Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our Worlds

Citton (The Ecology of Attention), a literature professor at the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis, delivers a galvanizing treatise on the relationship between narratives and political power. Asserting that stories shape people’s emotions, Citton analyzes how news stories about sexual predators and drug traffickers gin up fears that drive support for “tough on crime” politicians. More subtly, he contends, narratives serve as “an integrating structure” for reality, making implicit arguments about which factors are important or irrelevant by whether or not they’re included in a given account. Such tendencies make storytelling an effective form of soft power, Citton posits, urging left-wing politicians to counter the “racist, classist, conformist, and anti-intellectualist” narratives that he suggests drive support for conservative parties by providing more convincing accounts. He argues that such stories should reject “GDP as the measure of sovereign Good” and portray equality and liberty as inextricable from each other, instead of opposing causes taken up by socialists and capitalists, respectively. Citton does an admirable job of making the theoretical discussions accessible, and he concludes with a thought-provoking afterword on how admitting that all knowledge derives from “situated” perspectives might better refute conspiracy thinking than insisting on the existence of a single, authoritative version of reality. It’s an erudite 21st-century update on Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. (Apr.)