Full text loading...
-
“My life has changed forever!”
Narrative identities in parodies of Amazon reviews
-
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations
- Source: Narrative Inquiry, Volume 27, Issue 2, Jan 2017, p. 217 - 234
-
- 06 Oct 2017
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.