Slow Narrative across Media: Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Editat de Marco Caracciolo, Ella Mingazovaen Limba Engleză Hardback – 20 mai 2024
Slowness is frequently seen as a response to modernity’s cult of speed and efficiency, and its influence in contemporary culture can be felt in artistic trends such as “slow cinema” or “slow TV.” Despite the popularity of these labels, however, slowness remains undertheorized in contemporary narrative scholarship. What makes a narrative slow, and what conceptual and analytical tools are best suited to account for this slowness? Is slowness a feature of certain narratives, an experiential response to these narratives, or both? How is narrative slowness related to the pace and rhythm of plot, and how does it carry cultural significance? Slow Narrative across Media illuminates the concept of slow narrative and demonstrates how it manifests across media forms: from short stories to novel cycles, to comics, to music, to experimental film. Led by editors Marco Caracciolo and Ella Mingazova, contributors draw on cognitive and rhetorical approaches to narrative as well as on econarratology to bring into focus both the media-specific ways in which narrative evokes slowness and the usefulness of a transmedial approach to this phenomenon. Contributors: Jan Baetens, Raphaël Baroni, Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Karin Kukkonen, Ella Mingazova, Peggy Phelan, Greice Schneider, Roy Sommer, Carolien Van Nerom, Gary Weissman
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215678
ISBN-10: 081421567X
Pagini: 236
Ilustrații: 12 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
ISBN-10: 081421567X
Pagini: 236
Ilustrații: 12 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Recenzii
“Slow Narrative across Media offers a comprehensive theory of slowness in narrative flow that privileges complexity over reductionism and reflection over consuming stories for thrills: a ‘time out’ from capitalist cultures of speed. It affords a great deal of textual and cultural context, finding its strength in a nuts-and-bolts approach, rather than a philosophical one, to narrative theory.” —Lalita Pandit Hogan, editor of Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious
Notă biografică
Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium. He is the author of several books, including With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition. Ella Mingazova is a researcher in English and American literature at the University of Liège and at the KU Leuven in Belgium. She is the coeditor of Obsolescence programmée: Perspectives culturelles.
Extras
These narratological approaches to speed, rhythm, and slow TV are certainly relevant to a theorization of slowness, but they do not span the whole spectrum that this collection explores under the rubric of “slow narrative.” In our understanding, narrative pace refers to any temporal effect of narrative: it is a broad concept that covers a sense of both speed and slowness. By contrast, narrative rhythm captures variations in pace. We do not understand slowness as a textual category in the strong sense: as an experiential effect, slowness is relative and audience dependent. A narrative is perceived as slow when it is compared to the audience’s narrative repertoire—for instance, as seen above, the label “slow cinema” only makes sense when opposed to the expected pace of more mainstream productions. Further, even when an experience of slowness does arise in the audience, its exact features and qualities can vary significantly. For example, narrative can deploy strategies that appear to slow down the pace of engagement by lengthening perception, and some of the authors in this collection discuss those strategies in detail. That is one of the ideas behind Viktor Shklovsky’s landmark discussion of ostraneniye or defamiliarization in his 1917 essay “Art as Device”: art makes perception “long and laborious”—that is, it decelerates experience. Scholars in empirical literary studies have demonstrated this idea: they have used the concept of “foregrounding” (related to Shklovsky’s defamiliarization) to show that whenever readers come across a stylistically difficult passage, reading times tend to increase (see Miall and Kuiken). But of course the exact effects of this defamiliarization depend on the audience’s literary competence, and ultimately stories cannot prevent puzzled readers from skipping forward or even giving up: slowness, as an experience, will not emerge in these readers’ interactions with narrative.
Further, slow narrative can create a contemplative mood when it exposes what Lutz Koepnick calls the “manifoldness of the present”—that is, when it allows audiences to “reflect on the now in all its complexity”. In a similar vein, Caracciolo reads slowness as distancing readers from the human-scale world and affording opportunities for contemplating the richness of the nonhuman. But, again, this contemplative tendency isn’t necessarily true for all slow stories. By slowing down, narrative may also increase suspense and feed immersion in the storyworld, favoring the immediacy of representation over contemplative distance. Slowness, in other words, does correlate with specific textual forms and genres, but its effects depend on a complex interplay of form and reader.
Our chapters represent a series of samples or perspectives on this interplay: without claiming to offer a grand theory of “slow narrative,” they advance the narratological understanding of slowness as form and experience along multiple routes. Along with the aforementioned cognitive narratology, another relevant framework for many of the contributions is media-conscious narratology, which focuses on the affordances of storytelling media and on the dynamics of adaptation. The strategies responsible for slow experiences in comics are radically different from those underlying slow cinema, for example, because readers of comics can more easily stretch or compress the temporality of their engagement. Understanding these differences is central to a theory of slow narrative.
Further, slow narrative can create a contemplative mood when it exposes what Lutz Koepnick calls the “manifoldness of the present”—that is, when it allows audiences to “reflect on the now in all its complexity”. In a similar vein, Caracciolo reads slowness as distancing readers from the human-scale world and affording opportunities for contemplating the richness of the nonhuman. But, again, this contemplative tendency isn’t necessarily true for all slow stories. By slowing down, narrative may also increase suspense and feed immersion in the storyworld, favoring the immediacy of representation over contemplative distance. Slowness, in other words, does correlate with specific textual forms and genres, but its effects depend on a complex interplay of form and reader.
Our chapters represent a series of samples or perspectives on this interplay: without claiming to offer a grand theory of “slow narrative,” they advance the narratological understanding of slowness as form and experience along multiple routes. Along with the aforementioned cognitive narratology, another relevant framework for many of the contributions is media-conscious narratology, which focuses on the affordances of storytelling media and on the dynamics of adaptation. The strategies responsible for slow experiences in comics are radically different from those underlying slow cinema, for example, because readers of comics can more easily stretch or compress the temporality of their engagement. Understanding these differences is central to a theory of slow narrative.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Introduction Part 1 Theorizing Slowness in Narrative Chapter 1 The Speed of Plot: Narrative Acceleration and Deceleration Chapter 2 Summaries and Scenes as Decelerators and Accelerators of Narrative Speed Chapter 3 Turning Pages and Going Up and Down: On Seth’s Clyde Fans Part 2 Delaying the End Chapter 4 Snail Fiction and the Tome Challenge: What Makes Novels Slow? Chapter 5 Taming Your Time: Notes on the Novelistic Cycle as Slow Narrative Chapter 6 A Matter of Slowness in Comics: Modulating Time in a Tale of Confinement Part 3 Slowness, from One Medium to Another Chapter 7 Music as Slow Narrative in Philip Glass’s Opera The Fall of the House of Usher Chapter 8 Hearing the Slow Mood of Don DeLillo’s Point Omega Chapter 9 Rereading for Simultaneous Consciousness: The Making of Slow Narrative in “Story of Your Life”—and Its Unmaking in Arrival Part 4 Uses of Slowness Chapter 10 Cosmic Summaries and the Ecological Value of Slow Narrative Experiences Chapter 11 Warhol’s Empire: Weak Narrativity and Slow Cinema List of Contributors Index
Descriere
Draws on cognitive and rhetorical approaches to narrative to analyze how slowness emerges in a variety of storytelling media.