Navigating–Making Sense–Interpreting (The Reader behind La Jalousie)

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Preface ix
4. PART I. The Still Waters of Narrative: The Boring and the Plotless
5. Conversational and Authorial Disclosure in the Dialogue Novel: The Case of The Friends of Eddie Coyle 3
6. Resistance to Plot and Uneven Narrativity: A Journey from “A Boring Story” to The Rings of Saturn 24
7. What Happens When Nothing Happens: Interpreting Narrative Technique in the Plotless Novels of Nicholson Baker 42
8. Events Can Be Quoted (and Words Need Not Be) 57
9. Pynchon’s Poetics of Boredom: Cognitive and Textual Aspects of Novelistic Dreariness 75
10. PART II. A Web of Sense: Interpreting the Disturbing and the Difficult
11. Toward a Zoonarratology: Storytelling and Species Difference in Animal Comics 93
12. Watching a Tree Grow: Terrence Malick’s The New World and the Nature of Cinema 120
13. Navigating–Making Sense–Interpreting (The Reader behind La Jalousie) 139
14. History Impossible: Narrating and Motivating the Past 153
15. Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic 174
16. The Imperfect Is Our Paradise: Intertextuality and Fragmentary Narration in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace 192
17. Fragile Narrative Situations: Conrad Compared to Sebald 211
18. PART III. Shadow of a Tail: Problems of Authorship
19. Name Change and Author Avatars in Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi 227
20. Stranger than Fiction, or, Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita: Real, Implied and Fictive Authorship 238
21. Translators, Scoundrels and Gentlemen of Honor: Problems of Nabokov’s Loyalty 254
22. Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry 276
23. A Shadow on the Marble 297
24. Index 321