Henrik Skov Nielsen

Bio: Henrik Skov Nielsen is an academic researcher from Aarhus University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Narratology. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 26 publications receiving 485 citations.

Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models

Abstract: where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison and the editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age and Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Alber has written articles that were published or are forthcoming in international journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style, and he has contributed to the Routledge Enyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the Handbook of Narratology, and the online dictionary Literary Encyclopedia. Stefan Iversen received his PhD in 2008 from the Scandinavian Department at Aarhus University where he is a postdoctoral scholar working on a project on Danish narratives from concentration camps. Iversen is the organizer of the Intensive Programme in Narratology (www.ipin.dk). He is co-editing Moderne Litteraturteori (a series of anthologies on modern literary theory) and has written articles and books on narrative theory, on trauma narratives, and on the Scandinavian fin de siecle. Henrik Skov Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark. In the first half of 2010 he is a visiting scholar at Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. He is the editor of a series of anthologies on literary theory and is currently working on a narratological research project on the relation between authors and narrators. Brian Richardson is Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unnatural Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative and Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies in 2006. He has edited two anthologies, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames and Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices, and has published essays on many aspects of narrative theory. He is currently working on unnatural and antimimetic narratives.

Ten Theses about Fictionality

Abstract: President Barack Obama, at the end of his speech at the April 28, 2013, correspondents’ dinner, praised the journalists who had covered the recent terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon for their exemplary work, emphasizing the importance of thorough, deep-digging journalism that “painstakingly puts the pieces together” and “verifies facts” (“Watch: President Obama” 19:36–19:52). Just a few minutes earlier, however, Obama had jokingly treated several issues in a way that played fast and loose with verified facts. Among other jests, he an-

The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction

Abstract: The analyses and discussions in this article are all aimed at clarifying a question that most people don't even ask because the answer seems self-evident: "Who nar rates in first-person (or what most narratologists call homodiegetic) narrative fic tion?" My hypotheses, however, are (1) that in literary fiction, as opposed to oral narrative, one cannot be certain that it is the person referred to as "I" who speaks or narrates, and therefore that (2) we need to posit an impersonal voice of the narrative. We can observe this phenomenon whenever something is narrated that the "narrat ing-I" cannot possibly know, as happens in Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and other fictional narratives, some of which I'll examine later. To develop my hypothesis and to establish the context for my proposal about the impersonal voice, I will begin with a brief review of some contemporary discus sions of voice in literature. I will then proceed to use my proposal to examine pas sages of first-person fiction that seem difficult to explain without the concept of the impersonal voice. This examination, in turn, will lead me into a discussion of my proposal's consequences for interpretation and for our understanding of fictional worlds. Finally, I will compare my interpretations to some alternative proposals about similar textual phenomena.

What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology?: A Response to Monika Fludernik

Abstract: Jan Alber is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He is the author of a critical monograph titled Narrating the Prison (2007) and the editor/co-editor of several other books such as Stones of Law – Bricks of Shame: Narrating imprisonment in the victorian age (with Frank Lauterbach, University of Toronto Press 2009), Postclassical Narratology: approaches and analyses (with Monika Fludernik, Ohio State University Press 2010), and Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology (with Rüdiger Heinze, de Gruyter 2011). Alber has authored and co-authored articles that were published or are forthcoming in such journals as Dickens Studies annual, Journal of Narrative Theory, The Journal of Popular Culture, Narrative, Storyworlds, and Style. In 2007, he received a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation to spend a year at Ohio State University doing work on the unnatural under the auspices of Project Narrative. In 2010, the Humboldt Foundation awarded him a Feodor Lynen Fellowship for Experienced Researchers to continue this research at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Maryland.

The Drowned and the Saved

Abstract: How do refugees feature in contemporary rhetoric? In the face of suffering the only way to keep borders closed, as Europe is beginning to discover, is to turn one’s face away. The appeal constituted by the recent photograph of a drowned toddler functions as a counter to the dystopian imaginary that is increasingly being reflected in the European refugee crisis; and appeals to us to say that there might be others who can be saved.

Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models

Abstract: where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison and the editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age and Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Alber has written articles that were published or are forthcoming in international journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style, and he has contributed to the Routledge Enyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the Handbook of Narratology, and the online dictionary Literary Encyclopedia. Stefan Iversen received his PhD in 2008 from the Scandinavian Department at Aarhus University where he is a postdoctoral scholar working on a project on Danish narratives from concentration camps. Iversen is the organizer of the Intensive Programme in Narratology (www.ipin.dk). He is co-editing Moderne Litteraturteori (a series of anthologies on modern literary theory) and has written articles and books on narrative theory, on trauma narratives, and on the Scandinavian fin de siecle. Henrik Skov Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark. In the first half of 2010 he is a visiting scholar at Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. He is the editor of a series of anthologies on literary theory and is currently working on a narratological research project on the relation between authors and narrators. Brian Richardson is Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unnatural Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative and Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies in 2006. He has edited two anthologies, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames and Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices, and has published essays on many aspects of narrative theory. He is currently working on unnatural and antimimetic narratives.

The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.

Abstract: Why a species as successful as Homo sapiens should spend so much time in fiction, in telling one another stories that neither side believes, at first seems an evolutionary riddle. Because of the advantages of tracking and recombining true information, capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, and communication evolved in a range of animal species-yet even chimpanzees cannot communicate beyond the here and now. By Homo erectus, our forebears had reached an increasing dependence on one another, not least in sharing information in mimetic, prelinguistic ways. As Daniel Dor shows, the pressure to pool ever more information, even beyond currently shared experience, led to the invention of language. Language in turn swiftly unlocked efficient forms of narrative, allowing early humans to learn much more about their kind than they could experience at first hand, so that they could cooperate and compete better through understanding one another more fully. This changed the payoff of sociality for individuals and groups. But true narrative was still limited to what had already happened. Once the strong existing predisposition to play combined with existing capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, language, and narrative, we could begin to invent fiction, and to explore the full range of human possibilities in concentrated, engaging, memorable forms. First language, then narrative, then fiction, created niches that altered selection pressures, and made us ever more deeply dependent on knowing more about our kind and our risks and opportunities than we could discover through direct experience. WIREs Cogn Sci 2018, 9:e1444. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1444 This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Linguistics > Evolution of Language Neuroscience > Cognition.

Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: Brian Richardson. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 166 pp. $55.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Brian Richardson's Unnatural Voices is a major contribution to narratology. Its starting point is the highly convincing thesis that 'narrative theory, despite its emphasis on narrative and narrators, has not yet systematically examined the impressive range of unusual postmodern and other avant garde strategies of narration', in part because postmodernism 'has often proven resistant to traditional narrative theory' (ix). He explains that the book is intended to rectify these unfortunate absences. It explores in depth one of the most significant aspects of late modernist, avant garde, and postmodern narrative - the creation, fragmentation, and reconstitution of narrative voices - and offers a theoretical account of these unusual and innovative strategies. This is an empirical study that describes and theorizes the actual practices of significant authors . . . Such an inductive approach is essential because many extreme forms of narration seem to have been invented precisely to transgress fundamental linguistic and rhetorical categories, (ix) In essence, the book comprises an inventory and theoretical overview of a large number of innovative contemporary uses of narrators and narration. These are contrasted with current theories of narrative poetics that, Richardson plausibly argues, cannot fully comprehend them. Such innovations include a new kind of narrative that hinges on the unexpected disclosure of a homodiegetic narrator towards the end of an apparently heterodiegetic text (for example, Ian McEwan's Atonement); 'it', 'they', and passive voice narration; second person narration (divided into standard, hypothetical, and autotelic); 'we' narration; multiperson narration (for example, texts that employ first and third person narration); indeterminate speakers; impossible acts of narration; interlocutor narration (for example, the 'Ithaca' episode in Ulysses); 'denarration' (narrators denying the truth of what they have just said); 'permeable' narration ('the uncanny and inexplicable intrusion of the voice of another within the narrator's consciousness' [95]); distinctively postmodern types of unreliable narrators such as fraudulent, contradictory, incommensurate, and disframed narrators; and unusual narrators in contemporary drama. And all in one hundred and forty pages! The final chapter, after discussing the modernist origins of contemporary anti-realist practices, ends with a plea for a general 'anti-poetics' of narrative that should be considered as a supplement and foil to traditional poetics. The proposal is not for a different poetics but for an additional one; that is, for an anti-mimetic poetics that supplements existing mimetic theories. Such a model will allow us to greatly expand the area covered by narrative theory, and will allow it to embrace a host of earlier non-mimetic literatures. And only in this way can we begin to do justice to the most effective imaginative achievements in narrative in our time. (138) Specifically, he suggests that 'we will be most effective as narrative theorists if we reject models that insist, based on categories derived from linguistics or natural narrative, on firm distinctions, binary oppositions, fixed hierarchies, or impermeable categories' (139). In Richardson's view, instead of such rigid typologies, we need an alternative model that stresses the permeability, instability, and playful mutability of the voices in non-mimetic fictions. Unnatural Voices is just what a narratological book should be: its proposals for narrative theory are original and important, and it also contains a number of illuminating readings of individual works. The book features an encyclopedic reference to a wide range of narratives from various countries, both postmodern and other (although the regular use of Samuel Beckett narratives provides a thread of continuity). …