UNIVERSITÄT ZU KÖLN

In the lecture, the practice of telling stories will be discussed across languages, media types, and technological platforms. Different levels of interactivity in narrative communication will be outlined, both presence based and mediated at a distance in time and/or space. Examples will include spatial storytelling, live action role playing, the role of bards, and stories told with different computational systems, and span the world from Mongolia via Scandinavia to the Western Apaches in North America. 

How real is a fictional American President allowed to be? How free is an American TV series to invent foreign countries? Does it matter if they are supposed to be in Western Europe or Central Africa? How many stereotypes about America could a French comic book artist employ without risking ridicule? What does it mean to say that a Fantasy wargame’s Elves and Dwarfs are realistic? And would you believe me if I made up such a game?
 
Our intuitions about these questions suggest that rules do exist, but they vary widely according to genre, subject, context, and audience. This lecture deals with the question of inventibility, i.e. the rules we set for our storytelling, and takes a special look at how they interrelate with the conditions of character creation in transmedia storytelling networks. Following concepts from fictionality as well as factuality studies, critical theory’s assessment of popular ideology, and multimodal discourse analysis, I want to discuss some preliminary results from a comparative study across genres, media formats, and cultural settings to see what kinds of people we think we can imagine under which circumstances, how we recognize them as circumstances change, and what that means for our concepts of imagination, reality, and fiction.

Story is our mental ability to construe and imagine situations as complexes of events, objects, and actors engaged in interdependent activity. Storytelling is an advanced form of communication made possible by the cognitive operations of "blended classic joint attention." Story operates constantly in our thought. Its complex operation is almost entirely unconscious, although aspects of its operation can be dragged onto the stage of consciousness. For human beings, story is anything but a costly or special mental operation. It is fundamental to the modern mind. It is our primary instrument for predicting, planning, evaluating, and constructing meaning. Story is leveraged in the human mind via conceptual blending: not only do we blend distinct stories, but the basic elements of story—actor, time, interdependence, futures—are transformed by blending. This talk will discuss the ways in which advanced narrative cognition is a product of the evolution of double-scope blending and the ways in which blended classic joint attention gives us the capacity for storytelling.

References

Turner, Mark. 2014. The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark. New York: Oxford University Press.

Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford University Press.

Turner, Mark. 2008. "The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex." 2008. In The Literary Mind, Volume 24 (2008) of REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, edited by Jürgen Schlaeger. Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1274225. 

Of central importance in the South Indian Karnatak music tradition are formats where performers extemporise around melodic phrases that are characteristics of a particular raga (melodic framework). Through such performances, vocalists bring forth their own realisation of that raga for the audience, progressively revealing various facets of its character. This realisation of a raga is communicated by Karnatak vocalists through musical vocalization alongside spontaneous gestures of the hands, head and upper body, as well as through facial expression.

In this talk, I explore ways in which such raga performance can be considered to tell a musical story. I do this from an embodied perspective wherein co-singing expressive bodily movement is considered to be part of the music itself. Opening with a discussion of existing research that has considered music as either story or narrative, I then explore these ideas in the context of Karnatak raga performance. I dwell on what vocalists do in relation to the music and audience, based on interviews conducted with Karnatak musicians and supported by my own experience of learning to play the style in South India. Through analysis of Karnatak music performance videos, I show how vocalists use gesture alongside vocalisation to tell the story of their own exploration of a particular raga.

When we tell stories in mundane conversation, we create an interactional space in which the rules of turn-taking are temporally suspended so that a speaker can produce a multi-unit narrative as a ‘big package’ (Sacks 1992; Jefferson 1988). In line with conversation-analytic studies, the first part of the talk will focus on everyday storytelling to illustrate a) how tellers embed their stories into an ongoing discourse to establish tellership and tellability (Ochs & Capps 2001)  and b) how the interaction between teller and recipient fundamentally shapes a story’s delivery (Goodwin 1984; Mandelbaum 2013). 

The second part will then focus on storytelling in a different ‘interactional ecology’: mobile messenger chats. Working with German WhatsApp chats from the Mobile Communication Database (MoCoDa, Beißwenger et al. 2020), I will discuss how the platform’s affordances essentially shape the design and the sequential development of storytelling activities (Busch 2023; Frick 2024; Meiler 2021). Moreover, I will show that the proliferation of voice messaging has a fundamental impact on how stories are sequenced and designed (König 2024). Based on a corpus of WhatsApp group chats with text and voice messages, I argue that conversation-analytic approaches to storytelling have to be expanded by taking into account the chats’ publicness, their transmodal nature and their specific temporality. 

References

Beißwenger, Michael, Marcel Fladrich, Wolfgang Imo & Evelyn Ziegler. 2020. Die Mobile Communication Database 2 (MoCoDa 2). In Konstanze Marx, Henning Lobin & Axel Schmidt (eds.), Deutsch in Sozialen Medien: Interaktiv – multimodal – vielfältig, 349–351. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Busch, Florian. 2023. Präsentisches Erzählen im mediatisierten Alltag: Zeitlichkeit von Small Storys in mobiler Kommunikation. In Steffen Pappert & Kersten S. Roth (eds.), Zeitlichkeit in der Textkommunikation, 203–222. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.

Frick, Karina. 2024. Identitätsarbeit und kollektive Beziehungsgestaltung im WhatsApp-Gruppenchat.Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 54. 433–463.

Goodwin, Charles. 1984. Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. M. Atkinson & John Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis, 225–246. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jefferson, Gail. 1988. On the sequential organization of troubles-talk in ordinary conversation. Social Problems35(4). 418–441.

König, Katharina. 2024. Transmodal messenger interaction: Analysing the sequentiality of text and audio postings in WhatsApp chats. Discourse, Context & Media 62, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695824000643.

Mandelbaum, Jenny. 2013. Storytelling in conversation. In Jack Sidnell & Tanya Stivers (eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, 492–507. Chichester: Blackwell.

Meiler, Matthias. 2021. Storytelling in instant messenger communication. Sequencing a story without turn-taking. Discourse, Context & Media 43. 100515.

Ochs, Elinor & Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative. Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Much research has examined multimodal cues speakers in conversation deploy to signal turn completion. Much less research has looked into how speakers signal turn continuation in multi-unit turns that require the suspension of normal turn-taking. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by examining, in conversational storytellings, the multimodal design of turn-constructional units (TCUs) that are not yet transition-ready. The study is based on data from the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC). Considering a large range of possible cues from the verbal, visual, and vocal modalities and comparing them with cues in transition-ready TCUs in questions, we specifically aim to work out multimodal turn continuation cues that are statistically prototypical and that form recurring clusters in storytelling TCUs.

Storytelling plays a central role in a child's development: stories not only offer insights into the language (acquisition) skills but also allow conclusions to be drawn about cognitive and social skills. This is because stories or narratives are organized at two levels—the higher-order, more universal level dealing with the temporal-causal organization of events reported and the lower, language-specific level, which consists of smaller building blocks. These building blocks construct words into sentences and text.

In the talk I will describe the theoretically based, picture-based Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN, hereinafter: MAIN), which is used for the standardized elicitation and evaluation of narrative skills in children and is adapted to over 100 languages. In addition to the design and development of MAIN, key aspects of its multilingual applicability and its use in different contexts will be discussed and explained. The results of studies on language development in multilingual children will be reported.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and interaction, along with restricted and repetitive behaviours, interests, or activities (DSM-5, APA 2013). Communication impairments—both verbal and nonverbal—represent a core feature of ASD, and verbal difficulties often involve pragmatic competence and higher-level linguistic abilities. Previous research has documented challenges in understanding non-literal meanings, presuppositions, and narrative discourse.

This presentation will focus on narrative discourse in individuals with ASD, reporting findings from two studies conducted in our laboratory. The first study (Adornetti et al., 2024) examined storytelling abilities in 41 autistic children compared with 41 typically developing peers (7.02–11.03 years), matched on cognitive and linguistic skills. Narratives were elicited through the “Nest Story” task and analyzed at micro- and macrolinguistic levels. Results showed that autistic children produced more phonological errors and semantic paraphasias (microlinguistic level), as well as more coherence errors and fewer explicit and inferred events (macrolinguistic level).

The second study investigated narrative comprehension with a focus on the visual medium (Adornetti et al. 2020). Children were asked to reorder picture-based stories according to coherent sequence. The task assessed their ability to understand causal and temporal links between events and how these led to the story outcome. Results revealed that autistic children scored significantly lower than typically developing peers. These findings suggest that narrative impairments in ASD may not be limited to linguistic expression but could reflect a broader deficit in narrative processing that is independent of expressive modality.

Overall, the results from both studies confirm that narrative competence is compromised in individuals with ASD, affecting both production and comprehension abilities.

References 

Adornetti, I., Chiera, A., Altavilla, D., Deriu, V., Marini, A., Gobbo, M., ... & Ferretti, F. (2024). Defining the characteristics of story production of autistic children: A multilevel analysis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 54(10), 3759-3776.

Adornetti, I., Chiera, A., Deriu, V., Altavilla, D., Lucentini, S., Marini, A., ... & Ferretti, F. (2020). An investigation of visual narrative comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorders. Cognitive processing, 21(3), 435-447.

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Storytelling in medieval literature is shaped by a paradoxical dynamic: while narrative strives to bridge its temporal distance from what it recounts, it can never fully achieve the immediacy it promises. Precisely this failure, however, generates aesthetic effects of presence. One key strategy lies in the evocation of sound and voice, which allows narration to imitate the qualities of lyric song and to conjure the illusion of immediacy.

This lecture explores how medieval storytelling negotiates the relationship between voice and image, orality and writing. Verse narratives cultivate an implicit vocality that projects an imagined authorial presence, while later prose versions shift the emphasis toward visual immediacy through brevity and illustration. Early modern adaptations then reintroduce musicality and performance, combining song, image, and staged action.

By tracing these transformations, the lecture highlights storytelling as a medial practice that continually oscillates between sound and image. This oscillation transforms narrative deficits into productive effects, sustaining the imagination of presence across genres and epochs and offering a model for understanding the multimodality of storytelling beyond the Middle Ages.