The stories people tell in the course of conversations are both implicated in and distinct from the occasions on which they are told. Their implication is a matter of context; their distinctness is a matter of frame. Contexts show up as continuities between stories, conversations, and storytelling occasions; frames mark discontinuities. By virtue of their frames, stories can be identified as a different order of event from the conversations in which they are enclaves and from the occasions of their telling, (...) an event with its own conventions of presentation. Stories are neither natural utterances in conversations nor are they ordinary events in everyday life. They are recountings of such events in the course of such conversations. Stories thus constitute a separate universe of discourse, a storyrealm embedded in the realm of conversation. The storyrealm, that segment of narrative discourse within conversation, in turn directs attention to a third realm, the realm of the events the story is about or taleworld. Events in the taleworld are framed by the storyrealm, itself framed by the realm of conversation. (shrink)

Family traditions take a somatic turn in a therapeutic practice that focuses on how bodies are passed down in families, not as assemblages of biological traits enjoined on the bodies of children by parents but as intentional fabrications devised by children out of the bodies of parents. Somatic psychology holds that parents offer children models of how to be embodied in the form of bodily attitudes. The body shapes I imitate and resist at every stage of life arise out of (...) the memory of the past, incarnate memory in the present, and project the memorial body toward its future. Taking up the techniques by which a person makes her body, the somatic psychologist induces her to unmake and remake it. This is a study of how the flesh remembers. (shrink)