Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric: Experimental Fictionality on Digital Platforms - Rilegato

Iversen, Stefan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0814216072 ISBN 13: 9780814216071

Casa editrice: Ohio State University Press, 2026

Riassunto

Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric investigates how experimental uses of fictionality on digital platforms transform public storytelling, with political and ethical consequences. Focusing on communication that initially misleads only to provoke reflection, Stefan Iversen explores how narrative rhetoric—stories used to persuade within public discourse—can be strategically disrupted to produce what he terms “metanoic reflexivity”: a distinctive mode of afterthought triggered when audiences realize they have read wrong. Drawing from narrative theory, fictionality studies, rhetorical criticism, and digital platform studies, Iversen develops a model for analyzing narratives that play with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction to motivate action or reconsideration on urgent public issues. These narrative practices—found in humanitarian campaigns, presidential rhetoric, political trolling, and synthetic media—use the digital affordances of platforms like Instagram, X, Reddit, and YouTube to reorient audience expectations and provoke social engagement. Combining theory and close reading, Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric offers a compelling interdisciplinary framework for understanding how narrative experiments can either deepen democratic discourse or contribute to its fragmentation in today’s platformed public spheres.

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Informazioni sull'autore

Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He is the coauthor of Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media and coeditor of Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

The French influencer Louise Delage’s Instagram account, created in June 2016, told the story of a twenty-five-year-old Parisian with good friends, good genes, and a talent for selfies to match. Over the course of three months, her images of an exciting, high-flying lifestyle amassed sixty thousand subscribers who liked, shared, and commented on her nonposing poses. No one paid attention to the fact that on all her images, Louise was holding a drink or drinking. This was pointed out when in September 2016 her profile was revealed to be an invention, part of the campaign “Like My Addiction” to warn against abuse of alcohol. The central rhetorical strategy of the campaign coalesced with its main point: As her followers realized that they had ascribed the wrong kind of relevance to Louise Delage’s narrative—nonfiction, rather than fiction—they also realized that addiction, thanks to prevalent social norms and values about what people like, often hides in plain sight.

On March 12, 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a string of official Ukrainian Twitter accounts that included the Defense Ministry, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, and the Ukrainian government shared a short video (Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine 2022). The opening shot shows a young female in Paris. Smiling into a handheld mobile camera, she positions her hands in a way that makes it appear as if she is holding the actual Eiffel Tower between them. This type of forced-perspective shot is a popular, inexpensive optical illusion that warps automatic understandings of proportions. The amateurish rendition of the pose blends with the mobile-phone aesthetics into a video that initially invites a nonfictional reading. Most Western viewers automatically decoded this as a homely, safe, familiar situation, typical of contemporary mediated tourism. So much the more shocking are the explosions that suddenly go off behind and around the young woman. What appears to be the story of an aerial bombardment of Paris is then told through the shaken and shaking lens of ordinary people’s personal technology. Halfway through the video—originally made by French filmmaker Olias Barco and producer Jean-Charles Lévy—the semiotic mode switches from image to text, and the words “Just think if” make it clear that this depiction of the bombing of Paris is fictionalized. What follows then are quotes from President Zelenskyy about the ongoing invasion of Ukraine and appeals for help from European countries. The video performs its own version of a forced perspective. It invites a Western audience to watch, even if only briefly, its own world being bombed. When the video reveals the events to be fictionalized, the video pushes the audience to channel the shock and horror these depictions evoke into action on events that are actually taking place at the moment the video was posted by supporting Ukraine’s call for military aid in the war.

These two cases are examples of what this book sets out to investigate: experimental uses of fictionality in narrative rhetoric on digital platforms. Beyond the differences in the real-life issues they address, the textual mechanics they employ, and the reactions they invite, the cases share three characteristics. First, they produce misreadings by design. They are meant to appear to tell one kind of story, a factual one, but fictionalization of the story ends up forcing the audience to subvert that understanding. They question the typically automatic and instantaneous act of assuming a narrative to be either fictional or nonfictional, and they do so by reversing the very act of assuming, thereby opening a space of doubt, possibility, and reflexivity. The initial missing of the point is a crucial part of the overall point being made. Both designs confront their audiences with the experience of having read wrong; both hope that this forced act of textual reconsideration can reverberate into broader reconsiderations. Why do I find substance abuse attractive? What if Paris was under attack, or what if Ukraine was considered as central to the European identity as France? Second, both cases are using their experiments with fictional and nonfictional storytelling to intervene in the actual world. While the subversive formal practices used may resemble artistic or avant-garde traditions, the intention here is to convince actual people about actual issues. The two cases are rhetorical in a nontrivial sense of that word, in that they address and attempt to sway the opinions of specific audiences in specific situations on matters that are not reducible to calculations or strict logic. Third, both cases rely on and take advantage of the affordances of the digital platforms upon which they are published. They combine and juxtapose semiotic modalities and in doing so they display as well as invite affective postures. They quote, remix, and rescript story fragments that already circulate in attention-grabbing ways that seek to excite audiences to make them use the infrastructure of the platforms to further increase circulation.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Ohio State University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2026
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0814216072
• ISBN 13: 9780814216071
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 228
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Germania