“Dear Humans,” Stories: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Postmodern Fiction
Date
2014-04-30
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Abstract
“Dear Humans,” the creative portion of the dissertation, is a collection of eighteen discrete short stories that make use of a variety of narrative voices and strategies, both traditional and unusual. The stories present creative reactions to (and often rejections of) classical narratology as it was put forth by structuralist narratologists, such as Gerard Genette and Gerald Prince. Several of the stories were also inspired by the work of current narratologists in the postclassical subfield of unnatural narratology, including Jan Alber and Brian Richardson, who examine non-mimetic narrative strategies in experimental fiction. They argue that since fictional narrators are not bound by the physics and logic of the real world as we know it, they need not resemble human-like storytellers and thus should not be evaluated using mimetic-based classification systems.
Thematically, the stories comment on the vulnerability, awkwardness, and paranoia of being human. Several stories project future worlds in which humans must cope with environmental crises, the effects of technology, and staggering unemployment rates. These futures seem hopelessly bleak: the animals in Banff National Park are now extinct, little girls wish for iPhones rather than ponies, graduate degrees are required for all entry-level positions, computers have become sentient. However, the characters continue finding beauty in the everyday, the absurd, the tragic. They try to become better humans. Above all, they ask to be loved.
The critical afterword, “You, We, and Other Oddities: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Contemporary Fiction,” presents a brief history of narratology, introduces its taxonomy, and discusses its evolution from its classical to its postclassical phase. The afterword then summarizes the major tenets of unnatural narratology and puts that theory into practice in a discussion of contemporary “unnatural” fiction, concentrating on texts narrated in second person and first person plural perspectives. Unnatural narratology is then used to examine the stories in “Dear Humans,” suggesting the importance of distinguishing between non-mimetic narration and narration which is unusual for other reasons. Finally, I argue for the continued relevance of the field of narratology.
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Literature--Modern, Literature--English
Citation
Adams, H. (2014). “Dear Humans,” Stories: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Postmodern Fiction (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25524