Narrative Possibilities Research Articles

Animal Collectives

. From Virginia Woolf's Flush to Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear, there are numerous literary works narrated by a singular animal, a first-person nonhuman “I.” But there are very few texts narrated by animals, by a “we” who speak as a collective. Why is this? And what does it tell us about the political unconscious of both animal narration and literary animal studies? This essay asks these questions in order to develop the prevailing analyses of “nonhuman narratology” and to critique the often presumed posthumanism of animal-narrated stories. While genres such as poetry and short stories offer paradigmatic experiments with nonhuman we-narratives, I argue that the lack of an animal collective voice within fiction is symptomatic of the novel form's individuating logics, which produce a conception of bounded personhood that is coded as ontologically human. Thus although animal narration productively extends the realm of narrative possibility towards our nonhuman neighbours, it also risks decollectivising animals and thereby foreclosing the liberatory horizons that much animal studies critique makes possible.

Orkney Ecologies

Inspired by Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies ([1989] 2000), this article explores recent Orkney literature with an environmental focus (Working the Map—ed. J & F Cumming and M. MacInnes; Ebban an’ Flowan—Finlay, A., Watts, L. and Peebles, A.; The Outrun—A. Liptrot; Swimming With Seals—V. Whitworth) in terms of Orkney ecologies—which are always personal, environmental and cultural. Informed by fieldwork carried out in Orkney, looking at discourse around the development of marine renewable energy in the islands, it argues for the use of ecological dialogism, an approach to language and communication which recognises meaning-making as embodied and emergent within a meshwork (Ingold 2011) of lived experience. It explores the texts as part of an ecology of meaning-making within the naturalcultural (Haraway 2007) world, in which environment, social relations and human subjectivity are inextricably entangled. In this view, literary texts can be approached, not as isolated examples of individual creative expression, but as moments of emergent meaning-making in the dialogue between individual, cultural and environmental ecologies, reaching beyond the page into a living meshwork, where we can think in terms of ‘Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology’ (Morton 2010). These Orkney ecologies entangle the natural, personal, cultural and technological, through and as, stories, emphasising interdependence and care for both human and more-than-human relationships. Such moments of connection offer hope of new narrative possibilities with which to face the uncertainty of an Anthropocene future.

Fans Make Art: Authoring and Creativity in the Production of Fanvideos

The research aims to analyze how Brazilian produce fanvideos based on successful pop culture franchises. For such, assumes that fans are prosumers of pop culture in a context of participatory culture and that fanvideos are user-generated content propitiated by Web 2.0 technologies. A total of 257 fanvideos posted between April 2006 and February 2018 were analyzed through Interpretive Content Analysis. Five types of fanmade productions were identified: fandub, fanart, fan animation, fan music and fanfiction. Such production demonstrates that fanvideos reveal the fans' desire to make art, what occurs both as a way for the fans relate to the franchises they admire, as well as to express themselves based on them. By doing this, they wide the scope and the narrative possibilities of the franchises through intra- and inter-textualities in relation to the universe of pop culture and their own daily experiences. The research presents an original approach to user-generated content in association to fan production and the notion of prosumption. As limitation, the study is delimited to the Brazilian production of fanvideos. Future similar research could be carried out in other countries, as well as regarding other fan productions.

목격자와 전달자, 그 서사론적 가능성

가능성은 지니고 있지만, 모든 사건이 서사화될 수 있는 것은 아니다. 이 글에서는 ‘목격자’, ‘전달자’라는 개념을 중심으로 어떤 특정한 사건이 서사화되고 전달되는 과정을 따져 보았다. 기존의 서사론에서는 이미 언어적 서사물로 구성되어 있는 텍스트를 설명할 수 있는 유용한 방법들을 제공해 왔지만, 이 글은 언어적 서사물로 구성되기 이전에도 ‘사건’은 존재하고 있다는 점을 출발점으로 삼았다. 그래서 현장에서 직접 사건을 경험하고 목격했던 ‘목격자’와, 그 사건을 다른 시공간으로 전달하는 ‘전달자’의 역할을 개략적으로나마 이론화해 보려 했다.BR 물론 목격자와 전달자는 서술자와 자주 결합된다. 근대 이전의 서사물에서 목격자와 전달자는 서술자와 전혀 다른 존재였지만, 예술적 독립성을 확보해야 했고 한층 더 복잡해진 사회 구조를 담아내기 위해서는 이들도 복잡한 형상으로 다시 자리매김하게 된다. 그들은 스스로의 존재를 스스로의 언어로 증명해야 했고, 때때로 복잡하고 중층적인 구조를 취하면서 근대 서사의 중요한 기능을 담당하게 되었다는 것이 이 글의 대체적인 결론이다.BR 뿐만 아니라 서사는 본질적으로 전달의 (불)가능성을 지니고 있다는 점에서도 ‘목격자’와 ‘전달자’는 전달을 불가능하게 하는 힘들과 끊임없이 길항하고 있기도 하다. 내/외부에 존재하는 그 힘들은 다양한 형태를 띠면서 전달을 방해하지만 비록 지연되더라도 반드시 전달되어야만 한다는 점에서 이 역시 서사의 본질적인 요소 중의 하나라 할 수 있다.

閉ざされていく「幽閉」の可能性 : 井伏鱒二「幽閉」から「山椒魚」への改稿問題を中心に

閉ざされていく「幽閉」の可能性 : 井伏鱒二「幽閉」から「山椒魚」への改稿問題を中心に

#Distractinglysexy: the “trouble with girls” in Men in White (1934) and the need for narrative possibility

At the 2015 World Conference of Science Journalists, Tim Hunt, Nobel Laureate and now-former honorary professor at University College London, made the following assessment of professional female sc...

La Mémoire par le chemin

Memory as a path. Do we memorize our readings differently in a digital context, and what new perspectives does it bring to our narrative possibilities?

How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production

How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production

Grotesque and Southern Gothic in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

This article offers a
 post-southernist reading that challenges and problematizes the impacts of
 haunted past of the American South with implications of violence embodied by
 Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood
 Meridian, or The Evening Redness in
 the West. In order to present a moral compass to the reader, the text
 presents good-evil dichotomy and the world of human through the uncanny and
 grotesque characters of “the kid” and “the judge.” Through this dichotomy, the
 reader acknowledges the possibility of alternative narratives that escape from
 the control and totalizing gaze of dominant power and discourses. The counter-
 narratives complicate any types of subjugation, mythologized history, and
 refuse to approve the violence that the prevailing power practices against
 innocent people. This paper aims to analyze the struggle between the good and
 evil and the degree of insanity performed by the evil depicted through southern
 gothic and grotesque scenes. Thus, the paper contributes to grotesque reading
 of the selected text through a number of elements: “exaggeration, hyperbolism,
 and excessiveness,” generally considered fundamental attributes of the
 grotesque style (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 303).

Character (and absence) as a narrative key in installation art

Installation art has been critically interpreted with reference to themes or situations, the transgressive nature of this art form, place and space, material, or immersion and embodied perception. To a lesser degree, installation art’s narrative possibilities have also been explored. However, the centrality of character as a narratological tool for the interpretation of installation art has not yet been comprehensively investigated. As the viewer in installation art is transformed into an active participant by virtue of physically entering and ‘completing’ the work, it is argued that he or she also becomes a character in the storyworld of the artwork. Furthermore, it is posited that this participant-character becomes a focaliser who co-constructs the narrative suggested by the work by engaging with the narrativised elements presented in the work, often together with suggested absences at which the work hints. This article shows that character as a narratological tool creates interpretative possibilities for installation art and adds new dimensions to the narrative potential of this art form. Using character (and absence) in the South African installation artist Jan van der Merwe’s work Biegbak/Confessional (2003) as an example, an expansion of the narratological toolbox of installation art is suggested, that could find broader application in many works in this genre.

日本語教育研究者である私の「虫のよさ」を問い直すナラティブの可能性:ある留学生との相互行為を振り返って

日本語教育研究者である私の「虫のよさ」を問い直すナラティブの可能性:ある留学生との相互行為を振り返って

Inquiry the possibility of narrative in medical education

Inquiry the possibility of narrative in medical education

The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre

Recovery is now widely acknowledged as the dominant approach to the management of mental distress and illness in government, third-sector and some peer-support contexts across the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the Anglophone Global North. Although narrative has long been recognised in practice and in policy as a key “technology of recovery,” there has been little critical investigation of how recovery narratives are constituted and mobilised, and with what consequences. This paper offers an interdisciplinary, critical medical humanities analysis of the politics and possibilities of Recovery Narrative, drawing literary theoretical concepts of genre and philosophical approaches to the narrative self into conversation with the critiques of recovery advanced by survivor-researchers, sociologists and mad studies scholars. Our focus is not on the specific stories of individuals, but on the form, function and effects of Recovery Narrative as a highly circumscribed kind of storytelling. We identify the assumptions, lacunae and areas of tension which compel a more critical approach to the way this genre is operationalised in and beyond mental health services, and conclude by reflecting on the possibilities offered by other communicative formats, spaces and practices.

Motorbike, and: Untitled

Motorbike, and: Untitled Guilherme Bergamini (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 58] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 59] Guilherme Bergamini Reporter photographic and visual artist, Guilherme Bergamini is Brazilian and graduated in Journalism. For more than two decades, he has developed projects with photography and the various narrative possibilities that art offers. The works of the artist dialogue between memory and social political criticism. He believes in photography as the aesthetic potential and transforming agent of society. Awarded in national and international competitions, Guilherme Bergamini participated in collective exhibitions in 21 countries. Copyright © 2019 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

Screening Prophetic Machines: Preemption, Minority Report, and the Problem of Multiple Endings

“Screening Prophetic Machines” argues that director Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report (2002) stages inconsistencies in the ideological fantasies of prophetic inevitability and preventive action that sustained the George W. Bush administration's post 9/11 policy of preemption, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine. It observes that the film hyperbolizes this policy through the science-fictional tropes of the “prophetic machine,” which fuse preemption's speculative logics, traumatic affects, and excessive responses with contemporary media, screens, and surveillance to figure the American War on Terror and its ideological foreclosure of alternative futures. While acknow-ledging these parallels, however, this essay complicates criticism that proposes Minority Report inadequately critiques or even uncritically reproduces Bush-era ideology. Instead, it locates Minority Report's politics in cinematic form, claiming that the film's multiple possible endings suggest an array of possibilities for both narrative and prophetic closure that, when understood to be in tension, subvert assertions of preemptive certainty. Drawing from Fredric Jameson's work on utopian fiction, this essay thus examines how preemptive discourse and cinematic form converse in the film, and ultimately contends that Minority Report, because of its resistance to narrative closure, redirects attention from metaphysical discourses of fate and inevitability to the potential dangers of misplaced trust in interpretive authority.

Narration and the Optative in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the French Lieutenant’s Woman

This article argues that Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman use similar forms of narration to explore the gendered horizons of narrative possibility within Victorian realism. It asserts that Tess includes moments of intrusive commentary that construct counterfactual lines of plot, which several critics have called the optative, and articulates how these alternative plots simultaneously critique the generic conventions of the “fallen woman plot” and reveal its contingency. In turning to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which explicitly references Hardy at several points, the article contends that the later novel extends Tess’s critical project in two ways: by metafictionally invoking and disrupting the generic constraints of the “fallen woman plot” and by transforming the foreclosed optative possibilities of Hardy’s heroine into realized options for its central female character, Sarah Woodruff. As such, Fowles’s novel creates a formal kinship with Hardy’s text in order to more explicitly undermine the narrative and social norms around gender and sexuality.

As We Speak: Concurrent Narration and Participation in the Serial Narratives "@I_Bombadil" and Skam

Digital media have provided new avenues of distribution for serial fiction and created new narrative possibilities for the form, including the widespread use of what Margolin labels and Page terms real-time narration. This form of serial publication, where a story is distributed in installments coterminously with the events being reported, is enabled by the Internet's possibilities for instantaneous transmission, and it appears in narratives on various platforms that rely on the web for content distribution. To discuss this temporal confluence of the narrated, narration, and publication, we analyze the use of concurrent narration in two digitally distributed serialized narratives, David Mitchell's Twitter story @I_Bombadil (2015), and the Norwegian webserial Skam (2015–17), both of which were originally transmitted piecemeal in near-concurrence with the narrated events. Furthermore, we analyze the participation surrounding the two stories. Serial fiction has always encouraged the active engagement of its audience, and this tendency becomes especially pronounced when stories are distributed via social media that allow for rapid exchanges between readers. The participatory practices that emerge in the wake of digitalization are often conceived as inherently democratic forms of engagement, but this predominantly positive conception may be questioned, since participation is a complex concept that covers a range of different practices. By analyzing the participation that surrounds @I_Bombadil and Skam we nuance the perspective on digitally enabled participatory culture and thus contribute to a better understanding of how new digital forms of distribution affect the modes of narrating and engaging in serialized narratives today. (Less)

THE LITTERSCAPE AND THE NUDE: HISTORY ESCAPES IN MANSUR BUSHNAF'SAL-ʿILKA(CHEWING GUM).

AbstractMansur Bushnaf'sal-ʿIlka(Chewing Gum; 2008) is the author's sole novel, born of his twelve-year imprisonment in a Libyan jail, and his reflection on the nation's subjection to international marginalization and dictatorial rule under Gaddafi. The novel is centered on a 19th-century nude which confounds all who encounter it, and which lies neglected in a corner of Tripoli's Red Palace Museum. Through this statue, and the novel's broader poetics of stasis and “chewing,” I explore howturāthin Bushnaf's work, and wider Libyan fiction, is depicted through its abject vulnerability and exposure to historical vicissitudes, reflecting the parallel exclusion of human lives from rights and agency. Inal-ʿIlka, I examine how this is formulated into a defamiliarizing perspective on the postmodern, and on historical trauma and erasure, in which the possibility of narrative is a driving concern, rooted in existential reflection, as well as the real precarity of those who tell stories in Libya.

Literature in the Anthropocene: Possibilities of Catastrophic Narrative in Times of Ecological Crises

Literature in the Anthropocene: Possibilities of Catastrophic Narrative in Times of Ecological Crises

Reverberations and Reverb: Sound Possibilities for Narrative, Creativity, and Critique

The performative nature of this article simultaneously functions at multiple levels. It is at once an article about, among other things, the significance of the sonic and its qualitative differences from more ocular forms of expression, the inability to discern between that which occurs of its own accord and that which is manufactured, and questions of attention, intention, and expression. It is also an inversion of how sound is most often utilized in scholarship. In this case, rather than sounds explicating text, the text of this article functions as a kind of libretto for the sonic version of this piece.