“Really Unreal”: Narrative Evaluation and the Objectification of Experience

The specific narrative feature of ‘evaluation’, as described by Labov and Waletzky (1967/97), is not a discrete and secondary structure, but rather is embedded in the continuous acts of description that constitute a story, as well in the second-order evaluations provided by reported speech. Making use of Bakhtin’s (1984) concepts of polyphony and dialogism and recent work on ‘active voicing’, it is argued that (a) evaluation is a continuous and constantly shifting process within the narrative encounter; and (b) within this process, polyphony becomes a means towards the objectification of personal experience. Narratives are not the static discourses of literary theory and structuralist analysis, but dialogically evolving episodes of interaction, in which evaluations are frequently co-constructed between speaker and listener. (Narrative, Evaluation, Polyphony, Dialogic, Co-constructed, Objectification)