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In addition to broadening the range of examples with which narratology deals, Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology draws on cognitive theory to describe the ways in which readers process language to make even highly anomalous texts narrative –an important contribution. But her emphasis on readers’ success in “naturalizing” the apparently deviant or nonsensical makes it difficult to find ways of resisting critical misreadings that conceal the potential force of disruptive elements. Naturalization is not a wholly benign operation.
June 2018: Jonathan Culleris Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, author of Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, and numerous books on critical theory. His Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction has been translated into 26 languages.
