A Narrative Approach to Studying Writers Weblogs as Interactive Processes of Identity Performance

Abstract

Our research is directed at understanding how literary writers together with their readers narratively construct a sense of self through blogging. In this paper, we confront tentative results obtained from our analysis of blogging writers identity constructions with the observations that followed our analysis of the blogs reader comments. The aim of this paper is to understand how readers, by commenting, co-construct the identity of the literary writer. To this aim, we elaborate on the extent to which the comments relate to the narratives that make up the writers blog posts and, through a narrative analysis of the comments, how the blog commentators conceive of the writer in terms of authority and involvement. The rationale that underpins this study follows Alexandra Georgakopoulous linguistic ethnographic work on small stories that comprehends narratives as communicative, dialogical and locally produced practices of identity construction.