Organized by Isidora Cortes-Monroy and Daniel Aureliano Newman
To what ends do narratives fail? If narrative is our way of making sense of the world, why frustrate sense-making? Well-known in experimental fiction and film (from Sterne, Stein and Rankine to Caché and The Stanley Parable), frustrated narratives also occur, intriguingly, in texts with more practical, didactic or ideological aims: documentaries, journalism, political discourse, advertising, etc. And despite our rich conceptual vocabulary of frustrating narratives—“weak narrativitiy,” “slow narrative,” “recalcitrant digression,” “antinarrative,” and “unnarratability”—much remains to be explored about the motivations, mechanics, impacts and uses of such strategies and techniques. What is needed, we argue, is attention to the tangible effects and possibilities created by various forms of narrative frustration, an attention that goes beyond the easy equation of anti-narrative with heterodoxy or disruption.
The papers in this proposed panel therefore ask how, when and why texts of various genres, modes and media disrupt, impede or deny narrativity. How do the creators of these texts exploit the affordances of narrative failure? What might these gaps reveal about narrative as a “tool” for sense-making, or as a prompt for action, reflection and other responses?
The four presentations represent a wide range of voices, featuring speakers from a variety of disciplinary, institutional and geographic contexts, representing various career stages (doctoral student, postdoc, new faculty, established faculty). The papers themselves tackle diverse genres, media, and national and aesthetic traditions, from genre fiction to modernism, video games to documentary film. Each presentation, described below, will last 15 minutes, leaving a good amount of time for discussion amongst presenters and between them and the audience. One of the potential outcomes of the panel is to generate interest and forge connections between disciplines and institutions for further collaborations on the topic of the affordances of frustrating narratives.
In “The Life of the Mind, the Stuff of the World: Greg Egan’s Recalcitrant Novels of Science,” Simona Bartolotta investigates how Greg Egan’s science-fiction novels Incandescence (2008) and Clockwork Rocket (2011) downplay traditional narrative elements (character, plot, suspense, etc.) to an extreme degree in order to stage the drama of the unfolding universe: the beauty of the cosmos and of the process of its discovery merely for their own sake. Bartolotta demonstrates how Egan’s novels, by discarding the “human interest” of their narratives in favor of the staging of scientific investigations, problematize the efficacy of our current narratological tools.
Video games have been said to compromise between narrative and gameplay. In “Frustration and Interpretation in Video Game Narratives,” Marco Caracciolo argues that this compromise can produce unique forms of frustration: in games, narrative progression can be disrupted, decelerated, or obfuscated in ways that have no equivalent in non-interactive media. Discussing examples including the convoluted puzzles of point-and-click adventure games and the obscure narratives of the “Soulslike” genre, Caracciolo highlights how this frustration prompts a shift from mimetic to thematic ways of reading, in James Phelan's terminology, and how it often results in distinctive interpretive practices (for instance, in online platforms where the vague stories of Soulslike games are turned into fan fictions).
In “The Texture of Extraction: The Affordances of Slowness in Anti-Extractivist Documentary,” Isidora Cortes-Monroy explores the use of slow narrative in anti-extractivist documentaries in Latin America, such as Surire. Reading such films as responses to more traditional activist documentaries, she argues that these slow films’ use of the observational mode challenges the ontologies of landscape and the neat boundaries it draws around and inside of the extractive zone. By exploring the affordances of documentaries that resist teleological narratives, Cortes-Monroy argues for a rethinking of the representational possibilities of anti-extractivist documentary that go beyond an instrumentalist approach.
Marius-Virgil Florea’s “Narrative Disintegration as Cultural Semiotics: Absurdist Strategies in Romanian Modernist Literature” reinterprets modernist Romanian literature through the lens of radical narrative disintegration. Analyzing works by Urmuz, Tzara, Ionesco, and Caragiale, he identifies an "autoimmune literary strategy” where intentional narrative collapse paradoxically sustains cultural resilience. The authors' absurdist techniques—anti-climaxes, recursive dialogues, and structural ruptures—emerge not as mere aesthetic rebellion but as coded responses to Romania's dual identity crisis: torn between Western modernity and Balkan heritage. Florea reveals how geographically marginalized cultures transform modernist paradigms into tools of geopolitical self-fashioning, offering fresh methodologies for analyzing literature at civilization's crossroads.