Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning: Small Stories and Affective Positioning [Kõva köide]

This book offers a comprehensive theoretical and empirical engagement with the linguistic study of narrative as manifested in "mediatized mourning", the death-related rituals and memorialization activities found online in digital environments. Focusing on a "small story" approach, the volume meditates on the nature of contemporary mourning by grounding the discussion in its historical antecedents and then looking at how sociolinguistic and discourse-related perspectives can shed light on issues of identity construction and social and cultural change that emerge in examples of the "mediatized mourning" of today. The book engages with a rigorous set of data collected from popular social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to explore how small stories related to death and dying are shared, on both the personal and public scales, and how they contribute not only to self-portrayals of mourning but to our collective understanding of trauma and loss. This innovative volume will be key reading for students and scholars in discourse analysis, narrative studies, media and cultural studies, anthropology, and digital communication.