Volume 8, Issue 1

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he led the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” (2017–2022). His work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of several books including the most recently Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (2022) and Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (2022). In September 2021, Dr. Wang Hongri interviewed Caracciolo on Anthropocene literature and econarratology via e-mail. In this interview, Caracciolo sheds light on the use of such concepts as the Anthropocene, climate crisis and climate change fiction in literary studies. Further, he elaborates on the tardiness of narratological interests in environmental issues and narrative’s formal affordance to address the Anthropocene condition. After commenting on the relationship between New Formalism and the contextualist vein of contemporary narrative theory, Caracciolo identifies four future directions for the study of Anthropocene literature and econarratology.

Through a chronotopic reading of “How My Brother Leon Brought home a Wife” by Manuel E Arguilla, a famous short story in English included in textbooks and anthologies of Philippine literature published during the American colonial era, the role of the contextual “background” features of fiction are brought into the textual foreground in order to focus on their dynamic relations. This attention to the mutual constitution of the text and context which are conventionally understood to be exclusive if not exclusionary of each other is meant to show how, in fact, the spatio-temporal structuring and generic framing of the text highlight the role of the “aesthetic” (the “intrinsic” textual elements of artistic form) while also foregrounding the very “politics” of the story’s context (the “extrinsic” contextual reality of society out there). Indeed, as the paper argues through a broadly narratological close reading of “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife,” the story’s chronotope shows how text and context are mutually constitutive and inextricable spatio-temporal dimensions of the story embodying the story’s textual framing and structuring, marking its narratological significance, both aesthetically and politically against the larger backdrop of resistance movements during the American colonial period.

The past two decades witnessed an increasing interest in literary worldmaking. This paper begins with examining the current models of worldmaking, in particular, the model of the phenomenological, the constructive, the cognitive psychological, the media, the narratological, and the ethical. In doing so, it reveals their shared feature of the human-centred view and mimetic bias. Against the backdrop of the non-human turn in the 21st century, it questions the generally accepted assumption that “the representation of human experience is the central aim of narrative” (Fludernik 1996: 51) and gears scholarly attention to non-human agents in literature and their contribution to constructing the non-human world. Drawing on insights from unnatural narratology, it aims to go beyond the existing mimetic paradigm by proposing the unnatural ways of worldmaking. Taking cues of the narrative function of worldmaking and focusing on the non-human character in particular, it delves into three types of non-human worlds in Ian McEwan’s fiction, namely the world of a fetus in The Nutshell (2016), the world of a machine in Machines Like Me (2019), and the world of a metamorphosized being in The Cockroach (2019). Arguably, by projecting the non-human world and representing the non-human experience, unnatural narrative works invite readers to address such questions as what to do with non-human world, how it is made, and ultimately what it means to humans.

This essay reads the poetry of Ann Lauterbach, from the 1990 s to the present day, tracing the development of her central poetic concept of ‘the whole fragment’. Via close readings of exemplary works, the analysis is supported by her theoretical writings, essays and correspondence, and by archival material. The essay evidences ‘the whole fragment’ as a poetic methodology focused on flaws, ruptures, and transformations. It considers how loss and otherness catalyse the aporetic proclivity of Lauterbach’s poetry in the 1990 s, and analyses emergent formal ‘constellations’ and ‘reels’ as manifestations of ‘the whole fragment’. It then isolates an ethical turn for ‘the whole fragment’ in her poetry of the 2000 s, and traces its renewal through her most recent publications, up to 2018. Following this, it makes several critical postulations. Referencing concepts from Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, it analyses Lauterbach’s responses to 9/11 and the Other, and evaluates her ethical poetry of ‘disaster’. The essay’s conclusion distinguishes Lauterbach’s developments from contemporary practices of the ‘open’ text or ‘poethics’, in order to demonstrate the integrity, importance, and distinctiveness of her œuvre in contemporary American poetry.

The last three decades have seen a flourishing of theoretical discussions about the concept of literary authorship. This article is an attempt to scrutinise and engage with this thriving scene. Through a systematic review of conceptions of authorship in modern literary theories, I will outline historical shifts, disentangle current debates, and identify a range of approaches, with the aim of informing future studies of this concept. This article is divided into three parts. The first part offers a brief history of ideas of authorship in modern literary theories (ca. 1900 to the present). I trouble the narrative of the ‘death and resurrection of the author’ by showing that the concept of authorship has remained a constant concern, and by highlighting continuities between different theories. The second part identifies three main issues about the concept – agency/creativity, intention/authority, and self-presentation/self-construction. I illustrate how each of them has been addressed in recent discussions, focusing mainly on the last three decades, and point to potential directions for future research within each strand of debate. Finally, I provide a non-exhaustive typology of methodological approaches to the study of authorship. I will conclude with a brief consideration of the value of this concept for literary criticism.

Water Scott sets up the literary genre with his outstanding and genuine composition of twenty-seven historical novels. With unique and tactical narrative strategies, Scott successfully balances the real historical world and the fictional world in the stories. Scrutinizing from four aspects, namely plotting, narrative time, narrator and focalization, and characterization, the present paper will reveal how the history is told in a fictional world without losing the historicity and keeping the vividness at the same time. Taking the faithfulness to history as the major principle, Scott fabricates a fascinating fictional world embedded with his understanding and emotions of the past.