The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural and theoretical issues.
The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.
Introduction - Narrative Today: Telling Stories in a Post-Truth World
Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales) and Maria Mäkelä (Tampere
University)
I Narrative and Its Others
1. My Story, Your Narrative: Scholarly Terms and Popular Usage
Maria Mäkelä (Tampere University) and Samuli Björninen (Tampere University)
2. Non-Narrative Genres: Exposition, Lists, Lyric, etc
Monika Fludernik (University of Freiburg)
3. Narrative and Economic Modelling
Lindsay Holmgren (McGill University)
4. Data Narratives: Visualization and Interactivity in Representations of
Covid-19
Madeleine Sorapure (UC Santa Barbara)
II Narrative and the Public Sphere
5. What is the Narrative? Conspiracy Theories and Journalistic Emplotment
in the Age of Social Media
Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales)
6. Rodney King, The Fugitive, and the Cogency of Cultural Narratives
Alan Nadel (University of Kentucky)
7. Personal Storytelling in Social Movements
Francesca Polleta (University of California Irvine)
III Narrative and Social Media
8. Co-tellership in Social Media Storytelling
Ruth Page (University of Birmingham)
9. (Small) Stories as Features on Social Media: Toward Formatted
Storytelling
Alex Georgakopoulou (Kings College London)
10. Quantified Storytelling: How the Tellable and the Countable Intermingle
on Digital Platforms
Alex Georgakopoulou (Kings College London), Stefan Iversen (Aarhus
University), and Carsten Stage (Aarhus University)
11. Networks, Interfaces, Digital Media Infrastructure, and Their
Implications for Fictional World Theory
Dan Punday (Mississippi State University)
IV Narrative Truth
12. Legal Facts, Affective Truths, and Changing Narratives in Trials
Involving Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo
Greta Olson (Justus-Liebig-University Giessen)
13. My Mouth, Your Story: On Co-Witnessing
Irene Kacandes (Dartmouth College)
14. Playing Games with the Truth: Tabloid Stories, Urban Legends, Tall Tales,
and Bullshit
Marie-Laure Ryan (independent scholar)
V Narrative and the Novel
15. The Undead Novel: A History of Realism or a History of Prose Fiction?
Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales)
16. This is Not a Novel: Some Varieties of Anti-Novel
Brian McHale (The Ohio State University)
17. Panexperientiality, Media, and Narratives Time Management Problem
David Ciccoricco (University of Otago)
18. Chinese Narratology: Tradition, Developments, and Perspectives
Biwu Shang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
VI Narrative and Selfhood
19. Life and Narrative
Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku)
20. Just the Facts? Nonfictionality and Life Writing
Julie Rak (University of Alberta)
21. Toward a Rhetorical Narrative Medicine: Or, Corpus, Close Reading, and
the Cases of Oatess "Hospice/Honeymoon" and Wards "On Witness and Respair"
James Phelan (The Ohio State University)
22. Reading Celebrity Autofiction: Fictionality, Authorship, and Reader
Responses in Narrative Theory
Alison Gibbons (Sheffield Hallam University)
VII Narrative and Social Change
23. It Gets Better vs. To This Day: Queerness, Causality, Narrativity
Jesse Matz (Kenyon College)
24. What Does It Mean to #BelieveWomen? Popular Feminism and Survivor
Narratives
Tanya Serisier (Birbeck, University of London)
25. Narrating Eighteenth-Century Black Lives: Abolition and the Politics of
Form
Susan S. Lanser (Brandeis University)
VIII Narrative and Cognition
26. Human Cognition and Narrative Form
Richard Walsh (University of York)
27. Adaptationism, Postmodernism, and a Biocultural Narratology
H. Porter Abbott (University of California, Santa Babara)
28. The Experience of Narrative: Aesthetics and Embodiment
Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo)
IX Narrative and Complex Systems
29. Video Games as Complex Narratives and Embodied Metalepsis
Astrid Ensslin (University of Bergen)
30. Perspectives on Causality in Sciences and Arts: On the Limits and
Benefits of Narrative Representation
Marina Grishakova (University of Tartu)
31. Concepts and Aspects of an Integrated Narrative Generation Approach Based
on Post-Narratology
Takashi Ogata (Iwate Prefectural University)
32. Storytelling and Narrative Capital in Organizations: Bringing Boje and
Bourdieu into Conversation
Klarissa Lueg (University of Southern Denmark)
X Narrative and International Relations
33. Narrative in Politics and the Politics of Narrative
Monika Barthwal-Datta (University of New South Wales), Roxani Krystalli
(University of St Andrews), and Laura J. Shepherd (University of Sydney)
34. The Narrative Turn in European Studies: A Synergic Approach
Luis Bouza Garcia (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Carmen Sancho Guinda
(Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
35. Migration and Narrative Dynamics
Roy Sommer (University of Wuppertal)
36. Deconstructing the Hollow Man: Visual Narrative Analysis and World
Politics
Katja Freistein (University of Duisburg-Essen) and Frank Gadinger (University
of Duisburg-Essen)
XI Narrative and the Environment
37. Fables for Tomorrow: Narrating Net Zero
Genevieve Lively (University of Bristol)
38. Storying the Anthropocene: Narrative Challenges and Opportunities in
Times of Climate Change
Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University)
39. Narratives Environments
Eric Morel (University of Delaware)
Paul Dawson is the author of two monographs, The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction (2013) and Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005). Paul is also a poet and the author of Imagining Winter (2006). He teaches Literary Studies and Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland. Her publications deal with storification and the storytelling boom; the neoliberal logic of narrative and fiction; exemplarity; consciousness, voice, and realism across media; the literary tradition of adultery; authorial ethos; and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.
