Reviews | January 17, 2025
Death by Story
Adam Sobsey
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” in Joan Didion’s famous aphorism, but are our stories choking us to death? In Seduced by Story, Peter Brooks laments “the plethoric spread of narrative into public life.” He worries that our “promiscuous overuse” of storytelling has not only impoverished it but effaced the factual authority of logic and the mnemonic power of the lyric, “as if [story] were the only form of understanding left in our civilization.” Worse, from malevolent tongues and pens, it is also a form of misunderstanding.
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