Editor's Column: Exploring Storyworlds across Media and Disciplines

Like the first issue of the journal, Storyworlds 2 features contributions by specialists in a range of fields for which narrative constitutes a key concern. Again, the emphasis is on documenting storytelling practices across a variety of media, and also on stimulating cross-disciplinary conversations about how to develop productive methods for analyzing and interpreting those practices. This double emphasis carries with it, in turn, a twofold benefit. On the one hand, it promotes efforts to identify core features of narrative—the commonalities that cut across all modes of storytelling—while fostering the use of multiple frameworks of inquiry to create a detailed, layered profile of those shared features. But on the other hand, exploring narratives across media and via different disciplines can also illuminate the particularities of a given environment for storytelling. Hence analysts can, even as they sift out basic and general features of narrative, examine the different ways in which those features may be instantiated—and how the differences in question affect (constrain but also enable) the process of building and engaging with narrative worlds.

Collectively, the six articles assembled here investigate narrative practices both across media and by way of diverse analytic frameworks. Working at the intersection of science studies and narrative theory, and focusing on turn-of-the-twentieth-century narratives of conversion (in the broad sense of personal trans-formation), H. Porter Abbott explores how those attempts to narrate conversion experiences relate to two models of change: (1) the gradualist model influenced by Darwin's evolutionary theory and (2) modernist "momentism," grounded in a logic of sudden alteration and radical discontinuity. After a probing discussion of how narrative modes of representation break down when they are brought to bear on events that exceed a certain scale of complexity or compression, Abbott suggests that the momentist paradigm for understanding conversion is not so much a reaction against Darwinian gradualism as a "way to acknowledge its causal complexity—a complexity so extreme as to frustrate all efforts to narrativize it without distortion." Next, Richard J. Gerrig shifts the focus from a discussion of how modes of narration might have been shaped by scientific paradigms to a discussion of how humanistic research on narrative can both inform and be informed by empirical research on text processing. Examining three kinds of narrative gaps—those associated with readers' inferences beyond the information given, those created when initial mentions of characters withhold details about their roles in the story, and those stemming from unreliable narration—Gerrig makes a case for closer collaboration between literary narratologists and text-processing researchers. Arguably, it will require cross-disciplinary cooperation of this sort to (dis)confirm hypotheses concerning how various sorts of narrative structures and techniques shape readers' experiences.

Moving from monomodal print texts to multimodal graphic narratives, Karin Kukkonen draws on another area of inquiry pioneered by psychologists—namely, research on mental models—to explore interpretive challenges posed to readers of superhero comics. These comics were produced serially over many decades, by different sets of creators, resulting in more or less obvious discontinuities and inconsistencies. Kukkonen examines how interpreters can use cues deployed by the comics' creators to navigate this superhero "multiverse," which features not a baseline reality and various counterfactual scenarios but rather multiple parallel realities inhabited by any number of character versions. Sean O'Sullivan continues Kukkonen's investigation of the affordances and constraints presented by serial narratives, but he focuses on the medium of television rather than comics. Seeking to develop new tools for the study of television serials, O'Sullivan argues that shows such as Six Feet Under and The Sopranos can be analyzed as prosodic structures. Thus the recent innovation of the thirteen-episode season can be compared with the fourteen-line sonnet, with clusters of episodes functioning like stanzas in those "sonnet-seasons." Similarly, recurrent thematic and plot-related elements can be likened to beats distributed in a metrical pattern—by analogy with the pattern that governs, more or less stringently, the individual lines of a sonnet.

Apostolos Doxiadis also looks to the patterns of poetry—specifically, narrative poetry—in...