Joyce’s “The Dead” contains a number of partial and misleading narratives related in an unexpected manner, and as such greatly rewards a narrative centered analysis. Misinterpretation is general in this work; one might argue that the text is primarily a record of Gabriel’s repeated misinterpretations of the people and narratives around him. This is true of the women he interacts with; most egregiously, he does not even imagine that his wife has a story independent of her life with him. An attention to narrative and interpretation in turn leads to a different reading of the ending of the text. Far from being a definitive epiphany that finally reveals the bitter truth about himself and his marriage, Gabriel's closing convictions are yet additional misinterpretations about his marriage, his situation, and his life, and rather Romantic ones at that, which the reader trained by this text would be wise to question and reject in favor of a more skeptical conclusion. In addition, the kind of third-person narration with a single focalizer for nearly all the text lends itself to the kind of misleading narration which Margot Norris has identified; this strategy of narration reproduces and even re-enacts the text’s larger hermeneutical dramas, as the reader is challenged to see though a rhetoric that naturalizes an ideological perspective that seems untroubled by imperial rule.

August 2023: Brian Richardson is a Professor in the English Department of the University of Maryland and former president of the Joseph Conrad Society of America. He is the author of several books, including Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006); A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019), and The Reader in Modernist Fiction (2024). He is the editor or co-editor of many volumes, including Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices (2009) and a special issue of Conradiana on “Conrad and the Reader” (2002). He has written numerous articles and book chapters on 20^th-century authors, especially Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, in which he discusses class, voice, interpretation, plot, closure, the sense of touch, the reader, character, and the narratives of literary history. He is currently completing a book on Joseph Conrad and the making of modernist fiction. Website https://brianerichardson.weebly.com

Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury attempts to represent first-person experience in a radical fashion. In what I call (paradoxically) “free indirect discourse in the first person,” Faulkner ostensibly presents both thought thought and thought below the level of awareness together in one stream of text. The Quentin section in particular relies on an idealistic picture of language as meaningful in itself, apart from any intersubjective context or significant use, as though we could bypass communication and look inside Quentin’s head, finding not the brain but the “exact language” of his conscious life. I consider this temptation by way of Wittgenstein’s critique of the privacy of the mental. Wittgenstein’s aim, I argue, is not to deny or demote interiority, but rather to impugn a certain picture of how “the inner” must look — a realm composed of private objects to which the “I” alone has access. I thus suggest that we think of Quentin as an experiment, an appeal. Faulkner tries to reveal a mind in the brutal fullness of its suffering without forcing that mind to address us: to tell us that they suffer. I contend that this appeal fails, and in failing reveals the manner in which the (not-so-private) mind is essentially embedded in a shared, intersubjective world.

August 2023: Daniel Schwartz is a PhD student in English at Brandeis University. His work examines the breakdown of mimesis in modernist literature.

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).

In the recent past, narratives have been hailed as a promising instrument for improving the effectiveness of science communication to nonscientist audiences. Narratives play an important part in how individuals comprehend the world, and persuasive narratives may often be more successful in communicating complex scientific issues to the general public than evidence-based arguments. At the same time, however, narratives have the potential to perpetuate misinformation and inaccuracies about science due to their formal characteristics. Also, as narratives are not subject to the same truth requirements as scientific argumentation, they cannot be easily countered, which can lead to serious misconceptions about important scientific topics. In this article, the role of narratives and narrative explanations in science communication is discussed regarding the genre of popular science. The essay approaches the affordances and limits of narrative in this context with two primary examples representing recent popular-science best-sellers: Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011).

In theoretical literature concerning narratives in science communication and popular science, the concept of narrative tends to be applied rather loosely, encompassing everything from journalistic accounts of scientific research to sequential explanations of change in natural systems. As many of the discourse types of popular science involve representations of temporal change in the non-human natural world, they necessarily also create “narratives” that do not easily fill all the characteristics of prototypical narrative representations. This article takes a closer look at the narrative qualities of science popularization, focusing especially on popular scientific “histories” featuring human species as their main protagonist. The aim is to explore this topic further by a more comprehensive categorization of different kinds of narratives and narrative explanations in the selected popular scientific texts. With this theoretical emphasis, the article will contribute to a fuller understanding of the affordances and limitations of narrative in addressing scientific issues.

February 2022: Juha Raipola is a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland. Raipola has published articles on posthumanism, ecocriticism, and climate fiction, and he is currently focusing his research on the relationship between instrumental narratives and popular science. With a special interest both in the environmental humanities and narratology, Raipola has been exploring the fine line between informative narrative explications of scientific phenomena and scientific misinformation

Narrative is increasingly promoted for improving science communication and thus combatting misinformation and facilitating fact-based education and policy (Dahlstrom 2014; ElShafie 2018). This instrumental use of narrative is laudable, but current approaches tend to be reductive and therefore potentially counterproductive. Most proponents of narrative science view narrative as a mere formula, often derived from entertainment (Luna 2013; Olson 2015; Loverd et al. 2018). Sceptics rightly worry that using narrative formats in this way oversimplifies and distorts scientific information. Given the social, medical, and environmental urgency of effective and accurate scientific communication, the shortcomings and promise of narrativizing science represent a limit-case for the applicability and scope of narrative theory and practice.

In the context of narrative science, this essay begins by examining two valences of the term “limits of narrative.” First, it criticizes the current project of narrativizing science for failing to recognize narrative’s limited capacity to handle complex scientific models and phenomena, which H. Porter Abbott has upheld as exemplary cases of the “unnarratable” (2008: 227). The second valence of “limits” emerges as a response to the first. Although scientific information often eludes narrativity, what is unnarratable now may become narratable tomorrow. As Robyn Warhol suggests, attempts to render the unnarratable can create newly narratable ground, which she calls “neonarrative” (2005: 221). That is, new narrative forms arise at the limits of the narratable. This is a territory where scientists, like experimental novelists, struggle to express new, counterintuitive models, theories or results. What biologist Lewis Wolpert calls “the unnatural nature of science” (1998)—its resistance to commonsense notions of causality and ontology—could just as well be called the unnarratable nature of science.

The essay argues that an effective use of narrative in science would need to accept the limits of narrative, probing for neonarrative footholds at those limits; those neonarrative forms would likely be challenge or violate the narrative templates audiences bring to texts of various kinds. By way of illustration, the article analyzes willfully artificial elements in diagrams depicting coevolution between pollinators and plants (Nilsson 1988; Pauw et al. 2009), a narrative whose agents and events are relative statistical values rather than discrete entities. By foregrounding the “synthetic aspect” of their characters (Phelan 1989), these diagrams showcase how scientific texts use the communicative efficacy of narrative without sacrificing accuracy or complexity.

February 2022: Daniel Aureliano Newman is Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at the University of Toronto. Holding a PhD in literature and a Master’s of Science in Evolutionary Ecology, he is the author of Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman (Edinburgh UP, 2019) and of several essays in journals including Style, Journal of Narrative Theory, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, American Journal of Botany, and Configurations.

Although Alva Noë’s Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015) makes no direct reference to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), these otherwise dissimilar works share an astonishingly similar and current view of the mind: both Noë and Pullman construe cognition as embodied action that extends and reflects on its own possibilities through various instruments and technologies. For Noë, the key technology aiding this reaching of the mind is art; making and engaging with art is a self-reflexive endeavor that makes our activities available for closer examination and evaluation. By extension, works of speculative fiction could be read as illustrations of or investigations into speculative, imaginative cognition.

In case of Pullman’s trilogy, this is certainly true as it incorporates several explicit commentaries on John Keats’ notion of negative capability, which is closely linked to imagination and creative cognition. Moreover, Pullman illustrates his characters’ negative capabilities through very particular ”strange tools”: the Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, and the Amber Spyglass. These imaginary instruments serve the dual purpose of, first, modifying affordances, i.e. the ways the characters can respond to their changing situations, and second, making these speculative cognitive processes more visible to the readers.

Ultimately, the analysis of the trilogy suggests that skillful speculation entails at least two subskills: first, the ability to see as full a range of actionable possibilities as possible and, second, the ability to choose and act on the most suitable one. In the 4E framework, which views the mind as embodied, extended and action-oriented, speculation and imagination could thus be defined as especially extensive and flexible use of affordances. As such, speculation is something that always oveflows the limits of narrative. Like other forms of art, narrative is merely a tool for modifying and highlighting the affordances at its disposal.

February 2022: Essi Varis, PhD, is currently working on her four-year postdoctoral research project, Metacognitive Magic Mirrors (2020–2024), which explores how different kinds of texts and images aid and illustrate imagination and speculation in arts and research alike. Funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, she is splitting her time between the Universities of Helsinki, Jyväskylä, and Oslo. In her doctoral dissertation (2019), Varis suggested a new theory of fictional characters as experiential Frankenstein’s monsters. In addition to cognitive literary theory and speculative fiction, her research interests revolve around graphic narratives, Japanese fiction and Gothic horror.

Drawing on feminist, enactivist and posthumanist theories of reading, the essay develops theoretical and methodological tools for bodily and reflective reading of fictional figures. It introduces the notion of “readerly choreography,” which stands for the iterative experiential patterns that fictional narratives suggest. The primary purpose of the notion is to provide a better grasp of readerly dynamics typical to genre-derived works of fiction — including the cases in which generic frames of expectation and experience are estranged and reconfigured. The essay’s contribution to theory is presented on the basis of a reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004). This short story plays on the conventions of action-adventure, exaggerating the toughness and physical capabilities of technologically enhanced, posthuman action heroes. Owing to this exaggeration, it becomes difficult for readers to continue to perform the habitual experiential patterns of excitement, action-derived pleasure, and identification with the heroic protagonist. In other words, “The People of Sand and Slag” estranges the readerly choreography of action-adventure narratives.

February 2022: Kaisa Kortekallio is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Jyväskylä and the School of Resource Wisdom (JYU.Wisdom). Her work bridges cognitive narratology and posthumanist approaches to literature and philosophy, with a specific focus on ecological speculations and more-than-human reading. She has published on New Weird, climate fiction, readerly experientiality, seasonal mood, and close reading. She is a member of the research consortium Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory (Academy of Finland 2018–2022).

Typical of Ian McEwan’s early “shock literature,” “Solid Geometry” has attracted much scholarly comment on the issue of the conflict between female emotionalism and male rationality. By contrast, this paper focuses on the mystery of character M’s disappearance and examines the story’s three impossible events in the conceptual system of unnatural narratology. Yet it goes beyond the current model of naturalizing readings vs. unnaturalizing readings: it shows how the methods of ethical literary criticism can combine with unnatural narratology to yield new insights into the story, especially with the help of the concepts of ethical identity and ethical choice.

October 2020: Biwu Shang is Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the author of In Pursuit of Narrative Dynamics (Peter Lang, 2011), Contemporary Western Narratology: Postclassical Perspectives (People’s Literature Press, 2013) and Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). His work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Literary Semantics, Neohelicon, Semiotica and Arcadia, among other journals.

Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dulder (A Variation on the Old Theme)” (1923), the essay analyses a pre-Holocaust literary treatment of the Book of Job, enacting the collision of the traditional (Judaic) worldview of East European Jews with disastrous sides of modernity in Word War I and its aftermath. The paper juxtaposes two major actualizations of the Book of Job in modernist texts — (1) its appraisal in In Job Balances (1929) by Russian-Jewish existential philosopher Lev Shestov as a basis for his distinction between European rational philosophy and metaphysical belief and (2) a self-consciously anti-cathartic literary re-enactments of the Job story in Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (1922), Guber’s story, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Job” (1970). The essay shows in what historical and ideological contexts these post-metaphysical subversions of the biblical proto-text are rooted. In these terms, “Job Dulder” presents an important variant of the Modernist thematization of the Job story. It situates the Jewish predicament between the hammer and the anvil of both Russian and Polish nationalisms during WWI. I argue that this representation of the precariousness of Russian-Polish-Jewish relations was generated by a specific historical and ideological situation in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.

May 2019: Edward Waysband received his PhD in Russian Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2010. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Linguistics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg. His research interests encompass Russian and European Modernism; Russian-Polish-Jewish nexus; literature and identity (including the contexts of diaspora and exile); and postcolonial, nationalism, and minority studies. He has published articles on these issues in academic journals. He is currently writing a monograph on Vladislav Khodasevich.

This article addresses narrative ethics from a media and memory studies perspective. It discusses the ethics of premediation in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Premediation is a forward-facing, generative dynamic of cultural memory: the medial preformation of imagination, experience, storytelling, and action. I first explore Ulysses’s mimesis of premediation, showing how in the Calypso episode, Bloom’s imagination is premediated by Orientalist stereotypes, and how in the Ithaca episode, Stephen’s ballad of Little Harry Hughes exposes the premediating power of age-old anti-Semitic narratives. Both episodes reveal the ethically problematic dimension of premediating schemata, which often operate non-consciously. But they also hint at the possibility of critical reflection, of “turning around upon one’s schemata” in the psychologist Frederic Bartlett’s sense. In a second step, I discuss the novel’s references to the Odyssey as a case of premediation, showing how new concepts of memory and mediation can elucidate this famous case of intertextuality. I argue that the particular presence of Homer in Ulysses — not as remediation, but as premediation — marks modernism’s new temporal regime, where tradition is used to tell new stories and thus turns into a future-oriented and enabling resource. Discussing the dynamic of premediation both on the level of narrative representation and in the novel’s intertextual relations, this article explores the potentials of a memory studies concept for the fields of (ethical) narratology, Joyce studies, and classical reception studies.

May 2019: Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt (Germany) and founder of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform (FMSP). Her research fields include memory studies, narratology, media studies, and transcultural studies. Erll is general editor of the book series Media and Cultural Memory (with A. Nünning, de Gruyter) and author of Memory in Culture (Palgrave, 2011). Recent publications are Audiovisual Memory and the (Re)Making of Europe (Image & Narrative 2017, ed. with A. Rigney) and Cultural Memory after the Transnational Turn (Memory Studies 2018, ed.with A. Rigney). In her current research project, she studies the afterlives of the Odyssey.

Starting from an interest in witnessing as a set of conceptual and narrative operations that also involve comparison as a fundamental cognitive practice, this essay examines the work of the witness at two historically entangled moments. In the “multi-directional memory” (Rothberg) of the British Jewish writer and political activist Leonard Woolf early 20^th-century colonial trauma connects with the rise in racial persecution and absolute power in Europe of the 1930s. Woolf’s experience as a colonial administrator in Ceylon is given fictional form in his 1913 novel The Village in the Jungle; an analysis of the condition of colonialism that is enabled by his complex and contingent position as a witness. Strikingly, the novel’s comparative operations and conceptual tropes reappear in his historiography of “the origins of totalitarianism” in Barbarians at the Gate (1939). For Woolf, the extreme events of the 1930s spur an almost compulsive historicism that leads back to the history of European imperialism and to his own colonial encounter, bringing together different temporal and spatial coordinates in a manner that is at once prescient and familiar. Not only is this an anticipation of Hannah Arendt’s famous “boomerang thesis” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); more generally Woolf’s narrative offers a historical perspective on recent transnational and global approaches to comparison where network- or other horizontal and lateral models dominate and where connections among coordinates can only appear tentative and fractured. Like Arendt’s, Woolf’s grand narrative was composed with the urgency of the witness to extreme events, illuminating the potential, as well as the risks, of cross-temporal comparison.

May 2019: Randi Koppen, professor of British Literature at the University of Bergen, has published on various aspects of modernist literature and culture, including fashion and body culture, popular science, sound technologies and broadcasting. Her work has appeared in leading journals such as New Literary History and Modern Drama, and with international publishers such as Edinburgh University Press and Bloomsbury Academic. Her book Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), explores the modern fascination with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice, demonstrating how Woolf’s work provides illuminating examples of all of these aspects. Professor Koppen’s current research centres on the interwar writing and activism of Leonard Woolf, especially its advancement of international collaboration, solidarity and justice.

In recent years, literary critics and theorists have turned increasingly toward cognitive science for models, including in discussions of literary style. More than is usually recognized, such an approach recalls the "affective stylistics" developed by Stanley Fish in the 1970s - a similarity evident in the heavy use both theories make of the term "information." The assumptions behind the use of this term, however, are deeply misleading. "Information" implies that styles are parcels or propositions rather than expressions of attitude, and invokes a causal vocabulary that fails to capture how texts convey moods and communicate ideas. More plausible models of understanding can be culled from Donald Davidson's account of Mrs. Malaprop and Ludwig Wittgenstein's descriptions of "seeing-as." Avoiding the twin temptations of skepticism and dogmatism, these discussions suggest that cognitivist and affective theories are logically dependent on the practices of actually existing readers, whose engagements with style are at times effortless and at times full of confusion. Styles are not discrete objects, as the language of "information" implies, and understanding them demands a complex training and historically variable set of skills, sometimes referred to as know-how and wit.

This essay concerns the connection between literature and reality. It argues that the existence of such a connection is made possible by the dual role of social practice in founding, on the one hand, human reality (including character), and on the other, linguistic meaning. While an author is free to determine such matters as plot or imagery under the control of nothing stronger than general plausibility and verisimilitude, a far stronger constraint from the side of reality comes into play the moment he sets about deploying the resources of a natural language, which is not his private property but a public possession, whose possibilities of meaning stand before him independently of his wishes, already richly charged with references, both historic and contemporary, to the structures of practice constitutive of the social order from which it has emerged, and the complexities of whose daily intercourse on all levels it serves to mediate. In developing these themes, the essay explores the relationships between fairy tale, language, and reality in Our Mutual Friend, and the way in which Dickens' language mediates between our "uneasy" sense that, on the one hand, we are reading a fairy tale, or rather a set of interwoven fairy tales, and on the other hand, that the novel is, nevertheless, in some sense a work of "realism," though not at all concerned with "social reality" in any sense seriously analogous to, say, Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. The title and the epigraph pick up a passage in Cynthia Ozick's early novel Trust: "here was a man who shunned novels on the ground that they were always fiction."

This essay examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy. Walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of social change and entertaining middle-class readers, Dickens fuses homo ludens with homo faber. The sheer pleasure of reading must be shown to be useful, yet the novel has not proven popular until recent years and its moral message does not wear will in a postmodern hedonistic culture. Nevertheless, imagination as means as well as metaphor must be tested by its success, and the author, like Mr Jupe, cannot afford to miss a trick.