Storytelling and Drama: Exploring Narrative Episodes in Plays (review)

Hugo Bowles's Storytelling and Drama offers a thought-provoking account of "what tellers and listeners do with stories in plays" (196). Dissatisfied with the relatively static models of stories in the tradition of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, Bowles proceeds along linguistic lines, analysing stories in plays as part and parcel of the represented talk that is dramatic dialogue. His chosen method is an adapted form of conversation analysis (CA). Recognizing that, while CA is well suited to the study of actual conversation, it is handicapped when it comes to the study of created dialogue in plays, he integrates from Erving Goffman the idea that pieces of talk can be multiply "owned," from Willie van Peer a systematic method for identifying what is deviant in dramatic discourse, and from Deborah Tannen the notion of involvement and spontaneous linguistic creativity. By expanding on CA in this way, he seeks to develop a method of analysis that can cope with represented talk as interactional behaviour.

For the most part, Storytelling and Drama achieves its aims. While a few analyses end up in too obvious places (e.g., stories in drama can provide background information), a lot of the work, here, takes the criticism of drama in a much-needed new direction. Bowles's account of turn-taking patterns in dramatic narratives, for example, shows that this often taken-for-granted aspect of plays can be a powerful means of demonstrating how social relationships between characters develop and change. Similarly, his work on the linguistic analysis of various kinds of memory narratives sheds new light on the way dramatists exploit "[t]he subjectivity of memory and its relation to truth about the past" (120). Of particular note are the revealing analyses that are the subject of chapter seven. Here, Bowles shows to good effect that stories in drama are often an arena for power struggles. "[N]arrators are vulnerable" (3), he observes and then puts this observation to good use in, for example, a compelling account of how one narrator's story in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh is rendered "untellable" by one of its listeners (160). As Bowles points out, the challenge to the story is also a challenge to the reason for telling it, and this leads to a loss of status for the narrator.

My only two complaints, if complaints they can be called, are to do with Bowles's application of his method and his engagement with drama criticism. While several chapters of the book are devoted to an exposition of his adapted CA framework, many of his analyses move beyond this. Observations and findings from psychology, cognitive science, politeness theory, and Birmingham-school discourse analysis (DA) are usefully, indeed, insightfully applied, but these approaches are not sufficiently integrated into the method formulated at the start of the work. Given Bowles's expressed commitment to CA models, the incorporation of insights from DA (in, for instance, the identification of discourse moves and the classification of challenges) is a particular surprise. While CA and DA are sometimes synthesized (as in Amy Tsui's English Conversation [1994]), they are more typically identified as opposed approaches to talk.

As Bowles himself notes in his acknowledgements, he is "a linguist approaching a literary topic" (ix), and it is, perhaps, for this reason that there are relatively few explicit and specific engagements with work in drama criticism. More often, Bowles treads the traditional path in literary stylistics in this respect, speaking of what is "generally" said or done in literary-critical accounts and not going much further. This could be viewed as a missed opportunity, especially since many of Bowles's findings, particularly with respect to hesitations, false starts, repetition, and story retellings, constitute a direct and welcome challenge to many of the literary-critical accounts of dramatic language thus far offered. His work demonstrates, for example, that narrators who repeat themselves are...