In 2014, LEGO decided not to prolong its co-promotion with Shell due to an extensive global campaign initiated by Greenpeace. The campaign was a reaction to Shell's plans to drill in the Alaskan Arctic. Rather than initiating a factual campaign targeting Shell's activities in the Arctic, Greenpeace attacked LEGO on account of the policies of Shell by impugning LEGO's reputation as a socially and environmentally

This article discusses the reader's mindreading when exposed to realist, modernist, and postmodern fiction. It has been argued that the reader of fiction practices his mindreading competence by trying to attribute mental states to fictional characters and predict their next action (Zunshine). We argue that this applies most of all to the reader of realist texts written in the objective-realist mode

Narratologists tend to define the unnatural in terms of very strange textual elements alone, whereas they are very strange for somebody. A revised definition of the unnatural can make the theory more robust and precise—and more appropriate for cultures whose concepts of strangeness diverge from those in the secular West. Drawing on rhetorical poetics and reader response theory, this essay asks, "Unnatural

To challenge the so-called inherent fictionality of graphic memoirs, I begin by reconsidering the opposition between nonfictional and fictional representation from a pragmatic and transmedial perspective, which will lead me to state that no medium can be considered as inherently factual or fictional. Then, I discuss the specific case of Art Spiegelman's Maus in the attempt to reevaluate the most obvious

This review-article discusses Ian Duncan's groundbreaking book, which examines nineteenth-century narrative fiction in the light of natural science's approach to the origins of the human species and its place in the world. As Duncan explains, after Linneus and Buffon systematically classified all living species in the eighteenth century, Lamarck and Darwin focused on the specific processes involved

My response to Thomas Pavel's review focuses on two of the questions he raises. The first concerns narration's relation to nonhuman domains of life, and the second concerns the erotic couple as the topic that sets the nineteenth-century novel apart from philosophical and scientific discourse, constituting its distinctively human form. Recent studies in narrative theory and cultural anthropology have

This essay compares two novel forms that are separated by more than 250 years: Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, published in 1742, and Philippa Burne’s hypertext fiction “24 Hours with Someone You Know,” copyrighted in 1996. Using narratological, pragmatic, and cognitive tools and theories, the confrontation of the two distant texts aims to highlight that while “the ethics of the telling” is congruent

ABSTRACT:Even the smallest conversational turns can index macro-contexts of social inequality, racialization, and capital; fictional narrative, coordinating the particular and the global, seems well positioned to represent these scalar dynamics. But how exactly does the textual medium of the novel link the particularities of voice with the politics of race? Scholarship on this question has often turned

abstract:This essay investigates the phenomenon of "embedded" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state, as in, "Mrs. Banks wished that Mary Poppins wouldn't know so very much more about the best people than she knew herself"), asking if patterns of embedment manifest themselves differently in children's literature than they do in literature

Sharon Marcus (SM): I’m Sharon Marcus—I’m a Professor of English at Columbia University: I’m a Victorianist, and I work on nineteenth-century French literature, so I’m well-acquainted with the history of seriality. I’m also the Dean of Humanities and Editor of publicbooks.org. I would like to thank Lauren Goodlad and Sean O’Sullivan and Eileen Gillooly and everyone at the Heyman Center for putting

ABSTRACT:This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost

ABSTRACT:This article examines the high degree of parallelism and repetition that characterizes dialogue in Henry James's late fiction and considers both the function of such "consensual talk" in the context of James's novels and its implications for understandings of speech in the novel, more generally. Taking The Ambassadors (1903) as its primary case study, the article argues that dialogue's consensual

ABSTRACT:This essay examines how Samuel Richardson turned the technologies of print towards the acoustic to produce loud characters—both aurally and emotionally—in Clarissa. Specifically, it traces his techniques for representing the embodied features of argumentative conversation back to the performative genres of drama and music. Richardson's dual professional status as a printer and a novelist meant

ABSTRACT:In this paper, I employ large-scale data analysis to highlight trends in the use of direct speech across a corpus of 898 novels published in Britain between 1789 and 1901. The paper begins with a brief description of my quantitative method. Following this, it illustrates that an unexpected statistic—here the high number of speaking characters in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre—can shed new light

abstract:Digital media have provided new avenues of distribution for serial fiction and created new narrative possibilities for the form, including the widespread use of what Margolin labels "concurrent narration" and Page terms "real-time narration." This form of serial publication, where a story is distributed in installments coterminously with the events being reported, is enabled by the Internet's

abstract:This essay proposes a set of terms for considering serial narratives across media, by focusing on the defining quality of seriality: the rhythmic, compositional, and sequential relationship between one object and a subsequent, apparently similar object. The six terms—iteration, multiplicity, momentum, world-building, personnel, and design—address the methods by which serial installments relate

abstract:Television storytelling is one of the most vibrant, dominant fictional modes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and yet its foundational structure, the episode, has been undertheorized. All television stories deploy the episode in some way, and its formal and fictional contours are both inescapable and distinct from existing narrative theories of other serial forms. This essay is

abstract:Six-word stories present an intriguing case study to theorists of literary genres and narratologists alike. Despite the popularity of this peculiar narrative form—probably the latest newcomer to the club of narrative genres—and the fact that it has produced many captivating texts, there is almost no critical discussion of this fast-growing literary phenomenon. After explaining why six-word

A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a constitutive interdependency between humanity and material realities such as the climate or the geological history of our planet. This article looks at the ways in which narrative may capture this human-nonhuman interrelation, which occupies the foreground of debates on the so-called Anthropocene. I argue that

abstract:Many contemporary novels feature multiple narrators who tell distinct, sometimes incommensurate, stories. While this narrative strategy is often viewed as a relic of the short story cycle tradition, I argue that this technique actually constitutes a new subtype of the novel that I call the braided narrative. In braided narratives, novelists plait together different narrative threads, distinct

ABSTRACT:In recent years, critics have theorized ethically unproblematic versions of sympathy or empathy, ones that avoid cultural appropriation or the dismissal of crucial differences between witness and sufferer. Despite the admirable impulse of this project, this article claims that these sanitized versions cannot do justice to the complex ways that sympathy works in narrative communication, especially

abstract:This paper argues that the study of authorial image management should give more attention to the way literary fiction participates in shaping the author’s public image. This point has not been sufficiently taken into account in studies of author celebrity or persona making. These studies, to a great extent, focus on extraliterary activity. From another direction, some critics in narrative

This article examines how Karl Ove Knausgard's My Struggle intertwines with contemporary developments in media and technologies of self-representation and - expression. First, I situate this series within the generic frame of 'autofiction' and explain the rationale behind this categorization. Then I outline developments that have led to an increasing emphasis on scale and quantification in Western

abstract:This essay aims to fill a gap in the current research on translocal narratives by providing a concept that structures and defines the typical strategies found in contemporary global writing: translocal narratability. Translocal novels narrate side by side two or more different places, such as Lagos and Princeton in Adichie’s Americanah, and thereby show how places and cities can permeate each

abstract:This essay examines Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and S. Anand’s Finding My Way (2016), a graphic auto/biography by a member of a tribal community (Shyam). It examines the auto/biography’s paratextual apparatus that constructs it as an artifactual object—a manuscripture—and thus transforms subaltern auto/biography into an exercise in aesthetic iconography. The co-presence of at least three voices

abstract:Frederick Luis Aldama’s in-depth interview with Robert Alter covers over 50 years of scholarly contributions to the field of narrative studies. Alter shares his grand intellectual odyssey as informed by and distinctively different to a variety of different literary schools and approaches. The interview shares insights into how Alter deepened understanding of how language, style, and narrative

ABSTRACT:Responding to Ansgar F. Nünning’s oft-neglected call to locate the “clues” indicating unreliable narration, this essay offers a theory of what I call “narrative noise,” a sonic signal of unreliable narration (“Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration” 105). I propose that authors sometimes deploy noise to mark a narrative disturbance, a fracture in a narrator’s seemingly harmonious and coherent

ABSTRACT:Seeing it as a test case for the experientiality of narrative, I reclaim the concept of diegetic music from film to literature studies. My concern is whether readers can gain musical experience from what Scher dubs “verbal music”—diegetic music’s textual exponent, which I re-theorize in terms of audionarratology. As a storyworld phenomenon, diegetic music is literally heard by characters.

ABSTRACT:This article analyzes Open City by Teju Cole as an example of a Theory Generation novel, positing that neither a strictly surface reading nor symptomatic reading approach alone is adequate for this sort of text. Expanding and complicating the novel's aside on the biology of bedbugs, the article argues that Julius, the book's protagonist, can best be understood not as a flâneur, fugueur, or

ABSTRACT:Using a rhetorical methodology, this essay argues that, rather than a narrative of character or of progression, animal fables are primarily narratives of symmetry and asymmetry, of balance and reversal that not only flip a story's composition, but upend its narrative and ethical assumptions as well. The success of the fable depends on the audience's willingness to be deceived, to be taken

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 disregarded by narratology. The theoreticians we refer to—Sylvie Patron, Richard Walsh, and Lars-Åke Skalin—do not accept the notion that narrative fiction should be understood in terms of non-fictional

ABSTRACT:This essay challenges the skepticism towards the formal and thematic complexity of Agatha Christie’s detective stories by revealing the role of covert word-play in her works. In doing so, the essay also questions the consensus in detective fiction studies that the use of covert wordplay in British and American detective stories is a distinct feature of works by postmodern authors (with the

ABSTRACT:This article begins with an analysis of Marc Forster's Stranger than Fiction that emphasizes the film's telepathic nuances, illustrating literary telepathy's role in the metaleptic events that the ostensibly "innocent" protagonist experiences. Elaborating on existing work in literary telepathy, the article then brings Seo-Young Chu's SF model of mimesis into dialogue with that of unnatural

ABSTRACT:By discussing The Human Stain by Philip Roth, this article aims to question the standard view of fictional narratives as being told by a narrator and as being formal imitations of natural narrative discourse. In my discussion on Roth's novel, I demonstrate how the concept of the narrator can start to produce interpretations of a literary work. Although critics discussing this particular novel

ABSTRACT:Against the backdrop of a recent return to the institutional conditions of literature and an extension of the discipline of narratology, this essay retrieves Gérard Genette's concept of the paratext. It does so by centering on the relation between literary narration and paratexts and by discussing the implications of this relation for notions of authorship. On the one hand, the paratext can

ABSTRACT:This essay turns to Don DeLillo's novel Point Omega to revisit a blind spot of narrative theory—narrative's relation with lyricality and poeticity. Responding to recent debates on this topic by shifting the emphasis toward modes of reception and readerly engagement, my essay examines how the novel's experimental mix of literary forms changes the game of what narrative commonly does. Point

ABSTRACT:This article discusses three strategies that TV shows have increasingly employed in recent years to produce what Jason Mittell, in an essay that marked the beginning of his thoughts on the issue, has called "narrative complexity": unreliable narration, counterfictional scenarios, and ellipses and anachronological narration. It uses the last minutes of "The Wheel," the final episode of the

NARRATIVE HAS always been a phenomenon of considerable medial range, and recent technological innovations in the context of the so-called digital revolution as well as salient changes of media use during the emergence of the “web 2.0” have only served to further multiply the ways in which stories can be told across media forms and genres. Thus, it is no surprise that not only literary texts, but also

ABSTRACT: In this essay, I propose a new model and methodology for investigating the productive, layered ways in which affects operate in and through narrative texts in the communicative loops of reading and writing. I delineate this model by way of a dialogue between different concepts of worlding, world-building, and worldmaking circulating in narrative and affect theory, which provide connecting

ABSTRACT:This essay describes the way that digital narratives (both commercial video games and electronic literature) create two kinds of space: a primary storytelling space in which gameplay or reading occurs, and an orientating space through which those primary spaces are encountered. This orienting space might include a larger narrative world, a menu from which game options can be chosen, or some

ABSTRACT:Drawing from recent studies on authorial attachment by Dawson (2013) and Korthals Altes (2014), the article revises the notions of narrative authority and gnomic statements. I claim that authorial concerns, instead of manifesting themselves in imposing intrusions, may take the form of agential indecision, reflecting the ultimate imbalance between lived experience and its artistic framing.

Focusing on texts that blend fictional and autobiographical material, this article examines cases in which a character and an overt third-person narrator sound alike, such that instability in mood and inconsistency in voice result. Hypothetically, these phenomena—indeterminate focalization and voice contamination—can be chalked up to the quasi-autobiographical nature of the text and to the author’s

ABSTRACT:Drawing on research by, among others, Monika Fludernik, Marie-Laure Ryan, and previous publications by the author, the present article outlines the foundations of a transmedial narratology that draws on intermediality theory, frame theory, and prototype semantics. These foundations permit the simultaneous conceptualization of narrative as a semiotic macro-mode and as a cognitive frame which

ABSTRACT:Using J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (2013) as its case study, this article explores multimodal fiction and transmedia storyworlds. Conceptualizations of transmedia storytelling have sought to emphasize not only the creation and distribution of narrative worlds across media but also the imaginative construction of these worlds by recipients. Nevertheless, this latter characteristic has been

ABSTRACT:This article argues that recipients can make sense of abstract and highly self-reflexive live performances when they try to narrativize them, i.e., read them as narratives. In performances, different sign systems convey narrative meaning to the spectators. Recipients have to take both acoustic and visual clues into consideration: apart from the dialogues, important sign systems are music,

ABSTRACT: Starting out with the observation that collective storytelling has only recently received sufficient narratological attention, this article outlines the pervasiveness of plural subjects in factual narratives and their comparative lack of salience in fictional texts. Discussing the collective on the levels of agency, mind, and narration, the article examines the alternation between plural

This article discusses the recent trends in Fictionality Studies and argues for a point of view focusing more on the narrative dimension of fictionality than on the fictive story content. With the analysis of two case studies, where a non-fictional third-person narrator represents the experience of nonfictional protagonists, the authors maintain Fictionality Studies should take into account not just

Why are scenes of storytelling so central to sentimental fiction in late eighteenth-century Britain? Shifts in narrative level, where a character tells their story—most often of tragic loss—to another character, are as familiar to readers of sentimental fiction as the tears its heroes and heroines shed. This essay analyzes the typical structure of embedding in a range of sentimental novels, including

This essay reads Charlotte Brontë’s use of first-person narration in Villette as a contribution to a Victorian reassessment of personal identity as material, heterogeneous, and adaptive. Challenging common readings of Brontë’s first-person fictions as displays of self-definition and authority, I unpack the relationship between the narrated and narrating person in both Jane Eyre and Villette to reveal

ABSTRACT:This essay raises questions about ways in which law and the interpretive humanities might intersect in such manner as to offer real insight one to another. Specifically, it addresses the use of narrative in the law, and its analytic study. Stories, I argue, are not events in the world, but the way we tell events, a crucial distinction sometimes unrecognized in legal opinions. Examples analyzed

ABSTRACT:In this essay we respond to Mari Hatavara’s and Jarmila Mildorf ’s critical engagement with our “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” We explain why we find our rhetorical approach to fictionality more persuasive than their approach; more specifically, we explain why we disagree with their claims that fictionality entails narrative and that the presence in a text of techniques conventionally associated

ABSTRACT:Located within the more encompassing project of a genuinely transmedial narratology, this article's focus is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to further our understanding of strategies of narrative representation and processes of narrative comprehension across media by developing a transmedial conceptualization of storyworlds as intersubjective communicative constructs; on the other hand

ABSTRACT:Multistability refers to those moments in a narrative when readers are made aware of two mutually exclusive possibilities, conceived as an analogy to the visual illusion of the duck-rabbit, which can be seen either as a duck or as a rabbit, but not as both at the same time. Such mutually exclusive possibilities can arise from image elements that have different functions in different panels

ABSTRACT: This article establishes a definition of we-narrative based on a plural type of narrator, and in doing so challenges many of the presuppositions in the recent work on we-narratives. Despite an increased interest in this mode of narration, a definition of specifically first-person plural narrative as an independent narrative form has not yet been suggested and we-narrators have been mostly

ABSTRACT:In part because of Henry James’s own emphasis on the “rigour” of his practice, the strict limitation of The Ambassadors to Strether’s point of view has dominated critical discussions of the novel’s narrative technique. This essay argues that authorial narration plays a more prominent role in The Ambassadors than has previously been recognized and that the narrator’s efforts to read and describe

ABSTRACT:As the child of German-Polish Jews living in Łódź in the 1930s and ‘40s, Jurek Becker sustained losses—of his mother, of his childhood, and of his memories of that time period—that haunted him long into adulthood. A short autobiographical text that he wrote a few months before his death of cancer in 1997, sent in the form of a postcard to his friend Joachim Sartorius, employs a kind of ellipsis

Editor’s Note: Paul Zumthor’s “La Brièveté comme forme” is a suggestive take on the relations between brevity and form, one that also addresses questions about such matters as narrative time and about what is and isn’t narrative. Because the essay is not well-known among narrative theorists, I welcomed William Nelles’s proposal that Narrative publish the translation by him and Laurence Thiollier Moscato

Human cognitive structures and processes are to a great extent just that—human, thus universal or nearly universal. But at the same time no two human brains are identical. Applying these observations to literature, we would expect storytellers to share many narrative structures and processes, but also to exhibit in some degree individually distinctive patterns in these structures and processes. One

Despite its ubiquity, the cliffhanger has received little critical attention. This essay takes a closer look at the device, and finds that cliffhangers perform important functions for many narratives. Drawing on the rhetorical theory of narrative, I define the cliffhanger as a unique misalignment of story and discourse, and consider some of the device’s core features. I highlight aspects of the cliffhanger

This article argues that interactional metalepsis is a device that is inherently built into ergodic digital fiction and thus that ergodic digital fiction is necessarily unnatural. Offering a definition and associated typology of interactional metalepsis as it occurs in digital fiction, it explores the ways in which these media-specific and unnatural forms of metalepsis manifest in that medium. It defines