[ecrea] NEW TITLE: STORYTELLING BY CHRISTIAN SALMON

NEW TITLE:
 
STORYTELLING
 
Bewitching the Modern Mind
 
By CHRISTIAN SALMON

 

Published 22^nd 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
 
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
 

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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
 
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For more information visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/s-titles/salmon_christian_storytelling.shtml
 

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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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