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Part of
Storytelling in the Digital World
Edited by Anna De Fina and Sabina M. Perrino
[Benjamins Current Topics 104] 2019
► pp. 9–26

“My life has changed forever!”

Narrative identities in parodies of Amazon reviews

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.
Keywords: narrative identities, parody, Amazon reviews, humor, performativity, digital narratives, online identities
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Identities online
    • “False” identities
    • Parody
    • Parodies of Amazon reviews
  • Methods
  • Findings
    • Steering Wheel Work Tray
    • Banana Slicer
    • Tuscan Milk
    • Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt
    • BIC Cristal for Her Ball Pen
  • Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.104.02vas
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