Volume 7, Issue 2

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001), Avatars of Story (2006), Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 (2015), Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative (2016, with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu), and over 100 articles on narratology, media theory, and digital culture. In October 2021, Dr. Jiayi Chen interviewed Ryan by email about possible worlds narratology, narrative across media, and the recent development of narratology. During the discussion, Ryan elaborates on the productive ways transmedia narratology can complement the language-based enterprise of narrative theory, as well as its position in relation to other strands of narrative inquiry. To conclude, Ryan points out the recent trends that have been enriching and expanding the territory of narratology before mapping out some areas that merit greater attention and future investigation.

The essay traces the apparent influence of Emmanuel Levinas on several thinkers concerned in different ways with Anthropocene ethics. It postulates that an application of Levinas’s ideas to the involvement of the human and the non-human challenges and extends the limits of his thought, while considering the occasionally partial and even fundamentally distorting nature of some of these appropriations.

Edmund Wilson’s “The Scrolls from the Dead Sea,” published on the 6th of May, 1955 in The New Yorker , was one of the first pieces of journalism concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls and their discovery in the Judean desert in the late 1940 s. This study links the rhetoric within journalism on ancient manuscript finds to that which is found in travel narratives from the colonial era – a connection which emphasizes the rhetoric of protection and insertion of self in texts which invoke assumed authority in a situation of cultural importance.

Considering addiction to be the central concern of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), this article sees the human body as both a storytelling agent and a described object. It explores insatiable desire as essence of addiction, focusing on the interaction between characters’ bodies and their desires. This article seeks to further examine corporeal narrative techniques in the novel with a particular focus on the relationship between narrative bodies and time or space, the differential embodiments of bodies, and the text’s manipulation of the reader’s body. Adopting varied corporeal narrative techniques, Wallace warns readers against indulging one’s desire for addictive satisfaction – especially with regard to passive entertainment – and indicates the vulnerability of the human mind and body to desire. In this way, the reader not only observes the characters’ external actions and internal feelings under insatiable desire from a third-person perspective, but they also have the chance to feel similar desires within themselves.

Sidney Sheldon’s N othing Last Forever unfolds a mosaic of experiences encountered by medical professionals that normatively remains unheard in the cycle of diagnosing, treating, and caring for patients. The novel brings to light the human within the doctor that is consciously kept at bay to cope with professional demands. With the rise of narrative medicine, scholars such as Rita Charon have emphasized the importance of narratology to understand patients’ crises. However, narrative medicine has largely ignored the phenomenological crises and anxieties of medical professionals. Thus, the paper investigates how on the one hand the female agencies problematize the medical space, and on the other, how the agency embodied by the female doctor is constantly threatened and demeaned by the male gaze that primarily categorizes women as sexual objects and caregivers. This paper primarily inquires how the politics of gendered memory is dramatized and contested in Sidney Sheldon’s medical crime thriller Nothing Last Forever .

Tracking the major narratological trends that give treatment to Jane Austen’s narrators in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion , this paper at once seeks to consolidate a narratorial voice as distinct from an authorial voice in each work while simultaneously collapsing each of these narratorial voices into storyworld characters via metalepsis. This one-two punch of consolidation and collapse allows me to argue for the emergence of a “tangled indeterminacy” in Northanger Abbey , a discovery that leads to two original possibilities: either a second narratorial voice emerges toward the end of the novel, or the initial narratorial voice bifurcates, such that a part of her is left behind in the diegesis while another part of her retreats to the narratorial plane. In either case, any attempt to attribute “the wild imagination” of Northanger Abbey to a specific narratorial persona must account for one or both of these readings.