The Affordances of Frustrating Narratives (proposed panel for MLA 2026 in Toronto)
updated:
Sunday, January 19, 2025 - 9:48am
Isidora Cortes-Monroy & Daniel Aureliano Newman / University of Toronto
deadline for submissions:
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
To what ends do narratives fail? If narrative is our way of making sense of the world (Herman 2004), why frustrate sense-making? Well-known in experimental fiction and film (from Sterne, Stein and Rankine to Caché and The Stanley Parable), frustrated narratives also occur, intriguingly, in texts with more practical, didactic or ideological aims: documentaries, journalism, political discourse, advertising, etc. And despite our rich conceptual vocabulary of frustrating narratives—“weak narrativitiy” (McHale 2001), plot “perversion” (Roof 1996), “antinarrative” (Rose 2012), “unnarratability” (Abbott 2003; Warhol 2005)—much remains to be explored about the motivations, readerly dynamics and impacts of narrative frustration.