Doing remembering as a multimodal accomplishment

Abstract

The present study investigates how remembering is publicly displayed during storytelling in Oral History Interviews with Italian-speaking witnesses of labor camps during WWII. We focus on the use of the first-person indicative mi ricordo (‘I remember’). In this particular narrative genre, mi ricordo is recurrently used by narrators, as it makes the act of remembering publicly accessible. Drawing upon the methods of Interactional Linguistics, we identify two practices involving the use of mi ricordo: projecting the transition to the narration of a specific episode and displaying epistemic credibility towards facts. We argue that these practices correspond respectively to prospective and retrospective scopes of mi ricordo. Furthermore, a fine-grained multimodal analysis shows that narrators make the scopes of mi ricordo recognizable through recurrent multimodal gestalts, which encompass verbal, prosodic and bodily resources. In the discussion, we argue that the recognizable gestalts are routinized ways of dealing with the emergent character of remembering in oral history interviews and with the interactional tasks that are relevant in this particular communicative genre. The findings highlight that doing remembering is a multimodal accomplishment.