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.

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Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models

https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/estudos/article/download/1331/1063

It was like a fever

In recent years artistic practice has developed into a major focus of research activity, both as process and product, and discourse in various disciplines have made a strong case for its validity a...

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Creative Practice as Research: Discourse on Methodology

Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction

Marie-Laure Ryan Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001 xiii + 399 $2395 paper Narrative as Virtual Reality offers the reader an impressive and multifarious panorama of theory, cultural history, and textual analysis While the state of the art of electronic narrative is one of the book's concerns, its historical breadth of vision and the multiplicity of narrative (and other) media that it investigates sharply distinguish it from other recent publications focusing more exclusively upon electronic media in the context of contemporary culture and postmodernism "Virtual reality" in the context of Ryan's study refers to the domain of art itself-be it Baroque architecture, the classic realist novel, or the interactive movie-all genres which receive discussion Ryan traces the changing narrative strategies that have characterized the development of art and the key shifts in its forms of engagement with the minds of audiences Ryan concludes that two major forms of response-immersion and interactivity-have fueled key paradigm changes in the history of narrative and human culture In immersion, the reader is completely absorbed in the domain evoked by the work of art and becomes oblivious to the here and now; the reader's consciousness is thus recentered in the fictional world Texts that promote an immersive response in the reader have a transparent textual interface: in order to experience the text as world, the textual level of mediation becomes a window onto another world By contrast, in interactive texts, the recipient engages playfully with the work of art and becomes conscious of the artistic discourse as textual surface: the work of art loses its transparent world-creating capacity and offers itself as a game As Ryan shows, in some of their manifestations, immersion and interactivity can be seen as opposing aesthetic forces-for example when we contrast the realist novel with postmodernist experimental fiction However, it is one of the most insightful and instructive contributions of Ryan's wide-ranging consideration of artistic forms and narrative genres that she shows how in fact these two different urges have powered art in many different ways, both complementary and contradictory Narrative as Virtual Reality offers a wide-ranging theoretical discussion in connection with a pluralistic and exciting range of textual examples Its account of cultural and literary history modulates between densely erudite theoretical discourse and Ryan's own explorations of a number of narrative texts which well illustrate the interplay of interactivity and immersion These discursive shifts are particularly successful due to the book's overall structure: its ten chapters are interspersed with seven "interludes" that describe individual works of literature At strategic points the reader is thus given the chance to enjoy readings of immersion and interactivity in practice in texts as diverse as the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the interactive movie I'm Your Man, and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler The central framework of Ryan's investigation is set out in two key theoretical sections that describe a poetics of immersion and interactivity As a prelude to this, an initial section discusses a further key concept, which, as Ryan shows, has been subject to a dizzying spectrum of semantic variations: the virtual Ryan's illumination of the many metamorphoses of the virtual is characteristic of her combined theoretical rigor, historical depth, and cultural breadth The virtual is traced from its Latin etymology through to more recent significations such as the concept of the "virtual machine" from the formative days of computer technology, and its contemporary semantic overlap with the concept of cyberspace in the popular imagination (Ryan also clears up this overlap by showing how virtual reality is a world-creating technology which simulates spatial environments, whereas the cyberspace of the internet is a network of links and jumps in "nonspace …

Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

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.

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

We are always happy to clarify our work, discuss our ideas, explain our concepts further, and, for that matter, rethink our terms, arguments, and positions. Th is is the job of any intellectual, and it is especially important when one is developing a new conceptual paradigm. Hence, we would like to thank David Herman, the editor of Storyworlds, for giving us the opportunity to write a response to Tobias Klauk and Tillman Koppe’s “Reassessing Unnatural Narratology: Problems and Prospects.” Th eir piece is very polemical, but we still welcome the opportunity to set the record straight about what unnatural narratology does— and does not— aim to achieve.1 We recognize that we are advancing some oft en diffi cult, unusual, or unprecedented ideas that, due to their novelty, are liable to legitimate misinterpretation. Th erefore, in our response, we will do our best to (re)state our positions in the clearest possible terms.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.5250/storyworlds.5.2013.0101

What Really Is Unnatural Narratology

How does narratology relate to narrative strangeness? This question is urgent for narratologists who share a marked skepticism towards the idea of using 'natural' narratives as some kind of genetic model for understanding and interpreting all kinds of narratives, and for whom the distinction of fiction is important. This anthology presents a collection of articles that deal with different aspects of narrative voice in fiction ? with strange narratives, narratives of the strange, or, more generally, with the strangeness of fiction, and even with some strange aspects of narratology.

Stefan Iversen

Papers

Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models

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

What Really Is Unnatural Narratology

Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction

Broken or unnatural?: On the distinction of fiction in non-conventional first person narration