Description:
What is narrative? Ridvan Askin brings together aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, Gilles Deleuze, narrative theory and the recent speculative turn to answer this question. Through this process, he develops a transcendental empiricist concept of narrative. Askin argues against the established consensus of narrative theory for an understanding of narrative as fundamentally nonhuman, unconscious and expressive.
Close readings include: Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986); Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970); Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999); Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000).
Brief description: Ridvan Askin is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in American and General Literatures at the University of Basel. His recent publications include two co-edited volumes, Aesthetics in the 21st Century, a special issue of Speculations (2014), and Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (Narr, 2015).
Review Quotes: Narrative and Becoming takes everything we thought we knew about narrative theory, and places it in a startling new light. Ridvan Askin recasts storytelling both as speculation, exceeding the boundaries of the known, and as an upwelling of the nonhuman even in what we think of as a quintessentially human activity.--Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University