Showing papers on "Narratology published in 2012"

A narrative theory of games

Abstract: This paper presents a narrative theory of games, building on standard narratology, as a solution to the conundrum that has haunted computer game studies from the start: How to approach software that combines games and stories?

At the membranes of care: stories in narrative medicine.

Abstract: Recognizing clinical medicine as a narrative undertaking fortified by learnable skills in understanding stories has helped doctors and teachers to face otherwise vexing problems in medical practice and education in the areas of professionalism, medical interviewing, reflective practice, patient-centered care, and self-awareness. The emerging practices of narrative medicine give clinicians fresh methods with which to make contact with patients and to come to understand their points of view. This essay provides a brief review of narrative theory regarding the structure of stories, suggesting that clinical texts contain and can reveal information in excess of their plots. Through close reading of the form and content of two clinical texts-an excerpt from a medical chart and a portion of an audiotaped interview with a medical student-and a reflection on a short section of a modernist novel, the author suggests ways to expand conventional medical routines of recognizing the meanings of patients' situations. The contributions of close reading and reflective writing to clinical practice may occur by increasing the capacities to perceive and then to represent the perceived, thereby making available to a writer that which otherwise might remain out of awareness. A clinical case is given to exemplify the consequences in practice of adopting the methods of narrative medicine. A metaphor of the activated cellular membrane is proposed as a figure for the effective clinician/patient contact.

Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures

Abstract: A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields--including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology--El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.

The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative

Abstract: In this volume Guillemette Bolens examines the ways in which artists, authors, and readers draw on skills, sensorimotor capacities, and embodied knowledge when creating and experiencing artistic and literary works. In so doing, Bolens offers a new literary perspective on gesture studies and the role of embodied cognition in narrative. At the cutting edge of interdisciplinary inquiries into gesture, style, narratology, cognition, and literature, this work brings together academic expertise in literary studies with a consideration of neuroscientific and cognitive findings. Bolens studies the relevance of kinesic intelligence - our ability to understand the meaning of body movements, postures, gestures, and facial expressions - to the interpretation of literature. Through her discussions of works by John Milton, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and major medieval authors, Bolens shows how our experience of creative works draws on forms of cognition that are grounded in our corporeality. This book represents a crucial contribution from a literary scholar to the exciting new field of embodied cognition. With a foreword by well-known neuroscientist Alain Berthoz, "The Style of Gestures" convincingly makes the case that embodied cognition is essential to the reception, understanding, and enjoyment of art and literature.

Narrative inquiry: embracing the possibilities

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to promote narrative inquiry as a legitimate and rich research approach for academics undertaking postgraduate studies in higher education learning and teaching.Design/methodology/approach – This paper is framed within a personal narrative – one that draws upon the author's personal experience as an academic developer. It draws heavily on narrative theory to support its claims.Findings – It is argued that when narrative inquiry is presented as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, other research approaches, uptake amongst diverse groups of academics is strong. Furthermore, it is suggested that when accompanied by personal engagement with narrative inquiry and presented within a theoretical framework that honours its history, its robust literature and highlights its fundamental purpose and unique qualities, the possibilities offered by narrative are more likely to be understood and embraced.Research limitations/implications – This paper is based upon the exp...

Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories

Abstract: This book examines the intersection of gender and violence in popular culture. Drawing on the latest thinking in critical international relations, media and cultural studies and gender studies, it focuses in particular on a number of popular TV shows including Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Generation Kill, The Corner and The West Wing. The book makes a unique theoretical contribution to the ‘narrative turn’ in International Relations by illustrating the ways in which popular culture and global politics are intertwined and how we make sense of our worlds through these two frames. Methodologically, the book enhances discourse-theoretical analysis in IR through its incorporation of methods from narratology and film studies. The book proposes an aesthetic ethicopolitical approach to global politics which challenges us to interrogate how it becomes possible that we think what we think, it challenges the truths that we hold to be self-evident and that which we take to be common sense. It demands that we think carefully, critically, uncomfortably, about our world(s) – even when we’re ‘only’ watching television.

Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory

Abstract: Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Cybertext Theory Revisited Chapter 3: Cybertextuality and Transtextuality Chapter 4: The Textual Whole Chapter 5: Modes, Genres, Text Types and the Enigma of the Ergodic Chapter 6: Towards Cybertextual Narratology: The Amalgam of Narratologies Chapter 7: Interval 1: Towards an Expanded Narratology Chapter 8: Tense Chapter 9: Mood Chapter 10: Voice Chapter 11: Interval 2: Ergodic and Narrative Discourses Chapter 12: Ludology and the Exhaustion of Narratology Chapter 13: Game Ecology and the Classic Game Model Chapter 14: Game Ontology Chapter 15: The Gaming Situation Chapter 16: Game Time Chapter 17: Interval 3: Games as Configurative Practices: Models and Metaphors Chapter 18: Transmedial Modes and Ecologies Chapter 19: Ergodic Modes and Play Chapter 20: Textual Instruments and Instrumental Texts Bibliography Index.

Presence in the reading of literary narrative : A case for motor enactment

Abstract: Drawing on research in narrative theory and literary aesthetics, text and discourseprocessing, phenomenology and the experimental cognitive sciences,this paper outlines an embodied theory of presen ...

"How do I apply narrative theory?": Socio-narrative theory in translation studies

Abstract: Since the publication of Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (Baker 2006), there has been a growing interest in applying socio-narrative theory to Translation Studies, with Baker’s ideas extended and applied to several different areas of inquiry. This article gives a brief overview of these projects, and discusses in more depth the example of my own application and development of narrative theory. This includes a revised typology of narratives, the combination of narratological and sociological approaches, an intratextual model of analysis, and a new emphasis on the importance of narrators and temporary narrators in the (re)configuration of narratives. The article ends with a brief discussion on further topics within Translation and Interpreting Studies to which narrative theory might be applied.

Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology

Abstract: In this article, we focus on ontological metalepses that involve represented transgressions of world boundaries as one manifestation of the unnatural. We first discriminate between ascending, descending, and horizontal metaleptic jumps a three types of unnatural metalepses, or, more specifically, metalepses physically or logically impossible (Alber 80) and, in a second step, try to determine their potential functions. We also propose a new cognitive model that modifies Gerard Genette's structuralist model to conceptualize ontological metaleptic jumps as (1) vertical interactions either between the actual world and a storyworld or between nested storyworlds, or as (2) horizontal transmigrations between storyworlds.2 We argue that our postclassical method offers a more effective way of analyzing metalepsis because it allows us to describe the nature of ontological metalepsis more accurately and also because it embraces interpretation. We place this article on the overlap between unnatural narratology and transmedial narratology insofar as we analyze ontological metalepsis, an unnatural phenomenon, in both print and Storyspace hypertext fiction.

The narrative construction of identities in critical education

Abstract: List of tables Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: ON THE THEORY OF IDENTITIES Introducing Identities Defining Identity PART II: IDENTITIES IN CONVERSATIONAL NARRATIVES Narrative Theory, Data, and Methodology of the Study Analyzing Conversational Narratives PART III: IDENTITIES IN CONVERSATIONAL NARRATIVES: A MODEL FOR THEIR EXPLOITATION IN LANGUAGE TEACHING Narratives and Language Teaching Narratives and Critical Literacy Exploring the Narrative Construction of Identities in Class Conclusion Endnotes References Index

How Natural Is "Unnatural Narratology"; or, What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology?

Abstract: When I used the term natural in towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996), I tried to emphasize distinctly that this was a use of the term that was not to be contrasted with an opposite, the unnatural, dissociating myself from the moralistic, phallogocentric, heterosexual and generally conservative ideologies of the natural and their rejection, if not demonization, of the (unnatural, perverse) Other. To the extent that I needed to resort to dichotomy, I therefore employed the term non-natural as a, it seemed to me, less loaded contrary. Since Brian Richardson’s study Unnatural voices: extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006), however, the term unnatural has seen a landslide of popularity among younger narratologists, especially the coauthors of “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models” (Alber et al.), and has even been integrated into the Literary encyclopedia (Alber, “Unnatural Narratives”). Naturally, if one may phrase it like this, Alber et al. likewise stress that they do not take a moralistic, conservative stance, and that their “use of the term ‘unnatural’ is similar to the use of the term ‘queer’ in queer studies” (Alber et al., “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology,” 132, fn 5).

Narrating a ‘new Europe’: From ‘bitter past’ to self-righteousness?

Abstract: The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply about a glorious and heroi...

Discursive Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice

Abstract: 1. Discursive therapy: Why language, and how we use it in therapeutic dialogues, matters 2. Talking to listen: its pre-history, invention and future in the field of psychotherapy 3. Positioning Theory, narratology and pronoun analysis as discursive therapies 4. Therapeutic Communication from a Constructionist Standpoint 5. Ontological social constructionism in the context of a social ecology: The importance of our living bodies 6. Narrative Therapy: Challenges and communities of practice 7. Collaborative therapy: Performing reflective and dialogic relationships 8. Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Listening in the present with an ear toward the future 9. From Wittgenstein, complexity, and narrative emergence: Discourse and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy 10. Activity and performance (and their discourses) in Social Therapeutic Method 11. Developing a 'Just Therapy': Context and the Ascription of Meaning 12. Maori expressions of healing in Just Therapy 13. Systematic narrative review of discursive therapies research: Considering the value of circumstantial evidence 14. Problematising social context in evidence-based therapy evaluation practice/governance 15. The body, trauma, and narrative approaches to healing 16. Narrative, discourse, psychotherapy - neuroscience? 17. Conversation and its therapeutic possibilities

Neuroscience, Self-Understanding, and Narrative Truth

Abstract: Recent evidence from the neurosciences and cognitive sciences provides some support for a narrative theory of self-understanding. However, it also suggests that narrative self-understanding is unlikely to be accurate, and challenges its claims to truth. This article examines a range of this empirical evidence, explaining how it supports a narrative theory of self-understanding while raising questions of these narrative's accuracy and veridicality. I argue that this evidence does not provide sufficient reason to dismiss the possibility of truth in narrative self-understanding. Challenges to the possibility of attaining true, accurate self-knowledge through a self-narrative have previously been made on the basis of the epistemological features of narrative. I show how the empirical evidence is consistent with the epistemological concerns, and provide three ways to defend the notion of narrative truth. I also aim to show that neuroethical discussions of self-understanding would benefit from further engagemen...

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

Abstract: 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.

Narratives of criminal action and forensic psychology

Abstract: Purpose. In commenting on Youngs and Canter’s (2012a) study, Ward (2012) raises concerns about offenders’ personal narratives and their link to self-concepts and identity. His comments relate to explorations of personal life stories rather than the narratives of actual crimes that are the focus of Youngs and Canter’s (2012a) study. The elaboration of this different focus helps to allay many of Ward’s (2012) concerns and reveals further possibilities for developing the narrative approach within forensic psychology. Methods. The focus on offenders’ accounts of a particular crime allows the development of a standard pro forma, the Narrative Role Questionnaire (NRQ), which deals with the roles a person thinks they played when committing a crime. These roles act as a summary of the criminal’s offence narrative. Multivariate analysis of the NRQ clarifies the specific narrative themes explored by Youngs and Canter (2012a). Results. The examination of the components of the NRQ indicates that offence narratives encapsulate many psychological processes including thinking styles, selfconcepts, and affective components. This allows the four narrative themes identified by Youngs and Canter to provide the basis for rich hypotheses about the interaction between the dynamics of personal stories and identity. The four narratives of criminal action also offer a foundation for understanding the particular, detailed styles of offending action and the immediate, direct processes that act to instigate and shape these. Conclusion. These developments in our understanding of offence narratives generate fruitful research questions that bridge the concerns of investigative and correctional applications of narrative theory. Responding to Ward (2012) Ward’s (2012) commentary on Youngs and Canter’s (2012a) exploration of the forms of personal narrative revealed in interviews with offenders provides a valuable elaboration of the utility of the narrative approach. Furthermore, by identifying areas for further clarification, he shows the fruitfulness of this perspective and the rich research opportunities it provides as well as many practical applications. By opening up the background to the consideration of narratives tracing this back to Plutarch, he shows

Narrative and Rhetoric in Odysseus' Tales to the Phaeacians

Abstract: As Odysseus cautiously prepares to enter the straits plagued by Charyb- dis and Scylla, he encourages his crew by referring to his earlier success against the Cyclops (Od 12208-12) This article argues that the Odyssey constructs the Scylla adventure as a tale of heroic failure in contrast with the Cyclops episode Special attention is paid to narrative paradigms that underlie the Scylla episode and emphasize Odysseus' inability to defeat the monster I further show that the Cyclops/Scylla contrast serves both as an argument presented to Odysseus' internal Phaeacian audience and an interpretive key for the external audience in tHe last twenty years, the scholarship on the wanderings of Odysseus—arguably the most famous and beloved section of the Odyssey —has undergone a remarkable shift Ever since antiquity, an important exegetic tradition, ranging from Heraclitus the Allegorist to Charles Segal, has analyzed the apologoi as a moral or psychological journey, a return to humanity metaphorically shaped as an experience of death and rebirth 1 By contrast, recent studies implicitly or explicitly influenced by theoretical developments in narratology, pragmatics, and performativity have highlighted the fact that the apologoi are a speech act uttered by the secondary narrator Odysseus to an audience of Phaeacians on whom he depends to escort him home It is now well established that the apologoi stylistically differ from the main narrative (Goldhill 1991; de Jong 1992; 2001; Beck 2005) and that their emphasis on hospitality

Conjuring Freedom: Reconstructions and Revisions of Neo-Slave Narratives

Abstract: Author(s): Montgomery, Christine Lupo | Advisor(s): Gillman, Susan K | Abstract: My dissertation argues for a revisionist periodization of neo-slave literature as well as a reorientation away from a US-based literary history that has been dominated by the mode of realism and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography, history, and aesthetics of the Caribbean. The canon of slave narratives was first dominated by the assumption both of narrative as the major and sometimes only genre of slave writing and of a linear temporality emplotting the journey from slavery to an attenuated freedom. In contrast, most twentieth-century neo-slave narratives rethink the genre from the twin standpoints of temporality and narratology: how both the "neo" and "narrative" descriptors have produced an entrenched and unnecessarily restrictive view of this evolving archive. Chapter One places Arna Bontemps' Black Thunder (1936) at the headwaters of a new transnational neo-slave canon. In Bontemps' complex depictions of revolt and gender and in his construction of a past and predictive temporalities, he revises the paradigm of freedom both ontologically and corporeally. Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) and Assata Shakur's Assata (1985) comprise Chapter Two, highlighting how the enslaved and imprisoned black woman's body becomes a cultural text on which we read symbolic, discursive, and narratological traces derived from slavery. Chapter 3 argues comparatively that two poetic works, the well-known Aime Cesaire's Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land (1943) and Ed Roberson's less familiar Aerialist Narratives (1994), revisit the complexities of slave experience by focusing on metaphorical transformations of the slave body. In the final chapter, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1992) and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972) are paired in their differing attempt to transcend W.E.B. Du Bois' theory of "second slavery," as each author underscores how multiple slavery-derived pasts travel and collide in the present. In comparing these diverse grouping of texts via their neo-slave topoi, I demonstrate how this emerging canon provides a space for new thinking on comparative slaveries and comparative freedoms to emerge.

The Garden, the Serpent, and Eve: An Ecofeminist Narrative Analysis of Garden of Eden Imagery in Fashion Magazine Advertising

Abstract: Garden of Eden imagery is ubiquitous in contemporary print advertising in North America, especially in advertisements directed at women. Three telling characteristics emerge in characterizations of Eve in these advertising reconstructions. In the first place, Eve is consistently hypersexualized and over-eroticized. Secondly, such Garden of Eden images often conflate the Eve figure with that of the Serpent. Thirdly, the highly eroticized Eve-Serpent figures also commonly suffer further conflation with the Garden of Eden itself. Like Eve, nature becomes eroticized. In the Eve-Serpent-Eden conflation, woman becomes nature, nature becomes woman, and both perform a single narrative plot function, in tandem with the Serpent. The erotic and tempting Eve-Serpent-Eden character is both protagonist and antagonist, seducer and seduced. In this dissertation, I engage in an ecofeminist narratological analysis of the Genesis/Fall myth, as it is retold in contemporary fashion magazine advertisements. My analysis examines how reconstructions of this myth in advertisements construct the reader, the narrator, and the primary characters of the story (Eve, Adam, the Serpent, and Eden). I then further explore the ways in which these characterizations inform our perceptions of woman, nature, and environmentalism. Using a narratological methodology, and through a poststructuralist ecofeminist lens, I examine which plot and character elements have been kept, which have been discarded, and how certain erasures impact the narrative characterizations of the story. In addition to what is being told, I further analyze how and where it is told. How is the basic plot being storied in these reconstructions, and what are the effects of this version on the archetypal characterizations of Eve and the Garden of Eden? What are the cultural and literary contexts of the reconstructed narrative and the characters within it? How do these contexts inform how we read the characters within the story? Finally, I examine the cultural effects of these narrative reconstructions, exploring their influence on our gendered relationships with each other and with the natural world around us.

What meets the eye. Cognitive narratology for audio description

Abstract: Cross-modal (intersemiotic) translation is the general task of audio description but not the specific problem faced by audio describers of narrative texts. Their specific task for this textual subgenre is to select those discourse elements which produce narrative force (narrativity), and thus to attain a degree of narrative equivalence between source film and audio described film. This task is potentially difficult for two reasons: because narrative force is not just the realized action on screen: it is the receiver's state of mind, induced by the assumably realized events and by the discursively suggested hypothetical events; and because the suggestive, ‘intentional’ discourse triggers can be small. The following problem-solving procedure is proposed: equipped with a cogent definition of narrative force, audio describers can learn to recognize their narrative states of mind and become aware of the (possibly small) discursive triggers that generate those mental states. The second part of this paper argues...

Fictional Consciousnesses: A Reader's Manual

Abstract: Introduction In recent years, a surge of interest in what David Herman has called the "nexus of narrative and mind" has swept through narratology and its related disciplines (Basic Elements of Narrative 137-60). Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine have published two important monographs (respectively Fictional Minds and Why We Read Fiction), which Herman himself lists under the heading of "Issues of Consciousness Representation" in the entry "Cognitive Narratology" for the de Gruyter Handbook of Narratology. On a broad understanding of the word "consciousness," Herman's label is perfectly fitting. However, if we run a quick search for the word "representation" in Palmer's and Zunshine's books, we find out that it is almost never used in tandem with "consciousness." What Palmer and Zunshine focus on is the reader's attribution of mental states to the characters; they do not seem to devote special attention to consciousness proper. To clarify, l would like to introduce David Chalmers's distinction between "two concepts of mind." One may want to explore the mind's role in influencing behavior, and admit the existence of mental states only in so much as they can cause people's actions. Alternatively, one may focus on the subjective quality of our experience. One who takes the former approach is a devotee of functionalism, and his or her object of study is what Chalmers calls "the psychological mind." The latter is interested in "the conscious mind" or, simply put, in consciousness or subjective experience (I will use these terms interchangeably). My feeling is that both Palmer and Zunshine devote most of their books to the psychological mind (Palmer, in Fictional Minds 87-91, for instance, openly declares his allegiance to functionalism), leaving the issue of fictional consciousnesses unsolved. In John Searle's words, consciousness is "an inner, first-person, qualitative phenomenon"; it "refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become 'unconscious'" (5). Philosophers of mind love to talk about zombies--beings identical to us from a functionalist viewpoint, but which (unlike us) have no subjective experience. Just as functionalism has led to important scientific discoveries, defining fictional characters in functionalist terms has yielded deep insights, well exemplified by Palmer's and Zunshine's books. And yet, it is important to remind ourselves that readers do not just attribute mental states to fictional characters--they attribute to them mental states with a qualitative aspect. In short, they attribute to them a consciousness. This is the angle from which I will approach fictional characters in this article. Although I will not address the issue of focalization directly, I intend my article to have a bearing on the widespread belief that, in internal focalization, readers experience the fictional world through the consciousness of a character. I will argue that we should not view characters' consciousnesses as "things in the text." Readers can enact a fictional consciousness, they can perform it on the basis of textual cues--but this phenomenon, which I will call consciousness-enactment, cannot be simply identified with internal focalization. Not all internally localized texts induce the reader to enact the character's consciousness. What does it mean that we should not view characters' consciousnesses as "things in the text"? It means that a consciousness (be it fictional or not) cannot be represented--and this is my chief complaint against Herman's section heading ("Issues of Consciousness Representation"). Drawing on the work of philosophers of the "enactivist" stripe such as Kevin O'Regan, Alva Noe, and (in particular) Daniel D. Hutto, I would like to show that consciousness and subjective experience resist capture in representationalist terms. This will be my task in section I. …

On the Experientiality of Stories: A Follow-up on David Herman's "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance"

Abstract: Reading a narrative text is or provides an experience. In this article, I attempt to reconcile this common claim about reading with the intentionalist model of narrative David Herman has presented in his “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance” (2008). I do so by developing two lines of argument. First, taking my cue from Daniel D. Hutto’s philosophy of mind, I argue that two organisms can participate in a joint attention scene only if they are capable of sharing an experience. Thus, if we endorse Herman’s view that, through narrative texts, authors draw readers’ attention to some features of a storyworld, we must also account for how authors and readers can share an experience. I deal with this problem by tracing a (primarily heuristic) distinction between basic, embodied experience and linguistic, conceptual experience. At the level of basic experiential responding, I draw on psycholinguistic research to argue that both the production and the reception of narrative texts are grounded in embodied simulations. At the linguistically mediated level, I apply Dennett’s conception of consciousness as a “Joycean machine” to the experiences provided by narratives, adding that these experiences can be shared by authors and readers because they are narratively constructed. Second, I address the question of interpretation, which I distinguish from both the understanding of linguistic meaning and the reconstruction of the storyworld: interpretation is concerned with the “aboutness” of a work, and touches on what Stein Haughom Olsen (1987) has called the “human interest” questions. It is because of its openness to human experience that interpretation cannot be fully subsumed under the intentionalist model of our engagement with stories. At this level, readers are not required to comply with the author’s instructions: they are free to relate the experience they have undergone while reading a story to their own past experiences, and draw their conclusions as to what the story is “about.” This is why the experientiality of stories — i.e. the experiential “feel” they create — can be said to bridge the gap between Herman’s intentionalist model and interpretation.

Medieval Autographies: The "I" of the Text

Abstract: In "Medieval Autographies," A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the roles and functions of the I as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it "autography. He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in and commentaries on third-person narratives, and descendants of the "dit, " a genre of French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, and a concern with writing and textuality. Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, "Winner and Waster," the book examines instances of the" dit" as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer s "Wife of Bath s Prologue" as a textual performance, and devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve s "Regement of Princes" prologue, his "Complaint" and "Dialogue," and the witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham s legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of the concept of autography, including discussion of the intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in "Troilus and Criseyde "and Capgrave s "Life of Saint Katherine." "A deeply challenging and engaging book, "Medieval Autographies: The I of the Text "should be required reading in every graduate course in medieval English literature. In wonderfully nuanced close readings of various late medieval texts, A. C. Spearing extends and further theorizes his earlier groundbreaking work in "Textual Subjectivity." His proposal of autography as a new way of conceptualizing medieval first-person writing should have profound bearing on how future scholars conceptualize, designate, and discuss character, intent, and voice. Peter W. Travis, Henry Winkley Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Language and Literature, Dartmouth College "A.C. Spearing dares us to think without anachronistic notions, and teaches us, by impressive example, how to become better readers of medieval French and English poetry." Ad Putter, University of Bristol "Professor Spearing proposes in this new study a nuanced and persuasive theoretical framework for interpreting late medieval first-person narratives without anachronistic dependency on autobiography and modern preoccupations with narrative coherency. Drawing on postmodern theory and French scholarship on the "dit," "Medieval Autographies" promises to spark conversation that extends beyond the Medieval English circle to include French medievalists who will find a worthy cross-disciplinary discussion initiated and literary theorists who will discover a sorely understudied corpus whose relevance is made manifest." Deborah McGrady, University of Virginia"