Böcker av Marco Caracciolo

The first book-length study devoted to FromSoftware games, On Soulsring Worlds explores how the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring are able to reconcile extreme difficulty in both gameplay and narrative with broad appeal.

Slowness is frequently seen as a response to modernity's cult of speed and efficiency, and its influence in contemporary culture can be felt in artistic trends such as "slow cinema" or "slow TV." Despite the popularity of these labels, however, slowness remains undertheorized in contemporary narrative scholarship. What makes a narrative slow, and what conceptual and analytical tools are best suited to account for this slowness? Is slowness a feature of certain narratives, an experiential response to these narratives, or both? How is narrative slowness related to the pace and rhythm of plot, and how does it carry cultural significance?Slow Narrative across Media illuminates the concept of slow narrative and demonstrates how it manifests across media forms: from short stories to novel cycles, to comics, to music, to experimental film. Led by editors Marco Caracciolo and Ella Mingazova, contributors draw on cognitive and rhetorical approaches to narrative as well as on econarratology to bring into focus both the media-specific ways in which narrative evokes slowness and the usefulness of a transmedial approach to this phenomenon.Contributors:Jan Baetens, Raphaël Baroni, Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Karin Kukkonen, Ella Mingazova, Peggy Phelan, Greice Schneider, Roy Sommer, Carolien Van Nerom, Gary Weissman

How do physical things differ from non-things-human subjects, animals, abstract ideas, or processes? Those questions, which are as old as philosophy itself, have inspired contemporary debates in ecocriticism, thing theory, and in the interdisciplinary field of new materialism. This book argues that contemporary narrative is well placed to map out and work through the spectrum of the material and the philosophical questions that underlie it. This is because narrative does not resolve the tensions at the heart of conceptions of materiality but rather reframes them, envisioning their implications and exploring their relevance to concrete contexts of human interaction. This monograph is structured around a number of novels, experimental fiction, films, and video games that imagine the inherent agency of things but also interrogate the affective and ethical significance of materiality in human terms. Its aim is to demonstrate the power of formal narrative analysis to foster conceptually and ethically sophisticated ways of thinking about thingness in times of ecological crisis-that is, times in which "stuff" can no longer be taken for granted.

This open access book argues that storytelling is an important resource in coming to terms with the loss of the feeling of living a grounded existence where the future remains relatively stable and predictable. Faced with the specter of climate catastrophe, we lose confidence in the future-a well-documented response in the environmental movement, for example. Yet stories, and in particular sophisticated fictional stories, can help us negotiate that uncertainty: they offer affective and imaginative tools that channel the instability of our climate future and invite audiences to accept its fundamental uncertainty. In all, this book represents a serious contribution to the environmental humanities that brings a flexible formal approach to bear on central questions of our time. Its commentary on contemporary works of prose and digital narrative is an aid for navigating climate uncertainty and appreciating the more-than-human scale-but also the tragic ramifications-of the ecological crisis.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The European Research Council and the University of Ghent.

Marco Caracciolo investigates how the experience of slowness in contemporary narrative practices can create a vision of interconnectedness between human communities and the nonhuman world in an era marked by dramatically shifting climate patterns.

Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.

Die ReiheNarratologia publiziert innovative Monographien und Sammelbande zur modernen Erzahltheorie und zu ihrer fachgeschichtlichen Rekonstruktion aus allen philologischen Disziplinen. Sie stellt das erste narratologische Forum dieser Art in Deutschland dar. Neben literarischen Texten stehen u. a. auch das Alltagserzahlen, Wort-Bild-Texte, Erzahlen im Film und in den neuen Medien sowie das Erzahlen in Historiographie, Ethnologie, Medizin und Rechtswissenschaft im Fokus der Reihe. Die Publikationssprachen der Reihe sind Deutsch und Englisch. Alle Bande werden zweifach begutachtet.

A storyteller’s craft can often be judged by how convincingly the narrative captures the identity and personality of its characters. In this book, the characters who take center stage are “strange” first-person narrators: they are fascinating because of how they are at odds with what the reader would wish or expect to hear—while remaining reassuringly familiar in voice, interactions, and conversations. Combining literary analysis with research in cognitive and social psychology, Marco Caracciolo focuses on readers’ encounters with the “strange” narrators of ten contemporary novels, including Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Caracciolo explores readers’ responses to narrators who suffer from neurocognitive or developmental disorders, who are mentally disturbed due to multiple personality disorder or psychopathy, whose consciousness is split between two parallel dimensions or is disembodied, who are animals, or who lose their sanity.A foray into current work on reception, reader-response, cognitive literary study, and narratology, Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction illustrates why any encounter with a fictional text is a complex negotiation of interlaced feelings, thoughts, experiences, and interpretations.Marco Caracciolo is a postdoctoral researcher in the English department of the University of Freiburg in Germany. He is the author of The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach and the coauthor (with psychologist Russell Hurlburt) of A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science.