Narratology

Not long ago, narrative was all the rage... today, not as much. The fashionable preoccupation with (yet another) category to deliver religious imagination from the grips of organizing principles - artificial and reductionistic tropes - enjoyed its brief day in the sun. As with most fads, narrative theology still influences many but not in the label - more in the details and low-powered vocabulary. Why? Because we're frightened by those grand, reductionistic themes... embarrassed by our hubris and too cool to be tricked once again. Good luck with that....

"Narrative Theology" is a piece published as part of Walter Elwell's 2001 revised edition of The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Baker).

La Barcarolle op. 60 de Chopin fait partie de la dernière période créatrice du compositeur, également appelée « dernier style ». Cette œuvre a suscité de très nombreuses interprétations dans la littérature musicologique, mais l’objet de cette communication est de proposer notre propre analyse, à la fois formelle et narrative, qui permettra de mettre en lumière certaines nouveautés stylistiques caractéristiques de cette période et d’expliquer les déviances formelles apparentes. Ce double-niveau analytique souhaite en effet investir les aspects techniques du discours musical (forme, tonalités, sections, cadences, harmonies, etc.) mais également son niveau expressif, à travers l’utilisation des topiques musicaux. L’étude de la succession de ces unités expressives permettra notamment d’éclaircir et d’expliquer le parcours de l’œuvre, qui se détache de la forme ternaire si chère au compositeur, avec un retour varié des deux thèmes principaux dans un style héroïque au sein de la dernière section, amenant un sentiment apothéotique. Il s’agit donc d’une stratégie narrative construite selon une concaténation particulière des unités du discours musical, une disposition de type téléologique qui amènera à cette apothéose finale, également retrouvée dans d’autres œuvres du corpus de la dernière période.

Ante la asombrosa propagación del culto de la Divina Misericorida en nuestros días no dejan de sorprender los orígenes, un tanto “tormentosos”, del reconocimiento y la divulgación de este culto. Al hablar de dichos orígenes resulta indispensable aludir a la figura emblemática del padre Ignacy Rózycki SI, el teólogo a quien el arzobispo de Cracovia, Karol Wojtyla, encargó la evaluación de los contenidos teológicos del Diario de Sor Faustina, donde se revelan los misterios de esta devoción. La respuesta del Padre Rózycki fue contundente. Tal y como afirma él mismo en una confesión posterior, en un primer momento se negó a aceptar dicha tarea puesto que consideraba que “… Elena-Faustina, una muchacha sencilla, y muy piadosa, de todos modos era víctima de alucinaciones con una tendencia oculta a la histeria –como consecuencia- no sólo eran sus revelaciones (…) vacías de valor religioso, sino a la vez y por las mismas razones –lo heroico de su vida- una causa perdida.” Resulta de gran interés observar la evolución, tanto desde la perspectiva de la investigación teológica como de la actitud afectiva de este riguroso teólogo tomista hacia el culto de la Divina Misericordia, del cual, posteriormente, se convertiría en gran defensor y devoto.

Storytelling pervades almost every aspect of the law. Many narrativistic legal elements, however, have in fact been little more than historically transitory. Given the precarious status of narrative at law, I argue we should focus instead on one of the most historically consistent acts of legal storytelling: the judicial opinion. Here I examine in particular the invocation of precedent in legal opinions, what I call “judicial emplotment,” as an almost archetypal act of formalized storytelling. As I go on to argue, the courts justify legal outcomes by invoking precedent, thereby placing decisions within a specific and heavily formalized legal-narrative structure.

Affreschi antichi e moderni sui giochi di ruolo dal vivo Volume II: Affreschi moderni A cura di Andrea Castellani e J. Tuomas Harviainen Volume pubblicato in occasione del secondo Larp Symposium Firenze 2011 Prima edizione: settembre 2011 Seconda edizione: ottobre 2011 Progetto editoriale, coordinamento, revisione, proofreading (per gli articoli in italiano), progetto grafico, composizione e impaginazione: Andrea Castellani. Progetto editoriale, coordinamento, revisione e proofreading (per gli articoli in inglese): J. Tuomas Harviainen. Revisione e proofreading (per l'articolo di A. Castellani): Raffaele Manzo. Immagine di copertina: Emanuele Manzo.

According to Ian Bent, “musical analysis is the reduction of a musical structure in several components […] and the research of functions of these components inside the structure”. It is in this wide analytical context that my research about Chopin’s last style is to be situated. I use a combination of classical and narrative analysis to consider these two different but complementary aspects of a musical work. The musical work is divided into significant unities (discretization by segmentation) according to the topics and narratives actors use. By so doing, I want to integrate elements from the musical signification into the structural dimension of the work. However, this distinction allows us to go further and to bring to light the different narrative identities, by the relation and interactions of the discretized unities and their rhythmic states: complex course, simple course, less contrasted course, etc. Thus, these unities become entirely comprehensible by the global observation of the path and enable us to understand the construction and tracking of the work. Then, these elements can be used for the study of the interpretation at the level of the sound object (tempi and dynamics) and for the study of the choices made by performers. It will be asked if these unities are still relevant for the sound object and if they have an impact on the performance.

• This essay explores the literature/digital nexus from a narratological perspective and asks: how does the digital enter the traditional printed novel? The concept of the paratext – with the new categories of material peritexts and digital epitexts – serves as a theoretical frame to be discussed along with Paul Dawson's proposal for a discursive narratology and James Phelan's rhetorical approach to narrative in the attempt to fruitfully combine the two for a contextualized and cultural-aware narrative analysis.

This thesis focuses on a particular stylistic period of Frederic Chopin. The 1840s show an important evolution of Chopin’s musical language and correspond to an aesthetic turning point, characterized by a difficult historical and biographical context. All along our research, we will try to build a transversal definition of Chopin’s last style by highlighting the recurrent characteristics of this period. In this purpose, a corpus of twenty-two works will be analyzed through several levels (traditional and formal, semiotic, narrative and thymic), to grasp all the issues of the last period of the polish composer.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à une période stylistique particulière du compositeur Frédéric Chopin. Les années 1840 manifestent une évolution importante dans son langage musical et correspondent à un tournant esthétique marqué par un contexte historique et biographique difficile. Tout au long de ce travail, nous allons tenter d’ériger une définition transversale du « dernier style » de Chopin, en recherchant les éléments caractéristiques récurrents de cette période. Dans ce but, un corpus de vingt-deux oeuvres musicales sera analysé selon plusieurs niveaux (traditionnel et formel, sémiotique, narratif et thymique) afin de saisir tous les enjeux de la dernière période du compositeur polonais.

This is the Introduction to volume 9 (2009) of Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics that I co-edited with Laurent Milesi and Biwu Shang. The articles included in this issue can be accessed at http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/site_engleza/No_1_2019.html. The issue includes: Arleen Ionescu: Postclassical Narratology: Twenty Years Later GENERAL PERSPECTIVES Brian Richardson: Recent Work in Unnatural Narrative Studies Biwu Shang: Postclassical Narratology in China: Receptions and Variations John Pier: Is There a French Postclassical Narratology? THEMATIC DEPARTURES Samuel Caleb Wee: Songs of ‘Experientiality’: Reconsidering the Relationship between Poeticity and Narrativity in Postclassical Narratology Charlotte Lindemann: Dialogue and the Limits of Narrative Discourse: Gérard Genette, Gertrude Stein Florian Zitzelsberger: On the Queer Rhetoric of Metalepsis Xiaomeng Wan: Body as Resource of Narrative Communication: An Intersection of Corporeal Narratology with Rhetorical Narratology READINGS Vladimir Biti: Almost the Same but not Quite: Kafka and His Assignees Yili Tang: Character Narration and Fictionality in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot REVIEWS Yuzhen Lin: A Comparative Perspective on Unnaturalness: A Review of Biwu Shang’s Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives Fang Cai: A Discipline with Local Characteristics and a Global Perspective: Zhong Guo Xu Shi Xue [Chinese Narratology]

Da Matrix a Star Wars, da Harry Potter al Trono di spade: i grandi
successi dell’entertainment contemporaneo si basano sempre
più sulla creazione di esperienze di fruizione unificate
e trasversali, che hanno il proprio fulcro in storie e mondi
narrativi che si espandono e si dispiegano su molteplici canali
mediali. Si parla a riguardo di transmedialità: una logica ormai
centrale nelle produzioni mediali contemporanee, ma anche
un modo coordinato di organizzare i contenuti che negli ultimi
anni si è diffuso negli ambiti più diversi, dal marketing
all’informazione, dal documentario all’educazione, fino
a permeare il nostro stesso modo quotidiano di comunicare.

Today I finished the Fantasy – and the sky is beautiful, there’s a sadness in my heart – but that’s alright. If it were otherwise, perhaps my existence would be worth nothing to anyone.
(Letter to J. Fontana, 20th October 1841)

Musical narratology is an important item to highlight and understand the narrative strategies of musical works by the study of the concatenation of the expressive unities it contains. In the 19th century, the narrative strategy is often built as a “path which leads the listener from dysphoric elements till the transcendental level (euphoric) through several steps […]. This itinerary often corresponds to the coming-of-age novel or imaginary or initiatory journey […]” (Grabocz, 2009, p. 33). This is also possible in music by the choice of the protagonists, their relationships and their evolution into the musical piece.
In our thesis, which focuses on Chopin’s last style, we study 21 works of the 1840’s to reach a definition of this late stylistic period. Among our corpus, the Fantasy op. 49 in F minor is particularly interesting. In fact, this piece was rather badly received by the contemporary critics, considering “a lack of unity and cohesion” according to Lenz while Schumann found it “full of genius traits, although the whole hasn’t felt to have being bound by a formal harmonious framework”.
However, we consider that this work is a very good illustration of a real mastery of the formal construction and the narrative strategy proposed by Chopin and revealed by the narrative analysis. Composed in the beginnings of the 40’s, two themes serve as a basis of all the progression: the first is dramatic and more and more powerful all along its repetitions which put us deeper into the dramaturgy. The second is more transitional, in an improvised style and presents two kinds of appearance, totally opposite, which carries the auditor into two different atmospheres. The interactions between these two protagonists will build the “plot” of the piece, anchored in this romantic aesthetic, as we will try to show it in our presentation.
This kind of narrative strategy will also be compared with other works of our corpus which present the same kind of strategy but also totally contrary, like the Ballade op. 52 in f minor whose analysis in our forthcoming paper "La Ballade op. 52: une « épopée dramatique ». Entre analyse formelle, narrative et thymique" noticed a totally inverse narrative strategy.

The last style of Chopin is a new notion in musicology in France. In spite of the fact that the authors  admit its existence, very less researches concern this subject, particularly in France. All along our researches, the analysis of the works of our corpus  shows us different narratives structures.
The narrative framework, proved by some theoretician of literature , is the thread of the main conventional narrative  and can also govern the musical discourse: initial situation (tranquillity, exposition), inciting incident, quest and adventures, crisis, resolution, and final situation. In the romantic period, the artists change these traditional paths to express their new aesthetics ideas and cause a bursting of the classical structures, which will more freely model the narrative framework.
In this paper, we want to present several examples of different narrative structures in Chopin’s last style. In fact, the themes, motives and thymic states of the works enable to model different evolutions of the dramaturgy. The results of these researches reveal different “narrative structures” used by Chopin in the works of the last style.

A partir de su título, la novela de Faulkner pone en primer plano el tema de la agonía y la muerte. Mientras agoniza, Addie recuerda su pasado. Entre tanto, su cuerpo se rehúsa tenazmente a desaparecer en la oscuridad y se mantiene presente, con vida y sin ella, hasta el final de la novela. La presencia del cuerpo de Addie, que se deteriora progresivamente, es lo que mantiene la cohesión del relato, impidiendo que éste se desintegre a pesar de la fragmentación y el desorden que proponen la multiplicidad de puntos de vista narrativos y la falta de linealidad de la narración. En este trabajo analizaremos la novela faulkneriana, deteniéndonos en la técnica narrativa y en la forma en que dicha técnica está puesta al servicio para una reflexión crítica acerca del lenguaje.

Suspendus aux lèvres d’un conteur, incapables d’interrompre la lecture d’un roman, captivés par un film haletant, nous faisons tous l’expérience quotidienne de ce plaisir apparemment paradoxal que nous tirons de notre insatisfaction provisoire face à un récit inachevé. Bien qu’une mode esthétique et théorique ait tenté de nous convaincre que ce plaisir était honteux, on peut néanmoins avoir l’intuition que le cœur vivant de la narrativité réside précisément dans ce nœud coulant, toujours plus serré à mesure que nous progressons dans l’histoire, qui nous attache à l’intrigue et creuse la temporalité par l’attente impatiente d’un dénouement. Si le récit a quelque chose à voir avec la manière dont nous éprouvons le temps, cette expérience n’apparaît jamais avec autant d’éclat que dans le suspense, la curiosité ou la surprise qui font la force des intrigues fictionnelles. La compréhension des fonctions narratives engage donc non seulement l’analyse littéraire, linguistique et sémiotique, mais aussi l’analyse cognitive et la psychologie des émotions.

ROZBOR FILMU / FILM ANALYSIS [English summary]

Radomír D. Kokeš (Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2015)

The book focuses on possibilities of analyzing a film as a system. Its aim is to deal with the process of asking questions in such a way that their answers will contribute to convincing solutions of exactly formulated tasks related to the structure of a film work. It is not a broadly conceived exposé of numerous kinds of analyses of numerous types of films; it rather follows the method of in-depth study of a limited scope of issues. As such, it consists of four sections. Each of these sections offers different questions and answers, presents different findings to the reader and follows different methods of work with the explication. All sections logically follow from the others, and thus analysed topics reappear in various contexts, as well as complement and develop each other. An invariable background of the explications in the book is formed, first, by aesthetic norms of the classic Hollywood film, second, by traditions of the Czech cinema and third, by Kristin Thompson’s and David Bordwell’s neoformalist poetics.

(1) The first section is titled TO OBSERVE and it presents the basic tools for an analysis of a work of art. It sees the work as a system, where it distinguishes between basic components of narrative, style and the fictional world. It explains each of these components separately on specific examples. It gives special attention to the films: A Close Shave (GB, 1995) and Once upon a Time in the West (USA/Italy, 1968). The subject matter of the explication is a film work.

(2) In the second section, TO PLAN, the book approaches to discussion and writing about film as a way of issues-solving. It explains the importance of finding, posing, and answering question about the structure of a film. It gives examples of the films Titanic (USA, 1997) and Bloody Sunday (GB/Ireland, 2002). For a better understanding of the topic it deals with, it offers a conception of two types of theses: centripetal and centrifugal. The subject matter of the explication is the analysis as such.

(3) The third section TO WRITE AND READ / TO READ AND WRITE is the most guiding one, as it focuses on practical aspects of analytical writing, theoretical coherence and the field of recommended publication, which can help to enhance this sensibility. The subject matter of the explication is a written analytical text.

(4) The final section APPENDIX: THREE ANALYTICAL FORMATS AND A READER makes it easier to understand on a higher level the various ways of structuring analysis and its functions. It presents three formats of such texts: an analytical essay, an analytical study, and poetological study. Adaptability to analysed issues follows primarily from six case-studies of the films Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (Czechoslovakia, 1966), Arsenic and Old Lace (USA, 1944), Speed Racer (USA, 2008), Memento (USA, 2000), Smugglers of Death (Czechoslovakia, 1959) and A Tooth for a Tooth (Austria-Hungary, 1913). Each of these more or less comprehensive studies deals with a different issue, asks different questions and (intentionally) addresses readers with different levels of experience. The subject matter of the explication is a unity of approach on the one hand and a variety of issues-solving on the other hand.
The book aims to show the widest range of the explanatory possibilities of its approach, which it labels a poetics of fiction. When working with its case-studies, it repeatedly proceeds in the chapters from formally playful films (like A Close Shave, Titanic, Speed Racer or Memento) to structurally complex works (like Once Upon a Time in the West, Bloody Sunday or Smugglers of Death). This enables it to cover a wide range of challenges, which one can encounter in the process of an analysis of (not only audio-visual) works. And finally, the last chapter introduces the theme of a historiographic dimension of the book. It presents original research of the beginnings of Czech cinema.

The field of an analysis of a film authorship is rather suppressed in the explications, although it remains crucial and as such it is primarily dealt with in the second section of the book, which can thus be also seen from this perspective as an original contribution to authorial poetics and questions of a realistic effect in the work of the director Paul Greengrass.

Given the reasons stated above, Film Analysis wants to be (a) a comprehensible guide to the analytical process of a wide readership (especially students of programmes in history and theory of the arts, cinephiles and beginning critics), (b) a collection of original analyses, which explain a variety of issues related to structures of film from the perspective of the poetics of fiction, and (c) a source of helpful tools for not only film analysis, but also the analytical process as such (for example, kinds of theses or analytical formats).

Cet article propose une étude approfondie de la Polonaise en la bémol majeur op. 53 de Chopin afin de mettre en avant des caractéristiques essentielles du dernier style de Chopin, qui s'exprime dans les années 1840, période difficile avant son décès. La Polonaise "héroïque", investie de manière plus traditionnelle mais également par le biais d'une approche plus narrative met en avant une évolution de la forme tripartite, déjà amorcée dans la Polonaise op. 44 et qui aboutira également à la forme téléologique de la Polonaise Fantaisie op .61 qui clot ce répertoire. En effet, l'usage des topiques et de leur concaténation sont particulièrement intéréssants pour comprendre une part de l'évolution stylistique du compositeur dans les dernières années.

Le présent article propose une analyse musicale de la Ballade op. 52 en fa mineur de Frédéric Chopin. De nombreuses méthodologies existent pour investir l'oeuvre musicale, mais l'auteure défend l'importance et la complémentarité de deux niveaux essentiels que sont la partition et son langage technique ainsi que l'expressivité de la pièce, qui peuvent s'assimiler au couple signifiant/signifié de la sémiotique générale. Par la détection des unités signifiantes (appelées topiques) et l'étude de leur concaténation, Julie Walker tente de démontrer que la pièce présente une stratégie narrative complexe qui sera également mise en avant par l'interprète musical.

In Interpreting Ancient Egyptian Narratives, Martin Pehal applies structural analysis to four New Kingdom narrative compositions. The study explains the strong configurational character of ancient Egyptian (mythological) thought which has the ability to connect various ontological levels of human experience with the surrounding world into complex synchronic structures. These symbolical systems are shown to be mediating between the various cultural paradoxes which were inherent to ancient Egyptian society. Axial role in this process is attributed to the institution of positional kingship represented by the Pharaoh. Its transformative function is also put into relation to the special status of female characters who are shown to play the part of the “powerful powerless ones” further personifying the aspects of the mediating function of myth. Gradually, the study outlines a genuinely Egyptian “structural net” of basic mythemes and explains in what way it was possible for such a system to change and incorporate foreign mythological motifs especially from the Near East.

This paper will offer a close analysis of time loops as a narrative device in two recent videogames, Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital 2019) and Deathloop (Arkane Studios 2021). While far from a new phenomenon in videogames, nor other media (David Bordwell 2002; Jan Simons 2008), recent years have seen the release of various titles like Outer Wilds, Deathloop, Twelve Minutes (Luis António 2021), The Sexy Brutale (Cavalier Game Studios 2017), Loop Hero (Four Quarters 2021), Returnal (Housemarque 2021) and more that place time loops as central to their experiences. I argue that time loops narrativize something that is already implicit across most videogames – repetition. As Brendan Keogh (2018, p. 145) argues, “through character deaths, saved files, checkpoints, action replays, Let’s Play videos, walkthroughs, skippable cutscenes, lag, fluctuating framerates and countless other phenomena, time travel is a banal feature of videogame play”. Every game with a save/load feature already contains time loops. Acknowledging them within the gameworld essentially narrativizes elements like repetition and failure that are frequently part of play but outside of a game’s storyworld. This paper therefore intends to offer a close analyse of their inclusion in Outer Wilds and Deathloop and determine what impact narrativizing repetition has on how videogame time loop’s function.

Drawing upon innovative theoretical and empirical scholarship presented at Narrative Matters 2012: Life and Narrative (The American University of Paris, May 29-June 1, 2012), this volume seeks to make a significant contribution to our under¬standing of the dynamic interplay of life and narrative by creatively addressing it from multiple angles. It features cross-disciplinary work by cutting-edge scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, including Jens Brockmeier, Jerome Bruner, Mark Freeman, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, James Phelan, and Brian Richardson. Four main intellectual contributions distinguish this volume. First, the contributors clearly detail the conceptual and empirical frameworks for describing the mutual construction of narrative and life. Second, the volume illustrates the tension between the need for narratives to hold and represent factual experiences and the power of narrative to conjure coherent worlds of imagination. Third, the volume explores the tension between the power of social and cultural forces to influence, or even impose, pre-configured interpretations on experience and the ingenuity of persons to create their own interpretations of experience. Finally, the problem of life and narrative is conceived as a cross-disciplinary problem. Cross-disciplinary study is crucial for thinking through basic problems in the social sciences and the humanities. There is still little dialogue among the disciplinary groups studying narrative, but these are conversations without boundaries, and limiting the scope leaves out critical perspec¬tives that can advance knowledge of narrative, literature, and human beings. This volume aims to introduce a wide range of narrative scholars to the broader questions that narrative studies entails.

Depictions of the fantastic in modern literature established the fear oft he supernatural. Premodern literary texts lack such targeted evocations of horror. To find them, one must turn instead to Christian exempla, which seek to frighten readers in teaching them a lesson. Imaginations of Fear discusses the hitherto unappreciated significance of the “merveilleux chrétien” for the fantastic genre from its beginnings through the 20th century.

Die Phantastik etablierte die Angst vor dem Übernatürlichen in der Literatur. In vormodernen literarischen Texten sucht man hingegen vergeblich nach dem gezielt evozierten Horror. Er findet sich stattdessen in christlichen Exempla: Sie evozieren den Schrecken aus didaktischen Gründen. Von diesem Befund ausgehend, wird die in der Forschung konsequent negierte Bedeutung des christlichen Wunderbaren für die Phantastik bis ins 20. Jh. erörtert.

https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/505534

The problem of the different names of God in the book of Jonah is regularly discussed by researchers. There have been attempts to resolve this question through diachronic hypotheses (as part of literary criticism), as well as by synchronic hypotheses which attribute the choice of different names for God to semantic associations or to the structure of the story as a whole. This study offers an interpretation which considers the changes in the name for God as a function of the narrative. Thus, the very act of naming God comes from the story itself and through the interaction of its characters. The analysis offered here, after a brief study of each chapter of the book, shows that the double divine name ('YHWH God') is the term that brings out the positive or negative twists and turns in the narrative. In brief, Jonah makes his way through the story with different names for God, each indicating how God’s relation with others is positive or not.

Nobody is a highly stylized memoir that employs the choose-your-own-adventure structure to illustrate the complexity of navigating trauma for both author and reader. Nobody invites you to closely share a young girl's brave journey of growing up in Australia in the eighties in a violent and abusive world. It transgresses the boundaries of literary traumatic representation to weave moments of sweetness and humor through a narrative where unexpected threads of beauty and darkness intersect, emphasizing the horrors of her environment. In conflating the labyrinth and maze, Nobody offers glimpses of the threads and juxtapositions that emerge when struggling to cope with traumatic memory. Nobody's second-person narration and choose-your-own-adventure form work seamlessly together with word and image to powerfully convey the intimate exchange that the author had with her fragmented selves while writing, and reveals the claustrophobia and confusion of PTSD. Nobody challenges readers to cross the threshold: it forces them to examine their position as voyeuristic consumers of trauma and asks them to recognize their essential role as participant-witnesses. Through facilitating readers uncomfortable engagement with the text, Nobody challenges them to see the threads of complicity connecting individuals and communities to the ongoing issues of domestic violence and child sexual abuse.

According to a common though not universally accepted opinion, works of narrative fiction are made up of statements uttered by a fictional narrator who must be distinguished from the author. In what follows, I demonstrate that this assumption has led to misinterpretations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In the first section, I examine the view, held by several distinguished scholars, that there is a fictional narrator in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Two main problems of the respective interpretations are exposed. First, they fail to substantiate their claims about the existence and particular traits of the narrator. Second, they fail to clarify the very point of introducing him. In the second section, I challenge the general assumption that it is reasonable to postulate a narrator while ignoring, temporarily or permanently, the author’s purposes. The third section suggests that it is rather misleading to apply the term ‘narrator’ to the author of the novel. One may of course call Goethe the ‘narrator’ of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, but there is little point in doing so. In the final section, I draw attention to some aspects of Goethe’s novel that have previously been neglected and that can be more easily recognized once one refrains from assuming that there is a fictional narrator in the novel.

Part I of this paper summarizes narratological approaches to the the narrativity of the law. Two proposals are given extensive attention: Peter Brooks's proposals regarding the important influence of narrative on legal decision-making, and Meir Sternberg's analyses of the law code as narrative text. Part II, in contrast with Part I, analyses more recent examples of the genre of the law code as well as a judgement. In this section the argument consists in countering exaggerated claims for the narrativity of the law by demonstrating how narrative substrates are carefully elided in the prose of legal discourse.

Ever since the 1990s, school shootings have shocked the public in their brutality, their suddenness, and their inexplicability. While film and literature have played a role in the heated debates about so-called copycat crimes, the growing body of fictionalizations of school shootings has been neglected thus far. However, in a discourse in which the boundaries between fiction and reality are increasingly blurred, this book shows how fiction shapes and structures, challenges and disrupts cultural processes of meaning-making. Hence, for a better understanding of the school shooting phenomenon, the relevance of fiction on all levels of discourse construction requires thorough analysis. This book therefore develops a new approach to the role of fiction for contemporary forms of excessive violence. By combining narrative theory with insights from sociology and other disciplines, it provides the means for apprehending and describing the relevance of fiction for contemporary discourses. Furthermore, it provides exemplary analyses of more specific functions of literary and filmic fictionalizations of school shootings between 2000 and 2016.

- An interdisciplinary approach to a contemporary phenomenon, with a strong focus on the functions of literature and film.
- Provides a model for describing the interwovenness of fiction and reality in the construction of cultural discourses

Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca
Centro di Alta Formazione, Villa Forno di Breme

Corso di perfezionamento SCIENZE, METODI E POETICHE DELLA NARRAZIONE a cura di Emanuela Mancino

Presentazione
Il corso si rivolge a tutti coloro che intendano approfondire nello studio e soprattutto nella pratica, ovvero nell'esperienza, gli aspetti formativi della narrazione nei suoi risvolti riflessivi, progettuali e prospettivi ma soprattutto operativi.
In particolare durante gli incontri i partecipanti saranno guidati attraverso un apprendimento che sempre più si rivela strategico per il quotidiano di ciascuno e come strumento di relazione con il mondo, anche e soprattutto su un piano professionale: ovvero l’ imparare a creare connessioni narrative.
Il corso si propone di formare esperti in grado di padroneggiare e progettare il potenziale educativo e multidisciplinare della narrazione, sia all’interno delle consuete prassi educative e scolastiche, sia nelle ideazioni, progettazioni e realizzazioni di percorsi laboratoriali e di formazione che abbiano come metodologia preferenziale quella di tipo narrativo.

Le scienze
In tal senso, il corso svilupperà il tema della possibilità narrativa in chiave interdisciplinare, accogliendo al suo interno esperti di discipline le più diverse, per poter esplorare la “narrazione” con lenti ora pedagogiche, ora letterarie, psicanalitiche, sociologiche, biologiche, terapeutiche, antropologiche, giornalistiche...
É in questa direzione che si orienta la scelta del titolo e della declinazione plurale della proposta formativa, che rivendica con “scienze della narrazione” l’intento di far dialogare, accogliere, comprendere e incontrare sguardi disciplinari diversi ma soprattutto per evidenziare l’intento di una ridiscussione della narrazione in prospettiva scientifica.
Verranno presentate le prospettive di chi fa della narrazione uno strumento o un ambiente di marketing, di vendita, di comunicazione; i partecipanti incontreranno docenti del mondo accademico ma anche esperti e professionisti della comunicazione, di altre culture, esploratori dell’elemento narrativo inteso anche come testualità del quotidiano, della sfera religiosa, artistica, cinematografica, teatrale, museale, fotografica, fino alle più recenti attenzioni e declinazioni del giornalismo in chiave biografica e dell’attenzione anche politica al valore delle “storie”.

I metodi e le poetiche
Il corso esplorerà le declinazioni della narrazione attraversando la fotografia, il cinema, il teatro, il testo filosofico, il dialogo e la conversazione, il testo narrativo, epistolare, poetico, su web o altri supporti, i linguaggi e le modalità communicative e narrative dei mass media.
La proposta formativa si connota e si esplica in generi narrativi e soprattutto nel concetto e nelle forme della trama, che diviene un’esperienza di apprendimento, di espressione estetica, ma soprattutto una possibilità di visione e di risignificazione.
La proposta si rivolge pertanto a chi si occupi di sè e dell'altro, con particolare attenzione allo sviluppo del pensiero e delle emozioni.

Obiettivi formativi e professionalizzanti
Il corso si rivolge a coloro che intendano attraversare in modo approfondito il territorio narrativo, per apprendere ed affinare un sapere connessionale che accoglie la grande complessità dei paradigmi del racconto. Attraverso un itinerario di esplorazione del fenomeno narrativo nei suoi più diversi prismi espressivi, i partecipanti potranno approfondire le modalità attraverso cui il linguaggio è utile per immaginare nuovi modi di vedere, di progettare, di tessere “storie”.
In termini professionali, i partecipanti al corso acquisiranno i codici per leggere il narrativo, nonché gli strumenti per crearlo, costruendo per sé una competenza assimilabile al sempre più attuale e cogente concetto di narratività capitalizzabile.


Inoltre il corso di Perfezionamento risponde ad esigenze ormai non più implicite all’interno dei contesti scolastici ed educativi, nonchè del mondo del lavoro. Infatti è sempre più cogente l’esigenza di dedicare attenzione alla dimensione creative del pensiero, nonchè alle modalità di apprendimento che sostengano con maggior flessibilità il soggetto di fronte alla dimensione sempre più costante del cambiamento.
La figura professionale formata dal corso avrà le competenze e gli stumenti non solo per organizzare e sistematizzare e rendere quindi più “spendibile” il proprio sapere e saper fare, ma saprà farsi promotore di inziative didattiche, laboratoriali, di potenziamento della professionalità di cura e di formazione in grado di valorizzare il sempre più diffuso bisogno di creare relazioni di pensiero all’interno dei contesti operativi in cui vengono agite relazioni educative e non solo.

Where does the self stop and the rest of the world begin? Clark and Chalmers already paved the way for an application of the extended mind theory to the problem of selfhood and identity, when in their seminal paper they asked ‘What, finally, of the self? Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so’ (2010: 39). However, how can the self persist in time if it is chiefly constituted by a series of constantly renewed couplings, enactions, and extensions? If the self does persist, what are the processes responsible for the temporal unification and synthesis of what enactivists call different ‘sensorimotor contingencies’ (O’Regan and Noë 2001)? If the self does not persist, what kind of phenomenology and new ontology underlies, or results from, this shift? This essay focuses on these questions as they relate to an extended and enactive view of the self in the space-time trajectory explored in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2005) – the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s work is regarded as the monumental literary research on temporality, self and memory. I will argue, however, that extended and enactive frameworks can provide important new insights on the key claims and findings of Proust’s literary endeavour.