The Artifactuality of Narrative Form

Abstract

From what we know about the history of the novel, it seems consensual that certain periods have preferred narrative postures: the eighteenth century is the heyday of the firstperson novel; in the nineteenth, thirdperson "omniscience" holds sway, until the reintroduction of the first person -often through new methods such as the interior monologue -in the Modernist novel. How are we to explain the "systemic" dominance of narrative forms? Some strands of literary criticism skirt the question entirely. It doesn't come up if one seeks to articulate narrative form primarily with the choice of the individual writer who, in pursuit of a specific aesthetic goal, weighs the resources and disadvantages of each mode. 1 And it probably goes without saying that the formalist and synchronic orientation of most narratology resists devoting attention to such historical clustering. 2 By contrast, narrative personhood is of much more interest to the ideological criticism that has dominated literary studies for many decades -the very job of such criticism being to map cultural practices onto sociohistorical mutations. To give a schematic idea of possible explanations in this vein: the popularity of the firstperson novel in the 1 "[Stevenson] spoke of his habitual inclination towards the story told in the first person as though it were a chance preference, and he may not have perceived how logically it followed from the subjects that mostly attracted him" (Lubbock 1921: 218). Writing of the narrative transformation of the initial firstperson version of The Castle, Dorrit Cohn comments, "Kafka would surely not have bothered to make this laborious change in midstream, had he thought that it was of no consequence to his fiction. More or less consciously he must have known that there were advantages to the K. over the I…" (1978: 171). 2 Monika Fludernik's work is an obvious exception; see especially Fludernik 2003.

Why imaginary worlds? The psychological foundations and cultural evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds

“…At the same time, fictions are definitely artificial. Hence, it is probably more appropriate to say that fictions (e.g., novels, films, video games) are a kind of cultural technology primarily designed for entertainment N. Paige, 2018;N.…”