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Narrative Beginnings: Relations between First Full-Fledged Scenes and the Beginning of the Main Action Narrative Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Eyal Segal
This essay focuses on two important phenomena in the context of narrative “beginnings”: the beginning of the action proper and the first full-fledged scene (FFS), namely, the first time-section in the text that the author finds to be of consequence enough to deserve full scenic treatment. The point of departure for my discussion is Meir Sternberg’s claim that the FFS always signals the beginning of
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The Implicated Reader: Second-Person Address in Novels of US Imperialism Narrative Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Jennifer Noji
This essay explores how literature can help reckon with past and present political violence by employing formal and rhetorical techniques to implicate readers in such violence. Bringing Michael Rothberg’s concept of “the implicated subject” (2019)—a figure who is neither a victim nor perpetrator but rather enables or benefits from regimes of violence—into conversation with narrative theory and formalist
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The Historical Novel: Past, Reality and Future from Interpretation to Sociological Analysis Narrative Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Paweł Ćwikła
The article constitutes a study in the sociology of literature. It proposes a reflection on the communicative value of a historical novel and discusses several levels of interpretation in works that belong to this genre. The main issue discussed here is the possibility of treating Western literary works about the past as an element of the discourse on the present state of culture, the condition of
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"Nothing was solved, only accelerated": Contemporary Berlin Novels as Gentrifictions Narrative Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Hanna Henryson, Maria Sulimma
As a contribution to the growing scholarly debate on literary representations of gentrification, this article explores a tendency of contemporary, Berlin-set fiction to depict accelerating gentrification processes as an imminent apocalypse. While earlier gentrification fiction frequently centered on the struggles of a male character, this article turns to recent female-authored and female-centered
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Bibliographic Metaparatexts and the Author Function of Librarians Narrative Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Rob E. King
Through subject heading analysis of a popular culture franchise’s bibliographic records across its transmedia, library catalogers as well as metadata librarians are shown as authors of impactful metaparatext. In terms of reception studies, metaparatext intervenes in readers’ receptions of sought narratives. In this study, the Hellraiser franchise is chosen for rich subject analysis, providing one narrative
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Toward a Narratology of Western Narrative Theatre Dance Narrative Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Cristina de Lucas
ABSTRACT Dance is barely present in narrative studies. It is generally accepted as a narrative medium, yet lacks a systematic study that addresses its distinctive qualities. This article focuses on generic theoretical issues of dance as a narrative medium and discusses its place within current narratological debates. The first premise suggested here is that among the diferent manifestations of dance
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"It Is Enough": St. Ogg and Caring Through the Gap Narrative Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Heidi L. Pennington
This essay argues that the understudied micronarrative of St. Ogg in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss serves as a hermeneutic key to the significance of the novel's affectively perplexing conclusion. In this way, it also offers a productive, if difficult, model for ethical action in the world beyond the text. Integrating Talia Schaffer's insights on the ethics of care with narratological analysis
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Proximities and Cross-Species Empathies in Laura Jean McKay's The Animals in That Country Narrative Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Jessica Phillips
This essay asks: what is the value of cross-species empathy in a time of ecological crisis and how can contemporary fiction help along new thinking about human relationships with other animals? I make the case that empathy, in the dominant sense, fetishizes closeness. Empathy has become positive and valuable because it is said to narrow the distance between self and others. I develop the idea that
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The Narrative Features of Involuntary Time Loops Narrative Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Wibke Schniedermann
This essay introduces the category of involuntary time loop (ITL) stories and investigates their narrative specificities. These are stories in which the protagonist repeatedly lives through a certain period of time while all or most of the other characters do not experience the repetition. After a certain amount of time has passed in the protagonist's timeline, or after a specific event has occurred
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The Ethics of Animal Excess: Violence and Bataillean Vigilance in Ian McEwan's Black Dogs Narrative Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Ian Tan
This essay offers a different reading of the ethical imagination in Ian McEwan's fiction from that of human responsibility towards otherness propounded by Emmanuel Levinas. Long regarded as a natural philosophical interlocutor to McEwan, Levinas's concepts of alterity and the transcendence of the other seem to crystallize intersubjective encounters in McEwan's fiction and promote an ethical attitude
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The Neuroscience of Literary Time Travel: How Literary Works Cross Historical Distance Narrative Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Paul B. Armstrong
How do literary works speak across historical distance? When critics attempt to answer this question, they typically invoke biological metaphors that testify to the inability of formal or historical categories alone to explain the mystery of how literary works reach across the boundary between life and death. This essay investigates the embodied cognitive processes that enable literary time travel
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Introduction: "House Rules"—Reading with Authorial Instructions Narrative Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Tatyana Gershkovich
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduction:"House Rules"—Reading with Authorial Instructions Tatyana Gershkovich (bio) "The novels we know best have an architecture," writes Zadie Smith in an essay on reading (43). "Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, etcetera.
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Instructing the Reader of Metafiction: Nabokov & Gombrowicz Narrative Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Katherina B. Kokinova
This article compares and contrasts Vladimir Nabokov's and Witold Gombrowicz's various kinds of instructions in order to find out how they work in metafiction. The complicated relationship with the readerdom—a struggle (Gombrowicz) or a clash (Nabokov)—is discussed within an intertwined framework of theoretical approaches to audiences, readers, and the texts. This examination aims at a shift of the
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Disrupted Lines: The Illegitimately Born Narrator in Dostoevsky and Hurston Narrative Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Chloë Kitzinger
This essay explores the illegitimately born first-person narrator as a figure and technical device in two very different novels: Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1875) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). I argue that both Dostoevsky and Hurston use illegitimately born narrators to extend the novel form, centering the "voice" of a character who defies the genre's
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Toni Morrison's Authorial Audience and the Properties of Black-Centered Imaginative History Narrative Pub Date : 2023-05-24 David Witzling
This essay relates Toni Morrison's critical imperatives concerning the presence of racial formation in reading communities to rhetorical narrative theory's interest in the feedback among author, text, and readers. Through discussions of Morrison's critical writing and of Song of Solomon and Beloved, I examine how Morrison cultivated a Black-centered authorial audience for her texts, guiding readers
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The Book of Ashes: Authorial Instructions, Incorporations, and House Rules in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth Narrative Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Russell Samolsky
This article examines the apparatus of authorial instructions in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It does so by first investigating the role coincidence plays in the literalization of Ware's comic, and then by examining what might be hidden or more deeply at stake in Ware's incorporation of the urn of his father's ashes into the "corrigenda" (or afterword) of his book. My reading
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Drowned Places: Sea-Level Rise and Narrative Crisis in Elizabeth Rush's Rising Narrative Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Killian Quigley
Anthropogenic sea-level rise is forcing—and will force—extraordinary measures in adaptation and retreat. At the same time, it is compelling conventions in aesthetics, geography, and narrative to contend with fundamental challenges to description, reference, perception, and place. This article examines Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (2018), an ambitious and sensitive
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Character Change in Mainstream Movies: Structures of Moral Development Narrative Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Rory Kelly
Character change is an essential component of Hollywood storytelling, yet little has been written about how it is typically structured. This paper addresses that deficit. Through close formal analysis of a small but narratively diverse group of films—Casablanca (1942), The Apartment (1960), About a Boy (2002) and Wild (2014)—evidence is presented for the existence of a common schema, one that is used
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Storyminds and Readingminds: Cognitive Plots in David Small's Stitches and Virginia Woolf 's "In the Orchard" Narrative Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Melba Cuddy-Keane
Beginning with Virginia Woolf ’s question, when writing a novel, “Who thinks it?,” this article proposes that behind every storyworld is a storymind whose action constitutes a cognitive plot. Redeploying Gérard Genette’s “narrativization by focalization,” I argue that description is always focalized, focalizing is an act of perception, and unfolding perceptions inscribe narrative paths. Urging increased
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Dramatic Poetry as Rhetorical Form: The Case of Sarah Piatt's "Mock Diamonds" Narrative Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Matthew Martello
The programmatic study of narrative and poetry has stalled without engaging many approaches to narrative inquiry and without comprehending the sui generis achievements of poetical representation. This essay attempts to rejuvenate narratological and specifically rhetorical interest in poetry by carefully examining the dramatic poem—where poetic form intersects with several of narrative theory’s abiding
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Character Networks, the Zero Function, and the Lost Character: Solving Three Anomalies in Plot Genotype Theory Narrative Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Terence Patrick Murphy, Nanna Sophie Zheng
In Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp sets out three major postulates for understanding his corpus of Russian fairy tales: the first is the concept of the character network; the second is that of the participant role; the third is the importance of character action. According to Propp, each separate character fills a particular participant role in a definite character network, where that character
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Restorying the Sport Performance Masterplot: Jaclyn Gilbert's Late Air Narrative Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Caela Fenton
Sport and exercise studies (SES) scholars have begun harnessing the power of fictional discourse to communicate research. However, they have not yet considered how generic fictions may serve as an interlocutor for athlete/coach/fan negotiation of SES-identified (and potentially harmful) concepts such as the performance storyline, nor have they duly considered the role generic fictions play in interpellating
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Julian Barnes and the Subversion of the Sense of an Ending Narrative Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Tung-An Wei
Much theoretical attention has been devoted to the surprise ending, but it is still unclear how fully a surprise ending must resolve global instabilities for it to be aesthetically satisfying. To refine James Phelan’s theory, I argue that in character narration with multiple global instabilities the surprise ending must resolve the global instabilities which are most important to the narrator. My example
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Reading Unnaturally: A Response to Ellen Peel Narrative Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Jan Alber, Brian Richardson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reading Unnaturally: A Response to Ellen Peel Jan Alber (bio) and Brian Richardson (bio) WE ARE GRATEFUL TO ELLEN PEEL for making a number of important points about the role of different cultural beliefs, the question of the status of impossibility in fictional worlds, and the reader of unnatural narratives. We especially appreciate the
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Knowing What's Unnatural for Somebody: A Reply to Jan Alber and Brian Richardson Narrative Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Ellen Peel
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Knowing What’s Unnatural for Somebody: A Reply to Jan Alber and Brian Richardson Ellen Peel (bio) I AM GRATEFUL TO JAN ALBER AND BRIAN RICHARDSON for their attentive and generous reading of my article “Unnatural Narratology and the Return of the Repressed Reader,” and for their serious consideration of its suggestions. Below I explicate
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Eventuality in Fiction: Contingency, Complexity and Narrative Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Richard Walsh
This essay seizes upon the tension between two senses of “eventuality,” as concerning the staple of narrative, events, and as concerning the kind of contingency that remains unassimilated by narrative sense. Contingency is a manifestation of the gap between the systemic complexity of temporal phenomena and the reductive heuristic of narrative as a mode of cognition. Sophisticated forms of narrative
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Explorations of the Unconscious in Modernist Women's Works Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Elise Nykänen, Laura Oulanne, Anna Ovaska
This essay focuses on the construction of unconscious processes of the mind in narrative fiction, particularly in the work of modernist women writers. Bringing together Dorrit Cohn’s insights on the presentation of the unconscious, cognitive narratology, and phenomenological and feminist perspectives, we propose an approach for the narratological study of the unconscious that centers not on the “hidden
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Writing in Absentia: Woolf and the Language of Things Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 M. Ty
This essay queries the identification of modernist fiction with the development of formal strategies of interiority. Returning to the novel that Auerbach singles out as exemplary of the inward turn, I read To the Lighthouse as a work that does not engage exclusively with problematics of consciousness and memory but is also concerned with the ontological precarity of the object-world. I argue that in
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Bearing Witnessing with What We Cannot Speak: The Use of the Abject and Figurative Language in Pat Barker's Regeneration and Union Street Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Carol Erwin
This essay builds upon Joshua Pederson’s article, “Speak Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory,” published in Narrative in 2014. While Pederson’s three dicta for analyzing trauma are useful, his exclusive use of war-related trauma literature ignores the way in which hegemonic masculinity and public and private memory influence victims’ ability to tell their stories. Scholars
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Thinking through Queer Narrative Forms with Ben Marcus and Renee Gladman Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 E. L. McCallum
This essay aims to reimagine our narrative and queer theories by speculating on possible queer narrative forms. I start from three facets of this problem: the literary archive that has shaped queer theory, the narratological archive that has lately started grappling with its intersection with queer theory, and new queer narrative, via Gregory Bredbeck’s discussion of New Narrative and the distinctions
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Transmigrations: Race, Resistance, and Imperial Narrative Strategy in Richard Marsh's The Beetle Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Scarlet Luk
In this essay, I examine Richard Marsh’s obscure and eccentric fin-desiècle novel The Beetle (1897) and read its disturbing collusion between racial otherness and gender non-conformity as an act of colonial and narrative subjugation. I examine the ways in which the entirely white cast of narrators entrap the Egyptian beetle within their Eurocentric and cisnormative discourses of gender embodiment.
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Eventuality in Fiction: Contingency, Complexity and Narrative Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Richard Walsh
This essay seizes upon the tension between two senses of “eventuality,” as concerning the staple of narrative, events, and as concerning the kind of contingency that remains unassimilated by narrative sense. Contingency is a manifestation of the gap between the systemic complexity of temporal phenomena and the reductive heuristic of narrative as a mode of cognition. Sophisticated forms of narrative
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Explorations of the Unconscious in Modernist Women's Works Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Elise Nykänen, Laura Oulanne, Anna Ovaska
This essay focuses on the construction of unconscious processes of the mind in narrative fiction, particularly in the work of modernist women writers. Bringing together Dorrit Cohn’s insights on the presentation of the unconscious, cognitive narratology, and phenomenological and feminist perspectives, we propose an approach for the narratological study of the unconscious that centers not on the “hidden
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Writing in Absentia: Woolf and the Language of Things Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 M. Ty
This essay queries the identification of modernist fiction with the development of formal strategies of interiority. Returning to the novel that Auerbach singles out as exemplary of the inward turn, I read To the Lighthouse as a work that does not engage exclusively with problematics of consciousness and memory but is also concerned with the ontological precarity of the object-world. I argue that in
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Bearing Witnessing with What We Cannot Speak: The Use of the Abject and Figurative Language in Pat Barker's Regeneration and Union Street Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Carol Erwin
This essay builds upon Joshua Pederson’s article, “Speak Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory,” published in Narrative in 2014. While Pederson’s three dicta for analyzing trauma are useful, his exclusive use of war-related trauma literature ignores the way in which hegemonic masculinity and public and private memory influence victims’ ability to tell their stories. Scholars
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Thinking through Queer Narrative Forms with Ben Marcus and Renee Gladman Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 E. L. McCallum
This essay aims to reimagine our narrative and queer theories by speculating on possible queer narrative forms. I start from three facets of this problem: the literary archive that has shaped queer theory, the narratological archive that has lately started grappling with its intersection with queer theory, and new queer narrative, via Gregory Bredbeck’s discussion of New Narrative and the distinctions
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Transmigrations: Race, Resistance, and Imperial Narrative Strategy in Richard Marsh's The Beetle Narrative Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Scarlet Luk
In this essay, I examine Richard Marsh’s obscure and eccentric fin-desiècle novel The Beetle (1897) and read its disturbing collusion between racial otherness and gender non-conformity as an act of colonial and narrative subjugation. I examine the ways in which the entirely white cast of narrators entrap the Egyptian beetle within their Eurocentric and cisnormative discourses of gender embodiment.
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Synchronic Reading Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Helena Michie, Robyn Warhol
This essay intervenes in the largely diachronic assumptions of seriality studies by proposing a method called “synchronic reading,” in which readers might consume parts of different texts at the same time. While synchronic reading was an historical practice for Victorians, as a contemporary method it has historiographic and literary/interpretive implications. Historically, the essay attempts, with
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Chrononarratology: Modelling Historical Change for Narratology Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Dorothee Birke, Eva von Contzen, Karin Kukkonen
In this article, we introduce chrononarratology as a programmatic term for a way of “doing” narratology that addresses some of the major challenges and tendencies of narrative theory. Chrononarratology builds on and takes seriously the increasing interest in historical and diachronic approaches to narrative within narratology in recent years. We begin by offering a meta-analysis of what exactly narratologists
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Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Faye Halpern
This article makes a case for considering not just the implied author (IA) but the flesh-and-blood one in our interpretations, despite the anti-intentionalist assumptions that guide our discipline. Specifically, it argues against the view that we can find out about the IA only through consulting the text: instead, we must sometimes also look to the flesh-and-blood author to construct the IA. To make
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Enactive, Interactive, Social—New Contexts for Reading Second-Person Narration Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik
In this article, I would like to discuss whether recent interest in human interactions may facilitate the long-standing debates on second-person narratives, and help to go beyond an official list of controversies or questions about this ambiguous literary form. Here, I introduce the method of reconceptualizing second-person narrative inspired by social cognitive research, including some empirical findings
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Saving the Self from Stories: Resistance to Narrative in Primo Levi's The Periodic Table Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Joshua Landy
What if we aren’t just the stories we tell about ourselves? What if our identity also involves something beyond any possible narrative—something, indeed, that needs protecting from narrative? If so, then it might seem as though a sequential account of our memories is beside the point; yet under some circumstances, surprisingly, a sequential account of our memories is precisely what protects us best
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What the Rise of AI Means for Narrative Studies: A Response to "Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature" by Angus Fletcher Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Jon Chun, Katherine Elkins
The role of AI in narrative studies is not a question of if but of when and of how we humans prepare for such a future. The if claim is addressed with a detailed rebuttal to Angus Fletcher’s ‘Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature.” A counter-argument based upon key AI concepts, the historical progress of AI, and landmark failures and breakthroughs brings readers up to date on the current
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Why Computer AI Will Never Do What We Imagine It Can Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-28 Angus Fletcher
In response to questions about the author’s previous proof (in Narrative 29.1) that computers contain a hardware limit that renders them permanently incapable of reading or writing narrative, this article draws upon the author’s work with Deep Neural Networks, Judea Pearl’s do-calculus, GPT-3, and other current-generation AI to logically demonstrate that no computer AI (quantum or otherwise) has ever
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Why Computer AI Will Never Do What We Imagine It Can Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Angus Fletcher
I would like to express my gratitude to Jon Chun and Katherine Elkins for their thoughtful response to my proof of the limits of computer AI, a response that raises dozens of critical technical issues in the ongoing, high-stakes debate over what computers can, and will, do. In this reply, I directly answer Chun and Elkin’s objections by drawing on my firsthand experience with Deep Neural Networks,
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Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Faye Halpern
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Chrononarratology: Modelling Historical Change for Narratology Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Dorothee Birke,Eva von Contzen,Karin Kukkonen
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What the Rise of AI Means for Narrative Studies: A Response to “Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature” by Angus Fletcher Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Jon Chun,Katherine Elkins
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Saving the Self from Stories: Resistance to Narrative in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Joshua Landy
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Enactive, Interactive, Social—New Contexts for Reading Second-Person Narration Narrative Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik
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Live Burial: The Deep Intertextuality of Jordan Peele's Get Out Narrative Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Aviva Briefel
This essay revisits Jordan Peele's concept of the "sunken place" from his 2017 film Get Out as a model of deep intertextuality. I argue that the film draws extensively from the twentieth-century female gothic, especially the cinematic and literary versions of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, to formulate a narrative about racial violence and white privilege in America. In asking his viewers
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Replacing Omniscience: Superior Knowledge and Narratorial Access Narrative Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Annjeanette Wiese
In an article published in Narrative in 2004, Jonathan Culler rejected the concept of omniscience and called for a more fitting critical lexicon to replace it. But so far, this call remains largely unanswered. This essay seeks to provide such a replacement, but it aims to do so by maintaining a concept of superior knowledge, which can be defined as knowledge that could not typically be known by either
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Mind Representation as an Affective Device in the Gothic: Bridging the Cognitive and the Rhetorical Model Narrative Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Wanlin Li
Though the centrality of emotion in gothic fiction has long been acknowledged, its mechanisms for generating emotions have remained curiously underexplored. My review of the history of the genre's transatlantic development reveals that mind representation has often been explored as an important affective strategy by the gothicists, and that we can gain a solid understanding of its affective significance
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Fraught Fictionality in Narratives of Future Catastrophe Narrative Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Lieven Ameel
In our future-oriented era, future visions have become increasingly important for shaping policy and public awareness. How is fictionality as a rhetorical mode used in non-literary future visions, and how are signposts of fiction instrumental—or detrimental—to conveying pathways to the future, in view of forecasted environmental devastation and radical climate change? How does the temporal mode of
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New Media Ecology and Theoretical Foundations for Nonfiction Digital Narrative Creative Practice Narrative Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Nicole Basaraba, Peter Arnds, Jennifer Edmond, Owen Conlan
Digital storytelling techniques and persuasive communications are becoming increasingly intertwined and realized in cultural discourses such as cultural heritage, environmental activism, and politics. Rhetorical theory has grounded and influenced communication practice since the age of oration, and as society is increasingly undergoing new mediatization, digital rhetorical theory can be reexamined
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Stories like CDs: Musical Superstructures as Narrative Devices Narrative Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Rodrigo Guijarro Lasheras
Popular music often seems alien to literature's formal explorations and concerns. Existing studies on literature and pop music have mostly focused on ideological and political aspects derived from plot elements, but have discounted the possibility of technical or compositional influence. One may wonder what trace, if any, this ubiquitous music has left, besides being present or mentioned in the storyline
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Narrating Ruth Root's Images Narrative Pub Date : 2021-05-22 George Rush, Ruth Root
For this special issue of Narrative, celebrated artist Ruth Root has contributed work to accompany articles on the many ways that narrative is used and misused in public discourse. Below, The Ohio State University's George Rush offers thoughts on these paintings—his own narrations of these public artifacts.
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Dangers of Narrative: A Critical Approach to Narratives of Personal Experience in Contemporary Story Economy Narrative Pub Date : 2021-05-22 Maria Mäkelä, Samuli Björninen, Laura Karttunen, Matias Nurminen, Juha Raipola, Tytti Rantanen
The current storytelling boom across various spheres of life encourages actors from individuals to businesses and institutions to instrumentalize stories of personal experience, but the search for a "compelling story" is often blind to the possible downsides of experientially and emotionally engaging narratives. This article presents key findings of the project Dangers of Narrative that has crowdsourced
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Racial Justice in Medicine: Narrative Practices toward Equity Narrative Pub Date : 2021-05-22 Rita Charon, Craig Irvine, Aaron Ngozi Oforlea, Edgar Rivera Colón, Cindy Smalletz, Maura Spiegel
In an age of police violence against Black persons and their mass incarceration, Americans seek a "public sphere" in which to examine the torn fabric of race relations. To date, efforts to overcome centuries-long polarizations and to find collective avenues toward racial justice have had little success. This essay proposes that narrative engagement and creative discovery can open paths toward mutual
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Reframing Law's Domain: Narrative, Rhetoric, and the Forms of Legal Rules Narrative Pub Date : 2021-05-22 Stephen Paskey
Legal scholars typically understand law as a system of determinate rules grounded in logic. And in the public sphere, textualist judges and others often claim that judges should not "make" law, arguing instead that a judge's role is simply to find the meaning inherent in law's language. This essay offers a different understanding of both the structure of legal rules and the role of judges. Building