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Showing papers in "Narrative in 2016"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors consider how narrative depictions of the perspective of Holocaust perpetrators actuate complex and varied processes of empathy and identification in their readers, and suggest a taxonomy of identification that combines cognitive, affective, and ethical components and allows for the itinerant fluctuation between types and degrees of reader investment in a character at different points in a given narrative.
Abstract: Recent literary texts in English, French, and German represent the Holocaust through the autodiegetic narration of Nazi perpetrators, a strategy that emphasizes the humanness of their protagonists and complicates the reified image of Holocaust perpetrators that has developed in the decades since the war. Questions of reader identification, affect, and empathy are of critical ethical importance when examining such texts, providing new challenges for the currently flourishing discourse on narrative empathy. This article considers how narrative depictions of the perspective of perpetrators actuate complex and varied processes of empathy and identification in their readers. First, it situates its inquiry within recent research on narrative empathy, which offers a compelling framework for understanding readers’ empathetic engagements with admirable or suffering characters but has only barely begun to investigate empathy for victimizers. Second, it reconsiders the notion of reader identification as an umbrella concept that better accounts for complex readerly engagements with ethically charged characters. Third, it suggests a taxonomy of identification that combines cognitive, affective, and ethical components and allows for the itinerant fluctuation between types and degrees of reader investment in a character at different points in a given narrative. Finally, by taking a closer look at Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest , which pits two ethically dubious perpetrator-narrators against each other in a bid for the reader’s ambivalent identification, this article demonstrates how texts narrated by Holocaust perpetrators have mobilized and managed reader identification and considers the ethical issues that arise from it.

20 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a typology of interactional metalepsis is proposed, which includes metaleptic navigational devices, meta-paths, meta meta-text, metainteractions, metametaleptic webcams, and meta-metalithms.
Abstract: This article argues that interactional metalepsis is a device that is inherently built into ergodic digital fiction and thus that ergodic digital fiction is necessarily unnatural. Offering a definition and associated typology of interactional metalepsis as it occurs in digital fiction, it explores the ways in which these media-specific and unnatural forms of metalepsis manifest in that medium. It defines interactional metalepsis as a form of metalepsis which takes place across the actual to storyworld boundary and that exploits the interactive nature of digital technology via the hardware through which the reader accesses the text, such as the mouse, keyboard, or other navigational devices, and/or via media-specific interactive modes of expression such as hyperlinks or avatars. It argues that because interactional metalepses are inherently unnatural both in terms of physically and logical impossibility and also because interactional metalepsis is a device that is intrinsically built into ergodic digital fiction, digital fictions are inherently unnatural. Exploring the ways in which these media-specific and unnatural forms of metalepsis manifest in digital fiction, I offer a typology of interactional metalepsis which incorporates the following: metaleptic navigational devices, metaleptic hyperlinks, metaleptic webcams, and metaleptic breath. The article shows that digital fiction allows unnatural narrative to manifest in ways that must be analyzed media-specifically and therefore according to the affordances of a particular medium. I argue further that different forms of metalepsis are likely to be conventionalized by readers of digital fiction to varying degrees which depend upon the wider digital, cultural context to which they belong and also that, unlike most metalepses in print which are typically defamiliarizing, some forms of interactional metalepsis can have the opposite, immersive effect. This article shows that some of the theoretical underpinnings of unnatural narrative need to be reconsidered in light of the unnatural’s manifestation in digital fiction. It thus contributes to the development of unnatural narratology as a transmedial approach.

15 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article proposed a rhetorical definition of fictionality as intentionally signaled invention in communication, and analyzed salient passages related to fictionality in Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764, second edition 1766) and Austen's Northanger Abbey (1888, written in 1798-99).
Abstract: Proposing a rhetorical definition of fictionality as intentionally signaled invention in communication, this article shows how a historical investigation of fictionality can inform our understanding of the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century. The essay situates its approach to fictionality in relation to work on the concept by both historians of the novel, especially Catherine Gallagher, and narratologists, especially Richard Walsh. The essay then analyzes salient passages related to fictionality in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (first edition 1764, second edition 1766) and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1888, written in 1798–99). These analyses demonstrate that signs and discussions of fictionality in the early novel change in ways that reflect the development of the genre: whereas Fielding and Walpole explicitly proclaim to be founders of new provinces of writing, Austen incorporates a discussion of fictionality into the established but still-contested genre. More generally, the essay shows that the discourse on fictionality within the early novel reveals how its practitioners understood the genre’s relations to realism, to truth, and to the neighboring genres of romance and history.

15 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article pointed out that the second formal feature of FID might have a very different cognitive effect from empathy: an acceptance of alterity, and provided some supporting evidence for their hypothesis through an original psychology study.
Abstract: Recent cognitive research has indicated that free-indirect discourse (FID) can promote empathy in readers. We broaden and refine this research by distinguishing between two formal features of FID: (1) its pivot from the third person into the first, and (2) its pivot back out of the first person into the third. We then suggest that a historical survey of literature provides grounds for hypothesizing that the second formal feature of FID might have a very different cognitive effect from empathy: an acceptance of alterity. We provide some supporting evidence for our hypothesis through an original psychology study and conclude by proposing that our identification of a second cognitive effect of FID reveals how scientific reduction might be used to develop multiple, even divergent, models of rhetorical function.

14 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that readers themselves play a role in negotiating the disparity between the alternative worlds and alternative selves they encounter or inhabit in fiction and the often disappointing strictures of external, shared reality, by exploring ways to enact in their own lives elements of what they love in the imagined world and anticipating and evaluating the consequences of such enactments so that they can choose between healthy and unhealthy ones.
Abstract: Traditional and recent claims that literature enables readers to develop more satisfying ways of being in the world overlook the phenomenon of readers—especially adolescent readers—feeling bereft when their engagement with a fictional world ends and dissatisfied with the ordinary life to which they must return. Looking at cases of actual readers’ experiences with such immersive fictions as the Harry Potter novels and The Hunger Games trilogy, this essay draws attention to the role that readers themselves play in negotiating the disparity between the alternative worlds and alternative selves they encounter or inhabit in fiction and the often disappointing strictures of external, shared reality. Bridging the gap between the fictional world and ordinary living, the essay contends, requires a double response from readers: (1) exploring ways to enact in their own lives elements of what they love in the imagined world, and (2) anticipating and evaluating the consequences of such enactments so that they can choose between healthy and unhealthy ones.

8 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The second-person address of the interactive adventure gamebook generates a mode of identification between reader (player) and character that functions not through immersion or presence but through an estranging logic that arises from the particular affordances of the print form as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This essay argues that the second-person address of the interactive adventure gamebook generates a mode of identification between reader (player) and character that functions not through immersion or presence but through an estranging logic that arises from the particular affordances of the print form. It begins by situating the gamebook, an influential but short-lived genre that enjoyed its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, in relation to other forms of second-person narrative as well as Interactive Fiction and video games, before turning to a consideration of the points at which the forms diverge. Taking Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982) as its example, the essay then examines the ways in which the gamebook’s highly-demanding print form undermines notions of transparency, arguing that identification with the gamebook you is specific to, and reliant upon, the material properties of the print text.

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines key narratives in the African American tradition as rhetorically motivated and pedagogically engaged extensions of the musical genre known as the blues and proposes several narratological terms to signify these narratives' connections with blues music, specifically strategic variation, vernacular delivery, and participatory musicality.
Abstract: This essay examines key narratives in the African American tradition as rhetorically motivated and pedagogically engaged extensions of the musical genre known as the blues. Through the process of identifying, describing, organizing, and interpreting the elements of what can be termed blues narrative form , the essay argues that in these narratives performer-listener relationships draw from and also extend the rhetorical dimensions of blues music, lyrics, and performance styles. The essay introduces a taxonomy of examples developed from a set of approximately one hundred novels and narratives, and proposes several narratological terms to signify these narratives’ connections with blues music, specifically strategic variation, vernacular delivery, and participatory musicality. More generally, the concept of blues narrative form provides an advance over that of the “blues novel” because it helps to foreground often-overlooked narrative elements that have given unique rhetorical dynamism to the century-long practice of literary blues writing and its connections to the African diaspora.

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a distinction between dramatized and undramatized analepsis is proposed, which is synonymous with flashback and does not involve a real shift from one space-time to another.
Abstract: Flashback and flashforward, as well as analepsis and prolepsis in the terminology of Gerard Genette, belong to some of the few almost undisputed concepts in narrative theory. But if we dig deeper into their original definitions, we come to realize that they appear either vague or as an oversimplification of a more complex issue. In order to add precision to narrative theory’s efforts to analyze time shifts, I propose a distinction between dramatized analepsis, which is synonymous with flashback, and undramatized analepsis, which is not. Dramatized analepsis and flashback are synonyms because each involves an enactment of the past, while undramatized analepsis refers to past events but does not involve a real shift from one space-time to another. After looking at how this distinction can illuminate some paradigmatic cases in film and graphic narrative, I consider how these distinctions apply to verbal narratives. In addition, I discuss “fading effects” in verbal narratives, effects that follow from the progressive transition from one space-time to another. Finally, I suggest how these tools can illuminate the handling of temporality in Guy de Maupassant’s The Signal. More generally, this essay contributes to narratological understanding of the intersequential organization of narratives by adding greater precision to Genette’s discussion of analepsis by means of the distinction between dramatized and undramatized analepsis. Methodologically, the essay shows the value of transmedial comparisons, since my case about verbal narrative follows from work on narrative in visual media.

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article found that while FID enriched samples aroused emotional engagement in some readers, the increased emotional response was felt for the victim's suffering rather than inducing empathy with the revenger's emotions and actions.
Abstract: Suzanne Keen’s response to Fletcher and Monterosso evaluates their contribution to cognitive narratology and the psychology of narrative impact. Arguing that “there is more than one possible function for FID,” Fletcher and Monterosso design a clever experiment manipulating textual samples by increasing the amount of discourse in free indirect style in contrast to thought report (psycho-narration) or externalized narration in the originals. Employing follow-up questionnaires about affective response, perspective taking and role taking on the one hand, and attitudes towards revenge on the other hand, Fletcher and Monterosso discover that while FID enriched samples aroused emotional engagement in some readers, the increased emotional response was felt for the victim’s suffering rather than inducing empathy with the revenger’s emotions and actions. Keen discusses the narratological component, free indirect discourse, the link to reader’s empathy, and the methodology of Fletcher and Monterosso’s textual manipulations. With a nod to Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading, Keen notes that Fletcher and Monterosso’s work depicts active readers responding differently from one another. She offers cautions about the constitution of research subject pools, which should be as diverse as possible to arrive at persuasive observations about the impact of form. Keen affirms that narrative theorists can both contribute to and benefit from study of the various psychological responses to manipulations of narrative techniques.

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors explored the ethics of the telling of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend from a rhetorical perspective to demonstrate the ethical implications of misdirections and delayed disclosures, which create a multi-layered author-audience relationship.
Abstract: This essay explores the ethics of the telling of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend from a rhetorical perspective to demonstrate the ethical implications of misdirections and delayed disclosures, which create a multi-layered author-audience relationship. Our Mutual Friend has received much critical attention but very little has focused on the ethical implications of form for the relationship between Dickens and his audience. By examining the techniques of synthetic functions of character, double communication, misdirections, delayed disclosures, and narratorial devices of uncertainty, this essay demonstrates the consequences (for the genre of realism, the ethics of readerly judgment, the ethics of performance and play) and the rewards of reconfiguring the novel through attention to the synthetic dimension of acts of reading, themes, and characters. I offer some new directions for understanding Dickens’s multi-layered relationships with his readers in Our Mutual Friend, including a focus on perception, interpretation, and judgment; the cognitive pleasure of dealing with techniques that offer both immersion and defamiliarization; and the explicit awareness of the meta-fictional engagement offered by Dickens as designer. I offer a new argument about the nuances of implied author–narrator relationships in heterodiegetic narration, about the significance of mimetic and synthetic components of readerly and textual dynamics and their implications for genre, and about the ethics of the telling in narratives whose effects depend on misdirection and reconfiguration.

4 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The proxy narrative as mentioned in this paper is a type of narrative in which a key scene or plot sequence can be read most meaningfully as a substitute for a counterfactual alternative that cannot otherwise be narrated.
Abstract: This article discusses what I call the proxy narrative, a type of narrative in which a key scene or plot sequence can be read most meaningfully as a substitute for a counterfactual alternative that cannot otherwise be narrated. Building on existing critical applications of possible world semantics and counterfactual reasoning to narrative theory, I offer several case studies culminating in an extended discussion of The Ambassadors —and, particularly, of its critically contested final scene—to illustrate the extent to which recognition of the proxy narratives embedded in traditional plots can enrich our readings of even the most familiar texts. Unable plausibly or ethically to depict a renunciation scene between Strether and Madame de Vionnet, James uses the final encounter between Strether and Maria Gostrey, I argue, to enact a discursively necessary outcome that the logic of story otherwise precludes.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Zumthor as discussed by the authors analyzes the relation between brevity and form and addresses such matters as narrative time and the definition of narrative as a genre, and argues that discussions of brevity must take into account the real time of performance or reading and the immediate spatial and temporal contexts within which these works function in a given sociocultural situation.
Abstract: Paul Zumthor’s “La Brievete comme forme” analyzes the relations between brevity and form and addresses such matters as narrative time and the definition of narrative as a genre. Zumthor summarizes classical rhetorical theories of brevity in narration, and he considers the roles played by variations in time, space, and cultural milieux in the objects to which the term “brevity” is applied. Drawing examples from geographically, generically, and culturally diverse traditions, from ancient to modern practices, he notes that the length of a text in terms of its linguistic materiality does not necessarily give the measure of its duration, and argues that discussions of brevity must take into account the real time of performance or reading and the immediate spatial and temporal contexts within which these works function in a given sociocultural situation. Zumthor concludes by listing a series of attributes found at the heart of all brief medieval narrative literature: the unity of the event narrated; the finality of the ending, in which the conclusion exhausts the narrative premises; a relatively explicit and univocal significance or meaning; and a cluster of shared stylistic features found in narratives of less than a few hundred lines.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examined the relationship between the novel and nihilism, and found that the relation between the two can be traced back to Lukacs's theory that the novel is "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God".
Abstract: A century after Georg Lukacs launched literary theory as we know it with the publication of The Theory of the Novel , that work remains a vital resource for novel theory. Lukacs’s famed thesis that the novel is “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” establishes the intimate relation of the novel and nihilism. What is at stake in this relation is intensified by Nietzsche’s suggestion that reality does not take the form of a world except under the watchful eye of a monotheistic God and by the multiple and contradictory meanings of nihilism itself in modern thought. These issues are explored by examining Lukacs’s twofold conception of the novel’s “problematic individual” and “contingent reality” and transposing those terms into the question of the “essence of singularity” (Philip Roth) manifest in the creation of novelistic protagonists and the “ordeal of universalism” into which novelists themselves plunge by venturing their creation in the public sphere.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors found that organizational norms such as time pressure and poorly mediated controller-driver communications were significant causal factors for a majority of SPADs from the driver's perspective, and the findings have since gone on to inform a national SPAD Guideline by the Australian Rail Industry Safety Standards Board.
Abstract: From 2012 to 2014, the author led a research project about railway safety on the topic of “SPAD” occurrences, otherwise known as signals passed at danger. In Australia SPADs have been very problematic, and though none has caused any serious injury, over one thousand happen every year. In spite of the scholarly progress made in rail safety science, the industry still has a tendency to explain them through single-factor accounts of failure, which do not consider the system or the wider organizational behaviors. The research project found that organizational norms such as time pressure and poorly mediated controller-driver communications were significant causal factors for a majority of SPADs from the driver’s perspective. As findings started to emerge, they attracted controversy and the project was presented with the problem of translating its findings to optimize uptake within a very traditional and reactive industry. Using a Victorian rhetoric and character references that have become part of the popular lexicon (Sherlock Holmes), and by injecting light-hearted humor into an eminently serious topic, the findings were disseminated in a short story called “The Case of the Crooked Clock & the Distracted Driver.” The findings have since gone on to inform a national SPAD Guideline by the Australian Rail Industry Safety Standards Board. This essay illustrates the efficacy of narrative in bringing about changes in policy in a significant real-world situation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a short autobiographical text that Jurek Becker wrote a few months before his death of cancer in 1997, sent in the form of a postcard to his friend Joachim Sartorius, employs a kind of ellipsis, interestingly unmarked by any typographical symbols, that stands in for those losses.
Abstract: As the child of German-Polish Jews living in Łodź in the 1930s and ‘40s, Jurek Becker sustained losses—of his mother, of his childhood, and of his memories of that time period—that haunted him long into adulthood. A short autobiographical text that he wrote a few months before his death of cancer in 1997, sent in the form of a postcard to his friend Joachim Sartorius, employs a kind of ellipsis, interestingly unmarked by any typographical symbols, that stands in for those losses. What Becker does not write in his postcard text is as important as what he does write. This essay sheds light on the way in which the gaps in Becker’s text serve as the actual communicators of its theme, expands upon Robyn Warhol’s categories of the “unnarratable,” and explores what Becker’s text might tell us about the concept of the unnarrated in general.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and the films it engendered represent the Child as both the post-World War II promise of a new global community and the very threat that such a promise entailed: these Children are seemingly without race, class, or even gender, and possess preternatural intelligence with the ability for unfettered communication among the other children of their kind.
Abstract: John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos and the films it engendered ( Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned ) represent the Child as both the post-World War II promise of a new global community and the very threat that such a promise entailed. These Children are seemingly without race, class, or even gender, and possess preternatural intelligence with the ability for unfettered communication among the other children of their kind. While such racially and nationally transcendent self-possession was the basis for the dream of post-war global harmony, it also constitutes in the Children of Midwich the threat of global annihilation. As such, these counterfeit Children sustain an exploration of post-war childhood, its theoretical underpinnings, and the contesting narratives necessary to make “childhood” signify as a human category in the twentieth century: they produce a range of contesting narratives as to what the Child might mean, and what it might have meant within the new globalizing forces following the Second World War. These contesting narratives, I maintain, both depend upon the masterplot of the Child as our sentimental culture imagines it, and interrupt that masterplot to make of the Child a dangerous and fatal force. As our Children run askew, they become a counter-fit to the sentimental, political narrative, signifying instead the more primitive, psychoanalytic narrative of death’s inexorable drive.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article examined the operation of simulation in the parables of the Bible and found that the theology of parables may be guided by modes of emplotment, a point with broader implications for our understanding of theology and ethical thought more generally.
Abstract: Human cognitive structures and processes are to a great extent just that—human, thus universal or nearly universal. But at the same time no two human brains are identical. Applying these observations to literature, we would expect storytellers to share many narrative structures and processes, but also to exhibit in some degree individually distinctive patterns in these structures and processes. One important component of producing and experiencing stories is simulation, the imagination of particular, counterfactual or hypothetical situations and trajectories of events, including subjective perspectives and intentions. This essay examines the operation of simulation, focusing in particular on Jesus’s parables. It takes up the parables to further our understanding of human simulative processes. At the same time, it explores the individual features of the stories themselves, considering the ethical and theological issues they address. The analysis suggests that the theology of the parables may be to a surprising extent guided by modes of emplotment—a point with broader implications for our understanding of theology and ethical thought more generally.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The translation of Zumthor's "La Brièveté comme forme" by Nelles and Moscato has been published by Narrative as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Editor’s Note: Paul Zumthor’s “La Brièveté comme forme” is a suggestive take on the relations between brevity and form, one that also addresses questions about such matters as narrative time and about what is and isn’t narrative. Because the essay is not well-known among narrative theorists, I welcomed William Nelles’s proposal that Narrative publish the translation by him and Laurence Thiollier Moscato. I am also grateful that Professor Nelles agreed to provide this introductory frame for the essay that puts it in the larger context of Zumthor’s career.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that the main modes of modernist literary attention being a dispersal of attention that encourages detachment from the world and a self-involvement that entails an endless wandering within one's own inner depths.
Abstract: The article begins by examining the artistic effects of a formal device, narrative iteration, which consists in presenting the same events twice or more times. As an example from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina shows, this kind of recounting has important artistic consequences: within the story’s plot it emphasizes the characters’ feelings and responses, thus offering the readers elements that naturally attract human attention: passions, conflicts, options, and decisions, in particular spectacular, risky decisions. Asserting that for a long time successful narratives were built around worthy topics of gossip and/or news—couple formation, individual violations of law, and fights between nations—the article argues that in twentieth-century high literature attractive, well-organized plots are less frequent, the main modes of modernist literary attention being a dispersal of attention that encourages detachment from the world and a self-involvement that entails an endless wandering within one’s own inner depths. These two kinds of narrative attention, one naturally focused on human actions and passions, the other one turning away from them, either through dispersion or self-examination, shape the way in which readers relate to the world of the story, sympathize with its characters, and participate in it. Based on Jonathan Lear’s theory of catharsis, the article concludes that “gossip/news” narratives induce a significant amount of empathy, while narratives of dispersal and self-involvement often fail to do so.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A bibliographical record of all Doležel's works published in books and periodicals is presented in this article, which includes translations into other languages including Czech and Slovak.
Abstract: THIS IS A bibliographical record of all Doležel’s works published in books and periodicals. Though the primary focus is on the English and Czech versions of his texts, it also includes translations into other languages. In this respect, however, due to practical limitations, the bibliography remains incomplete. The items are sequenced chronologically. If several works appeared in a single year, they are ordered according to the following rubric: monographs, editions, essays in collective volumes, essays in conference proceedings, essays in journals, dictionary entries, reviews, interviews.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Cities of My Heart as mentioned in this paper is a brief intellectual autobiography that traces the progress of my work in narrative studies through attention to the important places and people in my career, and pays tribute to these cities and these colleagues in this short piece.
Abstract: “Cities of My Heart” is a brief intellectual autobiography. It traces the progress of my work in narrative studies through attention to the important places—and people—in my career. My encounters with these cities and especially with the scholars in each of them—Prague, Ann Arbor, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Toronto, Stockholm, Paris, and Amsterdam—have been crucial to the evolution of my thought. I am pleased to pay tribute, however small, to these cities and these colleagues in this short piece.