Join Project Narrative for a hybrid event with Visiting Scholar, Luca Diani!
This presentation examines the relationship between unreliability and nostalgia in fictional narratives. Nostalgia is a timeless and transcultural emotion, characterized by the disjunction between a subject and the object of her longing. Although the latter is irretrievably lost in time, space, or both, the nostalgic subject seeks to recover the past through the affective filter of memory. By reliving the past from her present perspective, the nostalgic subject tends to shape and embellish it through a mnemonic process that reflects the modalities of narrative reconfiguration. Given these characteristics, I argue that it is possible to identify a distinct mode of unreliability grounded in the affordances of nostalgia, resulting in a narrative dynamic that I refer to as nostalgic unreliability.
Drawing on James Phelan’s rhetorical account of unreliability, this paper explores the phenomenon of nostalgic unreliability not only in literary fiction—as rhetorical poetics typically does—but also in audiovisual fictional narratives. I distinguish between two types of nostalgic unreliability: the first type of unreliability refers to intratextual inconsistencies anchored in textual cues, while the second type concerns referential inconsistencies that are produced by the friction between the elements of the storyworld and the recipients’ extratextual knowledge. By discussing two narratives from different media—Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and George Lucas’s American Graffiti—this presentation aims to deepen our understanding of the interplay between narrative unreliability and nostalgia through the development of a transmedial model of analysis.
Meeting ID: 925 8218 5611
Passcode: 838658