ABSTRACT: This article addresses the question what kind of experiences the aesthetic assemblages of walking simulators such as Dear Esther (2012), Gone Home (2013), and What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), with their marked departure from established conventions of mainstream videogame design, afford their players. It argues that, when analyzing these experiences, we should move beyond terms such as "immersion" and "agency" in order to explore whether or to what extent or in which way(s) walking simulators afford their players what could be described as otium . Put in a nutshell, otium can be conceptualized as resulting from an interplay between two forms of freedom, namely "freedom from" externally imposed constraints and "freedom for" the kinds of activities that afford experiences of otium . Videogame players will need "freedom from" externally imposed constraints in order to have the "freedom for" playing videogames, yet most videogames establish what could be described as "second-order constraints," with a lack of the "freedom from" having to engage with the challenges of the gameplay leading to a lack of the "freedom for" the kind of contemplation and reflection associated with experiences of otium . As the article shows, however, walking simulators' prioritization of focused narrative exploration within evocative 3D game spaces as opposed to challenging game mechanics, complex game goals, sprawling storyworlds, or nonlinear narrative structures make them particularly likely to offer their players the "freedom from/freedom for" dynamic that is a core requirement for experiencing otium not just in order to play them but also while playing them.

ABSTRACT: The language of religion is typically characterized as conservative, as evidenced by the use of archaic forms and expressions. However, studies of religious prose during the Early Modern English period (1500–1700) have revealed great variation between genres and challenged this general view. Instead of morphosyntactic and lexical features, this paper focuses on another kind of linguistic conservatism, which could be called discourse-pragmatic conservatism. During the Middle English period (1100–1500), the ways of signaling narrative structure changed, which may reflect typological shifts in construing narratives and/or changes in stylistic trends associated with developments from a predominantly oral to a more literate tradition. The most notable of these developments concerned the move from more explicit signaling of the main storyline, involving reliance on discourse markers, to a less frequent, but more varied, use of discourse connectives. By investigating the markers of narrative structure in a selection of Early Modern English religious narratives, I aim to test the hypothesis that the impression of religious prose as conservative is, at least to some extent, based on the texts’ deployment of discourse-pragmatic features.

ABSTRACT: Narrative elements with expressions of affect are found in scientific writing throughout its history. The aim of this assessment is to demonstrate in a socio-historical frame how the scope of narratives changes in the course of time, how narrative elements are used, and how they reflect the prevailing scientific thought styles in a diachronic perspective. I shall relate various narratives to the overall sociohistorical frame, taking the different genres into account. The material divides into professional, semi-professional, and lay texts. Medieval Latin case reports belonged to core science, but in the vernacular the genre acquired other functions. Surgical texts belonged to the spearhead of scholasticism, displaying its typical linguistic features. The Royal Society epitomized the core of the New Science and introduced the novel method of empiricism with narratives at center stage. Late modern medicine renewed the use of case studies by assessing them in series as the first step towards probabilities. In addition, different story types for heterogeneous audiences flourish, e.g. in the developing press culture.

ABSTRACT: Robert Musil described his novella The Perfecting of a Love as a failure. In this paper it is suggested why he might have judged it so. The failure, if that is what it is, is attributed to an undisciplined use of simile. To that end the paper constructs a spectrum of imaginative license, defined through four points or waystations. The first three are: i) metaphors we live by; ii) relative metaphors social scientists live by; and iii) absolute metaphors poets and philosophers live by. These correspond to three ways in which thinking subjects itself to a communal discipline: the discipline of a community in everyday life, the discipline of a social science, and the discipline of poetry and philosophy. A fourth stage is then identified, called here: iv) simile running wild. It was here that Musil's striving for "precision in matters of the soul" resulted in something more akin to an individual's private counter-discipline.

ABSTRACT: The transgression of the boundary between narrative levels—metalepsis—is frequently understood in terms of narrators entering the diegesis, but it can also describe a seeming impossibility: the movement of a character into the author's world. This essay explores the nature and affordances of metalepsis of this latter type—"character metalepsis"—and suggests that it offers a unique sense of what it means to "feel fictional." The feeling of fiction is shown to be closely aligned with paranoia and alienation as characters who seek such passage naturally have a sense of powerlessness and doubts about the source of their consciousness. Drawing on narrative theory and contextualizing metalepsis in Romantic aesthetics, this essay presents a new reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann's quintessential tale of paranoia, "The Sandman" (1816), revealing Hoffmann to have been interested in exploring the feelings of fictional characters—much as he was interested in the feelings of other non-human entities. Under this reading, the essay moves to reconcile the competing views of Freud and Jentsch (who famously disagreed over "Sandman") on the nature of the uncanny. Framed by reflections on the simulation hypothesis and conspiracy theory, the essay suggests that "character metalepsis" provides insight into a wide array of cultural and textual environments.

ABSTRACT: Dance is barely present in narrative studies. It is generally accepted as a narrative medium, yet lacks a systematic study that addresses its distinctive qualities. This article focuses on generic theoretical issues of dance as a narrative medium and discusses its place within current narratological debates. The first premise suggested here is that among the diferent manifestations of dance, narrative theatre dance is the fullest expression of narrativity, with a narrative essence that the notions of plot and experientiality help defining and grading. Taking the discussion through routes explored for drama, this essay also argues for a narratological model of the analysis of dance narratives on two levels: the story level and the discourse level understood as performance. Another set of considerations concentrate on the semiotic structure of dance, showing how it can be dissected in a productive way for narratological analyses. The essay ends with a discussion on the relevance of context and cultural conventions for the interpretation of dance. Underpinning these reflections are foundational studies of transmedial narratology, widely-used narratological definitions of narrative, and discussions of the narrative nature of drama as well as key texts from the history, philosophy and analysis of dance. Three examples of dance—John Weaver’s ballet The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), Kenneth MacMillan’s The Invitation (1960), and Leonid Yakobson’s Vestris (1969)—illustrate this theoretical argumentation.

ABSTRACT: This essay explores how literature can help reckon with past and present political violence by employing formal and rhetorical techniques to implicate readers in such violence. Bringing Michael Rothberg’s concept of “the implicated subject” (2019)—a figure who is neither a victim nor perpetrator but rather enables or benefits from regimes of violence—into conversation with narrative theory and formalist criticism, the essay conceptualizes what I call an implicated reader , a term that designates an implied reader who is implicated in the violent events and structures represented in the given text. In order to develop and demonstrate my theoretical framework of the implicated reader, I analyze three twenty-first-century novels depicting diferent legacies of US imperialism: Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine (2002), representing the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans; Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), portraying post-9/11 racial violence; and Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), depicting legacies of Indigenous genocide and dispossession. I examine how these novels use distinct forms of second-person address—either characterized or uncharacterized , and internal or external —to invite readers to identify with the narratee evoked as an implicated subject. The essay ultimately suggests that rather than facilitating the reader’s identification and empathy with victimized subjects, some works of literature challenge injustice and provoke political responsibility by prompting readers to imagine themselves in the position of someone who contributes to rather than sufers from political violence.

ABSTRACT: This essay asks: what is the value of cross-species empathy in a time of ecological crisis and how can contemporary fiction help along new thinking about human relationships with other animals? I make the case that empathy, in the dominant sense, fetishizes closeness. Empathy has become positive and valuable because it is said to narrow the distance between self and others. I develop the idea that the dominant view of empathy gives limited consideration to how degrees and kinds of difference complicate this view, while disregarding the enduring presence of other animals in scientific and philosophical treatments of empathy. In my close reading, I examine a concept routinely connected to empathy in existing scholarship: proximity. I investigate how different kinds of proximities manifest and complicate empathies between humans and other animals in Laura Jean's 2020 novel, The Animals in That Country . My methodology differs from traditional treatments of empathy in Literary Studies in two significant ways. First, I do not define cross-species empathy upfront, but look to McKay's text to produce new ways of thinking about empathy through the different kinds of proximities (spatial, linguistic, geographical, species) that unfold. And second, I do not examine how a reader's empathy for humans or other animals is encouraged or stifled by the text. Rather, I view McKay's text, as an art form and a critical tool, as David Herman instructs, "for reconsidering—for critiquing or reaffirming, dismantling, or reconstructing" what cross-species can be and do in the here and now.

Character change is an essential component of Hollywood storytelling, yet little has been written about how it is typically structured. This paper addresses that deficit. Through close formal analysis of a small but narratively diverse group of films—Casablanca (1942), The Apartment (1960), About a Boy (2002) and Wild (2014)—evidence is presented for the existence of a common schema, one that is used to organize the ethical development of morally-flawed protagonists. While this represents only one type of character change, specifying its structural dynamics productively extends our knowledge of commercial cinema's narrative norms as they have persisted in history. It also provides a basis for challenging the view, most fully developed by Carroll (1984), Smith (1995) and Plantinga (2018), that sympathy with or allegiance to characters is a matter of general moral assessment. I argue that because the schema requires a protagonist to repeatedly fall short of an ideal morality, one that is always clearly delineated in the narrative, then allegiance to them cannot be the result of moral approval or their ethical development would be meaningless. My solution is to propose a pluralist account of allegiance, one which emphasizes the role of viewer concern for flawed protagonists who, in all of my examples, suffer sustained emotional and psychological distress.

In Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp sets out three major postulates for understanding his corpus of Russian fairy tales: the first is the concept of the character network; the second is that of the participant role; the third is the importance of character action. According to Propp, each separate character fills a particular participant role in a definite character network, where that character is defined not in terms of his or her character attributes, but rather in terms of the importance of his or her action for the outcome of the story. Nonetheless, if we attempt to apply Propp’s plot genotype analysis to a number of fairy tales, including Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, we are confronted by a number of potential anomalies, anomalies that suggest a potential contradiction between Propp’s second and third postulates. In this paper, we aim to solve these anomalies by defining two new character concepts: the first is that of the Cipher Character; the second, that of the Lost Character. These modifications have some interesting repercussions within the wider realm of narrative.