Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric

“A bold and theoretically rich book that, true to its title, disrupts established notions of narrative rhetoric and fictionality, bringing them into productive dialogue with platformed communication studies. Essential reading for understanding how experimentation and inventive practices in digital-age public storytelling unsettle assumptions and reshape how we imagine collective life.” —Alexandra Georgakopoulou, coauthor of Analyzing Narrative Online

“Iversen brings a sophisticated rhetorical perspective to the many ways narratives on digital platforms manipulate our expectations of their informative or fictive relevance. Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric delivers both astute engagement with theoretical ideas and illuminating analysis of extended examples, and the two richly inform each other.” —Richard Walsh, author of The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction

“Iversen’s original insights into the platformization of society, the rhetorical effects of disrupted acts of narrative interpretation, and the methodological demands of interconnections between narrative practices and real-world issues are convincing and compelling.” —Mari Hatavara, editor of Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media

Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric investigates how experimental uses of fictionality on digital platforms transform public storytelling, with political and ethical consequences. Focusing on communication that initially misleads only to provoke reflection, Stefan Iversen explores how narrative rhetoric—stories used to persuade within public discourse—can be strategically disrupted to produce what he terms “metanoic reflexivity”: a distinctive mode of afterthought triggered when audiences realize they have read wrong. Drawing from narrative theory, fictionality studies, rhetorical criticism, and digital platform studies, Iversen develops a model for analyzing narratives that play with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction to motivate action or reconsideration on urgent public issues. These narrative practices—found in humanitarian campaigns, presidential rhetoric, political trolling, and synthetic media—use the digital affordances of platforms like Instagram, X, Reddit, and YouTube to reorient audience expectations and provoke social engagement. Combining theory and close reading, Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric offers a compelling interdisciplinary framework for understanding how narrative experiments can either deepen democratic discourse or contribute to its fragmentation in today’s platformed public spheres.

Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He is the coauthor of Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media and coeditor of Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1     Theoretical Groundwork
Chapter 1     Narrative Rhetoric and Platformed Publics
Chapter 2     Fictionality and Metanoic Reflexivity
Part 2     Case Studies
Chapter 3     What Is Happening? Assumptional Dynamics in Stories of Distant Suffering
Chapter 4     A Nimble Navigator: Experimental Ethos in Digital Presidential Rhetoric
Chapter 5     Stories of Meme Magic: Purposeful Trolling or Trolling Purpose on Reddit
Chapter 6     Synthetic Deliberation: Deepfakes as Contested Character Narration
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
References
Index