ABSTRACT: Over the past two decades, productive discussions have begun on the theoretical paradigms of narrative criminology, as criminology has joined other social science disciplines witnessing a “narrative turn.” However, criminologists have thus far “hardly connected with narratology,” and instead accessed a “fairly limited toolkit for discerning the nuances of storytelling.” This article, thus, heeds Presser’s call for greater criminological engagement with narrative theory, and greater cross-fertilization between the fields, which hitherto has been limited. It sets out to explore how a “master narrative” of domestic abuse is witnessed and experienced (and perpetuated) by front line workers offering specialist support and help in this area. Through the analysis of interview data from the first study of its kind attentive to the narrative status of qualitative data solicited from domestic abuse service providers, this article will illustrate how these narrator-practitioners (re)produce a problematic and persistent “master narrative” of domestic abuse. Specifically, the findings of this original test-case in “applied narratology” reveal the persistent presence of a range of problematic tropes and stereotypes constituting the “master narrative” of domestic abuse as a complex web of interwoven stories; the existence and co-constitution of which is harmful as it erects barriers to support, impacts service provision and negatively forms part of a wider societal response to domestic abuse. This article thus concludes by underscoring the value of narrative criminology and/as “applied narratology” as a critical nexus and brings fresh insights from narrative theory into the process of re-telling the “master narrative” of domestic abuse.
ABSTRACT: This essay investigates how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini negotiate legal, political, and cultural scripts associated with migration in the US to construct prototypical immigrant characters and narratives. Given the American security state’s use of commercial LLMs and generative artificial intelligence in immigration management, we conducted a seven-month long empirical study that analyzed synthetic narratives produced in response to four prompt configurations in order to survey attitudes to noncitizens embedded in widely used LLMs. Our research shows that ChatGPT and Gemini, driven by an overarching “ideology of engagement,” simulate the positionality of “social storytellers,” constructing highly patterned stories with widely shared emotional goals to sustain user interaction. Synthetic narratives about immigrants are consistently structured as the “hero’s journey” which privileges happiness, economic mobility, and seamless assimilation while minimizing complex affects, trauma, and structural violence. A benchmark immigrant emerges in our synthetic data in the form of a recurring character: Anya, a young Ukrainian woman who finds joy in the US by opening a bakery. Anya’s whiteness, positivity, and economic assimilation reflect broader cultural myths and biases present in training data and corporate moderation rules. Advancing “Narrative AI Studies,” our essay puts affective narratology in dialogue with natural language processing (NLP) methods to scrutinize story structures, sentiment patterns, and phrase networks. We argue that cheap AI narratives of migration such as those featuring Anya facilitate algorithmic marginalization of real-world migrants. Our research contributes to applied narratology by demonstrating how narrative theory can help assess the political and ethical stakes of AI-mediated storytelling.
This essay represents an evolving conversation between a dendrochronologist or tree ring scientist and a narrative theorist. Our project of applied narratology uses narrative theory to read tree rings-a rich example of texts featuring what we call material narrativity in their clear representation of a sequence of events in their annual accumulation-and illustrates the practical and social significance of contemporary narratological scholarship. Alternating between our voices, we (1) introduce a case study of narrative featuring material narrativity, (2) place the tree ring narrative within a narratological context, (3) produce a revised interpretation of this narrative and a second case study using narratological concepts, and (4) explain what pressures such narratives might exert on contemporary narrative scholarship and dendrochronological practices. Our back-and-forth discussion ultimately advocates for and highlights the potentials of a narratologically-infused form of tree ring sciences, or what we playfully call dendronarratology. We also pitch two expansions to a narratological lexicon that dendronarratology provokes: an expansion of transmedial narratology to include material-specific narratological resources (in addition to media-specific ones) and a more capacious understanding of authorship in light of our recognition of trees as experiencing-and authoring-agents. Thus, we argue for a greater call for narrative scholars to delve deeper into the ecology of narratives.
A global community of futurists and policymakers has responded enthusiastically to the recent "narrative turn" in futures research and practice, embracing the use of storytelling in multiple forms. Narrative modes are increasingly prevalent in the futures scenarios and design fictions represented in the so-called "grey literature" of government, industry, and non-profit-sectors. Critiquing a series of such non-literary case studies, this essay seeks to introduce narratologists to this growing corpus of "future narratives" and to explore the mutual benefits potentially opened up by greater dialogue between narratologists and futurists. It traces the long history both of predictive narration and narrative theories thereof to demonstrate that narratology has, to date, neglected such "foretelling" as a distinctive story form. It suggests that both narratologists and futurists accordingly lack a usable critical toolkit to help parse or develop non-literary foretelling qua narrative practice. In particular, illustrating the affective use of different tenses in futurists' scenarios and other non-literary future fictions, it highlights the inadequacies of narratology's tense-based approaches towards theorizing predictive and prospective narration. It shows how scenarios and other future-focused fictions used by futurists in industry and government present a new and distinctive narrative corpus offering a potentially rich study-bed for narratologists to test and refine existing a priori theories of future narration. And, finally, it recommends key areas for reading and further cross-disciplinary work between narratologists and futurists in further research.
We see applied narratology as the meeting place between narrative theory and practice. While most scholarship on instrumental storytelling has focused on analyzing the stories produced by contemporary narrative practices, our aim was to map insider perspectives on non-literary storytelling and look for possible directions for future applied narratological research that seeks to intervene in these practices. We conducted semi-structured interviews with professionals and trainers (n=30) who instrumentalize narratives in their daily work (for example in communication, coaching, consultancy, or lecturing in vocational study programs in these fields). Interviewees were asked: (1) how they defined storytelling; (2) where the instrumentalization of narrative could be improved; and (3) about the limits to and risks of using storytelling in their field. Many interviewees confirmed one of the main criticisms of contemporary story-critical scholarship, in that they saw storytelling as inherently good, necessarily leading to a better future. However, they also expressed concerns about dangerous storytelling practices (populist politicians, companies seeking profit in bad faith). We will explore this paradox: If they see storytelling as inherently good, why are they concerned that it can be instrumentalized for evil? There seems to be a gap between ideals of storytelling that these professionals hold on the one hand, and actual norms and practices on the other. Attempts by interviewees to negotiate this gap point at an unease among storytelling professionals that may be fruitfully addressed in future applied narratological research.
While academic engagement with climate fiction-sometimes called "cli-fi"-remains active, limited qualitative research exists on real reader experiences with this type of literature. In this study, thirty-one interviews with readers of climate fiction were conducted and analyzed qualitatively with thematic analysis. The results consist of six themes representing readers' self-reported experiences of the impact of reading climate fiction and demonstrate how climate fiction works predominantly as a reinforcement of pre-existing attitudes and emotions related to the threat of climate change. Claims common in theoretical literature underlining climate fiction's potential in making the readers reflect upon the complexity of climate change did not receive empirical support. Reading and discussing climate fiction emerged as a powerful tool to address one's personal thoughts and feelings about climate change, while linear assumptions about its "impact" on people's climate change attitudes and knowledge seem overstated.
This essay examines recent scholarship on pseudotranslation (works presenting as translations for which no original exists) and the disnarrated (narrative phenomena that elaborate on scenarios that could have occurred in a given narrative but did not). Though texts containing elements of one or both date back millennia, both concepts, coincidentally, only began undergoing systematic study in the 1980s: the disnarrated by Gerald Prince and pseudotranslation by Gideon Toury and Julio C & eacute;sar Santoyo. This essay argues for reading these two concepts, one from narratology and the other from translation studies, together, in order to elaborate on their shared goal: telling a story that never was, but could have been, and now is.
This article offers a novel historical conception of metalepsis-a narrative device defined as the deliberate transgression of the boundary between the world of the telling and the world of the told. Narratologists have developed a fine-grained typology of metalepsis, in which types are seen as resulting from universals of narrative logic. Analyzing Anglophone and Russophone texts from the 1850s to 1960s, I show that these types are not transhistorical, but are constrained and enabled by specific conceptions of spatiotemporal reality. My approach reveals where structural types come from, and why they are culturally significant. The methodological contribution of the article is to show how structures articulated in the language of narratology can be translated into that of the history of ideas. In this I am contributing to the development of diachronic narratology-a priority for the field as it advances methodological exchange between the rigorous description of narrative structures and historical investigations of literature. I show how this effort can be furthered by integrating the study of narrative with the history of temporal discourses, a subject that has been studied in depth by historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists.
As the market for magazine stories, pulp, and other popular genres exploded in the late nineteenth century, editors clamored for fiction that featured a "strong," original plot-yet as ever more stories flooded booksellers' shelves, their plots blurred into monotony. To address this problem, a slew of plot-focused how-to manuals appeared between the 1890s and World War II, bearing colorful titles like The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1895), The Universal Plot Catalog (1916), Ten Million Photoplay Plots (1919), and Plotto: A New Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction (1928). Featuring a hodgepodge of autobiographical anecdotes, analyses of published stories and photoplays, philosophical musings on creativity, and inventories of common plot arcs, these manuals claimed to offer authors a pathway toward originality. Ironically, though, they often worsened this crisis of literary repetitiveness: Rather than teaching writers to create new plots, the manuals actually encouraged them to recycle formulaic storylines ad infinitum. This article explores the plot manuals' muddled theorizations of originality and unoriginality in relation to a marketplace saturated with stories. I argue that when novelty came to seem impossible in popular fiction, plot manuals offered an alternative: a model of writing, and of reading, that found heightened value in encountering the same plots repeatedly. By theorizing how to reuse plots, the manuals presented readers and writers with a kind of textual engagement tailor-made for the turn-of-the-century literary sphere, transforming repetitiveness from a detriment into an asset.
The essay aims to offer a comprehensive survey of techniques developed in English-language narrative fiction for presenting mentality within a framework synthesizing the findings of textual, rhetorical, and cognitive approaches. Taking into account the use of focalization for presenting mentality as well as the second-person and first-person-plural narrations, we demonstrate that Dorrit Cohn's categories of narrated monologue and psycho-narration overlap and that the former should be subsumed within the latter. We further argue in favor of recognizing multimodal self-and psycho-narration, acknowledging the category of quasi-autonomous monologue (taken as a technique, not a genre), as well as complementing the list with Lodge's rhetoric of abstention and Palmer's indicative description. Finally, we discuss the neglected or omitted techniques for presenting mentality, namely, (1) self-report (the characters' report on their mental condition articulated in a social context), (2) artistic inserts and ekphrastic descriptions (the characters' works of art and their descriptions insofar as they reflect the characters' subjectivity), and (3) textual, auditory, visual, and compositional correlatives of interiority (the novelistic use of textual materiality, visual, and auditory effects as well as compositional configurations to express or reinforce the expression of subjectivity). We conclude the essay by discussing the kinds of mentality the techniques can present, their accuracy as well as the implied author's use of the techniques and the reader's likely engagement with them. Theoretical considerations are illustrated with examples adduced primarily from contemporary fiction.
Stories with nonhuman narrators are common throughout literary history, but how does the imagination of computational nonhuman narrators in contemporary fiction prompt a rethinking of notions of narrative ethics, mediation, and (un)reliability? That is the central question that my article raises against the backdrop of current cultural understandings of artificial intelligence. Building on work in the social sciences and philosophy, I outline the main conceptual, emotional, and ethical tensions that traverse contemporary debates on AI. I argue that these tensions create a number of areas of uncertainty that are explored in a posthumanist vein by fiction including the works I focus on in the article, Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora and Charles Yu's short story "Systems." My readings show that the computational abstraction of AI systems affords unique possibilities for the defamiliarization of anthropocentric assumptions. It results in new forms of unreliability and a more explicit foregrounding of the synthetic dimension of narrative than in animal or object narration. The fictional device of AI narration thus offers stimulating, and often unsettling, perspectives on the dilemmas emerging from the increasingly tangible reality of computational cognition.
The recent emergence of a postcolonial narratology raises the question of just how narratologists deploy the "postcolonial" as a concept. While paradigmatic works in postcolonial narratology by Monika Fludernik and Gerald Prince treat the postcolonial either as a marker of a fixed literary corpus ("postcolonial literature") or as an established set of theoretical abstractions to be incorporated by narratology, other scholars who operate under the disciplinary sign of postcolonial studies treat the "postcolonial" as a contingent and generative concept that continually enables new ways of thinking about culture and colonialism. Since postcolonial narratology-and narrative theory more generally-relies on paradigms of narrative in which narrative form and history are necessarily separate and autonomous categories, narratologists often theorize and interpret narratives outside their immediate geographical, linguistic, and cultural contexts of publication and reception. Given these critical predispositions, such narratological work tends to overlook a vital space of postcolonial critique: geopolitical and institutional power. I examine how one influential contemporary approach to narrative theory, the Chicago School rhetorical approach, might incorporate the theoretical insights of Edward Said's stance of secular criticism, which is attuned to those forms of power. Through a short analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent," I demonstrate how we might synthesize the interpretive goals of rhetorical narrative theory with a secular criticism that treats the postcolonial as a generative category rather than a theoretical given that can support narratological projects unproblematically.
The outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum has reinforced political polarization in the United Kingdom. Brexit identities, as either "Leavers" or "Remainers," have duly replaced, for a time, party identification as one of the main dividing lines between British voters. The Conservative Party, at the heart of the Brexit crisis, seems to have fuelled those divisions for political gain. Various Conservative leaders have indeed indulged in the process of enemy making to establish their ethos and strengthen their (Brexit) credentials. Through a corpus-based critical narrative analysis of keynote conference speeches, this article proposes a comparative study of how storytelling enabled recent Tory leaders to make the most of the Brexit divisions by creating enemies to rally against and to defeat. The ambition of this paper is to shed light on the evolution of the Conservative Party's electoral strategy but also to contribute to the fields of both narrative analysis and of peace and conflict studies by discussing the concept of "enemy narratives" and assessing how they relate to the notion of "enemy images."
Both narratologists and practicing writers are committed to understanding the mechanisms underlying the communicative achievements of literary art, yet there is a lack of interdisciplinary conversations between narratology and creative writing. This essay makes a case for bringing together rhetorical narratology and master writers' craft knowledge by demonstrating a) that instruction in creative writing offers independent testimony and nuanced enrichment to the foundational premises of rhetorical narratology, b) that this synthesis can be further empowered by the psychology of aesthetics to illuminate how craft taps into human cognition to invigorate the audience's cohesive, multilayered engagement. My interdisciplinary discussion will focus on four interrelated aspects: narrative perspectives and strategies in forward and backward actions; the intricacies, dynamism, and thematic vibrancy of character craftsmanship; the multidimensional integration of mimetic resonance and defamiliarizing truthfulness; the fusion of aesthetic, ethical, visceral, and cognitive dimensions in craft and comprehension. To illustrate how craft advice, rhetorical narratology, and the psychology of aesthetics connect with one another in productive ways, I will offer a rhetorical reading of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. In blending together narrative strategies in action, dynamic unreliable character construction, and multidimensional defamiliarizing invitation, Fowler guides rhetorical readers toward an enlarged, renewed awareness of how imaginative storytelling expands mysteries in life into a world of shared empathy and intergroup connection.1 This essay concludes that fostering mutual enrichment and complementarity of craft, narratological, and psychological approaches sheds bonding light on what holds together artistic imagination and critical participation.
This article proposes and examines the new generic category of post-postmodernist fictions of the digital (PPFDs): contemporary print fictions that imitate, incorporate, and/or utilize digital media, and also display thematic concerns for the digitally mediated worlds in which they are set. We situate them within a broader post-postmodern context of contemporary fiction in which self-reflexive devices, associated with postmodernism, are repurposed to make an ethical point about the digitally mediated world outside of the text. We offer a new typology of multi-modal and transmedial PPFDs by adapting and schematizing the concepts of visual modality, paratext, and remediation to theorize 6 subtypes; a new methodology for analyzing PPFDs using a medium-specific approach and hypothetical intentionalism; and new analyses of two works which exemplify the ways in which multimodality and transmediality can be used synthetically and thematically in PPFDs. We conclude that while PPFDs use self-reflexive and potentially estranging techniques, they make serious ethical points about the digitally mediated world they represent such that they urge their readers to oscillate between (joyful) immersion and (critical) reflection.
The emergent field of autofiction studies faces two interrelated issues: a restriction on interpretation imposed by the thematic conception of autofiction as self-exploration, and a lack of systematic interpretive approaches specific to the genre. I suggest that the rhetorical approach to fictionality provides conceptual resources to address these issues. Inspired by Siddharth Srikanth's work, I propose a revised conception of autofiction as narratives in which the author achieves their purposes by deploying both fictionality and nonfictionality extensively without making either resource the dominant one for the narrative as a whole. On this basis, I develop a rhetorical approach to autofiction, characterized by a two-way dynamic between general and specific questions, that guides our exploration of how the author defies any stable hierarchical relation between fictionality and nonfictionality in a given work, and for what purposes. Designed to combine thematic flexibility with methodological rigor, this approach helps elucidate how autofictions transgress generic borders while also paying attention to how each work sets and fulfills its own communicative agenda. I then apply this approach to Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You (2017), showing how the author combines extensive use of fictionality and nonfictionality to expose, critique, and transcend the impossible conditions for female narration of domestic violence in a misogynistic environment.
"Very minor" characters in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, who receive only a few sentences' attention before vanishing from the canvas of the novel, receive surprisingly consistent and intense depiction through free indirect speech, especially in the London street scene near the opening of the novel and the party scene near its close. Even in comparison with similar-looking scenes in Mrs. Dalloway's modernist cousin, Ulysses, Woolf's interest in narrating her very minor characters' inner lives stands out. Woolf's application of free indirect speech to individuals in large groups generates an effect related to, but different from, the more unified "social mind" Alan Palmer identifies in novelistic narration of communities, and Alex Woloch's account of very minor characters as foils, notable for their paucity of detail. Instead, Woolf emphasizes both the distance between those individual minds, and the preoccupations and misperceptions resulting in their neglect of vulnerable or marginal characters such as Septimus Smith and Ellie Henderson. Woolf found in the use of free indirect speech to depict large groups of very minor characters a peculiar narrative tool for depicting how the collective mind can lose track of those who enjoy no special status within it.
This article addresses the question what kind of experiences the aesthetic assemblages of walking simulators such as Dear Esther (2012), Gone Home (2013), and What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), with their marked departure from established conventions of mainstream videogame design, afford their players. It argues that, when analyzing these experiences, we should move beyond terms such as "immersion" and "agency" in order to explore whether or to what extent or in which way(s) walking simulators afford their players what could be described as otium. Put in a nutshell, otium can be conceptualized as resulting from an interplay between two forms of freedom, namely "freedom from" externally imposed constraints and "freedom for" the kinds of activities that afford experiences of otium. Videogame players will need "freedom from" externally imposed constraints in order to have the "freedom for" playing videogames, yet most videogames establish what could be described as "second-order constraints," with a lack of the "freedom from" having to engage with the challenges of the gameplay leading to a lack of the "freedom for" the kind of contemplation and reflection associated with experiences of otium. As the article shows, however, walking simulators' prioritization of focused narrative exploration within evocative 3D game spaces as opposed to challenging game mechanics, complex game goals, sprawling storyworlds, or nonlinear narrative structures make them particularly likely to offer their players the "freedom from/freedom for" dynamic that is a core requirement for experiencing otium not just in order to play them but also while playing them.
