High Risk Narratives: Textual Adventures

Abstract

The paper explores how individual chosen risk is rendered in texts using 5 recent popular best selling books. They describe high adventure in distant, exotic locales—jungles, storms, mountains, and at sea. Dramaturgical analysis, based on Kenneth Burke's pentad of actor, acts, scene, agency and purpose, reveals how differential attention to and focus upon some aspects of the narrative selected actors and their acts, some features of the scene, the limited agency or tools employed, and the adventuresome purposes of the actors. Conversely, the same devices suppress or omit descriptions of other actors, acts, features of the scene and purposes, although they are mentioned or implied. The texts, quasi-ethnographies, illuminate how the commodification of leisure, seeking risky experience, and the social construction of risk are features of postmodern cultures. The works complement academic research by social scientists that analyze risk because they place risk in context—telling a good story and providing often riveting detail—and show how narrative forms can be used to express high risk experience.