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

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