Narrative Instability : Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture

"This book introduces the concept of 'narrative instability' in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend's poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text's plot, who its characters are, which of its diagetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite - or rather, exactly because of - their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male, middle-class Americans." -- Back cover Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture American Studies A Monograph Series Volume 305 Cover 1 Titel 4 Imprint 5 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 1 Introduction: Popularizing Instability 10 1.1 Methodology and Interdisciplinary Impulses 14 1.2 The Structure of This Book 18 2 Introducing Narrative Instability 10 2.1 Conceptualizing and Theorizing Narrative Instability 20 2.1.1 Previous Research 20 2.1.2 Narrative Instability as a Concept 27 2.1.3 Play and Transmediality:Instability Across Media 32 2.2 Contextualizing and Historicizing Narrative Instability: Why Instability Now? 40 2.2.1 Approaching the Contemporary Moment 41 2.2.2 Popularity and Popular Clulture 44 2.2.3 American Culture and Society in the Contemporary Moment 47 2.2.4 Clusters of Instability: Identities, Realities, and Textualities 53 3 Unstable Identities 56 3.1 Introduction 56 3.2 Narrating Unstable Identities 58 3.2.1 General Characteristics: ‚Fight Club‘ 60 3.2.2 Identity, Twists, and Pleasure 62 3.3 ‚BioShock‘ 69 3.3.1 Twisting the Storyworld: Narrative Instability 72 3.3.2 Identity: Rapture, Objectivism, and Class 81 3.3.3 Self-Awareness, Reception, and Pleasure 92 3.4 ‚Black Swan‘ 102 3.4.1 Nina’s Swan Dive: Narrative Instability 104 3.4.2 Constructions of Femininity 111 3.4.3 Intertextuality, Metatextuality, and Performances 120 3.5 Conclusion 126 4 Unstable Realities 128 4.1 Introduction 128 4.2 Narrating Unstable Realities 130 4.2.1 General Characteristics: ‚Interstellar‘ 131 4.2.2 Reality, Space/Time, and Popularization 135 4.3 ‚Inception‘ 144 4.3.1 “It’s Never Just a Dream”: Narrative Instability 147 4.3.2 “The Dream Has Become Their Reality”: Reality and Realities 153 4.3.3 Popularization and Metatextuality 161 4.4 ‚BioShock Infinite‘ 171 4.4.1 “A Wordl of Difference between What We See and What Is”: Narrative Instability 173 4.4.2 Reality and Realities—History and Histories 181 4.4.3 Breaking the Circle: Unstable Realities, Popularization, and Metatextuality 191 4.5 Conclusion 200 5 Unstable Textualities 202 5.1 Introduction 202 5.2 Narrating Unstable Textualities 204 5.2.1 General Characteristics: ‚The Stanley Parable‘ 205 5.2.2 (Meta)Textuality, Self-Reflexivity, and Genre 207 5.3 ‚Alan Wake‘ 212 5.3.1 A Multiplicity of Voices: Narrative Instability 214 5.3.2 Omnipresent Textualities 222 5.3.3 “There Can Be No Explanation”: Genre and Media Reflexivity 231 5.4 ‚Westworld‘ 239 5.4.1 “This Whole World Is a Story”: Narrative Instability 241 5.4.2 Textual Politics: Narratives of Race and Gender 250 5.4.3 “The Stories are Best Left To The Guests”: Genre, Play, Andmetatextuality 259 5.5 Conclusion 269 6 Conclusion: Future Instabilities? 270 Works Cited 276 Backcover 303 Universitätsverlag,Winter,GmbH,Heidelberg;,ISBN,978-3-8253-4684-3 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg,ISBN 978-3-8253-4684-3