Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative

by Peter Brooks

Overview

In this spiritual sequel to his influential Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks examines the dangerously alluring power of storytelling.

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681376646
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Peter Brooks is the author of several books, including the nonfiction volumes The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Troubling Confessions, Realist Vision, Henry James Goes to Paris, and Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, as well as two novels, World Elsewhere and The Emperor’s Body. He published Balzac’s Lives with New York Review Books in 2020, and has edited two NYRB Classics, Balzac’s The Human Comedy: Selected Stories and Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow. He is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale.

Table of Contents

Foreword 1

1 Stories Abounding: The World Overtaken by Narrative 3

2 The Epistemology of Narrative; or, How Can the Teller Know the Tale? 17

3 The Teller, the Told, the Difference It Makes 53

4 The Allure of Imaginary Beings 79

5 What It Does 101

6 Further Thoughts: Stories in and of the Law 122

Acknowledgments 153

Notes 155

Index 169

Editorial Reviews

08/29/2022

Brooks, a comparative literature professor at Yale, provides a bracing and insightful look at the downsides of reducing everything to storytelling in this follow-up to 1984’s Reading for the Plot. While Brooks still believes that “our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative,” he warns thats storytelling has evolved—“Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs,” he writes. To support that thesis, Brooks cites examples ranging from the “backstories” on personal care product packaging to the way George W. Bush described his cabinet choices in 2000 as each having “their own story.” To Brooks, the reduction of everything to narrative improperly dismisses other vital forms of “presentation and understanding,” including lyrics and logical arguments. Despite fascinating references to Sherlock Holmes, The Girl on the Train, and Miller beer ads, not all sections are lay-reader friendly, as Brooks lapses into the academic (“I don’t think it is 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”). However, readers who stay the course will find this is a thoughtful and revelatory analysis of what’s lost when story trumps all. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"A potent defense of attentive reading and its real-world applications.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

"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

From the Publisher

2022-07-30
A rigorous exploration of narrative, from its usage in classic literature to its misuse in contemporary discourse.

In 1984, Brooks published Reading for the Plot, in which he argued that we live in “an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue” and have situated ourselves “at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.” Decades later, the author senses a problem that warrants this follow-up book: In our world of 24-hour media, narrativity has run amok. Weary of “the storification of reality,” Brooks seeks a way forward that recognizes facts and storytelling as two separate concepts. “The universe is not our stories about the universe,” he explains, “even if those stories are all we have. Swamped in story as we seem to be, we may lose the distinction between the two, asserting the dominion of our constructed realities over the real thing.” Now, he laments, “story…has entered the orbit of political cant and corporate branding.” To better understand this new engagement with storytelling, the author proposes an “analytic unpacking of the claims for narrative.” These whirlwind essays span centuries of literature, from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747) to Paula Hawkins’ thriller The Girl on the Train (2015). Brooks extrapolates ideas of narrative veracity, character, speaker, and audience, all while conscientiously maintaining his collection’s accessibility. Even readers who are not yet familiar with Proust or Faulkner will find stable footing in these essays despite their many erudite digressions throughout the canon. In the final piece, the author shifts from novels to the legal world and chillingly recounts how the Supreme Court can disparately interpret its cases by widening or constricting the “narrative circle” of a particular situation. He closes with a plea: “We need, more than ever, the reflective knowledge that the humanities can provide, very much including analysis of the dominant stories of our economics, our ethics, our politics.”

An enlightening challenge to readers curious about literary theory and its real-world applications.

Kirkus Reviews