Volume 9, Issue 2 - Special Cluster: Uncertainty and the limits of narrative / Guest Editor: Marco Caracciolo

Mike Baynham is Emeritus Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). He was a Visiting Professor at York St John University (2020–2023) and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney (2019–2022). His recent publications include: Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach (with R. Breeze and S. Gintsburg, Bloomsbury, 2022) and Translation and Translanguaging (with T. K. Lee, Routledge, 2019). In retirement he has become engaged with writing and translating poetry and various types of performance. He translates from Spanish and Arabic mainly and has published translations of the poetry of the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika (Baynham 2020). He is currently translating the poetry of the Moroccan zajal poet Adil Latefi and the Kurdish Syrian poet Ceger Hillo. His translation of a poem by Adil was awarded second prize in the 2023 Stephen Spender Poetry Competition. He works as a poetry editor at The Other Side of Hope magazine, setting up a bilingual poetry section, working title Other Tongue / Mother Tongue . In this interview, Mike first elaborates on the reasons behind his involvement with narrative studies and how it became clear that the Labovian model of narrative is not always valid with all types of narrative data. He then reflects on the definition of narrative, the role space and time have in it and offers, as an example of non-linear narrative a “picaresque” story, in the Arab tradition of storytelling. In conclusion Mike offers his vision of the future of narrative studies.

Few measures are more emblematic of the desire to curb uncertainty than trigger warnings issued in the literary classroom. But do they establish more certainty? A growing body of empirical research is showing that trigger warnings are “functionally inert.” Furthermore, in some studies they have been shown to increase PTSD symptoms. Against this background, this paper takes the rise in demand for trigger warnings as a window into Gen Z reader’s relationship to uncertainty and directs attention to the problem that trigger warnings aim to mitigate but are failing to alleviate – an “epidemic of trauma” in the classroom, as identified by the US National Council of State Education Association (NCSEA). Illuminating trauma as a neglected issue in narrative studies, this paper takes an intersectionally situated perspective to reappraise general propositions about the Reader in order to move towards a trauma-informed approach to teaching narrative in the classroom.

The article explores the exhaustion of narrative as a cognitive instrument in trying to make sense of the “disconnective futures” of the Anthropocene and runaway technological imaginaries. Having its point of departure in the organic ties between narrative form and modern historical understanding, the article’s argument begins by sketching how the modern idea of a historical process entails constant crises of uncertainty, on the one hand, and functions simultaneously as the manager of the very crises it brings about, on the other. The means of this crisis management consists of crafting historical narratives which tame uncertainty and smooth ruptures in time into deeper continuities. It is this narrative crisis management of establishing connections between past, present, and futures, which breaks down when encountering the temporal disconnections of the Anthropocene and technological prospects. Narrative crisis management was created to attend to crises of uncertainty, but it is inadequate to cope with disconnective futures which are not merely uncertain, but unfathomable. Based on a distinction between uncertainty and unfathomability, the article argues that efforts to project narrative connections over disconnective futures produce cognitive failures, and concludes on a note of potential resolutions, hinting at the development of non-narrative and yet historically-minded cognitive instruments attuned to making sense of temporal disconnections.

The article calls for narratives that would accommodate the collision of two complex forms: climate change and social media. Science communication is currently on the lookout for personal stories that make climate change concrete and relatable for both decision-makers and the general public; similarly, climate activism on social media increasingly draws from personal experiences. Yet climate related stories going viral on social media often end up fostering political polarization and stark moral positioning instead of collective climate action. Building on Caroline Levine’s work on new formalism, I argue that this problem results from the collision between (1) climate change and (2) social media as complex forms that challenge the centrality of embodied experience and individual agency, and (3) the prototypical experiential story as a non-complex form. I analyze some viral climate change stories and focus particularly on experientiality, easily shareable masterplots, and moral positioning.

Nabokov and Sebald confronted the dark sides of their national histories and tried to exempt themselves from them. Nabokov liberated himself from its burden by escaping into levitation, whereas Sebald’s willing exposure to its consequences ended in paralysis. Nabokov appears in his Emigrants as the equivocal figure of the ‘butterfly man’ who is simultaneously mobilizing and immobilizing. This is like the Russian writer himself, who used to adopt butterflies’ metamorphoses as a writer and paralyze them as a lepidopterist. Contrary to him, Sebald was horrified by their immobilization and sincerely empathized with them. Eluding the detached position of an ultimate authority and making his author deeply attached to all kinds of ‘nocturnal’ creatures, he created an unreliable but indispensable narrative agency. If Nabokov was at pains to deaden the uneasy memories of his past in order to relieve the present of their contamination, Sebald took the other way around, adhering to the most painful of them in order to enlighten their subterranean existence. He was committed to manifest these deeply buried remnants via his protagonists and narrators, however this amounted to the expulsion of those among them that had no other choice but to stick to life in darkness.

In this paper, we specify features of a narrative that are responsible for its suspensefulness. Taking Noël Carroll’s account of erotetic narrative as our point of departure, we argue that a narrative is experienced as suspenseful because it gives rise to so-called potentially inquiry terminating questions. Such questions suggest to readers that they are just about to get the information they are reading for. Due to this highly specific erotetic structure, suspenseful narratives trigger cognitive and emotional mechanisms that are associated with what has been called a “near miss” in studies on gambling behavior: a situation which suggests a player that she has almost achieved a favorable result. In spelling out the details of the theory, we propose both a causal explanation of narrative suspense and defining properties, such that instances of suspense can be distinguished from instances of other states of readerly excitement.