Plotting the “right place” and the “right time”

Abstract

This article departs from the interactionist view that narrativized references to time and place are neither a backdrop to narrative action nor a priori fixed material but interrelated resources that are jointly (by storytelling participants) constructed on line in the course of a story's telling. The aim of this discussion will thus be to shed light on the uses of time and place as interactional resources in the conversational stories of a group of adolescent females. It will be shown that time and place in the data are at the core of "eventness" and emplotment; furthermore, they are systematically contested or negotiated between participants throughout a story's telling. In this way, they are instrumental for each participant's perspective building and take on past and future experiences. In addition, the relationships between time and place transcend the boundaries of one taleworld and involve the dialogical interplay between different narratives: taleworlds in past time and specific place inform and set up contingencies (sic affordances) for the positing of projected time and place. Such narrative interactional uses of time and place will be argued to be intimately linked with their indexicality, that is, the shared socio-symbolic meanings that references to them invoke for the participants. In particular, as brought to the fore by the ethnographic study of the group, familiar places (mostly "hang-outs") in the participants' small town carry a history with them and are at the core of shared worlds that both give rise to and are invoked in narrative plots. This evocative power and transportability of associations across contexts (sic recontextualization) meant that different places (in their interactions with time) call into play for the participants different affordances about what sorts of action and interaction with what sorts of participants can take place where and when. On the basis of such affordances, certain narrative plots can be contested and disallowed or equally validated.

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