ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.

Introduction

Narrative Today: Telling Stories in a Post-Truth World

Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales) and Maria Mäkelä (Tampere University)

Narrative and its Others

1. My Story, Your Narrative: Scholarly Terms and Popular Usage

Maria Mäkelä (Tampere University) & Samuli Björninen (Tampere University)

2. Non-Narrative Genres: Exposition, Lists, Lyric, etc

Monika Fludernik (University of Freiburg)

3. Narrative and Economic Modelling

Lindsay Holmgren (McGill University)

4. Data Narratives: Visualization and Interactivity in Representations of Covid-19

Madeleine Sorapure (UC Santa Barbara)

Narrative and the Public Sphere

5. What is ‘the Narrative’? Conspiracy Theories and Journalistic Emplotment in the Age of Social Media

Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales)

6. Rodney King, The Fugitive, and the Cogency of Cultural Narratives

Alan Nadel (University of Kentucky)

7. Personal Storytelling in Social Movements

Francesca Polleta (University of California Irvine)

Narrative and Social Media

8. Co-tellership in Social Media Storytelling

Ruth Page (University of Birmingham)

9. (Small) Stories as Features on Social Media: Toward Formatted Storytelling

Alex Georgakopoulou (King’s College London)

10. Quantified Storytelling: How the Tellable and the Countable Intermingle on Digital Platforms

Alex Georgakopoulou (King’s College London), Stefan Iversen (Aarhus University), and Carsten Stage (Aarhus University)

11. Networks, Interfaces, Digital Media Infrastructure, and Their Implications for Fictional World Theory

Dan Punday (Mississippi State University)

Narrative Truth

12. Legal Facts, Affective Truths and Changing Narratives in Trials Involving Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo

Greta Olson (Justus-Liebig-University Giessen)

13. My Mouth, Your Story: On Co-Witnessing

Irene Kacandes (Dartmouth College)

14. Playing Games with the Truth: Tabloid Stories, Urban Legends, Tall Tales and Bullshit

Marie-Laure Ryan (independent scholar)

 

Narrative and the Novel

15. The Undead Novel: A History of Realism or a History of Prose Fiction?

Paul Dawson (University of New South Wales)

16. This is Not a Novel: Some Varieties of Anti-Novel

Brian McHale (The Ohio State University)

17. Panexperientiality, Media, and Narrative’s Time Management Problem

David Ciccoricco (University of Otago)

18. Chinese Narratology: Tradition, Developments and Prospects

Biwu Shang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

Narrative and Selfhood

19. Life and Narrative

Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku)

20. Just the Facts? Nonfictionality and Life Writing

Julie Rak (University of Alberta)

21. Reading Celebrity Autofiction: Fictionality, Authorship and Reader Responses in Narrative Theory

Alison Gibbons (Sheffield Hallam University)

22. Toward a Rhetorical Narrative Medicine: Or, Corpus, Close Reading, and the Cases of Oates’s "Hospice/Honeymoon" and Ward’s "On Witness and Respair"

James Phelan (The Ohio State University)

 

Narrative and Social Change

23. It Gets Better vs. To This Day: Queerness, Causality, Narrativity

Jesse Matz (Kenyon College)

24. What Does it Mean to #BelieveWomen? Popular Feminism and Survivor Narratives

Tanya Serisier (Birbeck, University of London)

25. Narrating Eighteenth-Century Black Lives: Abolition and the Politics of Form

Susan Lanser (Brandeis University)

 

Narrative and Cognition

26. Human Cognition and Narrative Form

Richard Walsh (University of York)

27. Adaptationism, Postmodernism, and a Biocultural Narratology

H. Porter Abbott (University of California, Santa Babara)

28. The Experience of Narrative: Aesthetics and Embodiment

Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo)

 

Narrative and Complex Systems

29. Video Games as Complex Narratives and Embodied Metalepsis

Astrid Ensslin (University of Bergen)

30. Perspectives on Causality in Sciences and Arts: On the Limits and Benefits of Narrative Representation

Marina Grishakova (University of Tartu)

31. Concepts and Aspects of an Integrated Narrative Generation Approach Based on Post-Narratology

Takashi Ogata (Iwate Prefectural University)

32. Storytelling and Narrative Capital in Organizations: Bringing Boje and Bourdieu into Conversation

Klarissa Lueg (University of Southern Denmark)

 

Narrative and International Relations

33. Narrative in Politics and the Politics of Narrative

Monika Barthwal-Datta (University of New South Wales), Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews), and Laura Shepherd (University of Sydney)

34. The Narrative Turn in European Studies: A Synergic Approach

Luis Bouza Garcia (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Carmen Sancho Guinda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

35. Migration and Narrative Dynamics

Roy Sommer (University of Wuppertal)

36. Deconstructing the ‘Hollow Man’: Visual Narrative Analysis and World Politics

Katja Freistein (University of Duisburg-Essen) and Frank Gadinger (University of Duisburg-Essen)

 

Narrative and the Environment

37. Fables for Tomorrow: Narrating Net Zero

Genevieve Lively (University of Bristol)

38. Storying the Anthropocene: Narrative Challenges and Opportunities in Times of Climate Change

Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University)

39. Narrative’s Environments

Eric Morel (University of Delaware)