University of Wuppertal
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Wirklichkeitserzählungen als narrative Netzwerke.: Polyphone Erzählprozesse im virtuellen Raum als gemeinschaftsbildende Erfahrungsbewältigung
Get PDFDuring the Covid-19 crisis, participatory, co-creative narrative projects emerged which tried to open spaces for coping with the experiences of the pandemic. Digital networked media offered a means not only to document and archive everyday stories, but also to create virtual communities. This article transfers concepts from narrative theory such as ‘polyphony’ and ‘networked narrative’ and applies them in analysing two paradigmatic projects: Corona Diaries, an audio-based database, and Corona Haikus, launched as a Facebook group for visual poetry. Though different as to their specific medial affordances, these projects reveal the potential of collective narrative processes to deal with otherwise ungraspable cataclysmic times
Molecular Mimicry, Realism, and the Collective Memory of Pandemics.: Narrative Strategies of COVID-19 Fiction
Get PDFFrom Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969) to Jim Shepard’s Phase Six (2021), contemporary pandemic fiction relies largely on narrative strategies of continuity and the familiar, including authenticity or “reality effects” (Roland Barthes), reliable narrators, focalizers with backgrounds in medicine or science, and a structural pattern of what Priscilla Wald has termed the “outbreak narrative.” This paper reads conventional narrative patterns of pandemic fiction figuratively as a form of “molecular mimicry,” akin to the biomedical strategy by which viruses override immune systems and gain access to the interior of cells. Like Trojan horses, I argue, frameworks of narrative reliability and authority tend to be more successful in wheeling in specific normative representations, which stabilize given hierarchies. By contrast, The Decameron Project (2020), a “collective narrative” of twenty-nine short stories written in response to the COVID-19 situation in 2020, exhibits a significant increase in narrative and cognitive uncertainty. My analysis of stories by David Mitchell, Liz Moore, Margaret Atwood, Charles Yu, and others traces various functions of unstable narration through multilayered realities, unreliability, intertextuality, and self-reflexiveness, ultimately uncovering what may be a literary analogy to mRNA vaccines. The Decameron Project, I argue, not only diagnoses a growing unease with discourses of tacit objectivity, but it marks an important contribution to the emerging cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic
At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Narratology.: Contemporary Irish Women Writing Men
Get PDFThe chapter reacts to this special issue’s leading question “Why narratology?” by reflecting on a narrative phenomenon that has been neglected by literary and cul¬tural criticism: that of ‘women writing men.’ A number of reasons for the seeming reluctance to approach this question, which suggests itself as a fruitful object of study for both narratologists and gender-oriented literary critics, are discussed. Arguing for an integration of narratological and gender-oriented approaches in the context of the ‘new formalist’ turn, the chapter charts narrative constructions of masculinity in recent novels by Irish women writers. This corpus is approached through a discourse- (rather than story-) oriented lens. Using the two currently dominant ways of ‘perspectivising’ fictional worlds, the chapter first concentrates on women writers’ novels that feature male first-person narrators and in doing so deconstruct and reconstruct prevalent masculinities (Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know, and Caoilinn Hughes’ The Wild Laughter). It then goes on to analyse heterodiegetic novels that integrate male and female perspectives via multiple focalisation and mark their male protagonists’ views, emotions, and actions as decisive for any renegotiation of the concept of the Irish family (Anne Enright’s The Green Road, Helen Cullen’s The Dazzling Truth, and Ruth Gilligan’s The Butchers)
Fictual Matters Narration as a Process of Relating in Mark Bowden’s Blackhawk Down (1997)
Get PDFMark Bowden’s hypertext Blackhawk Down (1997) is a paradigmatic example of literary journalism. In this essay, I shall demonstrate that the performative power of Bowden’s hypertext is erected upon a number of textual signals that can be rendered intelligible with the help of analytical tools provided by narratology. I seek to shed light on the genre- and media-specific structures that serve as ways of cultural worldmaking as well as the ethical and epistemological functions of narratological categories that Bowden uses in order to advance narration so that it becomes a process of relating. The most urgent need in the context of a Critical Ethical Narratology (CEN) is to find a way to talk about the formal properties of hybridized (fictual) genres and to combine this discussion with a consideration of their ideological and ethical implications. The analytical framework of CEN promises to give insights into literary journalism as a genre that is heavily involved in the representation, construction and dissemination of ethical values and norms
Beehive Narratology?: Why Narrative Research should not Ignore Complexity Theory
Get PDFMarina Grishakova / Maria Poulaki (Hg.) Narrative Complexity. Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution. Lincoln, NE 2019 (= Frontiers of Narrative Series
The Value of ‚Old’ Stories: A Response to Marco Caracciolo’s „Negotiating Stories in the Anthropocene“
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Romanliebhaber = bessere Menschen?: Hanna Meretoja fragt nach dem ethischen Potenzial narrativer Praktiken
Get PDFHanna Meretoja: The Ethics of Storytelling. Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. New York: Oxford University Press 2018 (= Explorations in Narrative Psychology). 352 S. GBP 62,00. ISBN 978-0-190-64936-
The Narrative Facilitation of Recovery.: The Application of Narrative Theories in a Group Therapy for Patients with Schizophrenia
Get PDFThe application of narrative theories in non-literary disciplines has become a popular practice in the last decades. Yet, narratological application in the fields of psychology and phenomenological psychiatry usually disregards the findings of postclassical theories of narrative. In this essay, we will present a trans-disciplinary method for a group therapy for persons with schizophrenia through combining the theories of narrative psychology, psychiatry, and postclassical narratology. The main techniques to be applied in the therapy concern personal narratives and everyday conversations, but we are also interested in narrative intelligence in general. In a cooperation between the Department of English and the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Szeged we have also carried out a pilot study. In this research, we see an opportunity to re-examine concerns of (cognitive) narratology such as the nature and functions of narrative in human cognition
Der Erzählsalon als Verfahren strategischen Erzählens: Konzeptionelle Voraussetzungen und empirische Gestalt am Beispiel des Projektes Lausitz an einen Tisch
Get PDFThe Story Telling Salon is a method that regularly brings together groups of people who, under the leadership of a moderator – the salonnière –, exchange stories about personal experiences in a social environment (an organization, a community etc.). In this way, the Story Telling Salon not only strives to generate meaningful collective narrations but also trust, collective identity and commitment in groups which suffer from social alienation. We show how the Story Telling Salon applies collective storytelling as a strategic means towards community building and the empowerment of people. This will be exemplified by the example of “Lusatia at one table” (Lausitz an einen Tisch) – a regional development project that aims at strengthening social cohesion and facilitating civic commitment in the disadvantaged rural region of Lusatia / Germany. The paper presents the empirical findings of a one-year observation of “Lusatia at one table”