Moral Stance and Agency in Schooling Narratives

Mariana Souto-Manning

Authors

Mariana Souto-Manning University of South Carolina ##default.groups.name.author##

Abstract

In this paper I employ conversational narrative analysis to show how linguistic resources are used to convey agency and moral stance in two women's narratives. I analyze how they progress from dropping-out narratives to first-days narratives while negotiating returning-to-school narratives. Results indicate that these women's narratives changed from portraying themselves as helpless victims in which they did not orient to goodness due to someone else's action (dropping-out narratives) to perceiving themselves as active, ergative agents. The episodes analyzed were selected from life history interviews conducted in July, 2003.

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