Abstract
The article investigates the rhetorical means of mediating affective experience in occasioned storytelling.[1] We are interested in the forms and aspects of bodily action in signifying and communicating a “para-factual experience” that was triggered by a real-life incident, but in fact only took place in a person’s imagination. We explore the case of a TV interview in which an American living in Finland narrates a personal, disturbing experience related to the news about 9/11. The story presents a visual scenario of the teller’s affective reaction towards two Muslim women in a grocery store. What is interesting in the story are its involuntary dimensions: the scenario portrays a picture of the teller that he finds unrecognizable and detached from his sense of self as a person. Even if the act was never actually realized, to the teller it felt real and compelling, as is manifest in the way he translates the scenario into a bodily performance. The teller not only uses his body to tell the story but momentarily turns the surrounding setting into a scene in the storyworld in which he plays the unidentified me. We call this physical performance of the imagined scene the embodied ekphrasis of experience.[2] Deploying research on multimodal interaction and intermediality, our empirical analysis explicates how the teller’s body, and not just words, build action, convey affective meaning, and resemiotize and mobilize a physical enactment of the past hypothetical scene.
Funding source: Email Aaltonen Foundation
Funding source: Academy of Finland
Award Identifier / Grant number: 285144
| ok. | falling (concluding) intonation |
| ok? | rising intonation |
| (.) | short pause |
| (2.6) | pause timed in seconds |
| [ | overlapping talk or action |
| *hh | in-breath |
| hh | out-breath |
| ↑word, ↓word | onset of pitch rise or fall in talk |
| wo(h)rd | “laughter” bubbling within a word |
| wor- | utterance cut-off |
| wo:rd | stretched sound |
| word=word | no pause between turns or words |
| word | stressed syllables |
| WORD | louder voice |
| °word° | quieter voice |
| ∼word∼ | creaky voice |
| >word< | faster speech |
| <word> | slower speech |
| @word@ | animated speech |
| (words) | heard unclearly in transcription |
| ( ) | unheard talk |
| ((sniff)) | analyst’s comments (for example nonverbal happenings) |
| grey text | the original soundtrack |
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