The paper discusses Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as his first English experiment in constructing a model of a possible metaphysical contact between the world of human consciousness and a mysterious dimension beyond it. Nabokov's almost invariable principles of composition make the narrative stance of the novel open to various interpretations; the paper argues in favor of the version in which the title character’s secret (Russ. Taina Naita) is his calculated absence from the book of which he appears to be the biographical subject. The Appendix presents some results of archival study of the novel's extant manuscripts.

Born in Moscow, Gennady Barabtarlo (1949-2019), received a degree in philology from the University of Moscow in 1972, emigrated from the USSR, with his wife and daughter, in 1979, received a PhD from the University of Illinois in 1985, and was since professor of Russian Literature at the Univeristy of Missouri. He has published several books and numerous essays on Nabokov and translated into Russian three of his novels (Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Original of Laura) and all his short stories. He also published articles on Pushkin, Tiutchev, Solzhenitsyn,  and a book of poetry. updated in March 2019

Taking its starting point from Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel featuring an autistic first-person narrator, this paper explores the capabilities and limits of narrative as a cognitive instrument with special attention to the connection between knowing, living, and telling. In the novel the impairments connected with autism, affecting social interaction and the understanding of other persons as beings with minds of their own, influence both the narrator’s style of telling his story and his way of using narrative thinking to plan the future and conceive of the past. The discussion focuses on both these issues, arguing that narrative is not only a cultural technique which enables orientation in time and space as well as the understanding of other agents as intentional – that it is a highly social art, of vital importance for everyday action and interaction in a web of social relations.

The article explores the weave of memory, time, and narrative as it unfolds in the autobiographical process. It offers a reading of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as a book that outlines a new narrative vision of memory and autobiographical time. In this book Sebald, in a break with the traditional model of memory as an archive, describes remembering as an uncertain and speculative search movement which defies chronology, sequentiality, and linearity. What emerges instead is an idea of time as a mode of simultaneously co-existing moments and episodes from very different periods of clock and calendar time. This reading of Austerlitz leads, on a more general plane, to reflections about the autobiographical process as a way of narrative meaning-making that constitutes what Ricœur has called human time.

The essay analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go in the context of both fictional representations of cloning and the contemporary debates on the ethics of cloning. In certain debates human cloning has been framed primarily in terms of its effects on the parent-child relation and the family. But an investigation of arguments both for and against cloning reveals how this scenario privileges a specific normative narrative of individuation that prescribes the proper form for life. The conventions of cloning narratives highlight the role of this normative narrative in our constructions of the human. From movies like The Island to science fiction classics like Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, these narratives betray anxieties over individuation. Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, reflects on the narrative modes that shape what it means to be human. It measures the human not in terms of some narrative of internal or immanent development but rather through the process of relating to another.

This article proposes a cognitive approach to narrative that moves away from a “representational” paradigm – one concerned with exploring the fictionalized representation of conscious experience – to a conceptualist paradigm – one concerned with the functional organization of the mental structures that underlie our ability to comprehend a narrative in the first place. Stated blandly, my argument is that literary narratologists in particular need to jettison the remnants of traditional criticism that conceives of narrative in the form of a mimetic textual artifact and to adopt a method that systematically explicates the explicitly mental structures than underlie narrative comprehension. What kinds of categories, distinctions, and relations must be realized in the mind-brain in order to effect narrative comprehension? I suggest that this emphasis upon what we can characterize as the “content” of the mental structures that underlie narrative comprehension (rather the content of the narrative text) offers a paradigm for narratological research that respects the need for both disciplinary specialization and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The article reconsiders Jerome Bruner’s famous article “Life as Narrative” (1987), and in particular its thesis about those who “become” the autobiographical narratives they are telling. Galen Strawson’s recent criticism of narrativity is used as one perspective to weigh Bruner’s thought. Autobiography is, for Bruner, a cognitive achievement, yet he challenges the understanding of narrative as simply following and imitating life. He foregrounds the ways in which life imitates narrative, and the manner in which narrative cognition precedes and organizes experience. However, the key idea about the merger of autobiographical narratives and lived life privileges autobiography vis-à-vis the continuous process of the reception of narratives. Autobiography is never the sole cognitive resource used in organizing experience. The article argues that Bruner’s later emphasis on “folk psychological,” canonical narrativity and the “breaches” of these expectations as a cause of real narratives marks a change in his thought. The function of narration is to contain, solve, or deal with the “uncanniness” of life and shattered expectations. Experience is thus, to some extent, at odds with the preceding autobiographical narratives, and thus calls for revision of the preceding narratives rather than being dominated by them.  

Last year, guided by theories that regard sympathy as an imaginative capacity that can bridge divisions between people of different backgrounds, I conducted an experiment with nearly 200 Finnish secondary school students, in order to determine the extent to which particular texts would generate their sympathy for characters who seem unattractive, undesirable, or generally outside of the accepted norms of the societies in which they live. The present paper builds on my findings in that study by suggesting some of the pedagogical implications of providing adolescents with opportunities to engage with the lives of fictional characters, and particularly to experience feelings of sympathy for individuals toward whom they ordinarily might feel aversion or uncertainty. It examines some of the ways in which experiences with narrative fiction can be used to help develop emotional and conceptual structures in adolescent readers. In Education and Experience John Dewey contends that “the conditions found in present experience should be used as sources of problems”; indeed, the present paper shows how narrative experience can help form the basis for a problem-solving, emotionally-rich curriculum that takes as its primary aim the development of students’ capacities for emotional awareness and ethical reflection.

Drawing on treatments of the problem of intentionality in fields encompassed by the umbrella discipline of cognitive science, including language theory, psychology, and the philosophy of mind, this paper explores issues underlying recent debates about the role of intentions in narrative contexts. To avoid entering the debate on the terms set by anti-intentionalists, my analysis shifts the focus away from questions about the boundary for legitimate ascriptions of communicative intention, the tipping-point where those ascriptions become illicit projections of readerly intuitions onto an imagined authorial consciousness. Instead, I propose a two-part strategy for examining how storytelling practices are bound up with inferences about intention. The first part uses Hemingway’s 1927 short story “Hills Like White Elephants” to argue that narrative interpretation requires adopting the heuristic strategy that Daniel Dennett has characterized as “the intentional stance.” In other words, it makes sense to assume that stories like Hemingway’s are told for particular reasons, in the service of communicative goals about which interpreters are justified in framing at least provisional hypotheses. This first part of my analysis is tantamount to grounding stories in intentional systems. The second part, which draws on work on folk psychology (and research in the philosophy of mind more generally), describes narrative as a means by which humans learn to take up the intentional stance in the first place, and later practice using it in the safe zone afforded by storyworlds. This part of my analysis involves grounding intentional systems in stories. Here I argue that narrative constitutes in its own right a discipline for reading for intentions, a primordial basis for making the ascriptions of intentionality that lie at the heart of folk psychology, or everyday reasoning concerning one’s own and others' minds.

The paper deals with the presentation of minds in the mixed media environment of graphic narratives, inspired by the notion of narrative experientiality as it is defined in recent narratology. Focusing specifically on three interrelated medium-specific issues, it examines the way graphic narratives can also be said to stimulate the viewer’sengagement with the minds of characters and narrators: the mimetic aspect of the graphic image; the problem of the narrative agent; and the interaction between visual focalization, verbal focalization and verbal narration. Graphic narratives pose a challenge to common narratological analytical categories concerning narratorial authority, enunciation and control in that they display diverse and shifting relationships between verbal narration and visual presentations. The analysis of the graphic means of thought and mind presentation aims to illuminate some of the challenges that narrative theory meets in its transmedial extension. The main examples include first-person autobiographical narratives as well as third-person historical fiction that uses various focalizers and “behaviorist” graphic narratives that are structured around dialogue and action.

The “disnarrated” (Gerald Prince) means textual elements that consider (in a negative or hypothetical mode) what did not happen but could have. The scope of the term is inconveniently wide at present, ranging from explicit denials to lengthy passages of imagined or otherwise hypothetical events. This essay seeks to clarify the concept by relating it to the pragmatic and rhetorical functions of negatives in language and literature.

A statement of what could have happened but did not may often be rephrased as what should have happened but did not. Negatives reveal what is expected in a given situation and of a particular person or ethnic group. They thus render social and literary norms visible and subject to resistance, which makes them valuable for feminist and postcolonial criticism. Negatives do not record a neutrally observable reality but must be attributable to a narrative agent with her own set of cultural and individual norms. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s bicultural story “Interpreter of Maladies”, the descriptive focus inhering in (negative) phrases sometimes conflicts with the focalization indicated by contextual cues.

Salman Rushdie frequently evokes the voice of local gossips but renders their narrative hypothetical by using negatives. This may be regarded as one way of standardizing the expectations of a multicultural readership. Both Rushdie and Arundhati Roy invite the reader to make certain kinds of inferences concerning the events only to disappoint them by switching to disnarration at a climactic juncture. In making the reader conscious of the cultural stereotypes guiding her inferencing, negatives and the disnarrated serve ethical and political ends. They direct the reader’s attention to the discursive context of the text, urging her to read metonymically.

The disciplinary rapprochement between various disciplines across the arts and social sciences that have had an interest in narrative forms and functions has been slow and is still far from being completed. An area which has not been extensively covered yet is the question whether certain forms of third-person consciousness, i.e. the representation of the consciousness of a third party, are at all possible in oral narratives. One mode of depicting third-person consciousness in literary narratives is free indirect discourse (FID), which is commonly viewed as a dual-voiced narrative technique that entails both a reference to the thinking subject and to the narrating instance. The evaluation of FID as a literary narrative technique that is deemed less possible in oral stories results from the attribution of qualities of fictionality and factuality to the respective narrative genres and modes, whereas claims of truth-commitment and sincerity are made for spoken language. This paper discusses the methodological implications of FID for a cross-disciplinary narratology by looking at oral narratives from a sample of illness narratives on the UK’s DIPEx website. While FID can hardly be found in the spoken data, third-person consciousness is still made possible through the use of hypothesizing discourse markers and through devices such as constructed dialogue, which can be used to ascribe thoughts and feelings to other people in an indirect way. The paper demonstrates how third-person consciousness is used by speakers to come to terms with the motives behind other people’s actions. On a more abstract level, the paper explores the limits of a cross-disciplinary narratology when it comes to rigid methodological frameworks while at the same time arguing for a re-conceptualization of defining criteria such as fictionality and truth-commitment that allows for more flexibility.

In spite of Emmanuel Levinas’s famous criticism of narratives as artistic representations, the essay argues that we should construct a “post-Levinasian” approach to narrativity that would both respect the ethical priority of the Other, and go beyond Levinas by taking into account narrative techniques, as well as the historical and political contexts. As an example, the essay analyzes different encounters that take place in Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Eyes of the Poor.” In the narrator’s inevitable failure of reading the face of the Other we can perhaps hear the singular way in which, to quote Levinas, “across all literature the human face speaks -- or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature.”

The article considers some of the ways in which Seamus Deane’s novel maps political, sectarian, and folkloric borders onto the Catholic tradition of textual exegesis. In particular, the essay argues that Reading in the Dark treats Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as a productive site where both political and community identity are reconfigured through direct contact with literary-theoretical concerns.

Paul de Man believed that he had dismissed Jorge Luis Borges’ stories in calling them “contes philosophiques.”  However, this appellation only works as disparagement if one considers philosophical stories to be frivolous puzzles. There is a puzzle in Borges’ story “Funes the Memorious,” but it is of the utmost relevance not only to general philosophy but to the philosophy of language and, ultimately, that of ethics. Borges’ central character, Ireneo Funes, does not match his name, being the reverse of peaceful in mind, the reason being that he is gifted or, better, afflicted with the ability to remember all that he has ever sensed in infinitely intricate detail. The effect is to deny him our own humbler ability to classify his experiences usefully, either for himself or, more importantly, for others. The story brings his affliction subtly into focus, astonishing us with its autistic grandeur, but, in so doing, also lays bare the dialogic nerve of human communication.

In memory of Daniel Stern (Jan. 18, 1928 -- Jan. 24, 2007)

This article provides a brief historical overview of the changing perspectives in trauma studies, the field that has spawned an academic interest in the nature and impact of traumatic experiences. The latest insights of psychotherapists, historians, and cultural and literary critics such as Dori Laub, Bessel van der Kolk, Dominick LaCapra, Saul Friendlander, and Cathy Caruth about witnessing, testimony, representation, and working-through traumatic experiences are used as a frame of reference for the analysis of two novels by the Jewish American novelist Daniel Stern, whose work has somehow failed to achieve canonical status. Stern’s two early Holocaust novels, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die (1963) and After the War (1967), it is argued, are remarkable, not only for their understanding of the psychological effects of trauma, but also for their use of narrative strategies to mitigate and contain the traumas that dwell at the core of these novels.

In the short story “Bluebeard’s Egg” (1983), Margaret Atwood simultaneously replicates the form of one Bluebeard tale, “The Robber Bridegroom,” and recapitulates the content of another, “Fitcher’s Bird,” by having her protagonist recall to herself a tale about three sisters and a sorcerer she recently heard in a course on “Forms of Narrative Fiction.” The recollection of the Grimms’ story of “Fitcher’s Bird” within “Bluebeard’s Egg” is structurally analogous to the climactic scene in their “Robber Bridegroom” in which the robber’s bride is called upon to regale her wedding guests with “a good story.” She gives a first-person account of prior events that is nearly identical to the sequence already described by the third-person omniscient narrator. In other words, the bride whose experiences were the object of narration (at the diegetic level) now engages in narrating the events in which she took part (at the hypodiegetic level). For Atwood, as I propose, the mise en abyme in “The Robber Bridegroom” serves as a point of departure in both senses of the phrase: her text deviates from the structural model it imitates. The hypodiegetic narration in “Bluebeard’s Egg” – namely, the embedded tale of “Fitcher’s Bird” – does not verge on identity with events previously narrated; rather, Atwood literally realizes the rhetorical device of mise en abyme in her story. Things are put into an abyss. Nothing mirrors nothing. Through this inventive deployment of intertextuality, Atwood’s variant of the Bluebeard motif presents a case of negative mise en abyme.

One of the functions of literary fiction, in particular narrative fiction, is the construction, circulation and maintenance of world-models.  Literature, Lotman taught us, is a secondary modeling system: using the primary modeling system of language as its vehicle, it constructs models of and models for reality.  It also models itself: narrative fictions regularly embed within their own continuums secondary worlds – inset narratives, found manuscripts, ekphrastic descriptions, remediations of non-verbal media, micro-worlds and paraspaces, etc. – that mirror the primary worlds framing them.  Such structures en abyme have typically been treated as uncanny disruptions, fatally compromising fiction’s world-modeling function, at worst summoning up the specters of crippling paradox and infinite regress.  In fact, world-modeling and self-modeling are interdependent functions of fiction; they complement and sustain each other.  Internal scale-models make the “outer” fiction’s model of the world salient.  Far from disrupting the primary world, they hold a mirror up to it, providing the reader with a kind of schematic diagram of it, or an instruction manual for its proper operation. Moreover, the relationship between the “outer” world and the internal scale-model, the way one maps onto the other, can itself serve as a model for the relationship between the fictional world as a whole and the real world – the world “out there,” beyond the text.  So internal scale-models yield knowledge of the fictional world, but also of how the fictional world models the real.

          The paper revisits the literature on mise en abyme, as well as Jameson’s powerful notion, derived from the urban planning literature, of cognitive mapping.  Case-studies include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, read in the light of Fernand Braudel’s cognitive mapping of the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II; micro-worlds and scale-models en abyme in science fiction (Gibson, Sterling), and in the American mega-novel (Sorrentino, Pynchon, Barth).

As a child the Serbian-Jewish author Danilo Kiš witnessed the massacre of the so called “cold days” in Novi Sad in 1942, when thousands of Jewish and Serbian inhabitants were executed by the fascists and their corpses thrown into the Danube, and the disappearance of his father who perished in Auschwitz. As an adult he was witness to the dictatorship of Titoist Yugoslavia. His narratives focus on Fascism and Stalinism insisting on their purely literary representation. Relying on the documentary character of autobiographical testimony (Karlo Stejner’s Seven Thousand Days in Siberia), the “real” story of mystifications (Protocols of the Elders of Zion), the semantic energy of fictive documents, and the charm of story-telling, Kiš creates a multilayered, highly artificial narrative compositum. He combines the literary experience of Russian avant-garde “factography” (literatura fakta, 1929) with the puzzling effect of documentary simulacra without resuming the ludistic implication of this procedure, which – as he is well aware – is an integral element of Borges’s poetics. Without ignoring the intertextual orientation of Kiš’s text, the paper concentrates on the mnemonic dimension of his narratives, on the stylistics of anti-pathos and litotes, on the semantic coalition of “factography” and “thanatography,” and discusses the problem of hyperbole/understatement in virtual documents.