Mythocracy examines the narrative mechanisms that script our lives through the stories we tell one another. Digging beneath common anxieties about fake news, Yves Citton looks at the attention economy, which organises our political perceptions around affective attractors. These are much more powerful than the truth value of any given narrative. The time has come for the left to reclaim the power of myth from reactionary populism.

Yves Citton is professor in Literature and Media at the Universit Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, after having previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA (1992-2003) and at the Universit Grenoble Alpes (2003-2017). He was Executive Director of the Graduate School (EUR) ArTeC from 2018 to 2021 and is co-editor of the journal Multitudes. He published a dozen books in French, translated in many languages, among which Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019) and The Ecology of Attention (Polity Press, 2016). His articles are in open access on his website www.yvescitton.net.