‘Just because it isn’t happening here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening’: narrative, fictionality and reflexivity in humanitarian rhetoric

ABSTRACT

Narratives that use experiments with paratexts, generic conventions and frames of understanding to challenge an audience’s ability to distinguish the fictionalised from the non-fictional have moved from postmodernist forms of literature and art into newer forms of so-called post-postmodernism and metamodernism. They have also, and this is the starting point for this article, moved into rhetorical discourse proper, aimed at moving real people about real issues. The article investigates such experiments as they appear in two cases of contemporary NGO campaign rhetoric: SavetheChildren’s ‘Most Shocking Second a Day Video’ (2014) and Unicef’s ‘Unfairy Tales’ (2016). The campaigns do not simply use fiction in their attempts to motivate – they challenge the ability to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction by employing strategies of what the article calls metanoic reflexivity, defined as a reading effect, produced when combinations of textual and paratextual markers defamiliarise the act of ascribing a rhetorical master trope (fiction or non-fiction) to a cultural artefact. The article draws on a pragmatic, rhetorical conceptualization of imaginative thinking and on rhetorical theory about metanoia in order to engage critically with aspects of the discourse on posthumanitarianism.

KEYWORDS:

• Metanoia
• humanitarian rhetoric
• fictionality
• narrative rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Make Poverty History was a campaign to pressure governments into taking action against poverty, originating in 2005 in Great Britain and based on a coalition of, among others, public figures, trade unions and NGOs.

2. Genette (1997: 2) states that ‘more than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold.’ It is ‘a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that […] is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefan Iversen

Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published on narrative rhetoric, unnatural narratives, early modernism, autofiction and fictionality in journals such as Narrative, Storyworlds, Style, Poetics Today and EJES. Recent co-edited works are a special issue of Poetics Today on unnatural and cognitive perspectives on narrative theory (2018) a special issue of Rhetorica Scandinavica on affect and feelings in rhetoric (2018) and a special issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies (2018). Iversen leads the international PhD-course ‘Summer Course in arrative Studies’ (SINS), held annually in Denmark since 2013.