This cross-cultural study investigates the structural and cultural differences and similarities evident in 13 Mandarin (TM) and 17 English language narratives (TEFL) produced by Taiwanese university EFL students and 17 narratives (BE) produced by British university students. This study also explores how the Taiwanese L2 learners’ identities might affect their use of L2 discourse norms within their narratives. The findings show that within the three sets of narratives, past experiences, in general, are recounted in chronological order and the organisation of narratives follows the sequential order defined by Labov (1972). In terms of orientation, there is some cultural variance. The TM and TEFL narratives underscore the importance of family values in Taiwanese society and underline the role of teachers in these students’ worlds. However, the data shows some variance with Labov’s (1972) results in terms of the relationship between complicating action, resolution and evaluation. In terms of external evaluation, the British narrators use much more evaluation in directly addressing their listeners. In terms of internal evaluation, there is significant variance within the three sets of narratives i.e. stress usage, adverb usage, and repetition. The findings suggest that there is no major difference in tellership and tellability in the three sets of narratives. In terms of learner identity, although some Taiwanese EFL students demonstrate high levels of integrative motivation, they have difficulty using L2 discourse norms in their narratives. This is evidenced by their anxiety in relation to their locus of control. It is also manifest that their learner identities have changed over a period of time and were constructed in various sites of struggle, and by relations of power, in which they assumed different subject positions.

This dissertation sought to answer four research questions in relation to the master narrative of modern parenthood, themes of untellable tales of parenthood, how parents make sense of their identity in light of possessing untellable tales, and mechanisms parents utilize to cope with and make sense of their untellable tales. What emerges from this dissertation is a much needed, in-depth illustration of the multi-faceted, myriad pressures modern parents face. Furthermore, the results of the data analysis show the lengths parents will go to, to try and live up to the expectations placed upon them in modern society. Finally, this dissertation illuminates the (often) creative ways parents embark upon sense-making and coping strategies to continue to work each day to raise the next generation for future success. Through inductive, open-coding, qualitative analysis the findings related to each research question illustrate many varied, and rich themes. The master narrative of modern parenthood was discovered to contain ten separate narrative threads that weave together to create a rich tapestry of how parents are expected to be responsible for Determining the Future Success of the Child. Five of the narrative threads dictate the roles parents are expected to play within their daily parenting: Provider, Protector, Teacher, Biggest Fan, and Enforcer. Additionally, the master narrative of modern parenthood instructs parents to perform each of the roles in with: Unconditional Love, Selflessness, Attention, Enjoyment, and Perfection. When analyzing parent untellable narratives for emergent themes, it became clear the master narrative was closely entwined with what makes tales of parenthood untellable. The themes that emerged within untellable tales of parenthood were that of: Inadequate Provider, Inadequate Protector, Inadequate Teacher, Inadequate Biggest Fan, and Inadequate Enforcer. Furthermore, tales of parenthood can be deemed untellable because they illustrate a parent performing the various roles of parenthood with the opposite of the master narrative performative expectations. As a result, performative themes of untellable tales were found to be: Selfishness, Frustration, Inattention, Too Good, and Unconditional Love. Possessing untellable tales of parenthood did not disable parents from making sense of their parental identity. Instead, untellable tales were utilized by the parent to explore his or her identity and make sense of who he or she was or wished to be as a parent. This identity exploration manifested within four themes of identity sense-making that emerged during data analysis: Identity Under Construction, Identity Unintelligible to Others, Identity Outlier, and Identity Undecided. Within each of these identity sense-making themes, parents worked to accept/reject their untellable tale of parenthood and understand the stability/fluidity of their parental identity. Finally, when seeking to understand how parents cope with and make sense of their untellable tales of parenthood two large themes emerged: Cognitive Strategies and Communicative Strategies. Within the theme of Cognitive Strategies, parents embarked upon Internal Narrative Reflection and Internal Narrative Reframing to internally work through, assess, and understand their untellable tale of parenthood while not risking outsider judgement, or identity defamation. Communicative Strategies parents utilized for coping and sense-making purposes were found to be: Tell the Untellable, Tell a Therapist, Write the Untellable, and Tell and Alternative Tale. Through these Communicative Strategies parents could reap the benefits of sharing their untellable tale (sometimes creatively) to get listener feedback, emotional validation, and support that then helped the parent cope with and make sense of the challenge presented within the untellable tale and/or the challenges of parenting more generally.

There are two disciplines that are concerened with the same object of study, narratives, but that rarely exchange insights and ideas, let alone engage in collaborative research. The first is Narrative Theory (NT), an analytical discipline from the humanities that attempts to analyze literary texts and from these instances derive a general understanding of the concept of narrative. The second is Compuatational Story Composition (CSC), a discipline in the domain of Artificial Intelligence that attempts to enable computers to autonomously compose fictional narratives in a way that could be deemed creative. Several reasons can be found for the lack of collaboration, but one of them stands out: The two disciplines follow decidedly different research methodologies at contradistinct levels of abstraction. This makes it hard to conduct NT and CSC research simultaneously, and also means that CSC researchers have a hard time validating whether they use NT concepts correctly, while NT scholars have no use for the outputs created by work in CSC. At the same time, a close exchance between the two disciplines would be desirebale, not only because of the complementary approach to their object of study, but also because comparable interdisciplinary collaborations have proven to be productive in other fields, like for instance linguistics. The present thesis proposes a research methodology called generative modeling designed to address the methodological differences outlined above, and thus allow to conduct simultaneous NT and CSC research. As a proof of concept it performs several cycles of generative modeling, in which it computationally implements concepts and dynamics described in two frameworks from NT, namely Marie-Laure Ryan's possible worlds approach to plot, and Alan Palmer's fictional minds approach to characters. In detail, the first cycle attempts to implement Ryan's possible worlds semantics and the resulting dynamics of plot, but falls short in a way that suggests that the first principles layed out in the theory are not sufficient to capture an example plot, for a number of reasons. The second cycle resolves these hypothesized problems by extending Ryan's plot understanding with affective dynamics based on Palmer's understanding of fictional minds. With plot dynamics completed, the third cycle implements Ryan's concept of tellability, which represents a quantifiable measure of the structural quality of plots. The last cycle implements a Genetic Algorithm based search heuristic that is capable of searching the plot space spanned by the employed formalism for plots high in tellability, which provides additional insights on properties of tellability. The resulting implementation is a in-depth computational representation of plot ingrained into the CSC System InBloom, which is capable of autonomusly composing novel plots and evaluating their quality. The study reported in this thesis demonstrates, how implementing narratological theories as generative models can lead to insights for NT, and how grounding computational representations of narrative in NT can help CSC systems take over creative responsibilities. Thereby, it shows the feasibility and utility of generative modeling.