Anticipation and Narratology

Abstract

In one of the first analyses of its kind, this chapter examines how the tools and heuristics of narratology (the study of narrative) might enhance the study of anticipation. It assesses whether narratological insights into the ways in which stories narrate and readers read might enable us to tell better stories about the future and at the same time to become better readers of the possible worlds that such stories anticipate. Investigating the theory and praxis of anticipation across a broad temporal range of possible (fictional) and actual (real) world models and narratives (from antiquity to postmodernity), it scopes some of the pitfalls and possibilities opened up by treating the future as 'storied'. It engages with the latest studies on cognitive narratology, possible worlds theories, and so-called 'future narratives', examining anticipatory narratives particularly relating to the environment and to the self. It argues that the stories we tell about the future, including our future selves, must be open, multi-linear, and multi-dimensional in order to avoid anticipatory backshadowing, which forecasts the future as a continuation of the past and present. Narrative shapes our knowledge and understanding of the world-our past, present, and future. Narratology explains how narrative does this. Narratology has been characterized as a science, as a methodology, as a theory, and as a humanities discipline, combining both theory and praxis in the formal, rhetorical, and critical analysis of textual discourse across a broad spectrum of different genres and media (Meister 2014). Alongside its various theoretical schools (formalist, structuralist, post-structuralist, etc.) narratology has produced many sub-disciplines in recent years (cognitive, feminist, computational, etc.),

Patterns, anticipation and participatory futures

“…Similarly, while science fiction can provide a 'thinking machine' (Doherty & Giordano, 2020), it cannot on its own provide historically robust alternatives to the global crises that we face. Narrative and design fiction methods (Gill, 2013;Liveley, 2017;Wagner-Lawlor, 2017) have been applied in design, and from there, reapplied in futures studies. When these methods are used to prepare effectively, we would be inclined to think of them as part of a "Roadmap" in the sense we used this term above ( §2.1).…”

“…From the many existing approaches to scaffolding anticipation-including speculative fiction (Gill, 2013;Liveley, 2017;Wagner-Lawlor, 2017), design fiction (Danoff et al, 2019;Kerspern, 2019;Raymond et al, 2019) prospective studies (de Jouvenel, 2004) and predictive statistical models (Arslan & Shamma, 2006)-we get limited insights about how to engage together. It is understood that anticipatory behavior can be provoked and improved (Bishop, 2018); and as individuals, we can engage in anticipatory learning, "the general mechanism of learning to generate predictions or learning a predictive or forward model of an encountered environment or problem" (Butz & Pezzulo, 2012).…”

The Future of the World: From Scientific Account to Interactive Storytelling

“…Before discussing this topic, the following paragraph raises the question of the nature of the difficulties induced by a narration about the future. As Liveley [10] indeed asks: "By better understanding the ways in which such prospective reading and narrative anticipation works, then, might we better appreciate the subtleties and processes of anticipation in both story worlds and real world scenarios? Could narratological insights into the operations of anticipation offer useful insights into the way we read stories about the future?…”

“…It seems then, according to these narratological considerations, that the human mind projects itself into a narrative context concerning the future without getting rid of the filter through which it perceives and interprets the present world, built in part on the way it perceives and interprets its past experience. The cognitive processing of anticipation thus involves a complex interaction between the past, the present and the future [10] essentially built on what is familiar to the narratee.…”

“…However, in following Ryan's insight that 'Living a narrative prospectively means (…) trying to anticipate possible developments, and experiencing the disappearance of possibilities (…) but remaining steadily focused on the hatching of the future' [10], departing from scientific methodology to allow creativity to express itself may make sense in a process of rewriting SSPs.…”