Volume 7, Issue 1

Ruth Finnegan FBA OBE (1933, Derry, Northern Ireland) took a DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford, then joined the Open University of which she is now an Emeritus Professor. Her publications include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977), The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (1989), and Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation (2011). Ruth Finnegan was interviewed by Sarali Gintsburg (ICS, University of Navarra) and Luis Galván Moreno (University of Navarra) on the occasion of an online lecture delivered at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra. In this trialogue-like interview, Ruth tells about the childhood experiences that were decisive for her interest in orality and storytelling, about her education and training as a Classicist in Oxford, the beginnings of her fieldwork in Africa among the Limba of Sierra Leone, and her recent activity as a novelist. She stresses the importance of voice, of its physical, bodily dimensions, its pitch and cadence; and then affirms the essential role of audience in communication. The discussion then touches upon several features of African languages, classical Arabic and Greek, and authoritative texts of Western culture, from Homer and the Bible to the 19th century novel. Through discussing her childhood memories, her assessment of the development and challenges of anthropology, and her views on the digital transformation of the world, Ruth concludes that the notion of narrative, communication, and multimodality are inseparably linked.

J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello consists of eight “lessons,” which in their turn play host to seven lectures as given either by Coetzee himself or his fictional doppelganger. When a fiction consists of lessons that embed lectures, the latter are delivered simultaneously to the present direct addressees and to absent indirect ones. Both Costello and Coetzee refuse to accept the consensual illusion of their lecture halls by preferring to address a scattered and heterogeneous readership. Their lectures break the realist illusion by drawing attention to their unreliable performers who cannot act as unbiased agents of commonality. The best way to provoke dissent is to put emphasis on the consensual reality’s discarded “real,” such as violated children, exterminated peoples, or suffering animals. By responding to its call from an ever-new point of view and establishing a migrating point of view, Costello and Coetzee untiringly distance themselves from the artifice of reality that surrounds them.

The article reconstructs the theory of political storytelling as outlined by political strategist Mark McKinnon. Stories that conform to this theory feature a suspense structure, and as such they invoke hope and fear in recipients, thereby instilling pro- or contra-attitudes. This is potentially problematic in four respects: Political storytelling (1) can be used to induce attitude-change without a rational foundation, thereby infringing on the receiver’s right to epistemic self-determination; (2) political storytelling may involve a misrepresentation of the teller’s communicative intentions, thereby disclosing the truth about them in a way that is potentially harmful to society; (3) by expressing rather than stating crucial elements of his or her “message,” the political storyteller may immunize him- or herself from critique and mask the true content of the message; (4) by attempting to influence recipients’ preferences, the political storyteller does not conform to some fundamental principle of representative democracy.

Over the years, narratologists have established a unitary view of narrative structure based on the principles of Aristotle’s Poetics . I propose in this essay to describe the general features of an alternative epistemological framework based on a renewed interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy . Through this analysis, I wish to show how the adoption of the Aristotelian model as a framework for narratological research could have led to neglecting certain fundamental aspects of narrativity that the adoption of a Nietzschean perspective, conversely, would highlight. In particular, I want to emphasize that the abandonment of the Aristotelian perspective in favor of a Nietzschean approach can be extremely useful in order to highlight the über-natural character of so-called “unnatural narratives”. I will test my hypotheses through the analysis of David Foster Wallace’s short story “Mister Squishy” (2004), which represents an emblematic case of “Nietzschean narrative”.

This article introduces an experimental mode of contemporary writing and bookmaking that I call multimodal book-archives , an emergent mode of contemporary literature that constructs narratives and textual sequences through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and other artifacts. In multimodal book-archives the book-object is presented as a container designed to preserve and transmit textual artifacts. In this article, I examine Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) as a case study in archival poetics, exemplifying the “archival turn” in contemporary literature. My analysis draws attention to how writing, subjectivity, knowledge, history, and memory in the digital age are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces, demonstrating how Nox functions not only as an instrument of psychological rejuvenation, but as an aesthetic instrument for documenting, ordering, listing, and juxtaposing disparate bits of information and memory into cathartic self-knowledge. Carson’s archival poetics is deeply personal, laden with private symbols and metaphors that readers are asked to collocate, cross-reference, and translate as part of the archival reading process. If grief is a kind of chaos, then Carson’s archival poetics instrumentalizes the book as a tool for ordering that chaos into something manageable, useful, even beautiful.

In the Wounded Storyteller , Arthur Frank proposed three types of narrative told by people attempting to reclaim their voice and the body made alien by illness – restitution, quest, and chaos. Restitution narrative has dominated media; in it, the patient simply experiences the disease and is presented passively, and the medical community is presented as having agency. In quest narrative, the experiencer becomes their own hero; their suffering brings knowledge which is then shared with the audience who bears witness and is charged with learning the lesson the experience conveys. In quest narrative, while speakers have agency that they are often robbed of in the restitution narrative, they are saddled with the imperative to inspire others. This makes the narrator a hero, but we need to ask, where does the imperative come from that demands that the narrator become a hero and an example for others? If that imperative comes from the audience and market demands, we need to recognize how they are dictating the manner in which stories are told, determining which are selected by publishers and media venues to be disseminated. The third type, the chaos narrative, is rarely encountered by audiences because the chaos narrative is usually erased. This “anti-narrative” can only be lived and cannot be told. The individual living with chronic physical or mental illness or a disability, who cannot be stoic and turn their story into a quest narrative, is rendered mute. Since restitution narrative is also unavailable to these individuals, their stories are left unspoken or unwritten. Their stories have largely been controlled by external agents. Failure to meet normate expectations has meant rejection. How prescriptive norms arose that delegitimatized the authority of chaos narrative must be understood if authentic chaos narrative is to be spoken and written.

Against the backdrop of sudden shifts in global political and historical climate, our century has witnessed a convergence of turns in humanities, including the nonhuman turn and the historical turn. Ian McEwan’s latest novella, The Cockroach , is a just work along this line. Through the use of unnatural narratives within realistic context, McEwan presents readers with a world that is both strange and recognisable. By examining the unnatural narrative strategies, including the deployment of nonhuman character and omniscient narrator, McEwan expresses concerns for the future of humanity and fear for social and cultural parochialism, populism and anti-cosmopolitanism.