Entextualizing institutional memories: retelling the academic story
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Jenny Cook-Gumperz
Abstract
This paper explores the making of academic knowledge as discourse. It reports on the closing down of an academic program based on memories reconstructed through narrative interviews of two professors who organized this program. A narrative analysis of the two long interviews contrasting performance styles reveals differences in response by the two professors, even though their position within the institution is nominally the same. Their tales emerge through the multiple layering of their discourse as moral commentaries of their life and times, albeit from two very different perspectives. The narratives unfold through retellings; the tale shifts to a moral commentary on participants' actions that reveals the longevity of institutionally shaped ways of thinking.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: contextualising Gumperz
- Introduction — John Gumperz and the indexicality of language
- From speech as “situated” to speech as “situating”: insights from John Gumperz on the practical conduct of talk as social action
- Indexicalities of language contact in an era of globalization: engaging with John Gumperz's legacy
- Entextualizing institutional memories: retelling the academic story
- The dynamics of communicative practices in transmigrational contexts: ‘insulting remarks’ and ‘stylized category animations’ in everyday interactions among male youth in Germany
- Crosstalk 2.0: asylum and communicative breakdowns
- John Gumperz: an appreciation
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: contextualising Gumperz
- Introduction — John Gumperz and the indexicality of language
- From speech as “situated” to speech as “situating”: insights from John Gumperz on the practical conduct of talk as social action
- Indexicalities of language contact in an era of globalization: engaging with John Gumperz's legacy
- Entextualizing institutional memories: retelling the academic story
- The dynamics of communicative practices in transmigrational contexts: ‘insulting remarks’ and ‘stylized category animations’ in everyday interactions among male youth in Germany
- Crosstalk 2.0: asylum and communicative breakdowns
- John Gumperz: an appreciation
