ABSTRACT:This essay revisits Jordan Peele's concept of the "sunken place" from his 2017 film Get Out as a model of deep intertextuality. I argue that the film draws extensively from the twentieth-century female gothic, especially the cinematic and literary versions of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, to formulate a narrative about racial violence and white privilege in America. In asking his viewers to identify his film's referencing of female gothic tropes, Peele also compels us to delve into these earlier narratives to witness how their prioritizing of white female experience depends on silencing racial trauma. My aim in this essay is twofold: firstly, to examine Peele's repurposing of the structures of identification afforded by the female gothic; and secondly, to argue that the mode of intertextuality he deploys in Get Out offers a new relationship between source texts and their adaptations. This model reverses the expected direction of referentiality, in which earlier texts are thought to shape later ones, by exposing the power of adaptations to shed light on what was suppressed in their antecedents. By looking backward, we discover that the exclusion of racial engagement in Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives is not accidental, but a pointed attempt to limit the viewer's attention to white female experience. Get Out is groundbreaking not only for its innovative use of gothic tropes, but also for its political and historicizing use of intertextuality to reveal why the female gothic, at least in its mainstream forms, stayed white for so long.
{"title":"Live Burial: The Deep Intertextuality of Jordan Peele's Get Out","authors":"Aviva Briefel","doi":"10.1353/nar.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay revisits Jordan Peele's concept of the \"sunken place\" from his 2017 film Get Out as a model of deep intertextuality. I argue that the film draws extensively from the twentieth-century female gothic, especially the cinematic and literary versions of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, to formulate a narrative about racial violence and white privilege in America. In asking his viewers to identify his film's referencing of female gothic tropes, Peele also compels us to delve into these earlier narratives to witness how their prioritizing of white female experience depends on silencing racial trauma. My aim in this essay is twofold: firstly, to examine Peele's repurposing of the structures of identification afforded by the female gothic; and secondly, to argue that the mode of intertextuality he deploys in Get Out offers a new relationship between source texts and their adaptations. This model reverses the expected direction of referentiality, in which earlier texts are thought to shape later ones, by exposing the power of adaptations to shed light on what was suppressed in their antecedents. By looking backward, we discover that the exclusion of racial engagement in Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives is not accidental, but a pointed attempt to limit the viewer's attention to white female experience. Get Out is groundbreaking not only for its innovative use of gothic tropes, but also for its political and historicizing use of intertextuality to reveal why the female gothic, at least in its mainstream forms, stayed white for so long.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"297 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41360313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Though the centrality of emotion in gothic fiction has long been acknowledged, its mechanisms for generating emotions have remained curiously underexplored. My review of the history of the genre's transatlantic development reveals that mind representation has often been explored as an important affective strategy by the gothicists, and that we can gain a solid understanding of its affective significance by combining the cognitive model of narrative with the rhetorical model. Bringing a diachronic perspective to bear on the study of gothic minds, my research demonstrates the historical embeddedness of the mechanisms of emotional generation, and their evolution under particular historical circumstances. My synthesized approach—which builds on an implied compatibility or even complementarity between the narrative models—externalizes the connections between the models, illuminates the evolution trajectory of both the affective system and the gothic genre per se, and extends our understanding of specific gothic works, authors, and historical periods under consideration.
{"title":"Mind Representation as an Affective Device in the Gothic: Bridging the Cognitive and the Rhetorical Model","authors":"Wanlin Li","doi":"10.1353/nar.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Though the centrality of emotion in gothic fiction has long been acknowledged, its mechanisms for generating emotions have remained curiously underexplored. My review of the history of the genre's transatlantic development reveals that mind representation has often been explored as an important affective strategy by the gothicists, and that we can gain a solid understanding of its affective significance by combining the cognitive model of narrative with the rhetorical model. Bringing a diachronic perspective to bear on the study of gothic minds, my research demonstrates the historical embeddedness of the mechanisms of emotional generation, and their evolution under particular historical circumstances. My synthesized approach—which builds on an implied compatibility or even complementarity between the narrative models—externalizes the connections between the models, illuminates the evolution trajectory of both the affective system and the gothic genre per se, and extends our understanding of specific gothic works, authors, and historical periods under consideration.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"339 - 354"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42621728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay analyzes the narratological features of language produced by and about the International Monetary Fund in order to illustrate its role in establishing and covertly disseminating the ideological foundations of a finance-centric, global economic paradigm. This work, therefore, can be situated within the larger context of narratological inquiries, such as those of feminist, critical-race, and postcolonial investigations, which unveil and call into question the dominant paradigms that inform environmental, social, political, and economic systems. Reviewing the IMF narrative alongside that of one of its borrowers, Tanzania, the essay engages the twin applications of empirical research and rhetorical narrative theory as it has developed from classical through postclassical narratology; further, it underscores and challenges the linguistic and systemic means by which the IMF has crafted the policies that borrowing nations must adopt in order to receive aid (Structural Adjustment Policies). In light of the narratives it traces and the conditions it exposes, "Narrative in the Economic Sphere" makes a case for the value of enhanced narrative competence among economists, and especially those in International Financial Institutions that have increasingly governed the global economy since the close of the Second World War.
{"title":"Narrative in the Economic Sphere: The International Monetary Fund and the Scripting of a Global Economy","authors":"Lindsay Holmgren","doi":"10.1353/NAR.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAR.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay analyzes the narratological features of language produced by and about the International Monetary Fund in order to illustrate its role in establishing and covertly disseminating the ideological foundations of a finance-centric, global economic paradigm. This work, therefore, can be situated within the larger context of narratological inquiries, such as those of feminist, critical-race, and postcolonial investigations, which unveil and call into question the dominant paradigms that inform environmental, social, political, and economic systems. Reviewing the IMF narrative alongside that of one of its borrowers, Tanzania, the essay engages the twin applications of empirical research and rhetorical narrative theory as it has developed from classical through postclassical narratology; further, it underscores and challenges the linguistic and systemic means by which the IMF has crafted the policies that borrowing nations must adopt in order to receive aid (Structural Adjustment Policies). In light of the narratives it traces and the conditions it exposes, \"Narrative in the Economic Sphere\" makes a case for the value of enhanced narrative competence among economists, and especially those in International Financial Institutions that have increasingly governed the global economy since the close of the Second World War.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"192 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/NAR.2021.0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44475459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Charon, Craig Irvine, A. N. Oforlea, E. Colón, C. Smalletz, Marilyn J Spiegel
ABSTRACT:In an age of police violence against Black persons and their mass incarceration, Americans seek a "public sphere" in which to examine the torn fabric of race relations. To date, efforts to overcome centuries-long polarizations and to find collective avenues toward racial justice have had little success. This essay proposes that narrative engagement and creative discovery can open paths toward mutual comprehension, if not reconciliation, in the sphere of racial justice.Focusing on racial inequity within health care, faculty from the Division of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University designed and executed an intensive three-day workshop entitled "Race | Violence | Justice: The Need for Narrative" using the methods and principles of narrative medicine. This essay provides a critical race theory conceptual framework for the project and summarizes the content and process of the workshop itself. To learn about the workshop's outcomes, the 110 participants were surveyed anonymously six months later in an unsolicited email questionnaire composed of three open-ended questions and a creative exercise. The team accomplished a modified-grounded-theory–guided content analysis of the survey question responses and a narrative/poetics reading of the responses to the creative exercise.The study identified overarching themes and revealed uniform and enthusiastic endorsement of the methods of the workshop with evidence of lasting impact on respondents' work, teaching, activism, and personal lives. Although limited by the number of participants and respondents, the study supports the necessity of narrative and creative approaches in anti-racism and anti-bias work.
{"title":"Racial Justice in Medicine: Narrative Practices toward Equity","authors":"R. Charon, Craig Irvine, A. N. Oforlea, E. Colón, C. Smalletz, Marilyn J Spiegel","doi":"10.1353/NAR.2021.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAR.2021.0008","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In an age of police violence against Black persons and their mass incarceration, Americans seek a \"public sphere\" in which to examine the torn fabric of race relations. To date, efforts to overcome centuries-long polarizations and to find collective avenues toward racial justice have had little success. This essay proposes that narrative engagement and creative discovery can open paths toward mutual comprehension, if not reconciliation, in the sphere of racial justice.Focusing on racial inequity within health care, faculty from the Division of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University designed and executed an intensive three-day workshop entitled \"Race | Violence | Justice: The Need for Narrative\" using the methods and principles of narrative medicine. This essay provides a critical race theory conceptual framework for the project and summarizes the content and process of the workshop itself. To learn about the workshop's outcomes, the 110 participants were surveyed anonymously six months later in an unsolicited email questionnaire composed of three open-ended questions and a creative exercise. The team accomplished a modified-grounded-theory–guided content analysis of the survey question responses and a narrative/poetics reading of the responses to the creative exercise.The study identified overarching themes and revealed uniform and enthusiastic endorsement of the methods of the workshop with evidence of lasting impact on respondents' work, teaching, activism, and personal lives. Although limited by the number of participants and respondents, the study supports the necessity of narrative and creative approaches in anti-racism and anti-bias work.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"160 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/NAR.2021.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43896465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay examines President Donald J. Trump’s storytelling over twenty-seven days in spring 2020 in order to explore the ways in which his performances threatened to destroy the genre of nonfiction political narrative in the United States. The analysis of these twenty-seven days is framed by a Preface, written from the perspective of January 2021 after the attack on the US Capitol by those who believed Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election—an attack indicating that Trump had almost succeeded in destroying the genre. By the spring of 2020, Trump had all but eroded that genre’s foundations in referentiality, and his Republican supporters in Congress, in right-wing media, and in the electorate had allowed him to operate on the principle that “my saying makes things so.” The events of the spring of 2020, however, especially those accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic, provided the greatest resistance to that principle, because the virus was an extratextual reality that was indifferent to Trump’s rhetoric. The essay is itself an unfolding narrative, as it traces Trump’s storytelling about the pandemic, voting by mail, Barack Obama, and, toward the end of the period, about George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed. This thick description of Trump’s performances does not end with a definitive judgment about the fate of the genre of nonfiction political narrative, but instead offers insights into the nature and relentlessness of Trump’s attack on that genre that in turn shed light on his Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election.
{"title":"Donald J. Trump's Storytelling, May 12–June 7, 2020; or, Can His Saying Make Things So?","authors":"J. Phelan","doi":"10.1353/NAR.2021.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAR.2021.0015","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay examines President Donald J. Trump’s storytelling over twenty-seven days in spring 2020 in order to explore the ways in which his performances threatened to destroy the genre of nonfiction political narrative in the United States. The analysis of these twenty-seven days is framed by a Preface, written from the perspective of January 2021 after the attack on the US Capitol by those who believed Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election—an attack indicating that Trump had almost succeeded in destroying the genre. By the spring of 2020, Trump had all but eroded that genre’s foundations in referentiality, and his Republican supporters in Congress, in right-wing media, and in the electorate had allowed him to operate on the principle that “my saying makes things so.” The events of the spring of 2020, however, especially those accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic, provided the greatest resistance to that principle, because the virus was an extratextual reality that was indifferent to Trump’s rhetoric. The essay is itself an unfolding narrative, as it traces Trump’s storytelling about the pandemic, voting by mail, Barack Obama, and, toward the end of the period, about George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed. This thick description of Trump’s performances does not end with a definitive judgment about the fate of the genre of nonfiction political narrative, but instead offers insights into the nature and relentlessness of Trump’s attack on that genre that in turn shed light on his Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"275 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/NAR.2021.0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44367385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Toni Morrison frequently said that she wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, because she could not find, in the literary world around her, the fictional voice of young black women. In the years between 1965 and her death in 2019, Morrison both edited and authored a body of work which answered that need and valorized its literary merits. This essay attends to the question of reading publics, specifically to the interactions between the discourse of literature and literary production disseminated by Morrison in the late twentieth century and the implications of this discourse for the reception of her work and persona. I argue that Morrison, who operates in the literary sphere not only as a novelist, but also as a professor, an editor, and a public intellectual, addresses herself to an expansive, disparate readership (mass, literary, and academic; black and non-black) in order to open up fiction to new audiences through a narrative that insists on the value of literature as a participatory and public artifact. Drawing from studies of fictionality and from the interrelation of literary sociology with novel theory, I delineate the tensions between the material practices and rarefied literary languages which animate Morrison's editorial work, her discourse of reading, and her self-authored forewords.
{"title":"Reading with Toni Morrison: Literary Publics, Editing, and the Work of Authorial Persona","authors":"C. Terrell","doi":"10.1353/NAR.2021.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAR.2021.0016","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Toni Morrison frequently said that she wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, because she could not find, in the literary world around her, the fictional voice of young black women. In the years between 1965 and her death in 2019, Morrison both edited and authored a body of work which answered that need and valorized its literary merits. This essay attends to the question of reading publics, specifically to the interactions between the discourse of literature and literary production disseminated by Morrison in the late twentieth century and the implications of this discourse for the reception of her work and persona. I argue that Morrison, who operates in the literary sphere not only as a novelist, but also as a professor, an editor, and a public intellectual, addresses herself to an expansive, disparate readership (mass, literary, and academic; black and non-black) in order to open up fiction to new audiences through a narrative that insists on the value of literature as a participatory and public artifact. Drawing from studies of fictionality and from the interrelation of literary sociology with novel theory, I delineate the tensions between the material practices and rarefied literary languages which animate Morrison's editorial work, her discourse of reading, and her self-authored forewords.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"239 - 257"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/NAR.2021.0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66329441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:For this special issue of Narrative, celebrated artist Ruth Root has contributed work to accompany articles on the many ways that narrative is used and misused in public discourse. Below, The Ohio State University's George Rush offers thoughts on these paintings—his own narrations of these public artifacts.
{"title":"Narrating Ruth Root's Images","authors":"G. Rush, Ruth Root","doi":"10.1353/NAR.2021.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAR.2021.0007","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:For this special issue of Narrative, celebrated artist Ruth Root has contributed work to accompany articles on the many ways that narrative is used and misused in public discourse. Below, The Ohio State University's George Rush offers thoughts on these paintings—his own narrations of these public artifacts.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"129 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48911677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Mäkelä, Samuli Björninen, Laura Karttunen, M. Nurminen, Juha Raipola, Tytti Rantanen
ABSTRACT:The current storytelling boom across various spheres of life encourages actors from individuals to businesses and institutions to instrumentalize stories of personal experience, but the search for a "compelling story" is often blind to the possible downsides of experientially and emotionally engaging narratives. This article presents key findings of the project Dangers of Narrative that has crowdsourced examples of instrumental storytelling via Facebook and Twitter. We focus on three cases of political storytelling on social media, which foreground certain problems of using narrative in the public sphere: Donald Trump's anecdote about "Jim who stopped going to Paris"; a viral Facebook story by a Finnish MP about an encounter with a drug addict; and the social media controversy around the alleged confrontation between Covington High School students and Indigenous Peoples March attendants at the Lincoln Memorial in January 2019. Based on the idea in cognitive narratology of the experiential narrative as prototypical and on Caroline Levine's influential theory of colliding representational and social forms, we formulate a theory of how viral, affective storytelling may distort the intended rhetoric and ethics of narrative. We demonstrate how the prototypical narrative form, in collision with the formal affordances of social media, ends up contradicting the political or social forms that the teller or sharer of the narrative advocates. We describe the social media logic that creates a chain reaction from narrative experientiality to disproportionate and uncontrolled representativeness and normativity created by affective sharing, and we conceptualize this contemporary narrative phenomenon as the "viral exemplum."
{"title":"Dangers of Narrative: A Critical Approach to Narratives of Personal Experience in Contemporary Story Economy","authors":"M. Mäkelä, Samuli Björninen, Laura Karttunen, M. Nurminen, Juha Raipola, Tytti Rantanen","doi":"10.1353/NAR.2021.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAR.2021.0009","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The current storytelling boom across various spheres of life encourages actors from individuals to businesses and institutions to instrumentalize stories of personal experience, but the search for a \"compelling story\" is often blind to the possible downsides of experientially and emotionally engaging narratives. This article presents key findings of the project Dangers of Narrative that has crowdsourced examples of instrumental storytelling via Facebook and Twitter. We focus on three cases of political storytelling on social media, which foreground certain problems of using narrative in the public sphere: Donald Trump's anecdote about \"Jim who stopped going to Paris\"; a viral Facebook story by a Finnish MP about an encounter with a drug addict; and the social media controversy around the alleged confrontation between Covington High School students and Indigenous Peoples March attendants at the Lincoln Memorial in January 2019. Based on the idea in cognitive narratology of the experiential narrative as prototypical and on Caroline Levine's influential theory of colliding representational and social forms, we formulate a theory of how viral, affective storytelling may distort the intended rhetoric and ethics of narrative. We demonstrate how the prototypical narrative form, in collision with the formal affordances of social media, ends up contradicting the political or social forms that the teller or sharer of the narrative advocates. We describe the social media logic that creates a chain reaction from narrative experientiality to disproportionate and uncontrolled representativeness and normativity created by affective sharing, and we conceptualize this contemporary narrative phenomenon as the \"viral exemplum.\"","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"139 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/NAR.2021.0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41617505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:As the conditions for public deliberation are undergoing massive transitions, presidential rhetoric develops novel messaging tactics in order to remain visible and relevant in the multiple public spheres of present-day society. Recent work has demonstrated how the Obama and Trump administrations employ new digital platforms and how their communication interweaves with entertainment media formats. This article investigates an aspect of contemporary presidential rhetoric that so far has received far less attention: namely, its nonconventional use of fictionalized discourse. Drawing and elaborating on ongoing work in narrative theory on the rhetoric of fictionality, the aim of the article is to show how particular rhetorical practices, producing what I call metanoic reflexivity, have been employed by the Obama and Trump administrations. Metanoic reflexivity is a reading effect experienced when a rhetor's use of fictionality disrupts the audience's ascription of relevance to an act of communication.Through readings of such effects in Barack Obama's and Donald Trump's rhetorics, the article makes two arguments. Firstly, that metanoic reflexivity, by disrupting processes of generic ascription, offers a window into how and why a given public sphere distinguishes the invented from the referential. Secondly, that Obama's experiments with fictionality take place according to meticulous designs which ultimately reinstate stable distinctions between the invented, the feigned, and the authentic, whereas Trump's experiments permanently invite mutually exclusive ascriptions of relevance, thereby extending doubts about intention indefinitely.
{"title":"Nimble Navigation: Narrative, Fictionality, and Metanoic Reflexivity in Presidential Rhetoric","authors":"Stefan Iversen","doi":"10.1353/NAR.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAR.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:As the conditions for public deliberation are undergoing massive transitions, presidential rhetoric develops novel messaging tactics in order to remain visible and relevant in the multiple public spheres of present-day society. Recent work has demonstrated how the Obama and Trump administrations employ new digital platforms and how their communication interweaves with entertainment media formats. This article investigates an aspect of contemporary presidential rhetoric that so far has received far less attention: namely, its nonconventional use of fictionalized discourse. Drawing and elaborating on ongoing work in narrative theory on the rhetoric of fictionality, the aim of the article is to show how particular rhetorical practices, producing what I call metanoic reflexivity, have been employed by the Obama and Trump administrations. Metanoic reflexivity is a reading effect experienced when a rhetor's use of fictionality disrupts the audience's ascription of relevance to an act of communication.Through readings of such effects in Barack Obama's and Donald Trump's rhetorics, the article makes two arguments. Firstly, that metanoic reflexivity, by disrupting processes of generic ascription, offers a window into how and why a given public sphere distinguishes the invented from the referential. Secondly, that Obama's experiments with fictionality take place according to meticulous designs which ultimately reinstate stable distinctions between the invented, the feigned, and the authentic, whereas Trump's experiments permanently invite mutually exclusive ascriptions of relevance, thereby extending doubts about intention indefinitely.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"258 - 274"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/NAR.2021.0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44907898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Legal scholars typically understand law as a system of determinate rules grounded in logic. And in the public sphere, textualist judges and others often claim that judges should not "make" law, arguing instead that a judge's role is simply to find the meaning inherent in law's language. This essay offers a different understanding of both the structure of legal rules and the role of judges. Building on Caroline Levine's claim that texts have multiple ordering principles, the essay argues that legal rules simultaneously have three overlapping forms, none of which is dominant: not only the form of conditional, "if-then" logic, but also that of a rhetorical situation (as Lloyd Bitzer defines it) and a stock story, in which the story's elements are reduced to classes of things, acts, and circumstances. As a result, lawyers must tell stories, and legal decisions are a complex act of categorization in which a judge must decide whether the story before the court fits within the category of stories defined by the governing legal rule. This essay further suggests that if storytelling is inherent in law and legal practice, then legal textualism is flawed because it ignores both actual authors and actual audiences. In a very real sense judges do make law, and law's legitimacy in a modern democracy depends on a judge's willingness to consider the divergent voices of those who write the rules and who are bound by or benefit from them.
{"title":"Reframing Law's Domain: Narrative, Rhetoric, and the Forms of Legal Rules","authors":"Stephen Paskey","doi":"10.1353/NAR.2021.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAR.2021.0010","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Legal scholars typically understand law as a system of determinate rules grounded in logic. And in the public sphere, textualist judges and others often claim that judges should not \"make\" law, arguing instead that a judge's role is simply to find the meaning inherent in law's language. This essay offers a different understanding of both the structure of legal rules and the role of judges. Building on Caroline Levine's claim that texts have multiple ordering principles, the essay argues that legal rules simultaneously have three overlapping forms, none of which is dominant: not only the form of conditional, \"if-then\" logic, but also that of a rhetorical situation (as Lloyd Bitzer defines it) and a stock story, in which the story's elements are reduced to classes of things, acts, and circumstances. As a result, lawyers must tell stories, and legal decisions are a complex act of categorization in which a judge must decide whether the story before the court fits within the category of stories defined by the governing legal rule. This essay further suggests that if storytelling is inherent in law and legal practice, then legal textualism is flawed because it ignores both actual authors and actual audiences. In a very real sense judges do make law, and law's legitimacy in a modern democracy depends on a judge's willingness to consider the divergent voices of those who write the rules and who are bound by or benefit from them.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"29 1","pages":"178 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/NAR.2021.0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48185473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：