Kai Mikkonen

In Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction, Kai Mikkonen argues that early twentieth-century European travel writing, journal keeping, and fiction converged and mutually influenced each other in ways that inform current debates about the fiction–nonfiction distinction. Turning to narratives set in sub-Saharan Africa, Mikkonen identifies five main dimensions of interplay between fiction and nonfiction: the experiential frame of the journey, the redefinition of the language and objective of description, the shared cultural givens and colonial notions concerning sub-Saharan Africa, the theme of narrativisation, and the issue of virtual genres. Narrative Paths reveals the important role that travel played as a frame in these modernist fictions as well as the crucial ways that nonfiction travel narratives appropriated fictional strategies.
Narrative Paths contributes to debates in narratology and rhetorical narrative theory about the fiction–nonfiction distinction. With chapters on a wide range of modernist authors—from Pierre Loti, André Gide, Michel Leiris, and Georges Simenon to Blaise Cendrars, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)—Mikkonen’s study also contributes to postcolonial approaches to these authors, examining issues of representation, narrative voice, and authority in narratives about colonial Africa.

By placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tradition. This involves not just the exploration of those properties in comics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures that has hitherto been overlooked. This research monograph is, then, not an application of narratology in the medium and art of comics, but a revision of narratological concepts and approaches through the study of narrative comics. Thus, while narratology is brought to bear on comics, equally comics are brought to bear on narratology.
For open access, please see
https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/312423   
or
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/39883

... In literature, concems with thermodynamic or electric forces and with the possibility of reproducing consciousness and identity were more typical to the era than the effort at producing the perfect extemal or functional resemblance of a machine to a human being. ...

This paper poses the question of what it means to be ‘inside’ the terrorist’s mind and explore the terrorist’s mentality by means of a narrative, such as the terrorist novel and the terrorist memoir. Consequently, the paper focuses on authorial strategies of empathy and sympathy in texts that privilege the terrorist character’s subjective viewpoint and experience. The discussion operates on the premise that narrative techniques have bearing on the readers’ response to the story, even if it there is no guaranteed correspondence between a certain technique and a certain effect.  Thus,  the  paper  asks  how  first-person  narration,  the  interior  representation  of  a  person’s  consciousness,  and  extended  direct  representation  of  speech, can contribute to empathic and sympathetic effects in specific ways. After a brief look  on  the  ironic  method,  i.e.  alternation  between  ironic  distance  and  sympathy  for  the  terrorist  character,  and  the  narrative  of  changing  minds,  i.e.  a  story where  a  character  abandons  his  plot  for  destruction,  the  discussion  moves  into an extended analysis of three examples where the narrative as a whole suggests sympathy for terrorist cause and tactics. The examples include Yukio Mishima’s novel Runaway Horses (Honba 1969), Richard Jackson’s dialogue novel Confessions  of  a  Terrorist  (2014),  and  Omar  Nasiri’s  memoir  Inside  the  Global  Jihad (2006).
This article was published in Neohelicon in November 2018. Please see https://rdcu.be/5laI

The question of how readers use general everyday knowledge in reading fictional narratives has been the subject of lively debate in narrative and literary theory in recent decades. In this paper, I will look closer at the common claim made in recent cognitive literary studies that the audience's everyday world knowledge is the core mechanism in understanding characters in fiction. More precisely, I will focus on Anthony J. Sanford and Catherine Emmott's treatment of the question of characterization – that is, the representation and making sense of characters in narrative fiction – in their recent work Mind, Brain and Narrative (2012), in order to address the issue of relevant inferences about fictional characters. I will discuss in particular four crucial aspects of understanding characters in fiction that are missing in Sanford and Emmott's model. These aspects concern the reader's knowledge of what kinds of characters may exist in fiction, the role of narrative mediation in fiction, knowledge of genre, and intertextual information. Unlike Sanford and Emmott, who emphasize the writer's rhetorical control over the reader's act of cognition, I consider these aspects to be conventions of reading that both readers and writers apply in narrative understanding.

Abstract This article explores three narrative devices that affect the reading of fairy tales in Carter's novel: the treatment of characters as figures of speech; the narrator's unreliability and doubling into a “narrating” and “experiencing” self; and polygenetic intertextuality, or ...

Project MUSE-Comparative Critical Studies-'It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland': The Rhetoric of the Mad African Forest in Conrad, Céline and Greene Project MUSE Journals Comparative Critical Studies Volume 5, Issue ...

The central question in this paper is the relationship between European modernist traveller's self-fashioning and the representation of Sub-Saharan African cultures, spaces and cross-cultural encounters in the early 20th century. The premise is that the cultural production of ...

This article suggests a new analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’sQu’est-ce que la literature? (1948) by examining a densely intertextual passage in the text where Sartre associates words with sickness. By the ‘sickness” of words Sartre understands not only wartime ideological contamination of language but also modern literary expression in some of its forms. The hyperbolic statement that is, in itself, marked by wartime rhetoric includes amongst its references a satiric comment on Georges Bataille’sL’Expérience intérieure (1943). The aim of the article is to think out the association between the ideologically contaminated words and the literary words in Sartre’s post-war writings. This involves, first, an explication of what the diagnosis of words consists of, that is, how words can besick for Sartre. Second, the purpose is to investigate the ambiguity in Sartre’s statement concerning literary language. The idea of the morbidity of literary expression is another indication of Sartre’s ambivalent relation to fiction and poetry that characterized his whole career. The satiric diagnosis, therefore, is a symptom of a larger question of resistance to literature that can teach us something about the persistence of literature.

The stagedness of the three main segments in Diderot's Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (1772-1779) is revealed via the intermittent dialogues of the interlocutors A and B that comment, contextualize and in other ways add information to the fragments. After A ...

Todellisiin matkoihin perustuvan matkakirjallisuuden ja sepitteellisen matkakertomuksen tai -päiväkirjan raja on kautta historian ollut varsin huokoinen vuorovaikutuksen alue. Tutkimusmatkakuvaukset vaikuttivat modernin romaanin henkilökohtaisen kerronnan kehittymiseen 1700-luvulla. Matkakirjojen kaukaiset ja vieraat miljööt myös inspiroivat romaanikirjailijoita paikkavalinnoissa ja ympäristön kuvauksessa. Toisaalta moderni matkakirjallisuus on jatkuvasti ammentanut sepitteestä: esimerkiksi Saharan eteläpuolisessa Afrikassa 1900-luvun alussa matkaavien eurooppalaisten kirjailijoiden matkakuvauksissa on runsaasti viittauksia romaaneihin, satuihin ja myytteihin. Näissä yhteyksissä yhtä lailla Macbethin Skotlanti kuin Liisa Ihmemaassa voivat toimia koetun todellisuuden vertauskohtana. Fiktio on inspiroinut matkakirjallisuutta myös puheen ja ajattelun esittämisessä. Hyvin pitkässä historiallisessa perspektiivissä tosiperäisen matkakuvauksen ja fiktion ero saattaa my...

Matkakirjallisuus on perinteikäs ja alati uudistuva kirjallisuuden osa-alue, joka yhdistää omakohtaisuutta ja maailmaa koskevia havaintoja ainutlaatuisella tavalla. Tutkimuksen kannalta matkakirjallisuus on antoisa kohde, jonka kautta voi perehtyä esimerkiksi subjektiivisen tilan ja paikan kokemuksen, identiteetin, vierauden kohtaamisen ja kulttuurisen vuorovaikutuksen kuvaukseen kirjallisuuden keinoin. Läheinen yhteys historiankirjoitukseen, matkustamisen historiaan ja kartografiaan, taidehistoriaan, maantieteeseen sekä etnografiaan on ilmeinen, mutta aihepiiri tarjoaa runsaasti haastavia kysymyksiä myös tietokirjallisuuden, kertomuksen ja omaelämäkerrallisen kirjoittamisen tutkijoille.

In: Comics and Abstraction/ Bande dessinée et abstraction. Vol. 1. Ed. Aarnoud Rommens, with the collaboration of Benoît Crucifix, Björn-Olav Dozo, Erwin Dejasse, and Pablo Turnes. Liège/Bruxelles: Presses universitaires de Liège/La Cinquième Couche, 2019. 262-82.

This paper focuses on the dialogue form in comics as a key narrative device, and examines the main elements and narrative functions that characterise scenes of talk in comics. The goal is to develop a medium-specific understanding of the dialogue form in comics. The starting point is the multimodal character of conversational exchange in comics. This requires a focus on the interaction between the utterance and the elements of the narrative drawing, that is, the ways in which the dialogue form (as written and drawn speech) interacts with what is shown in the image. Crucial aspects of graphic showing in scenes of talk in comics are facial expressions, gestures, body language and shape, and participant
involvement. Equally, the expressive functions of typography and pictorial
symbols, onomatopoeia, as well as graphic style, panel framing, and page layout, can play a major role.

Appel à communications 7 ème Congrès biennal PEUR ET SÉCURITÉ Réseau Européen d'Etudes Littéraires Comparées (REELC) Lieu : Université d'Helsinki, Finlande Dates : 23–26 août 2017 Date limite d'envoi des propositions : 30 septembre 2016 Dans son passé récent, l'Europe a été confrontée à des crises économiques, un changement climatique, des interventions militaires, des attaques terroristes et la double montée de nationalismes agressifs et de craintes de perte d'identité et d'autonomie nationales. Notre époque découvre la présence de peurs collectives par rapport à des sujets économiques, politiques, environnementaux et à la sécurité. En même temps, les peuples ressentent un sentiment de peur à un niveau plus individuel dans leur vie quotidienne : ils craignent pour leur avenir économique personnel, peut-être pour leur identité culturelle ou sexuelle menacée, voire même pour leur sécurité physique. Dans ce contexte, il convient de se demander s'il existe une mentalité européenne contemporaine qui serait obsédée par l'idée de sécurité. En raison de son étymologie, la notion de sécurité a été associée au salut et à la rédemption. Telles connotations semblent cependant avoir perdu de leur importance dans les sociétés laïques, capitalistes et libérales, pour laisser place à une conception beaucoup plus protectrice et restrictive de la sécurité. Comment sont imaginés et idéalisés les environnements et les sociétés sûrs – ou sécurisants – en Europe, et de telles visions ont-elles changé au cours des décennies et des siècles ? Ce congrès invite des contributions portant sur les questions de peur et sécurité dans la littérature européenne. Les sujets des communications peuvent inclure des récits réalistes de migration contemporains, ou les récits apocalyptiques et dystopiques dont tout le paysage culturel est actuellement imprégné. Les thèmes transnationaux et multiculturels sont également les bienvenus, ainsi que les exposés centrés sur les problématiques spécifiques à un genre particulier quant à l'approche des thèmes de la peur et de la sécurité (par ex. récits fantastiques, thrillers, science-fiction, littérature d'enfance et de jeunesse. Les tendances récentes dans le domaine de la recherche, telles que la théorie des affects et la théorie du risque, sont également pertinentes. Comment les représentations littéraires créent-elles et modèlent-elles les émotions sociales, « publiques » et éventuellement collectives qui façonnent notre expérience ? Comment de telles représentations, généralement beaucoup plus accessibles au public que l'information scientifique, influent-elles sur l'évaluation de la vie réelle et la sélection des risques ? Quels types de stratégies textuelles et de moyens narratifs sont utilisés pour exprimer l'affectivité de la peur et de la sécurité ? Comment les adaptations et les oeuvres d'art multimodales de plus en plus populaires sont-elles connectées aux notions contemporaines de peur et de sécurité dans leurs manières de (r)écrire des histoires (anciennes) ? En outre, nous invitons les contributions sur les représentations des territoires européens de l'Arctique : on constate en effet dans le monde entier une fascination

In its recent past, Europe has encountered economic depressions, climate change, military interventions, terrorist attacks and the dual rise of aggressive nationalism and the fear of the loss of national identity and autonomy. These times reveal the presence of collective fears concerning economic, political, environmental, and security issues. Simultaneously, in their everyday lives, people deal with a sense of fear that arises on a more individual level: they fear for their own financial future, perhaps for their threatened cultural, gender or sexual identities, and possibly even for their physical safety. In view of this, it is pertinent to ask whether there is a contemporary European mind-set that is obsessed with the idea of safety. By virtue of its etymology, the notion of safety has been associated with salvation and redemption. Such connotations, however, seem to have receded in secular, liberal-capitalist society and have been replaced by the far more protective and restrictive idea of security. How are safe – or secure – environments and societies being imagined and idealised in Europe, and have such imaginings changed over the decades and centuries? This conference calls for contributions dealing with the issues of fear and safety in European literature. Paper topics might include contemporary realist narratives of migration, or the apocalyptic and dystopian narratives currently permeating the entire cultural landscape. Papers on transnational and multicultural issues are welcomed, as are papers focusing on the genre-specific problematics of approaching the themes of fear and safety (e.g. fantasy, thrillers, speculative fiction, children's literature, literature for young adults). Recent trends in research, such as affect and risk theory, are also pertinent. How do literary presentations create and shape the social, " public " , and possibly collective emotions that frame our experience? How do such representations, usually far more accessible to the public than scientific information, influence the reallife evaluation and selection of risks? What kinds of textual strategies and ways of story-telling are being used to express the affectivities of fear and safety? How are increasingly popular adaptations and multimodal works of art connected to contemporary notions of fear and safety in their ways of (re)telling (past) stories? In addition, we invite contributions about the representations of European territories of the Arctic: the entire world has become increasingly fascinated with the northern parts of the planet. Security in the Arctic is not threatened by the presence of armed forces or nationalistic movements; rather, the strains on the environment caused by climate change and increased human activity are raising fears on a global scale. Notions of fear and safety therefore lend themselves to comparative exploration through different disciplines, such as Geocriticism,