There is a growing interest in studying narrative discourse as ‘experimental values laboratory,’ both reflecting social values and participating in their circulation. Given the omnipresence of narrative and story-telling practices in public life, from advertising to politics, law, and the media, the need for narrative savviness – that is, the ability to read for the values that inhere in and are transmitted through narrative – transcends the study of fiction. This volume brings into focus the ways in which narratives are informed and shaped by values, and how they transmit values themselves. The authors in the volume take a broad range of approaches to narrative, including narratology, rhetoric, ecocriticism, narrative (meta)hermeneutics, applied narratology, and frame theory. By bringing together strands of contemporary narrative theory that are not often found in dialogue with one another, the volume aims to capture the most recent developments in the study of narrative ethics.

This book brings together several major essays on foundational topics of narrative studies and the theory of fictionality by one of the preeminent figures of postclassical narrative theory. It reexamines and reconceives the role of the author, the status of implied authors, the model for unnatural narrative theory, the nature of narrative, and the ideological implications of narrative forms. It also explores the status of historical characters in fictional texts, the paradoxes of realism, the presence of multiple implied readers, the role of actual readers, and the question of fictionality. In addition, an appendix offers a useful approach for teaching narrative theory. The book includes analyses of works by Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Beckett, Jeanette Winterson, Deborah Eisenberg, and others. Throughout, it argues for a more expansive conception of narrative theory and keen attention to the nature and difference of fiction. This provocative book makes crucial interventions in ongoing critical debates about narrative theory, literary theory, and the theory of fictionality, and is essential reading for all students of narrative.

"Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives interrogates the multimodal relationship between fictionality and factuality. The contemporary discussion about fictionality coincides with an increase in anxiety regarding the categories of fact and fiction in popular culture and global media. Today's media-saturated historical moment and political climate give a sense of urgency to the concept of fictionality, distinct from fiction, specifically in relation to modes and media of discourse. Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons explicitly interrogate the relationship of fictionality with multimodal strategies of narrative construction in the present media ecology. Contributors consider the ways narrative structures, their reception, and their theoretical frameworks in narratology are influenced and changed by media composition-particularly new media. By accounting for the relationship of multimodal composition with the ontological complexity of narrative worlds, Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives fills a critical gap in contemporary narratology-the discipline that has, to date, contributed most to the conceptualization of fictionality"--

The narrator (the answer to the question "who speaks in the text?") is a commonly used notion in teaching literature and in literary criticism, even though it is the object of an ongoing debate in narrative theory. Do all fictional narratives have a narrator, or only some of them? Can narratives thus be "narratorless"? This question divides communicational theories (based on the communication between real or fictional narrator and narratee) and noncommunicational or poetic theories (which aim to rehabilitate the function of the author as the creator of the fictional narrative). Clarifying the notion of the narrator requires a historical and epistemological approach focused on the opposition between communicational theories of narrative in general and noncommunicational or poetic theories of the fictional narrative in particular. The Narrator offers an original and critical synthesis of the problem of the narrator in the work of narratologists and other theoreticians of narrative communication from the French, Czech, German, and American traditions and in representations of the noncommunicational theories of fictional narrative. Sylvie Patron provides linguistic and pragmatic tools for interrogating the concept of the narrator based on the idea that fictional narrative has the power to signal, by specific linguistic marks, that the reader must construct a narrator; when these marks are missing, the reader is able to perceive other forms and other narrative effects, specially sought after by certain authors.

Object-Oriented Narratology explores the representation of objects from a narratological point of view, combining an object-centered approach with specific text studies and arguing for the cultural meanings of objects and their power and influence on the behavior of characters, while acknowledging the independence of their existence from human perception.

Mediated Narration in the Digital Age examines mediated narration from 1991 through 2018. Peter Joseph Gloviczki considers this pivotal period spanning the rise of the World Wide Web through the growth of social media to understand how contemporary media accounts storied everyday life and times of crisis. He uses examples across media culture to show that complicated issues benefit from a critical poststructuralist approach to journalism, which promotes a communitarian ethos of respect, inclusion, and dialogue. Textual analysis of a wide range of media narratives--from a 2012 YouTube clip outlining a time line of the Sandy Hook school shootings, to coverage of then-newly-discovered footage of President Roosevelt in a wheelchair in 2013, to the Cincinnati Enquirer's 2017 piece "Seven Days of Heroin"--illustrate how theoretical concepts work in practice while explaining the new media environment. In response to the lack of awareness of news as mediated narration, Gloviczki calls for journalists to be aware of their role in meaning-making and the attendant ethical responsibilities. He provides the analysis essential to effective practice that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community in order to more fully represent the mediated body.

Narrative Truthiness explores the complex nature of truth by adapting Stephen Colbert's concept of truthiness (which on its own repudiates complexity) into something nuanced and positive, what Annjeanette Wiese calls "narrative truthiness." Narrative truthiness holds on to the importance of facts while complicating them by looking at different types of truth, as well as the complexity, contradictions, and consequences of truth in the context of human experience. Wiese uses narrative theory to analyze several examples of hybrid (non)fiction: works that refuse to exist as either fiction or nonfiction alone and that challenge monolithic definitions of truth. She examines memoirs by Lauren Slater, Michael Ondaatje, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Tim O'Brien; fiction by Julian Barnes, Richard Powers, W. G. Sebald; Onion headlines; comics and graphic memoirs by Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and David Small; and fake news. Narrative Truthiness foregrounds the complexity that is inherent in human understanding and experience and in the process demonstrates the significance of the complex tensions between what we feel to be true and what is true, and how we are shaped by both.

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective traces the impact of legendary director Orson Welles on contemporary mass media entertainment and suggests that, ironically, we can see Welles’s performance genealogy most clearly in his unfinished RKO projects. Author Marguerite H. Rippy provides the first in-depth examination of early film and radio projects shelved by RKO or by Welles himself. While previous studies of Welles largely fall into the categories of biography or modernist film studies, this book extends the understanding of Welles via postmodern narrative theory and performance analysis, weaving his work into the cultural and commercial background of its production. By identifying the RKO years as a critical moment in performance history, Rippy synthesizes scholarship that until now has been scattered among film studies, narrative theory, feminist critique, American studies, and biography. Building a bridge between auteur and postmodern theories, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects offers a fresh look at Welles in his full complexity. Rippy trains a postmodern lens on Welles’s early projects and reveals four emerging narrative modes that came to define his work: deconstructions of the first-person singular; adaptations of classic texts for mass media; explorations of the self via primitivism; and examinations of the line between reality and fiction. These four narrative styles would greatly influence the development of modern mass media entertainment. Rippy finds Welles’s legacy alive and well in today’s mockumentaries and reality television. It was in early, unfinished projects where Welles first toyed with fact and fiction, and the pleasure of this interplay still resonates with contemporary culture. As Rippy suggests, the logical conclusion of Welles’s career-long exploration of “truthiness” lies in the laughs of fake news shows. Offering an exciting glimpse of a master early in his career, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects documents Welles’s development as a storyteller who would shape culture for decades to come.