Project MUSE®: Journal of Narrative Theory - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/262
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Narrative Theory.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 29 (1999) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Narrative TheoryTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Narrative Theory1548-92481549-0815Latest articles in Journal of Narrative Theory. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Rethinking the Boundaries of Narrative through the Unnatural
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981012
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For some two decades now, unnatural narratology has emerged as one of the most productive and stimulating branches of narrative theory. What began as a challenge to some mimetic assumptions of classical narratology has evolved into a broad, interdisciplinary field which continuously interrogates the limits of narrative representation itself. Unnatural narratology investigates the ways in which texts—and, increasingly today, films, computer games, and digital artifacts—depart from the experiential and ontological parameters of the actual world to narrate storyworlds that defy the mimetic to various degrees. In doing so, unnatural narratology compels us to reconsider not only how narratives can be told, but what
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/262/image/coversmallIntroduction: Rethinking the Boundaries of Narrative through the Unnatural2026-01-27text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Rethinking the Boundaries of Narrative through the Unnatural2026-01-272026TWOProject MUSE®189172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-27Between Object and Discourse: The Dual Universe of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981013
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In chapter four of The Navidson Record, the film analysis making up the bulk of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, character-author Zampanò embarks on a discourse concerning echoes. First discussing their mythological and theological resonance, Zampanò cites a sermon in which Hanson Edwin Rose proclaims, “We are only god’s echoes and god is Narcissus,” which Zampanò immediately follows with “another equally important meditation”:Zampanò’s self-appointed manuscript editor, Johnny Truant, draws attention to the meditation in a footnote, saying the “lines have a familiar ring though I’ve no clue why or where I’ve heard them before” (45). Johnny’s own editors express a similar inability to trace the lines, offering
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/262/image/coversmallBetween Object and Discourse: The Dual Universe of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves2026-01-27text/htmlen-USBetween Object and Discourse: The Dual Universe of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves2026-01-272026TWOProject MUSE®861562026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-27Impossible Identities: An Exploration of Character and Storyworld in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981014
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Character is a fundamental component of narrative, and though it might seem like a relatively simple element compared to other aspects of narrative, there is a lot one can say about it. Is a given character flat or round? What function do they play in the story? How are they presented? Is the narrator a character? Is the narratee? Should one read a character as an individual in the storyworld or as a textual or literary construct? And what are the implications of these concepts?1On a theoretical level, much has been said about the mimetic perspective that views characters not simply as textual constructs but as whole individuals with their own mental and physical existence within the story-world.2 What I find
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/262/image/coversmallImpossible Identities: An Exploration of Character and Storyworld in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown2026-01-27text/htmlen-USImpossible Identities: An Exploration of Character and Storyworld in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown2026-01-272026TWOProject MUSE®779152026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-27“Let’s make some choices: ”: Time-loop Narratives, Everyday Trauma, and a Reconsideration of the ‘Unnatural’
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981015
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March of 2020 was an uncanny time to begin writing about time loops and the traumatic everyday. As universities across the country closed for the remainder of the semester, work-from-home became the new normal, and excursions outside the house were limited to only essential transactions, this essay was born out of a moment which many have since described as a Groundhog-Day-like loop that lockdown procedure and fear of the rapidly spreading Covid-19 virus in the US necessitated. In the 1993 film Groundhog Day, Phil Connors asks his drinking buddy, Ralph, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” and Ralph replies, “That about sums it up
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/262/image/coversmall“Let’s make some choices: ”: Time-loop Narratives, Everyday Trauma, and a Reconsideration of the ‘Unnatural’2026-01-27text/htmlen-US“Let’s make some choices: ”: Time-loop Narratives, Everyday Trauma, and a Reconsideration of the ‘Unnatural’2026-01-272026TWOProject MUSE®1030102026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-27Multilinearity and Disnarration, Denarration, Unnarration: A Feminist Unnaturalizing Reading of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981016
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Toward the end of Kate Atkinson’s multilinear novel Life After Life (2013), readers encounter the narrative’s most explicit example of the phenomenon that Brian Richardson, theorist of unnatural narratives, terms ‘denar-ration.’ Atkinson writes of her main character Ursula Todd, who has lived and died in many contradictory plot lines by the end of the novel, “She knew that voice. She didn’t know that voice. The past seemed to leak into the present, as if there were a fault somewhere. Or was it the future spilling into the past? . . . . Time was out of joint, that was certain. . . . She had been here before. She had never been here before” (505). Atkinson’s language mirrors the example of denarration that Richardson
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/262/image/coversmallMultilinearity and Disnarration, Denarration, Unnarration: A Feminist Unnaturalizing Reading of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life2026-01-27text/htmlen-USMultilinearity and Disnarration, Denarration, Unnarration: A Feminist Unnaturalizing Reading of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life2026-01-272026TWOProject MUSE®989272026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-27A Crip/Queer Intervention: The Unnatural as the Unassimilable
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981017
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Jan Alber, Alice Bell, Monika Fludernik, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Ellen Peel, Brian Richardson: these are just some of the major contributors to the ‘unnatural narratology’ conversation over the past thirty years. A major focus of this conversation has been on the nomenclature. In one of their co-authored articles published in 2012, Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson recognize that the word ‘unnatural’ brings with it a “large amount of cultural baggage,” but they continue to advocate for an “ideologically neutral use of the term” (“What is Unnatural” 374). Indeed, in anticipation of unnatural’s “cultural baggage,” Fludernik deliberately avoided the term in her groundbreaking 1996 book, Towards a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/262/image/coversmallA Crip/Queer Intervention: The Unnatural as the Unassimilable2026-01-27text/htmlen-USA Crip/Queer Intervention: The Unnatural as the Unassimilable2026-01-272026TWOProject MUSE®813482026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-27