Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality: A Rhetorical Approach to Storytelling in Contemporary Western Culture (Literary and Cultural Studies, Theory and the (New) Media)

The book provides frameworks for analyzing the rhetorical uses and potential dangers of narratives and fictionality. The chapters deal with various storytelling environments, such as social media, news media, literary fiction and non-fiction. The book offers new perspectives of the rhetorical and ethical problematics of narratives and fictionality. Cover HalfTitle Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgement Table of Contents Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality: Introduction Story-critical narrative theory Rhetorical fictionality theory Pragmatic and critical approaches to the relationship between narrative and fictionality The outline of the volume Part I: Narrative, Fictionality and the Public Sphere 1. Bad Press: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Public Discourse What even is a narrative? ‘A Narrative’ versus ‘The Narrative’ Narrative as political rhetoric Narrative as political commentary Journalistic emplotment and competing narratives Narrative falsehood: Fiction, misinformation and conspiracy Narrative versus story Post-truth: Narrative and possible worlds 2. Dangers of Media Hoaxing Theoretical and methodological framework Hoaxing Fictionality and hoaxing The Yes Men @deeptomcruise: Deepfake technology and initial scepticism Findings: A method for analysing hoaxes 3. Assessing the Genre of Docudrama: The Case of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 The Trial of the Chicago 7 The Chicago 7 and the historical record Historically accurate representations Partially accurate representations Distortions/Inventions A rhetorical approach to fictionality and nonfictionality Q&A about The Chicago 7 Assessing The Trial of the Chicago 7: Salience and efficacy in four instances of fictionality Assessing the docudrama Part II: Networked Rhetoric 4. The Message Is Not the Truth: Uses and Affordances of Narrative Form on Social Media Platforms Towards a relational understanding of affordance in narrative theory Forms of content and forms of agency The irrelevance of the ‘original’ Changing the contextual assumption: Readings of ‘Cat Person’ Conclusions 5. Storytelling and Participatory Immersion in the Niilo22 Experience Social media and YouTube as technological platforms Storytelling online Immersion and irony Telling and following as participatory immersion Key scenes: ‘Weather’ and ‘Sleep’ Conclusion 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 Fictionality as knowledge creation and invention, truth and credibility in Conrad’s prefaces Contextualizing fictionality and invention in Chance’s representation of nonfictional conversational storytelling Knowledge creation and the dangers of shifts between fictionality and ambiguously signalled or unsignalled communicated invention in nonfictional conversational storytelling Conclusion: What Conrad’s fictional story teaches us about nonfictional conversational storytelling 7. Positioning You: Fictionality and Interpellation in Janne Teller’s War: What If It Were Here?388 What if? Second-person narration and reader involvement Second-person narration as interpellation Potential dangers of an interpellative use of second-person narration 8. ‘But it hurts like I killed someone’: Character Assassinations and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle Character assassinations in contemporary culture and literature Offended by My Struggle Exposing Knausgaard’s uncle’s attack ‘Oh, Linda, Linda’ The novel as another place Part IV: Broadening the Scope of Rhetorical Fictionality Theory 9. On Being Lectured in and by Fiction: Rhetorical Directness and Indirectness of Fictional Instructiveness Instructive fictions The Pale King: What does this lecture really inform us about? Oneiron: How to authorize factuality in fiction The Underground Railroad: The consonance of didacticism and fictionality Conclusion: Why factuality and instructiveness make a difference to the relevance of fictions 10. Dangers of Fictionality, Human Sexuality and Sexual Fantasies Imagination, fictionality and human sexuality637 Recent fictionality theory and earlier approaches to similar questions Three dangers of fictionality in the context of human sexuality Sexuality as a purpose of fictionality Conclusion: Purposes of imagination, fictionality and sexual fantasies Bibliography 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.