This essay challenges a recent trend in postclassical narratology, namely an over-expansionist tendency, in which even lyric poetry comes to be seen as yet another form of narrative. The hypothesis pursued here is: while some lyric poetry contains narrative elements, this genre is not typically narrative and therefore narratological terminology should be applied, if at all, with more circumspection than shown in some recent research. On the basis of prototype-theoretical descriptions of both narrative and lyric poetry, this essay discusses the elusive literary macro-genre "lyric poetry," its typical features, and their relationship to the typical characteristics of narrative as a semiotic macro-mode, as well as the pros and cons of alleged lyric narrativity. It is argued, among other things, that the content of lyric poetry is not eventful in the way characteristic of narratives and hardly contains suspenseful stories. However, some ambivalence applies. There are cases in which narrative elements and narrativity as such can nevertheless be discerned in poetry even outside ballads, but these are much rarer than in the competing literary macro-genres drama and fiction. Thus, rather than aligning poetry as a whole indiscriminately with narrativity, one may claim at best that some poetry is moderately "narrativity-inducing." Indeed, in the field of literature, when it comes to the relationship between macro-genres and semiotic macro-forms, lyric poetry may be considered to cater to the "others" of narrative, notably description, argument, or the expression of states of mind, including emotions. All of this also bespeaks the need of a "lyrology" independent of, and parallel to, narratology.

Television storytelling is one of the most vibrant, dominant fictional modes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and yet its foundational structure, the episode, has been undertheorized. All television stories deploy the episode in some way, and its formal and fictional contours are both inescapable and distinct from existing narrative theories of other serial forms. This essay is an attempt to provide a narrative theory of the television episode as a form, one that accounts for plot-based episodic storytelling as well as episodes built around a thematic structure, and it outlines a common framework for all fictional episodic expression on television. To do this, the essay considers several key texts, including Mad Men, House, and Friends, and explores the episode in contrast to the theories of narrative parts and wholes provided by works like Barthes's "Structural Analysis." The essay also gestures towards a longer history of episodic storytelling in television through shows like I Love Lucy and Twilight Zone, and also notes more recent developments in streaming television storytelling, where the episode's diminishing formal weight is growing more palpable.

This essay aims to fill a gap in the current research on translocal narratives by providing a concept that structures and defines the typical strategies found in contemporary global writing: translocal narratability. Translocal novels narrate side by side two or more different places, such as Lagos and Princeton in Adichie’s Americanah, and thereby show how places and cities can permeate each other as well as the world of the reader. Since contemporary Anglophone novels are increasingly characterized by a global, transcultural, and complex quality that becomes particularly tangible in their spatial settings and narrative voices, translocality has become an important field in literary research, but often responds to questions of ‘what’ rather than of ‘how.’ This essay will therefore illustrate how novels such as Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames, or Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For use specific sets of narrative techniques in order to layer urban spaces from diverse parts of the globe to create trans-local stories and to make them accessible and relatable for a wide readership. After briefly explaining which narrative strategies typically produce translocal narratability and which three areas of research inform the concept—translocality, narratology and urban studies—this essay provides an in-depth analysis of how Chris Abani, in his East LA novel The Virgin of Flames, employs the palimpsest as one of the most central tools of global urban narratives. This close reading aims to illustrate some of the techniques that are typical for translocal writing and further expand on the concept of translocal narratability.

Frederick Luis Aldama’s in-depth interview with Robert Alter covers over 50 years of scholarly contributions to the field of narrative studies. Alter shares his grand intellectual odyssey as informed by and distinctively different to a variety of different literary schools and approaches. The interview shares insights into how Alter deepened understanding of how language, style, and narrative devices shape Old Testament narratives as well as 18th, 19th, and 20th century literary works and their creating of a complex range of social, moral, and psychological realities. The interview shares insights into Alter’s significant contribution to the field of translation studies and his translation of the Old Testament.

Seeing it as a test case for the experientiality of narrative, I reclaim the concept of diegetic music from film to literature studies. My concern is whether readers can gain musical experience from what Scher dubs “verbal music”—diegetic music’s textual exponent, which I re-theorize in terms of audionarratology. As a storyworld phenomenon, diegetic music is literally heard by characters. However, we can only privilege it over other sonic events of the fictional universe if a specifically musical experience is transmitted across the borders of the diégèse. Seeking a solution to this problem, I borrow theoretical tools from the philosophy of music and cognitive narratology. First, I map three aspects of music—physical sound, tonal movement, and affective narrative—on what I call the “Triangular Iceberg of Musical Experience,” arguing for their complementary presence in individual listening acts, in different proportions. Second, I apply Jahn’s model of externalization/internalization of stories to show the cyclic nature of music’s circulation, which also applies to transitions of music to worlds of narrative fiction and back. Third, my three example case studies of verbal music outline the routes and constraints for readers’ enactive overhearing of diegetic music. Finally, I chart some textual variables to be manipulated in empirical testing of my hypotheses as my proposed follow-up to the present study. The essay demonstrates how “musicalized” prose provides a unique meeting point for reader-oriented narrative theory, intermediality studies, and empirical aesthetics.

This essay argues that the second-person address of the interactive adventure gamebook generates a mode of identification between reader (player) and character that functions not through immersion or presence but through an estranging logic that arises from the particular affordances of the print form. It begins by situating the gamebook, an influential but short-lived genre that enjoyed its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, in relation to other forms of second-person narrative as well as Interactive Fiction and video games, before turning to a consideration of the points at which the forms diverge. Taking Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982) as its example, the essay then examines the ways in which the gamebook’s highly-demanding print form undermines notions of transparency, arguing that identification with the gamebook you is specific to, and reliant upon, the material properties of the print text.

“Cities of My Heart” is a brief intellectual autobiography. It traces the progress of my work in narrative studies through attention to the important places—and people—in my career. My encounters with these cities and especially with the scholars in each of them—Prague, Ann Arbor, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Toronto, Stockholm, Paris, and Amsterdam—have been crucial to the evolution of my thought. I am pleased to pay tribute, however small, to these cities and these colleagues in this short piece.

This article discusses what I call the proxy narrative, a type of narrative in which a key scene or plot sequence can be read most meaningfully as a substitute for a counterfactual alternative that cannot otherwise be narrated. Building on existing critical applications of possible world semantics and counterfactual reasoning to narrative theory, I offer several case studies culminating in an extended discussion of The Ambassadors —and, particularly, of its critically contested final scene—to illustrate the extent to which recognition of the proxy narratives embedded in traditional plots can enrich our readings of even the most familiar texts. Unable plausibly or ethically to depict a renunciation scene between Strether and Madame de Vionnet, James uses the final encounter between Strether and Maria Gostrey, I argue, to enact a discursively necessary outcome that the logic of story otherwise precludes.

Certaine Tales in Sundry Fashions:Social Minds and Hypothetical Focalization in Early Modern Narratives Daniel Hostert (bio) Preliminaries: Social Minds and Intermental Thought In his study Social Minds in the Novel, Alan Palmer proposes a paradigm shift in the analysis of narrative: “traditional” narratological approaches, Palmer claims, have put “undue emphasis” on an “internalist” perspective on the representation of consciousness in narrative, focusing on “private, solitary, and highly verbalized thought” (39). Palmer, however, stresses the importance of an “externalist” perspective that examines the social nature of fictional thought in the novel and focuses on “socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition” (41). In light of this distinction, Palmer differentiates between intramental (individual or private) thought, and intermental (i.e. joint, group, shared, or collective) thought (ibid.). The entities that are ultimately capable of intermental thought, Palmer labels social minds1. Social minds and intermental thought, finally, he considers “a crucially important component of fictional narrative” (ibid.) that should be “at the center of narrative theory” (42). Palmer’s arguments and ideas have elicited some scholarly opposition and, occasionally, even harsh criticism.2 Specifically, it has been claimed that Palmer does [End Page 169] not provide a sufficiently clear definition of intermental thought3 and that his notion of intermental units and social minds is, despite his assertions, merely metaphorical.4 Moreover, scholars have argued that the theoretical apparatus introduced by Palmer does not yield new or innovative readings when applied to concrete textual artifacts.5 While terminological and conceptual precision is crucial and the debate on both important, it is beyond the scope of this essay to address the first two issues referred to above. Particularly the question of whether or not the concept of social minds and intermental thought is a metaphor would deserve a more thorough discussion than the present paper can provide. Moreover, and most importantly, the technical apparatus developed within Palmer’s conceptual framework has displayed a high level of analytical power irrespective of this discussion. The third argument raised by opponents of Palmer’s model, however, warrants closer attention in the context of this essay; it is an argument he himself anticipates: “Some skeptics argue that cognitivists put old wine into new bottles” (“Social Minds in Fiction” 223). Proponents of this argument claim that pre-cognitive analyses of the texts that Palmer discusses would produce readings very similar to his, and that, consequently, the theoretical apparatus Palmer developed is unnecessary. In an insightful response to this argument, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan makes three important points: “First, such a claim has been made about every new approach, including—of course—mainstream narratology before it became mainstream [ . . . ]. Second, perhaps one can get to the same “bottom line” without the apparatus, but the trajectory is not less interesting and enriching than the “bottom line.” Third, the new apparatus can yield a [ . . . ] higher degree of precision” (341). It is in light especially of the second and third points raised by Rimmon-Kenan that this paper takes its cue from Palmer. In what follows, I will examine some of the means by which social minds and intermental thought are represented and negotiated in two early modern texts: Robert Greene’s A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591) and Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare (1603).6 I do not pretend to offer revolutionary readings of these narratives or to get to a new “bottom line.” Rather, I am interested in (a) giving a more precise account of key strategies in each narrative and (b) refining the apparatus, i.e. adding the narrative strategies and principles used in these narratives to construct and reflect intermental minds to those narrative devices already identified and discussed by Palmer (see, for instance, “Middlemarch Mind” 433–434). Thus, I want to shed light on the ways in which experience is depicted as shared and cognition emerges as intermental in both narratives. The Corpus: A Few Remarks on Genre and (Non-)Fictional Narration Both Greene’s and Dekker’s text are hybrids in that they participate in the fictional as well as the non-fictional mode. Greene’s late Elizabethan prose narrative relates fictional or semi-fictional accounts of the crimes perpetrated by some of the shadier characters populating...

Why Medieval Literature Does Not Need the Concept of Social Minds:Exemplarity and Collective Experience Eva von Contzen (bio) Medieval examples of characters in interaction with other characters, often in groups, are ubiquitous. This is hardly surprising, and neither is the fact that these groups can act collectively as groups. However, to describe such phenomena in terms of “social minds” as described by Alan Palmer (details below) is problematic: the concept is misleading when applied to representations of collective experience in medieval literature, because medieval culture had a different understanding of the self than the one that underlies Palmer’s argument. Palmer takes for granted the idea of the post-Enlightenment self characterized by the privileging of interior consciousness. The concept of social minds is the logical extension of this idea: the novel shows a belief and interest in groups having a consciousness like the self. Medieval culture, however, had an action-oriented rather than a mind-oriented conception of self. Consequently, representations of collectivity turn out to be different from their counterparts in the age of the novel. The medieval evidence, I propose, may be better described in terms of exemplarity as a special case of collective experientiality, where experientiality is tied much more to acting than to thinking (and its cognitive bedfellows). Collectivity is contained in and expressed through the exemplary individual’s actions, which invite emulation on the part of the audience. [End Page 140] Action-Oriented Medieval Characters Let me briefly call to mind a number of aspects that are central to Palmer’s concept of intermental thought. At the onset of his analysis, there is the distinction, or rather the continuum, between the “internalist” and the “externalist” perspective on the mind: “An internalist perspective on the mind stresses those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached. An externalist perspective on the mind stresses those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged” (Social Minds 39). Palmer criticizes that traditional narrative theory has favored the internalist perspective (focus on private minds, questions of personal identity, introspection, interior monologue, etc.) and argues for a greater inclusion of the externalist perspective, examples of which include the analysis of social minds, continuing consciousness, and aspectuality (40). With respect to the novel, Palmer maintains that “fictional narrative is, in essence, the presentation of mental functioning” (9) and that readers make sense of a novel because they are able to follow a character’s mind throughout the text. In Palmer’s words, “novel reading is mind reading” (21). The processes of the mind make up the plot: the plot does not consist simply of causal connections between events, but of connections that are causal because of the characters’ experiences that are shaped by these events (“Social Minds” 202). Palmer demonstrates how, in the novel, social minds can function as a prime generator for the plot. This is most pervasively shown by the townspeople in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. Even a short passage such as the following illustrates Palmer’s point: The Doctor [Sprague] was more than suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor which made his neighbours call him hard-headed and dry-witted; conditions of texture which were also held favourable to the storing of judgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill. (Eliot 125; quoted in “Large Intermental Units” 85–86, Palmer’s emphasis) Palmer demonstrates that here the “Middlemarch mind” is created by means of explicit references to an actual group (in this case, “Middlemarch” and “his neighbours”), the use of...