Beyond Classical Narration

Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges

Jan Alber, Per Krogh Hansen, Jan Alber, Per Krogh Hansen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9783110352573
• eBook ISBN: 9783110376838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays looks at two important manifestations of postclassical narratology, namely transmedial narratology on the one hand, and unnatural narratology on the other. The articles deal with films, graphic novels, computer games, web series, the performing arts, journalism, reality games, music, musicals, and the representation of impossibilities. The essays demonstrate how new media and genres as well as unnatural narratives challenge classical forms of narration in ways that call for the development of analytical tools and modelling systems that move beyond classical structuralist narratology. The articles thus contribute to the further development of both transmedial and unnatural narrative theory, two of the most important manifestations of postclassical narratology.

Notes on Contributors

JAN ALBER is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where he has recently completed his Habilitation/faculty dissertation (“Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama”). He is the author of Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens’ Novels, Twentieth-Century Fiction, and Film (Cambria, 2007), and has authored or co-authored articles that were published or are forthcoming in such journals as Anglistica, Anglistik, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Dickens Studies Annual, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Journal of Narrative Theory, The Journal of Popular Culture, Literature Compass, Narrative, Storyworlds, Style, and Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. The “Deutscher Anglistenverband,” the Association of German Professors of English, has recently awarded him a prize for the best Habilitation in English Studies between March 2011 and March 2013.

NORA BERNING is a postdoctoral researcher and member of the management team of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. She has published widely on narratological topics. She is the author of Towards a Critical Ethical Narratology: Analyzing Value Construction in Literary Non-Fiction across Media (WVT, 2013) and Narrative Means to Journalistic Ends: A Narratological Analysis of Selected Journalistic Reportages (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010). Her main research interests are interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, genre theory, travel literature, and the politics of aesthetics. Nora Berning is a habilitation candidate of the Department of English and American Literature at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, with Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning.

MATTHIAS BRÜTSCH is senior lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. He is the author of Traumbühne Kino: Der Traum als filmtheoretische Metapher und narratives Motiv (Screening the Dream: Cinematic Metaphors, Oneiric Narration and the Function of Dreams in Film, Schüren, 2011) and a number of articles on film narratology and aesthetics. He has co-directed the International Short Film Festival Winterthur from 1999–2003, worked as a script analyst for the Zurich Film Foundation from 2003–2007, and has been a member of both the board of trustees of the Swiss Arts Council and the promotion agency Swiss Films from 2007–2011.

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HELENA ELSHOUT has been a doctoral researcher within the Research Group German Literature at Ghent University since 2009, carrying out a research project on rhetoric and narratology funded by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO-Flanders). In her PhD, she investigates the interferences between narrative and rhetorical processes in selected novellas from Heinrich von Kleist, Wilhelm Raabe, Gottfried Keller and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. She studied German, French and Comparative Literature at the universities of Ghent and Bamberg. Supported by a scholarship of the Swiss government, she conducted research on narratological processes in drama at the bilingual university of Fribourg/Freiburg. Her research interests include style, figurativeness, narratology, drama and theatre. She is the author of articles on Heinrich von Kleist, Wilhelm Raabe, Karl Kraus and Alexander Kluge.

PER KROGH HANSEN is Head of the Department of Design and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on a great variety of narratological concepts. His book Karakterens rolle: Aspekter af en litterær karakterologi (The Role of Character: Aspects of a Literary Characterology, 2000) explores the concept of character, whereas his other studies deal with narration, unreliable narrators, metafiction, realism, fairy tales, corporate storytelling, film musicals, etc. Beside narrative theory, Krogh Hansen is a specialist of modern Danish literature. He has edited and co-edited many books – among these are When we get to the end…Towards a Narratology of the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (with Marianne Wolff Lundholt, 2005), Borderliners: Searching the Boundaries of Narrativity and Narratology/Afsøgning af narrativitetens og narratologiens grænser (2009), and Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction (with Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Rolf Reitan, 2011). Since 2004, Krogh Hansen has been a literary critic for the Danish newspaper Berlingske, and in the period 2011-13 he was chairman of ENN – The European Narratology Network.

BENOÎT HENNAUT has completed his PhD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and EHESS (CRAL) in Paris. His research is dedicated to the articulation of a general theory of literature in terms of narrative and narration on the one hand, and contemporary theatrical writings on the other. Apart from reinforcing the links between drama/the performing arts and narratology, he focuses on various ways whereby live performances are textually archived through narrative discourse. He is actively involved in the organization of several doctoral and MA seminars in literary theory and theatre studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is carrying on his academic work while working in the field of the contemporary performing arts, and the management of cultural institutions.

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MARKUS KUHN is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Hamburg. He studied German literature, media studies, and art history in Göttingen and Hamburg. His MA thesis on “Narrative Situations in Literature and Film” was awarded the “Karl H. Ditze-Preis” for outstanding Master’s theses. Kuhn worked as a freelance journalist for various newspapers and online magazines. From 2006 to 2008, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Hamburg; and a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Bremen from 2008 to 2009, where he supervised the doctoral research group “Textuality of Film.” His dissertation Filmnarratologie: Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell was awarded the graduate prize by the “Studienstiftung Hamburg” in 2009 and was published in 2011 at De Gruyter—available as Studienbuch (paperback) since May 2013. He has just published (together with Irina Scheidgen and Nicola V. Weber) Filmwissenschaftliche Genreanalyse: Eine Einführung (De Gruyter, 2013), an introduction to genre studies.

GUNTHER MARTENS is Professor of German literature at Ghent University in Belgium. He specializes in modernist literature, rhetorical narratology, and in the cultural history of the encyclopaedia. He is the coordinator of research projects on the relationship between rhetoric and narratology, on narratorial profiling in performance and on new forms of documentary literature. He also acts as the coordinator of a project on educational innovation, which aims at developing a platform for computer aided language and literature teaching and teleclassing. He is a board member of the European Narratology Network. Most recent publications: (as editor, with Ralph Müller, Benjamin Biebuyck, and Helena Elshout) thematic issue on rhetorical narratology, in Language and Literature (forthcoming).

FELICITAS MEIFERT-MENHARD completed an accelerated B.A. degree in English and Philosophy at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in 2001 before continuing her studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, graduating with an M.A. in 2004. Her PhD thesis, “Multiperspectivity and Unreliable Narration in the English Novel since 1800,” was published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier in 2009. She held a postdoc position in the research project “Narrating Futures,” funded by the European Research Council and chaired by Prof. Dr. Christoph Bode, from 2009 until 2012. Her second monograph Playing the Text, Performing the Future: Future Narratives in Print and Digiture appeared in 2013 (De Gruyter). Currently, she is a research assistant for Christoph Bode at the English Department of LMU Munich. Her main research interests include narratology and the literature of the Romantic period.

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HENRIK SKOV NIELSEN is Professor at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at University of Aarhus, Denmark. He is head of the recently established “Centre for Fictionality Studies” where he is working on a project on fictionality conceived of one of the most fundamental human cognitive skills and as an ability to imagine how something might be, or can be, or would have been or simply: is not. Simultaneously, he is working on narratological research projects about the relation between authors and narrators and unnatural narratology in the context of two research groups, NRL and “Unnatural Narratology.”

http://nordisk.au.dk/forskning/forskningscentre/nrl/intro/;

http://nordisk.au.dk/forskning/forskningscentre/nrl/unnatural/.

MAŁGORZATA PAWŁOWSKA is a lecturer in Music Theory Department of the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland. In her doctoral thesis, she studied the problem of musical narratology, taking into consideration musical pieces of different styles and genres inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet. She was also awarded the national competition for her MA thesis entitled “The Devil in 19th- and 20th-century Music” (2006). Pawłowska graduated from the Academy of Music in Krakow in 2006. She spent part of her MA studies at the Royal Conservatoire in Brussels (2003-2004). Pawłowska has also completed postgraduate studies in Culture Management in the ...

Table of contents

• Narratologia
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Transmedial and Unnatural Narratology
• The Selection and Concretization of Elementsin Verbal and Filmic Narration
• Toward a Transmedial Narratology:On Narrators in Contemporary Graphic Novels,Feature Films, and Computer Games
• From Ironic Distance to Unexpected Plot Twists:Unreliable Narration in Literature and Film
• Narratorial Strategies in Drama and Theatre: A Contributionto Transmedial Narratology
• Building Stories around Contemporary Performing Arts:The Case of Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia
• Narrative Journalism from a Transdisciplinary Perspective:A Narratological Analysis of Award-Winning Literary Reportages
• Web Series between User-Generated Aesthetics and Self-ReflexiveNarration: On the Diversification of AudiovisualNarration on the Internet
• Emergent Narrative, Collaborative Storytelling:Toward a Narratological Analysis of Alternate Reality Games
• Photography and Narrative: The Representation of the AtomicBomb in Photographs of Nagasaki from 1945 to 1995
• Musical Narratology: An Outline
• Flow-Stoppers and Frame-Breakers:The Cognitive Complexities of the Film Musical Exemplifiedby Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000)
• The Unnatural in E. A. Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”
• Postmodernist Impossibilities, the Creation of New Cognitive Frames, and Attempts at Interpretation
• Notes on Contributors