It Was Like a Fever

Francesca Polletta's latest, It Was Like A Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, is essential reading for students of cultural trauma, social movements, and collective memory. Her basic thesis is that the ambiguity of narrative used in political speeches, public deliberation, and other discursive forums, is a powerful mechanism of social power. Her analysis successfully divorces narrative from the clutches of literary theory in order to show the causal and predictive power of storytelling for a variety of social outcomes. The following passage is a microcosm of the book's main message (p. viii):

"Take a story that, some say, won George Bush the 2004 election: a thirty-second television spot titled "Ashley's Story." The spot was produced by a conservative group, and it aired in nine contested states in the month before the election. It recounted sixteen-year-old Ashley Faulkner's meeting with the candidate at a campaign rally in Lebanon, Ohio. Ashley had lost her mother in the 2001 World Trade Center attack, and after that, the spot's narrator reported, she had "close up emotionally." The narrator continued, "But when President George W. Bush came to Lebanon, Ohio, she went to see him, as she had with her mother four years before." As Bush made his way through the crowed of well-wishers, a friend of the Faulkners told him that Ashley's mother had been killed in the 9/11 attack. Bush turned and spontaneously embraced the girl, saying that he knew it was hard and asking if she was all right. "And that was the moment," the family friend recounted, "that we saw Ashley's eyes fill up with tears." Ashley herself explained, "He's the most powerful man in the world and all he wants to do is make sure I'm safe, that I'm okay." The spot concluded with Ashley's father saying, "What I saw was what I want to see in the heart and soul of the man who sits in the highest elected office in our country"

This is only one of several powerful examples Polletta gives among others including analysis of the power of narrative in an on-line forum about the September 11th attacks, the use of the Civil Rights movement in Congressional speeches over the last sixty years, and the early sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement itself. In each of these examples, Polletta convincingly demonstrates how narrative can be strategically deployed by social movements and civil debate, developing a much more sophisticated vocabulary of "framing" than the wider literature on social movements in sociology as well as linguists such as Lakoff. Poletta's analysis of the context in which narratives are presented and the manner in which they are received allows her to predict when and where the use of narrative enables, transforms, or stifles, democratic debate. Coupled with Eviatar Zerubavel's similarly innovative analysis of the social structure of denail in The Elephant in the Room, Poletta's book provides young cultural sociologists with an impressive artillery of theory and methods with which to invade the dusty barracks of political sociology.