Does the Interview Make Experience Available? The Rhetoric of Fact and Concretization Sequences in Biographical Accounts

Abstract

Many biographical studies are conducted in order to access participants’ experience. Equally often, attempts to reveal this experience involve the use of various types of interviews. In this article, this analytical endeavour is considered problematic and deserving of separate reflection. To this end, a fragment of a narrative interview that was the subject of discussion during one of the Biographical Seminars organized at the University of Lodz is reanalyzed. Reanalysis takes its inspiration from discursive psychology; it leads to a reconstruction of the discursive work done in the interview, including the rhetoric of fact and the use of what could be called concretization sequences. This provides empirically grounded arguments that there is nothing obvious in inferring the narrator’s experience based on what is said in the interview and that this non-obviousness cannot be disregarded when analyzing biographical accounts.