Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

Narratives of Death: Journalism and Figurations of Social MemoryBruno Souza Leal, Elton Antunes & Paulo Bernardo Vazsituations where journalism is seen as a device for the connection, distribution and presentationof collective memory (Neiger, Meyers & Zandberg, 2011). Some contents, the so-calledmemorable events, are worth mentioning here.The modus operandi of narratives that give a familiar appearance to facts, in orderto adapt them to the different audiences, is also investigated. Memory here is seen as thepast, which becomes an instrument to produce and broaden the referentialization processof journalism. With the narrative, the event generates a reference to one’s own story, to the“present of things past”, which is a condition for its understanding.“A story” becomes part of the statement, with references to other events of remotetimes, to “a past” that is part of the “background” in which the new information is projected.Therefore, a knowledge embodied in experience is necessary, and memory is the condition tounderstand the events on display. The authority the journalist acquires when dealing with thepast should also be mentioned (Kitch, 2002; Zelizer, 2008).Often, journalism re-uses its own past content and presents it as historical evidence.It also produces specific modes of “telling the past” and transforms this past into an artifactto read the present and project the future. The function attributed to the document orarchive gives authority to journalistic narratives. Certainly, the connection between thisgeneral process of journalism and Koseleck’s meta-categories are attractive, since they canhelp understand the existence of a typically journalistic approach to temporality. However,such a project runs the risk of homogenizing a temporal fabric which is both complex andmulti-faceted. The difference observed in the news concerning important deaths and theshort narratives on little ones must be taken into account, particularly their distinctivetemporal regimes. Thus, we opted for a more circumscribed approach to analyzing journalistictemporalities, bearing in mind the “meta-categories” of “space of experience” and“horizon of expectations” in order to capture the peculiar phenomenon of ordinary dailydeaths built by journalism.3. Dying in the newsThese “little deaths” make us wonder if are immutable the ways by which journalismacts as an agent of social memory. Beyond remembrance and the past as a condition forintelligibility, is it possible to see other ways in which journalism can be involved in theconstruction of memory? The vision on little deaths is quite enlightening here. Curiously, itis even more interesting when one takes into account that “little death” in French (la petitemort) is the expression used to describe orgasm, both an extreme pleasure and a physicalexhaustion. It is worth wondering if the constant media reference to “little deaths” is nota kind of offer in daily doses, something that readers overindulge in but never get tired of,even when they just flirt with it. Something which brings pleasure, but is forgotten to beremembered the next day or moment, in continuous circles of new pleasure and oblivion.As such questions/suppositions could be interpreted as morbid, adjective which, inprinciple, should not be used to label newspapers or their readers, it is important to rememberthat outside the media scope, daily conversations that start with the question “have youNarratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches109