Marina Lambrou

Kingston University, London, Linguistics and Languages, Faculty Member

Kingston University, London, Humanities, Department Member

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I am an Associate Professor and the previous Head of Department for Linguistics and Languages (Jan 2014-July 2017) at Kingston University. I am the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Literary Semantics and a previous Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA).

I research in the areas of stylistics, personal narratives (including trauma narratives), narratology and media discourses. My monograph entitled 'Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction' was published in February 2019.

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Papers by Marina Lambrou

Foreword – Obituary: Terry Eaton

Journal of Literary Semantics

Education should be a right for all

Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches

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Foreword – 50th Anniversary Issue

Journal of Literary Semantics, 2022

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Introduction to narrative retellings: Stylistic approaches

Narrative Retellings, 2021

Telling Stories

Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction, 2019

Narratives of Trauma Re-lived: : The Ethnographer’s Paradox and Other Tales

Real Lives, Celebrity Stories : Narratives of Ordinary and Extraordinary People across Media

This chapter sets out to discuss some of the key issues that arose during an ethnographic study i... more This chapter sets out to discuss some of the key issues that arose during an ethnographic study involving participants who were interviewed for their personal experiences. I initially set out to interview individuals who had experienced the terrible events of the London 7/7 terrorist bombings in 2005 but went on to investigate personal narratives of those affected by New York’s 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The aim was to gather a corpus of personal narratives to understand the discourse of trauma and to identify the linguistic markers and story macro-structure for their telling (see Lambrou forthcoming 2014). Although the spoken data—or narratives—were the central object of study using ethnographic methodological approaches, it became apparent during the process just how complex researching personal narratives about real experiences can be when faced with the prospect of interviewing real people for their traumatic experiences. For example, there were a number of issues I was unable to anticipate prior to the study, such as the matter of what I call the “Ethnographer’s Paradox” and its effects in a constrained dialogic speech event. I was also unprepared for the sensitive and upsetting content of people’s experiences and had not anticipated the level of difficulty—at both a personal and practical level—that I would encounter during the study. Other important issues were ethical considerations to ensure confidentiality, which is fundamental to a study of this kind. This level of inter-subjectivity, nevertheless, produced a context for the sharing of some extraordinary stories. This chapter will discuss my experience as an ethnographer by focusing on the process of researching sensitive data rather than on the data itself. The case study that will be central to this discussion is the personal experience of a father who lost his son in New York’s terrorist bombings in 2001.

Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact: News Stories

Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction, 2019

This chapter presents the second discussion on disnarration in factual texts and examines the rep... more This chapter presents the second discussion on disnarration in factual texts and examines the reporting of events that do not happen in news stories. The chapter begins by establishing the criteria for news values by drawing on Galtung and Ruge (1965) and Bell's (1991) influential list of news criteria to understand what makes news stories newsworthy as a context for disnarration. Examples of disnarrated events in news stories are discussed by applying Bednarek and Caple's (2014) discourse analytic framework of news values where the focus is on the range of linguistic devices that construct newsworthiness. Central to the reportability of disnarrated news stories is the audience's understanding of the terrible consequences had the averted outcomes in the news stories occurred, triggered through counterfactual thinking and the prominence of the news value of NEGATIVITY. It is this ability to speculate on the counterfactual that appears to justify why extraordinary events where nothing happens are nevertheless considered as newsworthy. Keywords News values • News discourse • Newsworthiness • Near miss scenarios • Counterfactual thinking • Disnarration • Negation CHAPTER 4

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Introduction to Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction

Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction, 2019

Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction explores the presence of a dimension of stor... more Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction explores the presence of a dimension of storytelling described as "the disnarrated" (Prince 1988) across three genres of texts: personal narratives; news stories and fiction (literary and film). The main aim is to offer a broad discussion of disnarration 'the events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to' (Prince 1988) beyond literary fiction to include factual texts where this dimension of storytelling has not been fully explored to understand why disnarration is so pervasive. Other aims include identifying the discourse of disnarration to describe the creative absences and counterfactual divergences in these modes of storytelling. This chapter provides an overview of the chapters and scope of the book. Keywords Disnarration • Literary fiction • Personal experience • News stories • Counterfactuality When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. Mark Twain (1924: 96) CHAPTER 1 Introduction to Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction

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Metalepsis, counterfactuality and the forked path in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction, 2020

La La Land

Rethinking Language, Text and Context, 2018

Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fiction

Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction, 2019

This chapter explores the dimension of disnarration and counterfactual divergence as unconvention... more This chapter explores the dimension of disnarration and counterfactual divergence as unconventional storytelling modes in three fictional texts for insights of what did not happen and what might have been. The three fictional texts presented for analysis are two literary works of fiction: John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Tobias Wolff’s (1996) short story Bullet in the Brain; and the 2016 film La La Land directed by Damien Chazelle. The texts are analysed for their innovative narratological, literary and stylistic strategies, including plot divergences and forked pathways that generate alternative scenarios and unexpected plot twists. Marked uses of negation where absences simultaneously convey the less satisfactory version of a state of affairs at the same time as revealing the preferred version is also discussed for their linguistic form and purpose. There are also insights into how characters, through their own volition, trigger counterfactual scenarios to show t...

From alternative facts to tender age shelters : how euphemisms become political weapons of mass distraction

Metalepsis, counterfactuality and being led up the "forked" garden path

Introduction to Narrative Retellings

Oral accounts of personal experiences: when is a narrative a recount?

Narrative, text and time: Telling the same story twice in the oral narrative reporting of 7/7

Language and Literature, 2014

The question of whether it is possible to ‘tell the same story twice’ has been explored in work o... more The question of whether it is possible to ‘tell the same story twice’ has been explored in work on conversational narratives, which has set out to understand the existence of some kind of ‘underlying semantic structure’ and ‘script’ (Polanyi, 1981). In conversational narratives, ‘local occasioning’ and ‘recipient design’ (Sacks et al., 1974) are factors that determine the form and function of the story. Here, ongoing talk frames the narrative while other participants provide a ready made audience, all of which, form part of the storytelling process. What happens, however, when a survivor of 7/7 (the date in 2005 of the co-ordinated terrorist bomb attacks on the London transport system in the morning rush hour, which killed 52 and injured hundreds of people), whose personal narrative was reported globally on the day of the event, is again interviewed two and a half years later for their experience of that morning? Is the ‘same story’ retold? Specifically, how far does the latest stor...

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Telling stories

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2016

Introduction: the state of contemporary stylistics

The pedagogy of stylistics: Enhancing practice by flipping the classroom, using whiteboards and action research

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

This article describes how teaching in a second-year undergraduate stylistics workshop was transf... more This article describes how teaching in a second-year undergraduate stylistics workshop was transformed in my attempt to increase student attendance and engagement, and the strategies that were put in place to achieve this outcome. The personal account describes how I changed my teaching pedagogy to facilitate learning through collaborative strategies and how I evaluated the impact this had on student learning using action research (Bradbury, 2015 (ed) The SAGE Handbook of Action Research. London: SAGE) as the investigative approach. Using the model of Plan-Act-Observe-Reflect process (Kemmis and McTaggart, 1988 The Action Research Planner. 3rd edn. Geelong: Deakin University Press) and with data from a short questionnaire given to students, I was able to gain a deeper understanding of the value of the activities as perceived by students. The flipped classroom, where materials were given to students in advance to prepare, became critical for participation in the workshop and allowed ...

Foreword – Obituary: Terry Eaton

Journal of Literary Semantics

Education should be a right for all

Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches

Style

Foreword – 50th Anniversary Issue

Journal of Literary Semantics, 2022

Download

Introduction to narrative retellings: Stylistic approaches

Narrative Retellings, 2021

Telling Stories

Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction, 2019