Narrative, interrupted : the plotless, the disturbing and the trivial in literature / edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen, Maria Mäkelä.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface -- The still waters of narrative: the boring and the plotless. James Phelan: Conversational and authorial disclosure in the dialogue novel: the case of The friends of Eddie Coyle -- Matti Hyvärinen: Resistance to plot and uneven narrativity: a journey from "a boring story" to The rings of Saturn -- Bo Pettersson: What happens when nothing happens: interpreting narrative technique in the plotless novels of Nicholson Baker -- Laura Karttunen: Events can be quoted (and words need not be) -- Samuli Hägg: Pynchon's poetics of boredom: cognitive and textual aspects of novelistic dreariness -- A web of sense: interpreting the disturbing and the difficult. David Herman: Toward a zoonarratology: storytelling and species difference in animal comics -- Markku Lehtimäki: Watching a tree grow: Terrence Malick's The new world and the nature of cinema -- Maria Mäkelä: Navigating "making sense" interpreting (the reader behind La jalousie) -- Mari Hatavara: History impossible: narrating and motivating the past -- Jan Alber: Unnatural temporalities: interfaces between postmodernism, science fiction, and the fantastic -- Sanna Katariina Bruun: The imperfect is our paradise: intertextuality and fragmentary narration in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace -- Jakob Lothe: Fragile narrative situations: Conrad compared to Sebald -- Shadow of a tail: problems of authorship. Leona Toker: Name change and author avatars in Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi -- Marina Grishakova: Stranger than fiction, or, Jerome David Salinger, author of Lolita: real, implied and fictive authorship -- Hannu Tommola: Translators, scoundrels and gentlemen of honor: problems of Nabokov's loyalty -- Brian McHale: Affordances of form in stanzaic narrative poetry -- Gennady Barabtarlo: A shadow on the marble.