Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories

Zara Dinnen is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London, where she specializes in digital culture, new media arts, contemporary literature, and narrative theories. Her book, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2017) recovers the novel conditions of becoming-with-technology latent in seemingly boring everyday encounters with digital media. Robyn Warhol is Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where she is a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Her most recent books are Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (co-edited with Susan S. Lanser, Ohio State University Press, 2015) and Love among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (co-authored with Helena Michie, Edinburgh University Pres, 2015).

This Companion provides a cutting-edge and highly stimulating intervention in the rapidly changing field of interdisciplinary and intermedial narratives theories. It will be essential reading not only for specialists, but for all students and teachers interested in new trajectories of contemporary narrative theory and the cultural politics of narrative form.

• List of IllustrationsNotes on ContributorsIntroductionPart I. Mind-centred and Cognitive Approaches to NarrativeChapter 1. H. Porter Abbott, ‘What Does It Mean to Be Mad? Diagnosis, Narrative, Science, and the DSM’Chapter 2. Marco Caracciolo, ‘The Nonhuman in Mind: Narrative Challenges to Folk Psychology’Chapter 3. Suzanne Keen, ‘Narrative and the Embodied Reader’Chapter 4. Karin Kukkonen, ‘The Fully Extended Mind’Chapter 5. Merja Polvinen, ‘Sense-Making and Wonder: An Enactive Approach to Narrative Form in Speculative Fiction’Part II. Situated Narrative TheoriesChapter 6. Claudia Breger, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Controversy, and Collectivity: Zadie Smith’s Networked Narration’Chapter 7. Sue J. Km, ‘Race and Empathy in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica’Chapter 8. Susan S. Lanser, ‘Till Death Do Us Part: Embodying Narratology’Chapter 9. Sam McBean, ‘Digital Intimacies and Queer Narratives’Chapter 10. Valerie Rohy, ‘The Cinema of the Impossible: Queer Theory and Narrative’Part III. Theories of Digital NarrativeChapter 11. Zara Dinnen, ‘Cinema and the Unnarratability of Computation’Chapter 12. Rob Gallagher, ‘Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability’Chapter 13. Ellen McCracken, ‘Serial as Digital Constellation: Fluid Textuality and Semiotic Otherness in the Podcast Narrative’Chapter 14. Daniel Punday, ‘UI Time and the Digital Event’Part IV. Theories of Television, Film, Comics, and Graphic NarrativeChapter 15. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, ‘Continued Comics: The 'New Blake and Mortimer’ as an Example of Continuation in European Series’Chapter 16. Jason Mittell, ‘Operational Seriality and the Operation of Seriality’Chapter 17. Katalin Orbán, ‘Closer Than They Seem: Graphic Narrative and the Senses’Chapter 18. Sean O’Sullivan, ‘Episode Five, or When Does a Narrative Become What It Is?’Chapter 19. Christian Quendler, ‘Media Theory as Narrative Theory: Film Narration as a Case Study’Part V. Anti-Mimetic Narrative TheoriesChapter 20. Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin, ‘Digital Fiction and Unnatural Narrative’Chapter 21. Stefan Kjerkegaard, ‘Lyric Poetry as Anti-Mimetic Bridging in Narratives and Motion Pictures: A Case Study of Affective Response to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014)’Chapter 22. Brian McHale, ‘Speculative Fiction, or, Literal Narratology’Chapter 23. Brian Richardson, ‘Unnatural Endings in Fiction and Drama’Part VI. Philosophical Approaches to NarrativeChapter 24. Mark Currie, ‘Narrative and the Necessity of Contingency’Chapter 25. James Phelan, ‘Local Nonfictionality within Generic Fiction: Huntington’s Disease in McEwan’s Saturday and Genova’s Inside the O’Briens’Chapter 26. Ruth Ronen, ‘The Story of the Law’Chapter 27. Richard Walsh, ‘The Centre for Narrative Gravity: Narrative and the Philosophy of Selfhood after Dennett’Chapter 28. Amy Shuman and Katharine Young, ‘The Body as Medium: A Phenomenological Approach to the Production of Affect in Narrative’