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Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative Spiral-Bound | October 18, 2022
Peter Brooks
★★★☆☆+ from 101 to 500 ratings
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Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
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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.’ Thus spake Tyrion in the final episode of Game of Thrones, claiming the throne for Bran the Broken. Many viewers liked neither the choice of king nor its rationale. But the claim that story brings you to world dominance seems by now so banal that it’s common wisdom. Narrative seems to have become accepted as the one and only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs."
So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks's reckoning with today's flourishing cult of story. Forty years after Brooks published his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his own important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, he returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from Gone Girl to legal argument, to the power storytellers exercise over their audiences, to what it means for readers and listeners to project themselves imaginatively into fictional characters, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive. Precisely because story does command our attention so, we must be skeptical of it and cultivate ways of thinking about our world and ourselves that run counter to our penchant for a good story.
Publication History:Original
“‘There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.’ Thus spake Tyrion in the final episode of Game of Thrones, claiming the throne for Bran the Broken. Many viewers liked neither the choice of king nor its rationale. But the claim that story brings you to world dominance seems by now so banal that it’s common wisdom. Narrative seems to have become accepted as the one and only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs."
So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks's reckoning with today's flourishing cult of story. Forty years after Brooks published his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his own important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, he returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from Gone Girl to legal argument, to the power storytellers exercise over their audiences, to what it means for readers and listeners to project themselves imaginatively into fictional characters, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive. Precisely because story does command our attention so, we must be skeptical of it and cultivate ways of thinking about our world and ourselves that run counter to our penchant for a good story.
Publication History:Original
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 176 pages
ISBN-10: 1681376636
Item Weight: 0.5 lbs
Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
Customer Reviews: 3 out of 5 stars 101 to 500 ratings
"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
"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
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 a biography of Honoré de Balzac, Balzac's Lives, with New York Review Books in fall 2020, and has contributed to two NYRB Classics, Balzac's The Human Comedy: Selected Stories and Vivant Denon's No Tomorrow. He is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale.
Author Residence: Alexandria, VA & New Haven, CT
Author Hometown: New York, NY
Author Residence: Alexandria, VA & New Haven, CT
Author Hometown: New York, NY