Thoughts on the Recent Past and the Future of Byzantine Literary Studies

This brief postscript evaluates the place of Byzantine literature in the academy, and evaluates its current strengths. It looks back at a period when professors of Byzantine literature disparaged their subject matter, and it contrasts that era (c. 1970) with the position fifty years later, as large numbers of young scholars enter the field and are employed to do so, and to whom major research grants are awarded. The chapter locates itself in relation to other position papers written by the author in 1990, 2003, and 2010, and surveys the past twenty years in terms of conferences, publications, and other infrastructure, emphasizing the growth of texts, translations, and studies, and work on processes of literary production. It notes the confident place of rhetoric as the foundation of literary achievement in every genre and the arrival at a more nuanced periodization. Research has been informed by affective and cognitive neuroscience as well as by new philology, new historicism, post-classical narratology, and comparative approaches; it applauds the way that texts in Syriac, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and Latin are regarded as having a claim to be considered as Byzantine. It proposes a history of Byzantine literature.

Hacia un concepto de narratividad: cruces (posibles) entre su dimensión literaria, antropológica y cognitiva

This article suggests a conceptual reflection on narrativity and its role in different cultural spheres. Therefore, a dialogue between three traditions is proposed: literary, anthropological and cognitive, to bring some elements of the cognitive paradigm closer to the tradition of literary studies, literary theory and some authors that could be identified with philosophical anthropology. This approach pretends to critically examine some contemporary debates on narratives, post-classical narratology and bring these debates in the context of Latin American literary studies.

On Unnatural Narrative in Post-9/11 Fiction Flight

In the wake of innumerable and insightful studies on the unnatural narratology at home and abroad, it develops into a post-classical narratology that is comparable to female narratology, rhetoric narratology, and cognitive narratology. Taking the native American writer Sherman Alexie’s Flight as its central concern, the essay attends to explore the unnaturalness of the novel and further elaborates on its thematic meaning. In Alexie’s Flight, as a post-9/11 fiction, its unnaturalness can be explored by such elements as unnatural storyworlds, unnatural minds and unnatural acts of narration. The intentional violation of conventional narration further highlights the hero’s crisis and reconstruction of his identity in the post-9/11 world changed with the miserable memory in his childhood, his sublimation from terrorism to pacifism during his time travel and the regain of love in his final foster family, which consequently contributes to the final change of his appellation from “Zits” to “Michael”.

Narratology

Narratology studies what all and only possible narratives have in common as well as what allows them to differ from one another qua narratives, and it attempts to characterize the narratively pertinent set of rules and norms governing narrative production and processing. This structuralist-inspired endeavor began to assume the characteristics of a discipline in 1966 with the publication of the eighth issue of Communications, which was devoted to the structural analysis of narrative and included contributions by the French or francophone founders of narratology. In its first decades, or what has come to be viewed as its classical period, narratology dedicated much of its attention to characterizing the constituents of the narrated (the “what” that is represented), those of the narrating (the way in which the “what” is represented), and the principles regulating their modes of combination. Though classical narratology had ambitions to be an autonomous branch of poetics rather than a foundation for critical commentary and a handmaid to interpretation, the narrative features that it described made up a toolkit for the study of particular texts and fostered a considerable body of narratological criticism. Besides, by encouraging the exploration of the theme of narrative as well as the frame that narrative constitutes, it contributed to the so-called narrative turn, which is the reliance on the notion “narrative” to discuss not only representations but any number of activities, practices, and domains. In part because of the influence of narratological criticism and that of other disciplines; in part because of its biases and insufficiencies; and in part because of its very concerns, goals, and achievements, classical narratology went through important changes and evolved into postclassical narratology. The latter, which rethinks, refines, expands, and diversifies its predecessor, comes in many varieties, including feminist narratology, which exposes the way sex, gender, and sexuality affect the shape of narrative; cognitive narratology, which examines those aspects of mind pertaining to narrative production and processing; natural narratology, in which experientiality, the evocation of experience, is the determining element of narrativity; and unnatural narratology, which concentrates on nonmimetic or anti-mimetic narratives and tests the precision or applicability of narratological categories, distinctions, and arguments. Other topics—for example the links between geography and narrative or the narratological differences between fictional and nonfictional narrative representations—have lately evoked a good deal of interest. Ultimately, whatever the specific narratological variety or approach involved, narratologists continue to try and develop an explicit, complete, and empirically or experimentally grounded model of their singularly human object.

Wymiary transfikcjonalności

The article Facets of Transfictionality delivers a concise analysis of the newly-introduced narratological concept of “transfictionality” (put forward by Richard Saint-Gelais in the early 2000s). The author discusses the phenomenon as emerging on the border between the text-centred poetics of classical narratology and the world-centred poetics of postclassical narratology by use of Jan-Noël Thon’s and Marie-Laure Ryan’s project of “media-conscious narratology”. Defined as such, transfictionality allows the contemporary phenomena of retelling or cross-over to be described without the necessity of reproducing fan-made concepts and terms of such ilk, and instead rooting them in established theoretical constructs, such as narrative metalepsis. Consequently, the article illustrates the postclassical theory of narrative and the theory of literature with examples more common to media studies, with the aim being to emphasise Ryan’s thesis that transmediality is only a specific case of transfictionality, and that the latter is a far older and better acknowledged concept what is generally understood as the theory of fiction. Moreover, the text follows up on Saint-Gelais’ inspirations derived from Umberto Eco’s cultural semiotics and proposes to introduce an Eco-inspired concept of “xeno-encyclopaedic competence” in order to determine a specific recipient’s competence that allows them to move across not only media or texts but also imaginary worlds, which consequently become their fictional habitats.

“The new geography,” material science, and narratology’s space-time dichotomy: Notes toward a geographical narratology

This essay places narratology’s emphasis on space-time within the emergence of the discipline of geography and the rise of a materialist, hard science orientation in US institutions after WWII, ultimately arguing that a nascent geographical narratology should aspire to the broad intellectual scope of geography’s origins. “The new geography,” which emerged in 1887 and focused comprehensively on the relation of humans to the earth’s surface, subsequently contracted and fragmented with the post-war emphasis on material science. Likewise expanding in the rationalist post-war climate, classical narratology emphasized logical categories, especially the space-time dichotomy, divorced from human meanings. Today, cognitive research suggests that narratology’s enduring space-time paradigm occludes the constructive realities of both human relations to physical locations and reader processes. Drawing on discussions of space in narrative theory and in current cognitive research on navigation, Easterlin demonstrates that readers and viewers, rather than building spatialized storyworlds, construe space in a functional, piecemeal manner. Finally, maintaining that the area of place studies and an ecological approach to reading are two components of a broadly interdisciplinary geographical narratology providing a nuanced, psychologically contextualized approach to human-environment relations and narrative, Easterlin demonstrates their utility in readings of stories by Raymond Carver and Lydia Davis.

Affective Tales of the Body: Narrative and Narrativity in Biological Art

The paper aims to introduce biological art projects into the fi eld of narration studies, with a focus on two examples: physiological architecture projects (including Jean-Gilles Decosterd’s and Philippe Rahm’s ‘Hormonorium’ and ‘Split time café’), which go beyond classical representation and concentrate on the hormonal dimensions or the movement of retina, trying to explore the affective aspects of the body, and the artistic experiments of Turkish artist Pinar Yoldas (‘Fabula: Origins of Species’, ‘Speculative Biologies’, ‘After Evolution’ and ‘Remembering The Future’) – sculptures, photos and instalations based on organic materials. The article combines the theory of affect, cognitive narratology, the concepts of storyworld and possible worlds, and redefi nes the terms of post-classical narratology in order to determine whether it is possible to construct a narrative beyond language, an embodied one.