Stefan Iversen

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.

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.

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.

Kafka er din ven er din Kafka

Anmeldelse af Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric and Reading . Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2011, 251 sider.

Ekshibitionistiske selvudslettelser. Autoreception og genskrivning hos Jørgen Leth og clausbeck-nielsen.net

Stefan Iversen: “Exhibitionistic Erasures of the Self: Autoreception and Re-writing in Works by Jorgen Leth and clausbeck-nielsen.net” Taking its point of departure in the observation that recent Scandinavian literature and art have seen an increase in the number of works dealing with transgressions of the divide between the work of art as an autonomous entity and the artist as a concrete individual, this article sets out to investigate what it terms ‘autoreception’ and ‘rewriting’ in two already canonical works by Jorgen Leth and clausbeck-nielsen.net. The main argument is that not only are these two works composed by using a rewriting strategy, they also draw a lot of their highly original aesthetic and ethic impetus from it.

Det umisteliges dialektik

Efter disse mere principielle og overordnede teoretiske betragtninger reflekterer Stefan Iversen over den danske holocaustlitteraturs fravaer i dansk litteraturhistorieskrivning og laeser i “Det umisteliges dialektik” Iboja Wandall-Holms autobiografiske beretning Farvel til arhundredet fra 2000. Ud over at undersoge relationen mellem bogens uhyrlige haendelsesforlob og dens form samt dens grundlaeggende tema, det umistelige forstaet som betingelsen for overlevelse, og dens saeregne dialektiske metode papeger Iversen to forhold, som giver bogen en saerstatus inden for holocaustlitteraturen: For det forste, at den sammenstiller nazismen og den tjekkoslovakiske statskommunisme, og for det andet, at den er skrevet af en kvinde, at der altsa er tale om et konnet vidnesbyrd, og at dette gor en signifikant forskel.