Narrative, interrupted : the plotless, the disturbing and the trivial in literature / edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen, Maria Mäkelä.

Includes index.

Preface -- The still waters of narrative: the boring and the plotless. James Phelan: Conversational and authorial disclosure in the dialogue novel: the case of The friends of Eddie Coyle -- Matti Hyvärinen: Resistance to plot and uneven narrativity: a journey from "a boring story" to The rings of Saturn -- Bo Pettersson: What happens when nothing happens: interpreting narrative technique in the plotless novels of Nicholson Baker -- Laura Karttunen: Events can be quoted (and words need not be) -- Samuli Hägg: Pynchon's poetics of boredom: cognitive and textual aspects of novelistic dreariness -- A web of sense: interpreting the disturbing and the difficult. David Herman: Toward a zoonarratology: storytelling and species difference in animal comics -- Markku Lehtimäki: Watching a tree grow: Terrence Malick's The new world and the nature of cinema -- Maria Mäkelä: Navigating "making sense" interpreting (the reader behind La jalousie) -- Mari Hatavara: History impossible: narrating and motivating the past -- Jan Alber: Unnatural temporalities: interfaces between postmodernism, science fiction, and the fantastic -- Sanna Katariina Bruun: The imperfect is our paradise: intertextuality and fragmentary narration in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace -- Jakob Lothe: Fragile narrative situations: Conrad compared to Sebald -- Shadow of a tail: problems of authorship. Leona Toker: Name change and author avatars in Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi -- Marina Grishakova: Stranger than fiction, or, Jerome David Salinger, author of Lolita: real, implied and fictive authorship -- Hannu Tommola: Translators, scoundrels and gentlemen of honor: problems of Nabokov's loyalty -- Brian McHale: Affordances of form in stanzaic narrative poetry -- Gennady Barabtarlo: A shadow on the marble.

Print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Recent postclassical narratology has constructed top-down reading models that often remain blind to the frame-breaking potential of individual literary narratives. Narrative, Interrupted goes beyond the macro framing typical of postclassical narratology and sets out to sketch approaches more sensitive to generic specificities, disturbing details and authorial interference. Unlike the mainstream cognitive approaches or even the emergent unnatural narratology, the articles collected here explore the artifice involved in presenting something ordinary and realistic in literature. The first section of the book deals with anti-dynamic elements such as dialogue, details, private events and literary boredom. The second section, devoted to extensions of cognitive narratology, addresses spatiotemporal oddities and the possibility of non-human narratives. The third section focuses on frame-breaking, fragmentarity and problems of authorship in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. The book presents readings of texts ranging from the novels of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon to the Animal Man comics. The common denominator for the texts discussed is the interruption of the chain of events or of the experiential flow of human-like narrative agents.

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