Foreword: ‘Why Ambiguity and Narratology?’ (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ambiguous storytelling in three texts: unsettling the perception of reality
Text and Talk, 2016
Some texts offer to the reader/viewer ambiguity and in-betweenness and they effectively contradict reality within the world of the story and within the world of the reader/viewer. In this paper we look at three distinct fictitious texts as our case studies (Blow-Up [fiction film], Austerlitz [novel] and Mindgame [theatrical play]), which confuse the reader/viewer with their particular ways of contradicting reality. In other words, we elaborate texts in relation to their capacity to raise critical thinking through the working notions of ambiguity, in-betweenness and unreliability. We argue that our case studies not only surprise and disturb the reader/viewer with plot twists, reverse chronology, unreliable narrators, ambiguous perceptions of the protagonists and so on, but they also bring a critical eye to the dominant concepts and the working institutions of the society; and also to the dominant ways of perceiving reality. In other words, these texts through the use of all the above-mentioned literary devices in their storytelling enable the reader/viewer to think critically.
Narratology, 1996
'Narratology: An Introduction' provides an introduction and overview of Narratology, a rapidly growing field in the humanities. Literary narratologists have provided many key concepts and analytical tools which are widely used in the interdisciplinary analysis of such narrative features as plot, point of view, speech presentation, ideological perspective and interpretation. The introduction explains the central concepts of narratology, their historical development, and draws together contemporary trends from many different disciplines into common focus. It offers a compendium of the development of narratology from classical poetics to the present.
The Point of Narratology: Part 2
Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems
*The added number (part 2) after my title refers to the fact that 29 years ago, I published an article *with the same title: The Point of Narratology. Poetics Today 11(4), 727-753, 1990. The ongoing need *to make that point is the point of this article.
Interpretation: Its status as object or method of study in cognitive and unnatural narratology
Poetics Today (39 (3)), 2018
Narratology and literary studies have always had ambivalent attitudes toward interpretation. This article proposes that the recent divide between the research programs of cognitive and unnatural narratology is a new expression of a profound methodological schism. Reviewing the status of interpretation in cognitive and unnatural approaches to narrative, we contend that scholars in the cognitive camp have tended to treat interpretation as an object of study (i.e., investigating the interpretive process), while those in the unnatural field typically treat it as a method of study (i.e., practicing interpretation in the study of narratives). Relatedly, whereas cognitive narratology assumes continuity between the interpretive processes operative in narrative understanding and the rest of life, the unnatural approach emphasizes discontinuity between fiction (reading) and the everyday. To show how these different conceptual underpinnings feed into contrasting academic practices, we supplement this theoretical overview with a double case study of Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “ The Shadow” (“Skyggen”). Taking advantage of our diverse disciplinary backgrounds, we offer one “interpretation” from a cognitive perspective and one from an unnatural narratological perspective, followed by metaresponses to each other’s responses. By setting up a theoretical and methodological dialogue, we highlight the nature of the differences between the two approaches while also looking for possible sites of overlap and cooperation.
Narratology, a comparatively new discipline related to literary criticism or literary studies in general,, has been claimed to be scientific in its approach, but there are reasons to believe that it is not. The paper critiques Narratology from this angle.
Narrative forms of action and the dangers of ‘derivations’ in narratology
2016
This article attempts to define the form that action takes when it is the focus of narrative plot, in a manner that avoids certain detours in the interpretation of narrative phenomenon and its anthropological function. Two such detours are evoked at the outset. First, structuralist narratology has had a tendency to analyze the “actional” structures of the narrative fabula autonomously. This has led narratalogists to lose sight of the function that actions have in conversational, or oral narrative, and to generalize a theory of action from this partial view. Second, cognitive theorists, despite having decompartimentalized narrative structures, have generally based their work on a schematic model of intentional action that is too general and too simplistic to properly determine the function that narrated actions fulfill. The author highlights the ways that certain forms of narrated action produce suspense or curiosity when used in conversational narrative. Drawing attention to the fun...