Over the past thirty years, oral history has found increasing favor among social scientists and humanists, with scholars “rediscovering” the oral interview as a valuable method for obtaining information about the daily realities and historical consciousness of people, their histories, and their culture. One primary issue is the question of how the communicative performances of the interviewer and narrator jointly influence the interview. Using methods of conversation/discourse analysis, the author describes the collaborative processes that enable interviewers and narrators to interact successfully in the interview context.

Eva M. McMahan is a professor emeritus of communication studies at James Madison University. She is the coeditor of Interactive Oral History Interviewing.Ronald J. Grele is the former director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. He is the author of Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History and editor of Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History.

“Scholars and practitioners will welcome Eva McMahan’s work analyzing the oral history interview as a communicative event. The oral history interview is defined as a conversation with a person whose life experience is deemed memorable. The central focus in this unique book is how the communicative performances of interviewer and interviewee jointly influence the product of the interview—the oral text.”
—Communication Quarterly

“There is much that is commendable about Elite Oral History Discourse. Through a thought-provoking dissection of the oral history interview, the book reveals a great deal of the structure and underlying dynamics of that rewarding, but occasionally frustrating, exercise in documenting the past. It is a convincing contribution to a growing body of work on the context and meaning of communication in oral history, and it should have a positive effect on the interviewing styles of those who read it.”
—Indiana Magazine of History

“McMahan does a fine job of exploring for oral history the implications of both hermeneutic philosophy and communications/discourse theory. Moreover, McMahan demonstrates powerfully that the issues engaged in such theories and research are not merely relevant, but inescapably fundamental to the root documents and processes of oral history. A fascinating book.”
—Michael Frisch, SUNY-Buffalo, Editor, The Oral History Review

“Noteworthy for its focus on the problem of how a personal, lived-through experience is collaboratively transformed into a public, historical record. This study exemplifies the kind of detailed work that needs to be done if communication scholars are to achieve any real insight into how the procedures or everyday talk enable people to create social realities.”
—Scott Jacobs, University of Oklahoma