Project Narrative will be hosting a hybrid lecture given by Visiting Scholar, Changcai Wang.
In response to the controversy over the various definitions of unnatural narrative, a new definition of unnatural narrative is proposed, which attributes the characteristics of unnatural narrative to "anti-narrative causality". According to this definition, a narrative is unnatural to some extent if it is deemed by the reader to be a deliberate departure from or to challenge or subvert narrative causality, no matter if it occurs at the level of the story or the level of discourse. Considering the text's characteristics, author's purpose, and reader's reception, this new definition seems to be clear and flexible and in tune with the reader's strange feeling of the unnatural, which integrates several previous definitions while avoiding some challenges. A spectrum with narrative causality and anti-narrative causality as the opposite ends can be established to discuss varying degrees of unnaturalness. This talk also discusses two misunderstandings in judging unnatural narratives in non-ideal narrative communication.
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