Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous

"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 covers 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 discusses "rigorous honesty" within AA programs and provides a detailed analysis of the rhetorical act of stating "I am an alcoholic" in the context of an AA meeting. He devotes an entire chapter to explaining 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. He shows how newcomers to AA move away from their egocentric personae as practicing alcoholics to adopt a new identity within AA. Turning back to Bakhtin, he describes the moments of discourse during which individuals confess past wrongs to God and to another person. Drawing further on Bakhtin, he examines the autobiographical moments of AA talks, stressing that these moments never become fully autobiographical. 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."--BOOK JACKET.