“Narrative Co-Construction shakes up long-standing practices prioritizing authors and texts over readers in studies of narrative communication and rhetorical narratology. The coeditors’ generous spirit of inclusion invites practitioners and theorists to collaborate on readers’ active roles, showing how the creative contributions of readers, texts, and authors interact productively.” —Suzanne Keen, author of Empathy and Reading: Affect, Impact, and the Co-Creating Reader
Advances a new, inclusive, and varied framework for understanding narrative as a product of interplay between authors, audiences, and texts.
In centering the interplay between authors and audiences as the foundation for the narrative act, the innovative and varied collection Narrative Co-Construction makes a resounding argument for the importance of making space for attending to world-building both within the world of the story and out in the world of the audience. Drawing from a range of theoretical orientations, contributors advance a framework that allows multiple points of entry to a given story and welcomes intersectional approaches, both in terms of the embodied identities of its critics and in terms of the theoretical tools they use to identify the methodologies currently active within narrative theory.
Analyzing texts by Jane Austen, André Gide, Mark Z. Danielewski, Ruth Ozeki, Ocean Vuong, and others, as well as interviews and digital (epi)texts, contributors put co-construction in dialogue with digital media studies, empirical studies, cognitive theories, literary history, literary geography, narrative criminology, and more. This inclusive approach puts different viewpoints, identities, and intellectual allegiances in conversation and asserts the value of making context and intersectionality explicit when examining narrative. By highlighting the author-audience collaboration at the heart of narrative vitality, Narrative Co-Construction deepens our understanding of narrative’s world-building power and celebrates how fictions engage readers.
Contributors:
Helen H. Davis, Malcah Effron, Erika Gotfredson, Lindsay Holmgren, Isabell Klaiber, Margaret Love, Margarida McMurry, Rae Muhlstock, Virginia Pignagnoli, Lois Presser, Alexander Scherr, Siim Sorokin, Martha Swift, Anna Torvaldsen, Katherine Weese
Malcah Effron (Editor)
Malcah Effron teaches in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the coeditor of The Function of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts and The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film and Television.
Margarida McMurry (Editor)
Margarida McMurry is a Portuguese language tutor for the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office in the United Kingdom.
Virginia Pignagnoli (Editor)
Virginia Pignagnoli is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and German Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is the author of Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts.
Contents
- Introduction: Narrative Co-Construction: A Framework for Studying Narrative in Context
- Narrative Co-Construction: A Rhetorical Approach (Malcah Effron, Margarida McMurry, and Virginia Pignagnoli)
- Co-Construction Across Time and Space: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (Katherine Weese)
- Conjectures Right and Wrong: Rereading and Co-Constructions in Jane Austen’s Emma (Helen H. Davis)
- Co-Constructing Caryl Phillip’s Cambridge: The Role of Prior Reading in Narrative Co-Construction (Malcah Effron and Margaret Love)
- Being Theseus: The Labyrinth as a Model for Narrative Co-Construction in Gide and Danielewski (Rae Muhlstock)
- Co-Construction in Conversation with Literary Geography: Readers Reconstructing Narrative Space in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (Erika Gotfredson)
- Social Change Through Character Co-Construction in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Virginia Pignagnoli)
- “Plagiarizing the World”: Author-Audience Interactions and Collective World-Building in Olivia Laing’s Crudo (Martha Swift)
- Extended Unreliable Narration: Vladimir Nabokov and Ian McEwan as Untrustworthy Public Authors (Alexander Scherr)
- A Meeting of Minds: Narrative Co-Construction in Collaborative Literary Fiction (Isabell Klaiber)
- Conspiratory Contra-Plotting: Some Notes for the Conceptual Expansion of Narrative Co-Construction (Siim Sorokin)
- Co-Constructing Stories of Self: The Case of Criminology (Lois Presser)
- COVID-19, Climate Change, and the Future: Co-Constructing Finitude (Anna Torvaldsen and Lindsay Holmgren)
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Index
