The Affordances of Frustrating Narratives (proposed panel for MLA 2026 in Toronto)
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.