نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

Building Blocks of Unnatural Narrative in Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسندگان
1 گروه زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی، دانشکده زبان‌های خارجی، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی واحد تهران شمال، تهران، ایران
2 گروه زبان انگلیسی، دانشکده علوم انسانی، دانشگاه دانش البرز، قزوین، ایران.
چکیده
Unnatural narratology has significantly challenged the well-defined field of narrative studies by critically examining unnatural and unrealistic narratives in fiction. Questioning the mimetic basis of fiction, Jan Alber, in his influential book Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (2016), introduces analytical and interpretive strategies that assist readers in making sense of antimimetic narratives. The unnatural is possible to be permanently traced in such a wide range of speculative fiction as fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism; the unnatural, therefore, seems to have become a constructional and distinctive feature of these genres. Fantasy writers and critics, however, believe that the supernatural is a defining characteristic of the fantasy genre. Since supernatural elements lie beyond the limits of human logic and empirical understanding, fantasy can be approached as an unnatural narrative. In addition to the principal feature of the supernatural, such decisive elements as the hero, the quest, the secondary world, and the collision between good and evil are typically required to consider a text as fantasy. In this context, the researchers argue that the application of Alber’s theories of unnatural narratology to Rick Riordan’s young adult fantasy, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2005), not only facilitates the interpretation of the unnatural by examining its building blocks, antirealist figures, unnatural temporalities, and antimimetic spaces, but also assists the readers to deepen their reading through Alber’s strategies of blending of frames, generification, and satirization and parody. Thus, an unnatural narratological reading of fantasy may open an underexplored area of research.
کلیدواژه‌ها
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