Volume 6, Issue 2

Svend Erik Larsen is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a member of Academia Europaea. He has authored more than 10 books and 400 articles. His latest works include journal articles, ‘Australia between White Australia and Multiculturalism: A World Literature Perspective’ (2017), ‘Migration and Translation in a World Literature Perspective’ (2017), ‘World Literature in an Extended Media Landscape’ (2017), Yingyong Fuhaoxue (2018) and the monograph Literature and the Experience of Globalization: Texts without Borders (2017), translated as Wu bianjie wenben: wenxue yu quanqiuhua (2020). Professor Larsen was interviewed by Doctor Li Shuling while he was in China to give a series of lectures on literature and globalisation. Speaking about the problems in the current research on literature and globalisation, Professor Larsen suggests viewing globalisation as a cultural process and to reread literary works from both historical and global perspectives. This implies studying literature and world literature framed against the concrete everyday experience of globalisation in highly developed societies as well as in poor marginalised regions. He expounds the focal points of literary studies in globalised conditions, the dynamic relationship between local literature and world literature, the challenges and opportunities before minor literature and micro literature today, and the path for local literature to become global. He believes that world literature will help democratise the study of literature in global conditions.

Taking Nabokov’s Pale Fire as its tutor text, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that narrative functions as a complex or dynamic system. Due to the novel’s nonlinear and multiply configured format, a series of dissipative structures is provoked whereby states near equilibrium, on reaching states far from equilibrium under the weight of multiple causality, putting the system “beyond the threshold of stability” and “at the edge of chaos,” perpetually self-organize. Taking a cue from nonequilibrium thermodynamics, instabilities, it is argued, are inherent to narrative discourse. This calls into question the pertinence of the logic of linearity (“event A causes event B”) as well as the scope of such postulates as the isomorphic relation between sequence and narrative as a whole, a postulate that frames narrative as a closed system following the principle of conservation of energy in classical mechanics. As the poem “Pale Fire” in Nabokov’s novel advances linearly, it is constantly disrupted by the “Commentary” which is related to the poem only tangentially, each text fragmenting the other and self-organizing into new meanings. The effect is to render salient in narrative discourse the complexity science principles (in addition to those mentioned above) of irreversibility (the “arrow of time”) vs. reversibility, sensitivity to initial conditions, negative vs. positive feedback and the symmetry-breaking effects of bifurcation. The manifestation of these principles in Nabokov’s novel raises fundamental questions about the structuring of narrative, but also about the conceptual framework through which narrative at large might be approached.

Drawing on Janet Murray (1997), Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2004), and other previous proposals, this article conceptualizes player agency as the possibility space for “meaningful” choice expressed via player action that translates into avatar action, afforded and constrained by a videogame’s design. It further distinguishes between four core dimensions of agency thus conceptualized: First, spatial-explorative agency is afforded by those elements of a videogame’s design that determine the player’s ability to navigate and traverse the game spaces via their avatar. Second, temporal-ergodic agency is afforded by those elements of a videogame’s design that determine the player’s options for interacting with the videogame as a temporal system. Third, configurative-constructive agency is afforded by those elements of a videogame’s design that allow the player to configure their avatar and/or (re)construct the game spaces. Fourth, narrative-dramatic agency is afforded by those elements of a videogame’s design that determine the player’s “meaningful” impact on the unfolding story. The article then moves on to analyze two case studies of independently developed videogames: ZA/UM’s role-playing game Disco Elysium (2019), whose complex nonlinear narrative structure primarily affords configurative and narrative agency, and System Era Softworks’s sandbox adventure game Astroneer (2019), whose procedurally generated game spaces and “open” game mechanics primarily afford explorative, constructive, and dramatic agency.

Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu pave the way, in Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative (2016), to think of space in narrative as well as narrative in space. I steer their approach through nonhuman space by examining a narrative traversal of “the mesh,” which is Timothy Morton’s spatial metaphor for human and nonhuman interconnection. “A narrative traversal of the mesh” indicates two distinct aspects of narrative motion, which can be thought of as the motion that occurs within a narrative’s fictional spaces (internal), and as the movement of a narrative through the non-fictional spaces of the mesh (external). A narrative’s internal and external motions suggest that a narrative text is itself an enmeshed pocket of nonhuman space that emulates the meshiness of the space that envelops it. The outcome of each “narrative traversal” is that the text purports to become the mesh, but this outcome registers on two scales – that of the storyworld containing a fictional mesh (the internal scale), and that of the actual, non-fictional mesh containing the storyworld (the external scale). Remarkably, each type of traversal relies on and influences the other, so that the tandem dynamism that obtains between them emerges as my object of inquiry more so than either of them individually. Since a narrative’s spatial situation is precisely that of one nonhuman space within the larger mesh, my reading of Lucy Corin’s short story, “Eyes of Dogs,” engages ultimately with the scalar discrepancy between text and world and concludes that narrative may serve as an extramental shelter from correlationism.

This article discusses the first season of the television series Russian Doll (2019–), analyzing its time-loop structure through a narratological lens with focus on the significance of its setting to the narrative’s overall message on social connection in the city. The narrative’s chronotope of urban space and repetitive temporality works to reflect the internal struggles of its two protagonists (Natasha Lyonne and Charlie Barnett), but also a contemporary collective trauma and inability to imagine a different future – a narrative mode that Gomel and Karti Shemtov (2018) term “limbotopia”. However, Russian Doll is ultimately optimistic, allowing its protagonists to break out of their limbotopic time loops and move towards a transformative conclusion of regained hope for the future. The narrative device of the time loop pushes the characters to immerse themselves in their space: joining other people in the city and creating a community.

In the midst of the age of memoir, where the demarcation between public discourse and private lives has been eroded, a number of life-writing genres figure prominently as identity narratives. Specifically, illness narratives proliferate in both digital and non-digital forms, thus becoming powerful social and cultural forms to understand illness today. This article aims to analyze how online forms are bringing relevant changes both to the genre and to the actual communication of cancer experience. Nancy K. Miller and Susan Gubar choose different forms (visual diary and blog, respectively) to help readers “acknowledge the place of cancer in the world”. Having lived in cancerland for a while, both reject widespread stereotypes about illness, such as being a cancer survivor, the role of the good patient or the need to reject negative emotions such as anger, fear or sadness. Specifically, I will use the concept of automediality in order to explore how subjectivity is constructed in their use of images and new media. This concept may help us further explore the ways in which online forms offer new ways of self-representation and mediation between technology and subjectivities.

Plots have been described as having shapes based on the changes in tension that occur across a story. We present here a model of plot shape that is predicated on the alternating rises and falls in the protagonist’s emotional state. The basic tenet of the model is that, once the emotional valence of the beginning and ending of a story has been specified, then the internal phases of the story are constrained to connect these endpoints by oscillating between emotional rises and falls in a wavelike manner. This makes plot structure akin to a musical resonator – such as a flute – which can only conduct sound waves of certain discrete shapes depending on the structure of the tube’s endpoints. Using this metaphor, we describe four fundamental plot-shapes based on a 2 x 2 crossing of the emotional valence of a story’s beginning (happy beginning vs. sad beginning) and ending (happy ending vs. sad ending).