Poetics of Embedded Narratives and Images in the Literature and Arts of the English-speaking World: Moving Borders

Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (July 2-3, 2026)

Organisers: Françoise Buisson, Fabienne Gaspari and Arnaud Schmitt 

(ALTER, UR 7504)

In 1966, Tzvetan Todorov wrote quite straightforwardly: “Embedding consists in including a story within another oneˮ (“The Categories of Literary Narrative,ˮ translation ours). Later, in The Poetics of Prose, he defined two types of narrative progression ‒ linear succession and embedding (1971, 144) ‒ and then he gave the canonical example of “all the tales of The Arabian Nights […] embedded into the tale on Sheherazadeˮ (L’Analyse structurale du récit, 1981, 140, translation ours). Narrative discourse has to constantly find (new) forms which can embody it; embedding is one of them and is usually perceived as one of its most complex embodiments, suggesting the image of Russian dolls at a diegetic level, and the English phrase “nested stories” exemplifies this idea. This figure of literary discourse ‒ however simple or complex the latter may be ‒ raises a number of major issues about what might be called “the internal organization of a text”: its very structure then, its chronotopes and their connections – in other words the “deictic shifts” from a spatio-temporal pattern to another (David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, 2002, 271) ‒, a hierarchical relationship between its parts ‒ the text necessarily relies on a frame narrative, a first-level narrative into which the others will be embedded, giving it in fine its general meaning ‒, a semantic network of narrative organization entailing the seminal notion of transition from one segment to another: this notion of transition also involves the notion of borders between segments, which can sometimes be blurred or porous. In his Essai de typologie narrative : Le « point de vue », théorie et analyse (1981), Jaap Lintvelt thus analyses the narrative levels of the “framed narrative” which multiplies perspectives. Indeed, embedded narratives also bring up the question of the interplay between narration and focalization, for the very notion of focalization is “open to embedded structures” (“the structure of focalization – that is, of who is seeing what – is open to embedded structures,ˮ Jan Baetens & Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, 2015, 143). In other words, paying attention to the notion of embedment comes down to paying attention to the politics of narrative discourse. 

            On account of their possible complexity, the embedded diegetic strata can eventually turn upside down the horizon of expectations of a reader whose default position often consists in expecting a subject and a fabula that are linear, parallel, devoid of any slippage or break in narrative levels, but who experiences pleasure when it occurs, so as to feel carried away by some playful logic, out of their comfort zone, without losing the thread of the narrative though: in some cases, surprise can thus spring from metalepsis, that is to say from the “transgression of narrative levels” (Lintvelt 210, translation ours), when the first-level or extradiegetic narrator suddenly appears within the embedded narrative. The way micro-narratives are intricately encapsulated is highly seductive, and one of the champions of American post-modernism, John Barth, underlined their mesmerizing effect: “let me tell you the story of my romance with this second sort of stories: tales within tales” (The Friday Book. Essays and Other Nonfiction, 1984, 224). 

Lastly, embedded narratives are not limited to the internal politics of a particular work, they are also related to intertextuality and hypertextuality, beyond the confines of a single text, enabling texts to engage in a dialogue with one another. In the case of some hypertextual relationships, such as those between Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Percival Everett’s James, it might prove difficult to know whether the hypotext or the hypertext is the embedded narrative. Thus, we might wonder to what extent quoting from a text, or more generally tapping into the literary canon, turns the embedded narrative into a “second-hand” text, to use Antoine Compagnon’s formulation: it is then necessary to study the insertion of fragments of these ‘source texts,’ which then acquire the status of ‘secondary’ narratives. Furthermore, embedded narratives can introduce fascinating variations on the nature of the documents inserted into the text: letters, wills, manuscripts, press articles, police reports, are all fragments added according to a principle of montage or collage, meant to create an effect of reality, paradoxically enhancing the playful relation with the textual fabric, a patchwork with multiple seams.

This conference will also give the opportunity to focus on visual arts, which in turn propose interesting forms of narrative embedding. The more or less infinite visual mise en abyme, initiated by van Eyck and then Velasquez, finds numerous manifestations in the contemporary arts in the English-speaking world, a case in point being Vivian Maier’s enthralling self-portraits, in which the American photographer plays with a variety of mirrors to create a multiple embedding of her own image. Whether in cinema or painting, for example, the figure of embedded narratives is often accompanied by a specular desire, a metafictional reflection on the very notion of narrative, as in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, which pushes the logic of the film within the film (see, for example, Karel Reisz’s adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, or the series within the series, the characters in Seinfeld shooting a pilot bearing a striking resemblance to the pilot of the series in which they appear) in another burlesque direction, since in Allen’s film, a character literally steps out of the film he belongs to and later tries to get back in: in other words, a character lost in the wrong diegesis and trying to ‘re-embed himself’ in the one he originally comes from. Finally, in this context, narrative embedding can be literal: paper Russian dolls, in the case of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, a work consisting of a box into which various stories are inserted in different forms, redefining the book object and, similarly to ergodic novels, offering readers genuine hermeneutic freedom.

Working on embedded narratives in the 21st century is a perfect occasion to take stock of the current state of narrative, textual, visual or hybrid forms, by identifying both the function of these nested stories and their effects on the reader or the viewer.

Proposals – including a 200-word abstract and a 150-word bio in English or French – should be sent to francoise.buisson@univ-pau.fr, fabienne.gaspari@univ-pau.fr, and arnaud.schmitt@univ-pau.fr by September 15, 2025.