Jarmila Mildorf, Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity

In Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity (2023), Jarmila Mildorf examines oral storytelling as a complex rhetorical enterprise. Her overarching frame of reference is ‘fictional contamination’, a term she coins to describe what she views as an in-built fictionalization tendency of narrative, its ‘potential for fictionalization’ (6). Mildorf displays broad, cross-disciplinary theoretical knowledge, and deftly connects a detailed analysis informed by narrative theory, linguistics, and social research with reflections on larger topics like identity construction, cultural story templates, the manipulative use of narrative, and the dynamics of family storytelling. The central concept of fictional contamination, though, suffers from overreach, which raises ethical as well as theoretical issues. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the book’s many merits, not least for scholars of life writing.