Deconstructing imagined identities and imagined communities through humor
Evidence from adult L2 learners’ humorous narratives
The aim of this study is to explore humor as a means for deconstructing identities in humorous narratives written
by adult L2 learners.
Norton Pierce’s (1995) notions of
investment in
L2 learning,
imagined identities, and
imagined communities as well as the concepts of
script opposition and
target employed for the sociopragmatic analysis of humor (
Attardo 2001) are exploited for demonstrating how humor constitutes a means for
deconstructing L2 learners’ imaginary projections and investments in L2. The analysis reveals that L2 learners use humor in their
narratives to account for their failure to fulfill their imagined identities as competent speakers and legitimate members of the
host community, or for the flouting of their expectations concerning the behavior of the members of the imagined host community.
Moreover, humor emerges as a strategy allowing learners to attenuate potential threats against their own positive face or that of
host community members (
Brown and Levinson 1987).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Investments, imagined communities, and imagined identities in L2
- 3.Humor and the (de)construction of identities
- 4.The data for the study
- 5.Data analysis
- 5.1The humorous deconstruction of learners’ imagined identities
- 5.2The humorous deconstruction of learners’ imagined communities
- 6.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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