Tellability

Tellability is a notion that was first developed in conversational storytelling analysis but which then proved extensible to all kinds of narrative, referring to features that make a story worth telling, its "noteworthiness." Tellability (sometimes designated "narratibility" or "reportability") is dependent on the nature of specific incidents judged by storytellers to be significant or surprising and worthy of being reported in specific contexts, thus conferring a "point" on the story. The breaching of a canonical development tends to transform a mere incident into a tellable event, but the tellability of a story can also rely on purely contextual parameters (e.g. the newsworthiness of an event); in conversation it is often negotiated and progressively co-constructed through discursive interaction. Tellability may also be dependent on discourse features, i.e. on the way in which a sequence of incidents is rendered in a narrative.

Structuration du raconter et évaluation de la racontabilité dans l'entretien médiatique

In this study, we assume that the organisation of storytelling activity is sensitive to emerging norms and, specifically, to what is worth telling from a participant's perspective. We associate the methods of conversation analysis with a labovian approach to oral narratives and examine how storytelling is collaboratively and sequentially built during a radio interview parody. After discussing the relevance of parodic data to understand how media practitioners see their own practices (here: telling a story during a media interview), we provide a detailed analysis of a deviant case by considering the relations between structuring the telling and evaluating the tellability. The analysis leads to show what kinds of interactional resources are used to accomplish the activity: for instance, concurrent topic formulations, shared configurations of grammatical constructions, adjacency pairs. The study also points out how competing agendas can configure the activity in dissimilar ways. Eventually, it underlines the issues of being the interviewee and the storyteller at the same time.