New Adventures in the Theory of Fiction and of Narrative: A Postgraduate Panel
Shaye Easton (SAM), Meike Heinrich (Freie Universität Berlin), Xanthe Muston (SAM)
In-person talk followed by Q&A
Three short talks exploring new approaches to the theory of fiction and of narrative, given by three of our wonderful postgraduate students:
Shaye Easton, "What Is the Metaleptic Object?: Towards a New Theory of Metalepsis"
Meike Heinrich, "Remember the Rules? Narration and Meta-Commentary in Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone series"
Xanthe Muston, "'The obligatory note of hope': Polarities of Hope and Despair in Climate Change Narratives across Media"
See the abstracts below for further details.
This seminar is co-hosted by the Â鶹Éçmadou Literary Provocations Hub and by the Â鶹Éçmadou English and Creative Writing Programme in the School of the Arts and Media. All are welcome, and there is no need to register.
Abstracts
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"What is the Metaleptic Object?: Towards a New Theory of Metalepsis"
Much has been written on the forms metalepsis can take, whether rhetorical or ontological, horizontal or vertical, descending or ascending, or otherwise, but in all expansions of this notion little attention is given to a metalepsis that occurs independently of a character or narrator—a metalepsis not of subject but of object. Yet, in Jorge Luis Borges’s short fiction, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940), the objects of the metadiegesis—Borges’s invented Tlön—materialise in the real world of the diegesis. And again, over a half-century later, in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), the object at the centre of its textual labyrinth terrorises the characters of multiple diegetic levels. The duplications of these objects across levels have been described as mises en abyme, as strange loops, and as examples of "immersive metalepsis", but missing from these concepts is a greater consideration of the characteristics and function of the objects themselves. What is needed is a rethinking of these objects as engaged in a metalepsis, but the existing categories of metalepsis, in not privileging the object, do not adequately account for this phenomenon. This paper therefore proposes a new theory of metalepsis that can accommodate the challenge posed by objects that recur across levels.
Shaye Easton is a second-year PhD student in the School of the Arts and Media at Â鶹Éçmadou.
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Remember the Rules? Narration and Meta-Commentary in Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone series
Detective fiction of the British Golden Age was popular but not considered intellectually worthwhile. In an attempt to raise its profile, authors created rulebooks for how detective fiction should be written, for example by ruling out solutions that are too convenient or too unlikely. The rules were also meant to ensure fair play for the readers, enabling them to guess along with the detective and solve the case on their own. Over time, the genre diversified much and the rules lost their significance, though even in their heyday many prolific authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers famously broke various rules in their books and caused controversy. Recently, author Benjamin Stevenson has used his novels to revive and reintroduce the rules for detective fiction in a contemporary context. This talk will introduce the rules and the way Stevenson’s rule-abiding, but also self-critical narrator provides a complex web of plot, narration, and meta-commentary that readers are left to untangle, showing that his compliance to the rules does not actually make the narration easier or fairer. This talk will discuss examples (and spoilers) from Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone ²õ±ð°ù¾±±ð²õ.ÌýÌý
Meike Heinrich is an English Studies doctoral student at Freie Universität Berlin. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in English and German philology and her master’s degree in English literature there, with a year abroad at the University of Leeds, UK. She is currently spending one semester as a research practicum student at Â鶹Éçmadou as part of her PhD. Her dissertation focuses on games and game-like structures in British detective fiction; her other research interests include translations, adaptations, and regional novels.
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'The obligatory note of hope': Polarities of Hope and Despair in Climate Change Narratives across Media
It is well understood that both within and beyond the academy, individuals and groups make the same appeal to the importance of narrative as an invaluable tool to communicate complex phenomena in clear and compelling ways. This is particularly the case with the climate crisis where, as the need to mitigate its effects becomes increasingly urgent, narrative is turned to more than ever before: novelists use fictional narratives to imagine the dysphoric worlds of a climate in catastrophic flux, social media activists instrumentalise narrative frames to evoke the emotions of outrage they view as necessary for collective action, and climate policy is predicated upon the assumption that narrative is essential for communicating complicated policies in a persuasive manner. What is less understood is how this emplotment of climate change is framed by the language of genre, where the symbolic modalities of tragedy and satire, dystopia and utopia, shape our understanding of the current crisis. This paper will argue that our habit of narrativising information through generic frames evokes a narrowed way to communicate ecological breakdown as well as imagine possible worlds that deviate from the plots depicted by the narrative arcs of certain genres. By proposing a transdisciplinary econarratological approach to the study of narrative and climate, I explore how frames such as "apocalyptic doom" and blinkered "techno-optimism" are mobilised across fictional and factual forms of narrative, from ‘cli-fi’ literature to news journalism, IPCC reports, and social media posts. Ultimately, this paper proposes the need for climate change communicators to navigate between the polarities of generic extremes. It is only by rejecting the fatalist rhetoric of the tragedy frame and the idealistic recourse to what author Jenny Offill calls the "obligatory note of hope" that we might find a more effective way to frame the current crisis we collectively face.
Xanthe Muston is a second-year PhD student in the School of the Arts and Media at Â鶹Éçmadou, whose research explores a transdisciplinary approach to narrative and the climate crisis across genres and media.
Event details
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Date
Wednesday 7 May
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Time
3:00pm to 4:30pm
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Place
Robert Webster 327
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Enquiries
For more information, contact Sean Pryor.