Jarmila Mildorf, Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.14.42980Keywords:
book reviewAbstract
In Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity (2023), Jarmila Mildorf examines oral storytelling as a complex rhetorical enterprise. Her overarching frame of reference is ‘fictional contamination’, a term she coins to describe what she views as an in-built fictionalization tendency of narrative, its ‘potential for fictionalization’ (6). Mildorf displays broad, cross-disciplinary theoretical knowledge, and deftly connects a detailed analysis informed by narrative theory, linguistics, and social research with reflections on larger topics like identity construction, cultural story templates, the manipulative use of narrative, and the dynamics of family storytelling. The central concept of fictional contamination, though, suffers from overreach, which raises ethical as well as theoretical issues. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the book’s many merits, not least for scholars of life writing.
Published
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2025 Zuzana Fonioková
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
