Looking Through the Eyes of the Other: Sartrean Reader Consciousness

My title is frankly presumptuous.To imply that reflection on narrative in poetry begins here and now, with this essay, is to dismiss out of hand a huge body of precedent.Narrative theorists have been thinking deeply about poetic narratives since ancient times.Arguably, there would be no tradition of systematic reflection on narrative at all, at least not in the West, without the Homeric poems, which, from Plato on down to Genette and Sternberg and beyond, have continuously served as touchstones of narrative theory.Many important theoretical developments have hinged on analyses of poetic narratives; for instance, it would be hard to imagine Bakhtin finding his way to a theory of discourse in the novel without the example of Pushkin's Onegin.Nevertheless, presumptuous though it may be, my title does draw attention to a blind spot in contemporary narrative theory.We need to begin thinking about narrative in poetry--or perhaps to resume thinking about it-because we have not been doing so very much lately, and because, whenever we have done so, we have rarely thought about what differentiates narrative in poetry from narrative in other genres or media, namely its poetry component.Contemporary narrative theory is almost silent about poetry.In many classic contemporary monographs on narrative theory, in specialist journals such as the one you are now reading, at scholarly meetings such as the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, poetry is conspicuous by its near-absence.Even the indispensable poems, the ones that narrative theory seems unable to do without, tend to be treated as de facto prose fictions; the poetry drops out of the

Introduction Jared Gardner (bio) and David Herman (bio) This special issue assembles an international group of scholars to explore emerging connections between comics studies and narrative theory—two fields which, until the last five to ten years, have developed largely in parallel, without much cross-fertilization or even interaction. The signs of this new convergence of scholarly interests and research practices are unmistakable. Recent meetings of the Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the International Society for the Study of Narrative have increasingly featured papers and sessions on the intersections between scholarship on narrative and research on comics and graphic novels. Further, recent publications have featured narratologically oriented work by analysts of graphic narrative, including Jeanne Ewert's and Erin McGlothlin's path breaking studies of Art Spiegelman's Maus, Pascal Lefèvre's analysis of "Narration in Comics" in the inaugural issue of Image [&] Narrative, Teresa Bridgeman's work on bande dessinée, and Richard Walsh's discussion of "The Narrative Imagination across Media" in Modern Fiction Studies' special issue on "Graphic Narrative" (2006). In Francophone scholarship, there is a longstanding tradition of studying comics using semiotic concepts, which are part of the foundation for contemporary narratology. This tradition reached something of a culmination in Thierry Groensteen's recently translated monograph The System of Comics (discussed by Craig Fischer and Charles Hatfield in this issue). Yet for all of these incipient cross-disciplinary connections, the present issue is the first of its kind: a sustained, multi-author study organized around the question of how ideas from contemporary narrative theory can be brought to bear on graphic narratives, and how, reciprocally, the richness and complexity of narratives told in words and images might pose challenges to existing models of story. We use the term graphic narrative theory as a shorthand for the new, hybridized field of study in which questions of this kind are central, and which the essays gathered here collectively work to promote. In this introduction, we provide context for understanding the ongoing disciplinary reconfiguration—the continuing expansion of interest in storytelling via words and images—that has made this special [End Page 3] issue possible. Synopsizing the major lines of inquiry pursued by each contributor, we highlight questions that will require further investigation as comics scholars and narrative theorists work to open new avenues for exchange on graphic narrative theory. Our aim is to foster more dialogue of this sort, facilitating new ways of engaging with what has become, cross-culturally, one of the world's most vibrant and compelling forms of narrative practice. Graphic Narrative Theory's Two Trajectories of Development The study of graphic narratives and research on narrative theory: it seems like a natural fit! Aren't these two made for each other, as the specific case is made for the general category, the local practice for the broader protocols that enable and regulate it? In fact, the situation is more complicated, and characterizing the scope and aims of the present issue requires sketching out a brief history of the two fields at whose intersection graphic narrative theory has emerged. In both fields, longer trajectories of development have set the stage for the convergence of texts and traditions exemplified by the present issue. Scholars working in the field of narrative theory have come to recognize the need to diversify the corpus of narrative texts—the range of storytelling practices—on the basis of which they seek to develop accounts of what stories are, how they work, and what they can be used to do. To quote Gerald Prince, in his discussion of how a focus on female-authored texts might impact work in narratology, "it can be argued that a modification of the narratological corpus [e.g., an inclusion of more texts by women]…may effect the very models produced by narratology; and, should it turn out that such a change does not lead to an alteration of the models, the latter would be all the more credible, all the less open to negative criticism" (78). As part of this broader reassessment of the way theories of narrative are based on specific corpora of stories, and how the stories included therein...

toward private, subjective desire. The familiar vacillations of Macbeth in I.vii. are placed against the earlier model of split awareness in Tarquin and are compared to the design of sonnet 129. Each of the chapters lucidly examines the historical, theoretical and prac­ tical implications of the definitions of the central issues: conventions, voice, worldbuilding, and character. While postmodern theoretical approaches speak of the text rather than Shakespeare and are unwilling to fall into the intentional fallacy, Wilson easily marvels at Shakespeare’s “imaginative plurality” (147), which deliberately opens up rather than minimalizes inter­ pretative possibilities. The last chapter, “Boundaries,” is a bold attempt to study the problems of his own methodology, the paradoxes and dilemmas inherent in narrative theory, through the lens of Hamlet. Contemporary narrative theory, Wilson claims, has finally supplied the tools to study, or at least more completely articulate, Shakespeare’s complex use of narrative, and reveal (again) how “problem-filled Shakespeare’s texts actually are” (217). At the end of the chapter, he argues that theory is best regarded as a “question-quest” or as “hyperplay” : a mode of exploration which “follows paths rather than seeks destinations as such” (218), a kind of theoretical negative capability. This is an appropriate ending to a chapter that raises many questions about the limitations of narrative theory, especially the difficult issue of mapping interactive and overlapping semiotic domains and boundaries. Although it scants performance theory’s claims (with many of which I am deeply sympathetic) and presents one side of Shakespeare— as master storyteller not as dramatist — Wilson’s return to Shakespeare’s narrative is very persuasive in positing one possible explanation for Shakespeare’s richness, his continuing popularity, and his comprehensibility to a wide range of readers, both general and professional. “Narrative seduces the vision” (19), Wilson confesses early on in his insightful book, and it makes us see the plays differently. He’s right. ire n a R. m a k a r y k / University of Ottawa Anthony John Harding, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995). xvi, 289. $39.95 cloth. The réanimation of traditional mythological elements in Romantic poetry has always been recognized as an enlistment of their fertile figurative pos­ sibilities in the service of certain new cultural and literary ideologies. Far from picturesque or sentimental paganism, or facile redeification of nature, 362 the Romantic appropriation of myth was a strategy perfectly suited to dra­ matic representations of imaginative epistemology in a changing intellectual and political climate. Or so we have felt able to say in hindsight. And now Anthony Harding provides strong historical confirmation that Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats did understand their reconstructions of fa­ miliar mythology as strategic interventions in that struggle. More generally, Harding urges in his Introduction a revival of myth crit­ icism, grounded in the complex reception or process theory developed most fully by Hans Blumenberg in Work on Myth. Lamenting our languished ap­ preciation of the literary uses of myth, Harding acknowledges that they have been “obscured” and rendered “moribund” by a reductive modernist univer­ salizing archetypalism and “escape from history” he especially associates with the influence of Frye. The means of recovery is presumably a much subtler, harder, and more dynamically historicized Blumenbergian myth criticism that affirms the metaphoricity, the contingency, and the alwaysalready -opportunistic secondariness of any supposed invocation of (“working on” ) traditional belief systems. Harding’s first chapter, for example, identifies in the calculated weird­ ness of themes, language, atmosphere, and endless self-interpreting in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a specific and subversive engagement with tendencies in late-Enlightenment comparative mythography. At issue in this background of controversy were the rival claims of natural and revealed religion, and syncretic theory about “primitive” belief, shamanic vision, and other traditions. Dovetailing as these debates did with Coleridge’s own curiosity about unusual mental states of possession or inspiration and the authenticity or credibility of the poetic imagination, and with his own theological sympathies, they become the basis for what Harding calls “a rad­ ically indeterminate poem about the very nature of myth” (56). Harding’s later chapter on the polysemous “Christabel” turns by...

Narrative theories emerge from inquiries just as surely as do historical investigations. Therefore, understanding a particular theory requires that we attend to questions it puts to narrative. Expressed another way, we cannot fully appreciate terms of a narrative theory unless we also appreciate its purpose. Hempel's covering-law models provided history with a singular function: to serve as explanations (or explanation sketches) of crucial events. Hayden White's pivotal studies of historical narrative as a literary entity support values (and dangers) of history's creative functions. Ricoeur's mimetic dialectic develops narrative's function to configure time in human experience. However, all of these (and other) theories are incomplete in some cases, justifiably so. For example, in interests of literary criticism, White would leave to epistemologists the question of veracity of a given kind of discourse, with respect to 'object-world' of which it speaks.' Likewise, in their concentration upon history's explanatory function, Hempelians largely ignored everything in historical narrative that they could not translate with ease or by force into causal statements. We have made some recent inroads into connecting ground between these seemingly polar perspectives. Nonetheless, we must also record two major difficulties that remain: denigration of epistemology and its interests and failure to develop a comprehensive view of what a theory of narrative should contain in its finished state. Although White's remark on epistemology's task seems innocent enough, it reflects a more general view that epistemology deserves little place within contemporary narrative theory. Ricoeur echoes this idea, despite his appreciative critique of Anglo-American analyses of narrative. In characterizing such work as epistemology of historical sciences, he absorbs what he calls White's first presupposition, setting aside of methods in which objectivity and proof determine criteria for classifying modes of discourse. White and Ricoeur fall into this shared view by equating questions of objectivity and proof with ques-

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001), Avatars of Story (2006), Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 (2015), Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016, with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu), and over 100 articles on narratology, media theory, and digital culture. In October 2021, Dr. Jiayi Chen interviewed Ryan by email about possible worlds narratology, narrative across media, and the recent development of narratology. During the discussion, Ryan elaborates on the productive ways transmedia narratology can complement the language-based enterprise of narrative theory, as well as its position in relation to other strands of narrative inquiry. To conclude, Ryan points out the recent trends that have been enriching and expanding the territory of narratology before mapping out some areas that merit greater attention and future investigation.

James Phelan presents his rhetorical approach to narrative in opposition to the existing paradigm in contemporary narrative theory. His rhetorical poetics is therefore described as a search for a new paradigm. This article argues, however, that Phelan's view of narrative does not challenge the dominant paradigm within narrative theory. The main reason his approach fails to meet its goals is that it shares the common narratological aim of comprehending narrative according to a particular definition. Although the rhetorical emphasis on the action of somebody telling somebody else might seem applicable to most communicative situations we deem to be narrative, his definition is problematic in relation to literary fiction and fictional storytelling across different media. The article's examination of the key principles of Phelan's rhetorical theory thus leads to an interrogation of the methodological implications of his definition of narrative, in particular by analyzing the example of character narration. The author also presents a revised rhetorical approach, understanding narrative as a term used to denote communicative actions within a variety of contexts. The motivation behind this alternative lies not only in its theoretical contribution but also in its methodological possibilities, connecting the study of narrative fiction across different media.

358 Western American Literature seem too determined to define and limit the tricksters they study, the collected voices ofthe anthology finally allow the trickster to slip awayand wander along to the next story. BRADLEYJ. MONSMA University ofSouthern California Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790-1855. By Bruce Greenfield. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 249 pages, $36.50.) The “romantic explorer[s]” here in question are a pretty diverse bunch, and not altogether “American,”as the title indicates. Three of them—Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, and Alexander Henry—did their exploring in Canadian territories, and so may not be asfamiliar as Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, or John Charles Fremont. In addition to these, there are three who we tend to think of, first, as literary figures, and then, incidentally, as explorers: Washington Irving, Thoreau, and Poe. This assembly of the trail-weary and the ink-stained mayseem an unlikelyone, but itactuallyworkswell: on one hand, its inclusiveness will broaden your perspective on the explorations of the North American continent; and on the other hand, the attention it paysto some ofthe secondarywritings ofIrving, Thoreau, and Poe should add to whatyou know of them. The model for this volume is the scholarship of Sacvan Bervcovitch, ac­ knowledged in the introduction, and its critical orientation faces toward the myth/symbolists who have been prominent in the departments of American studies: Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, Frederick Jackson Turner, R. W. B. Lewis, Perry Miller, and Richard Slotkin, etc. Mentioning this body of scholarship is also a way of defining the sort of study that NarratingDiscoveryis not. I saythis because, when I first sawthe term “narrating”in the title ofthis critical monograph, Iwascurious to see ifit might try to situate its analyses in contemporary narrative theory. But there isnothing like that here. Greenfield makes but three very brief references to Hayden White and thereafter depends on Hegel for the balance of what serves as narrative theory. Perhaps the mostunifying aspectin this studyisnot narrative but instead its focus on the explorers’dealings with the Native Americans. This is a litmus test that Greenfield applies to his subjects: those like Lewis and Clark or Thoreau are instructive in the way they were able to hold their ambivalences for the natives in a kind ofsympathetic suspension, and thus resist the beguilements of Reviews 359 romance writing; whereas Fremont is instructive (in a negative sense) as one capable of imaginatively erasing the natives as he promoted his sense of mani­ fest destiny. On the whole, I enjoyed Greenfield’s book and learned some literary historyfrom it. Ifeel lesssatisfiedwith the “narrative] ”part. It’sregrettable that we know so little ofthe early explorations ofthis continent, and Greenfield has done quite a bit ofgood on that count. RUSSELL BURROWS WeberState University Jim Thompson: Sleep with the Devil By Michael J. McCauley. (New York: The Mysterious Press, 1991. 340 pages, $19.95.) In 1981, Geoffrey O’Brien called Jim Thompson the “Most Neglected Hardboiled Writer” in America, lamenting the fact that all twenty-nine of Thompson’s novels were currently out of print. By the end of the decade, however, VanityFairproclaimed thatThompson was “due to become the coolest dead writer in rotation,”and by the beginning ofthe 1990s VanityFair’s predic­ tion proved correct—Jim Thompson’s novels were everywhere. The inexpen­ sive paperback reissues put out by Black Lizard Press in the mid-’80s were repackaged in 1990 byRandom House as part ofits lavishVintage Crime Series. Furthermore, 1990 marked the appearance of three films based on Thompson’sworks: The Grifters; AfterDark, My Sweet, and TheKill-Off. As a result, readers and criticsfrom Paris to Hollywoodwere soon proclaimingJim Thomp­ son their favorite suspense writer. Michael J. McCauley’s fim Thompson: Sleep with the Devil is the second biography of America’s most hardboiled novelist (see alsoJim Thompson: The KillerInside Him, byCollins and Gorman). In his introduction, McCauley notes that there is an unfortunate “dearth of information about Thompson’sdomes­ tic life”because, while helpful in offering him some “preliminary facts”about the novelist, Thompson’sfamily “offers [only] a bland version ofJim’s life and character from which they refuse to waver, despite outside evidence to the contrary.”Thus, McCauley...

Contemporary narrative theory is, in many respects, a quite sophisticated area of study: it is international and interdisciplinary in its origins, scope, and pursuits and, in many of its achievements, both subtle and rigorous. It also appears to be afflicted, however, with a number of dualistic concepts and models, the continuous generation of which betrays a lingering strain of naive Platonism and the continued appeal to which is both logically dubious and methodologically distracting. The sort of dualism to which I refer is discernible in several of the present essays and is conspicuous in the title of Seymour Chatman's recently published study, Story and Discourse. That doubling (that is, story and discourse) alludes specifically to a two-leveled model of narrative that seems to be both the central hypothesis and the central assumption of a number of narratological theories which Chatman offers to set forth and synthesize. The dualism recurs throughout his study in several other sets of doublet terms: deep structure and surface manifestation, plane and expression plane, histoire and r&it, fabula and sjuiet, and signified and signifier-all of which, according to Chatman, may be regarded as more or less equivalent distinctions: Structuralist theory argues that each narrative has two parts: a story (histoire) [that is,] the content... and a discourse (discours), that is, the expression, the means by which the content is communicated.'

Contemporary narrative theory came to being with Russian Formalism and developed through the work of authors and critics such as Sheklovsky, Todorov, and Strauss. Relying on Saussure's linguistic theories, literary structuralism flourished in the 60s. Structural narratology started in 1928 with the publication of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of Fairy Tales. Propp, a Russian anthropologist, claimed that despite apparent differences, all stories follow similar actions and share similar characters. He believes there are fixed and changing elements in the stories. Names and traits may change, but the actions remain the same. Propp categorizes his findings in four formulas: fixed elements, 31 functions, and 7 spheres of action. This paper tries to reread Shahnameh's Bizhan and Manizheh from Propp's perspective to see if it complies with it or not. Finally, it concludes that it is compatible with the 31 functions, though Propp does not go beyond the surface structure and ignores key components such as motives, starting points, ethics, and religious considerations. Also some of the functions are not found in the story.

As a pianist and improviser, Jaki Byard (1922–1999) seems to have had an unabridged, if unbound, history book of jazz styles at his fingertips. Rather than synthesizing these in “add-and-stir” fashion, Byard often strings together coherent stylistic gestures in delightfully unintuitive ways. His solo and small-group records of the 1960s and 1970s consistently demonstrate this proclivity for creative anachronism. Yet despite having performed with, recorded with, or taught many better-known jazz performers over an exceptionally long and productive career, Byard has often been relegated to a marginal position in prevailing popular and academic jazz histories. In this context, I approach Byard as a kind of “symptom bearer” whose failure to fit comfortably into received style-based historical narratives offers a unique opportunity to interrogate the critical apparatus behind them. In response, I suggest an alternative theoretical approach to Byard's stylistically transgressive performance-as-historiography based in contemporary narrative theory.

Contemporary narrative theory has undergone significant changes, integrating new approaches to literary analysis. This field now encompasses “new narratologies”, including the transgeneric one, which concerns the application of narratological concepts to genres and media that are not primarily considered narrative, but nevertheless betray narrative features. This paper outlines new directions in poetic text interpretation. To this end, the study offers a comparative stylistic and narratological analysis of “Dream-Land” and “A Dream Within a Dream” by the American poet and prose writer Edgar Allan Poe, looking at style (e.g., foregrounding) and such narrative elements as the situational model, the plot, and the narrative perspective. Such forms of foregrounding as graphological deviation and parallelism on the lexical, phonological and syntactic levels are examined. As a result, the poem “Dream-Land” is defined as ultimately narrative. On the other hand, “A Dream Within a Dream” does not meet the criteria of narrative poetry while still containing several narrative elements. Therefore, the term “quasi-narrative” poetry is introduced. Thus, a promising direction for further investigation of Poe’s poetics lies in establishing regularities between the form and genres based on more texts of the author. Additionally, as the last decade witnessed a significant development of reader-oriented research models, another direction of the analysis could involve an empirical study of real readers’ responses to the author’s poetry and prose.

Mimesis is, simply put, imitation, but it also refers to modes of representation in which the external world is presented to the reader or viewer in as transparent a medium as possible. It is among the oldest concepts in literary theory, and continues to be of critical importance in contemporary narrative theory, aesthetics, and philosophy. For Plato (1968), who first brought the term into critical discourse, mimesis refers to the ways in which images and poetry (chiefly epic and tragedy) imitate reality; he did not believe that the imitations were real themselves. Art is secondary and derivative, a mirror of nature. Aristotle largely accepted Plato's assertion that poetry is a form of mimesis, and should therefore be measured against some other reality, but he also reframed the theory. In the Poetics (1987), he describes mimesis as a microcosm or simulation of reality itself; a tragic plot is effective and has a sense of reality when the relationship among its events is internally consistent, and thereby accords with our sense of cause and effect. For Aristotle, mimesis imitates rational thought processes, not material or conceptual realities.

Neste artigo, examinamos a hipótese de que a narrativa e a intriga devem ser entendidas como dois conceitos diferentes no interior da teoria narrativa contemporânea. O argumento principal para sustentar essa distinção consiste na ideia de que tanto a narrativa quanto a intriga são operações cognitivas com fins específicos para diversas atividades humanas, especialmente, para a imaginação social. Tal distinção, aparentemente óbvia, é largamente negligenciada nas várias correntes atuais da teoria social que fazem uso do termo narrativa. Ao fazer isso, essas correntes limitam a análise dos potenciais cognitivos desse dispositivo do discurso. Com base nesse argumento, definiremos brevemente, em um primeiro momento, os conceitos de intriga e narrativa e, em segundo lugar, faremos uma discussão a respeito do retorno dos conceitos de estrutura e de sistema nos estudos da narrativa. Posteriormente, desenvolveremos algumas hipóteses sobre os aspectos cognitivos ativados pela construção da intriga e da narrativa. Finalmente, apresentaremos os vários aspectos da imaginação social nos quais os dois conceitos podem ser aplicados.

This is an examination of the descriptive art found in four medieval poems: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity and Patience. Generally accepted as being the work of a single author, alternately known as the Pearl or the Gawain-Poet, these 14th-century poems are bound together in British Museum Cotton Nero A.x. Readers of the poems rarely fail to admire their descriptive art - the minutely detailed and precisely visualized depictions of costume, landscape, interior funishings or storms at sea. Sarah Stanbury examines the Gawain-Poet's powers of physical description and the ways in which the poems focus upon the moment and act of vision. The text grounds its discussion in medieval aesthetics, contemporary narrative theory and iconographic study to explore the ways in which the poet consistently uses description as a narrative tool for dramatizing the limitations of human experience and knowledge.

Narratology and Taxonomy: A Response to Brian Richardson Maria Mäkelä (bio) Unnatural foregroundings of textuality and artistic motivation have never been automatized and never will be. Unnaturalness, for me, is the cognitive flip side of the “natural” reading process, the counterforce that makes us appreciate and restore the distorted and mediated nature of fictional and textual representation. This stance associates my work—more or less loosely—with the unnaturalists. As a young doctoral student, I was impressed and inspired by Richardson’s radically antimimetic take in Unnatural Voices, and I continue to admire the fervor with which he is establishing this new paradigm, continually drawing in new texts and new people. Yet I have major reservations concerning some of the very fundamentals of Richardson’s approach, as well as with the narrative–theoretical methodology that follows from such a groundwork. Here I take up three such reservations that, in the end, all boil down to this question: what role does taxonomy play in contemporary narrative theory (and should it even play any role)? unnatural narratives or unnatural narratology? When we first engaged in the business of the unnatural during the 2007 Narrative Conference in Washington, what we had in mind was a critical, even provocative movement that would contest the homogenizing side effects of contemporary narratology—the very same “mimetic bias” to [End Page 462] which Richardson rightly draws our attention in his Target Essay. But what I particularly had in mind was a critique of the notions of reading and interpretation promoted by cognitive narratology: the perception of literature primarily through conversational story schemata; the analogies between real-life experiences and literary mediation that seemed too easy; and the tendency to construct the reader as a sense-maker who always opts for the primary, the plausible, the coherent, and the unambiguous. So for me, unnatural narratology was never about strange narratives but about the distortion of human experience that even the most realist literary narrative can create by its overly verbalized, overly structured, and overly intentional design. By “overly” I mean in relation to both conversational storytelling and our cognitive take on the real world. Furthermore, I thought that, when understood in this manner, unnaturalness would be the perfect new touchstone for the dominant cognitive paradigm. I thought that the term “unnatural” was a provocation, not a category for certain genres, texts, or narrative devices. And, behold, in recent years the narratological community has witnessed the ferreting out of ever more bizarre, nonconventional, noncommunicative, or self-eradicating texts. The theoretical provocation has turned into a taxonomic project that resembles an entomological expedition in the Amazon (see Tammi). Who will find the most exotic, unprecedented species? For this, I must blame Richardson and his passion for extensive, overwhelming lists of “unnatural narratives” and their categorization; he is the indisputable winner of this entomological contest. To be sure, new test cases for narratological analyses are welcome—I’m glad that someone moves the Austens, Jameses, and Hemingways aside for a while. Yet if we genuinely wish to contest the cognitive paradigm, we should not focus on classifying literary texts as more or less unnatural, but instead try to revolutionize our all-too-naturalized assumptions about the frames and dynamics of reading. In other words, we should do unnatural narratology instead of hunting for unnatural narratives. If we confront natural narratology merely with a new corpus, we fail to address the very fundamentals of the cognitive approach—the universalist claims about meaning-making and the overarching principle of economy, for example. In Monika Fludernik’s groundbreaking natural narratology (the original inspiration for the unnaturalist movement), there is no place for such a thing as a “natural novel.” As I have repeatedly argued elsewhere, placing the realist novel at the same end of the natural–unnatural axis with the [End Page 463] naturally occurring conversational narrative misses Fludernik’s original point, which relates to the anchoring of readerly frames in the real-life experiential schemata shared by the teller and the reader. Natural—and more generally, cognitive—narratology does not classify texts but instead hypothesizes on the reader’s dynamic narrative engagement with all kinds of texts, thus returning narratology to its...