Unnatural Temporalities and Projected Places in Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2

Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2 (1967) belongs to his first period of play writing. In this phase, his works exhibit experimental, remote, impossible narrative/fictional worlds that are overwhelmingly abstract, exhibiting “abrupt shifts of focus and tone” (Wetzsteon 1984, 4). Shepard’s unusual theatrical literary cartography is commensurate with his depiction of unnatural temporalities, in that, although the stage is bare, with almost no props, the postmodernist/metatheatrical conflated timelines and projected (impossible) places in the characters’ imagination mutually reflect and inflect each other. Employing Jan Alber’s reading strategies in his theorization of unnatural narratology and Barbara Piatti’s concept of projected places, this essay proposes a synthetic approach so as to naturalize the unnatural narratives and storyworlds in Shepard’s play.

Aristotelian and/or Nietzschean narratology

Over the years, narratologists have established a unitary view of narrative structure based on the principles of Aristotle’s Poetics. I propose in this essay to describe the general features of an alternative epistemological framework based on a renewed interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Through this analysis, I wish to show how the adoption of the Aristotelian model as a framework for narratological research could have led to neglecting certain fundamental aspects of narrativity that the adoption of a Nietzschean perspective, conversely, would highlight. In particular, I want to emphasize that the abandonment of the Aristotelian perspective in favor of a Nietzschean approach can be extremely useful in order to highlight the über-natural character of so-called “unnatural narratives”. I will test my hypotheses through the analysis of David Foster Wallace’s short story “Mister Squishy” (2004), which represents an emblematic case of “Nietzschean narrative”.

Unnatural narratives, Brexit and ideology in Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach

Against the backdrop of sudden shifts in global political and historical climate, our century has witnessed a convergence of turns in humanities, including the nonhuman turn and the historical turn. Ian McEwan’s latest novella, The Cockroach, is a just work along this line. Through the use of unnatural narratives within realistic context, McEwan presents readers with a world that is both strange and recognisable. By examining the unnatural narrative strategies, including the deployment of nonhuman character and omniscient narrator, McEwan expresses concerns for the future of humanity and fear for social and cultural parochialism, populism and anti-cosmopolitanism.

Unnatural London: the Metaphor and the Marvelous in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station

This paper explores allegorical and unnatural elements in China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station, starting with a parallel between the fictional city New Crobuzon and London. Fantasy literature examines human nature by means of myth and archetype and science fiction exploits the same aspects, although emphasizing technological possibilities. Horror is said to explore human nature plunging into our deepest fears. We encounter the three elements profusely in the narrative, making it a dense fictional exercise. In postclassical narratology, unnatural narratives are understood as mimetical exercises questioning verisimilitude in the level of the story and of discourse. When considered unnatural, narratives have a broader scope, sometimes even transcending this mimetical limitation. Fantastical and marvelous elements generally strike us as bizarre and question the standards that govern the real world around us. Although Fantasy worlds do also mirror the world we live in, they allow us the opportunity to confront the model when physically or logically impossible characters or scenes enhance the reader’s imagination. Elements of the fantastic and the marvelous relate to metaphor as a figure of speech and can help us explore characters’ archetypical functions, relating these allegorical symbols to the polis. In Miéville’s narrative, such characters will be paralleled to inhabitants of London in different temporal and spatial contexts, enhancing how the novel metaphorically represents the city as an elaborate narrative strategy.

Unnatural Narratives, Emotions, and Neoliberalism

From the perspective of dialectics and its notion of Wissenschaft (science) implemented into Latin American Marxist Studies of Culture and Media, this article aims at analyzing unnatural narratives developed by authors such as Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, etc., in relation to the emphasis on the emotional linked to bio-politics and post-postmodernism. It studies some elements as the violation of the excluded middle from the formal logics into unnatural narratives, as a means to eliminate the notion of mimesis, and at the same time through the non-referentiality and the abstracted, to accentuate the irrational (the emotional). Besides, these narratives are understood as a means of social control and of collaboration in the improvement of the extraction of surplus value, in the context of the current systemic crisis of capitalism. Also, it is assumed a critical position in regard to these narratives, since, in political terms, it is not possible to accept this economic strategy, disguised as a narratological paradigm, with nuances of social control, in the context of the Third-World countries.

Delving into Impossible Storyworlds of Terror: The Unnaturalness of Hassan Blasim’s Short Narrative Fiction

Many of Hassan Blasim’s short stories fall into a broad category of unnatural narrative. In line with the most recent scholarship on unnatural narratology, this article first discusses the unnatural worldmaking strategies adopted by Blasim that include dead narrators, conflicting events, and ontological metalepsis. Second, it analyzes a set of unnatural acts closely related to the characters’ death and their consequential corporeal impairments. Third, it examines the mentality of Blasim’s characters by focusing on a particular type of unnatural mind – the paranoid mind, which in radical cases involves two conflicting minds simultaneously emerging in one character. By resorting to unnatural narratives, Blasim makes his short stories anti-mimetically impossible but nightmarishly real, which not only generates effects of defamiliarity and horror but also forces us to ponder over what is now happening in the seemingly remote parts of the world and to raise our common concerns for human suffering.