Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Like Cinderella, many repurposed products involve a biographical transformation, from a tattered past identity (e.g., an old airbag) to a product with a valuable but different new identity (e.g., a backpack made from an airbag). In this article, the authors argue that marketers should help customers infer such product stories by highlighting the products’ tattered past identities. Three field experiments and four controlled experiments show that making a product’s past identity salient boosts demand across a variety of repurposed products. This is because past identity salience induces narrative thoughts about these products’ biographies, which in turn allows customers to feel special. Results also suggest that this strategy of past identity salience needs to be particularly well-crafted for products with easily discernible past identities. These findings highlight a promising new facet of storytelling (i.e., stories that customers self-infer in response to minimal marketer input); create new opportunities for promoting products with a prior life; and deliver detailed guidance for the largely unexplored, growing market for upcycled and recycled products.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022242919872156

A Cinderella Story: How Past Identity Salience Boosts Demand for Repurposed Products:

The idea of narrative has been widely discussed in the recent health care literature, including nursing, and has been portrayed as a resource for both clinical work and research studies. However, the use of the term 'narrative' is inconsistent, and various assumptions are made about the nature (and functions) of narrative: narrative as a naive account of events; narrative as the source of 'subjective truth'; narrative as intrinsically fictional; and narrative as a mode of explanation. All these assumptions have left their mark on the nursing literature, and all of them (in our view) are misconceived. Here, we argue that a failure to distinguish between 'narrative' and 'story' is partly responsible for these misconceptions, and we offer an analysis that shows why the distinction between them is essential. In doing so, we borrow the concept of 'narrativity' from literary criticism. Narrativity is something that a text has degrees of, and our proposal is that the elements of narrativity can be 'sorted' roughly into a continuum, at the 'high narrativity' end of which we find 'story'. On our account, 'story' is an interweaving of plot and character, whose organization is designed to elicit a certain emotional response from the reader, while 'narrative' refers to the sequence of events and the (claimed) causal connections between them. We suggest that it is important not to confuse the emotional persuasiveness of the 'story' with the objective accuracy of the 'narrative', and to this end we recommend what might be called 'narrative vigilance'. There is nothing intrinsically authentic, or sacrosanct, or emancipatory, or paradigmatic about narrative itself, even though the recent health care literature has had a marked tendency to romanticize it.

Narrative vigilance: the analysis of stories in health care.

Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology

In narrative, plot exists on two levels: the plotting of the author, who creates the storyline; and the plotting of the characters, who set goals, devise plans, schemes and conspiracies, and try to arrange events to their advantage. The plotting of both author and characters is meant to exercise control: for the author, control over the reader, who must undergo a certain experience; for the characters, control over other char- acters and over the randomness of life. But sometimes the goals of the author are at odds with the goals of characters. The author needs to make the characters take par- ticular actions to produce a certain effect on the reader, such as intense suspense, cu- riosity, or emotional involvement; but acting toward this situation defies narrative logic, because is not in the best interest of the characters, or not in line with their per- sonality. In this article I propose to investigate two types of aesthetically deficient plot twists that arise from this conflict between author and character goals. One in- volves an active intervention by the author, an attempt to fix the problem through hackneyed devices; I call this "cheap plot tricks" (henceforth CPT). The other results from ignoring the problem, or covering it up, a strategy (or omission) that leads to what is known among film writers as "plot holes" (henceforth PH). Through this em- phasis on the kind of events that makes the sophisticated reader groan, I will be breaking away from the almost exclusively descriptive tradition of both classical and postclassical narratology, and I will adopt an evaluative stance closer to the prescrip- tive spirit of Aristotle's Poetics.

/pdf/cheap-plot-tricks-plot-holes-and-narrative-design-bcbhetpma3.pdf

Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design

Brian Richardson. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modem Narrative. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.219 pp. $30.00 cloth. In the field of narrative theory, new publications are a common occurrence, but not so for new approaches. This is not to say that recent narrative theorists do not have their own insights or observations regarding narration, or that their critical work is not valuable, but much of what has been published in the last twenty years, from Todorov's Introduction to Poetics through the seemingly endless "introductions" to narrative that have followed in Todorov's wake, has consisted primarily of (usually uncredited) rewordings of Gerard Genette's Figures (especially the section published in English as Narrative Discourse) that often do little more than offer more illustrations of Genette's theory, or argue over terminology or small 'errors' Genette made in expressing certain concepts. Yet while it may be argued that at this stage of narrative theory's development it is unlikely that a theoretical work as significant as Narrative Discourse or Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination will be forthcoming, there is still a great deal of work to be done in this field. In Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, Brian Richardson succeeds in arguing that causality, "the single most undertheorized aspect of narrative transaction," is an important feature of narration and should be examined further by narrative theorists and critics (182). His book provides an excellent starting place for such examinations. Richardson states that the subject of his book is "the connection between multiple story lines, the interpretation of the text, the sequencing of episodes, and the casual system governing the world of fiction" (13). The text is divided into two sections, the first of which is concerned with Richardson's theoretical approach to literary narrative. In these chapters Richardson attempts to clarify and reconceptualize varied strands of causality in literature; discusses causal settings and four types of probability that govern fictional world; and moves his discussion into narrative segments, which in turn leads to the longer critical chapters. In the second section, Richardson applies his theories to a large number of literary works. He notes that "an all too common failure of literary history is a sweeping theory based ona paucity of examples" (63). This charge can certainly not be made against Richardson himself, who makes no sweeping claims, and yet gives us an impressive number of examples. In his first chapter, Richardson defines cause as the condition that occasions change in events. He adds that just as modernist and postmodernist narratives interrogate the boundary of fact and fiction, readers must use their own acumen to determine the existence and direction of causal connections (43-44). Of particular interest is his discussion of the "monistic fallacy": characters' behavior that rests on metaphysical assumptions that support a specific ideology (52). In fact, he says, free will is distinct from ontological issues. As Richardson is obviously interested in determinism and in narratology, it is perhaps curious that he does not cite Bakhtin (here or elsewhere), but despite this omission, his argument for cause and the free will of characters, and his arguments against dogma in criticism, are convincing and useful (60). In the important second chapter, we find Richardson's four types of probability settings that govern fiction: 1. the supernatural; 2. the Naturalistic, which includes recognizable and repeatable actions with plausible consequences; 3. chance worlds, in which the more unlikely the events, the more evident the author is; 4. authorial excursions into fictional worlds (metafictions) in which the characters can take control from the author (a section that would profit from a discussion of Bakhtin's dialogism). …

Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative

H. Porter Abbott. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. xii + 196 pp. $32.SO, cloth. Despite the ostensibly interminable commentary that scholars of recent decades have produced on the writings of Samuel Beckett, his work remains elusive. Just as we feel prepared to close in on this French-writing Irishman and place a classification on him so that we may neatly tuck him away in an academic category, he slips from our intellectual grasp. Perhaps more than any other major writer of this century, Beckett resists categorization, interpretation, and understanding. Yet we sense that there is something in Beckett's perspective that is worth scrutinizing and so we continue to return to his fluid, slippery world. In his latest contribution to Beckett studies, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, H. Porter Abbott (who has previously published The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect [1973] and numerous articles on Beckett) does not profess that he has the definitive word on Beckett, a writer whose texts he finds "littered everywhere with the barest fragments of narrative irrelevancy which lead nowhere" (9). While Abbott does not attempt to explicate a design or purpose for these narrative fragments (it is unlikely that anyone ever will), he does provide, despite a theoretical slant that is less than convincing, some informative, interesting, and thoughtful readings of late Beckett texts. Abbott maintains that through Proust and Joyce, Beckett achieved an attitude of extraordinary intimacy with art, and sought to make his work a total ("uncompletable") oeuvre (41). In exploring Beckett's work in synthesis with his professional life, Abbott constructs Beckett paradoxically as the mystical questor, impatient with surface truth, at once plagued and riveted by the idea of a hidden, unimaginable, possibly interior, possibly nonexistent, originary force of being. On the other hand, there is the artist of a thousand details, devoting himself with loving attention to the physical and verbal articulation of his work as finished art. (57) Within this paradox Beckett contemplates (to give two of Abbott's more forceful cases of explication as examples) his horror of fatherhood (Company) and his need for "onwardness" (Krapp's Last Tape). Beckett is always the artistic perfectionist, yet his work shows the frustration of one who wants to move onward. Abbott is also convincing in his contention that Beckett's later works are both beautiful and unjustly neglected. He shows us that in this period Beckett follows the Romantic tradition, creating art that "accentuates his difference" as he finds something "at once beautiful and wise, coherent and deep" (91). This is displayed particularly well in the second half of Abbott's book where, again making use of Beckett's biography as well as his texts, he shows the writing methods employed late in Beckett's career to establish a progression from The Unnameable to Texts For Nothing and How It Is; to create a displacement of personal scripts by dramatic scripts in his move to theater; and to explore, among other concepts, prisoners of technology (Krapp's Last Tape), the social distribution of power (Waiting For Godot), and the reinvention of the Utopian form (Endgame and many others). In Abbott's final chapter he aspires to show "the role we play" in Beckett's works (165). To display the significance of perception in Beckett's writing, he maintains that each of the late plays has a perceiver in the dramatis personae, including Ohio Impromptu, which literally brings readers on to the stage. …

Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph

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Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative

Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph