Author : Robin Wooffitt
Release : 1992
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 519/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Telling Tales of the Unexpected by : Robin Wooffitt
Download or read book Telling Tales of the Unexpected written by Robin Wooffitt. This book was released on 1992. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversation analysis, discourse analysis and the study of rhetoric are combining to form a powerful interdisciplinary field of social scientific inquiry. Robin Wooffitt, in a systematic analysis of how people describe their paranormal encounters as factual experiences, introduces this field to the student and reader unfamiliar with its methods and theoretical constructs. Powerful cultural scepticism about the paranormal ensures that such experiences not only provide an implicit challenge to common-sense understanding of the world, but also undermine the pronouncements of the scientific orthodoxy. Wooffitt focuses on the ways in which accounts are organized in order to warrant the speaker's claim that the experiences actually happened and were not, say, the product of misperception, wish fulfilment or psychological aberration. He also examines the design of descriptive sequences through which speakers portray themselves as 'normal','rational' people; and contributes to the study of identity construction in discursive practices. Wooffitt has illustrated and simplified complex theoretical arguments in conversation and discourse analysis with relevant empirical materials, and he usefully clarifies points of convergence and divergence between these analytic traditions.
