Henrik Skov Nielsen

Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models

where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison and the editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age and Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Alber has written articles that were published or are forthcoming in international journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style, and he has contributed to the Routledge Enyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the Handbook of Narratology, and the online dictionary Literary Encyclopedia. Stefan Iversen received his PhD in 2008 from the Scandinavian Department at Aarhus University where he is a postdoctoral scholar working on a project on Danish narratives from concentration camps. Iversen is the organizer of the Intensive Programme in Narratology (www.ipin.dk). He is co-editing Moderne Litteraturteori (a series of anthologies on modern literary theory) and has written articles and books on narrative theory, on trauma narratives, and on the Scandinavian fin de siecle. Henrik Skov Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark. In the first half of 2010 he is a visiting scholar at Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. He is the editor of a series of anthologies on literary theory and is currently working on a narratological research project on the relation between authors and narrators. Brian Richardson is Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unnatural Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative and Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies in 2006. He has edited two anthologies, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames and Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices, and has published essays on many aspects of narrative theory. He is currently working on unnatural and antimimetic narratives.

The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction

Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of articles and books in Danish on narratology, and has recently published his dissertation on digression and first-person narrative fiction, Tertium datur—on literature or on what is not. His publications in English include articles on psychoanalysis, Leonardo da Vinci, Edgar Allan Poe, and Plato’s Sophist. He is the editor of a series of anthologies on literary theory, and is currently working on a narratological research project on the works of Poe and Bret Easton Ellis.

Ten Theses about Fictionality

President Barack Obama, at the end of his speech at the April 28, 2013, correspondents’ dinner, praised the journalists who had covered the recent terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon for their exemplary work, emphasizing the importance of thorough, deep-digging journalism that “painstakingly puts the pieces together” and “verifies facts” (“Watch: President Obama” 19:36–19:52). Just a few minutes earlier, however, Obama had jokingly treated several issues in a way that played fast and loose with verified facts. Among other jests, he an-

What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology?: A Response to Monika Fludernik

Jan Alber is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He is the author of a critical monograph titled Narrating the Prison (2007) and the editor/co-editor of several other books such as Stones of Law – Bricks of Shame: Narrating imprisonment in the victorian age (with Frank Lauterbach, University of Toronto Press 2009), Postclassical Narratology: approaches and analyses (with Monika Fludernik, Ohio State University Press 2010), and Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology (with Rüdiger Heinze, de Gruyter 2011). Alber has authored and co-authored articles that were published or are forthcoming in such journals as Dickens Studies annual, Journal of Narrative Theory, The Journal of Popular Culture, Narrative, Storyworlds, and Style. In 2007, he received a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation to spend a year at Ohio State University doing work on the unnatural under the auspices of Project Narrative. In 2010, the Humboldt Foundation awarded him a Feodor Lynen Fellowship for Experienced Researchers to continue this research at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Maryland.

Why There Are No One-to-One Correspondences among Fictionality, Narrative, and Techniques: A Response to Mari Hatavara and Jarmila Mildorf

ABSTRACT:In this essay we respond to Mari Hatavara’s and Jarmila Mildorf ’s critical engagement with our “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” We explain why we find our rhetorical approach to fictionality more persuasive than their approach; more specifically, we explain why we disagree with their claims that fictionality entails narrative and that the presence in a text of techniques conventionally associated with fiction gives that text a hybrid or fictional status. We also explain why we find the large discursive territory covered by our notion of fictionality to be a theoretical advantage rather than disadvantage.

IntroductionUnnatural and Cognitive Perspectives on Narrative (A Theory Crossover)

This special issue presents a “crossover” between two strands of contemporary narrative theory: a second-generation cognitive approach that foregrounds the linkage of stories, mind, and the human body; and an unnatural approach, which focuses on narratives that depart from and challenge everyday cognitive parameters, including those involved in so-called literary realism. In this introduction to the special issue, we take our cue from Franz Kafka’s “Wish to Become a Red Indian” (a paragraph-long short story) to illustrate these ways of theorizing about narrative and to Poetics Today 39:3 (September 2018) DOI 10.1215/03335372-7032676 q 2018 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics The first drafts of the essays in this special issue were presented inNovember 2016 at aworkshop hosted by the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University (Sweden). The editors would like to thank Christer Johansson and Göran Rossholm for making this workshop possible, and the participants for their input on the articles. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/542780/0390429.pdf by guest on 25 November 2018 discuss the conceptual divides that separate them. From an unnatural perspective, the cognitive approach flattens narrative to real-world psychology; from a cognitive perspective, the unnatural approach ignores the way that every narrative, no matter how challenging or innovative, exploits our cognitive makeup. By examining these assumptions and by tracing the history of cognitive and unnatural models of narrative, this special issue seeks to move beyond a conceptual standoff between them. The essays collected in the issue demonstrate that it is possible to combine a cognitive approach with an interest in unnatural stories— or, conversely, an unnatural approach and attention to the cognitive and embodied dynamics of narrative. In addition to previewing the arguments advanced in the articles, this introduction explicates the innovative method of scholarly collaboration through which the articles came about, and the different results it produced in each case.

Pronouns in Literary Fiction as Inventive Discourse

This chapter approaches the question of pronouns from a rhetorical perspective, focusing on literary fiction as inventive discourse. Standard models of pronouns, especially linguistic ones, are based on non-inventive language uses. In the rhetorical approach, it becomes evident that parts of the grammar of literary fiction work differently from non-fictional conversational discourse. Focusing on pronouns, the chapter argues that it is a mistake to impose real-world, non-invented, narrative situations on fictional narratives. Having presented the semiotic framework of Charles Sanders Peirce, I offer a new reading of his ‘concept of’ the indexical sign in order to examine deictic and personal pronouns in literature.

The politics of fictionality in documentary form: The Act of Killing and The Ambassador

Abstract This essay sets out to do two related things: to investigate how the documentary films The Act of Killing and The Ambassador challenge the political and ideological ground of their audiences through radical experiments with documentarist strategies and fictional discourse. In order to carry out this investigation, the essay, secondly, presents and further elaborates a new way of approaching and making sense of fictional discourse using the concept of ‘fictionality’, an approach inspired by The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh and recently developed further by Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan and Walsh. One of the benefits of this new paradigm is that it offers productive ways of coming to terms with the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of cultural forms that are heavily invested in current political events and issues while at the same time employing experimental uses of fictional discourse.