Provided a little reaction in the comments on the blog to this piece on transmedia and the quest for unifying narrative as a motivating factor to consume more stories: https://narrativetheoryandnarratology.hcommons-staging.org/2020/12/06/narrative-universes/ Triggered by the authors positioning of “vulnerability”, the reaction calls for imagining…[Read more]

Morad Farhadpour’s description of understanding has wide application.
“Understanding is necessarily practical; its significance is only realised when it is put into practice or performed (like a play or a game).” The positioning has me thinking in a direction a bit orthogonal to translation about the possible relation of hermeneutics to ludology.…[Read more]

Interesting that Hamon crops up in this context. Mieke Bal goes on later in the book to acknowledge Hamon:

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An important book article by Hamon [Le personnel du roman] (1983), from which I have borrowed a great deal in this chapter, deals with characters. Hamon treats the most important aspects of the characters and places them in a…[Read more]

And now to add another arm to the spiral… I want to read those resources on the nature of history that José Angel posted (in anticipation?) https://narrativetheoryandnarratology.hcommons-staging.org/2020/09/25/telling-times/

An arm on the spiral … https://narrativetheoryandnarratology.hcommons-staging.org/2020/10/09/understanding-narratives/#comment-2465 and thanks to José Angel for sending me back to graduate school and the heady literary and philosophical concepts of possible and fictional worlds and their connection to the actual world.

Hints of a hermeneutical circle?

Marília Futre Pinheiro provides a good overview of the ancient Greek sources. She also touches upon modern narratology. I am particularly intrigued by the comparative possibilities in the mention of three tripartite models (Bal, Barthes and Genette) which Futre Pinheiro connects to Aristotle (see pages 23-24).

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These narrative levels…[Read more]

José Angel,

I am intrigued in this intro to narrative theory by the description of Genette on description and its relation to narration:

Genette argues that description is not opposed to narration in its representative technique, since it too must be submitted to the successivity of language. But the successive nature of the descriptive…[Read more]

Maj concludes by way of example: “Figuratively speaking, in contemporary fantasy or SF novel storyworld becomes prior to the storyline – it does not guide through the world (as the character in 18th century voyage imaginaire could have) or foretell the story (as appendices in early fantastic novels usually did) but provides the recipient with trans…[Read more]

Following the textual links in José Angel’s post, I came across this statement by Norman Holland in his reply to Joseph Carroll: “texts do not impose anything on readers. Readers construct texts.” This seems to suggest complete free play. As a reader resisting imposition, I suggest that texts propose and readers dispose — in the sense to incline…[Read more]

Raphaël Baroni concludes the survey:

[T]ellability could become a key concept for exploring the interface between life experience and its narrativisation, because it addresses directly the question of how and why some incidents become the object of a narration and others do not.

It is telling that the survey itself tells a tale. It is…

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Intrigued by Comuzzi’s championing the analogy between genre and gene and posted a reply that extends the analogy to gene splicing and cultural work … https://literarytheory.hcommons-staging.org/2020/08/16/lyric-poetry-as-a-narrative-speech-genre/

The concluding paragraph provides a rich selection of possible comparative studies of hybridity in genre. Beatriz Penas-Ibáñez writes:

Western narratives like Ulysses [Joyce], In Our Time [Hemingway], One Hundred Years of Solitude [García Márquez], The Garden of Eden [Hemingway], Speak Memory [Nabokov], or Malloy [Beckett], or Japanese ones lik…

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Early on in this interview in response to a question about ethnology, Lévi-Strauss responds: To critique is to attempt to analyze, to attempt to understand, to attempt to create linkages with other modes of living or modes of thinking. (critiquer c’est essayer d’analyser, c’est essayer de comprendre, c’est essayé de mettre en rapport avec d…[Read more]

José Angel, this note is tantalizing. I want to learn more about how Susan Horton’s book (Interpreting Interpreting) configures Jakobson’s communication model as a set of levels for interpretation. “The different levels of analysis make a particular detail appear as the embodiment of one or another of the six factors of linguistic communication…[Read more]

At 37:40 of the podcast “Narrative at 25” there is a small gem in this panel discussion of the history and aspirations of the journal Narrative

Gerald Prince:”Very often it is only like […] only ten lines in a piece that actually are portable. […] A little detail which is truly informative to a particular reader.”

BTW — little detail – the…[Read more]

I agree with your positioning of Gad Saad’s discourse. The interview took place in the context of the Sustainable Narratives conference organized by Vichaar Manthan which is devoted “To learn, live and share Hindu values in order to help build a better cohesive, yet plural British society.” Through Neeti Rao’s questions and remarks in her…[Read more]

Ironically, Gad Saad’s deployment of the metaphor of “ideas as pathogens” goes metastatic. A meta-discursive treatment and more nuanced approach can be found in the book by Peta Mitchell, Contagious Metaphor, an interdisciplinary study of the metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language. Other publications on contagion…[Read more]

At 48 minutes in, Daniel Ferrer proposes that the notion of implied author (from Wayne Booth) be set alongside a passage from Paul Valéry about how the author in the process of composing makes a series of choices out of an aleatory flow. Ferrer invites us to consider that the chance operations of reception are inscribed in the moment of genesis:…[Read more]