Narrative, Interrupted

What do boring stories and seemingly insignificant details reveal about the nature of narrative? How does narrativity manifest itself in forms such as stanzaic poetry and fictional dialogue? Narrative, Interrupted probes the limits of narrativity by focusing on the anti-linear, anti-causal and non-natural tendencies of literature.

Recent postclassical narratology has constructed top-down reading models that often remain blind to the frame-breaking potential of individual literary narratives. Narrative, Interrupted goes beyond the macro framing typical of postclassical narratology and sets out to sketch approaches more sensitive to generic specificities, disturbing details and authorial interference. Unlike the mainstream cognitive approaches or even the emergent unnatural narratology, the articles collected here explore the artifice involved in presenting something ordinary and realistic in literature.

The first section of the book deals with anti-dynamic elements such as dialogue, details, private events and literary boredom. The second section, devoted to extensions of cognitive narratology, addresses spatiotemporal oddities and the possibility of non-human narratives. The third section focuses on frame-breaking, fragmentarity and problems of authorship in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. The book presents readings of texts ranging from the novels of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon to the Animal Man comics. The common denominator for the texts discussed is the interruption of the chain of events or of the experiential flow of human-like narrative agents.