Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories

'This Companion provides a cutting-edge and highly stimulating intervention in the rapidly changing field of interdisciplinary and intermedial narratives theories. It will be essential reading not only for specialists, but for all students and teachers interested in new trajectories of contemporary narrative theory and the cultural politics of narrative form.'
Ansgar Nünning, International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture Giessen

A collection of original essays establishing how wide the intellectual boundaries of narrative theory have become, The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. Attending to literary, digital, visual, cinematic, televisual and aural forms of storytelling, this book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with senior and emerging scholars.

This is the first anthology to consider what narrative is and what it can do in the wake of various turns in literary studies which have been appearing in the context of digital media and algorithmic capital. From mind-centred and philosophical approaches to theories focusing on gender, race and sexuality, the chapters touch on poetry, drama, digital games, podcasts, coding, speculative fiction, the law, medical narrative, oral storytelling and comics as well as the more traditional areas of fiction, TV and film. This is the future of narrative theory.

Zara Dinnen is Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.

Robyn Warhol is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at The Ohio State University.

Cover image: Neon, Jack Landau, 2014 © Jack Landau

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List of contents

List of Illustrations; Notes on Contributors; Introduction; Part I. Mind-centred and Cognitive Approaches to Narrative; 1. H. Porter Abbott, 'What Does It Mean to Be Mad? Diagnosis, Narrative, Science, and the DSM'; 2. Marco Caracciolo, 'The Nonhuman in Mind: Narrative Challenges to Folk Psychology'; 3. Suzanne Keen, 'Narrative and the Embodied Reader'; 4. Karin Kukkonen, 'The Fully Extended Mind'; 5. Merja Polvinen, 'Sense-Making and Wonder: An Enactive Approach to Narrative Form in Speculative Fiction'; Part II. Situated Narrative Theories; 6. Claudia Breger, 'Cosmopolitanism, Controversy, and Collectivity: Zadie Smith's Networked Narration'; 7. Sue J. Km, 'Race and Empathy in GB Tran's Vietnamerica'; 8. Susan S. Lanser, 'Till Death Do Us Part: Embodying Narratology'; 9. Sam McBean, 'Digital Intimacies and Queer Narratives'; 10. Valerie Rohy, 'The Cinema of the Impossible: Queer Theory and Narrative'; Part III. Theories of Digital Narrative; 11. Zara Dinnen, 'Cinema and the Unnarratability of Computation'; 12. Rob Gallagher, 'Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability'; 13. Ellen McCracken, 'Serial as Digital Constellation: Fluid Textuality and Semiotic Otherness in the Podcast Narrative'; 14. Daniel Punday, 'UI Time and the Digital Event'; Part IV. Theories of Television, Film, Comics, and Graphic Narrative; 15. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, 'Continued Comics: The 'New Blake and Mortimer' as an Example of Continuation in European Series'; 16. Jason Mittell, 'Operational Seriality and the Operation of Seriality'; 17. Katalin Orbán, 'Closer Than They Seem: Graphic Narrative and the Senses'; 18. Sean O'Sullivan, 'Episode Five, or When Does a Narrative Become What It Is?'; 19. Christian Quendler, 'Media Theory as Narrative Theory: Film Narration as a Case Study'; Part V. Anti-Mimetic Narrative Theories; 20. Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin, 'Digital Fiction and Unnatural Narrative'; 21. Stefan Kjerkegaard, 'Lyric Poetry as Anti-Mimetic Bridging in Narratives and Motion Pictures: A Case Study of Affective Response to Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014)'; 22. Brian McHale, 'Speculative Fiction, or, Literal Narratology'; 23. Brian Richardson, 'Unnatural Endings in Fiction and Drama'; Part VI. Philosophical Approaches to Narrative; 24. Mark Currie, 'Narrative and the Necessity of Contingency'; 25. James Phelan, 'Local Nonfictionality within Generic Fiction: Huntington's Disease in McEwan's Saturday and Genova's Inside the O'Briens'; 26. Ruth Ronen, 'The Story of the Law'; 27. Richard Walsh, 'The Centre for Narrative Gravity: Narrative and the Philosophy of Selfhood after Dennett'; 28. Amy Shuman and Katharine Young, 'The Body as Medium: A Phenomenological Approach to the Production of Affect in Narrative'.

About the author

Zara Dinnen is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London, where she specializes in digital culture, new media arts, contemporary literature, and narrative theories. Her book, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2017) recovers the novel conditions of becoming-with-technology latent in seemingly boring everyday encounters with digital media.Robyn Warhol is Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where she is a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Her most recent books are Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (co-edited with Susan S. Lanser, Ohio State University Press, 2015) and Love among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (co-authored with Helena Michie, Edinburgh University Pres, 2015).

Summary

Thirty New Essays Redefine Narrative Theory for a Multi-Media Culture

Product details

• Authors: Zara Dinnen, Zara Warhol Dinnen, DINNEN ZARA
• Assisted by: Zara Dinnen (Editor), Robyn Warhol (Editor)
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.05.2018
• EAN: 9781474424745
• ISBN: 978-1-4744-2474-5
• No. of pages: 540
• Series: Edinburgh Companions to Literature; Edinburgh Companions to Litera; Edinburgh Companions to Literature; Edinburgh Companions to Litera
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > Communication science