Object-Oriented Narratology

by Marie-Laure Ryan, Tang Weisheng

Object-Oriented Narratology explores the representation of objects from a narratological point of view, combining an object-centered approach with specific text studies and arguing for the cultural meanings of objects and their power and influence on the behavior of characters, while acknowledging the independence of their existence from human perception.

268 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2024

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marie-Laure Ryan and Tang Weisheng, Object-Oriented Narratology (University of Nebraska Press, 2024).
• Introduction
o Madeleine Project (woman finds trove of objects left by deceased former occupant) highlights several issues that are central to this book
 1. Documents a particular kind of relation between humans and objects
 2. Illustrates the storytelling power of objects. We do not mean that inanimate things can literally tell stories (only humans can do that), but rather, that through their involvement in human action, which they either assist or impede, through their associations with memories, through their travels in space and time, or alternatively through their attachment to places, and more generally, through heir functioning as signs, objects have a unique ability to inspire the narrative imagination.
o “In material culture we are concerned at least as much with how things make people as the other way around”
o The phenomenological and ontological approach to objects
 Husserl emphasizes the connection of subjects and objects
 Heideggger questions what it is to be an object. How to make sense of their thingness
• Heideger has mere things, equipment, and works
o The marxist/sociological/semiotic approach
 Marx sees things reduced to commodities defined not by their use value but by their monetary and exchange value
 Baudrillard’s semiotics: material has being because it has life. Indebted to Saussure
o The material Turn or, new object philosophy (this is the move here)
 Donna Haraway and co.
 Decentering the human. Rejects anthropocentrism by denying any fundamental ontological difference between humans and nonhumans. Subject has no privileged role
 Concern of philosophy must be the relation between things and the human mind, but with the autonomous existence of things. post-Kantian relativism ain’t it.
 What is an object? who’s to say! everything you can think of is an object. humans included
 Flat ontology (deLanda) treats all objects in the same way, rather than assuming in advance that different types of objects require different ontologies. No one object is inferior to another
 Panpsychism: some kind of mental energy, vital force, or cosmic consciousness permeates the universe and inhabits matter as well as life forms.
 Agency of things! Thing-power
 Networks: if things have power, it isa power to affect other things.
o Thing theory, material culture studies, and object-oriented literary studies
 Bill Brown says there is something perverse if not archly insistent about complicating things with theory
 Reinstating the importance of the subject
• He says things are the product of a relation between subject and object
• Thing: “amorphous matter, primal stuff, sensations, pure experience, il y a, grubbish, etc.” these things acquire ‘thingness’ when the subject notices some of their physical, sensible, immanent qualities
• Any object can become a thing. For an object to become a thing for you, all it needs to do is “grasp you”
 Bachelard’s poetics of space—how objects organize space and inspire the poetic imagination.
 Susan Stewart’s on longing, explores the affective power of things with an emphasis on nostalgia.
o This book
 narratology concerned with the role of objects in narrative.
 Narratology has remained relatively untouched by the material turn in general, and by new object philosophy in particular.
 One may ask what is narratological, rather than simply literary-¬ critical, about our approach
 One of the effects of the expansion of narratology from a classical to a postclassical phase has been a blurring of the borderline between a “pure,” theoretical narratology, exemplified by Genette’s work, and interpretation. Narratology deals with the general, an interpretation with the particular.
 new object philosophy, by insisting on the agency of objects, opens new perspectives on their narrative functions.
• 1. Representing Objects: Mimetic Function THE HOW
o Narratology started out as a descriptive and taxonomic discipline. Its main purpose was not to tell what individual texts mean, but rather to show how narrative meaning is created and to categorize broad types of meaning.
o An approach to objects in narratology has two issues
 1. How are objects represented, that is, integratd in the storyworld?
 2. How to objects affect the unfolding of the events that make up the fabula?
o James Phelan 1989 analysis of character representation into a mimetic, synthetic, and thematic function, we distinguish four narrative functions for objects
 1. mimetic, the “how” that underlies all manifestations of objects
 2. thematic: symbolic dimensions of objects and their contribution to global meaning of a text
 3. strategic: role of objects in the plot, how objects determine the lives of characters
 4. structural: how objects are used as connectors between distinct narrative episodes
o mimetic, thematic, strategic, structural 31
o ON MIMETIC
 they can be part of narrative action
 they can be instruments of description
 they can be elements of lists
 they can be focus of description
 they can appear to mean nothing beyond themselves
• 2. Designing Stories with Objects: The Thematic, Strategic, and Structural Functions THE WHY
o Thematic
 objects receive a meaning, either explicitly in text or reached by reader through act of interpretation, that transcends common knowledge of their nature and cannot be predicted
 FETISH PARTS IS CLOSEST TO THIS BUT EVEN ‘THEMATIC” KEEPS DISTANCE THAT’S NOT HELPFUL
o Strategic
 operate on global narrative level or on relatively autonomous episodes
o Structural
 a type of strategic function, in that it contributes to the logical motivation of the plot. But it links together distinct episodes rather than working within an episode or plot as a whole
• 3. Experiencing Otherness: Rick Bass’s Deep Ecolohy Narratives
o explores the possibility of telling a story with a ‘flat ontology’ through a close reading of Rick Bass’ environmentally themed stories.
o Humans are depicted as animals, and animals cautiously invetsed with human-like feelings.
o In the moment of their encounter, humans and animals stare at each other without subjugating one party to the other: they are distinct, yet they belong, on equal footing, to the common natural world. This narrative strategy of cautious anthropomorphism, which gives “feelings” or “sentience” to all things while maintaining their differences, captures the essence of flat ontology.
• 4.
o Poe’s thing power in House of Usher. Every element of a story conveys a single [emotional] effect
• 5, 6, 7 focus on how material objects are experienced by characters
o 5: banal, everyday objects that inspire radically different experiences
o 6: excessive humanization (erotic fetishism, by which objects capture for a lover the presence of a loved one) and radical dehumanization.
o 7: Proliferation of commodities that characterizes capitalism
• 8: Enchantment of things: objects in classic Chinese literature
• 9. Things telling stories (visual)
• Conclusion
o Types of narratology
 Formal (genette)
• It consists of cataloging and describing the various discourse strategies used to tell stories, including narrator types, ways of reproducing dialogue, representations of mental processes, variations in speed of narration, types of focalization, disruptions of chronological order, and modes of description.
• formal approaches will consequently have to focus on the many functions a given form can fulfill rather than limiting themselves to the analysis of this form in a single work.
 Methodological
• investigating narrative from the pov of a well-defined theoretical model that explains the nature, formation, and use of narrative meaning.
 Ideological
• Derives it identity from the kinds of issues being involved in the text and is therefore much more interpretive
• A matter of content rather than form
 Phenomenological
• Asks whether narrative can be a truthful representation of life or history. whether life experience is inherently narrative, how it is affected by dominant cultural narratives, whether memory necessarily takes narrative form, what is the relation between narrative and sensemaking, and what role does narrative play in the construction of identity and reality
 Object oriented narratology does not fit into any of these categories
• Objects are not indispensable component of narrative.