Publisher:
University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville
"This book examines the power of autobiographical stories, when aggregated in large numbers, to fuel social and political movements by shaping people's sense of community"-- Social media has facilitated the sharing of once isolated testimonies to an...
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"This book examines the power of autobiographical stories, when aggregated in large numbers, to fuel social and political movements by shaping people's sense of community"-- Social media has facilitated the sharing of once isolated testimonies to an extent and with an ease never before possible. The #MeToo movement provides a prime example of how such pooling of individual stories, in large enough numbers, can fuel political movements, fortify a sense of solidarity and community, and compel public reckoning by bringing important issues into mainstream consciousness.In this timely and important study, Helga Lenart-Cheng has uncovered the antecedents of this phenomenon and provided a historical and critical analysis of this seemingly new but in fact deeply rooted tradition. Story Revolutions features a rich variety of case studies, from eighteenth-century memoir collections to contemporary Web 2.0 databases, including memoir contests, digital story-maps, crowd-sourced Covid diaries, and AI-assisted life writing. It spans the Enlightenment, the 1930s, and the twenty-first century-three historical periods marked by a convergence of mass movements and new methods of data collection that led to a boom in activism based in the aggregation and communication of stories. Ultimately, this book offers readers a critical perspective on the concept of community itself, with incisive reflections on what it means to use storytelling to build democracy in the twenty-first century
Interessenniveau: 06, Professional and scholarly: For an expert adult audience, including academic research. (06)
Introduction -- Toward collective intimacy -- Early story collections: setting the stage -- Libraries of human experience -- To-gather in time -- To-gather in space -- Stories and statistics -- Postscript: Toward algorithmic collectives.