DIEGESIS

The Stories of Somebodies. Collective Telling, Seeing, and Knowing in Natalya Bekhta’s We-Narratives

Shannon Lambert — 2022-07-13

Review of: Natalya Bekhta: We-Narratives. Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press 2020 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series). 203 pp. USD 79.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1421-4411

Engaging Narrative(s), Engaging Environment(s). Erin James, Eric Morel, and the Many Faces of Econarratology

Eva Mangieri — 2022-07-13

Review of: Erin James / Eric Morel (eds.): Environment and Narrative. New Directions in Econarratology. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press 2020 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series). 224 pp. USD 69.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1420-6

Molecular Mimicry, Realism, and the Collective Memory of Pandemics. Narrative Strategies of COVID-19 Fiction

Birgit Däwes — 2022-07-13

From Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969) to Jim Shepard’s Phase Six (2021), contemporary pandemic fiction relies largely on narrative strategies of continuity and the familiar, including authenticity or “reality effects” (Roland Barthes), reliable narrators, focalizers with backgrounds in medicine or science, and a structural pattern of what Priscilla Wald has termed the “outbreak narrative.” This paper reads conventional narrative patterns of pandemic fiction figuratively as a form of “molecular mimicry,” akin to the biomedical strategy by which viruses override immune systems and gain access to the interior of cells. Like Trojan horses, I argue, frameworks of narrative reliability and authority tend to be more successful in wheeling in specific normative representations, which stabilize given hierarchies. By contrast, The Decameron Project (2020), a “collective narrative” of twenty-nine short stories written in response to the COVID-19 situation in 2020, exhibits a significant increase in narrative and cognitive uncertainty. My analysis of stories by David Mitchell, Liz Moore, Margaret Atwood, Charles Yu, and others traces various functions of unstable narration through multilayered realities, unreliability, intertextuality, and self-reflexiveness, ultimately uncovering what may be a literary analogy to mRNA vaccines. The Decameron Project, I argue, not only diagnoses a growing unease with discourses of tacit objectivity, but it marks an important contribution to the emerging cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vom Sag-, Sicht- und Spürbaren zum Machbaren? Die Politisierung von Emotionen und Erzählungen in den Corona-Protesten

Anna Nora Freier — 2022-07-13

Protests against the Corona policy have been widespread since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the causes and patterns as well as the structures and dynamics of this political protest remain unclear. From a political science perspective, this article focuses on the everyday narrative processes in protest and accentuates a specific field of intersection: the connection between narratives and ‘doing emotions’. With an interaction-oriented perspective on this ‘bottom-up’ protest politics, it reflects on the extent to which the protest community can be understood both as a narrative community and as an emotional regime. Emotional practices open up a new, productive perspective to look at the range of emotional facets from pride, courage, humour and pleasure to moralising indignation, disgust and hatred instead of merely individual strong basic emotions in their interaction. This is illustrated with a view to the narrative 1. (de)construction of the crisis, 2. legitimisation of the protest, and 3. patterns of protest participation.

Wirklichkeitserzählungen als narrative Netzwerke. Polyphone Erzählprozesse im virtuellen Raum als gemeinschaftsbildende Erfahrungsbewältigung

Jasmin Kermanchi — 2022-07-13

During the Covid-19 crisis, participatory, co-creative narrative projects emerged which tried to open spaces for coping with the experiences of the pandemic. Digital networked media offered a means not only to document and archive everyday stories, but also to create virtual communities. This article transfers concepts from narrative theory such as ‘polyphony’ and ‘networked narrative’ and applies them in analysing two paradigmatic projects: Corona Diaries, an audio-based database, and Corona Haikus, launched as a Facebook group for visual poetry. Though different as to their specific medial affordances, these projects reveal the potential of collective narrative processes to deal with otherwise ungraspable cataclysmic times.

About This Issue

Editors / Herausgeber*innen — 2022-07-13

Five years ago, when we focused on the topic of “narrating illness” in two DIEGESIS special issues, the pandemic was not yet the paradigm of illness that it is now. The current issue can be seen as a sequel to these two extensive and much-cited (FR, NZZ) issues, a reaction to new desiderata in research on the relationship between illness and storytelling raised by the current situation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only triggered medical and scientific advances and technological responses but has moreover left its mark on cultural productions and their reception. The pandemic has been dealt with in diverse narratives. In this special issue we take a look at “reality narratives” (Klein / Martínez 2009) which can be analyzed as “collective narratives” in the sense of Sommer (2009). Collective narratives are characterized by the function they perform for a particular community, in that it is from such narratives that the community draws its collective identity and shared values.

The corpora analyzed in this issue showcase the great variety that narratives of this type can take: Programmatically connecting autobiographical narratives of individuals from all over the world, the Corona Diaries construct a larger polyphonic narrative structure; the Corona Haikus provide examples of transmedial storytelling in image-text relationships. The interaction between the authors’ contributions and their audience’s comments, typical of communication processes on the internet and in the social media, characterizes the collective narratives in these two corpora, which Jasmin Kermanchi and Anna Wiehl analyze and interpret. Based on an overview of recurring narrative processes in traditional pandemic narratives, Birgit Däwes suggests in her contribution that the narrative strategies of selected short stories from the prominent Decameron Project of the New York Times Magazine can be set in analogy to mRNA vaccinations. Finally, from a political perspective, Anna Nora Freier addresses the question to what extent protest communities against Corona policies can be understood as storytelling communities.

Marcel Beyer’s contribution to our new section “Hands-On Narratology / From the World of Narratives” deals with another highly topical event: Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The author wrote his essay as part of his ‘Poetikdozentur’ at the University of Wuppertal.

In our interview section “The Shape of Things to Come / New Horizons,” Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen reports on current developments in the field of fictionality research at the Center for Fictionality Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark, and affords insight into his latest project on the relationship between storytelling, fictionality and sexuality.

The issue is rounded off by two book reviews. Under review are the 2022 Perkins Prize-winning monograph We-Narrative: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction by Natalya Bekhta (2020) and Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology (2020) edited by Erin James and Eric Morel.

Die tonlosen Stimmen

Marcel Beyer — 2022-07-13

Marcel Beyer is one of the most prominent German-language writers. His contribution discusses the challenges of non-fictional narratives while focusing on Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. The author wrote his essay as part of his 'Poetikdozentur' at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal.

The Shape of Things to Come. An Interview with Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen

Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen — 2022-07-13

In this interview, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen reports on current developments in the field of fictionality research and affords insight into his latest project on the relationship between storytelling, fictionality and sexuality.