Peter Brooks, an emeritus professor at Yale University,is a literary theorist and writer. He was influenced by his teacher and colleague Paul de Man, who followed Continental European theories of structuralism and deconstruction. Prof. Brooks adopted many of the ideas of postmodernist version of Continental critical theory, of Jean-François Lyotard.
Prof. Brooks’s 1984 book on literary theory book, Reading for the Plot was hailed in the Times Literary Supplement as “A major book by a major critic. It will appeal both to literary theorists and to readers of the novel, and it is likely to be seen as an important point of reference for many years to come.” It was written as postmodern critical theory became entrenched in study and teaching of the humanities. His academic areas of interest include the use of narratives by judges in deciding legal disputes.
His new book,Seduced by Story (2022), was published as the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its judgment in the abortion rights case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. It has a chapter on the way judges of the U.S. Supreme Court, including the late A. Scalia and J. Alito, have written the “originalist” narrative that the U.S. constitution does not protect rights that were not articulated in a text written at the end of the 18th century. Prof. Brooks treats the originalist story in a neutral way, but may be critical.
For professional and academic literary critics and interdisciplinary critics, a narrative is an important theoretical concept. Seduced by Story, attempts to reinforce the validity of literary criticism and postmodern critical theory as a method for explaining events and persuading people about the causes of events.
There is some confusion about whether narratives have to be written on paper and how theories of narrative apply to oral storytelling, cinema, video, television, the Internet, and social media.
One of Prof. Brooks’ points seems to be that modern interdisciplinary study of narrative has extended into areas that have become scientifically respectable, making most stories psychologically persuasive, whether or not they are scientically and philosophically ways of proving real facts. He concedes there is a difference and that most people make emotional judgments based on their reaction to storytelling because no people can really understand the truth or make the best decisions
Prof. Brooks emphasizes the claim of historians to rely on the “evidential paradigm” that the historian’s relation to material of the past is considered to be an evidential one, through and through.
He credits this paradigm to a 1986 paper by href=Carlo Ginzburg, although it has been a tenet of historiography for several decades longer – and perhaps a delusion, a false hope or a pretense. Prof. Brooks also cites Prof. Ginzburg for the speculative evolutionary theory that early humans learn adaptive skills about signs of the presence of food sources and predators and for speculation that “this kind of knowing may lie at the inception of narrative itself”.
Prof. Brooks mentions Galen Strawson’s critique in narrative theory in "A Fallacy for Our Age" and other essays in the collection Things that Bother Me but does not engage with it. To the contrary he suggests Strawson approves of the literary narrative theories that Brooks supports.
The book is short and informative in a rich (dense) academic way, but is tendentious on the question of whether narrative is a scientific way of knowing facts. ( )