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Journal Article
Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art-Cinema Narration
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Poetics Today (2013) 34 (1-2): 119–146.
Published: 01 June 2013
... outcome in the end that calls for a distinct reviewing — as in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense , David Fincher’s Fight Club , and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige . After problematizing recent work on complex storytelling in film studies, this article analyzes mind-tricking narratives in greater...
Journal Article
Kept in the Loop: Narrative Play and Epistemic Emotions
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Poetics Today (2025) 46 (1): 29–52.
Published: 01 March 2025
... challenging time-loop fiction. Following the logic of narrative complexity hypothesis, looping moments in the story would destabilize the indices of narrative comprehension, resulting in feelings of confusion in the audience. The experiment's results seem to support such a hypothesis: during loop 1, 2...
FIGURES
Journal Article
Narrative and Emergent Behavior
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Poetics Today (2008) 29 (2): 227–244.
Published: 01 June 2008
...H. Porter Abbott The difficulty of understanding emergent behavior is usually attributed to our need to see in it the operation of some kind of centralized control where there is in fact none (Keller 1985, Resnick 1994). Yet as a species, we seem to have little difficulty with complex narratives...
Journal Article
The Inferential Semantics of Comics: Panels and Their Meanings
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Poetics Today (2019) 40 (2): 215–234.
Published: 01 June 2019
...Janina Wildfeuer As a multimodally complex medium, graphic narratives have long been approached from a semiotic perspective, though the latter’s focus on general decoding mechanisms for reading meaning out of signs has increasingly come under criticism. Only recently has the applicability...
Journal Article
Narrating the Future: A World-Literary Take on the Crisis of Imagination and the Novel
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Poetics Today (2023) 44 (3): 463–486.
Published: 01 September 2023
... from its core regions to the semi-periphery. Reframing the problem of the future as that of collective action rather than of complexity, the author proposes that the perceived failure of narrative imagination is, in fact, an expression of the generic limits of the novel, limits that are particularly...
FIGURES
Journal Article
Joint Attention, Semiotic Mediation, and Literary Narrative
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Poetics Today (2016) 37 (4): 517–538.
Published: 01 December 2016
... that are obscured by classical semiotics. Joint attention offers affordances for quasirecursive recontextualization, since the object of joint attention may consist of another act of joint attention: literary narrative can create complex joint attentional structures by which the story is “seen” through nested...
Journal Article
From Words to Worldview: Framing Narrative Genres
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Poetics Today (2017) 38 (2): 363–391.
Published: 01 June 2017
... Lakoff 's theory of the multiple levels of framing in discourse, concentrating on the interplay of argument and narrative frames. Studies of emotion and mood in narrative genres are adapted to refine Lakoff's account of narrative, making it more complex, systematic, and sensitive to historical context...
Journal Article
Small Stories in Charity Fundraising Letters and the Ethics of Interwoven Individualism
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Poetics Today (2022) 43 (2): 219–241.
Published: 01 June 2022
..., and in the individualized appeal to the addressee. It discusses the tensions between the charitable organization and the addressee as competing contenders for the archetypal role of the “hero” in the narrative of the victim/beneficiary, and reflects on the ways in which the complex narratives of supraindividual social...
Journal Article
Narrative Universals, Emotion, and Ethics
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Poetics Today (2020) 41 (2): 187–204.
Published: 01 June 2020
... and general principles of emotion modulation and involve ideals that are both hedonic and ethical. We may better understand the complex relations among narrative, emotion, and morality in terms of these story universals, their sources in emotion systems, and their associated ideals, which collectively predict...
Journal Article
A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction
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Poetics Today (2004) 25 (3): 399–436.
Published: 01 September 2004
... circumstances. In complex representations, the central aspect is
cognitive and involves a recognition scene in which the estranged characters discover
each other’s identity. An analysis of this narrative core of the coincidence plot centers...
Journal Article
Holding Hands: Intergenerational Desire in Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock and Ali Smith's Autumn
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Poetics Today (2023) 44 (1-2): 131–156.
Published: 01 June 2023
...Vanessa Joosen Abstract Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (1984) and Ali Smith's Autumn (2016) are two British novels that evoke an intense friendship between a girl and an older man. Their experimental narrative forms include a complex chronology, unreliable narrator, dream scenes, gaps...
Journal Article
Funny Fiction; Or, Jokes and Their Relation to the Humorous Novel
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Poetics Today (2005) 26 (1): 79–111.
Published: 01 March 2005
... and almost invariably considered low-class
literature. For ‘‘good’’ literature, according to Relevance Theory, is characterized by
a complexity and multiplicity of contextual effects produced fundamentally by way
of weak implicature.
In this article I put forward some ideas about the narrative...
Journal Article
Event: From Object to Schema to System
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Poetics Today (2018) 39 (3): 543–567.
Published: 01 September 2018
... of unnatural narrative (types most generally accepted as unnatural), the “event-as-system” concept is shown to be versatile in dealing with complex, problematic event types, including cases where events are posited and then negated, or proposed and then continuously revised— cases that problematize notions...
Journal Article
Implied Author, Overall Consideration, and Subtext of “Désirée's Baby”
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Poetics Today (2010) 31 (2): 285–311.
Published: 01 June 2010
... whites versus inferior blacks. This implied racist stance reflects the historical context of Chopin's personal experiences, but it contrasts with the quite different racial stances of the implied authors of some other Chopin narratives with different thematic designs. The complexity of the narratives...
Journal Article
Milan Kundera and the Poetics of Novelistic Truth
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Poetics Today (2015) 36 (3): 175–200.
Published: 01 September 2015
... statements and propositions. The fact that narrative operation often implies a poetics of truth telling makes literary narratives—and complex novels, above all—a privileged genre for conveying insights about life and the world, especially at a time when we no longer believe in one absolute truth universally...
Journal Article
The Future-as-Past in Dystopian Fiction
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Poetics Today (2016) 37 (3): 415–442.
Published: 01 September 2016
....
In this essay I explore the development of the complex temporality of
dystopian fiction from the early to the mid-twentieth century. The novelty
of my approach lies in my concern for how narrative structure is generative
of the political content of these novels. I pay especially close attention...
Journal Article
Editing Textual Synergies: New Historicism and “New Textualism”
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Poetics Today (2014) 35 (4): 591–613.
Published: 01 December 2014
... Today 35:4
the extensive, changing items in the paratextual apparatus published in the
successive editions alongside contextual material (e.g., letters from and to
More). On the basis of this material, it is possible to infer a complex genetic
narrative that will reveal the intense social...
Journal Article
Time Travel Stories as a Challenge to Narratology: The Case of The Time Traveler's Wife
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Poetics Today (2015) 36 (4): 529–560.
Published: 01 December 2015
..., the first episode (following the prologue), which
coextends with the section “First Date, One,” plays an important role in
establishing the reality model by virtue of its primacy effect; it also illustrates
well the complexities of the novel’s temporal scheme and the effects of
narrative interest...
Journal Article
Tropes of Jewish Humor in Women-Led Digital Streaming Productions (2010 – 2019)
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Poetics Today (2024) 45 (3): 435–469.
Published: 01 September 2024
.... Viewers can pause, rewatch, and look up references on the internet or continue to the next quick succession of jokes. Thus, digital streaming content creators can produce more complex narratives embedded with intertextual references. Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend brought the narrative tropes...
Journal Article
Interart Narrative: (Un)Reliability and Ekphrasis
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Poetics Today (2000) 21 (4): 711–749.
Published: 01 December 2000
... with those
of managing a quote within a quote. Semiotic and perspectival complexities arise
The first version of this article was presented in a session titled ‘‘The Unreliable Narrator
Revisited’’ during the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature conference at Dartmouth
College, April May , My...
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