A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today's world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others. Unnatural Narrative looks at the startling and persistent presence of the impossible or "the unnatural" throughout British and American literary history. Layering the lenses of cognitive narratology, frame theory, and possible-worlds theory, Unnatural Narrative offers a rigorous and engaging new characterization of the unnatural and what it yields for individual readers as well as literary culture. Jan Alber demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena become conventional in readers' minds, altogether expanding our sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of narrative engagement.
“Computing Action” takes a new approach to the phenomenon of narrated action in literary texts. It begins with a survey of philosophical approaches to the concept of action, ranging from analytical to transcendental and finally constructivist definitions. This leads to the formulation of a new model of action, in which the core definitions developed in traditional structuralist narratology and Greimassian semiotics are reconceptualised in the light of constructivist theories. In the second part of the study, the combinatory model of action proposed is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided investigation of the action constructs logically implied by narrative texts. Two specialised literary computing tools were developed for the purposes of this investigation of textual data: EVENTPARSER, an interactive tool for parsing events in literary texts, and EPITEST, a tool for subjecting the mark-up files thus produced to a combinatory analysis of the episode and action constructs they contain. The third part of the book presents a case study of Goethe's “Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten”. Here, the practical application of theory and methodology eventually leads to a new interpretation of Goethe's famous Novellenzyklus as a systematic experiment in the narrative construction of action - an experiment intended to demonstrate not only Goethe's aesthetic principles, but also, and more fundamentally, his epistemological convictions.
It has become something of a cliché within the field of narratology to assert the commercial, aesthetic, and sociocultural relevance of narrative representations, but the fact remains that narratives are everywhere. Whenever we read a novel or a comic, watch a film or an episode of our favorite television series, or play the latest video game, we are likely to engage with narrative media. Similarly, the intermedial adaptations and transmedial entertainment franchises that have become increasingly visible during the past few decades are, at their core, narrative forms. Since a significant part of contemporary media culture is defined by the narratives we tell each other via various media, the media studies discipline needs a genuinely transmedial narratology. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture focuses on the intersubjective construction of storyworlds as well as on prototypical forms of narratorial and subjective representation. It provides not only a method for the analysis of salient transmedial strategies of narrative representation in contemporary films, comics, and video games but also a theoretical frame within which medium-specific approaches from literary and film narratology, from comics studies and game studies, and from various other strands of media and cultural studies may be employed to further our understanding of narratives across media. Jan-Noël Thon is a research associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He is the coeditor of a number of books on narrative and media studies, including From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative and Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Nebraska, 2014).
The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding mediaOCoeverything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video gamesOCois key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society. "Storyworlds across Media" explores how media, old and new, give birth to various types of storyworlds and provide different ways of experiencing them, inviting readers to join an ongoing theoretical conversation focused on the question: how can narratology achieve media-consciousness?a The first part of the volume critically assesses the cross- and transmedial validity of narratological concepts such as storyworld, narrator, representation of subjectivity, and fictionality. The second part deals with issues of multimodality and intermediality across media. The third part explores the relation between media convergence and transmedial storyworlds, examining emergent forms of storytelling based on multiple media platforms. Taken together, these essays build the foundation for a media-conscious narratology that acknowledges both similarities and differences in the ways media narrate. aa
“Computing Action” takes a new approach to the phenomenon of narrated action in literary texts. It begins with a survey of philosophical approaches to the concept of action, ranging from analytical to transcendental and finally constructivist definitions. This leads to the formulation of a new model of action, in which the core definitions developed in traditional structuralist narratology and Greimassian semiotics are reconceptualised in the light of constructivist theories. In the second part of the study, the combinatory model of action proposed is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided investigation of the action constructs logically implied by narrative texts. Two specialised literary computing tools were developed for the purposes of this investigation of textual data: EVENTPARSER, an interactive tool for parsing events in literary texts, and EPITEST, a tool for subjecting the mark-up files thus produced to a combinatory analysis of the episode and action constructs they contain. The third part of the book presents a case study of Goethe's “Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten”. Here, the practical application of theory and methodology eventually leads to a new interpretation of Goethe's famous Novellenzyklus as a systematic experiment in the narrative construction of action - an experiment intended to demonstrate not only Goethe's aesthetic principles, but also, and more fundamentally, his epistemological convictions.
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