Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality  Open Access

A Rhetorical Approach to Storytelling in Contemporary Western Culture

by Samuli Björninen (Volume editor) , Pernille Meyer (Volume editor), Maria Mäkelä (Volume editor) , Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen (Volume editor)
©2024, Edited Collection, 294 Pages
Science, Society & Culture
Open Access

Series: Literary and Cultural Studies, Theory and the (New) Media, Volume 7

HARDCOVER

eBook


The 21st-century story economy is grounded on the premise that everyone – from individual social media users to political parties and multinational corporations – needs to become storytellers. At the same time, we witness the erosion of borders between fact, fiction, truth and lies within the public sphere. This book by literary researchers helps different audiences understand and analyse the rhetorical uses and potential dangers of narratives and fictionality. The contributors deal with various contemporary storytelling environments, ranging from social and news media to literary autofiction, and from documentary narration to sexual fantasy. Narratives and fictionality are an asset in today’s communication environments, but awareness of their rhetorical and ethical pitfalls will make us better readers.
  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Acknowledgement
  • Table of Contents
  • Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality: Introduction
  • Part I: Narrative, Fictionality and the Public Sphere
  • 1. Bad Press: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Public Discourse
  • 2. Dangers of Media Hoaxing
  • 3. Assessing the Genre of Docudrama: The Case of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7
  • Part II: Networked Rhetoric
  • 4. The Message Is Not the Truth: Uses and Affordances of Narrative Form on Social Media Platforms
  • 5. Storytelling and Participatory Immersion in the Niilo22 Experience
  • Part III: Repositioning the Novel
  • 6. ‘It […] cannot do any harm to anyone whatsoever’: Fictionality, Invention and Knowledge Creation in Global Nonfictions, Joseph Conrad’s Prefaces and Chance
  • 7. Positioning You: Fictionality and Interpellation in Janne Teller’s War: What If It Were Here?
  • 8. ‘But it hurts like I killed someone’: Character Assassinations and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle
  • Part IV: Broadening the Scope of Rhetorical Fictionality Theory
  • 9. On Being Lectured in and by Fiction: Rhetorical Directness and Indirectness of Fictional Instructiveness
  • 10. Dangers of Fictionality, Human Sexuality and Sexual Fantasies
  • Bibliography
  • Series Index
Pages:
294
Year:
2024
ISBN (HARDBACK):
9783631851739 (Active)
ISBN (EPUB):
9783631894767 (Active)
ISBN (PDF):
9783631894750 (Active)
Open Access:
CC BY
Language:
English
Published:
Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2024. 294 pp., 4 fig. b/w.

Samuli Björninen is a researcher in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland, and a postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark. His postdoctoral research focuses on developing story-critical methods for interdisciplinary narrative studies and theorising the rhetorical use of factuality in narratives.

Pernille Meyer is a PhD student in Scandinavian Language and Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her PhD project concerns second-person narratives in Danish literature and draws on theoretical areas such as rhetorical fictionality theory and diachronic narratology.

Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on the story economy; the neoliberal logic of narrative and fiction; narrative exemplarity; consciousness, voice and realism across media; adultery in fiction; authorial ethos; and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.

Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen is Professor of Fictionality Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research has attempted to contribute to conversations about three areas of narrative theory: first-person narration, unnatural narratology and fictionality. His current project is on human sexuality and the roles of imagination and fictionality in human sexual practices and preferences.

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