Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric: Experimental Fictionality on Digital Platforms (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780814216071)

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.

Author: Stefan Iversen
ISBN-10: 0814216072
ISBN-13: 9780814216071
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/02/2026
Pages: 228
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs