Narrative Analysis and Self-Presentation

This book shows the analysis of 28 narratives produced by individuals who share one specific social characteristic: they are bullfight aficionados. We observe how narrators use stories to communicate a series of personal and social concerns that characterize them as belonging to one specific community. A sense of evaluation proves to play a central role. Stories are considered to be evaluative in nature. In the light of the Labovian model, we define the structural patterns of texts in the corpus. We also show how evaluation is linguistically embodied at the level of grammar and at the level of discourse. What narrators evaluate and how they evaluate it is considered to convey how they experience the world, how they feel about the world, and how they see themselves as situated in the world under the category of bullfight aficionados. In sum, we describe the direct connection between the act of evaluating and the narrators' sense of self in narrative discourse.