Citation:
Date Published:
13 June 2022Abstract:
Introduction to the Special Issue on Limits of Narrative, guest edited Merja Polvinen and Samuli Björninen. It lays out the background for the theoretical issues concerning the limits of narrative, and sets the individual articles in the context of that larger debate.
February 2022: Merja Polvinen is the Principal Investigator of the Helsinki Team of the consortium Instrumental Narratives (Academy of Finland, 2018–2022), and works as a Senior Lecturer in English Philology and Docent in Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests are in cognitive narratology, specifically in the ways that artificiality and literary self-reflection probe the limits of narrative. Her dissertation on chaos theory and literature came out in 2008, and recent articles on cognitive approaches to literary self-reflection appear in Poetics Today and Style, as well as the volumes Cognitive Literary Science (Oxford UP, 2017), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (Edinburgh UP, 2018) and Narrative and Complex Systems (Springer, 2018). She is currently working on a monograph on Cognition, Emotion and Literary Self-Reflection: An Enactive Approach to Artifice for Routledge.
February 2022: Samuli Björninen is senior lecturer (fixed-term) in literary studies at Tampere University. He is part of the Tampere team of the consortium Instrumental Narratives and editor of the project’s international guest blog. His has conducted his postdoctoral research at Tampere University and the Center for Fictionality Studies at Aarhus University. His current research focuses on the rhetoric of factuality in narrative, the strategic uses of concepts of narrative in debates about science and truth, and conspiracist thinking seen through the lenses of narrative cognition and literary interpretation. His recent articles have appeared in Narrative Inquiry, Narrative, Tiede & Edistys and Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. He is editor of books on narrative after postmodernism and on the dangers of narrative (both in Finnish).