Everyday knowledge in understanding fictional characters and their worlds

Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction

Abstract: Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-thanhuman modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of mutant narratives. Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of embodied estrangement. Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-thanhuman aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.

Mimetic and synthetic views of characters: How readers process “people” in fiction

Abstract: This article examines recent theories of fictional characters, and raises the issue of how far characters can be understood with reference to human intersubjectivity. On the one hand, empirical res...

Aspects of the Novel

Abstract: ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL is a unique attempt to examine the novel afresh, rejecting the traditional methods of classification by chronology or subject-matter. Forster pares down the novel to its essential elements as he sees them: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm. He illustrates each aspect with examples from their greatest exponents, not hesitating as he does so to pass controversial judgement on the works of, among others, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Henry James. Full of Forster's renowned wit and perceptiveness, ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL offers a rare insight into the art of fiction from one of our greatest novelists. 'His is a book to encourage dreaming.' Virginia Woolf

Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory

Abstract: From the Publisher: In this important contribution to narrative theory, Marie-Laure Ryan applies insights from artificial intelligence and the theory of possible worlds to the study of narrative and fiction. For Ryan, the theory of possible worlds provides a more nuanced way of discussing the commonplace notion of a fictional "world," while artificial intelligence contributes to narratology and the theory of fiction directly via its researches into the cognitive processes of texts and automatic story generation. Although Ryan applies exotic theories to the study of narrative and fiction, her book maintains a solid basis in literary theory and makes the formal models developed by AI researchers accessible to the student of literature. The first part of the book seeks a more sophisticated application of the theory of possible worlds to the definition of fictionality. While fiction is a mode of travel into textual space, narrative is a journey within the confines of this space. The second part introduces the idea of a semantic domain consisting of a plurality of alternate possible worlds. This notion is developed into a theory of narrative conflict, which leads to an account of the forward movement of plot. By combining the philosophical back ground of possible world theory with models inspired by AI, the book fulfills a pressing need in narratology for new paradigms and an interdisciplinary perspective.

A dictionary of narratology

Abstract: "A Dictionary of Narratology is a remarkable feat. It is a specialized dictionary documenting important research, compiled by a scholar who has been centrally involved in the field and who writes with clarity, precision, and a sense of humor."--Substance