The other-granted self of Korean “comfort women”

Bringing together “identity as agency” (Schiffrin, 1996; De Fina, 2003), Bamberg’s (1997) three-level positioning, and Tannen’s (2008) narrative types, I analyze three interview narratives of Korean women coerced into the Japanese military’s sexual slavery during World War II, commonly known as “comfort women”. Through an eye toward “others” – e.g., Japanese soldiers, “comfort station” managers, interviewers, and sociocultural and sociopolitical forces – I investigate the manipulation of the women’s agency with their identities positioned as victims, rather than survivors. Meaning-making strategies, such as “constructed dialogue” (Tannen, 2007[1989]), repetition, deixis, and third turns, present the ways in which various others objectify and marginalize the women as well as control their stories. These illuminate how the women’s identities are granted and defined by others. This other-granted identity work reinforces aspects of language ideologies and ideologies of being silenced.

“This is like an RPG where you pick up friends along the way”

This chapter examines how Millennial friends in their late twenties appropriate texts from video games they have played to serve particular social interactive functions in their everyday face-to-face conversations. Speakers use references to the video games Papers, Please, The Oregon Trail, Minecraft, and Role Playing Games (RPGS) to shift the epistemic territories of conversations when they encounter interactional dilemmas. These epistemic shifts simultaneously rekey formerly problematic talk (on topics like rent, money, and injuries) to lighter, humorous talk, reframing these issues as being part of a lived video game experience. Overlapping game frames are laminated upon real-life frames and are strengthened by embedded frames containing constructed dialogue. This chapter contributes to understanding how epistemic shifts relying on intertextual ties can shift frames during interactional dilemmas in everyday conversation, which is ultimately conducive to group identity construction.

Structures within structures: Examining alternative cultures of learning in the institution

This article explores the possibilities of using critical pedagogy inside and outside the art school to counter the effects of neoliberalism. Developed from an initial transcript of a conversation between three graduates of the Royal College of Art (United Kingdom) about our education-as-art projects, it takes the form of a constructed dialogue that mirrors our approach to working collectively. We discuss particular issues that arose for us whilst studying, as we experienced how the neo-liberal art school conceptualized a form of education and arts practice that promoted individualized paths and set competitive dynamics between students. We are interested in how art practices characterized as being social, collaborative and democratic can resist the neo-liberal art school. Advocating for process-based methods that facilitate learning between groups of students, we aim to open up space for embodied and situated knowledges. Bringing critical pedagogical approaches to the inside of the university creates a porosity with the alternatives we experienced outside. Through re-practicing historically radical methods and creating supportive structures, we challenge the dominant ways of communicating and managing the student-body. We argue that students and artists can organize their own cultures of learning in opposition to those that the university-as-business wants to promote, whilst creating supportive models that take students’ needs into account.

‘I've got a daughter now man it's clean man’: Heteroglossic and intersectional constructions of fatherhood in the spontaneous talk of a group of young southeast London men

This article provides an insight into the heteroglossic and intersectional construction of fatherhood in the self-recorded, spontaneous talk of a group of young men from ethnically and racially mixed working-class backgrounds in southeast London. By adopting an interactional sociolinguistic approach, informed by Bakhtin's (1981, 1984, 1986) work on dialogicality and Tannen's (1989, 2004) notion of constructed dialogue, this article explores the young men's use of voices for their positioning in a range of fathering discourses which are shaped by and shape intersectional and hegemonic masculinities. Intersections of race, ethnicity, and social class inform many of the young men's positions, especially in their talk about the influences of hip hop on their children. This polyphony of voices allows the group to balance traditional discourses of fathers as providers, protectors, and moral guides with contemporary models of intimate and involved fatherhood, but also competing discourses of virile masculinity and bad boy identity. (Dialogicality, discourse, ethnicity, fatherhood, hegemony, heteroglossia, intersectionality, identity, masculinity, race, social class, voice)*

Well-prefaced constructed dialogue as a marker of stance in online abortion discourse

This paper offers an analysis of well-prefaced constructed dialogue as a stance-taking resource in written discourse on abortion. Drawing from four corpora collected from editorials, blogs, Twitter, and Reddit, I demonstrate that writers use the discourse marker well to indicate a stance of disalignment and convey negative attitudinal information when there is tension between the writer’s beliefs and those expressed in the constructed dialogue; the discourse marker allows the writer to position and align themself to construct a specific identity that reinforces a positive-self, negative-other evaluation.

Narratives of dialogue in parliamentary discourse

This paper puts forward an argument about the relation between narratives and constructed dialogue in political discourse. Narratives of dialogue are special cases of constructed dialogue that emphasize the embeddedness of the speaker, displayed as a discourse participant engaging in a conversation with an ordinary citizen or a public figure. Close analysis of British, German, and French parliamentary debates reveals how narratives of dialogue shape an image of the speaker involved in a dialogue. While being engaged in the activity of debating, parliamentarians simultaneously perform the act of debating. I argue that the main point of narratives of dialogue is not so much to report on a prior or hypothetical situation, but to create the ethos of a Member of Parliament receptive to their interlocutors.

The polyphonic pastor

The current study draws on insights from research on reported speech, or more accurately what Tannen (2007) calls “constructed dialogue” to elucidate its role as an argumentative device as observed in a journalistic interview with a prominent American minister. I explore diverse techniques the minister uses to marshal a multiplicity of respected voices – an impressive Bakhtinian polyphony – to defend faith. An important contribution of this study lies in its integration of what Gumperz (1977, 1982) calls “contextualization cues”, paralinguistic signaling mechanisms (stress, pitch, speech rate, etc.), and constructed dialogue as phenomena which function together. The study reveals how various contextualization cues embedded within constructed dialogue contribute to framing knowledge claims as reliable.

Two regimes of the symbolic: radical democracy between Romanticism and structuralism

The ‘symbolic’ has found its way into the heart of contemporary radical democratic theory. When one encounters this term in major theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, our first impulse is to trace its genealogy to the offspring of the linguistic turn, structuralism and poststructuralism. This paper seeks to expose the deeper history of the symbolic in the legacy of Romanticism. It argues that crucial to the concept of the symbolic is a polyvalence that was first theorized in German Romanticism. The linguistic turn that so marked the twentieth century tended to suppress this polyvalence, but it has returned as a crucial dimension of contemporary radical political theory and practice. At stake is more than a recovery of historical depth. Through a constructed dialogue between Romanticism and the thought of both Žižek and Laclau, the paper seeks to provide a sharper appreciation of the resources of the concept of the symbolic.