The study of narrative—the object of the rapidly growing discipline of narratology—has been traditionally concerned with the fictional narratives of literature, such as novels or short stories. But narrative is a transdisciplinary and transmedial concept whose manifestations encompass both the fictional and the factual. In this volume, which provides a companion piece to Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe’s Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, the use of narrative to convey true and reliable information is systematically explored across media, cultures and disciplines, as well as in its narratological, stylistic, philosophical, and rhetorical dimensions. At a time when the notion of truth has come under attack, it is imperative to reaffirm the commitment to facts of certain types of narrative, and to examine critically the foundations of this commitment. But because it takes a background for a figure to emerge clearly, this book will also explore nonfactual types of narratives, thereby providing insights into the nature of narrative fiction that could not be reached from the narrowly literary perspective of early narratology.

The search for the defining qualities of narrative has produced an expansive range of definitions which, largely unconnected with each other, obscure the notion of “narrativity” rather than clarifying it. The first part of this study remedies this shortcoming by developing a graded macro model of narrativity which serves three aims. Firstly, it provides a structured overview of the field of narrative elements and processes. Secondly, it facilitates the classification of narratological approaches by locating them on different stages of narrativity. Finally, it focuses attention on narrative dynamics as interpretative processes by which readers seek to produce narrative coherence. The second part of this study identifies three different narrative dynamics which characterise Laclos’s "Dangerous Connections," Kafka’s "Castle" and Toussaint’s novels. Wagner bases her analyses of these dynamics not only on the texts themselves but also on the ways in which literary scholars imbue the texts with narrative coherence. This book provides a long overdue systematisation of the jumbled field of theories of narrativity and opens new perspectives on the difficult relationship between narrative theory and interpretation.

In this important contribution to narrative theory, Marie-Laure Ryan applies insights from artificial intelligence and the theory of possible worlds to the study of narrative and fiction. For Ryan, the theory of possible worlds provides a more nuanced way of discussing the commonplace notion of a fictional "world," while artificial intelligence contributes to narratology and the theory of fiction directly via its researches into the congnitive processes of texts and automatic story generation. Although Ryan applies exotic theories to the study of narrative and to fiction, her book maintains a solid basis in literary theory and makes the formal models developed by AI researchers accessible to the student of literature. By combining the philosophical background of possible world theory with models inspired by AI, the book fulfills a pressing need in narratology for new paradigms and an interdisciplinary perspective.

Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives interrogates the relationship of fictionality and the multimodal use of fact in modern narrative construction.

The beginning of the 20th century saw literary scholars from Russia positing a new definition for the nature of literature. Within the framework of Russian formalism, the term 'literariness' was coined. The driving force behind this theoretical inquiry was the desire to identify literature--and art in general--as a way of revitalizing human perception, which had been numbed by the automatization of everyday life. The transformative power of 'literariness' is made manifest in many media artworks by renowned artists such as Chantal Akerman, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, William Kentridge, Nalini Malani, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, and Lawrence Weiner. These artists, much like the young Russian and German scholars of the 20th century, use literariness as a tool to analyze the esthetics of spoken or written language within experimental film, video performance, moving image installations, and many more media-based art forms. This volume uses, as its foundation, the Russian formalist school of literary theory, with the goal of extending these theories to include contemporary concepts in film and media studies, such as neoformalism, intermediality, remediation, and postdrama.

Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as "Theory of Mind" and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson s Clarissa, Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, and Austen s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov's Lolita, and Hammett s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine's surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.

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.