Abstract

This article challenges the strong presumption that narrative, capable as it is of expression in different media, is constituted by a medium-independent content. It draws upon Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics series in order to interrogate the role of the medium in narrative, and the foundational narrative concept of the event, and elaborates a concept of narrative as a cognitive faculty. This approach to narrative facilitates a rhetorical model of its medium-contingency, and occasions an exploration of the narrative quality of dreams, which emerge as proto-fictions, and as the paradigm for a rhetoric-driven model of fictionality.

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