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.

Narratology meets Translation Studies, or, The Voice of the Translator in Children’s Literature

Abstract: When critics identify ‘manipulations’ in translations, these are often described and analysed in terms of the differing norms governing the source and the target languages, cultures and literatures. This article focuses on the agent of the translation, the translator, and her/his presence in the translated text. It presents a theoretical and analytical tool, a communicative model of translation, using the category of the implied translator, the creator of a new text for readers of the target text. This model links the theoretical fields of narratology and translation studies and helps to identify the agent of ‘change’ and the level of communication in which the most significant modifications take place. It is a model applicable to all translated narrated literature but, as examples illustrate, due to the asymmetrical communication in and around children’s literature, the implied translator as he/she becomes visible or audible as the narrator of the translation, is particularly tangible in translated children’s literature.

Narrative identity construction in times of career change: Taking note of unconscious desires

Abstract: Working at the intersection of narrative and psychoanalytic theory, we present in this article an affective conceptualization of identity dynamics during times of career change, incorporating the notion of unconscious desires. We propose that frictions in career change narratives, such as the paradoxical co-existence of coherence and ambiguity, allude to unconscious subtexts that can become ‘readable’ in the narrative when applying a psychoanalytic framework. We point to the analysis of 30 life story interviews with former management consultants who report upon a past and/or anticipated career change for illustration. By linking three empirically derived narrative strategies for combining coherence and ambiguity (ignoring the change, admitting the ambiguity and depicting a wishful future) with three conceptually informed psychoanalytic ego-defenses (denial, rationalization and sublimation), we provide an analytic framework that helps to explain why workers in transition may try to preserve both coherence ...

Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems

Abstract: From Dr. Moreau's Beast People to David Cronenberg's Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem's robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler's human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, Posthuman Metamorphosis examines modern and postmodern stories of corporeal transformation through interlocking frames of posthumanism, narratology, and second-order systems theory. New media generate new metamorphs.New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines. But beyond the vogue for the cyborg and the cybernetic mash-up of the organic and the mechanical, Posthuman Metamorphosis develops neocybernetic systems theories illuminating alternative narratives that elicit autopoietic and symbiotic visions of the posthuman.Systems theory also transforms our modes of narrative cognition. Regarding narrative in the light of the autopoietic systems it brings into play, neocybernetics brings narrative theory into constructive relation with the systemic operations of observation, communication, and paradox.Posthuman Metamorphosis draws on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, Cary Wolfe, Mieke Bal, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Lynn Margulis to read narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems. Tracing the posthuman intuitions of both pre- and post-cybernetic metamorphs, it demonstrates the viability of second-order systems theories for narrative theory, media theory, cultural science studies, and literary criticism.