Volume 10, Issue 1

The essay demonstrates the relationship between specific figures of discourse dominant in particular novels and the thematic concerns or plot patterns of each individual novel. The figures discussed are (1) enthymeme, prominent in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and important also in Joyce’s Ulysses ; (2) hypallage, part of the rhetoric of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities , reflecting its plot pattern and its cluster of concerns; and (3) blazon, which helps to convey the implied author’s critique of the attitudes of the first-person narrator of Lolita .

A commonality among so many of Conrad’s narrators is their reluctance to reveal important information regarding the stories they tell. These narrators delay, obscure, or withhold, sometimes partly and sometimes entirely, crucial components to the tales they tell. This essay investigates why these narrators behave as they do. In some instances (as in Falk ), the narrator looks to recreate in his listeners (and the reader) his bewilderment as to Falk’s refusal to tow his ship and later to Falk’s “misfortune,” as Falk terms it. In other instances, such as Typhoon and Suspense , the narrator requires the reader to supply the missing information. On the other hand, in Nostromo , for example, the third-person narrator, despite knowing so very much, regularly relies on legend, hearsay, and other similar sources in narrating the novel, thereby questioning the idea of absolute knowledge, positing instead a contingent knowledge.

With the increasing proliferation of the internet, audience-authored online paratexts continue to gain significance in culture and in the communicative structures of narrative texts. This article takes a critical look at the ways in which Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext (1987) has been used in contemporary scholarship. The article offers a model of online paratexts based on an interdisciplinary understanding of paratextuality and internet-age culture. Ways in which paratexts become legitimate in online environments are considered through the analysis of HBO’s popular TV series Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Legitimation extends from production-authored paratexts to audience-authored paratexts, reflecting changes in the relationship between authors and readers typical to contemporary culture. Finally, the article introduces the concept of paratextual reauthoring , which refers to the practice of canonizing alternative interpretations of texts via the use of online paratexts.

This article presents a paradoxical narrative device that is controversially discussed in narratology. Since the introduction of metalepsis into narratology by Gérard Genette in the “Discours du récit” (1972) – “Tous ces jeux manifestent […] l’importance de la limite qu’ils s’ingénient à franchir au mépris de la vraisemblance, et qui est précisément la narration (ou la représentation) elle-même; frontière mouvante mais sacrée entre deux mondes: celui où l’on raconte, celui que l’on raconte” “All these games show […] the importance of the boundary that they try so hard to cross, in defiance of verisimilitude, and which is precisely narration (or representation) itself; a moving but sacred boundary between two worlds: the world in which someone tells, and the world that someone tells” (my translation).  – metalepsis was always modelled vertically. As early as 2005, Sabine Schlickers and Klaus Meyer-Minnemann proposed a horizontal modelling of this narrative device at a Paris conference on the metalepsis. In the following, I would like to take up this proposal once again, present the more recent criticism of this concept and then demonstrate the functioning of horizontal metalepsis using a series of examples from Argentinian literature and the visual arts.

This work begins with an exploration of various analytical techniques for discerning and describing details of vocal performance in the song “Episodes,” from Philadelphia Hip Hop group The Roots’ 1996 album, Illadelph Halflife . I pair this musical analysis with textual exegesis drawing on narratology and speech act theory. Reconciling the two analytical approaches, I conclude by suggesting a refreshed notion of affective realism in late twentieth-century Hip Hop, characterized by consistency between poetic, phonetic, illocutionary, and performative dynamics in rap verse.

Narrative experiencers frequently report broadly differing narrative responses. Literary scholarship customarily addresses those shared by communities of readers as pertaining to implied and rhetorical readers. However, empirical reader-response research shows that flesh-and-blood readers and audience members often show idiosyncratic narrative responses based on individual experience. Storyworld Possible Selves Theory (Martínez 2014. Storyworld possible selves and the phenomenon of narrative immersion: Testing a new theoretical construct. Narrative 22(1). 110–131, 2018. Storyworld possible selves . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) provides an analytical toolkit for the study of both culturally predictable and completely individual responses to narratives, drawing on the frameworks of cognitive narratology, cognitive linguistics, and social psychology. This study discusses the affordances and shortcomings of this framework when addressing the bearing of hegemonic cultural models on narrative response and introduces the concept of “secondary storyworld possible selves” to account for responses predictable in communities sharing non-hegemonic cultural models. This renders cultural (un)predictability as a graded category and facilitates its qualitative and quantitative exploration.

This study describes the narratives of innovation produced in a knowledge-based company, constructs them into core stories and develops a narrative framework suitable for researching the topic. The research data consisted of thematic interviews with 23 professionals from the Finnish technology company. Innovation stories were convoluted, identifying innovation-framing contexts that were related to ownership, drivers, continuity, decisions and values. Based on these narratives, the study generated the 4Co (context, content, conflict, and compromise) analytical framework suitable for examining narrative data in innovation research. The study also produced an ideal description of innovation as a simultaneously shared and personally meaningful evolutionary learning process that takes place in small steps and requires a balance of necessity and freedom as well as decision-making based on intuition and facts, producing human efficiency as a value for employees and the organisation. Based on the findings, scientific, methodological, and practical discussions are also presented.