VR Webinar: The Virtual Reality in Narrative - Varieties of the Actual in the Scenic Novel

Joe Hughes will present the 4th installment of our new series, 'Seeing Double: Books, Narratives, and Virtual Realities', on 21 October 2020.

Title: The Virtual Reality in Narrative: Varieties of the Actual in the Scenic Novel

Date and time: Wednesday 21 October 2020, 1:00-2:00PM AEST

Registration: Closed

Abstract: In Narrative as Virtual Reality, Marie Laure-Ryan observes that, remarkably, one of the most powerful experiences of reading—the sense of being transported, entranced, immersed, lost in a book—has not received a theoretical or even descriptive treatment by literary historians or theorists. In order to construct a “poetics of immersion,” then, she assembles a sequence of proximate discourses—possible worlds theory, cognitive psychology, phenomenology—before turning to some local techniques different novels use to draw their readers in. I want to suggest here that part of the neglect of this problematic follows from the neglect of one of the fundamental forms of narrative immersion in the history of the novel: the scene.

Scenes are what focus the reader’s attention, the parts of a story they remember, and the moments they talk about afterwards. But scenes were not always the dominant mode of narrative construction. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that long prose narratives began to take the form of an almost uninterrupted series of scenes. The “events,” “accidents,” “intrigues,” and “adventures” of older narrative forms were blown up into deeply engaging, immersive representations of events, strung together along a thread separated only by the briefest passages of summary. I want to use this historical transformation to illuminate the complex formal architecture of the scenic form, to show the different ways scenes draw a reader in and create a space of spectacular illusion and immediacy—but also to point back to the different forms of actuality the scenic novel displaced.

Speaker: Dr Joe Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in English and Theater Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has written widely on contemporary European thought. His most recent book is Philosophy After Deleuze (Continuum: 2012); his current project is a history of the scenic form of the European novel. Research and teaching interests include the history of criticism, history of the novel, theories of media and theories of literature.

Image: Lithograph of Michail Bachtin by Yuri Seliverstov