Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies
Published by The University of Nebraska Press
ISSN 1946-2204



Table of Contents for volume 1, published in June 2009

Click here for a flyer with more information about the journal, submission guidelines, ordering information, etc.

Scope of the journal: Storyworlds is a new, interdisciplinary journal of narrative theory. It features research on storytelling practices across a variety of media, including face-to-face interaction, literary writing, film and television, virtual environments, historiography, opera, journalism, graphic novels, plays, and photography, studied from perspectives developed in such fields as narratology, discourse analysis, jurisprudence, philosophy, cognitive and social psychology, Artificial Intelligence, medicine, and the study of organizations.

Additional context: The term storyworld refers to the world evoked by a narrative, whether that narrative takes the form of a printed text, film, graphic novel, sign language, everyday conversation, or even a tale that is projected but is never actualized as a concrete artifact—for example, stories about ourselves that we contemplate telling to friends but then do not, or film scripts that a screenwriter has plans to create in the future. But how do modes of storytelling--narrative ways of worldmaking--differ from other representational practices used to construct or reconstruct worlds, in a broad sense? Put differently, what distinguishes narrative from other methods for using symbol systems to structure, comprehend, and communicate aspects of experience? What constraints and affordances do particular storytelling media bring to the process of building narrative worlds? What tools are needed to characterize, in all its richness and complexity, the experience of inhabiting a narrative world in a given medium or across different media? What are the conditions for and consequences of engaging with such worlds, and how does this engagement vary across different narrative practices, cultural settings, and interpretive communities? The purpose of Storyworlds is to provide a forum for sustained scholarly inquiry into these and related issues, whose investigation will require collaborative, interdisciplinary work by researchers from across the arts and sciences.

Editor David Herman Editorial Board H. Porter Abbott Jens Brockmeier Jonathan Culler Gregory Currie Catherine Emmott Peter Galison Richard J. Gerrig Andreea Deciu Ritivoi Marie-Laure Ryan Deborah Schiffrin Roy Sommer Wendy Steiner

For submission information, download this flyer or contact David Herman Department of English Ohio State University 164 W. 17th Avenue Columbus, OH 43210-1370 USA herman.145[at]osu.edu http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/herman145/