Showing papers in "Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies in 2009"

Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them

Abstract: One of the most interesting things about fictional nar ratives is that they do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it. Many narratives confront us with bizarre storyworlds which are governed by prin ciples that have very little to do with the real world around us. Even though many narrative texts teem with unnatural (i.e., physically or logically impossible) scenarios that take us to the limits of human cogni tion, narrative theory has not yet done justice to these cases of unnaturalness or the question of how readers can come to terms with them. In what follows, I define the term unnatural and outline a cognitive model that describes ways in which readers can make sense of unnatural scenarios. Second, I use these reading strategies to discuss examples of unnaturalness in postmodernist narratives.1 Arguing that ideas from cognitive narratology help illuminate

Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative in Comics

Abstract: One of Plato's enduring concerns was about the best mode of education. Unsurprisingly, he opts for phi losophy over poetry. In Book X of the Republic and several other dialogues, notably the Ion, Plato inveighs against mimetic poetry on grounds that include its on tological inferiority (qua imitation) and its pernicious effects on the development of the just person and the just state. To the contemporary mind, Plato may appear to be a crank or even an embarrassment. After all, the poetry he targets (Homer, for instance) is now considered to be among the greatest works of literature of all time. However, as Alexander Nehamas (1988) has persua sively argued, Plato's true concern is not with high lit erature or fine arts at all (since those concepts did not exist at his time), but with the ancient Greek equiva lent of contemporary mass-media narrative forms. At