19 International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics ...

G E N E R A L S E S S I O N
being ‘continually shaped and reshaped through interactions with others and involvement in social and
cultural activities’ (Wetherell & Maybin, <strong>19</strong>96, p.220).
Furthermore, not only is this self diverse and ever-changing, narratives in which these selves occur
are also ‘versions of reality’ (Ochs & Capps, <strong>19</strong>96, p.21) that are closely linked to their contexts. This
relation is extremely intricate, since although the time of the story that is narrated is clearly situated in
the past, the time of narrating is obviously in the present and therefore also strongly linked to that
specific contemporary context. Typical elements that can influence life stories are social and political
changes that have taken place between the time of the narrated and the present.
In this presentation, I discuss a narrative that focuses on the Second World War. Since there is a
time span of approximately sixty years between the time of the narrated and the present, it is fairly
logical that the narrator has reflected on his past and that this mental process influences the way he
constructs his identity in his story. As Linde observes, such a time lapse ‘creates the occasion for self
regard and editing' (Linde, <strong>19</strong>93, p. 105). As one of the most important functions of this reflexivity, she
discerns the establishment of ‘the moral value of the self’. People […] want a good self, and a self that
is perceived as good by others.’ (Linde, <strong>19</strong>93, p. 122).
Taking all these elements into account, I propose to integrate another element as an additional
dimension in the analysis, namely the interview style. This is not only an important aspect of the
contemporary context, but it focuses also on the fact that narratives, and consequently the identities
within them, are being co-constructed. As Holstein and Gubrium observed, interviewers are always
involved in the construction of meaning that is generated in interviews. Because ‘both parties to the
interview are necessarily and unavoidably active’, meaning is ‘actively and communicatively
assembled in the interview encounter’ (2003, p. 68). By analysing the way the interviewee positions
himself in relation the questions of the interviewer, the influence of the interview style on the
construction of identity is being scrutinized.
References
Holstein, J.A. & Gubrium, J.F. 2006. Postmodern interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Linde, C. (<strong>19</strong>93). Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ochs, E. & Capps, L. <strong>19</strong>96. Narrating the self. Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, <strong>19</strong>-43.
Wetherell, M. & Maybin, J. <strong>19</strong>96. The distributed self: a social constructionist perspective. In R. Stevens (Ed.),
Understanding the self (pp. 2<strong>19</strong>-279). London: Sage.
Pronominal choice and identity in the academic writing of Italian students of English
Carla Vergaro
University of Perugia
vergaro@unipg.it
This paper reports a study on the expression of identity in the academic writing of Italian students of
English. That academic writing conveys a representation of the self together with content is something
that research has emphasized. Indeed, the issue of authorial stance, namely how much writers feel
themselves to be not just writers but also authors with the authority to say something, has attracted
and has been the topic of much research. A rather obvious way of claiming authorial presence is to
use first person reference and the corresponding determiners. However, not only is the I emerging
from the text by its very nature plural, but different genres are associated with differing degrees of Iism,
and these expectations and conventions vary from culture to culture and from period to period. In
the context of academic writing, the task of acquiring genre conventions that require authors to
position themselves in the text in a certain way, is particularly difficult for L2 students because, being
at the same time under the influence of their own culture, both genre and cultural conventions might
be operating. In this paper I explore the expression of identity in the academic writing of Italian
students of English by focusing on the use of first person pronouns I, we, me, and us and their
respective determiners. Indeed, although the issue of identity in writing has been the focus of much
research in recent years, less attention has been paid to students as authors, much more so to EFL
Italian students. The study – based on an analysis of a corpus of 30 essays, each of about 4,000
words in length – shows that cultural and genre conventions are intertwined in a complex way in a
heteroglossic space in which a reconstruction of the self takes place. This process is fruitfully
explained by recurring to the heuristic of intercultural – not contrastive – rhetoric and to the post-
Kantian philosophy notion of ‘thirding’.
<strong>19</strong> th ISTAL 60