In her book Towards a Natural Narratology, Fludernik defined narrativity through the notion of experientiality. This essay argues that, despite the success of Natural Narratology, the significance of experience has not yet been fully charted out in narratology. A look at philosophical discussions shows that experience need not be pitted against plot. The phenomenological tradition in particular has highlighted the temporal dimension of experience. Encompassing the temporal dynamics of narrative as well the role of consciousness, the concept of experience may help overcome some of the shortcomings of approaches that focus on fictional minds and tend to downplay plot.

June 2018: 

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.

Storytelling is not just a human practice, but a practice that reflects the physical and cognitive make-up of human beings. This is the intuition at the core of Monika Fludernik’s notion of “experientiality.” One of the upshots of this idea is that narrative struggles to come to terms with realities (such as natural evolution or geological history) that are not human-scale. In light of recent discussions in posthumanism and ecocriticism, one may ask if and how narrative can overcome this anthropocentric bias. This essay addresses this question through a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), a novel set a million years into the future, when humanity has evolved into a radically different species. The essay explores formal strategies and affective impact of Vonnegut’s novel, using it as a springboard to rethink narrative’s experientiality in the face of a more-than-human vantage point. 

Marco Caracciolo is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” Marco's work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (De Gruyter, 2014); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers' Engagement with Characters (University of Nebraska Press, 2016); and A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt; Ohio State University Press, 2016).

(updated in February 2018)

Though the literary figure of engineer-inventor George Stephenson epitomized Samuel Smiles’s “self-help” ideal of the “manly” liberal subject enabled by laissez-faire policies, Stephenson himself advocated for parliamentary intervention during the heated Railway Regulation debates of the 1840s. This essay deals with women writers’ engagement in those debates and their recognition that improved safety standards for railway travel depended on the inventor and vice versa. In City and Suburb (1861), Charlotte Riddell stylizes passages to mimic the dramatic cross-examinations of the Railway Regulation debates, effectively putting anti-regulation on trial. I argue that Riddell reworked Smiles’s Stephenson narrative in her fiction to promote thoughtful regulation that would enable rather than hamper innovation. Because women themselves sought recognition as part of the larger network of central decision-making, women writers such as Riddell saw the advantage of regarding the inventor not as an isolated hyper-masculine figure but rather as part of the integrated network of contingencies that defined Victorian modernity.

In her response to the essays, Monika Fludernik concentrates on tackling two major points of critique: the question of the natural and the term experientiality. She also engages with Shen Dan's complex remarks about narrativity and its relationship to experientiality and with Maria Mäkelä's remarks on diachrony in the context of models of reader response. As for experientiality, she welcomes both Jonas Grethlein's and Marco Caracciolo's extensions of the term, though signaling some caution about a conflation of experience and experientiality.

Lucy Strange, the protagonist of Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004), can be seen as an early example of a global citizen. Travelling between the periphery and the center of the British Empire, Lucy repeatedly makes sea-journeys that last for months — a kind of journey that no longer exists in today’s world. Although this travelling helps shape her identity, it also makes her incapable of calling any one location her home. This article discusses the portrayal of Lucy as a modern 19^th-century woman who is simultaneously a 21^st century, neo-Victorian creation. It analyzes the links between femininity and voyages in the novel. Lucy’s travels serve to depict the movement of women and mothers across the sea as an inherent part of globalization, writing them into what was often seen as a development led by male adventurers and businessmen. Jones presents Lucy as a young woman at the edge of modernity. Nevertheless, Lucy’s lack of rootedness also questions whether travelling requires different — more modern — constructions of female identity.

Modern forms of travel allowed Victorian women and their afterlives in neo-Victorian fiction to redefine gendered spaces and gender roles, in the metropolis as well as in the empire’s peripheries. The Introduction to the forum surveys issues pertaining to the relationship between female modernity, travel, and the subversion of imperial roles as explored by the papers of the forum.

Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World:  Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

(Updated on March 20, 2016)

In Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, there are two different conceptions of experientiality, one broader and the other more nuanced, the coexistence of which is an ingenious design and one necessary for the book both to make the powerful cognitive impact on the field and to show how readers use different frames to interpret different types of narratives. Similarly, we can find two different conceptions of “narrativity” which, though distinct from each other, together form a balanced cognitive-textual equilibrium. This paper analyzes the features, functions, advantages, and disadvantages of the different conceptions, pointing out their different roles in the 1990s and the present day.

This essay briefly sets out some of the main themes of Monika Fludernik’s path-breaking monograph and goes on to present the eight articles by the contributors. Among the topics covered are from the natural to naturalization, competing conceptions of experientiality, the role of diachronicity in reading, experientiality in factual narratives and experientiality in posthuman narratives.

How do women travelling the colonial frontier create a feminine, and potentially less hierarchical type of modernity? And how does Neo-Victorian fiction explore gendered and racialized types of modernity through the use of travel? Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) represesnts the quest for a postcolonial and feminine modernity through the trope of the woman traveler, worker, storyteller and entrepreneur. In particular, protagonists Anna Whetherell and Lydia Wells oppose the highly racist and sexist societies of gold rush frontier towns of the 1860s New Zealand through solitary travel on foot, by sea and across textual layers. This paper argues that such independent solitary women travelers stand for a new representation of white women in colonial contexts and challenge traditional categories of Victorian femininity, such as the dichotomous opposition between the Angel in the House and the fallen woman. By shifting across white femininity and queer Chinese identities (in Anna’s case), and by embracing a masculine, capitalist model (for Lydia), Catton’s heroines survive, on their own, as members of a minority in the communities of white, male miners. The two women thus embody new types of femininity and, while placing themselves outside the colonial hierarchy, they question the social structure, the exploitation of the Other (the woman, the Chinese) and set an example for a more viable and more equal society born out of colonial settlement. Finally, while shaping modernity through their female gaze and a free way of travelling the peripheries, the two women also accomplish their own Bildung process and, forgers of their own fortunes, symbolize the shift from masculine, imperial modernity to a feminine, neo-Victorian, postcolonial paradigm.

The article traces the theoretical reader position implicitly constructed in Fludernik’s natural narratology. Fludernik’s diachronic method assumes a conceptual reader figure trained by the texts she encounters while making her way in diachronic succession from oral to the written, ending up with literary deconstruction of language and narrative. Along the way, she gains the required reading strategies and cognitive parameters, finally being able to make narrative sense of — narrativize — (almost) any representation. I claim that this non-empirical (and as such, “non-natural”) reader position marks the cornerstone of postclassical narratology, suggesting a necessary departure from the synchrony of “natural” cognitive parameters. Eventually I will ask if diachronic narratology, as originally initiated by Fludernik’s book, has the potential to deal also with the synchronicity of narrative sense-making through its manifestly non-natural reader construct.

Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently she is running two research projects, Dangers of Narrative (2017–2020) and the research consortium Instrumental Narratives (2018–2022). In 2018, she is Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University. She is co-editor of Narrative, Interrupted (De Gruyter, 2012) and Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (Routledge, 2015). She has published on consciousness, voice, and realism across media, the literary tradition of adultery, authorial ethos, and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.

updated on September 26, 2018

This essay argues that in Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, Herman Melville draws on the 19^th-century reading public’s repugnance towards infanticide to both construct his narrative and inspire readers’ emotions to critique capital punishment. The connections between child murder and the execution of Billy in Billy Budd emerge out of the transatlantic literature and culture of capital punishment reform, which includes, significantly, George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede. A reading informed by the literary and cultural history of child murder reveals that Melville’s critique of sovereign power draws on the emotional dynamics of the infanticide narrative. Billy embodies elements of both the infanticidal mother and the murdered child, while Captain Vere exhibits a parental sympathy that might be associated with 19^th-century sentimental reformers. Dramatizing how Vere’s personal connection with Billy ultimately supports the aims of sovereign power, Melville provides a compelling enactment of the corrosive effects of biopolitics on human relationships. Beyond that, Melville’s use of the infanticide topos ultimately likens Billy’s execution to a coolly rational infanticide by the state

June 2018: Emer Vaughn is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation examines trans-corporealities in mid-19th-century American nature writing.