Exploring the intersection of narratives and world-building, Marie-Laure Ryan delves into the concept of 'world' within narratology, examining its implications across various disciplines. By analyzing diverse works, she redefines key concepts like narrator, plot, and fictionality, addressing fundamental questions in narratology. Ryan challenges existing paradigms and proposes a new framework that emphasizes the role of world in storytelling, offering fresh perspectives that expand our understanding of narrative structures and their relationship to reality.
Exploring the intersection of narrative theory and geography, this book redefines the role of space in storytelling. It challenges the conventional view of space as merely a backdrop, highlighting its multifaceted functions, such as conveying symbolic meaning, evoking emotions, and influencing narrative structure. By examining how narratives interact with real-world spaces, the authors provide a fresh perspective on the significance of spatial elements in literature, emphasizing their potential to shape and enhance narrative experiences.
Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
304 pages
11 hours of reading
Exploring the intersection of textuality and cognitive processing, this work delves into how contemporary artistic practices reshape our understanding of mimesis. It challenges traditional notions of text and representation, proposing innovative frameworks for interpreting how we engage with and construct meaning in art. Through critical analysis, the book invites readers to reconsider the relationship between texts and their representations in the modern artistic landscape.
Narratology has been conceived from its earliest days as a project that transcends disciplines and media. The essays gathered here address the question of how narrative migrates, mutates, and creates meaning as it is expressed across various media. Dividing the inquiry into five areas: face-to-face narrative, still pictures, moving pictures, music, and digital media, Narrative across Media investigates how the intrinsic properties of the supporting medium shape the form of narrative and affect the narrative experience. Unlike other interdisciplinary approaches to narrative studies, all of which have tended to concentrate on narrative across language-supported fields, this unique collection provides a much-needed analysis of how narrative operates when expressed through visual, gestural, electronic, and musical means. In doing so, the collection redefines the act of storytelling. Although the fields of media and narrative studies have been invigorated by a variety of theoretical approaches, this volume seeks to avoid a dominant theoretical bias by providing instead a collection of concrete studies that inspire a direct look at texts rather than relying on a particular theory of interpretation. A contribution to both narrative and media studies, Narrative across Media is the first attempt to bridge the two disciplines.
As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory—the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text's creation.
