Stories of vicarious experience in speeches by Barack Obama

Abstract

Stories of personal experience have been a staple of research on narrative, while stories of vicarious experience have remained largely ignored, though they offer special insights into issues of epistemic authority and telling rights, coherence and evaluation, contextualization and stance-taking. This article investigates the largely unexplored matters of why conversationalists tell stories about other people, how they establish their authority to tell these stories, how they relate these stories to their current conversational context, and how they participant design these stories and shape them for purposes of identity construction in interaction. Speeches by Barack Obama provide a rich resource for investigating narratives of vicarious experience, illustrating a wide range of forms contextualized in complex ways, and told for a variety of purposes.