1st Edition

Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds

    326 Pages
    by Routledge

    326 Pages
    by Routledge

    Offering an interdisciplinary approach to narrative, this book investigates storyworlds and minds in narratives across media, from literature to digital games and reality TV, from online sadomasochism to oral history databases, and from horror to hallucinations. It addresses two core questions of contemporary narrative theory, inspired by recent cognitive-scientific developments: what kind of a construction is a storyworld, and what kind of mental functioning can be embedded in it? Minds and worlds become essential facets of making sense and interpreting narratives as the book asks how story-internal minds relate to the mind external to the storyworld, that is, the mind processing the story. With essays from social scientists, literary scholars, linguists, and scholars from interactive media studies answering these topical questions, the collection brings diverse disciplines into dialogue, providing new openings for genuinely transdisciplinary narrative theory. The wide-ranging selection of materials analyzed in the book promotes knowledge on the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making through narrative, necessary for navigating the contemporary, mediatized cultural landscape. The combination of theoretical reflection and empirical analysis makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students in fields including literary studies, social sciences, art, media, and communication.

    Introduction: Minds in Action, Interpretive Traditions in Interaction  Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, and Frans Mäyrä  Section I  1. Texts, Worlds, Stories: Narrative Worlds as Cognitive and Ontological Concept  Marie-Laure Ryan  2. Storyworlds and Paradoxical Narration: Putting Classifications to a Transmedial Test  Liviu Lutas  3 The Charge against Classical and Post-Classical Narratologies’ "Epistemic" Approach to Literary Fiction  Greger Andersson  Section II  4. How You Emerge from This Game Is up to You: Agency, Positioning, and Narrativity in The Mass Effect Trilogy  Hanna-Riikka Roine  5. Playing the Worlds of Prom Week  Ben Samuel, Dylan Lederle-Ensign, Mike Treanor, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Josh McCoy, Aaron Reed, and Michael Mateas  6. Scripting Beloved Discomfort: Narratives, Fantasies, and Authenticity in Online Sadomasochism  J. Tuomas Harviainen  7. Storyworld in Text-Messages: Sequentiality and Spatialisation  Agnieszka Lyons  Section III  8. Defending the Private and the Unnarratable: Doomed Attempts to Read and Write Literary and Cinematic Minds in Marguerite Duras’s India Cycle  Tytti Rantanen  9. Of Minds and Monsters: the Eventfulness of Monstrosity and the Poetics of Immersion in Horror Literature  Gero Brümmer  10. Narrative Conventions in Hallucinatory Narratives  Tommi Kakko  11. Narrative and Minds in the Traditional Ballads of Early Country Music  Alan Palmer  Section IV  12. Mind Reading, Mind Guessing, or Mental-State Attribution? The Puzzle of John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning  Matti Hyvärinen  13 Mind as World in the Reality Game Show Survivor  Maria Mäkelä  14 Performing Selves and Audience Design: Interview Narratives on the Internet  Jarmila Mildorf  15 Documenting Everyday Life: Mind Representation in the Web Exhibition "A Finnish Winter Day"  Mari Hatavara  Afterword: A New Normal?  Brian McHale

    Biography

    Mari Hatavara is Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland

    Matti Hyvärinen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tampere, Finland

    Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer of Comparative Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland

    Frans Mäyrä is Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media at the University of Tampere, Finland