At first blush, the Gospel According to Matthew may not seem to offer readers the most fascinating or intriguing of narratives from among the canonical gospels. However, upon closer inspection, one finds in it a different sort of narrative, deeply infused with Jewish storytelling techniques.

Narrative is a “mimesis” of human action, as defined by Aristotle. Mimesis is achieved by means of discourse, the combination of expressive signs available in a medium. In graphic narratives or story-manga, discourse utilizes three primary elements: image, word, and panel, with various expressive techniques developed for each. The actual signs of discourse, however, serve only as a starting point. It is by utilizing imaginative supplementation that the reader is able to interpret events, receive impressions, understand temporal and spatial transitions, and grasp the overall structure of the narrative world, that is, the story. The cognitive process of the reader can be broken down into three hypothetical phases: micro-, meso- and macroscopic. This chapter provides an outline of each phase in order to demonstrate the distinctiveness of manga as a narrative medium in terms of its expressive means and the resulting narrative experience.

David Foster Wallace’s challenge as a writer was to try and square the circle of conjugating the legacy of (what was still vital about) postmodernism with the necessity to achieve truthfulness. What narratological shape does this post-ironist challenge take? Drawing on specific examples from his works, such as the jumbled chronology and the consistent employment of the present tense in “Little Expressionless Animals,” the utilization of what I call “figural sliding” in Infinite Jest, the double internal focalization in “Think,” the reorganization of deictic centers due to the metaleptic transgression in “Good Old Neon” and “PopQuiz #9,” this chapter shows how traditional narratological items were reinvented by Wallace to serve his thematic postindustrial concerns and to honor his ever-present need to connect with his readers. Unnatural narratology comes immediately to mind, and yet his pervasive attention to the reader invites us to employ an enactivist lens, thus focusing on the situated and embodied dimensions of the reading activity.

Wallace tends to put his readers in interpretive positions that baffle easy solutions: Narrators are simultaneously omniscient and limited, both “down here quivering in the mud of the trench” and Olympically coordinating “the whole campaign”; focalizing perspectives are fluid and overlapping; the distinction between story and discourse becomes permeable, and so forth. This contribution aims at mapping the (sometimes unnatural) trajectories of Wallace’s narratological reinterpretations while showing how readers negotiate (or fail to negotiate) textual clues starting from their experiential background and their embodied and situated positioning.

This essay describes Bernardine Evaristo as exemplary of a cohort of contemporary writers who are self-consciously pushing the boundaries of content and form to amplify the voices and perspectives of marginalized persons. Laying out in a systematic way the features and goals of the multifocal decolonial novel, this article takes Evaristo’s Booker Prize–winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a case study. We show that Evaristo uses a multifocal narrrative structure to distribute narrative attention and character space more or less equally among a large number of characters, even as she pays careful attention to the characters’ networks of interaction and affiliation. Such a narrative structure demonstrates that there are always multiple “worlds of sense” – or domains of intelligibility – that make up a shared social-natural world; they further effectively illustrate the ecological and interconnected nature of that world. In this way, multifocal narrative novels provincialize the so-called universal perspective without falling into epistemological or ontological relativism. Through the use of a multifocal narrative structure and the poetic technique of caesura, Evaristo deploys the resources of literary fiction to document an obscured Black British historical past while harnessing the imagination to reshape an understanding of that past.

Steinbeck received much of his early training in creative writing classes at Stanford University. Focusing on Steinbeck’s short story cycle, The Pastures of Heaven, this chapter explores Steinbeck’s education in writing--and his resistance to many of its principles--as it relates to his understanding of the colonial history of the American West. The unstable mixture of realist and fantastic forms, particularly as they relate to the construction of literary character, here encapsulates an ambivalent resonse to the haunting lagacies of slavery and race in the California land. The second part of the chapter, on the story “The Snake,” traces another aspect of Steinbeck’s education--this time in the scientific laboratory--to understand an approach to gender more complex than critics would admit. The experiment with narrative point of view uncovers sexist ideologies in the purportedly objective act of scientific observation, thus bringing attention to the process of attention itself.

This chapter is prompted by Coetzee’s longstanding interest in stories and storytelling, an interest that is registered across his critical essays and reviews, and thematized in several of his works. Focusing on In the Heart of the Country, The Master of Petersburg, and The Childhood of Jesus, as well as the computer poem ‘Hero and Bad Mother in Epic’, the chapter charts the relationship between the kinds of story that Coetzee has told – generally limited in the scope of their plots and the number of their principal characters – and the forms of narration he has adopted, which vary from the first-person character narration of certain of his early and middle fictions, to the tightly focalized external narration of his later works, to the dialogue-heavy and somewhat affectless narration of the Jesus novels. In each case, it is suggested that the particular form of narration is related to the particular truth with which the work in question seeks to confront its readers.