Narrative Constitution in the Medical Consultation: A Contribution to the Dynamics of Narrated Feelings in Factual Texts

Abstract

This paper aims, ultimately, to make a contribution to the study of the narrative constitution of factual narratives, and, with that aim, it focuses on a particular subclass of an oral and interactional character: the illness narrative. To this end, on the basis of the analysis of a corpus produced in a public hospital in the southern Buenos Aires metropolitan area (Argentina), it proposes: 1. A brief historical-critical review of the main contributions to the reflection on the story/discourse dichotomy and the failed attempt to deconstruct it; 2. The hypothetical postulation of a different functioning of these two structural levels in factual and fictional autodiegetic narratives, and the pointing out of the central role of emotions in this respect, in a theoretical-methodological sense. 3. A partial model, devised for the analysis of medical consultations, which justifies the differentiation of two levels on the represented side (the what) and which seeks to account for the function of narrated feelings in the logic of co-narration that takes place in the doctor’s surgery.