Article published In: Narrativization of the News
[Journal of Narrative and Life History 4:1/2] 1994
► pp. 69–88
Narrating the Social: Postmodernism and the Drama of Democracy
Published online: 4 August 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.4.1-2.05nar
https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.4.1-2.05nar
Abstract
This article challenges the postmodernist view—embodied in the work of such theorists as Baudrillard and Lyotard—that contemporary society is rife with meaninglessness and objectification. Rather, we will argue, meaning is creatively negotiated, among other ways, through narratives conveyed by the mass media. In examining the metanarrative underlying American news accounts, the drama of democracy, and the application of its various genres in the cases of Mikhail Gorbachev and Clarence Thomas, we aim to show that the dramatic categories of good and evil are ever-present parameters of morality in media accounts. The existence of such parameters demonstrates the robust nature of the social imagination as a resource to combat the despair offered by the postmodern perspective. (Sociology)
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