Description: Based on an ethnographic study spanning four years, George H. Jensen's Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis calls upon Bakhtinian theory to analyze storytelling in AA.

Jensen introduces his study with an analysis of "Bill W.'s Story" as it appears in the first chapter of AA's central text, Alcoholics Anonymous. Drawing on Walter Ong's work on orality and literacy, he argues that "Bill W.'s Story" as it appears in print cannot fully capture the oral tradition of storytelling as it occurs in AA meetings.

Jensen discusses storytelling as practiced by the Washingtonians, a temperance organization much like AA. He also discusses the influence of the spiritual program of the Oxford Group (an international and interdenominational religious movement seeking to recapture the enthusiasm and dedication of first-century Christianity) on the development of AA's Twelve Steps.

Jensen introduces Bakhtin's theory of the relationship between the author and the hero of a text, using Lillian Roth's autobiographies as counterexamples of AA talks. He explains how AA meetings provide an example of what Bakhtin meant by carnival, a process through which humor, irony, and parody supply a mechanism for questioning commonly held beliefs. AA talks, Jensen argues, are fragmented, yet achieve coherence through the interweaving of two important chronotopes. Finally, using Bakhtin's discussion of heroes in autobiography, Jensen discusses the kinds of heroes one typically finds in AA talks.

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