Narrative Theory

This essay proposes a historically material theory of resonance in experience and literature. Working against contemporary techno-deterministic assessments of sound, I argue for a historical, rather than individual, modality of listening – a collective acoustical unconscious. Understood in its technical expression, Faulkner’s literary acoustics helps us to draw out some of Benjamin’s more elliptical points regarding an acoustical unconscious, a notion that Benjamin never directly articulated, but can be found scattered across the writings. Both Faulkner and Benjamin teach us that the acoustical unconscious far exceeds the boundaries of the individual life. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner crafted a narrative space that is a sensitive recording apparatus, more sensitive than any mechanical device. But as history moves through narrative space and its radiophonic air, there are consequences for racial consciousness. In Faulkner’s narrative space, blackness and whiteness become, above all, sound-effects,  or what I call a “fact of resonance” rather than of essence or substance.

Not long ago, narrative was all the rage... today, not as much. The fashionable preoccupation with (yet another) category to deliver religious imagination from the grips of organizing principles - artificial and reductionistic tropes - enjoyed its brief day in the sun. As with most fads, narrative theology still influences many but not in the label - more in the details and low-powered vocabulary. Why? Because we're frightened by those grand, reductionistic themes... embarrassed by our hubris and too cool to be tricked once again. Good luck with that....

"Narrative Theology" is a piece published as part of Walter Elwell's 2001 revised edition of The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Baker).

Our time is characterized by a crisis of representational
practice, fuelled by unprecedented technological and economic changes on a global level. Narrative, therefore, takes a wide variety of forms. This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of film and literature from around the world, and analyses the masters of each art form. Through short stories and plays, we will study different ways a story can be told and the many exciting ways embedded "narratives" (or discourses) can be framed. Similarly, through films and film adaptations of great literary masterpieces, we will study how visual elements challenge the reader's imagination.


Specifically, we examine the relationship between meaning
and narrative structure. The course considers the tensions
between claims for originality and poetic license, between
producers and audiences, between fiction and reality, narrative and history, memory and representation. We will study representative theorists of narratology, such as J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and Hayden White. Cutting-edge scholarship on film and the new media will also be introduced, such as Seymour Chatman, Rey Chow, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation. In addition to becoming familiar with major issues in film studies and East-West comparative studies, students will acquire a working knowledge of narrative theory.

In this contribution I would like to elaborate on why the development of a narrative identity for elderly is so important, but also what they can do if they don’t succeed in having one. The narrative paradigm has enormous potentials in gerontology, but also meets some limitations. Often, older adults don’t succeed in articulating  their life story. The late modern necessity of identity construction continues, however, to put pressure on their lives. Sometimes minor or major depressions cannot be avoided. More common in later life is the experience of  the meaninglessness of life.  But many elderly seem to have found other ways of saving their endangered sense of self, though they hardly owe the narrative power necessary to develop a coherent and purposeful life story.

Das Buch ist die erste monografische Abhandlung zu Vogelbildern als Untergattung der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts. Es nähert sich dem Thema interdisziplinär mit einem ungewohnten methodischen Ansatz, der die erzählerische Struktur der Bilder behandelt. So wird erstmals in einer umfassenden Form deutlich, wie viele Geschichten und Geschichtchen in den Gemälden zu finden sind, die deutlich mehr als nur dekorative Aspekte zu bieten haben. In einigen Bildern können mithilfe der narrativen Analyse Fabeln als literarischer Bezug benannt werden. Nebenbei wird ein geschichtlicher Überblick der Vogelmalerei einschließlich Ursprüngen, Entwicklungsverläufen und Nachwirkungen geboten, in welchem beinahe alle Künstler dieser Gattung vertreten sind. Die Arbeit schöpft aus einem reichen Fundus von Gemäl­den, der aus Privatsammlungen, dem Kunsthandel und natürlich Museen zusammengetragen wurde.

Storytelling pervades almost every aspect of the law. Many narrativistic legal elements, however, have in fact been little more than historically transitory. Given the precarious status of narrative at law, I argue we should focus instead on one of the most historically consistent acts of legal storytelling: the judicial opinion. Here I examine in particular the invocation of precedent in legal opinions, what I call “judicial emplotment,” as an almost archetypal act of formalized storytelling. As I go on to argue, the courts justify legal outcomes by invoking precedent, thereby placing decisions within a specific and heavily formalized legal-narrative structure.

'Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the "Commedia"’ questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante’s masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot’s workings in Dante’s text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the 'Commedia' over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of the 'Commedia' that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot’s influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book’s impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante’s narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the 'Commedia'.

The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas. It provides a thorough description about outlawry on the basis of extant law and saga texts as well as an analysis of referential connotations attached to it. The concept of outlawry was fundamental for the medieval Icelanders conceptions of their past. Indeed, understanding outlawry is essential for understanding many of the Family Sagas. Outlaws appear in saga texts in significant roles.

The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.

The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.

The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.

However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.

The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.

The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.

The paper examines the dominancy of narrative in Hasidic religious life through the discourse of narrative ethics and its implications for theology, specifically feminist theology, and for religion in general.
I claim that the centrality of storytelling in Hasidism reflects and constructs an essential attitude toward religious life. This attitude directs one to narrative and contextual thinking, which focuses on the specific person, circumstances, emotions, as opposed to law, norm, and abstract determination. This centrality of storytelling is connected to a deep Hasidic awareness of the restriction of normative religious life, a finite facet of the infinite paths to God

The article contends that Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels occupy a special place among contemporary literature in that they superficially adopt traditional modes of storytelling, typically associated with the nineteenth century Bildungsroman, while destabilizing them through a first-person narrator keenly aware of the manipulative potentialities of plot(ting). It supports this contention in a twofold manner. Firstly, by scrutinizing the text’s apparent linear trajectory and, through Genette’s notion of the arbitraire, coming to the conclusion that such linearity is revealed to be, at the end of the penultimate section, entirely constructed by the protagonist in an effort to exact vengeance on her friend. The article proceeds to examine how the textual apparatus bears the brunt of this revelation. In doing so, it adopts Peter Brooks’s thermodynamic model and reconfigures it into a metabolic model meant to monitor the set of activities and energetic transformations at work in the text. It identifies a metabolic malfunction in the novel’s last section, manifested as a form of textual hypothyroidism whereby the plot becomes, as it were, constipated. The article finally concludes that in halting the progress of the novel’s plot, Ferrante offers a cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and our tendency to read consequence into sequence, while simultaneously advancing a geometry of narrative entanglement that stands in sheer opposition to the linear.

• This essay explores the literature/digital nexus from a narratological perspective and asks: how does the digital enter the traditional printed novel? The concept of the paratext – with the new categories of material peritexts and digital epitexts – serves as a theoretical frame to be discussed along with Paul Dawson's proposal for a discursive narratology and James Phelan's rhetorical approach to narrative in the attempt to fruitfully combine the two for a contextualized and cultural-aware narrative analysis.

Transitional justice is a major concept in promoting peace and reconciliation between conflicting parties. It is usually associated with formal judicial processes such as criminal justice, rule-of law reform and paying reparations. This chapter focuses on another transitional justice method, a more informal one: memory work. There is a growing realization of the major impact on the way in which the history of a conflict is viewed by the members of parties involved on their psychological and behavioral reactions. Addressing that history properly can promote their well being, conflict resolution and reconciliation between the parties. There are many ways of addressing the relevant history, for example, through truth and reconciliation committees, the rewriting of history textbooks, and commemoration projects. This chapter focuses on another way: the role of the autobiographical memory, that of the people who experienced the conflict directly, as it is manifested in their memoirs, newspaper articles and interviews with scholars. To this end the chapter uses a case study approach, regarding the causes for the main historical event of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the 1948 Palestinian exodus. It explores for the first time the way in which Israeli-Jewish 1948 war veterans presented these causes between 1949 and 2004. The question posed was: did their autobiographical memory present a Zionist narrative (willing flight of the Palestinians) or a critical/post-Zionist narrative (willing flight combined with expulsion)? This exploration is based on an analysis of all published war veterans' memoirs and newspaper articles, as well as interviews with scholars, in the 56 year research period. During this study, interviews were also conducted with 1948 war veterans. Following the description of the empirical findings regarding the Israeli-Jewish autobiographical memory of the exodus, these findings are used to theoretically conceptualize various phenomena. For example, what determines the way in which direct-experience people describe their experiences during a conflict, how these people influence directly and indirectly the collective memory of their society of a given conflict, and the way in which they influence the dynamics of

La critica letteraria è una materia in cui “parole e cose” sono strettamente intrecciate le une alle altre, e in cui tra i componenti materiali dei testi e le categorie che li classificano esiste un intricato rapporto di individuazione reciproca: non c’è termine, nel lessico della teoria letteraria, che non sia nato da un dato testuale, un caso particolare che ne ha influenzato natura e confini con le proprie caratteristiche specifiche, e allo stesso tempo non si dà dato testuale che possa essere identificato come tale in mancanza di una categoria che gli preesiste, di uno spazio teorico che lo fa esistere in quanto oggetto e ne garantisce la riconoscibilità. Partendo da questo doppio presupposto, questo libro si offre come strumento di partenza per lo studio della narrativa, occasione per riepilogare i concetti fondamentali della critica riportandoli – per quanto possibile – ai loro contesti di origine, così da coniugare nozione ed evoluzione, significato e storia.

This thesis focuses on a particular stylistic period of Frederic Chopin. The 1840s show an important evolution of Chopin’s musical language and correspond to an aesthetic turning point, characterized by a difficult historical and biographical context. All along our research, we will try to build a transversal definition of Chopin’s last style by highlighting the recurrent characteristics of this period. In this purpose, a corpus of twenty-two works will be analyzed through several levels (traditional and formal, semiotic, narrative and thymic), to grasp all the issues of the last period of the polish composer.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à une période stylistique particulière du compositeur Frédéric Chopin. Les années 1840 manifestent une évolution importante dans son langage musical et correspondent à un tournant esthétique marqué par un contexte historique et biographique difficile. Tout au long de ce travail, nous allons tenter d’ériger une définition transversale du « dernier style » de Chopin, en recherchant les éléments caractéristiques récurrents de cette période. Dans ce but, un corpus de vingt-deux oeuvres musicales sera analysé selon plusieurs niveaux (traditionnel et formel, sémiotique, narratif et thymique) afin de saisir tous les enjeux de la dernière période du compositeur polonais.

The article discusses the production of live television formats, as they have developed in Europe during the past decade. The analytical examples are taken from entertainment as well as factual television, and from public service as well as commercial contexts. In the article, it is argued that there has been an approximation between the textual features and generic and narrative structures of entertainment and factual live television, and a model is presented that is supposed to account for these narrative patterns.

Umfangreiche Freskenzyklen, überdimensionierte Flügelaltäre und reich illustrierte Manuskripte: Insbesondere im Mittelalter konnten Bilder komplexe Geschichten erzählen. Die Vorlesung stellt unterschiedliche Strategien bildlicher Narration vor und fragt nicht nur, wie Bilder Geschichten erzählen, sondern auch, wie wir diese Geschichten heute neu erfahren und interpretieren können.

The article discusses the production of live television formats, as they have developed in Europe during the past decade. The analytical examples are taken from entertainment as well as factual television, and from public service as well as commercial contexts. In the article, it is argued that there has been an approximation between the textual features and generic and narrative structures of entertainment and factual live television, and a model is presented that is supposed to account for these narrative patterns.

Suspendus aux lèvres d’un conteur, incapables d’interrompre la lecture d’un roman, captivés par un film haletant, nous faisons tous l’expérience quotidienne de ce plaisir apparemment paradoxal que nous tirons de notre insatisfaction provisoire face à un récit inachevé. Bien qu’une mode esthétique et théorique ait tenté de nous convaincre que ce plaisir était honteux, on peut néanmoins avoir l’intuition que le cœur vivant de la narrativité réside précisément dans ce nœud coulant, toujours plus serré à mesure que nous progressons dans l’histoire, qui nous attache à l’intrigue et creuse la temporalité par l’attente impatiente d’un dénouement. Si le récit a quelque chose à voir avec la manière dont nous éprouvons le temps, cette expérience n’apparaît jamais avec autant d’éclat que dans le suspense, la curiosité ou la surprise qui font la force des intrigues fictionnelles. La compréhension des fonctions narratives engage donc non seulement l’analyse littéraire, linguistique et sémiotique, mais aussi l’analyse cognitive et la psychologie des émotions.

ROZBOR FILMU / FILM ANALYSIS [English summary]

Radomír D. Kokeš (Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2015)

The book focuses on possibilities of analyzing a film as a system. Its aim is to deal with the process of asking questions in such a way that their answers will contribute to convincing solutions of exactly formulated tasks related to the structure of a film work. It is not a broadly conceived exposé of numerous kinds of analyses of numerous types of films; it rather follows the method of in-depth study of a limited scope of issues. As such, it consists of four sections. Each of these sections offers different questions and answers, presents different findings to the reader and follows different methods of work with the explication. All sections logically follow from the others, and thus analysed topics reappear in various contexts, as well as complement and develop each other. An invariable background of the explications in the book is formed, first, by aesthetic norms of the classic Hollywood film, second, by traditions of the Czech cinema and third, by Kristin Thompson’s and David Bordwell’s neoformalist poetics.

(1) The first section is titled TO OBSERVE and it presents the basic tools for an analysis of a work of art. It sees the work as a system, where it distinguishes between basic components of narrative, style and the fictional world. It explains each of these components separately on specific examples. It gives special attention to the films: A Close Shave (GB, 1995) and Once upon a Time in the West (USA/Italy, 1968). The subject matter of the explication is a film work.

(2) In the second section, TO PLAN, the book approaches to discussion and writing about film as a way of issues-solving. It explains the importance of finding, posing, and answering question about the structure of a film. It gives examples of the films Titanic (USA, 1997) and Bloody Sunday (GB/Ireland, 2002). For a better understanding of the topic it deals with, it offers a conception of two types of theses: centripetal and centrifugal. The subject matter of the explication is the analysis as such.

(3) The third section TO WRITE AND READ / TO READ AND WRITE is the most guiding one, as it focuses on practical aspects of analytical writing, theoretical coherence and the field of recommended publication, which can help to enhance this sensibility. The subject matter of the explication is a written analytical text.

(4) The final section APPENDIX: THREE ANALYTICAL FORMATS AND A READER makes it easier to understand on a higher level the various ways of structuring analysis and its functions. It presents three formats of such texts: an analytical essay, an analytical study, and poetological study. Adaptability to analysed issues follows primarily from six case-studies of the films Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (Czechoslovakia, 1966), Arsenic and Old Lace (USA, 1944), Speed Racer (USA, 2008), Memento (USA, 2000), Smugglers of Death (Czechoslovakia, 1959) and A Tooth for a Tooth (Austria-Hungary, 1913). Each of these more or less comprehensive studies deals with a different issue, asks different questions and (intentionally) addresses readers with different levels of experience. The subject matter of the explication is a unity of approach on the one hand and a variety of issues-solving on the other hand.
The book aims to show the widest range of the explanatory possibilities of its approach, which it labels a poetics of fiction. When working with its case-studies, it repeatedly proceeds in the chapters from formally playful films (like A Close Shave, Titanic, Speed Racer or Memento) to structurally complex works (like Once Upon a Time in the West, Bloody Sunday or Smugglers of Death). This enables it to cover a wide range of challenges, which one can encounter in the process of an analysis of (not only audio-visual) works. And finally, the last chapter introduces the theme of a historiographic dimension of the book. It presents original research of the beginnings of Czech cinema.

The field of an analysis of a film authorship is rather suppressed in the explications, although it remains crucial and as such it is primarily dealt with in the second section of the book, which can thus be also seen from this perspective as an original contribution to authorial poetics and questions of a realistic effect in the work of the director Paul Greengrass.

Given the reasons stated above, Film Analysis wants to be (a) a comprehensible guide to the analytical process of a wide readership (especially students of programmes in history and theory of the arts, cinephiles and beginning critics), (b) a collection of original analyses, which explain a variety of issues related to structures of film from the perspective of the poetics of fiction, and (c) a source of helpful tools for not only film analysis, but also the analytical process as such (for example, kinds of theses or analytical formats).

Some live their lives in a ‘Narrative’ and ‘Diachronic’ fashion. They intuitively feel they’re the same self or person across long periods of time. Others live in a decidedly ‘non-Narrative’ and ‘Episodic’ way with no strong sense that they’re the same same self or person across time. Some think you have to live Narratively and Diachronically to live a morally or ethically good life. I argue that Episodic, non-Narrative people can lead equally moral, ethical, responsible, conscience-governed, lives, and are equally capable of remorse, love, friendship, loyalty, and so on. I raise and respond to a doubt about gratitude.

key words narrative, non-narrative, Narrativity, Diachronic personality, Episodic personality, remorse, contrition, guilt, conscience, love, friendship, loyalty, resentment, gratitude

In Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments, Barbara Postema uses the notion of the gap to explain how comics create meaning. As texts that combine words and images, comics rely on the verbal register to communicate meaning, but they also use images in a number of different ways, many of which are based on leaving out information, forcing readers to fill in the blanks. By foregrounding the narrative qualities of comics, Postema demonstrates the ways in which comics are structured at every level of communication—image, panel, sequence, narration—to guide the reader to assemble the narrative from fragments. Besides advancing a new understanding of the structure of meaning in comics, this work’s exploration into the form of comics integrates two traditionally separate approaches to the study of comics, namely, the semiotics of the Franco-Belgian school of visual culture and comics studies, and the practice-based comics theory advanced by American cartoonists Will Eisner and Scott McCloud. It combines these traditions to advance a novel analytical framework and a vocabulary to study the form, an approach that is demonstrated through a series of readings of contemporary North-American comics.

Storytelling has long been an important part of both campaigning and creating and maintaining community.  However, the relationship between stories and rational argument has been problematic in the study of public moral debate.  The question remains unsettled: How do stories argue?  How dod stories have a persuasive role in political rhetoric?  Rather than the view that narrative reasoning is based in a different paradigm of reasoning, I argue that the persuasive use of stories goes back to early rhetorical training and that stories have always been used along with rhetorical argument as part of persuasive discourse.  Vladimir Propp's work on the morphology of folk and fairy tales demonstrates that stories use topics, or topoi, in a manner similar to those used to generate lines of argument in rhetoric.  I offer four aspects of narrative that affect the persuasive reception of stories: performance, adaptation, context, and iconicity.  These aspects of rhetorical storytelling, combined with the topoi of the story, give us a new analytical framework for evaluation the persuasive potential of political storytelling.

This article stems from a story of arts education advocacy in the midst of a bureaucracy that misunderstood the purpose of art education at the launch of a new elementary school. Contemporary visual arts education practices overlap a unique period of change in neighboring social science disciplines, a turn of the tide that involves the embrace of narrative methods to rewrite prevailing working models and paradigms of social science practice. Here at the start of the 21st century, art education continues to be practiced in the thrall of a scientific paradigm that misunderstands the greater potential of the arts in education, often imposing a ceiling ill-fitted for arts praxis, arts-based research, or arts pedagogy. The author argues that art education is also at a turn of the tide and surmises some of the unexpected outcomes when new and ex-centric stories of learning and a “pedagogy of possibility” are more thoroughly explored, allowing practitioners to fully rethink an art education practice without taxonomic ceilings and within the shelter of the unexplored labyrinth.

Drawing upon innovative theoretical and empirical scholarship presented at Narrative Matters 2012: Life and Narrative (The American University of Paris, May 29-June 1, 2012), this volume seeks to make a significant contribution to our under¬standing of the dynamic interplay of life and narrative by creatively addressing it from multiple angles. It features cross-disciplinary work by cutting-edge scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, including Jens Brockmeier, Jerome Bruner, Mark Freeman, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, James Phelan, and Brian Richardson. Four main intellectual contributions distinguish this volume. First, the contributors clearly detail the conceptual and empirical frameworks for describing the mutual construction of narrative and life. Second, the volume illustrates the tension between the need for narratives to hold and represent factual experiences and the power of narrative to conjure coherent worlds of imagination. Third, the volume explores the tension between the power of social and cultural forces to influence, or even impose, pre-configured interpretations on experience and the ingenuity of persons to create their own interpretations of experience. Finally, the problem of life and narrative is conceived as a cross-disciplinary problem. Cross-disciplinary study is crucial for thinking through basic problems in the social sciences and the humanities. There is still little dialogue among the disciplinary groups studying narrative, but these are conversations without boundaries, and limiting the scope leaves out critical perspec¬tives that can advance knowledge of narrative, literature, and human beings. This volume aims to introduce a wide range of narrative scholars to the broader questions that narrative studies entails.

This paper is based on doctoral work-in-progress and discusses the post-literary on the basis of Callus and Corby’s (2015) grounding poetics of the countertextual as an “artefact [which essentially] challenge[s] and reconfigure[s] cultural givens and accepted notions of textuality.” I consider one example of the countertextual artefact to be ‘simulation’, “a process in which a model of any kind is used to imitate (some aspect of) the behavior of its referent” (Jeff Rothenberg, 1989). This definition, among others, can also be applied to narrative, itself a very particular form of modelling of actual or pseudo-referents. There is therefore much in common between simulation modelling and fictional world-building.
Yet, simulation is not without its paradoxes. Its use in technology today may have reconciled its ability to mimic existing systems (replication) on one hand while generating emergent behaviour (construction) on the other, yet from the standpoint of a pervasive neo-platonism, simulation’s mimetic strategies serve to produce second-order and ‘untrue’ copies which ultimately delegitimise their source (Jean Baudrillard, 1981). As with any attempt to describe the post-literary - is it what comes after literature? – and here we would be hard pressed to determine when literature ceases to be (read?) (written?) (understood?) – we are also forced to question what simulation has become today. Narrative-as-simulation may well prove to be one (countertextual) answer. In negotiating itself between mimesis (imitation) and poïesis (production), as well as between literature and “literature-plus” (Callus and Corby, 2015), simulation may well have opened up the text to new forms of re-presentation (modalities) and their reception. 
I consider Jorge Luis Borges’s impossible cartography in his story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946) to fittingly foreground these post-literary modes. Although Borges did not use the term simulation, nor explain how to achieve one-to-one scalar representation, his one-paragraph story is essentially an invitation to carry out simulation modelling. Borges’s story has been read, extrapolated and reconfigured through the many shifting perspectives of simulation, from Baudrillard’s semiotic analysis in ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ to Umberto Eco’s mathematical essay ‘On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1’ (1995) and, more recently in 2016, as an “absurdist thought-experiment” in the artistic installation of Sara Morawetz.

Despite a growing prevalence of mental illness diagnoses and treatments, there remains remarkable interpretive diversity regarding the meaning of these diagnoses and their implication for mental healthcare. Humanities scholarship devoted to language, power and ethical cares of the self provides invaluable tools for navigating interpretive diversity in this domain. This scholarship suggests that ethical questions of informed consent regarding mental difference and disability go much deeper than the usual standards. Ethical questions of informed consent go back to the very language choices people use to narrate and navigate the mental difference or disability. Making these ethical choices between different ways of understanding psychic difference is fundamentally about making narrative and lifestyle choices. This article considers these issues in the context of the many interpretations of Vincent van Gogh's life and their ongoing relevance for contemporary approaches to mental difference and disability.

Through the nightclub sequence, we analyze how, during ten minutes, the building of suspense is made, which never falls and does not lose its intensity at any time, particularly thanks to a very specific type of editing. Also, this suspense is a tool to convey a discourse on society as well as on technology, through the example of the Terminator.

The search for medical care leads to the need for interaction between the patient and the doctor, in which there is a meeting of narratives. The patient's narrative is an important base of work for the physician who will diagnose and care, however, its interpretation and communication, in the therapeutic sense, will obey ethical and moral commitments. This relationship of dependence is part of the medical narrative formulation whose ultimate contribution will be a therapeutic response recognized and accepted by the patient.
Keywords: Narrative; Ethics; Moral; Medicine; Therapy

According to a common though not universally accepted opinion, works of narrative fiction are made up of statements uttered by a fictional narrator who must be distinguished from the author. In what follows, I demonstrate that this assumption has led to misinterpretations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In the first section, I examine the view, held by several distinguished scholars, that there is a fictional narrator in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Two main problems of the respective interpretations are exposed. First, they fail to substantiate their claims about the existence and particular traits of the narrator. Second, they fail to clarify the very point of introducing him. In the second section, I challenge the general assumption that it is reasonable to postulate a narrator while ignoring, temporarily or permanently, the author’s purposes. The third section suggests that it is rather misleading to apply the term ‘narrator’ to the author of the novel. One may of course call Goethe the ‘narrator’ of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, but there is little point in doing so. In the final section, I draw attention to some aspects of Goethe’s novel that have previously been neglected and that can be more easily recognized once one refrains from assuming that there is a fictional narrator in the novel.

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31989
Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post–civil rights era, the Cold War as it exploded across Asia and Latin America, and the Asian and Latin American labor flows powering global capitalism today.

Read together, Asian American and Latinx literatures convey astonishing diversity and untapped possibilities for coalition within the United States' fastest-growing immigrant and minority communities; to understand the changing shape of these communities we must see how they have formed in relation to each other. As the U.S. population approaches a minority-majority threshold, we urgently need methods that can look across the divisions and unequal positions of the racial system. Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America leads the way with a vision for the future built on panethnic and cross-racial solidarity.

There is a view, which I have used as the premise for this paper, that historical thinking is evident within the narratives of societies as historically existing entities. These narrations can be gathered empirically and analyzed for underlying structures. A more common research approach, however, is to assume a priori that these structures exist and then to look at value judgments from which they can be inferred. In this way, various quantitative studies have been carried out that polled the opinions of European, and in particular German and Turkish, youths and young adults. These have shown that amongst Germans there is ostensibly a strong desire for change, from which one can infer an underlying narrative pattern of history as progress. Indirect questioning hints at a lacking link with tradition among young Germans and even more so in some other Western European cultures, mainly those with a distinctly Protestant imprint. In this paper I will establish a link between first, these opinion polls, second, the results of psephology since the 1950s and third, additional supporting historical evidence in order to argue that there is a structural difference between the narratives of German Protestants and Catholics, with Catholics showing a stronger tendency towards tradition.