A sociolinguistic approach to experiences of nature: A narrative analysis of ‘nature stories’ by young writers from Paris and Fréjus.
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This article reports on narrative analyses of ‘nature stories’ written by 456 primary, secondary, and tertiary students at various locations around Paris and Fréjus. All of the writers were between six and twenty years of age at the time of their participation. The stories were produced as part of the ‘The sound of the wolves’ (‘Le bruit des loups’) project. We aim to use these analyses to investigate the existence of experiences of nature – in the sense of encounters with nature – as they are lived, recounted, mediated, and reconstructed by the young writers involved. To this end, the study of the narrative structures takes due account of the circumstances in which the writing was produced and cross-references a codified set of themes covering the types of experience recounted. We address the following research questions: Which narrative forms are used to construct which types of story? What kinds of experience do they relate? How do the young writers evaluate these experiences at an emotional level? In what way can the narrative structures used in the stories shed light on the transformative effect of these experiences on the young writers? Which experiences in the stories appear to effect these transformations?
Réseaux sociaux