Narratology

This essay provides an overview of the different types of study that can be conducted when considering the narrative aspects of video game play. It contextualizes this research among the larger movements of narratology, particularly concerning the structuralist roots of the discipline and the parallels between gameplay and narrative structures. A brief overview of the key points of the ludology/narratology debate is made, followed by an introduction to the three domains of narrative in video game studies: story content, story structures, and narration as the discursive mode that games use to relay the game-state

True Detective Stories: Media Textuality and the Anthology Format between Remediation and Transmedia Narratives

In questioning the so-\uad called complexities of narrative models through the possibilities offered by the new trans-\uadmedia digital platforms, what defines the specificity of a medium, its materiality, inks and codes, along with the effects of the vanishing anchorage of the content in an identifiable technological dispositif, are issues to be confronted. This essay tries to elaborate on a very limited such confrontation, through the case study of a TV series \u2013 the first season of True detective (USA, HBO, 2014) and the ways it rewrites and translates some of the features of contemporary seriality and transmedia storytelling. Hence, what the article elaborates is, firstly, a hopefully productive, however brief, reflection on a language of the text that does not exclude the \u201cmateriality\u201d of the screen or the computer, along with the effects that the idea of contents outside their containers might induce on the very thinking of new forms of narratives and their affects

Prototypes, Genres, and Concepts: Travelling with Narratives

The “narrative turn” is (too) often understood as a celebratory term indicating the growing importance and popularity of narrative studies. This article elaborates the merits of a more critical approach to the history of narrative theory. By discussing David Herman’s idea of prototypical narrativity, the article suggests that there has been a longstanding contradiction between the abstract and universal notion of narrative and the narrow and particular Proppian prototype of narrativity. The article argues that “narrative” has primarily travelled either as a concept, metaphor, or prototype rather than as a full narrative theory or method. Instead of one, unitary narrative turn, the article argues for the existence of several diverse and partly contrasting narrative turns. The recent experiential turn in narrative studies and the consequent change of the prototype of narrative gives a strong impetus for a new wave of cross-disciplinary narrative theory

Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136474/1/ae.2001.28.1.248.pd

Beyond Narrative: Exploring Narrative Liminality and Its Cultural Work

This book calls for an investigation of the 'borderlands of narrativity' - the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the 'beyond' of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of "narrative liminality," which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years

Beyond Narrative

This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years

Death in digital games : a thanatological approach

Analysing our time is an important part of our understanding and modi operandi. At the same time, of equal importance is the analysis of the end of time, that is, the time of death. The analysis of death contains a paradox, since there is no way of knowing death before death, and writing about death after the grave contradicts death itself. Nevertheless, death is a diachronic consistency which defines our presence, existence and, of course, every era, both culturally and temporarily. It reigns over our consciousness and its manifestations: language, philosophy, religion, literature and the arts. Nowadays, we live in the era of digital revolution and are re-familiarising ourselves with many established perceptions of the world we live in and the manner we experience and communicate within it. Death, together with our acknowledgement of it, is no different. Much can be said about how death is perceived through social media and digital applications, but my core focus will be death in digital games. Digital games, as a relatively new medium, and an ergodic one at that, have many interesting aspects that remain unexplored and are worth looking closer into as they provide an exciting field of study. Being one of—if not the most popular leisure activity of our age—one cannot be more in our time than when engaging with digital games. They pose a different approach to interactivity, and for that reason function in a novel manner and are accompanied by new challenges and a need for methodological tools. In this case however, digital games themselves will provide the tool for analysing such a timeless and simultaneously time-perceived idea as death itself. A great example of how the contemporary can not only facilitate the intertemporal, but also re-introduce it in innovative ways.peer-reviewe

To relate, to read, to separate : a poetics of the collection and a poetics of diffraction

Within the context of contemporary French and Quebec literature, this paper reflects on the defining traits of a poetics of the collection. This poetics is based on internal structures as well as on the reading of texts. An investigation of the specific characteristics of recent texts allows me to reflect anew on collection-like narrative practices whose internal structure strongly resembles that of short story collections. The notion of diffraction enables me to define in general terms the tension character- izing these texts.À partir des contextes des littératures française et québécoise contemporaines, je me propose de réfléchir aux éléments de définition d’une poétique du recueil. Cette poétique convoque les architectures internes autant qu’elle prend en considération la lecture des œuvres. Un regard porté sur les singularités des corpus récents amène à ouvrir la réflexion sur des pratiques narratives connexes, dont l’économie interne les rapproche fortement des recueils ; la notion de diffraction permet de saisir de façon plus générale la tension propre à ces œuvres