Figures of Complexity in Contemporary Fiction

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English at Ghent University, Belgium. His work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media (particularly video games). He is the author of ten books, including With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition (co-authored with Karin Kukkonen, 2021), Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (2022), and Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (2022; winner of the Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative).

This is a much-needed book that combines the literary, narrative and experiential aspects of complexity with those of urgent current social issues, including climate change, migration, and the effects of colonial history. Through carefully chosen examples and eloquent analysis, Marco Caracciolo traces the formal as well as affective aspects of complexity that literary and real-world situations share, making the former a paradigm for the latter, and giving strong attestation to the importance of narrative complexity as an analytical tool for understanding art and life alike.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Figuring the Spectrum of Complexity1. Tangle: Paranarratives of Climate Anxiety2. Atmosphere: Scales of Mobility3. Paperwork: Boredom and Climate Change4. Network: How the Internet Enters Narrative Space5. Infrastructure: The Threat of Complexity6. Knot: Science Not Made for TED Talks7. Puzzle: Detecting Colonial History8. Bog: Materializing Patriarchal Violence9. Loop: Uncomfortable ImplicationCoda: Mazes and LayersNotesBibliographyIndex