Against Nature

The premise of Monika Fludernik’s “natural” narratology is that all narratives, including the most “artificial” literary narratives, ultimately rely on the basic cognitive parameters of naturally-occurring, spontaneous conversational narrative. We naturalize texts by narrativizing them. Fludernik attributes this idea of naturalization, correctly, to Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975), where it modestly masquerades as a synthesis and rationalization of ideas already current in the Formalist-Structuralist tradition. More than merely a synthesis of precursor concepts, however, Culler’s naturalization actually offers something like a unified theory of literary convention, underwriting a profoundly demystifying account of the literary — one that is arguably incompatible with Fludernik’s narrativization, while it also undermines some of the claims of the unnatural narratologists.