Showing papers on "Narratology published in 2018"

Narratology beyond the Human

Abstract: This essay uses Lauren Groff’s 2011 short story “Above and Below” to explore aspects of a narratology beyond the human, considering how ideas developed by scholars of narrative bear on questions about the nature and scope of human-animal relationships in the larger biosphere. Bringing Groff’s text into dialogue with the concept of “self-narratives” as developed by Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen, anthropological research on the ontologies projected by the members of different cultures, and ideas from literary narratology, I discuss how the structure and narration of Groff’s story reveal a fault line between two competing ontologies in the culture of modernity, one parsimonious and the other prolific when it comes to allocating possibilities for selfhood across species lines. More generally, in addition to illuminating how a given self-narrative locates the human agent in a transspecies constellation of selves, a narratology beyond the human can assist with the construction of new, more sustainable individual and collective self-narratives that situate the self within wider webs of creatural life.

The cinematic mode in twentieth-century fiction a comparative approach

Abstract: This study deals with the influence of film form in fiction in terms of narrative discourse, focusing on issues of genre, narration, temporality, and the imitation of cinematic techniques. It provides a theoretical analysis of different methodologies (intermediality theory, semiotics, narratology, genre theory) which are useful to assess how a cinematic dimension has found a place in literary writing. This research, in particular, puts forth the idea of a 'para-cinematic narrator', a 'flattening of the narrative relief', and a 'para-cinematic narrative contract' as constitutive items of strongly cinematised fiction. These three theoretical items are subsumed in the concept of 'cinematic mode in fiction', which describes a distillation of characteristics of the film form on the written page. This research therefore represents a theoretical attempt to demonstrate how the cinematic component integrates the stylistic and generic traits of novels and short stories relating to different periods, styles and genres of the twentieth century. The proposed theoretical model is tested on a corpus of American, French, and, especially, Italian case studies. The remediation of film that emerges from these texts points to a complex interconnection between cinema and literature which still requires full acknowledgment in literary history.

Fictional MindsComing to Terms with the Unnatural

Abstract: In the analysis and interpretation of fictional minds, unnatural and cognitive narratology may seem mutually exclusive. They each highlight different aspects of what narrators and characters think and feel, and their explanatory grounds differ. An unnatural reading unearths the narrative features, such as literal mind reading, that cannot be reduced to real-world possibilities, whereas a cognitive approach may focus on what is analogous to real-world cognition, or it may explain how unusual fiction is made sense of in cognitive terms. This article offers a synthesis in which the contrast between the two is closely examined. Then the article makes a case for a dialectical approach in which readings move from one position to another in order to achieve a more rewarding and encompassing understanding of fictional minds in general and unnatural minds in particular. The argument is developed through a reading of Peter Verhelst’s The Man I Became and through a discussion of the case of mind reading.

Narrative and Interpretation on Twitter: Reading tweets by telling stories

Abstract: Existing research on communication on Twitter has largely ignored the question of how users make sense of the fragmentary tweets with which they are presented. Focusing on the use of Twitter for political reporting in post-revolutionary Egypt, this article argues that the production of mental stories provides readers with a mechanism for interpreting the meaning of individual tweets in terms of their relationships to other material. Drawing on contemporary narratology, it argues that Twitter exhibits key elements of narrativity, but that a creative reading process is nonetheless required to transform this incipient narrativity into coherent, sense-making mental narratives. This foregrounding of the reader’s creative role makes stories on Twitter highly fluid and dynamic. Through reference to classic critical theory, I propose that this nonetheless represents an evolution rather than a radical break from earlier forms of narrative reception, which in many cases demanded similarly creative reading practices.

Narrating success and failure: congressional debates on the ‘Iran nuclear deal’

Abstract: This article applies a method of narrative analysis to investigate the discursive contestation over the ‘Iran nuclear deal’ in the United States. Specifically, it explores the struggle in the US Congress between narratives constituting the deal as a US foreign policy success or failure. The article argues that foreign policy successes and failures are socially constructed through narratives and suggests how narrative analysis as a discourse analytical method can be employed to trace discursive contests about such constructions. Based on insights from literary studies and narratology, it shows that stories of failures and successes follow similar structures and include a number of key elements, including a particular setting; a negative/positive characterization of individual and collective decision-makers; and an emplotment of success or failure through the attribution of credit/blame and responsibility. The article foregrounds the importance of how stories are told as an explanation for the dominance or marginality of narratives in political discourse.

History and the Hebrew Bible: Culture, Narrative, and Memory

Abstract: This essay offers an introduction to select disciplinary developments in the study of history and in historical study of the Hebrew Bible, focusing first and foremost on cultural history. It highlights key works on culture, narrative, and memory, in order to establish a contemporary historical approach to biblical studies.

What is Public History

Abstract: Do you like to study history but wonder what you can do with a history degree? If so, the public history program at North Dakota State University may be for you. This innovative program is the first and only one of its kind in the Upper Midwest for undergraduates. It provides students with the opportunity to explore a variety of careers and prepares them for employment or graduate school in the expanding field of public history. Examples of new opportunities for public history majors in recent years include employment in historical societies, museums, archives, historic preservation, corporations, municipalities, labor and farm organizations, and state and federal government agencies.

Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media

Abstract: This open access book is a methodical treatise on narration in different types of media. A theoretical rather than a historical study, Transmedial Narration is relevant for an understanding of narr ...

Conviction Narrative Theory and Understanding Decision-Making in Economics and Finance

Abstract: This chapter describes the radically uncertain context faced by money managers and how they cope by developing conviction narratives. It then generalizes these findings to introduce a wider theory of decision-making under radical uncertainty, termed Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT). CNT differs from standard approaches to decision-making in economics and behavioural psychology that are limited to theories of efficient and inefficient information processing in contexts where data is available to calculate future probabilities. In radical uncertainty, we cannot know which bits of information are useful. CNT explains the human capacity to cope despite this situation: actors organize their experience through narratives and use the emotions attaching to them to feel the conviction to act. In effect, CNT operationalizes Keynes’ (1936) formulation of animal spirits as a human solution to radical uncertainty; and it provides more plausible and empirically substantiated microfoundations on which to build understanding of aggregate economic outcomes, the development of monocultures, and financial market instability.

Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London

Abstract: Threshold Modernism reveals how changing ideas about gender and race in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain shaped - and were shaped by - London and its literature. Chapters address key sites, especially department stores, women's clubs, and city streets, that coevolved with controversial types of modern women. Interweaving cultural history, narrative theory, close reading, and spatial analysis, Threshold Modernism considers canonical figures such as George Gissing, Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf alongside understudied British and colonial writers including Amy Levy, B. M. Malabari, A. B. C. Merriman-Labor, Duse Mohamed Ali, and Una Marson. Evans argues that these diverse authors employed the 'new public women' and their associated spaces to grapple with widespread cultural change and reflect on the struggle to describe new subjects, experiences, and ways of seeing in appropriately novel ways. For colonial writers of color, those women and spaces provided a means through which to claim their own places in imperial London.

Make data sing: The automation of storytelling:

Abstract: With slogans such as ‘Tell the stories hidden in your data’ (www.narrativescience.com) and ‘From data to clear, insightful content – Wordsmith automatically generates narratives on a massive scale that sound like a person crafted each one’ (www.automatedinsights.com), a series of companies currently market themselves on the ability to turn data into stories through Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques. The data interpretation and knowledge production process is here automated, while at the same time hailing narrativity as a fundamental human ability of meaning-making. Reading both the marketing rhetoric and the functionality of the automated narrative services through narrative theory allows for a contextualization of the rhetoric flourishing in Big Data discourse. Building upon case material obtained from companies such as Arria NLG, Automated Insights, Narrativa, Narrative Science, and Yseop, this article argues that what might be seen as a ‘re-turn’ of narrative as a form of knowledge productio...

Rethinking risk: a narrative approach

Abstract: Purpose The assessment and management of risk is central to contemporary mental health practice. The emergence of recovery has contributed to demands for more service user centered approaches to risk. This paper examines the potential of narrative as a framework for understanding risk and safety in mental health care. Design/methodology/approach Narrative theory is adopted to structure a debate examining the potential role of a narrative approach to risk assessment and inform future practice. Findings There is a danger that even within services, people with mental health problems are understood in terms of their riskiness perpetuating an image of service users as ‘dangerous others’. This is confounded by a disconnection with individual context in the risk assessment process. Narrative centralizes the persons’ subjective experience and provides a contemporaneous self-account of their identity. This situates risk within a context and creates possibility for greater understanding of coping, strengths and resilience. Originality/value There has been a call for new ways of working with risk in mental health which facilitate safety and recovery. There is limited examination of what this might actually look like. This paper presents narrative as an approach that may achieve these aims.

What Game Narrative Are We Talking About? An Ontological Mapping of the Foundational Canon of Interactive Narrative Forms

Abstract: There have been misunderstandings regarding “narrative” in relation to games, in part due to the lack of a shared understanding of “narrative” and related terms. Instead, many contrasting perspectives exist, and this state of affairs is an impediment for current and future research. To address this challenge, this article moves beyond contrasting definitions, and based on a meta-analysis of foundational publications in game studies and related fields, introduces a two-dimensional mapping along the dimensions of media specificity and user agency. Media specificity describes to what extent medium affects narrative, and user agency concerns how much impact a user has on a narrative. This mapping is a way to visualize different ontological positions on “narrative” in the context of game narrative and other interactive narrative forms. This instrument can represent diverse positions simultaneously, and enables comparison between different perspectives, based on their distance from each other and alignment with the axes. A number of insights from the mapping are discussed that demonstrate the potential for this process as a basis for an improved discourse on the topic.

The benefits of narratology in the analysis of multimodal legitimation: The case of New Democracy:

Abstract: Previous studies on legitimation, multimodality and political discourse by researchers, such as Van Leeuwen, Van Dijk and Mackay, have suggested different but supplementary methods of legitimation ...

Temporal Event Knowledge Acquisition via Identifying Narratives.

Abstract: Inspired by the double temporality characteristic of narrative texts, we propose a novel approach for acquiring rich temporal “before/after” event knowledge across sentences in narrative stories. The double temporality states that a narrative story often describes a sequence of events following the chronological order and therefore, the temporal order of events matches with their textual order. We explored narratology principles and built a weakly supervised approach that identifies 287k narrative paragraphs from three large corpora. We then extracted rich temporal event knowledge from these narrative paragraphs. Such event knowledge is shown useful to improve temporal relation classification and outperforms several recent neural network models on the narrative cloze task.

Queering narrative voice

Abstract: Narrative theory has paid less attention to queer possibilities than narrative itself warrants. This essay takes up the specific subject of narrative voice and asks how it might be ‘queered’ by con...

Narrative suspense in Arrian’s Indikē (29.9–31.9): the portraiture of Alexander and the exotic tradition intermingled

Abstract: BY UNDERTAKING to narrate the navigation of the Indian coastline by the Macedonian fleet, Arrian aspired to compose a work which, along with the Anabasis of Alexander, would serve as an integral part of his prosopography of Alexander. On the other hand, Arrian was also fully aware of the fact that, in writing the Indian account, he was also invited to follow a long tradition of exotic literature on the mirabilia of India. As a result, in the Indikē the reader is offered the opportunity to meet with passages that serve both the author’s need to amuse and his intention to focus on the characters of Alexander and Nearchus.Although modern scholarship has repeatedly noted the twofold nature of the work, little attention has been paid to if and how these two goals intermingle on a narrative level. The present study constitutes the first narratological analysis of Arrian’s Indikē and elaborates exactly on this question: How did Arrian manage to reach a compromise in his narrative between these two goals of the work, the amusement of the reader and the delineation of Alexander’s and Nearchus’ literary portraits? By drawing from recent outcomes of psychology, theory of literature, and narratology, I examine the narrative techniques through which Arrian exploits exotic stories about the Macedonian navy’s voyage in the Indian Sea in his effort not only to entertain his readers but also to shape a favorable image for the protagonists. The main point of argument of this essay is that the exotic and amusing elements of the Indikē should not be seen cut off from the literary representation of Alexander’s and Nearchus’ intellectual and moral qualities but as a part of this representation. The basic narrative technique, through which Arrian combines elements of exotic content and characterization, is the creation of suspense.

New stories of intellectual disabilities : a narrative approach

Abstract: In this chapter, the authors begins by outlining some of the key ideas and practices of narrative therapy and then consider what opportunities narrative therapy may offer in therapeutic work with adults with intellectual disabilities. They provide a brief overview of the key theoretical ideas and practices in narrative therapy. Narrative therapy was initially developed by Michael White and David Epston and has evolved from a synthesis of diverse influences. The ideas of various social sciences theorists and poststructuralist philosophers, in particular Foucault, have been instrumental in the development of narrative theory. Narrative therapy's challenge of dominant discourses and taken-for-granted realities makes it an appealing approach for therapeutic work with people who collectively have been marginalized and stigmatized like few others. The authors conclude by addressing some questions that the reader might have about using this approach and offer some personal reflections on the effects of incorporating narrative therapy into our own work.

The Myth of ‘Universal’ Narrative Models

Abstract: In narrative game design and related practices, the role and function of narrative models is described as predominantly pragmatic. However, we see that many interactive digital narratives (IDN) including narrative video games derive their story structures from the same formulas connected to Joseph Campbell and Aristotle, adhering to the trajectory of the Hero’s Journey and the dramatic arc. We engage with scholarly criticism exposing the supposed ubiquity of these structures and agree that the question of narrative models in interactive digital media requires both further exploration and intervention. We follow up on some proposed solutions by looking at non-Western narrative traditions to expand the corpus of narrative structures available to game designers and other narrative developers. With this paper we raise awareness of alternative structures and simultaneously introduce implementable narrative structures with the aim to expand the design space and range of analytical models for IDN.

Sameness versus Difference in Narratology : Two Approaches to Narrative Fiction

Abstract: In this article we examine the critical proposition that common versions of narratology do not provide an accurate description of narrative fiction and analyze why this critique has mostly been dis

Styles of narrative selection in crafting life stories

Abstract: Life stories have been the focus of narrative theory and research in psychology for decades. Despite the wealth of knowledge accumulated on this narrative type, a central aspect has remained disreg...

Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction

Abstract: This collection of essays follows upon the success of a previous special issue of English Studies focused on ecocriticism, edited by Astrid Bracke and Marguerite Corporaal and published in November...

Narration et jeu vidéo. Pour une exploration des univers fictionnels

Abstract: This dissertation is devoted to the study of the various terms through which the video game as a medium can build a narrative. First of all, it is quite relevant to note that traditional narratologic tools are not suitable to describe every aspect of video game narrativity. Indeed, contrary to what some researchers say, this medium does not necessarily limits itself to imitating literature and cinema in order to build a narrative (which would therefore consist merely of texts and cutscenes): it is also able to convey narrative information through purely ludic elements (a setting can reveal the past of a character, the interface can or cannot be integrated into the fiction etc.). Moreover, these "narrativisation elements" (as named by Sebastien Genvo ) make sense only when they are activated i.e. acknowledged by the video game player: the gamer’s attitude is therefore a variable which is to be taken account in the study of video game narrative. However, if the video game narrative only exists in the form of potentiality possibly updatable by the player, how could we define precisely a corpus that would set apart narrative games from those radically devoid of narrative? With what tangible elements could we study an object that varies according to the receiver who activates it? The reflexion of this work shows that these methodological difficulties cannot be solved thanks to the traditional narratology tools – unless distorting them until they become inoperative. The thesis sustained here consists of calling into question the validity of the notion of narrative (as a linear sequence of events) because this latter is neither able to render all the "narrativisation elements" nor the player’s influence on the narration. The notion of fiction world then stands in for the notion of narrative. This concept designates a particular form of narration, displayed on several dimensions and in which the linear narrative is one aspect among others. More precisely, the universe is divided into three key notions (borrowed from Etienne Armand Amato ): the cosmos, the diegesis and the ludiegesis. In order to test the effectiveness of this new conception of the narrative and to establish a first approach of the field through the new vision that it allows, this dissertation suggests to take an inventory and describe the main "narrativisation elements" that can occur in the construction of a diegesis. Forteen of these can be counted: the cutscenes, the texts, the avatar, the characters, the intertextual references, the paratext, the interface, the camera, the objects, the environment, the objectives, the sounds, the gameplay and the variations introduced by the player (the manipulation of the rules and the choices). The conception of the narration as a universe (i.e an arrangement of elements that the player has to organize into a hierarchy, and not a succession of events) permits to consider the possibility to "load" with narrative these different game levels and the consequences of this investment on the story which is vehicled this way. Moreover, this reformulation favors the acknowledgement of the player in the elaboration of the narrative, since it authorizes a new conception of the story, which no longer appears like a "whole to receive", but like an "area to explore".

Narrative Theory for Complexity Scientists

Abstract: The aim of this chapter is to outline some of the key ideas and concepts in narrative theory, in order to make the field more accessible to those who have only a passing acquaintance with it (complexity scientists in particular). The chapter first gives an account of what narrative is, and then goes on to draw out some of the implications of that account for the way we think and understand in narrative terms. My discussion of these implications draws attention, as opportunity arises, to respects in which the form of narrative bears upon our ability to understand and communicate the way complex systems behave. The chapter does not survey the many facets of the problematic relation between narrative sensemaking and complex systems (that is really the work of the book as a whole), but it does provide a reasonably solid theoretical underpinning for the narrative problems, questions and possibilities taken up in subsequent chapters.

You Too: The Narratology of Apostrophe and Second-Person Narrative in Virgil's Georgics

Abstract: Narratological approaches to classical literature have long since extended beyond the limits of the conventionally narrative genres of epic, historiography, and the novel to encompass less obvious genres such as lyric, elegy, and tragedy.2 Didactic poetry, however, has received relatively little attention. There has been some work on “narrative technique” in the more obviously “narrative” sections, such as the Athenian plague in de Rerum Natura (DRN) 6 or the “Aristaeus” in Georgics 4, but these episodes, though integral to the didactic project of their respective poems, are nevertheless the least characteristic of didactic’s distinctive qualities.3 The excellent studies by Don Fowler (2000), Monica Gale (2004), and Simon