Unnatural Voices Research Articles

Is it real? A study on detecting deepfake videos

AbstractWe present an exploratory study of how people detect deepfake videos. Through watching a set of real and fake videos, and semi‐structured interviews, participants identified a set of characteristics such as blurred faces and unnatural voices, present in deepfake videos. A list of verification strategies, including checking other sources and repeated viewing, were also derived.

Two Sides to the Story: Multiple Versions and Post-Postmodernist Epistemology

While postmodernist writers often highlighted the problematic nature of using narrative to convey accurate representations of history, many contemporary writers have reoriented their focus, demonstrating that narrative is a valuable system for conveying personal, subjective history. This essay argues that these claims are most visible in “reflexive double narratives,” books that tell two versions of their stories and explain why they have done so. This essay relies on Brian Richardson's term “denarration” from Unnatural Voices and David Herman's conception of “qualia” from Basic Elements of Narrative to reveal that the contemporary novel has reconceived accuracy in a nonliteral way. For post-postmodernists, experiential accuracy is more important than empirical accuracy. The contemporary novel often focuses on revealing what it feels like to be certain characters in certain situations as a way to find a new kind of value in storytelling.

Gaping before Monumental Unnatural Inscriptions?: The Necessity of a Cognitive Approach

Gaping before Monumental Unnatural Inscriptions? The Necessity of a Cognitive Approach Jan Alber (bio) I would like to begin by thanking Brian Richardson, whose ideas I value very much, for inviting me to respond to his Target Essay. I believe that [End Page 434] Richardson has done groundbreaking narratological work by showing that unnatural narratives are an important subset of fictional narratives and also by demonstrating that we need new categories or concepts to adequately deal with them. From my perspective, his best work includes his article on unnatural temporalities (“Beyond”) and his book on unnatural narrators (Unnatural Voices). Even though I also see overlaps between our research agendas, I want to zoom in on differences that concern (1) the definition of the term unnatural and (2) issues of methodology, that is, what one actually does with unnatural narratives.1 In contrast to Richardson, I believe that a cognitive approach (see Herman, “Cognitive”) does not only help us define the unnatural; it also helps us explain what the unnatural does to recipients and how we can try to make sense of it. My own interest in the unnatural begins with the following observation: I find it striking that so many fictional narratives represent physical, logical, or human impossibilities that contradict our real-world knowledge. Some of them have already been conventionalized, that is, transformed into cognitive frames we are now familiar with (such as that of the speaking animal in the beast fable or time travel in science fiction), while others are currently being conventionalized (such as the impossibilities in postmodernist narratives). I am primarily interested in the question of what the human mind does to come to terms with phenomena that transcend real-world possibilities.2 In addition, I want to know how the impossibilities in postmodernist narratives, which constitute forms of anti-illusionism (Wolf) or metafiction (Waugh 1–11), and the conventionalized impossibilities in earlier narratives, which have become parts of familiar generic conventions, are connected. defining the unnatural For Richardson, unnatural narratives “defy the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, the practices of realism or other poetics that model themselves on nonfictional narratives,” and they “transcend the conventions of existing, established genres.” He also distinguishes between the antimimetic (the properly unnatural) and the nonmimetic (in, say, “animal fables, fantasy, or supernatural fiction”), which, for him, is not unnatural. Richardson explains that the difference between the antimimetic and the nonmimetic has to do with “the degree of unexpectedness that the text produces, whether surprise, shock, or the wry smile that [End Page 435] acknowledges that a different, playful kind of representation is at work” (Unnatural Narrative 5, my italics). In his Target Essay, Richardson also mentions narratives that are “constructed to be processed in surprising or unexpected ways” (391). It thus seems to be fair to say that for him, the unnatural is identical with the unconventional. But what exactly is the foil against which Richardson measures the unnatural? To my mind, he puts too much emphasis on the potential effects of the unnatural on the reader. Arguably, effects differ from recipient to recipient, so it is difficult to base the definition of a concept such as the unnatural on them. I also wonder how long these effects can be upheld. Personally, I do not believe in the existence of the eternally unconventional. Even the unnatural games of postmodernism will sooner or later seem outmoded. What happens when somebody like Jonathan Franzen (259–63), for instance, dismisses what Richardson calls “fiction that displays its own fictionality” as a boring, ludicrous, and self-important convention? Do such narratives cease to be unnatural because there is no longer a degree of unexpectedness to them? With regard to this question, Richardson argues that “it takes a lot of repetition—and widespread knowledge of that repetition—to fully conventionalize the antimimetic” (Unnatural Narrative 18). By contrast, I believe that Richardson’s own critical work and the many examples he uses contribute to the process of conventionalizing the antimimetic (because more and more readers become familiar with it). I think we need a different criterion to define the unnatural. In my usage, the term denotes physically, logically, and humanly impossible scenarios and events (regardless of...

Unnatural Fallacy?: The Logic of Unnatural Narrative Theory

Unnatural narrative theory, initiated by Brian Richardson in his book Unnatural Voices (2006), has had an invigorating effect on narratological debates on both sides of the Atlantic. The unnatural is an intriguing concept that offers a fresh perspective on established narratologies, especially those based on a cognitive framework. However, as the critical responses to Richardson's keynote lecture at the ENN Conference in Paris and to the Unnatural Narrative Panel at the ISSN Conference in Manchester (both in 2013) show, many narrative theorists remain skeptical of the new approach. It therefore seems timely to devote a special issue of Style to Richardson's contribution to narrative theory. In a now well-rehearsed manner, the Target Essay seeks to establish the relevance of this new approach by arguing not only that a large body of texts has hitherto been ignored by narratologists, but also that most existing narrative theories are conceptually flawed. How exactly unnatural narrative theory intends to set things right is only mentioned in passing: two pages refer the reader to other work both by Richardson and others. In short, we learn less about unnatural narrative theory itself than about why it is needed. Instead of engaging with this rhetoric of innovation, my response will focus on the premises and methodological foundations of unnatural narrative theory. I will briefly outline how narratological theory design usually works, starting with definitions of narrative that allow us to deduce further hypotheses, to develop models, and to propose terminologies in order to produce systematic knowledge about the forms, functions, and uses of narrative (note that terms like deduction, induction, inferences, abstraction, and knowledge are used more loosely in literary theory than in formal logic and epistemology). For reasons of space, my short introduction will focus on the kind of reasoning typical of text-oriented rather than cognitive approaches, as Richardson expresses a clear preference for the former; this does not mean, however, that I share his view of cognitive narratology in general or of David Herman's pioneering work in particular. In the body of the article, I will then juxtapose my account of narratological theory design with Richardson's inductive approach in order to discuss whether unnatural narrative theory fails to propose a coherent theoretical argument (one of the objections often raised by critics of the unnatural approach). It should be noted that narratology, as the systematic study of narrative representations, always provides nominal, not real definitions. These are not aimed at capturing the distinctiveness of specific (sets of) narratives but mainly serve to distinguish narrative from nonnarrative and antinarrative (cf. Prince, On a Postcolonial 373). The term narrative thus signifies an abstraction, an idea of what constitutes a narrative. Narrative, as an abstract entity, has been conceptualized in various ways, for instance as a text type or discourse type, a mode of representation, a form of communication, or, if viewed from a cognitive angle, a way of sense making or world making. Proceeding from such general premises, narratological approaches have developed well-constrained descriptions of narrative as a specific text type, as a verbal, auditory, or visual representation, a fictional or nonfictional form of communication; and they have proposed heuristic frameworks for theorizing cognitive parameters in order to further our understanding of how we make sense of narrative. This is not to say that narratological reasoning is wholly deductive: in practice, aesthetic experiences and individual preferences influence conceptual and terminological decisions (this is especially true for approaches that limit themselves to the analysis of narrative fiction). However, narratology has always sought to reconcile intuition and abstraction in a systematic manner (cf. Sommer). When outlining the project that eventually evolved into unnatural narrative theory, Richardson proceeded from rather different assumptions, as he explains in Unnatural Voices: This is an empirical study that describes and theorizes the actual practices of significant authors, instead of building on a priori linguistic or rhetorical categories; such an inductive approach is essential because many extreme forms of narration seem to have been invented precisely to transgress fundamental linguistic and rhetorical categories. …

Narratology and Taxonomy: A Response to Brian Richardson

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...

How Unnatural Does It Get?

* Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 20x5.197 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1279-0. * Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2016. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8032-7868-4. Unnatural has become one of the most prominent recent developments in narrative theory. It started around the year 2000 with the work of Brian Richardson, who collected his explorations of narratives in his 2006 study Unnatural Voices. The approach quickly attracted a group of young scholars, focusing on unusual fictional texts and questioning the usual narratological concepts. Among them were Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Maria Makela, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. The term unnatural obviously alluded to Monika Fludernik's narratology (1996). Fludernik was inspired by Jonathan Culler's idea of naturalization, stressing the ways in which readers try to turn alienating texts into something they can understand. Richardson, on the other hand, took his cue from postmodernist fiction and poststructuralist theories, stressing the irreducibility of the alien and the exceptional. Culler's is a strategy that turns the peculiar and the unknown into the known. It depends upon and literary supposedly present in readers' heads (138). These models range from general cultural patterns of signification, such as intentionality, to specific literary knowledge of periods and genres. The application of the models normalizes the abnormal: 'Naturalization' emphasizes the fact that the strange or deviant is brought within a discursive order and thus made to seem (137). Fludernik elaborates on and updates Culler's study of these models via cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. From William Labov she borrows the term narrative--oral, everyday stories people tell each other. Fludernik develops Culler's concept of models into her concept of frames; she uses the term experientiality to describe the central process of normalization (as soon as a reader recognizes a center of experience in a narrative, he or she can come to grips with the text); and she replaces the term with narrativation. Although Fludernik's basic idea is that people tend to normalize the abnormal, she does realize that some texts cannot be fully normalized. such as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake remain unreadable (Towards 293). They result in collapse: When narrativization breaks down, whether incipiently or in full measure, it does so where the consciousness factor can no longer be utilized to tide over radical inconsistency, and this happens first and foremost where overall textual coherence or micro-level linguistic coherence (and cohesion) are at risk. (317) The preference for consistency and narrativization that seems to underlie formulations like these is precisely what Richardson's rejects. Simply put, he sees the process of naturalization as a form of reductionism, which smooths over the problematic aspects of narrative texts and which reformulates the new into something old. In this way, the complex, literary, and disruptive nature of the narrative is disregarded. Unnatural narratology, on the other hand, holds this complex nature in high regard and wants to respect it in its interpretation. The fundamental differences between the two narratological views were formulated clearly in a joint 2010 essay by Alber et al. They claimed that natural and classical are guilty of mimetic reductionism (Unnatural Narratives 115) as they reduce the sophistication of literary narrative to everyday storytelling. The theorists point to three levels of literary unnaturalness (116): storyworlds (in which impossible things happen), minds (e.g., a character that knows he is being narrated by someone else, or an omniscient character), and acts of narration (e. …

Representing Social Minds: “We” and “They” Narratives, Natural and Unnatural

Representing Social Minds:“We” and “They” Narratives, Natural and Unnatural Brian Richardson (bio) The representation of social minds can be done in many ways, including the familiar group perspective in nineteenth century fiction that Alan Palmer has documented so thoroughly. In many cases, however, authors feel a need to present collective experience in an unusual or innovative form. This has led to the rise of first-person plural or “we” narratives, prominent examples of which can be found throughout the twentieth century, as I have discussed at some length in Unnatural Voices (37–60). “We” narration easily slides into distortions of ordinary usage and readily becomes nonrealistic or what I have called “unnatural,” as we will see in the accounts below. “They” narration, by contrast, is much more rare; it is found in only a few works, such as the first three-quarters of D. H. Lawrence’s “Things” (1928); two chapters of Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963, see Fludernik 224–25); Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965), and two chapters of Maxine Swann’s Flower Children (2007). “They” narration rarely loses its basis in realism, though as such a narration continues it seems odder and odder that the narrator doesn’t refer to the characters individually; in the case of D. H. Lawrence, the shift from an insistent “they” reference to the more conventional [End Page 200] “Erasmus” and “Valerie” signals a growing fissure in the relationship of the couple. Most radical is the close juxtaposition of “we” and “they” kinds of narration; such a fusion, which necessarily unites internal and external narrative stances, is generally considered impossible.1 The first sustained example of both first- and third-person plural narration seems to be Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1899), a novel which represents what Conrad called “the collective psychology” of the crew of a merchant marine ship (ix). The work opens in the conventional manner of standard, omniscient third person narrative: “Mr. Baker, chief mate of the ship Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarter-deck” (3). The work’s collective subject is soon identified, as individual characteristics are subsumed within the roles and functions the men perform: The men had shaken into their places, and the half-hourly voice of the bells ruled their life of unceasing care. Night and day the head and shoulders of a seaman could be seen aft by the wheel, outlined high against sunshine or starlight, very steady above the stir of revolving spokes. The faces changed, passing in rotation. Youthful faces, bearded faces, dark faces: faces serene, or faces moody, but all akin with the brotherhood of the sea; all with the same attentive expression of eyes, carefully watching the compass or the sails. (30) Extended “they” narration starts early in chapter 2, once the ship is at sea: “They were forgetting their toil, they were forgetting themselves” (32). “We” narration does not appear until a common bond develops among the seamen; then “we” becomes the primary perspective: “We hesitated between pity and mistrust” (36). Conrad uses these two types of collective narration in counterpoint to the sensibility of the men he is depicting: the greater their cohesion, the more insistent the use of “we”; when the connection is lessened, “they” narration dominates. This general pattern is further varied in the text, as will be discussed subsequently. “We” in this text is not universal but circumscribed; it refers to most of the crewmen, but not the officers; the resentful troublemaker, Donkin; the West Indian sailor, James Wait; or old Singleton, the boatswain, a seaman of an earlier period, “a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation” (24). The men’s perceptions of Donkin are represented in terms that express difference: “Our sea-boots, our oilskin coats, our well-filled sea-chests, were to him so many causes for bitter meditation: he had none of these things, and he felt instinctively that no man, when the need arose, would offer to share them with him” (40). Intriguingly, in this passage the “we” narration is focalized unnaturally through the mind of Donkin, something of course a first person narrator...

From Unnatural Narrative to Unnatural Reading: A Review of <em>A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative</em>

From Unnatural Narrative to Unnatural Reading: A Review of A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Eds. Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2013.The field of narrative studies began under that name following Brian Richardson's book Unnatural Voices (2006), a response to Monika Fludernik's Toward a Natural Narratology (1996). These two volumes formed two sides of a theoretical coin: Fludernik presented and Richardson critiqued the proposition that we read and interpret narrative on the basis of models for communication that we develop in handling natural narrative, in face-to-face conversation with other people. For Fludernik, narratives become comprehensible because they evoke mental expectations (cognitive frames) already familiar from prior embodied experience. For Richardson, this position invites reading and interpretive methods that blind themselves to narrative elements that depart from face-to-face conversation, or indeed any possible embodied experience. Richardson's project, and indeed many of its subsequent developments in other hands, created an elaborate typology of unnaturalness. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, the new volume from Ohio State University Press, retains some of this cataloguing impulse, but its noteworthy contribution-as indicated in its title-is its emphasis on what narrative does (or what we do with it), rather than what it is. All of the ten essays within share as a common thread the aesthetic experience of rupture, slippage, or incommensurability, an experience with alterity that Jean-Francois Lyotard might recognize as an encounter with a differend. But where some of the contributors emphasize interpretation (making the meaningful), others envision the as less a matter of content or representation, and more as a reading method, applicable to a wide variety of texts.Few theorists agree completely about what exactly makes narrative unnatural, so the book presents a variety of divergent accounts, a plural poetics with shifting definitions where any one example might receive very different interpretive treatments. At the outset, then, I want to offer a brief summary of the flavors of poetics, and then examine how these variants might handle two examples not commonly chosen by unnatural theorists: a classic piece of science-metafiction, and a piece of popular literary fiction where the very term problematizes interpretation (it is for this reason that I have enclosed the term in scare-quotes thus far, a practice I will now discontinue, assuming its point made).The variants on unnatural poetics have expanded the field so that it can address nearly any aspect of the narrative reading process, and in so doing, they have generated productive tensions, presented in A Poetics in their clearest form yet. Each variant deals with discrepancies, dislocations, and moments of slippage, but each slices across a different axis of the reading experience. Some confine themselves to what is generally called the story-world (the structuralist/afin/a): here readers meet with strange events, characters, and actions. Other variants work with textual features, the question of how the story is told, (the syuzhet, or discourse), and here readers meet with texts that are difficult to read or comprehend. Finally, some work primarily with issues of interpretation, asking what readers are to do with unnatural events, and suggesting (to oversimplify a little) that we either use them to better understand ourselves or our world; or that we acknowledge our inability to interpret adequately. Finally, some in this last category suggest that the unnatural is not so much an authorial gambit, but actually comprises a kind of reading practice, a denaturalizing approach that might help us interpret even the most realist texts.Most of the essays in the book provide an introduction of this kind, so rather than repeat a descriptive catalogue, I want to follow the gesture of poetics, and introduce the first of my own examples, to demonstrate the consequences of the choices sketched out above. …

Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models

Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural NarratologyBeyond Mimetic Models Jan Alber (bio), Stefan Iversen (bio), Henrik Skov Nielsen (bio), and Brian Richardson (bio) In recent years, the study of unnatural narrative has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory. Both younger and more established scholars have become increasingly interested in the analysis of unnatural texts, many of which have been consistently neglected or marginalized in existing narratological frameworks.1 By means of the collaboration of four scholars who [End Page 113] have been developing unnatural narratology, this article seeks to summarize key principles, to consolidate some conclusions, to extend the work through carefully chosen examples, and, finally, to point toward the future. More specifically, in a first step, the essay seeks to clarify what the term "unnatural" denotes and how unnatural narratology differs from both classical structuralist and standard cognitive narrative theory. Second, it presents four analyses of textual examples to demonstrate the possible consequences of working within the framework of unnatural narratology. To examine unnatural storyworlds, we explore first the nature of physically impossible worlds through the example of the reverse temporality of Alejo Carpentier's "Journey Back to the Source," and go on to examine a logically impossible world in Robert Coover's "The Babysitter." We next take up the question of unnatural minds by looking at Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger, while Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" serves as an example of unnatural acts of narration. Finally, the article illustrates how the investigation of unnaturalness in narrative may shed new light on the workings of narrative in general and explicates some of the unresolved problems and open questions raised by an unnatural approach. Narrative and the Unnatural Most definitions of the term "narrative" have a clear mimetic2 bias and take ordinary realist texts or "natural" narratives as being prototypical manifestations of narrative.3 That is to say, they focus far too extensively on the idea that narratives are modeled on the actual world and consequently ignore the many interesting elements of narrative which James Phelan has termed synthetic.4 Similarly, all handbooks and surveys of narrative theory contain a section on narrative temporality; however, the vast majority of these emphasize mimetic and "natural" examples and practices as they restate the model of Gérard Genette and his categories of order, duration, and frequency. Very few theorize or even mention the various impossible temporalities of experimental fiction, medieval dream visions, playful Renaissance texts, science fiction, or postmodernism. We agree with other narratologists that in many narratives, the projected storyworld (i.e., the temporal and spatial coordinates), the characters in it, and the narrative act that produces the narrative closely correlate with real-world scripts or schemata. Many narratives focus on a human or human-like being, be it a fullyfledged person or merely a voice, and they inform us about one or several minds experiencing change over time in a real-world-like setting. What we want to highlight by means of the notion of the unnatural is the fact that narratives are also full of unnatural elements. Many narratives defy, flaunt, mock, play, and experiment with some (or all) of these core assumptions about narrative. More specifically, they may radically deconstruct the anthropomorphic narrator, the traditional human character, and the minds associated with them, or they may move beyond real-world notions of time and space, thus taking us to the most remote territories of conceptual possibilities. [End Page 114] Brian Richardson, for example, defines unnatural narratives as anti-mimetic texts that violate the parameters of traditional realism ("Beyond Story") or move beyond the conventions of natural narrative, i.e., forms of spontaneous oral storytelling (Unnatural Voices). Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando is an example of the former because it deconstructs mimetic notions of time. More specifically, this narrative confronts us with what Richardson calls a "differential" temporality: "the eponymous hero ages at a different rate than the people that surround him (her), as one chronology is superimposed on another, larger one" ("Beyond Story" 50). Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad is an example of the latter in so far as it transcends "the mimesis of actual speech situations" (Unnatural Voices...

The Problem of the Human Narrator

Brian Richardson’s Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction problematizes traditional narrative theory’s reliance on an anthropomorphic conceptualization of the narrator and the presupposition of a mimetic narrative situation. Richardson argues that narrative theory has not kept up with developments in narration and he proposes a new, expanded system of classification. Through a rigorous inductive approach to argumentation, Richardson indicates deviations from the humanistic norm. In the process, his study catalogues literary innovations in narration throughout the century with equal attention to established literary figures and lesser-known authors alike.

O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (review)

O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage. By Amanda Eubanks Winkler. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. 232 pp. To study the English stage during the turbulent seventeenth century inherently involves grappling with disorder. Before and after regicide and revolution divided England, disharmony and faction seemed a permanent condition of the kingdom, so the most a monarch could hope for wasn't the containment of discord (not that was ever really a possibility) but escape from it (9). In O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage Amanda Eubanks Winkler unveils the English theater as a mediating space for public discourse during a century when the nation continually, and often violently, redefined the boundaries of political, religious, and social order. Winkler delves into the heart of this uneasy dramatic period and focuses the reader's attention on character types that defy easy categorization and reflect the underlying anxieties of a nation struggling to retain control. Specifically, she studies representations of the witch, lovesick, melancholic, and mad and thereby reveals shifting views of the gendered body and mind that influenced social interaction over the course of the seventeenth century. While her argument thus far is likely familiar to early modern English historians, literary critics, and gender theorists, Winkler reaffirms music's prominent role within this study. She emphasizes music's central symbolic value in seventeenth-century England's Neoplatonic understanding of the relationship between the political nation and the individual and offers her subsequent analysis of the dramatic stage as an answer to the following question: In this age of conflict, this century that completely reformulated the relationship between monarch and subject, between man and woman, between the macrocosm and microcosm, how did music, dance, and theater negotiate this obvious social tumult? (11) Although Winkler draws on abundant early modern print sources as well as contemporary literary and critical theory to support her observations, her deep familiarity with the masques and plays of the entire seventeenth century and her rich musical analyses of the theatrical music therein are the most persuasive evidential sources in the book. Winkler's concise survey of the wide variety of musical genres found on the English public and private stages provides a nuanced introduction for novice readers; she does not assume her readers' familiarity with the drama and genres she discusses, and she situates her examples before detailing their particular relevance. She also provides ample musical excerpts for readers to trace her observations if they so desire. The inclusion of a recording of these examples (either included with the text or available online) would have been an additional bonus and would have encouraged readers, like seventeenth-century audiences, to listen for the meaning encoded in the music. Following opening critical and structural commentary, Winkler introduces readers in her second chapter to the ideological contractions in musical representations of witchcraft and shows how onstage English witches threatened social and religious authority by challenging conventional gender roles (12). From the start of the seventeenth century, the roles of English witches were typically performed by adult men, while young boys played other feminine characters. Winkler points to this casting decision as the first among many physiological and behavioral factors to contradict Jacobean ideals of femininity. English witches recited and sang lines in deep unnatural voices, and they moved across the stage in erratic dances that symmetry and harmony of form (20). (1) Furthermore, these unnatural witches who consorted with devilish familiars and mimicked sacred rites in their demonic rituals directly subverted normative patriarchal authority and incited anti-Catholic sentiment. …

Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction Christian Moraru Brian Richardson. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. xiii + 168 pp. Those who have followed Brian Richardson’s work over the past couple of years must have suspected, as I have, that his articles were part of something bigger and ambitious. A landmark in narrative analysis and in the study of modern and postmodern fiction generally, Unnatural Voices confirms the suspicion. For more than two decades now, narrative scholarship has been under strong pressure [End Page 457] to revisit its postulates, which, largely speaking, had been set forth by the linguistics-based poetics of the structuralist 1960s and 1970s. The cultural-historicist turn, its emphasis on ideology, the “politics of” (rather than the “poetics of”) kind of approaches to things literary, and, before them, the poststructuralist skepticism of taxonomic logic appeared, at least for a while, to render considerations of voice, viewpoint, character-narrator-author dynamic, and the like less imperative. All of a sudden, the urgent issues, we were being told, were elsewhere. Or so it seemed. A number of theorists and critics, primarily American, Dutch, and German, were already busy recalibrating time-honored concepts and approaches, and it is due to them that voice is currently dealt with as a matter of both form and subjectivity. Patrick O’Donnell’s 1992 book Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative was one of the studies that helped us realize that voice just cannot be—and cannot manifest itself—other than as a configuration of expressed (“voiced”) content regardless of the latter’s nature. Meanwhile, the conversation in the field has diversified a great deal, and Richardson himself has been one of the most original participants. Unnatural Voices organizes his contributions into a systematic if inductive treatment of the particular—one might say, characteristic —vocality or voicedness of modern and postmodern fictional prose (but chapter six successfully extends the book’s conclusions to contemporary drama). Simply speaking, this treatment leads the critic to several conclusions. First, modernism and postmodernism, and more broadly the last hundred years or so of fiction, can be defined by the struggle to give voice to a world, human and nonhuman alike, that according to more traditional—mimetic, humanistic, culturally and politically conservative—way of understanding the speaking subject, remains silent or is deliberately silenced. Second, he notices that narratology has met with little success in its attempts to come to grips with the unnatural voices with which modern and postmodern writers tell their stories. Hard to fit into the models usually employed to hear them, these voices may be odd, but they are not aberrations. In reality, the plethora of examples adduced throughout the book suggest, as observed earlier, that such vocal forms are dominant. Derived from this insight is the critic’s conviction that curiosities of these kind can be theorized and organized; it is just that available theories and classifications are not very helpful, precisely because in these accounts such narrative procedures are usually treated as exceptions and what they “communicate” is regarded accordingly. What Richardson argues in chapter 1 is actually the opposite: the “death” of certain techniques does not herald, pace Wolfgang Kayser, the death of narrative—of the novel in this case (1). In fact, [End Page 458] it may well signal the birth of a particular narrative type and with it a whole shift in the representation of the human. How we see ourselves comes off, Richardson contends across Unnatural Voices, in how and with what kind of voice we tell our own and others’ stories, in how we speak, from what and with how many perspectives, and finally, in how we picture the speaking subject, what qualities we think this speakerly/storytelling instance might possess. Along these lines, chapter 2 examines one of the most unnatural storytelling forms: the second person. For it, Richardson unearths a “surprisingly rich . . . genealogy” (17), with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ian Flemming among the precursors of Butor’s La Modification, after which the you-narration turns into something of a fashion. Here, the critic distinguishes among “standard” (common), “hypothetical” (more vague, future-oriented...

Unnatural Innovations

Page 18 American Book Review The Sublime Meets the Real Keya Mitra The Religious and Other Fictions Christina Milletti Carnegie Mellon University Press http://www.cmu.edu/universitypress 191 pages; paper, $16.95 Unnatural Innovations Aaron Chandler Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction Brian Richardson The Ohio State University Press http://www.ohiostatepress.org 166 pages; cloth, $55.95; paper, $24.95 “What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking.” This utterance, taken from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1958), presents us with a miniaturization of the problem of voice in fiction. Is it, after all, an honest question, a bare declaration, a taunt, a note of grief, or something else altogether? Michel Foucault, for example, read it as thoroughly rhetorical and thus an affirmation of the priority of discourse over author, of statement over speaker, so that who speaks matters less than what comes to be spoken. Less polemically, one might read Brian Richardson’s recent addition to the study of narrative, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, not as a definitive answer to Beckett’s dislocated paradox of a non-question, but rather as an atlas charting its several answers. In his slender but ambitious volume, Brian Richardson offers a model of narrative voice that is both supple enough to attend to the dizzying variety of innovations in contemporary fiction and precise enough not to add to the confusion that such works often produce. This is no easy task, for the texts that most interest Richardson are precisely those which traditional narrative theories (of, say, Gérard Genette, Seymour Chatman, and Gerald Prince) are least adept at analyzing, and hence most likely to sideline as aberrant: the nouveau roman, the postmodernist novel, and works of magical realism. Herded together in the close quarters of this study, these varied texts occasionally give the impression of a P. T. Barnum bestiary: stories told by animals, by corpses, by a Minotaur, a dozen novels in which “you” tell the tale, and a score in which “we” do. But the sheer number of these “unnatural voices” speaks persuasively to the critical need to do more than discount them as marginal aberrations. If “who’s speaking” matters at all, it matters here as well. The foremost merits of Richardson’s study are twofold, and both derive from his thoroughly empirical methodology. First, he provides a valuable lexicon for the analysis of texts in the experimental traditions. One can easily imagine concepts such as the “permeable narrator,” “denarration,” and the “fraudulent narrator” entering the general critical discussion of contemporary fiction, not because they yield some jargonic weight but because they are reflections of more incisive thinking about the action of voice in narrative discourse. This freshness of thought is nowhere more evident than in Richardson’s chapters on second-person and first-person-plural narratives, which he takes to be the two “major new form[s] of telling a story.” It is here that Richardson proves particularly resourceful by illuminating continuities across texts that differ vastly in time, place, and purpose. One finds considerations of authors as varied as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Vladimir Nabokov, Nuruddin Farah, and Lorrie Moore all in a handful of pages. This breadth of sample, the study’s second prime virtue, uncovers sets of shared formal interests cutting across cultural and ideological borders, while at the same time revealing how many of these seemingly outré innovations were already present in canonical authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and, of course, Beckett. Richardson also includes a chapter on experimental theater, which further enriches his consideration of innovative presentations of voice and broadens the reach of his claims. Some of those claims, such as that “there is no inherent ideological valence in any narrative form, despite the vigorous claims of its various champions,” will surely rankle some partisans, but because Richardson is unfailingly attentive to the various ways in which form may flexibly serve a host of ideological ends, they will not find him easy to dismiss. Richardson provides a valuable lexicon for the analysis of texts in the experimental traditions. Clearly much is gained...

Unusual Techniques

Other| November 01 2007 Unusual Techniques BRIAN RICHARDSON, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006), pp. 166, cloth, $55.95, paper, $24.95, CD, $9.95. NAOMI MANDEL NAOMI MANDEL University of Rhode Island Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Novel (2007) 40 (3): 320–322. https://doi.org/10.1215/ddnov.040030320 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation NAOMI MANDEL; Unusual Techniques. Novel 1 November 2007; 40 (3): 320–322. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/ddnov.040030320 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNovel Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Novel Corp. 20072007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Unnatural voices: extreme narration in modern and contemporary fiction

Unnatural voices: extreme narration in modern and contemporary fiction