Volume 11, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Counter-narratives: A concept for narratology and the study of fiction?; Guest Editors: Per Krogh Hansen, Matti Hyvärinen and Sylvie Patron

W.J.T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry . He is an iconology and cultural studies expert, and his works include Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), Cloning Terror (2011) and the collection of influent essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005), awarded the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. This conversation with W.J.T. Mitchell focuses on the image media representation of the ongoing Israeli attacks in Gaza to develop an approach to the visual particularities of this event. This interview aims to gain insight from cultural and visual studies about how conflict is represented and perceived in society, the media or contemporary culture. In light of his previous works Cloning Terror and “Eyeless in Gaza,” we explore and contrast the role and typology of the actual spreading of war images and how these can affect and even turn our perception of the events.

This article studies the role of dialogues, oppositional positioning and small stories in telling counter-narratives in fiction. The countering itself is understood as intentional action and as a communicative strategy, which raises the question about how this resistance is expressed or signalled. To answer these questions, Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed are studied from the perspective of counter-narration, including the role of embedded dialogues and oppositional narrative positioning in marking counter-narratives. This approach, drawing on small stories research, foregrounds the counter-narratives’ capacity to resort to factuality within fiction, which addresses the narrative contests of social world in a different way than purely fictional discourse. The narratological study of counter-narratives encourages thus the integration of small stories research and positioning analyses more closely into the analytic repertoire of narratology.

This article discusses the capacity of climate fiction to construct master and counter-narratives as part of the logic of its storyworlds, and to use such narrative structures to both (1) represent climate change as a grand-scale problem requiring collective action and (2) function as environmentally oriented counter-narratives to currently dominant discourses. Drawing from both sociolinguistic and philosophical approaches to master or “grand” narratives, this two-pronged analytical approach is prompted by two thorny questions in environmental humanities and ecocritical literary studies. Firstly, can climate change, as a grand-scale complex system, be usefully represented in narrative form? Secondly, how can climate fiction contribute to public discourse around climate change, and to what effect? While these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered within the scope of one article, the inquiry they inform here yields new insight into how master and counter-narratives can be usefully employed, as narratological concepts, for investigating the expressive and persuasive potential of climate fiction. Regarded as literary devices, they can be fruitfully analyzed as tools for world-building that facilitate representing disruptive environmental and societal change as a matter of narrative contestation of the storyworld. Understood in terms of rhetoric, on the other hand, reading climate fiction as counter-narration provides a new framework for assessing the potential of such grand-scale storytelling as meaningful political action.

This article analyzes narrative contestation as presented in a novel’s storyworld and narration by an implied author orchestrating meanings in the novel. The aim is to test master and counter-narratives as a methodological concept in the analysis of literary fiction with its specific, multilayered communicative structure. Particularly the fiction-specific concept of implied author as the nexus for interpretation is discussed as a potential key for transporting the theory on master and counter narratives to the fictional realm. The analysis of the Finnish novel Röyhkeys ( Arrogance , 2017) by Ossi Nyman investigates how the theory of master and counter-narratives could be used to illuminate the values of the constructed implied author in literary fiction. The results contribute to the theoretical discussion on master and counter-narratives, particularly on the narrative means to indicate countering and to draw on master narratives. They also indicate the ways in which the communicative layers specific to fiction affect the analysis and interpretation of mastering and countering with narratives.

Under what conditions can works of fiction serve counter-narrative aims? If the reified claims of a national narrative purport to be grounded in fact, can they be successfully challenged or dismantled by works of admittedly imaginative status? This essay singles out five strategies that occur with particular frequency in novels and stories that manifestly push back against a national Israeli narrative: multiple and variable focalization, analepsis, doubling, chiastic or conversion plots, and negative or counterfactual plotting. I argue, however, that adherence to fact is the necessary grounding for realist fiction to succeed as counter-narrative, though speculative and counterfactual novels offer their own path toward upending a master text. Ultimately, of course, the success of counter-narrative fiction will depend on the response of its readers. The counter-narrativity of fiction might therefore be best understood as a reading effect rather than as a textual quality. The testimony of readers does, however, provide ample evidence that fiction has rich counter-narrative capabilities.

Philip Roth’s 2000 novel The Human Stain wades directly into the ethical and emotional complexities of “passing,” the attempt by light-skinned African Americans, particularly during the Jim Crow era of American history, to hide their identities in order to assimilate within mainstream White society. The novel presents the case of Professor Coleman Silk, a Black man passing as White, a hidden identity that is compounded by the particular “White” identity that Silk has adopted: Jewish. Roth has reduced the distance between his own (Jewish) experience and that of a passing African American by providing Silk with an adopted Jewish identity. Thus, Roth engages – in possibly irreconcilable ways – with two master-narratives. On the one hand, he counters a master-narrative of White supremacy by revealing the debilitating experience of hiddenness – both Black and, by implication, Jewish – as represented in one man. However, the novel also reinforces – without any implication of counter-narration – another master-narrative that presents “identity politics” primarily as a narrowminded attempt to police social discourse. These contradictory impulses ultimately muddle the rhetorical persuasiveness of a novel that both challenges one form of discriminatory discourse, while reinforcing another. While the fictional mode itself enables Roth to attempt to inhabit Coleman’s complex experience, the novel ultimately misses an opportunity to effectively challenge, through counter-narration, the ethical dimensions of that story.

Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is about the generation born between the early 1960s and 1980s, who grew up in the economic decline of the period as a generation who experienced “having less” (economically as well as in terms of future prospects) than their parents, the “baby boomer” generation. Told by the character Andy, representing the X generation’s worldview, it is a story of coming to terms with and laying distance to the pervasive materialism and societal expectations of contemporary culture – and of searching for one’s own identity. Here, storytelling is an important element. The novel has been read as illustrating the postmodern debates concerning the end of history, the death of the grand narratives of Western society, and the upcoming of their replacements, the little narratives. In this article, this perspective is developed by including the concept of “master and counter-narratives,” which are approached as social and cultural expressions of and reactions on the grand narratives governing society. The binary relationship between grand and little narratives clearly invites reflections on master and counter-narratives within postmodernity. In addition to interpreting Coupland’s novel, the purpose is to elucidate the connections between these two conceptual pairs (grand/little and master/counter) and propose ways they can be applied in literary research.

This article examines the forms taken by master- and counter-narratives in fiction through a case study of Ahmadou Kourouma’s first novel, Les soleils des indépendances (1968), published in English as The Suns of Independence in 1981. It focuses specifically on the third chapter, which contains the narrative of the genital excision and rape of Salimata, the main protagonist’s wife and second protagonist of the novel. As Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews remind us, “[c]ounter-narratives only make sense in relation to something else, that which they are countering” (2004: x). First, I shall examine the relation of countering in the chapter in question: it contrasts the glorious narrative of excision presented by Salimata’s mother with Salimata’s traumatic experience as recalled by the character herself. Then, I shall consider the master- and counter-narrative of excision from the perspective of narrativity and tellability: contrary to the mother’s master-narrative, which features a relatively low degree of narrativity and tellability, the counter-narrative centered on Salimata contains all the elements making it possible to speak of an individual, prototypical narrative, therefore a counter-narrative in the proper sense. Finally, I shall ask what fiction brings to counter-narrativity: in particular, a distinctive account of “what it is like” to undergo the operation of excision. Overall, the aim of the article is to show that the interpretive frame of master- and counter-narratives allows in some cases to shed new light on what is loosely called the “message” of a fictional narrative: in this case, the denunciation of traditional practices harmful to women, with the active or internalized participation of women themselves.

James Joyce’s Ulysses contains numerous counternarratives – ideological, cultural, and literary – and it brilliantly embodies those oppositions in the construction of the narrative itself. Ulysses enacts counternarratives of the traditional heroic epic, the Victorian novel, and mimetic narrative in general. Joyce removes all supernatural and implausible elements in his version of the epic form, thereby deflating its pretension and at the same time making it more realistic. His primary assault on Victorian conventions comes through representations of the human body that had been forbidden by Victorian statutes and sensibilities. Instead, Joyce creates an epic of the human body in Ulysses , representing all human bodily functions, including urinating, defecating, menstruating, masturbating, and nose-picking. Most egregiously, Joyce assaults the mimetic or realistic parameters of fiction in several ways: having perfected realistic representations of subvocal speech, he goes on to present impossible scenarios, as when one character remembers something perceived only by another. His intersecting counter narratives together reveal how much had been denied, ignored, or repressed by earlier forms of fictional representation, and thereby disclose the range, importance, and the power of counternarratives, which in turn can help us theorize them more effectively.