Advertising and meaningful stories

Abstract

Starting from the premise that contemporary advertising is defined by a “literary turn”, the paper proposes an investigation of the advertising stories from the perspective of Mircea Eliade’s theory of the sacred and the profane. In the first part of the paper, I focus on the concept of storytelling, emphasizing also the major impact of new media on the manner in which we understand the advertising stories. Next, I discuss the most important aspects of Eliade’s conception on the essential relationship between the narrative and the sacred, emphasizing the idea that the omnipresence of storytelling in the postmodern society is, in fact, stirred by this longing for meaning and for access to what is perceived as “truly real”. Furthermore, the narrative core of advertising, understood in the terms provided by the theory the sacred of Mircea Eliade, contributes in a decisive manner at defining what is known as “the religious dimension of advertising”. (Sheffield 2006)