Framed Slowness and the Ecological Value of Multiperspectivity

2015

This interdisciplinary thesis, an exercise in post-classical narratology that draws on “second-generation” cognitive science, phenomenology and semiotics, argues for mediation and dynamics as the basis of the experience of reading narrative fiction. Chapter One, “Narrative Mediation”, presents the case for seeing the primary form of narrative signification as being a triadic mediation (as opposed to a dyadic “communication”) involving not just the parties to the communication but also their joint attention on (and intentions towards) the object of their communication. The narratological implications of this triadic view (which draws on recent discussions in developmental and evolutionary psychology) are explored through readings of the Decameron and Don Quixote, and through a discussion of the semiotics of “character” in fiction. Chapter Two, “Narrative Contexture”, draws out the functionalist implications of this view of narrative language, arguing that the interaction of reader an...

This volume examines a range of novels and novellas published over the course of nearly forty years, from 1968 to 2014, including E.L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain, John Gardner’s “The King’s Indian,” Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, Peter Straub’s Mr. X, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Expensive People. These texts display one crucial unifying thread: they are doubly-mediated fictions, fictions in parentheses, so to speak. The application of narrative framing and embedding has been commonly acknowledged and abundantly researched in various works belonging to the Western literary heritage. However, its use in the twentieth and twenty-first century fiction has not been adequately explored, perhaps with the exception of the literary creations of such giants as Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth. Despite this critical oversight, narrative frames prove to be a major resource for modern-day novelists, who adapt this literary device and very effectively put it to their own uses. The essays collected in this volume will serve to spark the revival of interest in this time-honored narrative tool, demonstrating its validity for research into more recently created novels.

As creative practitioners we bring to our writing not just our storytelling skills and imagination, but a polyphony of identities that derive from our multiple places and experiences in the real world. Whatever we create arises from the collision of our creative, aesthetic impulses and our epistomological standpoints. Homi Bhabha's notion of the third space of enunciation, which results from the coming together of two different cultural traditions, has particular relevance in this context. As Ikas and Wagner (2009, 2) note, the negotiation of two cultures leads to a displacement of the old and the emergence of a new, hybrid identity. This theoretical concept was transposed into the creative arena to inform the understanding of the outcomes resulting from writing an issues-based young adult novel. The project’s aim was to create a fiction that re-storied meta-narratives around the relationship of those in Western, consumeristic culture to the earth. An ecocritical epistemological perspective thus fed in to the creative writing journey. The risk I faced as a white female located in an affluent, Western culture was that any emergent narrative would simply re-frame known meta-narratives around the dominant social paradigm, as defined by Koger and Winter (2010); a paradigm which sees the earth as a dead resource to be utilised. However, the process was guided by a narrative therapy methodology, which offers a specific structure not only for breaking apart the known through the post-structuralist process of deconstruction, but for then identifying alternative stories and finding among these the threads of new, previously unknown (or at least unrecognised) stories that can emerge. The writer’s discovery was that this methodology also provided a meeting ground where principles and issues could join with aesthetics in a constant process of negotiation. This process veered from conflictual to complementary at different times. The writer’s practice likewise veered from analytical to instinctual, from being guided by theory to being guided by the creative impulse. Allowing this merging of the known with the unknown resulted in an emergent narrative that achieved some of the project’s aims in unexpected, unlooked-for ways. Not only did the writer discover a hybrid practice where principles and storytelling could merge, but the resulting story brought forth tropes, characters and ideas that offered new choices for eco-critical storytelling. This presentation therefore investigates which key aspects of the writer's practice led to the creation of a third space from which an eco-critical narrative which challenges and moves forward from the dominant social paradigm.

Interlitteraria, 2013

Our contribution points to the strategic split operated by Ian McEwan's narrative and, comparatively, by Joe Wright's film Atonement. This split allows them to craft two diverging narrative discourses which overtly compete to dominate the interpretation of the fiction and especially its reading transactions. Eventually these narrative maneuvers of both the writer and the director overcome the teleological fate of the narratives and allow them to perform a meta-fictional and self-reflexive role.

The author posits that postmodern fictions can create environmental awareness, as they incorporate ecological issues in their narratives in a dialogic interaction with their textual strategies as well as disclose how the discursive constructions of nature shape and condition the human valuation and understanding of the environment. Postmodern fictions also transcend false dichotomies in a process of writing that self-consciously interrelates texts and contexts.

The film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) was notable for being one of the early Hollywood made, high budget general release films that addressed issues of climate change. Setting aside both its interesting twists – American citizens crossing into Mexico for security reasons, cynical and disbelieving national politicians eating humble pie, and mawkish family based sentiments that beset so many American movies – what interests me is the treatment of time in relation to narrative and plot. To affect a classic Hollywood pattern of quest, conflict, suspense and resolution within the narrative, the writers and director simply speeded the process of climate change so that America (and in fact the whole Northern Hemisphere) was subject to a new ice age in the period of six weeks!! Standard Hollywood motifs of (car) chases were created in a new forms. Killer temperature gradients literally chasing a protagonist and his comrades through the streets of New York, who just make their refuge in time, the killer weather sounding menacingly at the door just as they slam it shut. And two military helicopters being over taken and frozen out the sky by another high speed killer weather front. This, and similar examples, tells us a lot about the challenges of representing ecological time within the temporalities of human narratives. Stories are the tissue – or essence - of life itself as A S Byatt says. They underpin constructions of the self, individual and collective identities, and cultural, social and political atmospheres more broadly. The narratives which dominate enlightenment culture are set at human pace and to human durations -so narratives of lives and generations of lives, and the twists and turns in the common time frames of human life, be they in hours, days, week, season, years, stages of life. There is little tradition or skill within these modern narratives of extreme human exceptionalism and a split nature-culture, of weaving many forms of natural temporality into our stories. Indeed it could be argued that modern narratives rest in part on stripping non-human temporalities out of our stories. Be they the differing processes speeds of non-human brains; the very other life cycles of other beings (from weeks to centuries): the ‘long’ rhythms within the biosphere such as ice ages, and sun spot cycles, we don’t know how (with some emerging exceptions) to tell stories with these other temporalities woven into the plot. This is one reason why, as the one of the greatest (most tragic) events ever unfolds (the unravelling of the current diversity of the biosphere by a self-other destructive single species), as the band Talking Heads put it, “as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention”. Presented at: Im/mortality and In/finitude in the Anthropocene Perspectives from the Environmental Humanities Conference; Environmental Humanities Laboratory. Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm; 2-4 December 2014.

2022

THIS DOCTORAL PROJECT ANALYSES multimodal representations of time in comics and other visual narratives. The research comprises a creative artefact and exegesis which explore the meaning-making potential of the accordion folded format with a focus on temporal paradox, metaphor and materiality. The creative artefact is designed as six accordion-folded comic booklets that aim to manipulate the reading experience through foregrounding and the construction of a multi-perspective narrative via narrative fold-ins;. The accompanying exegesis analyses apposite theoretical principles including multimodal viewpoint construction, cognitive linguistics, multistable perception, metalepses, metaphor and gestalt. These principles are discussed in relation to a range of published works which use the spatiotemporal structure and materiality of the book-as-object to encourage play, contribute to narrative, disrupt time and undermine assumptions about linear storytelling.

2024

My paper aims to explore how ludic strategies in multiperspective narratives can contribute to actualize their ethical potential. Rather than merely juxtaposing contradictory or complementary viewpoints side by side, such texts adopt experimental techniques to evoke a multilayered entanglement of perspectives. My focus is on how experimental multiperspective narratives can integrate ludic strategies and compositional constraints on a formal level, thus challenging the teleological, plot-driven linearity that characterizes many examples of multiperspectivity. As noted by Hanna Meretoja, “narratives that create awareness of different perspectives on the same phenomenon or situation are generally ethically more productive than ones that present only one perspective as worth considering.” However, multiperspective narratives cannot be considered as ethically charged forms per se. Otherwise, we risk neglecting Meir Sternberg’s “Proteus Principle,” which highlights the relative independence of formal choices and ideological meanings. As I aim to demonstrate here, some ludic strategies help express this ethical value by fostering two effects: first, they are likely to elicit a slow reading practice that directs readers’ attention toward the intricate entanglement of character perspectives; second, they formally mirror the dialectic between freedom and constraint that shapes human relationships.

2015

A critical analysis on the multi-stranded narrative's place in a postmodern world, with a particular focus on Game Of Thrones. Written for my A-Level Media coursework.

Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory, 2011

In 2011, Frederick Aldama published a critical anthology entitled Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory. This is the Afterword to that collection. About the book: Why are many readers drawn to stories that texture ethnic experiences and identities other than their own? How do authors such as Salman Rushdie and Maxine Hong Kingston, or filmmakers in Bollywood or Mexico City produce complex fiction that satisfies audiences worldwide? In Analyzing World Fiction, fifteen renowned luminaries use tools of narratology and insights from cognitive science and neurobiology to provide answers to these questions and more. With essays ranging from James Phelan's "Voice, Politics, and Judgments in Their Eyes Were Watching God" and Hilary Dannenberg's "Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media: Voice and Cultural Identity in Television" to Ellen McCracken's exploration of paratextual strategies in Chicana literature, this expansive collection turns the tide on approaches to postcolonial and multicultural phenomena that tend to compress author and narrator, text and real life. Striving to celebrate the art of fiction, the voices in this anthology explore the "ingredients" that make for powerful, universally intriguing, deeply human story-weaving. Systematically synthesizing the tools of narrative theory along with findings from the brain sciences to analyze multicultural and postcolonial film, literature, and television, the contributors pioneer new techniques for appreciating all facets of the wonder of storytelling. William Nericcio. “How This Book Reads You: Looking Beyond New Horizons in the Analysis of World Narrative Fiction,” in New Horizons in the Analysis of World Narrative Fiction, Frederick Aldama, editor (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 269-276.