‘Oral versions of personal experience’: Labovian narrative analysis and its uptake

Abstract

William Labov is known across the human and social sciences for his work on oral narratives about personal experience. This article provides an overview of that research and discusses its uptake and influence in linguistics and in other fields. Subsequent scholarship on narrative has critiqued Labov's model on the grounds that it privileges a certain genre of personal‐experience narrative and underplays the role of interlocutors and other contextual features in shaping oral narratives, but such scholarship inevitably borrows Labov's insight that the form of narrative is linked to its interactional functions. Narrative research in psychology and other fields often cites Labov without actually making much use of Labov's model, but Labovian narrative analysis has nonetheless had an enormous influence in making possible and legitimizing the study of everyday, vernacular narration.