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In:Storytelling in the Digital World
Edited by Anna De Fina and Sabina M. Perrino
[Benjamins Current Topics 104] 2019
► pp. 9–26

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“My life has changed forever!”

Narrative identities in parodies of Amazon reviews

 | University of South Florida
Published online: 18 June 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.104.02vas
Abstract
New parodic genres have emerged across diverse forms of digital media. Sometimes these parodies take the form of mock “narratives of personal experience,” with authors drawing on a range of discursive resources to perform particular identities and in doing so, to create texts written from imagined perspectives. In this article, I focus on parodies of user-generated product reviews on Amazon. For over a decade, Amazon users have contributed thousands of parodies of reviews written about real products. This analysis focuses on a sample from a data set of 100 parodic Amazon reviews written about five different products (which have become the targets of a large number of parody reviews), and demonstrates how authors perform self-disclosure to construct fictional personae. I demonstrate how these discursively-constructed narrative identities are central to the ensuing and improbable narrative events represented in the parodic texts.
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Identities online
    • “False” identities
    • Parody
    • Parodies of Amazon reviews
  • Methods
  • Findings
    • Steering Wheel Work Tray
    • Banana Slicer
    • Tuscan Milk
    • Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt
    • BIC Cristal for Her Ball Pen
  • Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (38)
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