How do readers experience literary narrative? Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind, this book offers a principled account of the dynamics underlying readers' ...responses to narrative. Through its interdisciplinary approach,this study combines close readings of literary texts and theoretical discussion in ways that shed light on the deep connection between narrative, literary fiction, and human experience.
Drawing inspiration from discussions on the relationship between archaeology and video games (“archaeogaming”), this article argues that contemporary games address three central concepts of ...archaeological theory: the uncertain materiality of archaeological finds, the way in which caring for artifacts complicates a linear or chronological understanding of history, and the open-ended quality of archaeological interpretation. The “archaeogames” I examine—which include Heaven’s Vault (Inkle, 2019), Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019), The Forgotten City (Modern Storyteller, 2021), and Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022)—capture these concepts by implementing a variety of gameplay and narrative mechanics. In addition to embedding archaeological objects at the level of representation, these games turn archaeological theory into a gameplay practice—a process potentially leading to the emergence of collaborative and creative storytelling within what I call archaeological fandom.
A hierarchical model of human societies' relations with the
natural world is at the root of today's climate crisis;
Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is
instrumental in countering this ...ideology. Drawing inspiration from
Timothy Morton's concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the
human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco
Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel
and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel
the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.
How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions
of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does
it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes-from
contaminated landscapes to natural evolution-can become characters
in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising
awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters'
mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating
the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted
Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer,
Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary
debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how
stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate
and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully
illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple
levels.
A storyteller's craft can often be judged by how convincingly the narrative captures the identity and personality of its characters. In this book, the characters who take center stage are "strange" ...first-person narrators: they are fascinating because of how they are at odds with what the reader would wish or expect to hear-while remaining reassuringly familiar in voice, interactions, and conversations. Combining literary analysis with research in cognitive and social psychology, Marco Caracciolo focuses on readers' encounters with the "strange" narrators of ten contemporary novels, including Bret Easton Ellis'sAmerican Psycho, Haruki Murakami'sHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Mark Haddon'sThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Caracciolo explores readers' responses to narrators who suffer from neurocognitive or developmental disorders, who are mentally disturbed due to multiple personality disorder or psychopathy, whose consciousness is split between two parallel dimensions or is disembodied, who are animals, or who lose their sanity.A foray into current work on reception, reader-response, cognitive literary study, and narratology,Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fictionillustrates why any encounter with a fictional text is a complex negotiation of interlaced feelings, thoughts, experiences, and interpretations.
Recent debates about the Anthropocene have prompted a re-negotiation of the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman matter within a wide range of disciplines. This collection builds on ...the assumption that our understanding of the nonhuman world is bound up with the experience of space: thinking about and with nonhuman spaces destabilizes human-scale assumptions. Literary form affords this kind of nonanthropocentric experience; one role of the critic in the Anthropocene is to foreground the function of space and description in challenging the conventional link between narrative and human (inter)subjectivity. Bringing together New Formalism, ecocriticism, and narrative theory, the included essays demonstrate that literature can transgress the strong and long-established boundary of the human frame that literary and narrative scholarship clings to. The focus is firmly on the contemporary but with strategic samplings in earlier cultural texts (the American transcendentalists, modernist fiction) that anticipate present-day anxieties about the nonhuman, while at the same time offering important conceptual tools for working through them.
This open access book argues that storytelling is an important resource in coming to terms with the loss of the feeling of living a grounded existence where the future remains relatively stable and ...predictable. Faced with the specter of climate catastrophe, we lose confidence in the future—a well-documented response in the environmental movement, for example. Yet stories, and in particular sophisticated fictional stories, can help us negotiate that uncertainty: they offer affective and imaginative tools that channel the instability of our climate future and invite audiences to accept its fundamental uncertainty. In all, this book represents a serious contribution to the environmental humanities that brings a flexible formal approach to bear on central questions of our time. Its commentary on contemporary works of prose and digital narrative is an aid for navigating climate uncertainty and appreciating the more-than-human scale—but also the tragic ramifications—of the ecological crisis. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The European Research Council and the University of Ghent.
Leon Festinger’s account of cognitive dissonance, published in 1957, has become one of the most successful theories in the history of social psychology. I argue that Festinger’s framework—and the ...research it generated over the last sixty years—can shed light on key aspects of readers’ engagement with literary characters. Literature can invite the audience to vicariously experience characters’ dissonance through an empathetic mechanism, but it can also induce dissonant states in readers by encouraging them to take on attitudes and beliefs that are significantly different from their own. I suggest that there are two strategies—or patterns of reader-response—through which the audience can cope with the dissonance between their own worldview and the characters’: attitude change and imaginative resistance. In the first, readers adjust their own beliefs and values according to what they have experienced and learned in adopting characters’ perspectives. By contrast, in imaginative resistance readers’ worldview prevents them from establishing an empathetic bond with characters. I integrate these hypotheses into a model that builds on theoretical as well as empirical insights into reader-response.
Game scholars have discussed both the ways in which video games structurally differ from literary fiction and the ways in which they remediate motifs and narrative strategies from it. In this ...article, I reverse the direction of that exchange, arguing that video games are disclosing new perspectives on both literary writing and literary interpretation. My focus is on how literature can integrate ludic strategies on a formal level, rather than by merely thematizing games (as genre fiction does extensively). I thus discuss three formal devices—multimodality, present-tense narration, and loop-like repetitions—that evince considerable literary interest in gaming culture. Through these formal experimentations, literature participates in a media environment that is significantly shaped by games. I argue that this intermedial transfer also offers an opportunity for a literary scholarship to enrich its conceptual and interpretive toolbox through dialogue with both game studies and gaming culture.
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