Moving to Higher Ground

Brett Kavanaugh threatened us with the revenge of a (presumably apocalyptic) whirlwind yesterday if–what? If we don’t believe him? In an effort to dispel that mini dust storm in advance, we scoured the Reps archive today for essays that might help clear the air. The special forum “Crime, Lies, and Narratives,” from shortly after 9/11 (another great time of national name-calling and angst), offers three such essays, perfect for weekend reading:

Representations 80: Special Forum–Crimes, Lies, Narratives

KEN ALDER
A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America

TODD HERZOG
Crime Stories: Criminal, Society, and the Modernist Case History

ISTVAN REV
The Suggestion

MARGARET OLIN
Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s “Mistaken” Identification

DANIEL COTTOM
To Love to Hate

Kent Puckett Wins Perkins Prize

Congratulations to Kent Puckett

–whose book  Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2016) has won the 2018 Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. The Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize is presented annually the society to the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in the preceding year.

Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction provides an account of a methodology increasingly central to literary studies, film studies, history, psychology, and beyond. In addition to introducing readers to some of the field’s major figures and their ideas, Puckett situates critical and philosophical approaches toward narrative within a longer intellectual history. The book reveals one of narrative theory’s founding claims – that narratives need to be understood in terms of a formal relation between story and discourse, between what they narrate and how they narrate it – both as a necessary methodological distinction and as a problem characteristic of modern thought. Puckett thus shows that narrative theory is not only a powerful descriptive system but also a complex and sometimes ironic form of critique.

KENT PUCKETT is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author, in addition to Narrative Theory, of War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945 (Fordham, 2017)  and Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 2008). He serves on the editorial board of Representations, for which he  edited the special forum Search (127) and coedited, with C. D. Blanton and Colleen Lye, the special issue Financialization and the Culture Industry (126).