Description
Offering an interdisciplinary approach to narrative, this book investigates storyworlds and minds in narratives across media, from literature to digital games and reality TV, from online sadomasochism to oral history databases, and from horror to hallucinations. It addresses two core questions of contemporary narrative theory, inspired by recent cognitive-scientific developments: what kind of a construction is a storyworld, and what kind of mental functioning can be embedded in it? Minds and worlds become essential facets of making sense and interpreting narratives as the book asks how story-internal minds relate to the mind external to the storyworld, that is, the mind processing the story. With essays from social scientists, literary scholars, linguists, and scholars from interactive media studies answering these topical questions, the collection brings diverse disciplines into dialogue, providing new openings for genuinely transdisciplinary narrative theory. The wide-ranging selection of materials analyzed in the book promotes knowledge on the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making through narrative, necessary for navigating the contemporary, mediatized cultural landscape. The combination of theoretical reflection and empirical analysis makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students in fields including literary studies, social sciences, art, media, and communication.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Minds in Action, Interpretive Traditions in Interaction Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, and Frans Mäyrä Section I 1. Texts, Worlds, Stories: Narrative Worlds as Cognitive and Ontological Concept Marie-Laure Ryan 2. Storyworlds and Paradoxical Narration: Putting Classifications to a Transmedial Test Liviu Lutas 3 The Charge against Classical and Post-Classical Narratologies’ "Epistemic" Approach to Literary Fiction Greger Andersson Section II 4. How You Emerge from This Game Is up to You: Agency, Positioning, and Narrativity in The Mass Effect Trilogy Hanna-Riikka Roine 5. Playing the Worlds of Prom Week Ben Samuel, Dylan Lederle-Ensign, Mike Treanor, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Josh McCoy, Aaron Reed, and Michael Mateas 6. Scripting Beloved Discomfort: Narratives, Fantasies, and Authenticity in Online Sadomasochism J. Tuomas Harviainen 7. Storyworld in Text-Messages: Sequentiality and Spatialisation Agnieszka Lyons Section III 8. Defending the Private and the Unnarratable: Doomed Attempts to Read and Write Literary and Cinematic Minds in Marguerite Duras’s India Cycle Tytti Rantanen 9. Of Minds and Monsters: the Eventfulness of Monstrosity and the Poetics of Immersion in Horror Literature Gero Brümmer 10. Narrative Conventions in Hallucinatory Narratives Tommi Kakko 11. Narrative and Minds in the Traditional Ballads of Early Country Music Alan Palmer Section IV 12. Mind Reading, Mind Guessing, or Mental-State Attribution? The Puzzle of John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning Matti Hyvärinen 13 Mind as World in the Reality Game Show Survivor Maria Mäkelä 14 Performing Selves and Audience Design: Interview Narratives on the Internet Jarmila Mildorf 15 Documenting Everyday Life: Mind Representation in the Web Exhibition "A Finnish Winter Day" Mari Hatavara Afterword: A New Normal? Brian McHale
