Sedotti dalle storie. Usi e abusi della narrazione

by Peter Brooks, Giuseppe Episcopo (Translator)

«Non c’è nulla al mondo più forte di una buona storia. Niente può fermarla, nessun nemico può sconfiggerla»: in questo volume – miglior libro di saggistica del 2022 secondo “New York Magazine” – Peter Brooks s’interroga sul ruolo che hanno acquisito negli ultimi anni le narrazioni, diffuse in ogni campo, da quello politico a quello pubblicitario, fin nelle aule dei tribunali, e, da semplice racconto, diventate strumento di spiegazione e convincimento. Perché tra i poteri del racconto – ci ammonisce Brooks – c’è anche quello di ingannare...

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Criticism, Art, Books About Books

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2022

About the author

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.

Reviews

[Sebastian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was not seduced and more abused by this collection of essays. As loose thoughts and inspirations some of the observations mentioned are interesting but as a coherent piece it does not deliver.

[Kaptan HUK · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dikkat Hikaye Var! Yutar! Yaklaşma!
Heyecandan hop oturup hop kalkarak okudum. Bir insanın okuma hayatında devrim etkisi yapacak nitelikte bir kitaptan bahsediyoruz. Devrim? Hikayenin anlamı, işlevi, sonuçları farkındalığıyla bir daha eskisi gibi olmayacak bir okuma hayatı  sürmek!          Hikaye araçtır. Ve aracı bilmiyorsun. Mümkün mü? Doğu'da sıradan olay, Batı'da ayvayı yersin hiç şansın yok! Düşünsene ticaretle meşgulsün, elinden dünyanın parası gelip gidiyor ve bir araç olarak parayı bilmek zorundasın ama bilmiyorsun!! Türkler parayı bilmez. Bu yüzden yoksuluz. Dünyanın hasılatını bir yıllığına Türkiye'ye pompala yoksulluk duygusu başedilemez seviyelere yükselir.          Anahtar kelime, ilgisisiz ve bilmiyoruz. Geçelim.          Kitaba gelelim. Hikayelerde inandırıcılık! Okuru aptal yerine koyma durumu kitabın öncelikli konusu, ikinci bölümden akışa giriyor.          Peter Brooks sözlü-yazılı anlatımları kıyasladığı üçüncü bölümde eskiden insanlar sevinçlerini, sıkıntılarını, bilgilerini hikaye anlatarak paylaşırlardı dediği paragrafları okuduktan sonra insanın aklını oynatmasına sebebiyet verecek rastlantılara tanıklanıyorum okuduğum romanlarda: Panenka, Çöl Kitabı ve hemen arkasından bu aralar okuduğum Yukarııda romanlarında karakterler birbirlerine hikaye anlatıyor!! Babası ölen Servivo'ya arkadaşları babasını hikayeyle anlatıyorlar. Bu bir şaka diyor gülüyorum; ama tabii bu tecrübenin bir ismi var: Farkındalık; Brooks'dan okuduklarım birer örneklemeyle odağıma geliyor. Muazzam bir keyif!          Peter Brooks çılgın paragraflarının birinde Marcel Proust'un yazdıklarını değerlendirerek insan başka gözlerle dünyayı gezer diyor. Başka gözler? Roman karakterlerinin bakış açılarıyla görmek; düşünsene yüzlerce bakış! Muazzam birikim!          Devlet, şirket, medya yalanlarıyla, afedersin hikayeleriyle zamanla hikayeleşirsin. Devletin "rakamlarıyla" zengin fakir hep birlikte yoksulluğu yaşarken, şirketlerin "hayal satışlarıyla" mutsuzluğu derinleştirir ve medyanın "haberleriyle" cahil kalırız. Bana bunları düşündürten birinci bölümden çok etkilendim. Fakat çok tuhaf, çoluk çocuğun bildiği konular, insan bildiği konudan etkilenir mi? Sıcaklardan mı acaba? Bizim algı operasyonları dediğimiz duruma Brooks "hikaye" diyor. İnsanlığı hikayeler yönetiyor diyor. Enteresan! O vakit 'Dikkat Hikaye Var! Yutar! Yaklaşma' tabelalarını asmak lazım. Yaka kartlarını da tabii! Hayata yeni başlayan gençleri hikayelerden korumak lazım. Kendimden biliyorum, insan yaşlandıkça hikayeleşiyor ve başlıyor hikaye anlatmaya. "Dikkat hikayedir" diye yaka kartı yaptırıyorum kendime!

[The Atlantic]

"There is a growing trend in American culture of what the literary theorist Peter Brooks calls 'storification.' Since the turn of the millennium, he argues in his new book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, we’ve relied too heavily on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us, which has resulted in a 'narrative takeover of reality' that affects nearly every form of communication—including the way doctors interact with patients, how financial reports are written, and the branding that corporations use to present themselves to consumers. Meanwhile, other modes of expression, interpretation, and comprehension, such as analysis and argument, have fallen to the wayside." — Sophia Stewart

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...

[Whitaker · Rating 1 out of 5]

The back of the book claims that the book "question[s] the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one". Given that, I was expecting more of an examination of the techniques of story - hero, villain, struggle etc - and showing how these are used by corporations and governments to frame narratives to influence Joe Public. The goal, I thought, would be to show how the use of these techniques functions to elicit the same emotional reactions that a reader of stories experiences in order to manipulate him/her, and to equip the reader to defend himself against these techniques by recognising them when he sees them. (Note: In this review, the use of the terms "he", "him" and cognates of these terms should be read as covering all genders.)

What I got instead was a history of the Western novel: how Western societies first presented novels as true accounts of real lives (the epistolary novel and the technique of the narrator recounting what a third party had said had happened to them are example) before wholeheartedly embracing their fabulation; how novelists used narrative techniques to tell stories of other people telling stories to deceive or to tell stories via the unreliable narrator. So, if what you are looking for is a history of narrative techniques in the Western novel, how the novel developed techniques to tell stories, what was considered presentable as stories, the development of unreliable narrators and stories of characters engaging in deception, you might give the book four stars because it does that well.

Unfortunately, this history is not remotely relevant to examining the socio-political question of how "story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation" to explain current affairs. Or if it is, Brooks does not make that link by, for example, undertaking an examination of the narratives spun by political spinmeisters in the context of filing these under "unreliable narrators".

Only the last chapter attempts even to address the promise dangled by the book's blurb by looking at written judgements and discussing how these tell a story of what happened to the parties in the case or tell a story of what the law should be. This is the lowest hanging fruit you can pick as all it requires is a reading of the written judgment and going, "Eureka! Look! The judge is talking about what happened to the parties as if he is telling a story." Well, if there is another way for a judge to lay out in text form a sequence of events that have occurred other than using narration, I would like to know what that might be.

Brooks even chooses the easiest targets by using judgements in appellate cases, where the facts have already been decided by the trial court and the appellate court as a decider of law not facts is constrained to adopt the "narrative" that the trial court has decided has actually occurred. If you read judgements from trial courts, you get a very different picture because there the judge sets out the contending explanations and testimonies, tests them against the documentary and physical evidence, describes the demeanour of the witnesses under cross-examination and explains why he has come to a view as to which party's case theory is the more plausible.

So, if you are looking for a work that "question[s] the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one" as claimed by the blurb of the back of the book, well, you should note that the blurb not simply overpromises and under delivers, it positively misrepresents what the work is about. I might have put this down to bad marketing but the introduction to the work by the author makes the same claim. All of which is hugely ironic given that the book is all about the use of narrative to deceive.

[Sevim Tezel Aydın · Rating 4 out of 5]

Başucu kitaplarımdan biri oldu:)
Hayatın her alanında sürekli karşımıza çıkan hikayelerin edebiyat, siyaset ve hukuktaki yerini sorgulayan; anlatıyı her yönüyle tartışan bu kitabı çok sevdim…
Bize anlatılan hikayelerin düşünme süreçlerindeki yeri ile ilgili kısımları özellikle zihin açıcı buldum…

[M. Altuğ Yayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zaman zaman tartışmaların yüzeyde kaldığını, derinleşmesini beklediğim yerlerin hızlıca geçildiğini düşündüm. Buna karşılık bazı bölümlerde ise gereğinden fazla ayrıntıya girilmişti; neden bu kadar uzatıldığını anlamakta zorlandım. Yine de kitap, yer yer gerçekten ufuk açıcı sorulara temas ediyor, bu da az şey değil.
En dikkat çekici tarafı, anlatıların sadece bir şey anlatmakla kalmayıp düşünme biçimimizi de yönlendirdiğini göstermesiydi. Bu yönüyle akılda kalıcı bir kitap oldu benim adıma.

[Dominic · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be continued -- Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (Peter Brooks)

Before we begin, I should mention that this sort of thing -- literary criticism -- isn't my wheelhouse. Brooks makes a compelling argument that it should be. I think this is an excellent book, though I find the main thrust of the argument somewhat loses itself in the middle of each section. The book is a little too replete with things Brooks finds "intuitively right" or lengthy quotes we simply take as (ironically) revealed truth. Perhaps this is my own failure as a reader, but it does not stop me from recommending this book as it is ultimately short.

The map is not the territory, or rather, the narrative is not the world. So we continue to hear, and convincingly. But it is not clear to me what is not narrative. At one point we contrast with logical argument, but then we set much of the legal edifice in the narrative context, so some clarification here for the nescient (ha) would be helpful. In any case, Brooks makes no case either way that narrative is ontological or epistemological: telling a story and living it, narration and authorship are not the same thing. Good-bye solipsists! This might, at this point, seem a bit like self-indulgent philosophising but Brooks makes a compelling and correct point that narratives are everywhere and deserve more formal attention through the lens of narratology. They legitimate the state, are the cognitive force by which the government acts, they are on the back of your shampoo bottle. So it is important that we do not mistake the map for the territory (metaphysics not covered) so as to not be fooled into turning narratives into totalising myths.

We duck and weave between psychological, critical, and evolutionary explanations about narrative. The one that stuck with me is that narrative is a cognitive -- perhaps our primary -- tool. It allows us to sort the signal from the noise, arrange it into a shape that allows us to understand the world, predict the future, and recontextualise the past. It has no moral valence, it can enlighten or fool. It is certainly our primary epistemological tool: we know and communicate our knowing through narratives. Epistemic trust even comes up at one point. We touch on narrative as therapy (perhaps this might help explain Trump?), on self-narrative as identity (a bit indulgent), of shared narratives.

In perhaps the most important, and final, section, Brooks touches on how the law and state use narratives. Is there any way to know a fact independent of its "description in narrative form"? The way we choose to tell stories, what we exclude and include, minimise or maximise (the sjuzhet against the fabula) now has forceful implications. Brooks talks a bit about narratives letting the present "overwrite" the past but I find this discussion a bit overwrought. Causes are not causes only retrospectively, causes are only understood to be causes retrospectively. Perhaps even predicted, so can we even say retrospective? In any case I think Brooks should have touched on (de)legitimating narratives rather than constitutional originalism.

I'm aware this review probably makes little sense unless you've read the book. I apologise for my own self-indulgence. If you've the time, I recommend it.

[Marc Blanchard]

Brooks goes full lit dad mode. References Game of thrones while also spending a sizeable part of this book criticizing how popular contemporary authors craft narrative perspective. It’s hard to see others living your dream life.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I took two months to read this because I routinely forgot about it for weeks at a time. The book is 150 pages long, with wide spacing. This should not have happened.

I appreciate what Peter Brooks is trying to do, or at least I would, if I could be 100 percent certain what he was trying to do instead of a strong 62 percent. I was interested in this book because I was hoping for an exploration of how the charismatic power of narrative can be used against people (particularly the marginalized), but Brooks seems only rarely to be interested in that. Instead, he talks about ... narratives he, personally, thinks are effective? Or not? Any book about writing has a hard sell here, because examples of effective and ineffective storytelling can be so subjective. But Brooks often doesn't even prove anything with these examples; it's just "here they are." He's a college professor, but he doesn't seem to remember the writing advice he's probably given freshmen.

If I had read this book for a class, with time to discuss it and a professor to bring in other examples, I might (?) have enjoyed it more. Actually, never mind. I would probably have still been glad it was over.

[Jonas Heide · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very clever - but also very loosely connected - reflections on narrative.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few short passages from Seduced by Story:


*


The oral storyteller, on the other hand, can gauge audience reaction, respond to questions or skeptical looks or bored body language. Many writers in the age of writing and print appear to look back upon the era of oral storytelling with nostalgia, as a less fallen age of communication and fellowship.


*


There is a continual conflict of form and the formless. The novel struggles to create form in the transitory and chaotic passage of human life, attempting to impose a readable structure on experience in time, admitting its defeat.


*


Without play, we risk being overwhelmed by an inhuman world.


*


Human beings from the moment of entry into language are ready to become dreamers and fiction-makers, not to mention liars, fetishists, and perverters of the real. Our fiction-making capacity may be foundational of our search for truth in our selves and in the world, but it does not guarantee it, nor assure our mental stability. The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same. But fiction-making does seem to be crucial to the ability to carve out a space within reality for attempts at understanding and reflection.


*

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

God, I really started this in January and went through starting and stopping phases, huh? My little brain was having trouble with theory, I suppose. Reading this book went by so much more smoothly after reading a novel which was, at its most basic level, about two men telling each other stories.

In other news, I need to stop thinking of writing about books in terms of how I will present it as a staff pick. Writing this review and examining how I /feel/ about it is such a challenge because of my constant self scrutiny. In short: auffhsjdnannsam. I can’t write this review, I’m too conscious of how I will be perceived gootbye

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Brooks's Seduced by Story begins with a pretty sound thesis: narrative has become the dominant epistemology in our culture at the expense of direct argumentation, description, exposition (facts and data), and this overreliance on storytelling increases the potential for the type's of propaganda and fake news that now permeates our discourse. I'm not sure, however, that this is actually what the book delivers. I'm not sure not only because Brooks's language is so abstruse and academic but also because the many forays into characterization, epistolary narratives, and even jurisprudence are never explicitly tied to this thesis, leaving Seduced by Story to feel more like a series of esoteric articles about narratology than any real examination of "the use and abuse of narrative". It's not that it's a bad book; I particularly liked Brook's digression into how characters should never be permitted to narrate their own deaths, which serves as an indictment of that The Girl on the Train book, and found a lot of Brooks's analysis of famous works of literature interesting. I just wish I'd read the book that was seemingly promised by its title and introduction.

[Leane · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my purpose (deep dive into narrative technique) this was worth my time. This slim volume is packed with literary criticism about the role narrative plays in the humanities, everyday life, and the law. The last third about Stories in the Law was less helpful but cogent and compelling. Well-researched, annotated, and a good combination of academically dense and approachable to the to the non-academic interested in how stories are told and their meaning to humanity.

[Shoshana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to read this for school and it was the worst. So boring.

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was good and breezy--working us through different dastardly things that storytelling can make us do. It mostly made me want to put it down and reread Absalom Absalom! or The Golden Bowl, though.

[Charlie Sigaud · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t read much literary analysis and I was unfamiliar with narratology before reading. I thought that some of Brooks’s arguments were persuasive and provoking about the use of narrative as a necessary tool and what its use requires or strips from the language it contains. That said, I was never really gripped by this. Don’t know if I was supposed to be.

[Emily]

Notes

Narrative plays a constitutive role in a number of the disciplines in which we seek and impart knowledge. One of the most thoughtful analysts of historical writing, Louis O. Mink, has reflected on the uses of narrative in making sense of historical events, neither rejecting narrative history (as certain quantitative historians claimed to do) nor investing narrative with truth-value on its own. He makes the point that the past comes into existence only in so far as we tell stories about it. (PG. 11)

It is not always clear whether thinkers associated with the narrative turn want to make an ontological or an epistemological claim for narrative: Whether they see narrative as constitutive of human existence, and humans defined as Homo narrans, or rather conceive narrative as the menstrual instrument that humans used to make sense of otherwise unorganized existence. (PG. 13)

I don't think it's pedantic to urge that a fundamental distinction advanced by the Russian Formalists remains crucial to any serious discussion of narrative: the distinction between fabula and sjuzhet. Fabula is the story told, the events recounted, in their "natural" chronological order, whereas sjuzhet is the presentation of events in the narrative we read or listen to – events that may not fall in chronological order, that may be, will almost certainly be, rearranged, shaded, minimized, distorted. Events are ordered, usually with some design and intention. Thus sjuzhet is not innocent: it is a take on a story, a perspective, an arrangement. Yet a moments reflection shows us that most often we know the fabula, what happened, only by way of the sjuzhet. The distinction between story and its telling has immediate consequences in many domains. (PG. 15)

In broader terms, we might say that narrative becomes a necessary form of knowing with the emergence, in the Enlightenment, from a culture dominated by a sacred explanation of the human condition into a new secular world where humans are on their own and must explain themselves to themselves. (PG. 17)

The analysand needs to reach a coherent story of who he or she is. But developing a narrative is a tool toward self understanding rather than the goal. Strawson's critique of the position that equates the self with the narrative told about it carries weight. He agrees with what appears to be Jean-Paul Sartre's argument, in his novel Nausea, that "self-storying, although inevitable, condemned us to inauthenticity, a kind of absence from our own lives." (PG. 21)

It may be easy to forget when reading a novel, a form generally consumed in solitude, that we are it's addresses, that the author has imagined the reading and even readership of this novel, that it is an attempt at communication. One that may very well go awry: Plato notes in his Phaedrus that the problem with written texts is that they roam around everywhere, promiscuously, and it's impossible to know how they will be received, interpreted, acted upon. (PG. 53)

As a narrator, Lucy not only alludes us but at times positively deceives us. Yet such elusiveness may be what is needed for Lucy to avoid limiting definitions –"the spinster," for instance–that would reduce and pin down her ambiguities and evasions. It is the precondition of her freedom. (PG. 69)

John Keat’s notion of "negative capability": "that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." (PG. 91)

"Of all the gifts [the novel] offers, this is the most certain: the end… The novel is not important because it portrays the fate of a stranger for us, but because the flame that consumes that stranger’s fate warms us as our own fates cannot. What draws the reader to the novel again and again is its mysterious ability to warm a shivering life with death." —Walter Benjamin (PG. 76)

Marlow goes on to claim that it is "impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence–that which makes its truth, it's meaning–its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream–alone." (PG. 99)

For Schiller, the play drive keeps the other two drives in balance and produces the realm of human freedom… Play, Schiller emphasizes, allows humans to fulfill their nature: "man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays." That makes art the fullest realization of what it is to be human. (PG. 101)

Psychoanalysis since Freud has increasingly tended to elevate narrative to a supreme position, claiming that the analytic and therapeutic endeavor is all about getting your story right… "I begin the treatment, indeed, by asking the patient to give me the whole story of his life and illness, but even so the information I receive is never enough to let me see my way about the case. This first account may be compared to an unnavigable river who stream is at one moment choked by mass as a rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks." …The "theoretical significance" of the patient's incoherent initial account derives from the notion that gaps and blockages result from repressions and resistances, material that is "Forgotten" because too painful to recall, thus lost from memory. Trauma resistance becoming part of a coherent story, although it is crucial to understanding that story… Hysteria emerges in time, even though it manifest itself as the blockage of forward movement, in the symbolic fixation of trauma as bodily symptom. The course of the analysis seeks to restore a sense of cause-and-effect, to put time back into gear, so that the story can move forward. The patient should eventually be able to recover a workable sense of her own life story and its future possibilities. (PG. 106-107)

The power of the story to make sense of a life is all that matters. An extreme version of this position has become characteristic of some work in narrative analysis and in psychology. In Jerome Bruner, for example: "I want to begin by proposing boldly that, in fact, there is no such thing as a intuitively obvious and essential self to know, one that just sits there ready to be portrayed in words. Rather, we constantly construct and reconstruct ourselves to meet the needs of the situations we encounter, and we do so with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopes and fears for the future. Telling oneself about oneself is like making up a story about who and what we are, what's happened, and why we're doing what we're doing… " Or, as Oliver Sacks claims: "This narrative is us, our identities." We may wish our self-narrative to be us, but that seems an excessively idealist or even solipsist position in that our discourse of ourselves comes up against all sorts of rehearsals of fortune, including disease and death, that can test our capacity to control the narrative. (PG. 109-110)

Accordingly, Sartre came to reject the novel as a falsification of the contingency of reality that blinds us to our freedom and what he sees as the obligation to choose our becoming at every moment. (PG. 112)

For James, as for many other novelists, to manipulate another, to use someone for your own ends, is to deny that person his or her freedom, an irreducible definition of the human. To deprive another of freedom is the supreme ethical fault. It is also, for the novelist, as James conceives that practitioner, a kind of technical and aesthetic fault. The novelist owes his created persons a grant of freedom so that they may develop their full potential. (PG. 116)

In what may be the most important doctrine line of his opinion, Cardozo states: "In a very real sense a defendant starts his life afresh when he stands before a jury, a prisoner at the bar." The past is irrelevant. The pertinent narrative should concern only the immediate circumstances of the deed and its motivation. (PG 126)

And so too the narratives told—retold—at the highest appellate level themselves possess a formative force. "it is so ordered": the story as we have told it orders reality decisively. This is what happened—nothing else—and all the consequences follow. (PG. 136)

Narrative begins from the end, which confers meaning on beginning and middle, which indeed allows us to understand what can be identified as beginning and middle. When we read a narrative, we read toward the end, not in knowledge of what it will bring but in anticipation but it will bring retrospective illumination to the plot leading to it. Similarly, Sartre’s fictional spokesman Roquentin in Nausea argues that when you tell a story –as opposed to living it –you only appear to begin at the beginning, since the knowledge than an end lies ahead confers intention and meaning on the actions were counted. The novelist a hero lives life backwards from the end, all his actions seen as "annunciations" of the future outcome. It is in the peculiar nature of narrative as a sense making system that clues are revealing, that prior events are prior, and causes are causal only retrospectively, in a reading back from the end. (PG. 144)

[brunella]

all my friends love this book. i enjoyed it. but love is a strong word

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting a little more about the abuse of narrative, but Brooks's examples focus mostly on narrative's use in such classic novelists as Proust, Balzac and Henry James. While Brooks implies that narrative can be dangerous if applied uncritically in psychology, politics or business, he does little to show how it has happened. For a book of lit crit, this is interesting enough. But if you're looking for more philosophy or cultural critique, you may be disappointed.

[Lukia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lol. I love when people decide to write a whole essay on something before checking if it’s already a phenomenon or god forbid, a widespread initiative :) The sources themselves were rather straightforward—as if plucked from a syllabus for a seminar on the novel. Though he uses the 1619 Project and the cultural battle over our nation’s racist origins in his introduction, Brooks can’t be bothered to include a single non-white author or even a text outside the western canon. I also just expect more interrogative & less anecdotal work from someone of his caliber.

[Mark Rance · Rating 5 out of 5]

The analysis of the use and abuse of narrative in Supreme Court adjudications is worth the price of admission. Brooks’ examination of originalism, currently plaguing the court with facetious rulings, is timely and urgent.

Highly recommended.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm so happy to read from other reviews that readers of this book also struggled with finishing it. I'm not sure what it was about this particular book — typically, I can handle boring non-fiction prose like Seduced by Story. But let it be known that I actually stopped reading altogether in February 2023 after diving into this book. That sounds like a huge criticism of this book, and maybe it is. I dunno. All I know is that I was really excited to read Seduced by Story, and then I felt sorta let down about a quarter of the way into the book, maybe because it felt more like a loose collection of essays rather than a coherent thesis? That's what a couple other reviewers said at least, and truthfully I felt the same way while reading this book. It felt so ironically anecdotal at many points that it almost felt as if Peter Brooks were playing a sly joke on me.

Brooks is very serious though, and truly this book is a noble endeavor. My favorite chapter was all about characters because I feel like it's such a haphazard, glib thing to say now that something (a novel, a television show, a comedy sketch, etc.) is worth indulging because it's a cHaRaCtEr-dRiVeN sToRy, and so I appreciated Brooks's deep-dive into the larger-than-life importance that we place on characters. His conclusion exploring the implications of narrative on jurisprudence is certainly worthwhile as well, but it felt more like an application of his theory rather than an elevated glimpse into his thesis.

I'm speaking out of my ass, but anyway, I'm glad it's over and I can move on to other books that I've had in my queue LOL.

[Lucy Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Brooks’ book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative is fascinating. Although once again incredibly eloquent regarding the power of storytelling, unlike his previous works, the thesis of this book has as its focus the use of narrative to convey messaging for the purpose of manipulation. The use of story both by public figures and the media is analyzed by Brooks, provoking deep reflection. For those of us horrified by terms like “alternative facts,” this is a book well worth reading. Brooks begins the first of six chapters with a recap of President Bush’s December 2000 remarks when introducing his cabinet appointments. Bush’s commentary about the individuals appointed were, in his words, “a great American story.” The then-President’s emphasis on narrative as opposed to outlining the career contributions of his cabinet colleagues in a more traditional outline of facts, captured Brooks’ attention, and set up his argument regarding the use of narrative in the current climate to valorize one view of competing claims over another. This book provides an inquiry into the use of story in literature, critical theory and politics. Highly recommended.

[CJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn't exactly the book I was hoping for it to be, but it was still really interesting and clearly a great work of literary criticism. Personally I wish it had been less academic and more about 'real world' issues but that's just my bias--and to that point probably why I thought the last chapter, which focused on law, was the most interesting. This is a topic I think about a lot (there's a reason my Goodreads bio is Didion's famous aphorism 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live') and something that I increasingly worry about as more and more of our news media seems shaped by a desire for entertainment. Narrative is powerful but the stories that we tell and that are told about us can trap us as much as they can free us (Rachel Aviv's book 'Strangers to Ourselves' is a great look about this is the context of mental illness) and what makes for a compelling narrative is often different than what's true.

[Shadib Bin · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those unreadable books - he writes very, very eloquently but I don’t think Peter understands that some people (myself included) quite simply won’t get his steady stream of thoughts without a bit more pausing, structure, clarifications and humility. I don’t know who it’s catered towards - especially if the mantra is to allow story telling to happen with critical analysis by the listener. Especially if from what I understand - he wants the listener to be more thoughtful on their own especially in this age where everyone is wanting to tell their story and slip into harmful territories (I.e. positioning the story telling to benefit one own self). By being this inaccessible - it just feels a bit pandering to himself and those who truly get it - the very select few.

Still a great exploration - wish it was more accessible.

[Angie Boyter]

I misunderstood what this book would be about, and it was partly my fault, so I will not penalize the author in the ratings.
This is a scholarly, often pedantic, exploration of narrative, primarily in literature, through "narratology", the methodical analysis of narrative. It makes heavy reference to a LOT of works and authors (like Diderot and Clarissa) and schools of thought (like French Structuralists) that I either did not know or read so MANY years ago that I cannot remember them .
I have been distressed about the current use of "stories" in journalism and politics and thought that was the emphasis of this book. The last chapter about legal narrative was closer to what I had expected but not enough to make me want to read the whole thing.

[Russell Chee · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was sorely disappointed by this. The introduction is promising, if a little self-satisfied, as the author discusses how the world, power relations, and various cultural areas have shifted ever more towards narrativisation in recent decades. In fact, in the next few chapters, which are strangely incoherent with little sense of a common thread holding them together, the author proceeds to spend inordinate amounts of time on 18th-century French literature and late-19th-century/early-20th-century American literature, explaining how these works exemplify the power and dangers of narrative. But that's not what we were promised! To make things worse, a random chapter on legal issues is tacked on at the end, which the author purports is because the legal system has "unique importance" in the sphere of narratology, but which is clearly just an outgrowth of the author's frustration with the Supreme Court.

Skip.

[Nikas.bookforest · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Talking about stories in the law lets us begin to understand how the analytics study of narrative can extend well beyond its place of origin in literary studies." This quote sums up what I thought this book was about but this is a quote from the last page. The author only streaks on the use of political narrative and instead zu gives us an overview of narrative studies im literature. That was interesting but not what I expected at all. Overall I was pretty dissapointed by this and I was not a fan of the writing which contains a loooot of quotes. The most interesting chapter was the one about the law in my opinion.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the first chapter of Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative covers how narrative has become a more dominant form of how we look at society (abuse), the next chapters are more literary analyses of certain trends among authors when it comes to authorship, point of view and metatext. The analyses are good enough, but one can get a bit lost if they have not read or are not familiar with the books in question. The final chapter is in interesting read of how narrative vs. fact play out in the courtroom but, having not read many of the titles discussed, most of the book fell flat for me.