2026-01-29
jnteditor
1. Tell us a bit about the essay you wrote for JNT. My contribution, “Impossible Identities: An Exploration of Character and Storyworld in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown,” looks at the ways that Yu’s novel uses unnatural narrative techniques to connect our understanding of narrative with our understanding of lived experience. The novel, which mostly reads as if it were a screenplay or script, details the experience of Willis Wu, his family, and fellow Asian immigrants who work as extras for a Law and Order-style television show titled Black and White. In this fictional context, the characters are not recognized as individuals: they are always only seen as the roles they play, even when they are ostensibly not in character. This process creates impossible identities because there is no space permitted where individuality and intelligibility might coexist. What is particularly noteworthy here is that Yu’s formal experimentation with characterization and storyworlds reflects actual experience: because scripts and roles determine what makes one culturally intelligible, marginalized individuals find themselves trapped in the characterizations and contexts that define them, showing that an attention to form and character can provide crucial insights into our larger understanding of individuals as well. I argue that, by experimenting with types of characterization and narrative levels that are impossible on a mimetic level while also prompting a mimetic reading that sees these characters as individuals with real experiences in the storyworld, Yu aids readers in understanding the extent of damage caused by stereotypes and the biases behind cultural intelligibility. 2. What inspired you to research this topic? I have been working for some time now with texts that challenge the limits of narrative and the ways those limits might provide particularly poignant reflections on human experience. The methods by which narratives play with and push the limits of form have long interested me because of the capacity of form itself to provide insights into our experiences, especially those that are not deemed “normal.” My interest in a new understanding of mimesis does not pit the unnatural and mimesis against each other but instead tries to expand the concept of mimesis to account for experimentations in form. This led me to an interest in what I call the “poetics of association.” At the same time, after reading and teaching Yu’s Interior Chinatown, I was struck by the powerful blurring of the lines between fiction and reality in a way that parallels actual experience and the similarly blurry lines therein. The novel illustrates what I’ve been trying to talk about in ingenious ways. 3. What was the most exciting thing about this project for you? And has your research on this topic changed the way you see the world today? Yu’s novel is deceptively complex and trying to articulate how it works posed a particularly instructive challenge. I feel that trying to work through how the novel reflects on the experiences of marginalized individuals and communities and how Yu plays skillfully with narrative components that shouldn’t work but do reveals not just the limits of narrative but also its possibilities. His ability to create impossible and stereotyped characters who simultaneously prompt mimetic engagement on a deep level challenges my thinking in new ways and I appreciate the novel greatly for it. Researching unnatural narratives continually reminds me of the power of narrative simultaneously to challenge assumptions and to create connections and understandings. 4. What’s next for you? My next project builds on my research and understanding of experimental narrative, but it does so specifically in the context of unconventionally literalized representations of the self as multiple (especially in works that use the second person voice and/or other formal devices to complicate the telling as well as the told). In this context, and in keeping with my earlier work, I am engaged in exploring how form helps us to understand experience and identity more deeply—that is, how techniques like multiple selves and the formal experiments that sometimes accompany their representation provide both new understandings of narrative conventions and open up new and associated understandings of being. The post 55.3 Featured Author: Annjeanette Wiese appeared first on JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory .
2026-01-29
jnteditor
1. Tell us a bit about the essay you wrote for JNT: My essay addresses the multilinear structure of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life¸ exploring the novel in conjunction with Brian Richardson’s work on the phenomenon that he terms denarration and Robyn Warhol’s extension of Gerald Prince’s category of disnarration to the narrative techniques that she associates with what she calls the unnarratable. The essay argues that Richardson’s formal analysis of Life after Life an unnatural narrative can be complemented by a contextualist feminist narratology, and I explore how the antimimetic aspects of Life After Life ’s complicated unnatural temporality offer a commentary on the mimetic, real-world dilemmas that women face–both at the time the novel is set in the early-mid twentieth century and at the moment of its publication in 2013—regarding sexual assault and reproductive rights. The essay thus builds on Richardson’s claim that a multilinear narrative is both antimimetic and mimetic, and it makes a case for the importance of contextual feminist narrative theory in the twenty-first century. 2. What inspired you to research this topic? From the moment I first read Life After Life and recognized it as a novel that taps into my interests in unnatural narratives and feminist narratives, I knew I wanted to write about it. I was fascinated by the repetitions of the “Snow” chapters and the forking paths of main character Ursula Todd’s many lives after her multiple deaths. I was also fascinated by Brian Richardson’s work denarration, but I had the sense that Atkinson’s novel didn’t quite conform to the models of denarration that Richardson was writing about in his poetics of unnatural narratives, even though it definitely had structural features in common with denarrated novels. So it became an intellectual puzzle to see how the novel mapped onto the technique of denarration but also departed from some of Richardson’s conclusions. I was also familiar with Robyn Warhol’s essay on neo-narrative techniques, and I was interested in seeing how her work on disnarration and unnarration could be productively combined with theories of denarration to illuminate Atkinson’s complex plot. Ultimately, I wanted to see if I could build a feminist account of the multilinear technique that was more narratological than other critics’ accounts of the novel’s feminist tropes and that explored the ways that feminist and unnatural narratologies complement one another. 3. What was the most exciting thing about this project for you? Any scholar who writes about this novel of course has had to address the forking path structure. But as I mapped out the plot structure in minute detail, it was exciting to see that Atkinson’s work is more complicated than various accounts of it have recognized, and that it exceeded as well general accounts of forking path narratives such as the one articulated in David Bordwell’s essay “Film Futures.” Making the realization that the novel seemed to use the technique of denarration to denarrate its own initial ameliorative pattern in Ursula’s lives was a key discovery. I saw the novel’s overall structure in a new way at that point. It was also exciting for me to think about Life ’s experimental structure in relation to the seemingly much less experimental companion novel, as Atkinson calls it, A God in Ruins . I was writing about God for a different publication, and working on the two pieces in tandem helped me refine my thinking about the implications of each one’s experimentation. 4. What’s next for you? Working on Atkinson’s fiction– both for this special issue of JNT and for a book project recently published in Ohio State University Press’s Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series– has sparked an interest in further research into narratives that present multiple incompatible events, that employ surprise endings, involve delayed disclosure, or in some other fashion complicate events presented as given. I’m interested in exploring how these techniques overlap with or differ from one another in twenty-first century fiction. The post 55.3 Feature Author: Katherine Weese appeared first on JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory .
2025-06-02
jnteditor
1.Tell us a bit about the essay you wrote for JNT. Under-narration is a narrative mode that has not been studied very much so far. It can be roughly defined as ‘hinting at a story without fully telling it’. It struck me that undernarration has its counterpart in conspiracy theorizing. If undernarration is not telling the whole story, conspiracy theorizing is assuming you’re not being told the whole story. My essay is about the relationship between these two sides of the same narrative mode. I explore this in a discussion of three texts: Thet Oera Linda Bok, a fake ancient manuscript in a fake language – supposedly Old Frisian – that ‘proofs’ that the Frisians, a minority from the Northern Netherlands, are the oldest civilization in the world; The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a cult classic from 1970s American counterculture written from the perspective that all conspiracy theories are true; and 2023: A Trilogy, a novel published in 2017 written from the perspective that everything you read on the internet is true. 2. What inspired you to research this topic? Conspiracy theories are becoming more and more disruptive and there is a need for more resilience towards them. People need to be able to resist the ‘mind candy’ offered by conspiracy theories: the gratifying feeling that ‘it all makes sense!’ I started my research with the hypothesis that artworks that experiment with undernarration are good training grounds for such resilience, or narrative literacy as I call it. 3. What was the most exciting thing about this project for you? The topic of the special issue that this paper is part of, narrative literacy, is extremely important. Because of the central role of narrative in human cognition, we constantly make sense of the world around us by use of stories. We need to be aware, however, that the stories we make out of reality are not reality itself – especially in our current times, facing the wicked problems we do, the shortcuts offered by narrative understanding are tempting, but not always for the best. Narrative literacy is an extremely important skill to develop in this context. 5. Has your research on this topic changed the way you see the world today? Absolutely. A lot of attention has gone to the need for citizens to become better at fact checking when facing fake news and conspiracy theories. That is very important, but without narrative literacy – the capacity to recognise when we are being manipulated by use of storytelling – we wouldn’t even know that there are facts that need checking. 6. What’s next for you? I’m starting a research project in which educational tools for narrative literacy are to be developed, which builds on my findings presented in this and other recent publications. The post 55.1 Featured Author: Dr. Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar appeared first on JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory .
2025-01-22
jnteditor
As a young reader, I tore through every book about Nancy Drew or Judy Bolton or Beverly Gray that I could lay my hands on. My access to these books was spotty since the library refused to carry them. I occasionally got one as a present and I borrowed and swapped on the playground. Then, the summer I was eight years old, our downstairs neighbour presented me with two massive cardboard cartons: her three daughters’ outgrown collections of series books. I spent the rest of the summer fighting with my mother about why I was not outside in the fresh air, when all I wanted to do was read and read until I had consumed every single one of those treasures – and then read them all again. I took a book outside and read in the fresh air; but I fell asleep in the sun and wound up in a darkened room with heatstroke and a ban on any kind of reading whatsoever, so that strategy was a failure. Nancy or Judy or Beverly would have made a much better job of sneaking around the apartment than I did, but my battle to read all the stories I now owned simply confirmed my devotion to these books. From time to time as an adult, I have occasionally returned to one series or another and been duly horrified by the casual and focused racism, the snobby class prejudices, and the stupefying plots that they incorporate. And yet, I know that the unexpected gift of so many of these series books at once represents a substantial turning point in my own history as a reader. What had I learned from these banal and stereotyped adventures? The JNT call for papers gave me a chance to explore this question. I chose to look at the Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene and the Judy Bolton books by Margaret Sutton because my memory represents them to me as very different kinds of heroine. As a young reader, I liked Judy Bolton much better, but it was undoubtedly easier to read the Nancy Drew books out of sequence because her backstory is repetitive rather than developmental. Nancy is static, but Judy grows up. When I looked more closely, I found that Judy is also a much more substantially embodied character. We read as spectators of Nancy’s derring-do, but, even presented through a collection of clichés, Judy is a character who lives with the limitations of the physical world. For example, Nancy’s blue roadster is an accessory that makes life very convenient for her. Judy, on the other hand, must organize transportation with somebody else, or else she must walk to wherever she needs to go – a handicap for a young sleuth that I certainly recognized and resonated to. In many other ways, Judy is much more familiar with the friction of managing her fictional body in the world than Nancy ever needs to learn. As a child, I did not articulate the distinctions between Judy’s grounded endeavours and Nancy’s effortless performances in any specific way; I just knew which one I liked better. It was fascinating to return to the stories and find a textual explanation for my preferences very clearly laid out in the books. And I was intrigued to explore the light shed on how we learn to process book-length narratives. Nancy Drew is, of course, represented online in a vast variety of forms and formats, but the Internet resources for Judy Bolton are far more selective. I was impressed to learn that the Judy Bolton website (http://www.judybolton.com) is the dedicated work of Christine Kilger, who created this attractive site in 1995 and keeps it up to date with news of activities related to the work of Margaret Sutton. What a tribute to the power of these series books! Margaret Meek famously told us that “texts teach what readers learn” (1988). Looking closely at texts through the filter of exploring what readers may learn from them about reading itself is an infinitely interesting topic to me. I would not argue that the Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton books are works of great literature, though they are undoubtedly beloved by many. Yet young readers glean permanent lessons about the joys and the skills of reading from these and other such materials, and it would be a short-sighted shame to write them off as of little value. Learning to master the long arc of a complete novel with the aid of stereotyped series books is just one part of the even longer arc of different people’s lifelong and individual reading journeys. Exploring the communal nature and infinite personal distinctions of such journeys is also a lifelong project, and one that continues to engage me. (Meek, Margaret. (1988) How Texts Teach What Readers Learn. Stroud, UK: Thimble Press.) The post JNT 54.3 Featured Author: Margaret Mackey appeared first on JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory .
2025-01-22
jnteditor
My JNT essay titled ‘Opening a Window or Pulling Back the Curtain’ is based on a section of my PhD thesis which I completed at the University of Nottingham in 2023. My doctoral research explored a variety of interactive postmodern and metafictive strategies in popular middle grade fiction, using stylistic analysis to highlight the linguistic, narrative and structural complexities of children’s literature. In particular, I concentrated on the ways in which pseudo-oral, over-obtrusive, visibly inventing narrators seem to speak directly to the audience outside the text and, in doing so, dramatize child-readers as active participants in the storytelling process. One chapter of my thesis focused on metalepsis specifically, and this served as the foundation for my JNT essay. In the original version I delineated between rhetorical and ontological metalepsis only, the former being the equivalent of brief narratorial asides while the latter completely conflates logical narrative boundaries to create a blended space between storyworlds. Using three case study middle grade authors – UK Children’s Laureate, Cressida Cowell; musician-turned-bestselling-author, Tom Fletcher; and the weird, wonderful and blatantly fictional, Pseudonymous Bosch – I demonstrated that metaleptic transgressions are not always as binary as one might imagine, and subsequently proposed a sliding scale to show how different types of metalepsis can be linked together or happen concurrently within a text. When I then came to write my JNT essay, I discovered Serafini and Reid’s work on blended transgressions in children’s picturebooks which aligned brilliantly with the ‘in-between-ness’ I’d discussed in my PhD thesis. As such, I was able to develop my metaleptic spectrum to include Serafini and Reid’s blended categories such as ‘Minimal Acknowledgement’, ‘Acknowledgement Throughout the Story’ and ‘Co-Constructing Storyworlds’ to illustrate different levels of readerly engagement and interaction through a range of narrative transgressions. Although metalepsis can be complicated and often requires sophisticated reading strategies to navigate successfully, a core theme in my JNT essay is that child-readers are more than capable of handling it. In fact, its popularity as a narrative technique in contemporary children’s fiction suggests that children don’t just understand metalepsis and other complex postmodern devices – they really enjoy them too! Since the 1990s (if not before), we have seen postmodernism and metafiction become normalized in mainstream children’s literature, yet this can sometimes be overlooked by well-meaning but misguided adults who think books for children must automatically be simple to suit the target readership. Anecdotally, I’ve lost count of how many colleagues have been surprised when I say that my research examines the kinds of techniques commonly associated with ‘highbrow’ postmodern authors like John Fowles, Luigi Pirandello, Flann O’Brien and so on, just in books for 8 to 12-year-olds instead. They’re then even more shocked when I tell them how prevalent those techniques are in contemporary children’s literature across the board! While children’s literature scholarship has come on in leaps and bounds in this regard, I think it’s important that we continue to champion the academic and artistic value of reading material for younger audiences. That’s one of the reasons I’m so thrilled that this special issue has been put together and I feel incredibly privileged to be sharing my research with JNT readers alongside the other scholars featured in this collection. I concur entirely with Haifeng Hui’s comments in the introduction to this special issue in which he states that children’s literature is overdue sustained narrative analysis; the same can be said for my other research field of stylistics in which analysis of children’s literature has, until recently, remained rare. I hope, as Dr Hui addresses in his introduction, that special issues like this will spark a scholarly dialogue between different fields of research and therein enable us to continue illustrating the diversity, value and fun of studying children’s literature. In my own life, this is an ethos I always try to promote, and I imagine it will feature heavily in a monograph titled Language, Style and Storytelling in Postmodern Children’s Literature which I am currently preparing for Routledge. After all, children’s literature is as dynamic, playful and engaging as it is stylistically and structurally sophisticated, and I encourage everyone to rediscover (and embrace!) its magic. The post JNT 54.3 Featured Author: Ella Wydrzynska appeared first on JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory .