Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
A commonality among so many of Conrad’s narrators is their reluctance to reveal important information regarding the stories they tell. These narrators delay, obscure, or withhold, sometimes partly and sometimes entirely, crucial components to the tales they tell. This essay investigates why these narrators behave as they do. In some instances (as i...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
With the increasing proliferation of the internet, audience-authored online paratexts continue to gain significance in culture and in the communicative structures of narrative texts. This article takes a critical look at the ways in which Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext (1987) has been used in contemporary scholarship. The article offers a mod...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
This work begins with an exploration of various analytical techniques for discerning and describing details of vocal performance in the song “Episodes,” from Philadelphia Hip Hop group The Roots’ 1996 album, Illadelph Halflife. I pair this musical analysis with textual exegesis drawing on narratology and speech act theory. Reconciling the two analy...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Narrative experiencers frequently report broadly differing narrative responses. Literary scholarship customarily addresses those shared by communities of readers as pertaining to implied and rhetorical readers. However, empirical reader-response research shows that flesh-and-blood readers and audience members often show idiosyncratic narrative resp...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
This study describes the narratives of innovation produced in a knowledge-based company, constructs them into core stories and develops a narrative framework suitable for researching the topic. The research data consisted of thematic interviews with 23 professionals from the Finnish technology company. Innovation stories were convoluted, identifyin...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
The essay demonstrates the relationship between specific figures of discourse dominant in particular novels and the thematic concerns or plot patterns of each individual novel. The figures discussed are (1) enthymeme, prominent in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and important also in Joyce’s Ulysses; (2) hypallage, part of the rhetoric of Dickens...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
This article presents a paradoxical narrative device that is controversially discussed in narratology. Since the introduction of metalepsis into narratology by Gérard Genette in the “Discours du récit” (1972) – “Tous ces jeux manifestent […] l’importance de la limite qu’ils s’ingénient à franchir au mépris de la vraisemblance, et qui est précisémen...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Nabokov and Sebald confronted the dark sides of their national histories and tried to exempt themselves from them. Nabokov liberated himself from its burden by escaping into levitation, whereas Sebald’s willing exposure to its consequences ended in paralysis. Nabokov appears in his Emigrants as the equivocal figure of the ‘butterfly man’ who is sim...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Mike Baynham is Emeritus Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). He was a Visiting Professor at York St John University (2020–2023) and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney (2019–2022). His recent publications i...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
The article explores the exhaustion of narrative as a cognitive instrument in trying to make sense of the “disconnective futures” of the Anthropocene and runaway technological imaginaries. Having its point of departure in the organic ties between narrative form and modern historical understanding, the article’s argument begins by sketching how the ...
