“Here’s My Story”: Narrativizing Crisis and Agency in Personal Appeals

• In Event: 40811 - When Do Stories Work? Narrative Persuasion

Abstract

Personal narratives tend to be discussed in one of two general ways in sociology: either as public manifestations of beliefs and attitudes, distinct from social action, or as performances or “speech acts” structured by particular institutional contexts. A more recent wave of scholarship has proposed integrating these perspectives through examination and comparison of narrative structure in contexts of “hyperprojectivity”: that is, sites that are “somewhat removed from the flow of day to-day activity, in which the explicit purpose of talk is to locate problems, visualize alternative pathways, and consider their consequences and desirability”(Mische 2014, 454). Here otherwise ‘fragmentary’, subconscious narratives become explicit objects of discussion and negotiation. Research in this vein has imagined these sites to be those of collective deliberation, like public policy fora. I build upon this work through empirical examination of narrative structure in a site of ‘hyperprojective’ individual storytelling: an archive of 10,058 personal appeals to Warren Buffett and his sister, Doris, 2006 and 2016, from people all over the United States who were seeking monetary assistance. I propose that variation in letter writers’ stories can be meaningfully characterized by their ‘tellability’, which Ryan (1991) proposes is an emergent property of stories that dramatize the intersection of possible narrative pathways projected by focal characters (and by the reader, on their behalf) and how those pathways are in fact realized in the story. I draw upon new computational methods to identify the structural signature of tellability in letter writers’ stories. Finally, I examine how this signature is associated with letters’ substantive foci and with sociodemographic features of letter writers.

Author

• Amy S. Weissenbach, Columbia University