Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9642581
Andrea Macrae
The explicit imperative to “tell a story” recently dominating UK and US fundraising discourse refers specifically to the central compelling “story” of the representative victim/beneficiary, and yet there are multiple stories at work in charity fundraising letters, with interdependent narrative trajectories. This article draws on small stories research and on scholarship on storytelling and ethics to explore the relative narrativity of the stories within charity fundraising letters and their marked contingence upon lack of resolution. This article also disentangles and investigates the interactions among the stories of the representative beneficiary, the addressee as potential donor, and the charitable organization. It discusses the affirmation and exploitation of Western neoliberal individualism in the selective spotlighting of an individual beneficiary, and in the individualized appeal to the addressee. It discusses the tensions between the charitable organization and the addressee as competing contenders for the archetypal role of the “hero” in the narrative of the victim/beneficiary, and reflects on the ways in which the complex narratives of supraindividual social processes involved both in the causes of suffering and need and in their alleviation are downplayed in the service of more impactful individualistic narratives.
{"title":"Small Stories in Charity Fundraising Letters and the Ethics of Interwoven Individualism","authors":"Andrea Macrae","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9642581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642581","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The explicit imperative to “tell a story” recently dominating UK and US fundraising discourse refers specifically to the central compelling “story” of the representative victim/beneficiary, and yet there are multiple stories at work in charity fundraising letters, with interdependent narrative trajectories. This article draws on small stories research and on scholarship on storytelling and ethics to explore the relative narrativity of the stories within charity fundraising letters and their marked contingence upon lack of resolution. This article also disentangles and investigates the interactions among the stories of the representative beneficiary, the addressee as potential donor, and the charitable organization. It discusses the affirmation and exploitation of Western neoliberal individualism in the selective spotlighting of an individual beneficiary, and in the individualized appeal to the addressee. It discusses the tensions between the charitable organization and the addressee as competing contenders for the archetypal role of the “hero” in the narrative of the victim/beneficiary, and reflects on the ways in which the complex narratives of supraindividual social processes involved both in the causes of suffering and need and in their alleviation are downplayed in the service of more impactful individualistic narratives.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42776334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9642651
Hanna-Riikka Roine, Laura Piippo
Narrative theorists have identified the role of social networking sites as elementary in the contemporary story economy. This article argues that they have, however, neglected to treat the sites as part of the digital infraculture which creates blind spots in current analyses of the digital as a context for narrative. The aim is to construct tools for a semiotics of the imperceptible, an approach to analyze the ways in which the digital shapes human agency in dimensions the users cannot directly perceive but which nevertheless affect users’ sense of what is possible for them. The article first reevaluates affordance and affect as concepts to demonstrate digital environments as a new type of context for uses of narrative. It then shows how these concepts can be applied to readings of experientiality and narrativity in digital environments which shape users’ narrative agency on multiple layers. Finally, the article examines how different agencies on these layers can be analyzed within the wider affective logic of the social networking sites. Finally, the article's findings are summarized as a story-critical approach to digital environments, one which accounts for the entanglement of individual agents in collectivities and points the way toward recognizing the ethics of shared responsibility.
{"title":"Social Networking Sites as Contexts for Uses of Narrative: Toward a Story-Critical Approach to Digital Environments","authors":"Hanna-Riikka Roine, Laura Piippo","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9642651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642651","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Narrative theorists have identified the role of social networking sites as elementary in the contemporary story economy. This article argues that they have, however, neglected to treat the sites as part of the digital infraculture which creates blind spots in current analyses of the digital as a context for narrative. The aim is to construct tools for a semiotics of the imperceptible, an approach to analyze the ways in which the digital shapes human agency in dimensions the users cannot directly perceive but which nevertheless affect users’ sense of what is possible for them. The article first reevaluates affordance and affect as concepts to demonstrate digital environments as a new type of context for uses of narrative. It then shows how these concepts can be applied to readings of experientiality and narrativity in digital environments which shape users’ narrative agency on multiple layers. Finally, the article examines how different agencies on these layers can be analyzed within the wider affective logic of the social networking sites. Finally, the article's findings are summarized as a story-critical approach to digital environments, one which accounts for the entanglement of individual agents in collectivities and points the way toward recognizing the ethics of shared responsibility.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43275874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9642665
A. Rüggemeier
Focusing on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) and Han Kang's The White Book (2016), this contribution explores how contemporary life writers critically engage with the causally and temporally bound form of narrative through the use of story-critical forms such as lists, vignettes, and meditations. While scholars of narrative agree that we witness a new dominance of the generic conventions of traditional autobiography—especially its trope of redemption and conversion narratives—among storytellers on digital platforms as well as in advertisement, marketing and political campaigns, the literary genre of autobiography, this article argues, starts to reinvent itself. The life writers Nelson and Kang turn toward the essayistic rather than the affirmative, the enumerative rather than the narrative, and the unity of form rather than the linear and causal cohesion of storytelling. Bluets and The White Book show their authors as deeply involved in imagining alternative acts of literary representation that exceed the scripts and protocols that are usually activated and called up through the story-ing of the self. As Nelson and Kang explore the story-critical affordances of fragmentary literary forms and test the limits of experientiality (sensu Fludernik), they highlight the opaqueness of life and ask for non-subsumptive readings (sensu Meretoja).
这篇文章聚焦于玛吉·纳尔逊的《蓝》（2009）和韩抗的《白书》（2016），探讨了当代生活作家如何通过使用列表、小插曲和冥想等故事批评形式，批判性地参与因果和时间约束的叙事形式。尽管叙事学者们一致认为，我们见证了传统自传的通用惯例——尤其是其救赎和转换叙事的比喻——在数字平台以及广告、营销和政治活动中的故事讲述者中占据了新的主导地位，但本文认为，自传的文学流派开始重塑自己。生活作家Nelson和Kang转向散文主义而非肯定主义，枚举主义而非叙事，形式的统一而非故事的线性和因果衔接。Bluets和The White Book表明，他们的作者深度参与了对文学表现的替代行为的想象，这些行为超出了通常通过自我故事激活和调用的脚本和协议。当Nelson和Kang探索零碎文学形式的故事批判可供性，并测试经验的局限性（sense Fludernik）时，他们强调了生活的不透明性，并要求非包容性的阅读（sense Meretoja）。
{"title":"Lists, Vignettes, Enumerations: Contemporary Life Writing and the Gesture of Refusal toward Narrative","authors":"A. Rüggemeier","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9642665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642665","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Focusing on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) and Han Kang's The White Book (2016), this contribution explores how contemporary life writers critically engage with the causally and temporally bound form of narrative through the use of story-critical forms such as lists, vignettes, and meditations. While scholars of narrative agree that we witness a new dominance of the generic conventions of traditional autobiography—especially its trope of redemption and conversion narratives—among storytellers on digital platforms as well as in advertisement, marketing and political campaigns, the literary genre of autobiography, this article argues, starts to reinvent itself. The life writers Nelson and Kang turn toward the essayistic rather than the affirmative, the enumerative rather than the narrative, and the unity of form rather than the linear and causal cohesion of storytelling. Bluets and The White Book show their authors as deeply involved in imagining alternative acts of literary representation that exceed the scripts and protocols that are usually activated and called up through the story-ing of the self. As Nelson and Kang explore the story-critical affordances of fragmentary literary forms and test the limits of experientiality (sensu Fludernik), they highlight the opaqueness of life and ask for non-subsumptive readings (sensu Meretoja).","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41524061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01Epub Date: 2022-05-19DOI: 10.1111/trf.16927
Caitlin McOmish
{"title":"A monthly roundup of key articles in other journals.","authors":"Caitlin McOmish","doi":"10.1111/trf.16927","DOIUrl":"10.1111/trf.16927","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"12 1","pages":"1153-1156"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90529947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9642595
Kristiana Willsey
In a post-draft era in which American civilians have grown increasingly apart from their military, veterans are urged to share their stories, to personalize distant and poorly understood conflicts—to make war meaningful. But individual veterans can't control the larger conversation in which their stories are interpreted or used. Veterans’ stories are ventriloquized by candidates in campaign rallies, recapped in late-night news monologues, retweeted by celebrities, optioned for film, and consistently cited as evidence of why we should, or shouldn't, be at war. This politically charged landscape for the telling of personal narrative (and the speed and ease with which stories circulate via mass media) creates unique challenges for veterans, who need to find meaning in their experiences for their own sakes, but resist the ready-made plots and morals imposed on them by politicians and popular culture. Caught between what Amy Shuman calls “competing promises of narrative,” veterans learn how to not tell war stories, relying on the denial or deferral of storytelling to assert small-scale meanings that resist recirculation and politicization. But to reject narrative outright is antisocial at best, and at worst pathological. Instead, the management of narrative—learning to select and edit stories for a given audience—is critical to avoiding the stigmatized identity of the traumatized veteran, who is either stubbornly silent or disturbingly voluble. Framing the withholding of narrative in positive rather than negative terms, my interlocutors stressed their need to curate the situations in which storytelling could keep its promises.
{"title":"At War with Stories: A Vernacular Critique of the Storytelling Boom from American Military Veterans","authors":"Kristiana Willsey","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9642595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642595","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In a post-draft era in which American civilians have grown increasingly apart from their military, veterans are urged to share their stories, to personalize distant and poorly understood conflicts—to make war meaningful. But individual veterans can't control the larger conversation in which their stories are interpreted or used. Veterans’ stories are ventriloquized by candidates in campaign rallies, recapped in late-night news monologues, retweeted by celebrities, optioned for film, and consistently cited as evidence of why we should, or shouldn't, be at war. This politically charged landscape for the telling of personal narrative (and the speed and ease with which stories circulate via mass media) creates unique challenges for veterans, who need to find meaning in their experiences for their own sakes, but resist the ready-made plots and morals imposed on them by politicians and popular culture. Caught between what Amy Shuman calls “competing promises of narrative,” veterans learn how to not tell war stories, relying on the denial or deferral of storytelling to assert small-scale meanings that resist recirculation and politicization. But to reject narrative outright is antisocial at best, and at worst pathological. Instead, the management of narrative—learning to select and edit stories for a given audience—is critical to avoiding the stigmatized identity of the traumatized veteran, who is either stubbornly silent or disturbingly voluble. Framing the withholding of narrative in positive rather than negative terms, my interlocutors stressed their need to curate the situations in which storytelling could keep its promises.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44217320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9642609
A. Georgakopoulou
Small stories research has recently been extended as a paradigm for interrogating the current storytelling boom on social media, which includes the design of stories as specific features on a range of platforms. This algorithmic engineering of stories has led to the hugely popular feature of Stories on Snapchat and Instagram (also Facebook and Weibo). This article offers a methodology for studying such designed stories, underpinned by a technographic, corpus-assisted narrative analysis that tracks media affordances, including platforms’ directives to users for how to tell stories and what stories to tell, discourses about stories as platformed features, and communicative practices. The article specifically focuses on the directive of authenticity in the storytellers’ self-presentation with data from influencers’ Instagram Stories. Authenticity is attestable in the values underlying the design of stories, the affordances offered, and the storytelling practices that these commonly lead to. The article singles out three constituents of authenticity vis-à-vis each of the above: the design of stories as vehicles for “imperfect sharing” and an amateur aesthetic; visual and textual affordances for sharing life-in-the moment; and the deployment of specific genres of small stories that anchor the tellings onto the here and now. These enregister a type of teller who offers a believable account of themselves and their life through affording an eyewitnessing quality to their audiences and access to their everyday.
{"title":"Co-opting Small Stories on Social Media: A Narrative Analysis of the Directive of Authenticity","authors":"A. Georgakopoulou","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9642609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642609","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Small stories research has recently been extended as a paradigm for interrogating the current storytelling boom on social media, which includes the design of stories as specific features on a range of platforms. This algorithmic engineering of stories has led to the hugely popular feature of Stories on Snapchat and Instagram (also Facebook and Weibo). This article offers a methodology for studying such designed stories, underpinned by a technographic, corpus-assisted narrative analysis that tracks media affordances, including platforms’ directives to users for how to tell stories and what stories to tell, discourses about stories as platformed features, and communicative practices. The article specifically focuses on the directive of authenticity in the storytellers’ self-presentation with data from influencers’ Instagram Stories. Authenticity is attestable in the values underlying the design of stories, the affordances offered, and the storytelling practices that these commonly lead to. The article singles out three constituents of authenticity vis-à-vis each of the above: the design of stories as vehicles for “imperfect sharing” and an amateur aesthetic; visual and textual affordances for sharing life-in-the moment; and the deployment of specific genres of small stories that anchor the tellings onto the here and now. These enregister a type of teller who offers a believable account of themselves and their life through affording an eyewitnessing quality to their audiences and access to their everyday.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43590452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9642567
M. Mäkelä, Hanna Meretoja
The proponents of the contemporary storytelling boom, such as professional business storytellers and self-help coaches, urge individuals, groups, institutions, and corporations alike to find and tell their story. Social media as the predominant narrative environment for contemporary storytellers promotes the instrumentalization and commodification of stories of personal experience. Literary fiction as the primary locus for narrative experimentation finds itself conditioned and challenged by the story logic of social media, but it also possesses unique affordances for a critical engagement with the current celebration of narrative. How should a narrative theorist position oneself vis-à-vis these developments that are currently changing the public notions of what narratives are and what they can do? By drawing from narrative hermeneutics and cognitive and rhetorical narratology, this article outlines a “story-critical” approach to the current storytelling boom and provides examples of how to bring narrative-theoretical findings to bear on public and professional nonacademic storytalk. The article focuses particularly on a critical analysis of storytelling consultancy, provides an overview of antinarrativist approaches and recent criticism of the storytelling boom in narrative studies, analyzes the story logic of social media, discusses the critical potential of contemporary “metanarrative” forms of fiction, and proposes narrative hermeneutics as one possible paradigm for the critical examination of storytelling cultures. It concludes by envisioning future forms of public critical engagement for narrative theorists. Popular notions of narrative tend to celebrate the cognitive and moral benefits of storytelling while downplaying the limits of narrative understanding and popular story formulas; this article thus identifies the dissemination of tools for a critical narrative analysis among various audiences as an important task for narrative scholars.
{"title":"Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom","authors":"M. Mäkelä, Hanna Meretoja","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9642567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642567","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The proponents of the contemporary storytelling boom, such as professional business storytellers and self-help coaches, urge individuals, groups, institutions, and corporations alike to find and tell their story. Social media as the predominant narrative environment for contemporary storytellers promotes the instrumentalization and commodification of stories of personal experience. Literary fiction as the primary locus for narrative experimentation finds itself conditioned and challenged by the story logic of social media, but it also possesses unique affordances for a critical engagement with the current celebration of narrative. How should a narrative theorist position oneself vis-à-vis these developments that are currently changing the public notions of what narratives are and what they can do? By drawing from narrative hermeneutics and cognitive and rhetorical narratology, this article outlines a “story-critical” approach to the current storytelling boom and provides examples of how to bring narrative-theoretical findings to bear on public and professional nonacademic storytalk. The article focuses particularly on a critical analysis of storytelling consultancy, provides an overview of antinarrativist approaches and recent criticism of the storytelling boom in narrative studies, analyzes the story logic of social media, discusses the critical potential of contemporary “metanarrative” forms of fiction, and proposes narrative hermeneutics as one possible paradigm for the critical examination of storytelling cultures. It concludes by envisioning future forms of public critical engagement for narrative theorists. Popular notions of narrative tend to celebrate the cognitive and moral benefits of storytelling while downplaying the limits of narrative understanding and popular story formulas; this article thus identifies the dissemination of tools for a critical narrative analysis among various audiences as an important task for narrative scholars.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44457276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9642679
Hanna Meretoja, Eevastiina Kinnunen, Päivi Kosonen
This article lays out the theoretical-analytic framework of narrative agency, three central dimensions of which are narrative awareness, narrative imagination, and narrative dialogicality, and presents a model of metanarrative reading groups, which aims at amplifying narrative agency. It argues that an important form of self-reflexivity in contemporary literary fiction is metanarrativity—self-aware reflection not only on the narratives’ own narrativity but also on the significance and functions of cultural practices of narrative sense-making. It analyzes how reading together metanarrative fiction, which critically engages with the roles of cultural narrative models in contemporary society, can shape narrative agency—that is, the ability to navigate narrative environments. The article illustrates the metanarrative reading-group model through the analysis of one reading-group session, which focuses on a metanarrative excerpt from Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries. The article suggests that a creative, dialogical space of a metanarrative reading group forms a productive environment for exploring the affordances, limitations, and power of narratives. It argues that working with narrative agency has the potential to help participants gain critical awareness of—and thereby more agentic power over—their narrative environments, and to engage with them in more critical and creative ways.
{"title":"Narrative Agency and the Critical Potential of Metanarrative Reading Groups","authors":"Hanna Meretoja, Eevastiina Kinnunen, Päivi Kosonen","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9642679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642679","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article lays out the theoretical-analytic framework of narrative agency, three central dimensions of which are narrative awareness, narrative imagination, and narrative dialogicality, and presents a model of metanarrative reading groups, which aims at amplifying narrative agency. It argues that an important form of self-reflexivity in contemporary literary fiction is metanarrativity—self-aware reflection not only on the narratives’ own narrativity but also on the significance and functions of cultural practices of narrative sense-making. It analyzes how reading together metanarrative fiction, which critically engages with the roles of cultural narrative models in contemporary society, can shape narrative agency—that is, the ability to navigate narrative environments. The article illustrates the metanarrative reading-group model through the analysis of one reading-group session, which focuses on a metanarrative excerpt from Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries. The article suggests that a creative, dialogical space of a metanarrative reading group forms a productive environment for exploring the affordances, limitations, and power of narratives. It argues that working with narrative agency has the potential to help participants gain critical awareness of—and thereby more agentic power over—their narrative environments, and to engage with them in more critical and creative ways.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42142737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9642623
K. Giaxoglou
Illness stories have been celebrated as a resource for giving patients voice from the active position of the wounded storyteller. The proliferating research on illness stories, however, has often reproduced a reductionist approach to narrative as a window to subjective views and experiences based on a largely underdeveloped and essentialized notion of voice. Critics of the over-celebration of narrative have called for caution toward the use of personal stories, pointing to the need to situate constructions of the narrative self in their social, cultural, and political contexts. This article discusses a new type of illness stories that has emerged in digital contexts and that is characterized by the use of illness for producing various forms of economic and social value. Using small stories and affective positioning as its analytic lens, the article examines the specific case of story design, curation, and sharing of the COVID-19 diagnosis of actor Idris Elba in March 2020. As the article argues, the illness experience is mobilized in small stories online as a resource for authenticating the self in line with conventional modes of sharing, blurring the lines between the personal voice and the public visibility of storytelling. The article contributes to the critical study of the mobilization of stories in digital contexts.
{"title":"Mobilizing Stories of Illness in Digital Contexts: A Critical Approach to Narrative, Voice, and Visibility","authors":"K. Giaxoglou","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9642623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642623","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Illness stories have been celebrated as a resource for giving patients voice from the active position of the wounded storyteller. The proliferating research on illness stories, however, has often reproduced a reductionist approach to narrative as a window to subjective views and experiences based on a largely underdeveloped and essentialized notion of voice. Critics of the over-celebration of narrative have called for caution toward the use of personal stories, pointing to the need to situate constructions of the narrative self in their social, cultural, and political contexts. This article discusses a new type of illness stories that has emerged in digital contexts and that is characterized by the use of illness for producing various forms of economic and social value. Using small stories and affective positioning as its analytic lens, the article examines the specific case of story design, curation, and sharing of the COVID-19 diagnosis of actor Idris Elba in March 2020. As the article argues, the illness experience is mobilized in small stories online as a resource for authenticating the self in line with conventional modes of sharing, blurring the lines between the personal voice and the public visibility of storytelling. The article contributes to the critical study of the mobilization of stories in digital contexts.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42989676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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