Volume 4, Issue s1

The transmedial discussion in this article shows that the terms narrative mediation and representation should be carefully distinguished from fiction or fictionality . The constitutive use of ‘real’ (or factual) artifacts in performative media (i. e. media which present embodied events, such as theater or film) provides a good example for the necessity of this distinction. Frequently these artifacts serve the purpose of a fictional discourse and certain definitions of fictionality (cf. Walton 1990) can be said to be fulfilled. However, a real-world artifact can by no means become itself fictive, but is rather used to represent a fictive entity. By focusing on representation and mediation instead, it becomes possible to compare theater with other performative media in terms of narrative representation: even though it is sense-physiologically unmediated, the functions of narrative mediation (i. e. selecting, ordering, presenting, commenting; cf. e. g. Chatman 1990) apply. The article establishes a dynamic system of representation that can be used for the analysis of all kinds of multichannel narrative media and thus rests the ongoing scholarly discussions of transmedial narrative representation on a much sounder theoretical basis. It distinguishes representation clearly from fictionality, and highlights the significance of theater in this discussion.

This article focuses on the imitation of film form in cinematic novels and short stories on the level of narrative discourse and introduces the concept of ‘para-cinematic narrator’. The author compares the temporality expressed by verbal tenses in literature and the temporality expressed through film semiosis. The connection between film and literary fiction is explored in terms of foreground and background narrative style. It is argued that the articulation of narrative foreground and background – i. e. the “narrative relief” (Weinrich 1971) – in film form tends to favour the foreground style, and that such narrative relief is ‘flattened’ due to the “monstrative” quality (Gaudreault 2009) of the medium. This flattening is remediated in strongly cinematised fiction and conveyed through the use of verbal tenses. The imitation of montage and specific cinematic techniques is conceived, consequently, as a separate feature that can integrate into this remediated, para-cinematic temporality. Finally, the author recalls the concept of “mode” in genre theory (Fowler 2002), which describes a “distillation” of traits from one genre to another. With the category of cinematic mode the remediation of basic traits from film to literary fiction can be framed in terms of genre-related discourses.

Interactive digital narrative (IDN) is an umbrella term used to encompass the various formats of digital narrative such as hypertext fiction, transmedia stories, and video games. The study of IDNs transverses the disciplines of narratology, game studies, and media studies. The main question this article addresses is how does the digital medium affect narrative in cultural heritage websites? This question is examined by proposing a new communication model that considers the role of digital media — the Creator- Produser Transaction Model — and adapting existing “tools” of narrative analysis into a “narratological toolkit” for the study of non-fiction IDNs. The transaction between creators and produsers and how an IDN narratological toolkit can be applied are exemplified through the analysis of three cultural heritage websites: Open Monuments ( “Otwarte Zabytki”), Belgian Refugees of 1914–1919 , and Storymap .

Unacknowledged by its practitioners, narratology has often been revisionary rather than descriptive when categorizing narratives. This is because definitions, expert judgment and personal intuition , traditionally the main tools for categorization, are vulnerable to media blindness and to being theory loaded. I argue that to avoid revisionary accounts of ordinary everyday practices such as narrative or gameplay of which non-experts have a firm understanding, expert categorizations have to be tested against folk intuitions as they become apparent in ordinary language. Pictorial narrative in single pictures is introduced as a specific case of categorization dispute and an experiment laid out in which non-experts assess if different pictures tell stories. As the chosen pictures correspond to different criteria of narrative to varying degrees, the experiment also serves as an implicit test of these criteria. Its results confirm monochrony compatibilism, the position that single monochronic pictures can autonomously convey stories. While the pictures rated high in narrativity correspond to traditional criteria of narrative, I argue that the way in which these criteria are usually interpreted by narratologists is problematic because they exclude these pictures from the realm of narratives. It is argued that the way marginal phenomena are categorized is essential for a sound understanding of even the most paradigmatic objects of a domain because categorizations influence definitions and definitions ultimately guide interpretations.

Homunculi (1967) is the first short story collection by the Flemish-Belgian experimental writer Claude C. Krijgelmans. The stories challenge narrative conventions. The title story of the collection mainly experiments with formal conventions: it foregrounds rhythmic repetition and musicality, and deviates from grammatical rules. These features are conventionally associated with lyrical poetry, rather than with narrative texts. Moreover, the text thematises rituals, which hints at the presence of a ritualistic quality that is often linked with lyrical texts. This article focuses on the lyrical elements in “Homunculi” and associates them with the ritualistic. I define lyricality as a literary mode that consists of lyrical tendencies, which can be realised in different ways. The ritualistic quality associated with this mode can be defined as a recurrent combination of lyrical tendencies. The ritualistic involves both semantic and formal aspects. Semantically, it is characterised as an impersonal quality of language. Formally, the ritualistic is memorable, non-representational language. The focus on lyricality enables a working definition of the ritualistic. Approaching “Homunculi” with lyricality as an interpretative lens has theoretical as well as analytical advantages. First, it situates the prose text in a wider tradition of lyrical, ritualistic texts. Next, the focus on lyricality reveals new interpretative possibilities for “Homunculi”. Against that background, this paper demonstrates the need for a narratology that considers the interaction between narrativity and other modes, like lyricality.

In the early 1960 s Brion Gysin, while experimenting in various genres and media, “re-invented” the cut-up technique that first had appeared in the 1910-1920s in Dadaists art practices. The accidental selection of texts’ or visuals’ fragments and the randomness in their combination in cut-ups were aimed to represent multiple experiences occupying the human mind. Methodologically I draw upon “natural” narratology developed by Monika Fludernik, who redefines narrativity in terms of experientiality. Correspondingly, cut-up technique can be regarded as a means of representing human perception and other mental processes (unobservable directly), especially by mapping the simultaneity of external observations and internal reflections that exist in constant relationships between minds and their environments. The paper brings into correlation the enactivist idea of cognition without content, elaborated by Daniel D. Hutto and Eric Myin, with the idea that cut-up narratives in a sense also have no content. As there are no consistent and coherent story in cut-ups, there could be difficult for the reader to produce a clear mental representation of what is happening in the text. My paper proposes a new reading of texts that initially seem to be uncommunicative.

Considering that enacitivsm emerged in rebellion against the representativism of first-generation cognitive science, an enactivist approach to narrative, which after all does relate events, situations, people, necessitates a directly realistic (i. e. anti-representationalist) concept of perspective on literary objects. Ingarden’s description of the spatio-temporal properties of the cognizing of the literary work, in the process of which the reader transgresses the realm of signs (representation) toward embodied and culturally embedded cognition of objects and events in a presented world, may serve as a prototype for an enactive approach narrative, provided the theory in question is situated in its original context, for example that of Ingarden’s ongoing discussion with structuralism regarded at this juncture as a representationist stance. In the first step, I am referring to the philosophical tradition of direct realism, which was apparently invigorated by the theories of embodied and enactive cognition, to propose a way of conceiving first-person perspective on literary objects and events, first-person and temporal perspective on objects being the royal road to all sorts of enaction. In the second step, I am tackling the issue of point of view in East and Central European structuralism by recalling its most general context of the dialectical relationship between synchrony and diachrony. The interpretation of linguistic signs by the receiver is a space in which structuralism and Ingarden’s phenomenology concur as they share a similar model of receptive temporality, rooted in Husserl’s description of the inner consciousness of time and aiming to reduce the ambiguity of linguistic units and increase the predictability of meaning. In Ingarden, however, there is a threshold between the linguistic and the extralinguistic elements of the literary work, which are conceived in a directly realistic manner. I specifically recall the notion of “objectification,” which was suppressed by that of “concretization,” as a borderland between indirect (semiotic) and indirect (objectual and enactive) representation. In the conclusion, I point to the major differences between present-day cognitivist aesthetics and Ingarden’s approach, which was immersed in the culture of his time, and ask whether these differences impede us to achieve as interesting results as Ingarden’s.

Scientists and scholars in multiple fields have been discussing the current geological epoch under the heading of the “Anthropocene” – an era marked by the planetary impact of human activities (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The epistemological shift brought about by this notion exposes the latent anthropocentrism of narrative practices, raising a challenge taken up by narrative theorists such as Erin James (2015) and Alexa Weik von Mossner (2017) in the context of an “econarratology.” In this article, I examine the prime suspect for anthropocentrism in narrative – namely, the notion of character as intrinsically human-like. My point of departure is A. J. Greimas’s (1976) actantial model of narrative, which I revisit and revise in light of work in the field of ecolinguistics (Goatly 1996). I thus explore five strategies through which narrative may integrate nonhuman characters that challenge both anthropocentrism and the subject-object binary that anthropocentrism entails. I exemplify these strategies by discussing contemporary novels that deal with the Anthropocenic entanglement of humanity and the nonhuman world.

As proposed by Olson and Copland (2016), “the politics of form” should help us examine both the ways in which politics condition narrative form and the ways in which narrative forms, in turn, participate in their political contexts. Contextualist approaches in narratology have gained attention since the beginning of the 21st century, but theorists still struggle to determine how political discourses are relevant to narrative form. This article proposes that the modulations of narrative reliability known as “estranging narration” (Phelan 2007) and “discordant narration” (Cohn 2002) are especially dependent on the political discourses that make them possible. Both categories describe forms of narrative reliability based on biased judgment rather than misreported facts, but the use of political ideology in these approaches has not been sufficiently examined. This is evident in Albert Camus’ L’étranger (1942) [ The Stranger ], which actively uses the École d’Alger colonial discourse of the Méditerranée from contemporaneous French Algeria, to produce an ambivalent version of estranging and discordant narration. The politics of form, therefore, provides an opportunity to delve into and revise the concepts of estranging and discordant narration, which constitute a good starting point for narratologists’ efforts to elucidate both the uses of historical discourse in narrative poetics and the uses of narrative poetics for shaping political ideology.

This article explores the nexus between narrative and metaphor by examining a specific and widespread metaphor in the discourse on cancer, namely “the war against cancer”, and paying attention to the function it has in the narratives we tell about cancer – personally as well as culturally and politically. Of special interest is how this dominant metaphor has a negative consequence in relation to the seriously and incurably ill, who are necessarily positioned as ‘losers’. The concepts of master and counter-narrative are applied to describe this and show how the war metaphor can be generatively turned against itself and function as the basis for counter-narratives of being ill. In the final part of the article, attention is paid to Danish author Maria Gerhardt’s autofictional novel Transfervindue. Fortællinger om de raskes fejl (2017) [Transfer Window: Narratives about the flaws of the healthy] as an example of a productive extension of the war metaphor. The general aim is to argue that the ‘war against cancer’ metaphor is complex and simultaneously plays a positive and negative role in health discourse. On the one hand, it structures the general effort for treatment of and research on cancer. On the other hand, it positions the incurable as losers. It is, however, argued that we cannot eradicate this metaphor from language, and that we should instead find examples of extensions of the metaphor where e. g. ‘protection’, ‘peace-keeping’ and ‘exile’ are active.