How Do Stories Motivate Harm?

• In Event: Narrative Criminology I: What Stories Do and How They Do It

Abstract

The basic job of stories is to account for some portion of the past. In addition, stories hint at some moral significance that the past holds for the future. Stories relate what has been and suggest what will be and why it all matters. But what exactly gives stories the emotional grip that social scientists, especially students of political projects, have documented? This paper examines the capacity of narrative to motivate harm by arousing the senses – of both listeners and tellers. It explores the connections that philosophers and psychologists draw between narrative and affect for the sake of understanding the narrative grounds of crime and other harmful action. Relevant concepts from the philosophy and psychology literatures are character identification and empathy, the yearning for order and immortality, and the moral and aesthetic ambiguity of the most compelling stories. By engaging with these concepts, narrative criminologists can move beyond established mechanisms for the story-crime relationship – stories as legitimizing harm and harm as performing stories, for stories also give emotional force to collective logics.

Author

• Lois Presser, University of Tennessee