In hindsight in view

 An abstract & bio for a  chapter for a prospective book on narrative complexity:

In Hindsight:

Complexity, Contingency, and Narrative Mapping

This chapter explores the narrative dimensions of Big History and the inherent narrativity of evolutionary theories and explanations, especially as regards their retrospective nature, by addressing the implications of the concepts of evolutionary supervenience, retrospection, and hindsight, for a theory of narrative mapping. There is a narratological dimension in cosmological approaches to complexity which has been insufficiently theorised, and some way ahead may be made by emphasizing the narrativity of these accounts, and the role that narratology can play in making these conceptual models more theoretically self-conscious. If Time is the foundation on which complex emergents are built through unprecedented interactions, narrative is a both fundamental emergent phenomenon and a fundamental tool in understanding the complexity of all phenomena—given that narrative is our way of coming to terms with objects and events as the product of time and of complex unprecedented interactions.

Keywords: Complexity, Narrative, Cosmology, Evolution, Big history, Cognitive mapping, Emergence, Cognitive narratology

José Ángel García Landa (MA Brown University, PhD University of Zaragoza) is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). He has coedited a Longman Critical Reader on Narratology and the volumes Gender, I-deology, Theorizing Narrativity, Semiosphere of Narratology, and Corporalidad, Temporalidad, Afectividad. He is the author of Samuel Beckett y la narración reflexiva, of Acción, Relato, Discurso: Estructura de la ficción narrativa and of more than a hundred academic papers, book chapters and blogs. He has been the editor of Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies and is currently editing A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology, http://bit.ly/abiblio —Further information and online papers: http://garcialanda.net  and http://bit.ly/jagluz

Retropost — Backwards

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