Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction

Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction

Author: Marco Caracciolo

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2016-12

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0803296754

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A storyteller’s craft can often be judged by how convincingly the narrative captures the identity and personality of its characters. In this book, the characters who take center stage are “strange” first-person narrators: they are fascinating because of how they are at odds with what the reader would wish or expect to hear—while remaining reassuringly familiar in voice, interactions, and conversations. Combining literary analysis with research in cognitive and social psychology, Marco Caracciolo focuses on readers’ encounters with the “strange” narrators of ten contemporary novels, including Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Caracciolo explores readers’ responses to narrators who suffer from neurocognitive or developmental disorders, who are mentally disturbed due to multiple personality disorder or psychopathy, whose consciousness is split between two parallel dimensions or is disembodied, who are animals, or who lose their sanity. A foray into current work on reception, reader-response, cognitive literary study, and narratology, Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction illustrates why any encounter with a fictional text is a complex negotiation of interlaced feelings, thoughts, experiences, and interpretations.


A Peculiar Peril

A Peculiar Peril

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0374308896

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Peculiar Peril is a head-spinning epic about three friends on a quest to protect the world from a threat as unknowable as it is terrifying, from the Nebula Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer. Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion—a veritable cabinet of curiosities—once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables). Swept into encounters with allies more unpredictable than enemies, Jonathan pieces together his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. But as the ground shifts and allegiances change with every step, he and his friends sink ever deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them.


The New Cinematic Weird

The New Cinematic Weird

Author: Steen Ledet Christiansen

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-07

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1793612757

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The New Cinematic Weird argues that weird fiction is rising also in audiovisual culture. Presenting several detailed analyses of weird cinematic works, the book shows how the new cinematic weird is best understood as atmospheric worldings — affective intensities that suffuse the experience of the cinematic weird. The weird exists as an experiential field, an inflation of the world. These worldings disclose a variety of experiences. The book engagingly shows how creepy, unsettling, ominous, uneasy, and eerie atmospheres provide a way into the weird experience. This book is important to anyone interested in the audiovisual weird, cinematic atmospheres, how audiovisual media produce worlds, and how weird fiction challenges our conception of the way the world is.


Poetics of Disturbances

Poetics of Disturbances

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-10-31

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 9004519882

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume calls for a Narratology of Diversity by investigating narratives of non-normative bodies and minds. It explores mental health representations in literature, including neurodiversity, the body-mind nexus, and embodied non-normativities, therein emphasizing the importance of understanding diverse psychological conditions as represented in narratives. The contributions include perspectives from a wide variety of scholars of European, North American, and comparative literature and culture. While post-classical narratology has evolved through phases of diversification and consolidation, this volume represents innovation in understanding narrative development to embrace new areas of social awareness, including gendered narratologies (specifically feminist and queer narratologies) and post-colonial criticism, paving the way for a more inclusive narratology.


Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel

Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel

Author: Marta Puxan-Oliva

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-07

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 0429638728

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How does racial ideology contribute to the exploration of narrative voice? How does narrative (un)reliability help in the production and critique of racial ideologies? Through a refreshing comparative analysis of well-established novels by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, Albert Camus and Alejo Carpentier, this book explores the racial politics of literary form. Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel contributes to the emergent attention in literary studies to the interrelation of form and politics, which has been underexplored in narrative theory and comparative racial studies. Bridging cultural, postcolonial, racial studies and narratology, this book brings context specificity and awareness to the production of ideological, ambivalent narrative texts that, through technical innovation in narrative reliability, deeply engage with extremely violent episodes of colonial origin in the United Kingdom, the United States, Algeria, and the French and Spanish Caribbean. In this manner, the book reformulates and expands the problem of narrative reliability and highlights the key uses and production of racial discourses so as to reveal the participation of experimental novels in early and mid-20th century racial conflicts, which function as test case to display a broad, new area of study in cultural and political narrative theory.


Optional-Narrator Theory

Optional-Narrator Theory

Author: Sylvie Patron

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-02

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1496223373

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Optional-Narrator Theory makes a strong intervention in (or against) narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives.


Mediated Narration in the Digital Age

Mediated Narration in the Digital Age

Author: Peter Joseph Gloviczki

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-10

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1496217632

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Peter Joseph Gloviczki provides a history of new media technology that examines mediated narration from 1991 through 2018.


Modern Character

Modern Character

Author: Julian Murphet

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0192863126

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, Julian Murphet examines how dramatists and prose writers at the turn of the twentieth century experimented with new forms of modern character. Old truisms of character such as consistency, depth, and verisimilitude are eschewed in favour of inconsistency, bad faith, and fragmentation.