Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses

14 Introduction
of further revision by, among others, Chatman (1990), Edmiston (1991) and
Jahn (1996, 1999a). Voice has been targeted in Aczel (1998, 2001), Fludernik
(2001), and in Walsh (2007, this volume). Walsh (2007) moreover queries
the story-discourse distinction (see also Fludernik 1994b, this volume) and
the existence of a heterodiegetic extradiegetic narrator (see also this volume),
in continuation of Ann Banfield’s theses in Unspeakable Sentences (1982;
see also Fludernik 1993). Massive attention has recently been given to the
implied author and the issue of unreliability, and even a return of the author
into narrative studies is being promoted in clear violation of what has almost
become a taboo in literary studies. 14 The list could be extended to include
many more issues and critics and a large variety of supplementary proposals
and critical restructurings.
A final postclassical area of research is the study of unnatural narratives,
that is, anti-mimetic narratives that challenge and move beyond real-world
understandings of identity, time, and space by representing scenarios and
events that would be impossible in the actual world. 15 Brian Richardson
(1987, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2006) is the most important representative of this
type of postclassical narratology that looks at anti-mimeticism, but recently
a number of younger scholars such as Jan Alber (2002, 2009a, 2009b, in
progress), Henrik Skov Nielsen (2004), and Rüdiger Heinze (2008) have also
begun to look at the ways in which some (primarily postmodernist) narratives
challenge our real-world parameters. 16 Even before the invention of
the term “unnatural,” Brian McHale (1987, 1992) and Werner Wolf (1993)
devoted themselves to the range of specific techniques employed in postmodern
or anti-illusionist narrative texts. McHale lists a substantial number
of metafictional strategies, all of which are designed to foreground the
inventedness of the narrative discourse. Wolf’s study attempts an exhaustive
description of anti-illusionistic techniques which are meant to cover all antiillusionistic
writing, not just the specific kind of anti-illusionism practiced in
postmodernist texts. Unnatural narratology, in a sense, is a combination of
postmodernist narratology and cognitive narratology. It could also be argued
to constitute an answer to poststructuralist critiques of narratology as guilty
14. On the implied author debate see Nünning (1998, 2005, and 2008) as well as Phelan/
Martin (1999), Phelan (2008a), and Kindt/Müller (2006); on unreliability see also Yacobi
(1981).
15. Alber argues that unnatural narratives confront us with physically or logically impossible
scenarios or events (2009a; 2009b; in progress; Alber/Heinze in progress; see also Tammi
2008: 43–47 and Alber/Iversen/Nielsen/Richardson 2010). Alber’s Habilitation (in progress)
also contains a historical analysis of the development of unnaturalness in English literary history.
16. See also the essays by Jan Alber and Henrik Skov Nielsen in this volume.