Civic storytelling : the rise of short forms and the agency of literature

A deep history of storytelling as a civic agency, recalibrating literature’s political role for the twenty-first century Why did short narrative forms like the novella, fable, and fairy tale suddenly emerge around 1800 as genres symptomatic of literature’s role in life and society? In order to explain their rapid ascent to such importance, Florian Fuchs identifies an essential role of literature, a role traditionally performed within classical civic discourse of storytelling, by looking at new or updated forms of this civic practice in modernity. Fuchs's focus in this groundbreaking book is on the fate of topical speech, on what is exchanged between participants in argument or conversation as opposed to rhetorical speech, which emanates from and ensures political authority. He shows how after the decline of the Ars topica in the eighteenth century, various forms of literary speech took up the role of topical speech that Aristotle had originally identified. Thus, his book outlines a genealogy of various literary short forms—from fable, fairy tale, and novella to twenty-first century video storytelling—that attempted on both "high" and "low" levels of culture to exercise again the social function of topical speech. Some of the specific texts analyzed include the novellas of Theodor Storm and the novella-like lettre de cachet , proverbial fictions of Gustave Flaubert and Gottfried Keller, the fairy tale as rediscovered by Vladimir Propp and Walter Benjamin, the epiphanies of James Joyce, and the video narratives of Hito Steyerl. Cover Contents Introduction: Two Ontologies of Prose Literature,Short Form versus Novel Rhetorical Speech versus Topical Speech I. The Ars Topica, Its Disappearance, and Its Afterlife The Ars Topica: Method, Form, Storehouse The Eclipse of Formal Agency The Afterlife of the Ars Topica Form of Life and Literary Form II. After the Ars Topica: The Failed Return of the Fable in Modernity Praising What Is Present: Ainos in Modernity A Here and Now in Poetics Fabulatory Philosophy III. Form: The Novella and the Agency of Short Narrative Forms Force Autonomy Self-Formation IV. Argumentation: The Proverb as Micronarrative Agency The Scene of the Irrepressible Proverb Keller’s Baroque Clothes Make the Man and “Clothes make the man” Topos as Form V. Perception: The Fairy Tale as Topical Archive Fairy Tales versus Legends Disappearing Forgetting Literary Form and Virtuality Against Myth: The Archive of the Homo narrans VI. Epiphanies, Enacted Stories, and the Praxeology of Short Forms Epiphany, Perception, Argumentation, Agency Short Forms as Actors For a Praxeology of Short Narrative Forms VII. Coda: Civic Storytelling and the Postliterary Image Life Stranger Than Fiction No Climate Change without Storytelling Known Practices of Storytelling and Unknown Forms of Life Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index "This book recalibrates literature's political role for the twenty-first century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency"-- Provided by publisher