Stāstījuma jēdziens un tā adepti latviešu literatūrzinātnē

Keywords: stāstījums, vēstījums, Broņislavs Tabūns, Harijs Hiršs, narratology, Latvian literary scholarship This article is dedicated to the concept of narrative, exploring the origins of the concept, its character, and use in Latvian literary history and nowadays. The concept of narrative has telltale signs of an epistemological crisis: the meaning of concepts (including narrative) is regularly questioned and expanded. Independent of whether we view a narrative, at the level of microanalysis, as a chain of events (actions) linked by causality, or at the level of macroanalysis, as an ideological concept or an ingredient of cognitive processes, narrative is linguistic in origins and still retains that function. The sources of narratology in Latvian literary scholarship are found in the publications on the theory of fiction by Harijs Hiršs and Broņislavs Tabūns as early as the 1980s. The views of both theoreticians tend to impact the use of the words “vēstījums” (message) and “stāstījums” (narrative) in Latvian: Tabūns used “vēstījums”, whereas Hiršs has used both “vēstījums” and “stāstījums”, originally as synonyms, and later introducing a hierarchical relationship between the two. The different approaches have lead to confusion among literary scholars—to this day, both concepts are sometimes used as synonyms in scholarly literature. The etymology of words and context of their use indicate that ‘stāstījums’ is a more precise translation of the concept of “narrative” than “vēstījums”, for it satisfies the requirements of both classical and postclassical narratology.

Notions of Atmosphere: Toward the Limits of Narrative Understanding

The change of methodological paradigms, introduced by postclassical narratology and especially its cognitivist orientation, has thus far not reflected on the phenomenon of atmosphere. This is somewhat surprising, if we consider that the contemporary conceptualization of atmosphere and the increased interest in the questions it brings forth arise from new phenomenology and phenomenological aesthetics, fields that have directly initiated the development of postclassical narratology. Starting with the phenomenological concept of atmosphere of M. Merleau-Ponty and H. Schmitz (atmosphere as an ecstasy of experience, a specific modus of presence with a quasi-objective and inter-subjective status fitting into the extra-linguistic framework, atmospheric perception as seizing the surfaceless space) and the aesthetic relevance of the concept (G. Böhme, T. Griffero, E. Fischer-Lichte), this article presents the terminological instability and semantic vagueness of atmosphere and related terms within the narratological discourse of M. Bal, G. Prince, M.L. Ryan and P. Abbott (atmosphere as receptive and narrative disposition, the accompanying factor of morphological categories, the thematic-psychological distinctive characteristic of genre). The primary objective of the paper is to reexamine the methodological legitimacy of the concept of atmosphere, both regarding the limits of narrative understanding and its interpretative potential which might become relevant within cognitive theories of intertextuality (E. Panagiotidy, M. Juvan), while also being a humanistic response to the challenges of new epistemological paradigms and a return to the transcendental essence of literature.

Jak czytać planszówki? Gry planszowe zorientowane na narrację a powieści hipertekstowe

How to Read Board Games: The Similarities between Narrative-Oriented Board Games and Hypertext Novels In Storytelling in the Modern Board Game: Narrative Trends from the Late 1960s to Today, Marco Arnaudo describes how board games can create narratives by using the tools that ludology and postclassical narratology provide. The way narratives emerge from tabletop games is extremely unique and interactive: they are created through the synergy of the game rules, material components, and actions undertaken by players. Board games, treated as transmedial narrative systems in which the text is entangled in various relations with images, sounds, or the ludic aspects of games, can become an area of research in literary studies. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that a scholar can effectively use knowledge of hypertext novels or ergodic literature to study narrative-oriented board games.

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.

Postclassicism

This chapter argues that in the postclassical cognitive turn and the latest developments in natural and unnatural narratology pioneered by Fludernik, Herman, Richardson, Alber, and others, we are witnessing an important re-interrogation of the basic terms and frames of narratology’s earliest discussions. Developing the poststructuralists’ concerns with context, postclassical narratology is keenly interested in the part that readers and real-world experiences have to play in the co-poetic functioning of narrative and its narrativity—reconsidering the psychological and emotional iteractions between stories and audiences, and returning to the ancient debate between Plato’s Socrates and Aristotle regarding the status of narrative as mimesis.

Unnatural London: the Metaphor and the Marvelous in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station

This paper explores allegorical and unnatural elements in China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station, starting with a parallel between the fictional city New Crobuzon and London. Fantasy literature examines human nature by means of myth and archetype and science fiction exploits the same aspects, although emphasizing technological possibilities. Horror is said to explore human nature plunging into our deepest fears. We encounter the three elements profusely in the narrative, making it a dense fictional exercise. In postclassical narratology, unnatural narratives are understood as mimetical exercises questioning verisimilitude in the level of the story and of discourse. When considered unnatural, narratives have a broader scope, sometimes even transcending this mimetical limitation. Fantastical and marvelous elements generally strike us as bizarre and question the standards that govern the real world around us. Although Fantasy worlds do also mirror the world we live in, they allow us the opportunity to confront the model when physically or logically impossible characters or scenes enhance the reader’s imagination. Elements of the fantastic and the marvelous relate to metaphor as a figure of speech and can help us explore characters’ archetypical functions, relating these allegorical symbols to the polis. In Miéville’s narrative, such characters will be paralleled to inhabitants of London in different temporal and spatial contexts, enhancing how the novel metaphorically represents the city as an elaborate narrative strategy.