NEW TITLE:
STORYTELLING
Bewitching the Modern Mind
By CHRISTIAN SALMON
Published 22nd March 2010
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EVENTS:
8 April, 1pm at the RSA, London: ‘Storytelling: How narratives shape our
reality, ideas and behaviour’. For more information and book your free place:
http://www.thersa.org/events/our-events/storytelling-how-narratives-shape-our
-reality,-ideas-and-behaviour
<http://www.thersa.org/events/our-events/storytelling-how-narratives-shape-ou
r-reality,-ideas-and-behaviour>
8 April, 6.30pm at the ICA, London: ‘Making Believe’, with Julia Hobsbawm,
founder of media analysis and networking firm Editorial Intelligence and
pioneer of ‘integrity PR’, and Neil Boorman, author of Bonfire of the Brands.
Chaired by ICA director Ekow Eshun. For more information and booking:
http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=24203 <http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=24203>
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“French writer Salmon here treats us to the useful spectacle of a relentless
polemic against a ubiquitous idea widely held to provoke only positive
feelings. As used by branders or politicians, “storytelling” is, on his
argument, a sedative, suppressing the desire for truth in favour of
satisfying narrative form.” Steven Poole, Guardian
“This book, which is both concise and clearly written … guides us through
these texts which are largely unknown and now very influential.” Le Monde
“There are certain books that make you feel less stupid after reading them
than before. … It is a fascinating and never jargon-heavy book.” Le Progres
“Lively, very well informed and slickly handled.” Les Inrockuptibles
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Some stories tell of real, lived experience, passing on its lessons: telling
stories is an art that has been cultivated by humanity and lies at the heart
of the social bond. Others mask reality and distort the truth, concealing
reality rather than elucidating it: these stories, Christian Salmon argues,
work to convince people to believe in the existence of WMDs and buy things
they don’t need.
Through groundbreaking research, Salmon builds upon Naomi Klein’s No Logo for
the Internet age, Salmon examines how storytelling has been exhumed and
employed by the same PR and marketing and management gurus who sold the world
brands before products. Narrative history is the triumphant successor to the
image or brand as the weapon of choice to format the minds of consumers – and
citizens.
Behind the advertising campaigns for heritage brands such as Chivas Regal
(“Live with Chivalry” i.e. like Frank Sinatra) and the founding stories of
all-natural, ‘ethical’ brands such as Innocent and Ben & Jerry’s- but also in
the shadows of victorious electoral campaigns from Bush to Sarkozy hide
“storytelling management” and “digital storytelling” technicians. Salmon
argues “Obama turned political storytelling into a new rhetorical art”; the
Obama legend shows how the construction and marketing of politicians’ life
stories is key to their electoral success.
With the journalist’s nose for a story, the lucid mind of an analyst, and the
keen affinity with the nuances of narrative as a literary critic, Salmon’s
rigorous research untangles the
worldwide web of discourse. From the world as painted by Fox News, training
videos for soldiers made by the Pentagon in collaboration with Hollywood, and
the Enron house of cards, Salmon finds fabulous artificers weaving the
reality of our world.
As well as in the commercial company and on the political level, Salmon also
detects the creeping impact of storytelling strategies across the judicial
system in the rise of surveillance and profiling. But where this threatens
individual freedom, citizens are increasingly distracted by telling stories:
a new blog is started every second, and a 2006 report entitled “A Portrait of
the Internet’s New Storytellers” found that “seventy-seven percent of
bloggers are interested only in talking about “my life and experiences.”
Salmon founded the International Parliament of Writers in 1993 as a human
rights organization that would create awareness of writers living in
oppressed circumstances and offer them something concrete. A key media and
cultural figure, Salmon has published over ten books in his native France.
Salmon has already caused a media storm with Storytelling and is set to do
the same here with his exposure of the Scheherazades in the White House and
Whitehall who have hijacked the human imagination.
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AUTHOR: Christian Salmon is a writer and researcher in the Centre for
Research in the Arts and Language at the CNRS in Paris. He is the founder of
the International Parliament of Writers, of which he was president from 1993
to 2003 and editor of the organisation’s journal Autodafe. He has worked as a
literary critic and is the author of several works, including Kate Moss
Machine, Verbicide and Devenir minoritaire and writes a regular column for Le
Monde.
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ISBN: 978 1 84467 391 9 / $24.95 / £14.99 / CAN$31 / 192 pages
