Joan Mulholland

A series of story turns : Intertextuality and collegiality

This paper is framed as a study of the political and social functions addressed by cooperation in a story series. It presents a qualitative account of a specific workplace conversation in which four factory workers take story turns and form them into a series, and supports this by examples from a large corpus of other talk stories. An ethnographic account of the data provides an analysis of the intertextual relations between the stories in the series; the solutions achieved for the story tellability requirement; and extrapolates from them a set of categories for some of the structural variations and similarities which might be found in other story series. The paper also explores the story features from which the participants make their selections in order to achieve a degree of collegiality in their talk.