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Narrative and Gender: Similarities and differences in written narratives produced from same- and opposite-gender perspective in Modern Greek

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Author

  • Lambrini Kokkali

Summary, in English

Narrative and gender are both notions closely connected to culture and society. Narrative, on the one hand, is not just the art of telling stories, it carries deeper meanings, evokes feelings, and even affects our actions and interactions with one another. Gender, on the other hand, and specifically social gender, is defined as the gender identity that a person has shaped through his or her interaction with society. In other words, the society and culture we grow up into forms our identity, our beliefs, and the way we see others and the world in general. The thesis focuses on how Greek society and culture influence the discourse of narrative texts produced by male and female participants (L1: Modern Greek), especially in terms of gender roles and the genders’ representation in the narratives. In order to research how one’s gender influences the way they narrate the exact same picture-story, attribute features and characteristics to the protagonists and structure their narratives, a two-task experiment was conducted. The participants (N=48) performed two tasks (one from the perspective of the protagonist with the same gender as theirs and one from the perspective of the protagonist of the opposite gender to theirs) based on the plot given by a picture-story. The analysis revealed that narrators’ own gender does not necessarily affect their narrative texts, but the stereotypical representations of genders in Greek society influenced the construction of the male and female protagonists in the narratives. However, similarities and differences between male and female participants’ narratives were detected in terms of content, structure, length, time spent on the tasks and quality of the final texts. Finally, the results showed that the majority of the participants changed their discourse according to the gender perspective they were assigned, revealing that the female participants’ texts in the opposite-gender task were similar in terms of discourse to those produced in the same-gender task by the male participants and vice versa. The influence of previous knowledge and experiences, the culture and the society are certainly visible in the way men and women produce and construct their narratives.

Department/s

Publishing year

2020

Language

English

Document type

Student publication for Master's degree (two years)

Topic

  • Languages and Literatures

Keywords

  • discourse analysis
  • gender representation
  • males
  • females
  • Greek language
  • Greek society
  • narrative text
  • picture-story
  • stereotypes
  • story-grammars
  • storytelling

Supervisor

  • Vassilios Sabatakakis
  • Victoria Johansson (Fil Dr)