Narratology

About: Narratology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2833 publications have been published within this topic receiving 50998 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theory.

Philosophical transgression and self cultivation in the Purātan Janamsākhī: Bhāī Vīr Singh and modern Sikh reading practices

Abstract: This paper examines narratological changes made in Bhāī Vīr Singh's Purātan Janamsākhī (1926). These changes encode an alternate narrative logic for producing images of a past that entrenches ‘reli...

Stories, theories and things: Whatever happened to narratology?

Abstract: It got swallowed into story seems the obvious answer; it slid off the slippery methods of a million structures and became the story of its own functioning-like mathematics, which has never claimed to speak of anything but itself, or even to speak at all. But was it a good story? Did narratology ever have that air of a neodivine activity in which to formulate is to function, and to function is to self-verify? Linguistics tried to be a new mathematical discourse but on language, and language, like the physical universe, only more so because human, is inexact: there are always differences and disturbances, escape-hatches which mean that, however minute the particles or units observed, the system has to adjust, to cheat ever so slightly, in order to present a good theory, to tell a coherent story. Reality is a scandal; it never quite fits. Discourse, texts of all kinds, purport to represent the real, but what does this mean? Is the representation in excess of the real (Aristotle), or less than the real (Plato), or does it merely reorganise the real? These are ancient questions, but we are still asking them, not just of representations (stories) in general, but also of the very discourses (stories) that purport to analyse stories, stories of people, stories of people reading stories of people, stories of people reading stories of the world. The initial excitements and fairly rapid disappointments of narratology must have had to do with the early high claims of universality. But the laws discovered, though often couched in learned words, rigorous analyses and diagrams, even mathematical or logical formulas, often turned out to be rather trivial. Above all, there was no constancy

Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel

Abstract: BERUFLICHER WERDEGANG Seit 10/2018 Gastprofessorin Institut für Anglistik, Universität Innsbruck 10/2015 –09/2018 Marie Curie Fellow am Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, Universität Aarhus, Dänemark 10/2014 – 09/2015 Vertretungsprofessur an der Universität Freiburg 04/2014 – 09/2014 Vertretungsprofessur an der Universität Gießen 04/2013 – 03/2014 Junior Fellow am FRIAS (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies), Universität Freiburg 05/2013 – 10/2013 wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Englischen Seminar der Universität Freiburg 04/2008 – 04/2013 Junior Fellow am FRIAS, Universität Freiburg 10/2005 – 10/2007 Geschäftsführerin des Gießener Graduiertenzentrums Kulturwissenschaften / International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GGK/GCSC) 02/2003 – 08/2006 wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Anglistik der Universität Gießen 04/2001 – 09/2002 studentische und wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft am Englischen Seminar der Universität Freiburg

Machinic Fu Manchu: Popular Seriality and the Logic of Spread

Abstract: This paper explores the processes of serial narration in view of the serial enactment of Fu Manchu. Its contention is that seriality is a principle rather than a technique and that this principle cannot be deduced to one author, author collective, or instigator. It gains a ‘machinic’ momentum of its own in the course of its unfolding. It is no mere circumstance that the most successful serial narratives—like the Fu Manchu narratives—were initiated in the ‘long’ 19th century with its expansionist ambitions regarding the spread of global capitalism and the modern nation state, and then were propelled by the engines of 20th-century media modernity. The Fu Manchu narratives lend themselves to an investigation of the principle of seriality because they vent the serial logic of expansion, excrescence, and spread both on a thematical and a formal level and tightly interweave structural and ideological functions. In consequence, the narratives have to be seen as serial performances or enactments, rather than representations, of the yellow peril theme. They do not so much express politico-social fears and cultural anxieties from the vantage point of an author or individual text, but work as engines in the serial machinery which generates and spreads ideological certainties. JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 43.2 (Summer 2013): 186–217. Copyright © 2013 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. My attention fixed itself on the spinning roulette wheel and the little white ball whirling inside it. I experienced the sensation that I was the whizzing roulette ball, that the numbers I passed in my spin where the faces of all those I had known at Land’s End, and before: that I was myself and Petrie, that Smith and Fu Manchu were the same imago, and that the spin would never stop, the ball that was me would never come to rest on red or white, on 7 or 24, but rotate for eternity on that clicketing wheel. (Indiana 204) This is how the narrator of Gary Indiana’s The Shanghai Gesture (2009), which is arguably the most recent literary take on the subject matter of Fu Manchu, envisions himself at the end of the novel. By then, the fact that Fu Manchu is a cultural construct has been thoroughly driven home in the text. Fu Manchu is of interest to Indiana precisely because he has been of interest to so many other people before. The Shanghai Gesture approaches Fu Manchu as formula fiction, correlating its references to the figure of the Chinese master criminal with allusions to many other popular yellow peril fictions, such as the 1941 film from which the novel gleaned its title. Indiana’s narrative thus relishes in quotation, exaggeration, parody, and ironic inversion, while—for large stretches, at least—taking its material seriously enough to trust in its inherent potential, most notably the dynamics of serial narration. Or perhaps the material itself brings to bear its potential on Indiana’s novel? We’ll see that the answer to this question depends heavily on how we conceptualize the phenomenon of seriality. At the time when Indiana’s narrator Petrie, who happens to share the last name with the narrator figure of the first Fu Manchu narratives, identifies with a roulette ball, things have already become quite convoluted. The novel’s many narrative threads and layers have turned out to be complicatedly looped. Toward the end of Indiana’s novel the principle of seriality is no longer associated with the idea of a chronological evolution, in the sense of a sequence of past, present, and future. Edmund Husserl’s concept of a “field of sensuous data” (Indiana 204) is called up to suggest the idea of a time-space-continuum in which episodes and figures pertaining to different historical circumstances, distinct conceptual spheres, and diverse narrative enactments are tightly tangled. With this turn, the novel insists that, particularly as a narrative mode, seriality relies as much on the Popular Seriality and the Logic of Spread 187