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137 Chapter 3 TRANSFORMING LIFE INTO STORY Genre Genres are powerful. Whether as a system of classification or an emergent form of discourse, genres provide the means for creating and interpreting performance .1 The shared structures, themes, styles, and contexts link past performances with present ones, setting up a series of expectations for both performer and audience. The “knock-knock” joke provides a useful example. A knock-knock joke told among six-year-olds in the present does not emerge fully formed in the moment of performance. Themes change, contexts change, but basic structures are fairly conservative. Children learn very quickly, for example, that a knock-knock joke must begin with “knock, knock.” And they learn the required response: “Who’s there?” and will prompt a young listener if this is his or her first knock-knock joke. They also learn that the joke comes in two parts, where the second part transforms the first into something that will ideally elicit a laugh. These “rules” can be understood as expectations of the genre. Those expectations carry over from one performance to the next. Accordingly, a knock-knock joke told in the present can be understood within a broad context of other knock-knock jokes linking one text to another. These textual connections describe a process of intertextuality and have been useful in highlighting how present performances are affected by past ones. Yet audiences construct different “histories” for any given genre. Some children may have heard knock-knock jokes from their parents and grandparents and interpret the joke told by their peer on the playground within this generational history . Others will have heard the jokes only from other children on the playground and may narrate them only in similar contexts. Their intertextual connections will be more restricted. In both cases, however, the child will typically learn to tell knock-knock jokes from hearing other people perform them.2 When they hear a Still, the Small Voice 138 knock-knock joke, they will expect it to follow these basic rules. Further, if they innovate and create their own knock-knock joke, they will draw heavily upon the structures and formula and rules for the genre in order to be effective and make their audience laugh. Genres are therefore self-reifying—performance reinforces generic expectations, which in turn shape performance. More prescriptive, heavily regulated genres are more conservative than genres with fewer, less formalized rules. Personal anecdotes, for example, provide far greater leeway for innovation in performance than knock-knock jokes. Yet for both, and for all genres, there are expectations that must be met for effective performance. Those expectations guide the audience in evaluating performance (as discussed in chapter 2). Personal revelation narratives are no different. By narrating personal revelation within a narrative genre recognized throughout the community, heard again and again in church and in the home, speakers are confronted with a series of expectations that they must negotiate in the context of their specific experience. Those expectations are formal, functional, stylistic, interpretive, and ideological. For example, as a narrative genre, there is an expectation for dramatic tension and resolution. Such narrative requirements, coupled with social constraints on narrative performance, can translate into constraints on the interpretation of personal revelation as shared in performance. The result is that genre is an agent, not just a vehicle, for interpretation. Index versus Interpretation Personal experience narratives purport to report. They reference a set of experiences and translate them into verbal form to share with others. In the absence of formal recording—video footage, audio recording, stenographer’s notes— the oral narrative often becomes the primary record of the event, an index of the past, told in the present. That act of translation from experience to story is also an act of interpretation. At the most basic, we choose what to include and exclude. However, transforming experience into story is far more nuanced than the choice of content; our perceptions and perspectives of the event, our reasons for narrating, and the images of ourselves and others all reflect important interpretive decisions that shape our stories. Beyond our own specific motivations, social and cultural beliefs and norms also shape what we see and how we interpret it. A cow asleep in a field may evoke the sacred for a group of Hindu teenagers in India, while the same image may prompt a prank by teens out cow-tipping in the United States. A statue falling off a mantle may be attributed to the effect of...

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