Conference "Which narratologies beyond mimetic narratology?", Paris, September 2010

The members of the seminar “Narratologies contemporaines” at the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL CNRS/EHESS) in Paris organized a conference on September 24, 2010, in collaboration with three leading scholars working in the field of unnatural narratology. Within the scope of its program in transdisciplinary research and in the interest of furthering international exchanges in narrative theory, the seminar wished to present, for the first time in France, a body of research that explicitly takes issue with the mimetic categories generally adopted by narratology, structuralist and cognitive in particular.

After a brief introduction by Stefan Iversen (Aarhus University) to the general tenets of unnatural narratology, three lectures were given, each focusing on one of the main issues dealt with by this approach. Brian Richardson (University of Maryland), in “Story and Discourse,” explored narratives that portray impossible narrative worlds, both physically and logically. In “Narrators,” Henrik Skov Nielsen (University of Aarhus) argued that in literary fiction, “I” may not refer to the narrator and that there is an “impersonal” voice in narrative. Stefan Iversen, in “Minds,” connected recent research on the Theory of Mind with the “unnatural” power of heterodiegetic narrators to see into characters’ inner lives; unnatural minds are found in texts where a represented consciousness cannot be naturalized by the reader, as it violates the rules governing the world in which it is found. While these various characteristics are most evident in non-mimetic, mostly avant-garde, texts, they can also be found in more realistic texts.

The second part of the conference began with “Unnatural Narratology – General Narratology” by John Pier (University of Tours and CRAL EHESS/CRAL). This paper, noting that all narrative, including “natural” narrative (Labov; Fludernik), necessarily exists through conventions, and it suggested that unnatural narratology provides necessary tools for exploring narratives on the margins. In “Stories from Fragmentation: Beyond Discourse Narratology,” Simone Morgagni (EHESS/CNRS and University of Bologna) examined non-verbal modes of narrative in computer games and visual narratives. Philippe Roussin’s (CRAL EHESS/CNRS) “Some Observations on, in Particular, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger” sought to demonstrate that, in certain cases, the categories of classical narratology can in fact serve the purposes of unnatural narratology.

The rich exchanges following each of the papers suggests that further discussion will identify common points of reference between unnatural narratology and francophone perspectives as well as a number of divergences that in themselves can shed light on significant theoretical issues.

About us

ENN is the European Narratology Network, an association of individual narratologists and narratological institutions. ENN aims to foster the study of narrative representation in literature, film, digital media, etc. across all European languages and cultures.