Title: Stories Without Borders: Global Iconic Events and Transnational Media

Lecturer: Julia Sonnevend (University of Michigan)  

Date: 4.3.2014

Time: 12:15-13:45

Abstract:

Global iconic events are news events that are covered extensively and remembered ritually by international media. Events like 9/11 and the fall of the Berlin Wall split off from the regular rhythms of daily life and stand out in memory as unique, marked as uplifting or traumatic. We isolate these occurrences from whatever came before and after, strip off their contradictions and complexities, and discard their webs of causes. In the stories we tell, such events become stand-alone items, compressions of time and space, elevated above the repetitive flow of time. Focusing on the initial and anniversary coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in this talk I examine how storytellers build up certain events so that people in distinct parts of the world can and will remember them for long periods of time. How do stories of particular events turn into global myths, while others fade out – due to counter-narration, forgetting, and other factors that are hard to pin down? In other words, what characterizes the transnational narration of global iconic events?