Volume 5, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Sameness and Difference in Narratology / Guest Editors: Greger Andersson, Per Klingberg and Tommy Sandberg

In the summer of 2018, James Phelan co-organized the Summer Seminar on Narratology on behalf of Project Narrative at Ohio State University, in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the journal Frontiers of Narrative Studies . During this period, Shang Biwu, the editor of Frontiers of Narrative Studies, had a conversation with Phelan, who talked about important issues such as rhetorical poetics, fictionality, and narrative communication.

This article aims to characterize a commonly misunderstood and neglected critique of narratology and insists that the critique could advance the narratological discussions if taken more seriously. I describe the notions of three individual critics and one group of critics and their suggested alternatives to what they hold to be the dominating description of narrative fiction in narratology. In turn, I take up Sylvie Patron’s linguistic approach, Lars-Åke Skalin’s aesthetic approach, and Richard Walsh’s pragmatic approach, as well as unnatural narratology (which is less radical), and suggest that they have a Difference approach to narrative fiction. The critique is contrasted with what I refer to as a Sameness approach, guiding the dominating description of narrative fiction in narratology. The Sameness approach relates novels and short stories to a notion of a default mode of “narrative” which is based on situated speech about something that has happened. This is, according to the critics, a mistake. The main thrust of the critics, although with some exceptions, is instead that narrative fiction needs to be approached as sui generis in order to be described effectively. Yet how this should be done is still open for debate.

This paper is a critique of narratology’s generality thesis and especially focused on a corollary of that thesis, the “sameness premise”. It says that all objects designated by the noun “narrative”, whether actual, possible, or fictional, are defined by some basic intrinsic properties. This goes for ordinary informative telling of events as well as for literary art, such as novels and short stories. The latter assumption is rejected by me and theorists taking up a “difference premise” instead. Literary art should not be included within a general category of narrative. It would be more correct to regard it as sui generis , since it manifests a system quite different from and incompatible with narrative as this system is defined by standard narratology. For example, ordinary narrative accounts display logically a two-place relation between the denoting signs and the denoted contents (events); while the artistic representations produced by literary art and other art-forms do not denote anything outside themselves– the relation between signs and content is one-place. I discuss this theoretic problem from two sources: modern narratology in conflict with artistic/aesthetic theory and the mimesis-debate in Greek antiquity between Plato and Aristotle, where Plato is advocating a sameness and Aristotle a difference premise.

Three claims are advocated in this article. Firstly, the article suggests that there is no relevant “sameness approach,” which would advise reading fiction and non-fiction similarly. Secondly, it argues that both fiction and non-fiction exhibit multiple functions and cannot be reduced to the binary setting of informing or entertaining. Thirdly, it suggests that the continuity thesis does not imply sameness. By applying the fundamental logical distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions, one can accept major similarities between the resources of reading fiction and non-fiction without ever presuming their sameness. These claims are considered by first revisiting the histories of narratology and the narrative social research and then discussing M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic-functional language theory.

This article analyses two major problems in the dichotomous framing of the question of whether narratives in fiction and “real life” are the same or different. The dichotomy prevents us from seeing, first, that there are both crucial similarities and differences between them and, second, that there are important similarities between variants of the “similarity approach” and the “difference approach”, both of which tend to rely on ahistorical, universalizing and empiricist-positivistic assumptions concerning factuality, raw experience and the non-referentiality of narrative fiction. The article presents as an alternative to both approaches narrative hermeneutics, which sees all narratives as culturally mediated and historically changing interpretative practices but approaches literary narratives as specific modes of making sense of the world – as ones that have truth-value on a different level than non-literary narratives. Narrative hermeneutics shares with (at least some forms of) unnatural narratology and the Örebro School a passion for the uniqueness of literary narratives, but it places the emphasis on the ability of literature to disclose the world to us in existentially charged ways that would not be otherwise culturally available – in ways that open up new possibilities of thought, action and affect.

Corporate communication has long been viewed through the lens of narrative and storytelling. Over time, a wide variety of conceptions have been developed in this field with respect to the special circumstances regarding the organisational communicative situation, which differs from other materialisations of narrative. In this article, however, we will explore the value of a more general approach, which pays attention to some of the recurring features of narrative across media and communicative situations. We will approach organisational narrative through common analytical and narratological concepts such as master narrative and counter-narrative, character, identification and actantial roles. Specifically, we investigate the organisational change in the Danish-owned multinational company Danfoss and examine how the materialisation of a founder narrative and a CEO master narrative each evoke different expectations, reactions and counter-narratives among the employees. Our empirical material consists of public communication in, from and around the organisation, and focus group interviews conducted at Danfoss China.

This paper argues that the examination of representational (formal) and semantic (referential) features of fictional and factual narratives would be incomplete without discussing specific pragmatic (communicative, performative, heuristic, and cognitive) functions of fiction – how and why “fictions” are used in literature and arts, but also in scientific, philosophical, and everyday discourses. On the one hand, the pragmatic approach blurs the fictional/ factual divide and identifies similarities in the use of fiction across disciplinary borders. On the other, as we argue, to avoid panfictionalism inherent in Vaihinger’s philosophy of “as if” the pragmatic act of boundary-crossing should be accompanied by mapping out new “cross-territorial” forms and distinctions. The paper revises and recasts the “cross-territorial” concept of scenario as a narrative structure and a type of fictional modeling and explores its semantic and pragmatic features.

The article discusses basic questions of narrative studies and definitions of narrative from a historical and conceptual perspective in order to map the terrain between different narratologies. The focus is placed on the question of how fiction interacts with other realms of our lives or, more specifically, how reading fiction both involves and affects our everyday meaning making operations. British horror writer Ramsey Campbell’s (b. 1946) short story “The Scar” (1967) will be used as a test case to show how both narrative modes of representation and the reader’s narrative sense making operations may travel between art and the everyday, from fiction to life and back. We argue that the cognitively inspired narrative studies need to pair up with linguistically oriented narratology to gain the necessary semiotic sensitivity to the forms and modes of narrative sense making. Narratology, in turn, needs to explore in detail what it is in the narrative form that enables it to function as a tool for reaching out and making sense of the unfamiliar. In our view, reading fictional narratives such as “The Scar” can help in learning and adopting linguistic resources and story patterns from fiction to our everyday sense making efforts.

The article seeks to explore sameness and difference in narrative theory by way of shifting the emphasis from the narratives themselves to the research acts we perform on narratives. It proposes a model for analyzing research acts. Applying this model to various research acts in narrative theory it shows that what it implies to look for sameness and difference within narratives will vary with the kind of research act in question. Highlighting the difference between research acts that make theoretical claims about groups of narrative and research acts that seeks to explore the meaning of individual narratives, the article is critically geared both towards theories that stress the fiction/non-fiction divide and towards theories that seek to formulate a narrative theory that encompasses narratives of all kinds. It argues for the place in narrative theory of interpretive working procedures that allow us to focus on the individual narrative, in order to grasp its potential contribution to the human conversation.