The Ohio State University Colloquium on Transmedial/Interdisciplinary Narrative Theory

Panel I: Visual Narrativities

Sharon Estes, "Narrative Time and Space in Literary Illustration"

Despite the burgeoning interest in non-print forms of narrative, there is currently no definitive work on literary illustration.  Literary illustrations can be distinguished from other text/image combinations including graphic novels, images with captions, or autonomous images that depict a single frame of a narrative because they represent a specific kind of combination in which text and image are materially separate and sequentially ordered, and the image draws portions of the text into another medium.  This paper situates illustration within theoretical discussions both of visual and of verbal narratives; it develops a model for understanding how literary illustrations integrate visual and verbal information to depict narrative time and space, allowing the reader to utilize textual information as a contextual frame (Emmott) for the illustrative image and vice versa.  Further, I deploy that model to analyze the specific text-image relationships created by illustrated periodical fiction during the Victorian period, drawing examples from serial novels by Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Anthony Trollope.
    Beginning with Lessing’s Laocoön, theorists of visual narrative have associated the visual image with spatiality.  As a result, on the strength of traditional definitions of verbal narrative that privilege temporality, or the ability to establish plot sequence, analysts have tended to assign at best a “weak” form of narrativity to visual versus verbal texts.  This paper questions the assumption made by theorists of both verbal and visual narrative that verbal texts operate in a temporal mode and visual ones in a spatial one.  By contrast, I argue that this distinction is not absolute and that there are spatial elements in verbal narratives and temporal elements in visual ones.  What is more, the juxtaposition of word and image in literary illustrations further extends the possibility that each can work outside its traditional mode.  Specifically, the material and sequential position of the illustrations that I discuss (a full page woodcut engraving coming before each new number of the serial) also allows them to function temporally: the illustrations condense previous narrative sequences and anticipate subsequent action.  Thus, focusing on text-image combinations in the sequentialized reading experience of the serial novel, this paper aims to lay the groundwork for a theory of how illustrations work in literary narratives.

References
Mark Buchsieb, “Frames of Understanding: Narrative Space and Gender Dynamics in Sally Potter’s Orlando”

Classical structuralist narratology understands story as constituted of events occurring at specific times and in specific spaces, a constitutive relationship termed a chronotope by Mikhail Bakhtin in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.”  Recent scholarship on narrative privileges the temporal dimension of the chronotope while leaving the spatial dimension to narrative underdeveloped.  By contrast, drawing on the ideas of theorists who have stressed the importance of spatialization in narrative inquiry, my paper explores how film stages the inextricable interconnectedness of space and time in narrative.  By exploring how space bears on the interpretation of gender dynamics in Sally Potter’s Orlando, I work toward a model that makes possible a genuinely chronotopic approach to narrative.
    In the medium of film, spatial relationships and techniques that manipulate screen space—editing, point of view, mise en scene—bear directly on actants and actions in the narrative.  As a dominant plot in the film, the developing story of Orlando’s gender serves as a useful site for exploring the narrative functions of space in Orlando.  In extending to the film medium Catherine Emmott’s research on the “contextual frames” used to interpret written narrative, and in applying Celestino Deleyto’s analysis of focalization in film narrative, I emphasize the spatial component of gender and identity interpretation in order to illustrate the essential role space plays in narratives such as Potter’s.  I thus argue for a narratological approach to Potter’s Orlando which restores space to the chronotope. More generally, my paper suggests the relevance of space for meaning-making processes in film narrative, while also illuminating the politics of gendered space and the narrative construction of subjectivity and self. 

References
Charles Conner, “The Mind in the Gutter: Filling the Space Between Comics and Narrative Theory”

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud attempts to show the “hidden power” (3) of the medium by theorizing how comics function in medium-specific ways. At the heart of the medium, McCloud argues, is the theory of “closure” (63), which he defines as “[T]his phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole...” He notes this concept at work in shapes and icons, but he mostly uses it to show how comics use closure as the “agent of change, time, and motion” (65) by harnessing the reader’s predisposition to fill the gaps between panels. These gaps, known as the “gutter,” constitute what McCloud calls “the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics!” (66).
    In this paper I recontextualize McCloud’s account using insights from narrative theorists David Herman, Lisa Zunshine, and Alan Palmer, along with reader response critics Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser. Ingarden’s idea of a traditional literary text as a “schematic formation” with “places of indeterminacy” demanding “concretizations” to complete it (13-14) along with Iser’s concept of the “artistic reader” (274) contradict McCloud’s claim that “[n]o other art form gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well...” (93). Using Art Spiegelman’s Maus as my tutor text, I argue that the concretizations of both literary fiction and comics demand the same processes from the reader, and turn to David Herman’s research on “scripts” to suggest how both media “...trigg[er] a recipient to activate—existing knowledge about the world” (1048) in order to produce stories. Maus’s dynamic weaving of a matrix or “primary” narrative and a remote embedded narrative asks the reader to develop a perhaps familiar emotional situation (parent/child) in a domestic locale alongside a distant, almost unimaginable horror, internment in Auschwitz. Maus tests reader response theories and Herman’s script-based account, because few worlds seem as alien and unknowable as Vladek’s Holocaust memories.
    My major move in the paper is to suggest that McCloud’s sentiment is correct, that comics do have a “magic and mystery,” but that instead of being a distinctive feature of the gutter, that same kind of magic also enters into the interpretation of characters. In this connection I draw from Zunshine’s work on Theory of Mind, which suggests that “works of fiction manage to ‘cheat’ [our ability to infer emotions from people’s behavior] into ‘believing’ that [it is] in the presence of the material that [it was] ‘designed’ to process” (273). Zunshine’s work parallels Palmer’s account in Fictional Minds, according to which “...in essence, narrative is the presentation of fictional mental functioning” (17). Using this research, I suggest that comics use visual data like cartoons and symbols to stimulate the same “cognitive mechanisms” (274) that Zunshine argues fiction engages and that Palmer argues narratives are “about.” My argument is that synthesizing these ideas with McCloud’s account can help pinpoint more precisely what gives comics its “hidden power.”

References
Panel 2: Narrative and Identity

Margaret Kelliher, “The Internet Self: Positioning Theory and Weblogs”

In this paper, I use Rom Harré and Luk van Langenhove’s Positioning Theory to examine the structure and dynamics of online weblogs (“blogs”), specifically those that offer a quasi-daily account of the writer’s life.  Positioning theory attempts to further the psychological idea of roles in relationships; that is, it assumes that people, when interacting with each other, take on different positions depending on the course of the interaction, rather than assuming one role in an interaction and remaining in that role.  Also, people position each other based on the assumptions that they make about each other while interacting.  Previous research on positioning has used the theory to explore traditional autobiographies, both oral and written (Harré and Langenhove 60-73), and also to examine the fashioning of the self (Davies and Harré).  While much work has been done on the form and genre of the blog and on blogs’ importance as a vehicle for creating a personal identity, I am not aware of any scholarship that explores blogs and positioning theory in tandem.  To illustrate the relevance of positioning theory for the study of blogging, I focus my analysis on the entries of a young British female blogger with the pseudonym “thesecondmouse,” whose blog reveals the multiple positioning possibilities afforded by the medium.
    My paper argues that like traditional diaries and autobiographies, blogs function as a medium for positioning one’s self as a unique personal identity.  Furthermore, just as self-referential autobiographies and diaries both reflect and enable positioning between reader and writer, blogs too provide an opportunity for self-positioning vis-à-vis readers as well as a means for recounting positioning experiences within daily life.  In comparison with print autobiographies, however, blogs create even richer possibilities for positioning.  By permitting the creation of multiple selves and identities via the blogger’s ability to update them frequently, especially in response to other internet bloggers’ comments on their entries, blogs afford modes of positioning not available in the medium of print autobiographies.  Also, bloggers are able to create multiple identities and positions because of the blog’s presupposed internet audience; bloggers establish a reputation with their audience through their entries that must remain consistent throughout entry posting. In this way, blogs function like conversations.  Thus, thesecondmouse uses not only text entries, but also image files and hypertext links in order to engage in the creation of multiple identities that are nonetheless coordinated through the activity of blogging itself.  Her blog entries also incorporate instances of extra-entry positioning (that is, the recounting of positioning experiences that occur outside of the entry-world of the blog) in order to retell daily events in which the thesecondmouse’s behavior was positioned by others’ expectations of her.
 
References
 Krista Paradiso, “Questioning the Self, Questioning Theories of the Self: Autobiography and the Construction of Subjectivity”

This paper focuses on the question of what kind of self is rhetorically created in autobiographies written by people with manic-depression, exploring whether current paradigms for studying autobiography can capture the full complexity of such acts of rhetorical self-creation.  Currently, autobiographical theory relies on the idea that the story told in autobiography is that of the development of a personality.  Yet this definition is largely unable to deal with problematic relations to oneself in works that fundamentally question contemporary understandings of what it means to be a self in the first place.  The limitations of current theories are epitomized in autobiographies by people with manic-depression because of the way such accounts suggest multiple and complex relationships among parts or phases of the self, as it experiences the vicissitudes of mental illness.  Such complex relationships call, in turn, for an enriched autobiographical theory that can address the specific problem of not having been oneself, the feeling that the narrating-I can only relate to the experiencing-I as a part of a past that can no longer be understood as the same self that one is at the time of narration. 
    Focusing on Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, I explore the implications for autobiographical theory of narration that involves more or less explicitly marked forms of self-dissociation.  In particular, I draw on accounts by Dorrit Cohn, Philippe Lejeune, and others of the relationship between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I.  I argue that these accounts of the relationship between narrating and experiencing selves are unable to the complex self-relationships found in autobiographies of manic-depression. In these autobiographies, the grammatical link between the "I" who tells and the "I" who is told about does not suffice to explain the link between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I. Jamison's autobiography exemplifies a disconnect between selves by relying on the memories of others to tell about certain parts of her life, the narrating-self's frustration and incredulity at the experiencing-self's refusal to take medication, and the motivations and actions that happened during severe mood swings that are incomprehensible to the narrating-self.  Hence, the importance of this project lies not only in its attempt to accommodate narratives about discontinuous forms of identity, but also in the way it poses questions about what it means to be, and write, oneself.
 
References
 Kirsi Haenninen, “Self-Narration and the Narrative Construction of Emotions in Narratives about Supernatural Experiences”

According to the model proposed by Dorrit Cohn, the relationships between the narrating self and the experiencing self in first-person narratives can be placed on a sliding scale between dissonance and consonance. In the dissonant mode, the narrating self can move back and forth in time, contradict and evaluate the thoughts and statements of the experiencing self, and add information and opinions regarding past events. Opposite to this dissonant self-narration is the consonant self-narration where the narrating self reports what happened while adopting a vantage-point that is very proximate to experiencing self, and where it can even be difficult to distinguish between the experiencing self and the narrating self at all. In this paper, I build on Cohn’s ideas by examining the rhetorical construction of emotions in written first-person factual narratives about supernatural experiences; specifically, I focus attention on how this construction of an emotional self works in synergy with the sliding scale of consonant and dissonant self-narration.
    My study explores the narrative construction of emotions in a corpus of approximately 500 first-person retrospective accounts of encounters with supernatural beings. Discussing a subset of the stories in this corpus, I draw on ideas from the field of discursive psychology, which deals with how people talk about emotions, how they use emotion categories when talking about things, and how such emotional discourse performs social actions. Thus, according to Derek Edwards, “[e]motion discourse is an integral feature of talk about events, mental states, mind and body, personal dispositions, and social relations” (170). In order to suggest how emotion discourse functions in stories, Edwards presents a set of rhetorical positions and contrasts that can structure narrative discourse; for example, emotions can be viewed as irrational versus rational, event-driven versus dispositional, natural versus moral emotions, and private versus public. I extend Edwards’ work by synthesizing his account with Alan Palmer’s research on the importance of the emotions in the construction of fictional minds, and by using both Edwards’ and Palmer’s approaches to examine the use of emotion talk on the sliding scale of self-narration. My project raises a number of questions: What kinds of emotions are related to supernatural experiences? How are the causes, states and consequences of these emotions constructed? How are the emotions used in the construction of narrating and experiencing selves, as well as other characters and narrated events? How can we deal with the private/public distinction in public expressions of private experiences? Overall, my paper argues for the fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary approach when examining the patterns that link a narrator’s fluctuating position on the scale of self-narration with his or her strategies for the construction of an emotional self.

References
Panel 3: Rethinking the Forms and Functions of Narrative

Jill Smith, “Synthesizing Postmodern and Narratological Approaches to Young Adult Literature: Narrative ‘Literacy’ and the Case of What Happened to Lani Garver? by Carol Plum-Ucci”

The category of Young Adult literature (YA Lit) is relatively new and in flux; it is a genre often viewed by traditional educators as one representing little intellectual challenge and sagging morality; one critic even asserts that it is a genre "which belongs properly only to a society of morons." Nonetheless, current trends in educational research reflect not only the survival of  YA texts, but a profusion of new critical perspectives that can be brought to bear on them, thus opening up a more empowering, inclusive discourse about writing targeted at young adult readers. Suggesting how ideas from narrative theory can contribute to this new scholarship on YA Lit, the present paper draws on accounts of fictional vs. historical narrative to explore the possible ethical ramifications of narrative theory for educational practice. Using Carol Plum-Ucci's What Happened to Lani Garver? as my tutor text, I sketch an interdisciplinary approach that brings narrative theory into dialogue with the theories of literacy now being developed within the field of education.
    In my discussion of Plum-Ucci’s novel, I foreground several key issues where a rapprochement between narrative theory and literacy theory can help advance the study of YA Lit. These issues include the turn toward multicultural, non-canonical literature, the relativity and context-specificity of attempts to draw a boundary between fictional and nonfictional discourse, and the dynamics of power bound up with determinations of what counts as “Truth.” Multiculturalism draws non-canonical and controversial texts like What Happened to Lani Garver? closer into the ring of legitimacy; furthermore, multicultrualism helped to initiate (if not dictate) the use of critical perspectives, or "lenses," for canonical texts which are already firmly rooted in curricula nationwide. But more needs to be done to explore how methods of narrative study in particular shape pre-service teachers’ approach to the teaching of YA novels. In What Happened to Lani Garver, for example, I use the ambiguity of Lani's gender to exemplify how essentialism in text, theory, and practice can further oppress individuals who have little or no agency. Further, in parallel with narrative theorists’ distinction between fiction and non-fiction narratives (e.g., autobiographies), Language Arts teachers inform their own students that solid lines really do exist: there are rules for knowing what is Truth and what is fiction. Plum-Ucci's positioning of objectivity and subjectivity, particularly when she employs reconstructed memory scenes, is essential to demonstrating that experiences for pre-service teachers may unintentionally promote systemic oppression in that it highlights the ways in which hegemonic forces permeate our utmost certainties. I posit that while traditionally taught non-fictional narratives have few problems with re-writing, triangulation, and verification, others, such as neo-slave and feminist narratives and Queered narratives do not have these luxuries. In short, narrative scholars have a duty to contextualize their theories, and I use  Plum-Ucci’s work (gender-bending, collective and individual memory reflexivity, and postmodern disruptiveness) to suggest how such contextualization might proceed. If we take the education of our children seriously, we must bring explicit interdisciplinary conversations between narrative study and literacy into the forefront.

References
 Paul McCormick, “Marching Double-Time with Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier”

Much of the critical history of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier revolves around the question of narratorial reliability.  In this paper I draw upon tools from narrative theory – including the work of Dorrit Cohn, James Phelan, Wayne Booth, Gérard Genette and Jeffrey Williams – to rethink the rhetoric, ethics, and reliability of Ford Madox Ford’s character-narrator in The Good Soldier, John Dowell.  I examine the fluctuating distance between Ford and Dowell by tracing and analyzing Dowell’s frequent characterizations of himself as both character and narrator.  My study suggests that Dowell actively valorizes both his current wisdom and his former innocence while protecting his master-identity as “chaste and pure in a morally corrupt world,” and that Ford foregrounds this process to offer his reader insight into the considerable differences between Dowell’s judgments and his own.  Hence, while my specific tutor-text is Ford’s The Good Soldier, my larger aim in the paper is to develop new tools for studying (un)reliability in contexts of extra-homodiegetic narration.
    To account for the divergent stories that Dowell likes to tell about himself as character and narrator, respectively, I combine Cohn’s description of  “dissonant” character-narrators with aspects of Phelan’s model of narrative progression.  To this end, I create three different categories to capture the dynamic aspects of Dowell’s identity in discourse-time.  Revisioning Gérard Genette’s tripartite model of narrative levels, I deploy these categories to situate Dowell’s static descriptions of himself – his iterative claims of selhood – in the context of his dynamic claims about his double lives as character and narrator, respectively.  Accordingly, I propose three analytic constructs to capture the complexities of character-narration in the novel: Dowell (the experiencing-I), narrating-Dowell (the narrating-I), and iterative-Dowell (who mediates between those poles of the time-line separating past from present). This model throws the double lives constructed by many character-narrators into dialogue, and draws upon the stories character-narrators tell about themselves for insights into the motivations behind their judgments of others.          

References
 Aaron McKain, “The ‘Dean Scream’ Didn’t Happen: Narrative Theory and News Analysis”

Presidential candidate Howard Dean’s late night barn rally after the 2004 Iowa Caucus only took on the character of a tirade when it was divorced from its immediate context by the news media.  This same news media eventually acknowledged its complicity in creating the event, but insofar as the spectacle still carries considerable currency in American political discourse, it is imperative to examine exactly how this “pseudo-event” came to exist in the news.
    Narrative theory is uniquely able to provide such an examination.  Focusing on the “Dean Scream” as it played out in a metropolitan paper (The Columbus Dispatch), this presentation proceeds along three tightly interwoven levels of analysis in order to parse out the structural elements of news gathering and reporting that enabled the construction of this event.
    The starting move is Allan Bell’s account of narrative temporality in news discourse.  Bell argues that the twin, and symbiotic, demands of timeliness and newsworthiness necessitate that the primary event of a news story, usually the lead, be posited as “time zero” or “story present.”  From the perspective of the story/discourse distinction, this formal demand on where/when the story can begin entails highly complex temporal narratives at the level of discourse.  It also demands that sources be found that can posit both the timeliness and newsworthiness of the “story present.”  The interplay of these features is seen in the case of the “Dean Scream,” as the easily discredited evaluative statements that are used to evidence the leads—and thus establish the news value of the story—are buried within a cacophony of flash-forwards and flashbacks  
    These postulations of “story present” also command considerable power in shaping the teleology of the narrative.  Drawing on Sartre and on Peter Brook’s account of narrativity in law, the presentation turns to explore the causalities that are retrospectively applied to Dean’s rise and fall upon the imposition of the “Dean Scream” narrative.  These models also get at the cart/horse problem that pervades the event: the “Dean Scream” exists only as reporting on reporting on Dean’s speech.  It really isn’t a news story except insofar as it has been, and is in the process of being, reported as a news story.
    This last point brings us to the third level of analysis, which also shares affinities with Brook’s project.  Just as judicial decisions narrate an account of the law whereupon the law itself is postulated as the agent driving the story (the judges merely interpreting/channeling the story that the law ‘tells’), reporters covering the Dean Scream also mask their agency (and presence) within the story.  The problem is that, just as the judge is part of the account of the law he is narrating, so is the reporter reporting on the “Dean Scream” an integral part of the story his discourse is narrating. This breakdown of the story/discourse distinction synthesizes my arguments about narrative temporality and teleology, elucidating how such “pseudo” news events come to be and what structural processes enable them.