Current Trends in Narrative Theory: International Perspectives

Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Welcome! This page contains information about and links to the papers that will form the basis for a workshop co-sponsored by Project Narrative and the Working Group on Narrative and Cognitive Theory. The workshop will take place on the campus of Ohio State University, at The Knight House (104 E. 15th Avenue).

Featured participants: Anniken Greve (University of Tromsø, Norway); Per Krogh Hansen (University of Southern Denmark); Ellen Spolsky (Bar-Ilan University, Israel); Richard Walsh (York University, U.K.)

Papers on which the workshop will be based: By mid-March 2008 this page will have links to the essays associated with the four abstracts listed below. Anyone planning to attend the workshop is encouraged to download these papers and read them in advance, since the featured participants will not be presenting the papers in their entirety during the session itself. Rather, this will be a roundtable discussion, in which each person has about 10 minutes to synopsize his or her main ideas and then put those ideas in dialogue with those of the other panelists. The rest of the time allocated for the workshop will be devoted to discussion among the panelists and between the panelists and members of the broader audience.

1. Per Krogh Hansen, "Unreliable Narration between Authors' Intentions and Readers' Cognitive Strategies"

Debates concerning the status of unreliable narrators—should they be analyzed in terms of the implied author or as a cognitive strategy adopted by readers to make sense of narrative texts?—have recently heated up in the narratological literature. Granted, one might consider the case to have been closed when Ansgar Nünning, one of the most radical advocates for the "cognitivist" position, suggested the need to build a bridge between the two approaches. In his contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (2005), Nünning suggested that readers' inferences about the degree to which a narrator is reliable should be "supplemented by the insight that the narrator's unintentional self-incrimination in turn presupposes an intentional act by some sort of higher-level authorial agency, though it may be open to debate whether we should attribute the constructive and intentional acts to "the implied author" or "the real author"" (100). The question, of course, is whether Nünning is right.
    In my paper I will discuss the relevance of the (implied) author or what we more generally might call authorial intentionality in our understanding and interpretation of unreliable narrators. Furthermore I will suggest a communicative model for unreliable narration which tries to include the insights produced by rhetorical narrative theorists and the cognitivists respectively.

2. Richard Walsh, "Dreaming and Narrative Theory"

This essay first makes the argument that dreams are, essentially, instances of narrative creativity: that is to say, fictions conceived by the dreamer. It then shows how the narrative quality of dreams represents a significant challenge to some of the basic assumptions of narrative theory, not only because dreams lack features widely considered definitional for narrative, but also because they exhibit features that confound conventional narratological explanation. As such the narrative view of dreaming demands a substantial reconfiguration of the place of fictionality within narrative theory, and of the relation between narrative and its media.

3. Anniken Greve, "Conversational Thematics and Rhetorical Force in Narrative Fiction"

In Experiencing Fiction (2007) James Phelan outlines a contrast between cultural thematics and rhetorical poetics. Acknowledging the historical importance of this contrast, the paper will seek to find connections between Phelan’s rhetorical approach and a thematic approach to narratives by etablishing  a contrast between cultural and conversational thematics, arguing that Phelan’s objections to the former do not necessarily apply to the latter. The idea of conversational thematics will be grounded in an interpretation of the notion of context (”language game”) in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, a notion that allows for a distinction between the situational and the conversational context of an utterance. Arguing that the concern (theme) of a fictional narrative is crucial to etablishing its conversational context, the paper will claim that its theme thus understood is crucial also to its rhetorical force. The paper is part of a larger project, Conversation and Interpretation, in which various aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy are brought to bear on literary theory in general and narrative theory in particular.

4. Ellen Spolsky, "Distributed Cognition (Cog Sci Talk) and Unsaturatable Context (Poststructuralist Talk)"

Please excuse my confronting you with such a coarse collection of consonants, such a mound of Greco-roman morphemes. But I have, I plead, been trying to reduce and simplify. Continuing the work I began in my essay, “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post-Structuralism” (Poetics Today 23.1 [2002]), I have been looking for ways to match up topics that cognitive literary critics have recently been exploring with some familiar but still unsettled issues in interpretative theory. My assumption has been that beneath the different terminologies, there is probably more agreement among cognitivists and post-structuralists than has been recognized.
    The paper I am preparing for the workshop will discuss my attempt to match cognitive theories of distributed cognition with post-structural theories of our permanently unsatisfiable dependence on contextual information. With examples from the experiences of teaching and performing Shakespeare in Israel, I will try to describe how bringing these two metaphors of thinking together not only reveals a congruence of thinking about thinking, but also produces some interesting reflections on response, on genre, and on fictionality.