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The premise of Monika Fludernik’s “natural” narratology is that all narratives, including the most “artificial” literary narratives, ultimately rely on the basic cognitive parameters of naturally-occurring, spontaneous conversational narrative. We naturalize texts by narrativizing them. Fludernik attributes this idea of naturalization, correctly, to Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975), where it modestly masquerades as a synthesis and rationalization of ideas already current in the Formalist-Structuralist tradition. More than merely a synthesis of precursor concepts, however, Culler’s naturalization actually offers something like a unified theory of literary convention, underwriting a profoundly demystifying account of the literary — one that is arguably incompatible with Fludernik’s narrativization, while it also undermines some of the claims of the unnatural narratologists.
Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. A co-founder of Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which he directed in 2012–2014, he is also a founding member and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). He was a vice-president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2014–2015, and president in 2016. He is the author of four books on postmodern literature and culture, including Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015). He has co-edited five volumes on twentieth-century literature, experimentalism, and narrative theory. Since July 2015 he has edited the international journal Poetics Today.
