Shame and Pride in Narrative

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5
Shame and Pride:
Defendiéndose in Narrative
Abstract: This chapter analyzes how Mexican immigrant
women interactionally portray and position themselves
in relation to language experiences in their narratives.
I present a linguistic analysis of the role of constructed
dialogues and emotional devices as the main evaluation
devices to convey moral stances in these narratives.
This analysis illustrates the main hypothesis this book
puts forward: Mexican immigrant women in Southern
California contest and resist the racialized social order
they inhabit, emotionally characterized by shame for not
speaking English “well” and pride in the Spanish in which
they want to socialize their children. As a consequence,
they attempt to restore a moral order based on respect for
the linguistic varieties of Spanish and English they speak,
as well as the right to use both languages in public.
Keywords: constructed dialogues; moral order; pride;
shame; socialization
Relaño Pastor, Ana María. Shame and Pride in
Narrative: Mexican Women’s Language Experiences at the
U.S.–Mexico Border. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137348593.0009.
doi: 10.1057/9781137348593.0009
10.1057/9781137348593preview - Shame and Pride in Narrative, Ana Maria Relaño Pastor
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Shame and Pride in Narrative
Reported speech or the discursive practice of quoting oneself or others
(Vološinov, 1973) has been defined as “the reflexive capacity of language
to report utterances, index and describe aspects of the speech event, and
guide listeners in the proper interpretation of their utterances” (Lucy,
1993, p. 11). For some research, such as that of Tannen (1989), reported
speech is always “constructed” when we report on something someone
has previously said, given the necessary distinction between the “reporting context”, or the context of the telling, and the “reported context”,
or the world of the original words. That is, much of what appears in
discourse as dialogue, or reported speech, was never uttered by anyone
else in any form, but, on the contrary, it gets constructed and situated in
interaction.
In addition, reported speech finds its natural home in the narrative
structure since it is one of the main discursive devices narrators use in
recounting personal experiences. Reported speech represents the logic of
past events, what happened, who said what to whom, how it was said and
why. There has been controversy among researchers on the “faithfulness”
of the relationship between the quoted utterances and what was originally
said. Koven (2001) agrees with Tannen that speakers’ quotations are not
necessarily faithful reports of the original events, and, therefore, should be
considered as “constructed”, “creative performances” of past events (p. 549).
Reported speech has also been connected to evaluation or assessment, displaying the speakers’ positioning towards the quote (Buttny,
1997; De Fina, 2003; O’Connor, 1997), and, consequently, serving
various functions such as “to dramatize a point, to give evidence for a
position, or to epitomize a condition” (Buttny, 1997, p. 478). Whether
direct, reported, or “constructed”, the speaker “assimilates, reworks,
and re-accentuates another’s words” (Bakhtin, 1981; Goffman, 1974,
1981) in the quoted world. That is, reported speech would be one of
the most “stance-saturated” (Jaffe, 2009, p. 23) forms of speech, or, on
the contrary, depending on the quotation formula chosen to portray
a particular event, it can also convey a stance of “affective neutrality”
(e.g., “said” versus “denied”) in Jaffe’s words. Moreover, reported speech
should never be taken in isolation but in a continuous relationship with
other linguistic devices conveying “epistemic and affective stances”
(Jaffe, 2009, p. 3), that is related to individuals’ knowledge and emotional states, respectively.
doi: 10.1057/9781137348593.0009
10.1057/9781137348593preview - Shame and Pride in Narrative, Ana Maria Relaño Pastor
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2016-11-19
5.1 Constructed dialogues of language experiences
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