Unnatural Temporalities and Projected Places in Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2

Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2 (1967) belongs to his first period of play writing. In this phase, his works exhibit experimental, remote, impossible narrative/fictional worlds that are overwhelmingly abstract, exhibiting “abrupt shifts of focus and tone” (Wetzsteon 1984, 4). Shepard’s unusual theatrical literary cartography is commensurate with his depiction of unnatural temporalities, in that, although the stage is bare, with almost no props, the postmodernist/metatheatrical conflated timelines and projected (impossible) places in the characters’ imagination mutually reflect and inflect each other. Employing Jan Alber’s reading strategies in his theorization of unnatural narratology and Barbara Piatti’s concept of projected places, this essay proposes a synthetic approach so as to naturalize the unnatural narratives and storyworlds in Shepard’s play.

Divergent theoretical trajectories in Game Studies: a bibliographical review

Video games have become important objects of study for different academic disciplines. From the birth of the medium in the mid-twentieth century to the present, video games have offered new and creative ways of approaching reality and fiction, and not only serve as entertainment, but also have significant cultural, social, and technological implications. The formal study of this medium is the purview of the field of game studies, which brings together the contributions of various disciplines. This paper presents a bibliographical review of several theoretical trajectories in game studies, reflecting on the relevance of early debates on narratology and ludology, and examining the ways these initial divisions of the field have branched beyond that debate. Over the past several years, the narratological line of critique has established links with other theories such as cognitivism, the theory of fictional worlds and the contributions of unnatural narratology to the analysis of new technologies; ludology, for its part, has grown through its adaptations to postcolonial and decolonial theories in cultural studies, as well as through its connections to critical race and gender studies. We conclude that as game studies has evolved as a discipline, its initial theoretical debates have undergone profound transformations that have brought depth to the analysis of games’ meaning and diversified to the tools and techniques we have for analysing games as digital and cultural artefacts.

Existing Within and Beyond Time: «Capri—an Island of Refugees» by Krystian Lupa

The proposed article ponders upon Krystian Lupa’s Capri—an island of refugees (2019), an original production staged at the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw that brings together two of Curzio Malaparte’s prose books: Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949). By focusing on the parts of the production that adapt Kaputt, the article scrutinizes scenes produced by the live performance and the virtual projections in order to describe and explain how theatrical expression is enriched by such a juxtaposition. This analysis uses the theoretical frameworks of unnatural narratology (Jan Alber et al.), postdramatic durational aesthetics (Hans-Thies Lehmann), and the idea of the virtual double (Matthew Causey). The primary argument relies on the specific temporality emerging from the Lupa’s performance that enables spectators to feel existence within and beyond time. Furthermore, the study investigates the overarching idea of the performance, recognized by the strategy of foregrounding the thematic that oscillates within the problematics of human cruelty.

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”.

The critique of the common theory of narrative fiction in narratology: Pursuing difference

This article aims to characterize a commonly misunderstood and neglected critique of narratology and insists that the critique could advance the narratological discussions if taken more seriously. I describe the notions of three individual critics and one group of critics and their suggested alternatives to what they hold to be the dominating description of narrative fiction in narratology. In turn, I take up Sylvie Patron’s linguistic approach, Lars-Åke Skalin’s aesthetic approach, and Richard Walsh’s pragmatic approach, as well as unnatural narratology (which is less radical), and suggest that they have a Difference approach to narrative fiction. The critique is contrasted with what I refer to as a Sameness approach, guiding the dominating description of narrative fiction in narratology. The Sameness approach relates novels and short stories to a notion of a default mode of “narrative” which is based on situated speech about something that has happened. This is, according to the critics, a mistake. The main thrust of the critics, although with some exceptions, is instead that narrative fiction needs to be approached as sui generis in order to be described effectively. Yet how this should be done is still open for debate.

Beyond sameness and difference: Narrative sense-making in life and literature

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 “similarity approach” and the “difference approach”, both of which tend to rely on ahistorical, universalizing and empiricist-positivistic assumptions concerning factuality, raw experience and the non-referentiality of narrative fiction. The article presents as an alternative to both approaches narrative hermeneutics, which sees all narratives as culturally mediated and historically changing interpretative practices but approaches literary narratives as specific modes of making sense of the world – as ones that have truth-value on a different level than non-literary narratives. Narrative hermeneutics shares with (at least some forms of) unnatural narratology and the Örebro School a passion for the uniqueness of literary narratives, but it places the emphasis on the ability of literature to disclose the world to us in existentially charged ways that would not be otherwise culturally available – in ways that open up new possibilities of thought, action and affect.