Destructive Storytelling

This book offers a new approach to understanding disinformation and its destructive impact on the democratic function of the news media. Using the notoriously false reporting of EU policies by the British press as a starting point, it utilises Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the linguistic properties of false news stories and to understand how they function as myth in Roland Barthes’ sense. The disinformation is essential for the impact these news stories had as it provides the simplification which creates the blissful clarity of myth that Barthes described. As myth, the false news stories depoliticised a political argument and naturalised the claim of antagonistic British-European relations. Henkel shows how news stories used disinformation to articulate a Eurosceptic myth of the feisty, witty Briton who stands up against the European bully. Her main argument is that the disinformation contributed to the Brexit vote because, as myth, it transported an ideology. Henkel argues that the Brexit debate and the news reporting that preceded it for decades can be understood as a case study for how political journalism becomes democratically dysfunctional. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of journalism, media and culture, political communication, and Critical Discourse Analysis.

This book offers a new approach to understanding disinformation and its destructive impact on the democratic function of the news media. Using the notoriously false reporting of EU policies by the British press as a starting point, it utilises Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the linguistic properties of false news stories and to understand how they function as myth in Roland Barthes' sense. The disinformation is essential for the impact these news stories had as it provides the simplification which creates the blissful clarity of myth that Barthes described. As myth, the false news stories depoliticised a political argument and naturalised the claim of antagonistic British-European relations. Henkel shows how news stories used disinformation to articulate a Eurosceptic myth of the feisty, witty Briton who stands up against the European bully. Her main argument is that the disinformation contributed to the Brexit vote because, as myth, it transported an ideology. Henkel argues that the Brexit debate and the news reporting that preceded it for decades can be understood as a case study for how political journalism becomes democratically dysfunctional. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of journalism, media and culture, political communication, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Imke Henkel is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Lincoln, UK. She is a former political journalist who wrote for top German national newspapers including Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit, as well as being the UK and Ireland correspondent for the German news magazine Focus for ten years. Her research focuses, among other topics, on how the British media report European issues.

An innovative philosophical meditation on the muteness of Holocaust survivors and the human faculty of storytelling. In Storytelling, Rodolphe Gasché reexamines the muteness of Holocaust survivors, that is, their inability to tell their stories. This phenomenon has not been explained up to now without reducing the violence of the events to which survivors were subjected, on the one hand, and diminishing the specific harm that has been done to them as human beings, on the other. Distinguishing storytelling from testifying and providing information, Gasché asserts that the utter senselessness of the violence inflicted upon them is what inhibited survivors from making sense of their experience in the form of tellable stories. In a series of readings of major theories of storytelling by three thinkers—Wilhelm Schapp, whose work will be a welcome discovery to many English-speaking audiences, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt—Gasché systematically assesses the consequences of the loss of the storytelling faculty, considered by some an inalienable possession of the human, both for the victims’ humanity and for philosophy. “This book pursues the problem of what happens when the stories that are the object of narration become so enigmatic and troublesome that they withdraw from the realm of communicability and meaning into the space of a certain muteness. By focusing on Schapp, Benjamin, and Arendt, Gasché succeeds brilliantly in weaving together the three strands that are most vital to its subject: philosophical rigor, literary sensitivity, and historical concreteness.” — Gerhard Richter, author of Inheriting Walter Benjamin

Set one hundred years in our future, WE STAND ON GUARD follows a heroic band of Canadian civilians turned freedom fighters who must defend their homeland from invasion by a technologically superior opponent... the United States of America. Collects WE STAND ON GUARD #1-6

An transdisciplinary exploration of narrative not just as a target for interpretation but also as a means for making sense of experience itself. With Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind, David Herman proposes a cross-fertilization between the study of narrative and research on intelligent behavior. This cross-fertilization goes beyond the simple importing of ideas from the sciences of mind into scholarship on narrative and instead aims for convergence between work in narrative studies and research in the cognitive sciences. The book as a whole centers on two questions: How do people make sense of stories? And: How do people use stories to make sense of the world? Examining narratives from different periods and across multiple media and genres, Herman shows how traditions of narrative research can help shape ways of formulating and addressing questions about intelligent activity, and vice versa. Using case studies that range from Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to sequences from The Incredible Hulk comics to narratives told in everyday interaction, Herman considers storytelling both as a target for interpretation and as a resource for making sense of experience itself. In doing so, he puts ideas from narrative scholarship into dialogue with such fields as psycholinguistics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive, social, and ecological psychology. After exploring ways in which interpreters of stories can use textual cues to build narrative worlds, or storyworlds, Herman investigates how this process of narrative worldmaking in turn supports efforts to understand—and engage with—the conduct of persons, among other aspects of lived experience.

Over Australia's 2019-20 Black Summer bushfire season, scientists estimate that more than three billion native animals were killed or displaced. Many species - koalas, the regent honeyeater, glossy black cockatoo, the platypus - are inching towards extinction at the hands of mega-blazes and the changing climate behind them. In Flames of Extinction, award-winning science writer John Pickrell investigates the effects of the 2019-2020 bushfires on Australian wildlife and ecosystems. Journeying across the firegrounds, Pickrell explores the stories of creatures that escaped the flames, the wildlife workers who rescued them, and the conservationists, land managers, Aboriginal rangers, ecologists and firefighters on the front line of the climate catastrophe. He also reveals the radical new conservation methods being trialled to save as many species as possible from the very precipice of extinction.

Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy it Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it. In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it’s the best method we’ve ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization’s greatest ills—environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare—you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story. Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible. With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”

Do Books provide readers with the tools and inspiration to live a fulfilled and engaged life. Whether it's mastering a new skill, cultivating a positive mindset, or finding inspiration for a new project, these books dispense expert wisdom on subjects related to personal growth, business, and slow living. Written by the movers, shakers, and change makers who have participated in the DO Lectures in the United Kingdom and the United States, Do Books are packed with easy-to-follow exercises, bite-size tips, and striking visuals. Practical, useful, and encouraging, each book delivers trustworthy, empowering guidance so readers can succeed in whatever they choose to "do." Do Story teaches the art of telling powerful stories. The book includes short stories on a variety of subjects; taken together they demonstrate a range of effective narrative techniques. Vivid, enlightening, and brimming with practical tips, Do Story unlocks the secrets to becoming a captivating storyteller.

Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion. In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll. East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.

Populism is on the rise across the globe. Authoritarian populist leaders have taken over and solidified their control over many countries. Their power has been cemented during the global coronavirus pandemic, though perhaps the defeat of populist-in-chief Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election (despite his continuing protestations to the contrary) has seen the start of the waning of this phenomenon? In the UK Brexit is 'done'; Britain is firmly out of the EU; Covid is vaccinated against; and Boris Johnson has a huge parliamentary majority and, despite never-ending problems, of his own and others' making, his grip on power with a parliamentary majority of more than 80, still seems secure. Meanwhile culture wars continue to rage. How has media, worldwide, contributed, fulled or fought this populism. Cheerleaders? Critics? Supplicants? This book examines those questions in 360 degrees with a distinguished cast of authors from journalism and academia.