ABSTRACT: The essay develops the notion of a “novel of the institution” based on readings of Kafka’s novelistic fragments The Trial and The Castle . A category to account for certain novels from the early to mid-twentieth century, “novel of the institution” is functionally the supplement of the traditional bildungsroman (as an episode it exists already in Fielding or Goethe) and historically its reversal (in Kafka, the institution forms the finite totality of the novel). The biographical form which was the backbone of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel in Europe (Lukács, Moretti) is replaced by the institutional realm which characters enter and (try to) leave, where they move and fight, in which they perish or from which they try to escape. The essay explores the formal consequences and the topical implications in terms of plot, agency, time, and space.
ABSTRACT: This study explores a distinctive form of unreliable narration in an understudied Persian oral narrative, traditionally performed by itinerant storytellers known as “ naqqāls ” over multiple installments spanning weeks or months. These narratives possess unique features shaped by their oral origins, direct engagement with live audiences, and episodic structures—among them, a peculiar form of unreliable narration. While unreliable narration is typically associated with homodiegetic narrators, this research reveals its presence in heterodiegetic narration. Unreliability can arise in reporting, interpreting, or evaluating events; in naqqālī stories, it manifests through falsified dialogues, where the naqqāl deliberately alters characters’ speech. This represents an unconventional form of unreliability in which the naqqāl reliably evaluates events but misreports them, creating a split between the narrator’s voice (which distorts facts) and the implied naqqāl, who subtly signals the irony. Understanding this phenomenon requires situating it within the historical and ideological contexts that shaped these narratives, particularly the sectarian rivalries of the Safavid period and the ethical tradition of futuwwa . By highlighting this atypical form of heterodiegetic unreliable narration, this study examines its interpretive and ethical implications, while also demonstrating how the shift from oral to written tradition complicates existing models of narrative reliability.
ABSTRACT: Reality television is undoubtedly the defining genre of twenty-first century media. Despite the genre’s dubious realism and melodrama, reality television shows, particularly reality competition shows like Survivor , represent multifaceted narrative artifacts carefully curated on multiple levels by producers, contestants, and editors. These programs are best understood as co-authored, collaborative texts with three discrete levels of narrative. This essay unfolds as an introduction to the genre, followed by localized close readings of instances of these three narrative levels as they are crafted by the process of editing raw footage into the television show Survivor . Reality television, I argue, transcends any binary between “real” and “false,” and creates a hyperrealism built upon the narrative machinations of dozens of participants, all collaborating in the endeavor, which speaks to the techniques used in crafting media narratives outside the confines of reality television.
ABSTRACT: The recent emergence of a geographical narratology has enriched the study of narrative by revealing and modeling new analytical paths. This geographical emphasis has been grounded primarily in a topographical approach to space that follows Euclidean understandings of contiguity. Our essay seeks to supplement this approach by introducing a topological conception of space that emphasizes its affective, political, and multitemporal dimensions independent of material positioning. Drawing on research in the field of human geography, we show the benefits of topology for understanding Jerusalem as a city of historical layers, charged politics, and complex social dynamics inscribed in colliding geographical claims. We explore the topological configurations of space in three novels representing very different constructions of Jerusalem: Mahmoud Shukair’s Jerusalem Stands Alone (2010), David Grossman’s Someone to Run With (2000), and Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular (2010). We conclude with a brief revision of our own work on “The Postclassical Chronotope” to show the broader benefits of incorporating topological understandings of space into geographical narratology.
ABSTRACT: This paper explores Fflur Dafydd’s novel The White Trail , a contemporary retelling of the medieval Welsh tale “Culhwch and Olwen,” through the lens of ekphrasis as a transtextual framing strategy that straddles the domains of both time and space. I argue that the novel’s network of verbally-mediated visual representations—oil paintings, sketches, photographs, digital and television images—generates recursive ontological layers whose spatial and temporal instability mirrors the difficulties of accessing and interpreting temporally remote source texts. The analysis identifies in Dafydd’s novel an inversion of the medieval tale’s character hierarchy and treats this finding as a structural mechanism that enables a broader exploration of the tension between representational stasis and the temporality of narrative, particularly through the figure of Arthur, whose sketches highlight the gaps between temporal layers and metatextually articulate the temporal gap between the source text and the present re-telling. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality, Hans Lund’s typology of word-image relationships, and Boris Uspensky’s model of perspectival framing, I demonstrate that the visual insets function as “hypotextual time capsules” that reveal the friction between the stasis of the visual and narrative temporality. Consequently, the paper argues that The White Trail employs a meta-palimpsestic mode of adaptation that preserves, transforms, and comments on its medieval source by translating it—metatextually and temporally—into, to use Gérard Genette’s words, “new circuits of meaning.”
