Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
The paper proposes to read the British novelist Ian McEwan as an ethically disconcerted post-imperial writer. His early works “gave voice to an anxiety about social, cultural and moral decline after the end of Britain’s imperial power had become vividly apparent” (Groes). Both the writer’s and his characters’ fatherless post-war childhoods testify ...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Ever the devil’s advocate, Richard Walsh argues in a 2017 article that drawing maps based on narrative fiction is a meaningless activity, because (1) narrative cognition is temporal and not spatial; (2) narrative fiction does not project worlds in any experiential sense of the term (i. e. worlds as immersive environments) but only “worlds” as textu...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
This paper argues that the examination of representational (formal) and semantic (referential) features of fictional and factual narratives would be incomplete without discussing specific pragmatic (communicative, performative, heuristic, and cognitive) functions of fiction – how and why “fictions” are used in literature and arts, but also in scien...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
This paper is a critique of narratology’s generality thesis and especially focused on a corollary of that thesis, the “sameness premise”. It says that all objects designated by the noun “narrative”, whether actual, possible, or fictional, are defined by some basic intrinsic properties. This goes for ordinary informative telling of events as well as...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
In the summer of 2018, James Phelan co-organized the Summer Seminar on Narratology on behalf of Project Narrative at Ohio State University, in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the journal Frontiers of Narrative Studies. During this period, Shang Biwu, the editor of Frontiers of Narrative Studies, had a conversation with Phelan,...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
This article analyses two major problems in the dichotomous framing of the question of whether narratives in fiction and “real life” are the same or different. The dichotomy prevents us from seeing, first, that there are both crucial similarities and differences between them and, second, that there are important similarities between variants of the...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
The article discusses basic questions of narrative studies and definitions of narrative from a historical and conceptual perspective in order to map the terrain between different narratologies. The focus is placed on the question of how fiction interacts with other realms of our lives or, more specifically, how reading fiction both involves and aff...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
The article seeks to explore sameness and difference in narrative theory by way of shifting the emphasis from the narratives themselves to the research acts we perform on narratives. It proposes a model for analyzing research acts. Applying this model to various research acts in narrative theory it shows that what it implies to look for sameness an...
