Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind

Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind
ISBN-10
1784786608
ISBN-13
9781784786601
Series
Storytelling
Category
Social Science
Pages
192
Language
English
Published
2017-01-31
Publisher
Verso Books
Author
Christian Salmon

Description

The narrative spell cast over politics and society Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way that it is perceived. In Storytelling Christian Salmon looks at the twenty-first-century hijacking of creative imagination, anatomizing the timeless human desire for narrative form, and how this desire is abused by the marketing mechanisms that bolster politicians and their products: luxury brands trade on embellished histories, managers tell stories to motivate employees, soldiers in Iraq train on Hollywood-conceived computer games, and spin doctors construct political lives as if they were a folk epic. This “storytelling machine” is masterfully unveiled by Salmon, and is shown to be more effective and insidious as a means of oppression than anything dreamed up by Orwell.

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