Horsing around Again: Poetics and Intention in Oral Narrative Performance

Abstract

Abstract:In this article I compare two accounts by the same narrator of the same event separated by forty-two years, one enclosed in a personal letter and the other an unrehearsed, voiced text. Comparison offers the opportunity to examine transformations in story form from one medium to another. These transformations demonstrate the importance of thematic and emotional as well as linguistic parallelism in oral narrative performance, and they complicate our understanding of personal narrative as distinct from traditional storytelling forms. My own reinterpretation of the emotional core of the story calls attention to the shifting subject positions of narrators who conjure an earlier self in their storytelling.