Unnatural Narratives - Unnatural Narratology

Unnatural Narratives - Unnatural Narratology
Author: Jan Alber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2011-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110229048

In recent years, the study of unnatural narratives has become an exciting new but still disparate research program in narrative theory. For the first time, this collection of essays presents and discusses the new analytical tools that have so far been developed on the basis of unnatural novels, short stories, and plays and extends these findings through analyses of testimonies, comics, graphic novels, films, and oral narratives. Many narratives do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it but confront us with strange narrative worlds which rely on principles that have very little to do with the actual world around us. The essays in this collection develop new narratological tools and modeling systems which are designed to capture the strangeness and extravagance of such anti-realist narratives. Taken together, the essays offer a systematic investigation of anti-mimetic techniques and strategies that relate to different narrative parameters, different media, and different periods within literary history.

Unnatural Narrative

Unnatural Narrative
Author: Brian Richardson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814293843

Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice provides the first extended account of the concepts and history of unnatural narrative. In this book, Brian Richardson, founder of unnatural narrative studies, offers a theoretical model that can encompass antirealist and antimimetic works from Aristophanes to postmodernism. Unnatural Narrative begins with a sustained critique of contemporary narratology, diagnosing its mimetic bias and establishing the need for a more comprehensive account. This new approach results in original theoretical insights into the basic elements of story, such as beginnings, sequencing, temporality, endings, and narrative itself. Applying these theoretical insights, Richardson also provides a compelling alternative view of the history of narrative. He traces a genealogy of unnatural narratives from ancient Greek and Sanskrit works through medieval and renaissance fiction to eighteenth-century and romantic fiction. The study continues through the twentieth century, discussing the unnatural elements of Ulysses and other early twentieth-century texts, and engages with contemporary fiction by offering an alternative account of postmodernism. Unnatural Narrative makes an essential intervention in narrative theory and an important contribution to the history of the novel.

Unnatural Narrative

Unnatural Narrative
Author: Jan Alber
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0803278683

A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today’s world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others. Unnatural Narrative looks at the startling and persistent presence of the impossible or “the unnatural” throughout British and American literary history. Layering the lenses of cognitive narratology, frame theory, and possible-worlds theory, Unnatural Narrative offers a rigorous and engaging new characterization of the unnatural and what it yields for individual readers as well as literary culture. Jan Alber demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena become conventional in readers’ minds, altogether expanding our sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of narrative engagement.

Unnatural Narratology

Unnatural Narratology
Author: Jan Alber
Publisher: Theory Interpretation Narrativ
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814214190

Provides extensions and reconceptions of unnatural narratology, and intervenes in major debates in narratology, critical theory, and narrative analysis.

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural
Author: Astrid Ensslin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814257852

Refines, critiques, and expands unnatural, cognitive, and transmedial narratology by looking at digital-born fictions.

Unnatural Narrative Across Borders

Unnatural Narrative Across Borders
Author: BIWU. SHANG
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2021-06-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9781032034164

This book actively engages with current discussion of narratology, and unnatural narrative theory in particular. Unsatisfied with the hegemony of European and Anglo-American narrative theory, it calls for a transnational and comparative turn in unnatural narrative theory, the purpose of which is to draw readers' attention to those periphery and marginalized narratives produced in places other than England and America. It places equal weight on theoretical exploration and critical practice. The book, in addition to offering a detailed account of current scholarship of unnatural narratology, examines its core issues and critical debates as well as outlining a set of directions for its future development. To present a counterpart of Western unnatural narrative studies, this book specifically takes a close look at the experimental narratives in China and Iraq either synchronically or diachronically. In doing so, it aims, on the one hand, to show how the unnatural narratives are written and to be explained differently from those Western unnatural narrative works, and on the other hand, to use the particular cases to challenge the existing narratological framework so as to further enrich and supplement it. The book will be useful and inspiring to those scholars working in such broad fields as narrative theory, literary criticism, cultural studies, semiotics, media studies, and comparative literature and world literature studies.

A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative

A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative
Author: Jan Alber
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814252543

Surveys many basic areas of narrative studies from an unnatural perspective: story, time, space, voice, minds, narrative levels, realism, nonfiction, hyperfiction, and narrative poetry.

Beyond Classical Narration

Beyond Classical Narration
Author: Jan Alber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2014-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110353245

This collection of essays looks at two important manifestations of postclassical narratology, namely transmedial narratology on the one hand, and unnatural narratology on the other. The articles deal with films, graphic novels, computer games, web series, the performing arts, journalism, reality games, music, musicals, and the representation of impossibilities. The essays demonstrate how new media and genres as well as unnatural narratives challenge classical forms of narration in ways that call for the development of analytical tools and modelling systems that move beyond classical structuralist narratology. The articles thus contribute to the further development of both transmedial and unnatural narrative theory, two of the most important manifestations of postclassical narratology.

Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction

Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction
Author: Per Krogh Hansen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2011-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110268647

From its beginnings narratology has incorporated a communicative model of literary narratives, considering these as simulations of natural, oral acts of communication. This approach, however, has had some problems with accounting for the strangeness and anomalies of modern and postmodern narratives. As many skeptics have shown, not even classical realism conforms to the standard set by oral or ‘natural’ storytelling. Thus, an urge to confront narratology with the difficult task of reconsidering a most basic premise in its theoretical and analytical endeavors has, for some time, been undeniable. During the 2000s, Nordic narratologists have been among the most active and insistent critics of the communicative model. They share a marked skepticism towards the idea of using ‘natural’ narratives as a model for understanding and interpreting all kinds of narratives, and for all of them, the distinction of fiction is of vital importance. This anthology presents a collection of new articles that deal with strange narratives, narratives of the strange, or, more generally, with the strangeness of fiction, and even with some strange aspects of narratology.

Contemporary Native Fiction

Contemporary Native Fiction
Author: James Donahue
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429589263

Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance analyzes paradigmatic works of contemporary Native American/First Nations literary fiction using the tools of narrative theory. Each chapter is read through the lens of a narrative theory – structuralist narratology, feminist narratology, rhetorical narratology, and unnatural narratology – in order to demonstrate how the formal structure of these narratives engage the political issues raised in the text. Additionally, each chapter shows how the inclusion of Native American/First Nations-authored narratives productively advance the theoretical work project of those narrative theories. This book offers a broad survey of possible means by which narrative theory and critical race theories can productively work together and is key reading for students and researchers working in this area.