Showing papers in "Narrative in 2019"

Six Elements of Serial Narrative

Abstract: abstract:This essay proposes a set of terms for considering serial narratives across media, by focusing on the defining quality of seriality: the rhythmic, compositional, and sequential relationship between one object and a subsequent, apparently similar object. The six terms—iteration, multiplicity, momentum, world-building, personnel, and design—address the methods by which serial installments relate to one another, and build stories, environments, and expectations over time. These elements operate not as necessities but as options for enunciating the structures and experiences that serials provide for their audiences; some serials may choose to minimize or work against these elements. Drawing on examples from television, the novel, cinema, podcasts, and comics, the argument makes a case for the centrality of a collection of characteristics that together articulate the narrative strategies that installment-publication continues to privilege. Serials that resist these six elements most persistently represent examples of "minimalist seriality"; serials that embrace them most robustly represent examples of "maximalist seriality." The essay concludes with the broader claim that all serials, whatever their era or context, essentially contain both "Victorian" and "Modernist" energies—the interplay between a sustained, immersive, imaginative investment and the interruptive, fragmented effect of distinct installments.

What Mary Poppins Knew: Theory of Mind, Children's Literature, History

Abstract: abstract:This essay investigates the phenomenon of \"embedded\" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state, as in, \"Mrs. Banks wished that Mary Poppins wouldn't know so very much more about the best people than she knew herself\"), asking if patterns of embedment manifest themselves differently in children's literature than they do in literature for \"grownups.\" Looking at books for three age groups (nine to twelve, three to seven, and one to two), Zunshine finds significant differences in their respective patterns of embedment, while also arguing that a critical inquiry into complex mental states is not just a cognitive but also a historicist project. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

Form, Science, and Narrative in the Anthropocene

Abstract: A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a constitutive interdependency between humanity and material realities such as the climate or the geological history of our planet. This article looks at the ways in which narrative may capture this human-nonhuman interrelation, which occupies the foreground of debates on the so-called Anthropocene. I argue that the formal dimension of scientific knowledge-as manifested by diagrams or metaphors used by scientists-is central to this narrative remediation. I explore two analogical strategies through which narrative may pursue a formal dialogue with science: clusters of metaphorical language and the global structuring of the plot. Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), for instance, builds on a visual representation of meteorological patterns in a storm (lifted from an actual scientific paper) to stage the narrator's mental illness. Two other contemporary works (Orfeo by Richard Powers and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki) integrate scientific models through the overall design of the plot. By offering close readings of these novels, I seek to expand work in the area of New Formalism and show how formal choices are crucial to bringing together the human-scale world and more-than-human phenomena.

Keeping Count: Direct Speech in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Abstract: ABSTRACT:In this paper, I employ large-scale data analysis to highlight trends in the use of direct speech across a corpus of 898 novels published in Britain between 1789 and 1901. The paper begins with a brief description of my quantitative method. Following this, it illustrates that an unexpected statistic—here the high number of speaking characters in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre—can shed new light on individual novels. After this example, the paper argues for the usefulness of combining computational methods with literary analysis when studying direct speech in the novel. The paper then presents several corpus-wide facts about direct speech, and offers some hypotheses about what these statistics reveal about the role of speech in nineteenth-century British novels. Finally, the paper proposes ways in which the current corpus and data can be improved and considers how those improvements can shed further light on the use of direct speech in Romantic and Victorian novels.

Theorizing the Television Episode

Abstract: abstract:Television storytelling is one of the most vibrant, dominant fictional modes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and yet its foundational structure, the episode, has been undertheorized. All television stories deploy the episode in some way, and its formal and fictional contours are both inescapable and distinct from existing narrative theories of other serial forms. This essay is an attempt to provide a narrative theory of the television episode as a form, one that accounts for plot-based episodic storytelling as well as episodes built around a thematic structure, and it outlines a common framework for all fictional episodic expression on television. To do this, the essay considers several key texts, including Mad Men, House, and Friends, and explores the episode in contrast to the theories of narrative parts and wholes provided by works like Barthes's "Structural Analysis." The essay also gestures towards a longer history of episodic storytelling in television through shows like I Love Lucy and Twilight Zone, and also notes more recent developments in streaming television storytelling, where the episode's diminishing formal weight is growing more palpable.

As We Speak: Concurrent Narration and Participation in the Serial Narratives "@I_Bombadil" and Skam

Abstract: Digital media have provided new avenues of distribution for serial fiction and created new narrative possibilities for the form, including the widespread use of what Margolin labels "concurrent narration" and Page terms "real-time narration." This form of serial publication, where a story is distributed in installments coterminously with the events being reported, is enabled by the Internet's possibilities for instantaneous transmission, and it appears in narratives on various platforms that rely on the web for content distribution. To discuss this temporal confluence of the narrated, narration, and publication, we analyze the use of concurrent narration in two digitally distributed serialized narratives, David Mitchell's Twitter story "@I_Bombadil" (2015), and the Norwegian webserial Skam (2015–17), both of which were originally transmitted piecemeal in near-concurrence with the narrated events. Furthermore, we analyze the participation surrounding the two stories. Serial fiction has always encouraged the active engagement of its audience, and this tendency becomes especially pronounced when stories are distributed via social media that allow for rapid exchanges between readers. The participatory practices that emerge in the wake of digitalization are often conceived as inherently democratic forms of engagement, but this predominantly positive conception may be questioned, since participation is a complex concept that covers a range of different practices. By analyzing the participation that surrounds "@I_Bombadil" and Skam we nuance the perspective on digitally enabled participatory culture and thus contribute to a better understanding of how new digital forms of distribution affect the modes of narrating and engaging in serialized narratives today. (Less)

The Poetics of Six-Word Stories

Abstract: abstract:Six-word stories present an intriguing case study to theorists of literary genres and narratologists alike. Despite the popularity of this peculiar narrative form—probably the latest newcomer to the club of narrative genres—and the fact that it has produced many captivating texts, there is almost no critical discussion of this fast-growing literary phenomenon. After explaining why six-word stories deserve the title of a narrative genre, I offer a brief comparative discussion of such stories alongside traditional short literary forms like aphorisms and proverbs. I then discuss seven important characteristics of six-word stories. The first three comprise the \"hard core\" of the poetics of the genre, the next two are very common among six-word stories but are not an essential part of its poetics, and the last two are related to the reception and production of the genre: (1) A represented chain of events (the narrative element); (2) The tip of the iceberg principle; (3) The punch-line structure; (4) Poetic, rhythmic structures; (5) The realism of the stories; (6) The \"contagiousness\" of the form; and (7) The strong connection of the genre to English, the language in which it was first introduced. I conclude by pointing out that while many six-word stories illustrate witty, artistic achievements, there is also the risk that practitioners of the form will mechanically produce dull texts.

Gossypoglossia: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Pragmatics of Dialogue

Abstract: ABSTRACT:Even the smallest conversational turns can index macro-contexts of social inequality, racialization, and capital; fictional narrative, coordinating the particular and the global, seems well positioned to represent these scalar dynamics. But how exactly does the textual medium of the novel link the particularities of voice with the politics of race? Scholarship on this question has often turned either to the representation of vernacular speech (e.g., dialect) or to free indirect discourse, the latter as a \"double-voiced\" mode that linguistically concretizes Du Bois's influential theory of black double consciousness. This essay draws an alternative approach from Du Bois's fictional practice, highlighting the affinities between his use of dialogue in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and recent work in linguistic anthropology. In the turn-of-the-century US South represented in Quest, the functions of conversation are intricately connected with the production and exchange of cotton—otherwise known as gossypium hirsutum, giving the essay a key term, gossypoglossia, for describing these connections between a racialized global economy and particularized forms of talk. To attend to those forms is to locate theoretical resources in the very thing that critics, often dismissing Du Bois's dialogue as unrealistic or discordant, have found least compelling about his fiction. For Du Bois, the essay argues, fictional dialogue is not only (nor primarily) a site for the realist representation of conversation, but also a speculative mode in which the unspoken metapragmatic contexts of the \"color-line\" can be rendered explicit, unfamiliar, and subject to contestation.

Contemporary Seriality: A Roundtable

Abstract: Sharon Marcus (SM): I’m Sharon Marcus—I’m a Professor of English at Columbia University: I’m a Victorianist, and I work on nineteenth-century French literature, so I’m well-acquainted with the history of seriality. I’m also the Dean of Humanities and Editor of publicbooks.org. I would like to thank Lauren Goodlad and Sean O’Sullivan and Eileen Gillooly and everyone at the Heyman Center for putting this on today. I am going to introduce our panelists, although they don’t really need an introduction. They say of great actors that you would be happy to listen to them read the phone book. I think we can say of our panelists that we’d be happy to hear them write a review of the phone book, write a novel based on the phone book, or produce the phone book as a radio podcast. [laughter] But rituals are important, so here we go: Lev Grossman is the author of five novels, including the #1 New York Times-bestselling Magicians trilogy, which is now an

The Question of James's Speech: Consensual Talk in The Ambassadors

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This article examines the high degree of parallelism and repetition that characterizes dialogue in Henry James's late fiction and considers both the function of such \"consensual talk\" in the context of James's novels and its implications for understandings of speech in the novel, more generally. Taking The Ambassadors (1903) as its primary case study, the article argues that dialogue's consensual structure is used to express a fantasy of reciprocity that is at once broadly attributable to the novel's speakers and to James himself, stung by the failure of his theatrical work and the lack of commercial uptake of The New York Edition. In particular, it draws on his 1905 lecture, \"The Question of Our Speech,\" in which James conveys his aspirations that \"conscious, imitative speech\" could serve a unifying function in the social realm. Yet closer analysis of The Ambassadors reveals the extent to which James's theoretical ideals are at once dramatized and ultimately discredited in his fictional work. In the process, the article models a rhetorical approach to interpreting character dialogue, which treats it as an expressive affordance of the author as well as the character. In this way, it frames novelistic speech as less an instance of mimesis than poiesis and Jamesian dialogue as just one example of the ways fictional conversations get \"made.\

Typography and Conversational Threat in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This essay examines how Samuel Richardson turned the technologies of print towards the acoustic to produce loud characters—both aurally and emotionally—in Clarissa. Specifically, it traces his techniques for representing the embodied features of argumentative conversation back to the performative genres of drama and music. Richardson's dual professional status as a printer and a novelist meant that he was familiar with the typographical conventions particular to various genres in print and, likewise, that he was invested in the graphic scaffolding of his own novels. As such, he used print as a creative resource, mining comedies and musical dynamics for models to notate interruptive pause, simultaneous speech, and changing vocal tone and cadence in the novel's heated arguments. He uses these techniques to craft an acoustic page with visual cues to help readers hear characters' words through their eyes, and thus to perceive the emotion motivating them. I argue that Richardson figures the twin specters of bodily violation and rape through the novel's threatening conversations and that his richest resources in doing so are notational techniques adapted from specifically embodied art forms. In delineating the architecture of dramatic and musical intonation that supports novelistic dialogue in Clarissa, this essay helps to revise critical narratives about the rise of the novel, emphasizing the residue of orality in this densely literary form and asserting the continuing presence of the spoken word and performative voice in the midst of a genre we tend to think of as having made characters private, quietly read, and interior.

Voice, Focalization, and Disembodiment in P. C. Jersild and C. F. Ramuz

Abstract: This essay deals with the possibility of using disembodied narrative voice and focalization in literary texts. I start with an overview of narratological approaches to the question, and I bring in ...

Late Victorian Novels, Bad Dialogue, and Talk

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of \"orality.\" Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to \"invisible\" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of aesthetic judgment that endure into the present. Through examining two late Victorian novels specifically panned for their attempts to include talk's embodied situatedness into dialogue—George Meredith's One of Our Conquerors (1891) and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901)—this essay motivates a prior literary historical moment (before dialogue's definitive separation from talk) to consider a continuing verbal bias in our own critical and creative practices. This essay speculates that an embarrassment about embodied procedures continues to underlie our sense of dialogue as a less sophisticated narratological category, and that \"best practices\" in creative writing problematically erase the body when mandating that dialogue must show interiority or further novelistic action. Ultimately, unlike \"orality,\" talk compels a confrontation with dialogue that brings attention to historical and present ways in which the notion of speech is inseparable from the power dynamics of embodied relation.