Stories: Big or small—why do we care?

Critical Analysis

In this short text, the author argues the value of small stories and small story analysis. Responding to a scholarly, disciplinary debate, he explains that the telling of a small story is not a cognitive recap of something that happened or a summary of how a person has internally organized themselves. Text is an active instrument, and “through talk, speakers establish (i) what the talk is about (aboutness/content), and simultaneously (ii) the particular social interaction in the form of particular social relationships” (171). Speaking is a positioning process, and a speaker telling a small story is working to arrange themselves in relationship to the “here and now.” This positioning is a sense of identity. It is also a rhetorical tool, as “the descriptions and evaluations rhetorically function to convey how speakers signal to their audience how they want to be understood” (171).

The larger claim made is that the methodology of small story analysis provides a legitimate way to view a master narrative (an “ideological position”) as a point of context, and to understand how a speaker is working to position themselves relative to that larger narrative.