Showing papers by "Marco Caracciolo published in 2018"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a crossover between two strands of contemporary narrative theory: a second-generation cognitive approach that foregrounds the linkage of stories, mind, and the human body; and an unnatural approach, which focuses on narratives that depart from and challenge everyday cognitive parameters, including those involved in so-called literary realism.
Abstract: This special issue presents a “crossover” between two strands of contemporary narrative theory: a second-generation cognitive approach that foregrounds the linkage of stories, mind, and the human body; and an unnatural approach, which focuses on narratives that depart from and challenge everyday cognitive parameters, including those involved in so-called literary realism. In this introduction to the special issue, we take our cue from Franz Kafka’s “Wish to Become a Red Indian” (a paragraph-long short story) to illustrate these ways of theorizing about narrative and to Poetics Today 39:3 (September 2018) DOI 10.1215/03335372-7032676 q 2018 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics The first drafts of the essays in this special issue were presented inNovember 2016 at aworkshop hosted by the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University (Sweden). The editors would like to thank Christer Johansson and Göran Rossholm for making this workshop possible, and the participants for their input on the articles. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/542780/0390429.pdf by guest on 25 November 2018 discuss the conceptual divides that separate them. From an unnatural perspective, the cognitive approach flattens narrative to real-world psychology; from a cognitive perspective, the unnatural approach ignores the way that every narrative, no matter how challenging or innovative, exploits our cognitive makeup. By examining these assumptions and by tracing the history of cognitive and unnatural models of narrative, this special issue seeks to move beyond a conceptual standoff between them. The essays collected in the issue demonstrate that it is possible to combine a cognitive approach with an interest in unnatural stories— or, conversely, an unnatural approach and attention to the cognitive and embodied dynamics of narrative. In addition to previewing the arguments advanced in the articles, this introduction explicates the innovative method of scholarly collaboration through which the articles came about, and the different results it produced in each case.
12 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a close reading of Vonnegut's Galápagos (1985), a novel set a million years into the future, when humanity has evolved into a radically different species, is used as a springboard to rethink narrative's experientiality.
Abstract: Abstract:Storytelling is not just a human practice, but a practice that reflects the physical and cognitive make-up of human beings. This is the intuition at the core of Monika Fludernik’s notion of “experientiality.” One of the upshots of this idea is that narrative struggles to come to terms with realities (such as natural evolution or geological history) that are not human-scale. In light of recent discussions in posthumanism and ecocriticism, one may ask if and how narrative can overcome this anthropocentric bias. This essay addresses this question through a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), a novel set a million years into the future, when humanity has evolved into a radically different species. The essay explores formal strategies and affective impact of Vonnegut’s novel, using it as a springboard to rethink narrative’s experientiality in the face of a more-than-human vantage point.
11 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that these novels are able to evoke a strong sense of the disrupted temporality of catastrophe through what they call negative strategies, which are formal devices that leverage the underlying psychological structure of negation in order to confront readers with the absence of the preapocalyptic world.
Abstract: abstract:This article engages with the challenges of narrating catastrophe in so-called postapocalyptic fiction, and more specifically in three contemporary novels that bring formal and stylistic sophistication to the genre: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). I claim that these novels are able to evoke a strong sense of the disrupted temporality of catastrophe through what I call “negative strategies.” These are formal devices that leverage the underlying psychological structure of negation in order to confront readers with the absence of the preapocalyptic world. My textual analyses are part of a broader attempt to understand how the imbrication of human and nonhuman realities (as revealed, in my corpus, by catastrophe) impacts narrative not just in thematic but in formal terms.
9 citations
22 Nov 2018
TL;DR: The authors examine the prime suspect for anthropocentrism in narrative, namely, the notion of character as intrinsically human-like, and explore five strategies through which narrative may integrate nonhuman characters that challenge both anthropocrism and the subject-object binary.
Abstract: Abstract Scientists and scholars in multiple fields have been discussing the current geological epoch under the heading of the “Anthropocene” – an era marked by the planetary impact of human activities (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The epistemological shift brought about by this notion exposes the latent anthropocentrism of narrative practices, raising a challenge taken up by narrative theorists such as Erin James (2015) and Alexa Weik von Mossner (2017) in the context of an “econarratology.” In this article, I examine the prime suspect for anthropocentrism in narrative – namely, the notion of character as intrinsically human-like. My point of departure is A. J. Greimas’s (1976) actantial model of narrative, which I revisit and revise in light of work in the field of ecolinguistics (Goatly 1996). I thus explore five strategies through which narrative may integrate nonhuman characters that challenge both anthropocentrism and the subject-object binary that anthropocentrism entails. I exemplify these strategies by discussing contemporary novels that deal with the Anthropocenic entanglement of humanity and the nonhuman world.
6 citations
01 Dec 2018
TL;DR: The authors argue that experimental narratives can destabilise the widespread tendency to describe mental processes through spatial metaphors, by foregrounding the continuity between the physical space of the setting (an island) and the protagonists' existential predicament.
Abstract: Ideas enter our mind, a realisation can dawn on us, and we should let bad news sink in. This article argues that experimental narrative can destabilise this widespread tendency to describe mental processes through spatial metaphors. My case studies are J. G. Ballard's short story 'The Terminal Beach' (1964) and Dear Esther (2012), an arthouse video game developed by The Chinese Room. These narratives develop and literalise metaphors for mind by foregrounding the continuity between the physical space of the setting (an island) and the protagonists' existential predicament. Going beyond a dualistic reading of the 'mind as space' metaphor, these texts construct spaces that are more than a symbol for the characters' mental processes: narrative space is causally linked to mind in neurophysiological terms (in Ballard's short story), or extends the protagonist's emotional meaning-making (in Dear Esther). This set-up is unsettling, I contend, because it raises deep questions about the relationship between subjective experience and material realities. By exploring these narratives and their ramifications, the article seeks to open a conversation between the cognitive humanities and the 'nonhuman turn' in contemporary literary studies.
5 citations
4 citations
TL;DR: Phelan's brand of functionalism or hyperfunctionalism leads him to neglect the possibility that not every element in a narration functions well or is necessary as discussed by the authors, which makes him overvalue the communicative function of narrative (at the expense of its expressive function).
Abstract: risk of circular reasoning (use x of element y therefore z and z therefore use x of element y . . .), Phelan’s brand of functionalism or hyperfunctionalism leads him to neglect the possibility that not every element in a narration functions well or is necessary. Together with his definition of narrative, it makes him overvalue the communicative function of narrative (at the expense of, say, its expressive function). Last but by no means least, it is tied to the pragmatism that moves him to favor usefulness over truth, bricolage over engineering, rhetoric over grammar. Of course, above all, Phelan is a splendid rhetorician.
2 citations
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: The Inheritors (1955) and Out of Eden (2013) are two prose narratives that seek to connect readers with the "deep history" of human evolution as discussed by the authors, and use embodied experience as a probe into the ideologically loaded question of human difference and our position vis-à-vis the nonhuman world.
Abstract: Drawing on work in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics, narrative theorists have argued that making sense of stories builds on schemata drawn from our embodied experience of the world. Put simply, as audiences immerse themselves into fictional worlds, they bring their bodies along—and this makes an important difference for interpretation. This essay explores this difference in relation to two prose narratives that seek to connect readers with the ‘deep history’ of human evolution: “Out of Eden” (2013-), a writing project by American journalist Paul Salopek; and The Inheritors (1955), a novel by British author William Golding. Both narratives strategically exploit readers’ embodied resonance as they imagine (respectively) the migration of our ancestors and the life of a group of Neanderthals. In this way, Salopek and Golding use embodied experience as a probe into the ideologically loaded question of human difference—and of our position vis-à-vis the nonhuman world.
1 citations