Participant transposition in Senegalese oral narrative

In: Narrative inquiry: a forum for theoretical, empirical, and methodological work on narrative, Volume 15, Issue 2, p. 345-375

Abstract

This article examines a Senegalese narrative practice in which speakers make co-present individuals into denoted characters in their stories, a process I refer to as "participant transposition." I analyze participant transposition in illness narratives recorded in Dakar, Senegal, during phases of which I am even recruited to play the part of the narrator's past self. I demonstrate how this narrative practice allows speakers to calibrate the realm of the story (the denotational text) with the storytelling event (the interactional text). (Illness narrative, Transposition, Textuality, Interaction, Senegal)