Chronotope alignment in retold interviews: narratives of vicarious experiences

Abstract

The application of Bakhtin’s chronotope to the investigation of oral narratives allows to map and visualise the multiple und fluid spatio-temporal scenarios created by the narrator while oscillating between the here-and-now of the interaction and the back-and-then of the story told. This article points out that the chronotope can be resorted to as a means to effectively comparing retold stories of vicarious experiences, i.e. of narratives about events the narrator neither witnessed nor experienced at first hand. With this respect, I show how the chronotope alignment brings along a more evident tendency to create parallelisms between subsequent versions of the same vicarious narrative.