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Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative Kindle Edition
“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story.
Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question 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.
In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew York Review Books
- Publication dateOctober 18, 2022
- File size2643 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Brooks spent most of his career trying to impress upon readers the particular power of narrative…In his most recent book, 'Seduced by Story,' he describes the horrifying feeling of having succeeded all too well." —Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker
“A succinct account of narrative persuasion, offering a solid case for the ambivalent power that stories can have in shaping us as individuals and nations.” —Caterina Domeneghini, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Brooks explores various fields – including psychoanalysis, legal practice and modern political discourse – in which the distinction between narrative and “reality” has been eroded, or even collapsed. . . . It is in this context that a critical faculty – the ability to understand and critique narrative – is of vital importance.”
—Jonathan Taylor, TLS
“Brooks built an influential career arguing that stories are key features of how we all experience ‘human temporality’ and strive to articulate ‘meaning in general.’ This new book is, therefore, a kind of personal as well as intellectual reckoning with narrative turns and what may be their less salubrious legacies.” —Killian Quigley, Australian Book Review
"Society’s obsession with résumé, and its use to construct an aura of credibility, is such a pervasive element of contemporary life that it inevitably implicates even the author and his own field of 'literary humanities.' But that dynamic is exactly what Brooks parses in his terrific critical survey: the essential differences between surface stories and the ways in which they’re constructed." —J. Howard Rosier, Vulture
"A bracing and insightful look at the downsides of reducing everything to storytelling. . . A thoughtful and revelatory analysis of what’s lost when story trumps all." —Publishers Weekly
"For writers, readers, and citizens of the story-addled world." —Emily Temple, Lit Hub
“A rhapsody to the partial suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in novels, but simultaneously and most crucially, a brilliant intervention against the complete suspension of disbelief that allows a citizenry to succumb to conspiracy theories, false-flag narratives, authoritarian fictions. An eloquent and triumphant culmination of Peter Brooks’s lifelong inquiry into the aesthetic and ethical intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, law, and politics. Impossibly good.” —David Shields
“Stories are everywhere—shaping us, shocking us, showing us what really happened (or making it up). Peter Brooks invites us to step to one side of our over-storied surroundings to think about all the ways they work. . . . In the process, he tells a gripping tale of his own.” —Rachel Bowlby
“This is an amazing book, crossing back and forth between literature and politics, illuminating each side by the other. It is written without fuss, continually evocative and surprising.” —Richard Sennett
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B09FP4PJ2N
- Publisher : New York Review Books (October 18, 2022)
- Publication date : October 18, 2022
- Language : English
- File size : 2643 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 179 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #351,724 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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And that's just the writing. The substance is even better. How can anyone stand up to narrative? Well, this is coming from the scholar who as much as anyone led the narrative turn. There is gravitas to hearing what he says now.
Gravitas message, writing which lifts you along.
Brilliant.
(In what seems to be a bit of cross-marketing by New York Review Books, PB manages to discuss both Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" and some philosophical essays by Galen Strawson in editions published by NYRB in 2019 and 2021, respectively. The quoted thesis from the Benjamin work, in particular, seems highly dubious: Benjamin claims that readers' "shivering lives" are "warmed" by the death of fictional characters. Maybe that's apt for English murder mysteries, but how about in novels about war or other miseries? And how to account for warm fictions where no one dies, or where the only deaths occur offstage? Examples include Fielding's "Tom Jones," Joyce's "Ulysses," Maruya Saiichi's "A Mature Woman," and Ali Smith's "Winter," among many others.)
You'll get the most out of the book if you've "done the reading": If you're not already familiar with most of the authors and works mentioned at the top of this review, most of the middle chapters can be sort of a drag. So this isn't a book for the general reader, unless you're extraordinarily well-read or patient. Even for a more academic reader, the theory deployed in the book is far from the most current points of view.
I felt the book's best chapter was the last, which discusses stories and US Supreme Court cases. "Law and literature" was another '80s/'90s academic fad, but here it's put to to good use. Most appellate court decisions begin with recitations of the facts of the case that are selected to foreshadow the judge's decision at the end. The notion that the endings of narratives are often implicit in their beginnings comes up in several places in the book (including in Walter Benjamin's exaggerated and inaccurate claim), but here the idea is made more accessible and interesting for a general reader, at least in the US. Several of the court cases discussed are from the 21st Century, though readers may feel a bit wistful when PB describes how narratives were used to justify upholding Roe v. Wade, among other precedents. (The text evidently went to press before the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision that overturned Roe.)
Overall, though, this book seems a dated and ivory tower affair. That it opens with a one-sentence quote from the most-despised episode of Game of Thrones doesn't sufficiently recognize that many people today consume narratives from streaming services, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter B.E. (before Elon), and other social media, rather than from lesser-known works of Charlotte Brontë and Henry James. And as for narratives in the political sphere, the Trump regime, especially post-11/3/2020, seems like a much more salient trove of material than court opinions, which are read mainly by lawyers. Yet none of these more modern sources, which have greatly increased the volume of narrative chatter surrounding us, is mentioned in this book.
This book may be of most interest to PB's former students (he is a professor emeritus at Yale), and Baby Boomers who'd majored in English or comparative literature and who now, maybe with more time on their hands to read philosophy and criticism, are nostalgic for the sorts of things we read back then. If you're interested in a more contemporary take, whether as scholar or concerned citizen, I think you may find this book a frustration.