Editor’s Column: Principles and Practices of Narrative Worldmaking

As was the case with the first two issues of the journal, Storyworlds 3 maintains a dual focus on the principles and practices of narrative worldmaking—on the way particular storytelling environments both shape and are shaped by general protocols for building narrative worlds. Thus, even as the essays assembled here investigate the organizing logic by virtue of which texts and discourses invite the co-construction of storyworlds, the essays also explore how such narrative ways of worldmaking accommodate themselves to (or become interwoven with) a variety of settings and media—from Web-based fan fiction to children’s narrative productions in a classroom setting to avant-garde literary writing. The contributors thereby collectively suggest that to grasp what stories are and how they work, analysts need to come to terms with the range of contexts in which narratives can be used, and also with the many purposes that narrative worldmaking can serve in those contexts. By diversifying the narrative practices under consideration, scholars of story can avoid overhasty generalizations deriving from a too-limited sample. At the same time, they can continue the search for principles for storyworld design that, bound up with the full range of attested narrative practices, provide a firm basis for the study of narrative across media—and also of different storytelling traditions within a particular medium.

In the first essay, Bronwen Thomas uses ideas from narrative theory, media studies, and other fields to examine stories produced by fans who draw on characters and plot lines deriving from a source text or canon of works. In the process, Thomas also suggests how practices of Web-based fan fiction may require the development of new ways of understanding the forms and functions of narrative itself—as well as new ways of gauging the aesthetic value of stories growing out of today’s emergent media ecology. Developmental psychologist Ageliki Nicolopoulou shifts the focus to children’s storytelling practices, which she has studied for more than twenty years. Contrasting her interpretive and sociocultural approach with other, more formal approaches, Nicolopoulou characterizes children’s storytelling styles as modes of symbolic action, in which issues of genre, strategies for emplotment, and questions of gender identity intersect. Overall Nicolopoulou’s analysis suggests the benefits of integrating developmental and narratological perspectives on stories. Richard Walsh, for his part, revisits the relationship between music and narrative. Whereas previous work on the music-narrative relationship has tried to use ideas from narratology to analyze musical structures and effects, Walsh explores how interconnections between music and narrative might help illuminate the nature of narrative—by throwing it into relief against an unfamiliar background. Concentrating on issues of rhythm, Walsh addresses the somatic, social, and affective foundations shared by narrative and music, situating those foundations within the context of pre-linguistic communicative behavior.

In the next three essays, practices associated with written, literary narratives—including their translation as well their interpretation—provide the basis for theory building. Examining Nabokov’s narrative experiments, Brian Richardson demonstrates the importance of taking avant-garde literary works into account when studying the possibilities and limits of narrative worldmaking. Focusing on five types of authorial intrusion by Nabokov (the biographical author) into the fictional worlds that he creates, Richardson reconsiders models for understanding the relation between authors and narrators. He also intervenes within debates about the fiction/nonfiction divide, arguing for the general salience of the distinction even as he highlights modes of narrative play that, in Nabokov’s texts, call the distinction into question. Meanwhile, honing in on the concept of “voice,” and using two recent English translations of Ovid’s Heroides as case studies, Catherine Slater works to extend the emerging dialogue between narrative theory and translation theory. Slater suggests, first, the advantages of characterizing narrators’ voices in terms of locations within storyworlds—locations that lexical markers such as spatial adverbs, demonstratives, and place names help establish. She then argues that research on the concept of voice can benefit from closer scrutiny of what happens to the voice of the narrator when a story undergoes the process of interlingual translation. At issue...