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Hungary has the most restrictive migration policy in the European Union, and its discriminatory LGBT law and anti-European rhetoric keep alienating more liberal member states. Starting with a survey of Hungary’s ‘rebalanced’ media landscape, this essay explores the narrative dynamics of Viktor Orbán’s nationalist rhetoric. We focus on the government’s manipulative ‘national consultation’ strategy and billboard campaigns to show how new communication channels are established which allow the government to address its national audience directly, making it largely independent from both legacy media and social media. We further argue that the “immigration and terrorism” narrative of 2015 is designed to fuel ontological insecurity and, like the toxic narratives on gender and Brussels initiated by Orbán, serves a dual purpose: it fosters the centripetal dynamics of Hungary’s nationalist narrative while fueling the centrifugal dynamics of an anti-liberal vision of Europe.

This survey article paves the way for a new exchange between migration studies in the social sciences and narrative research on migration in the humanities by introducing the concept of a narrative ecology of migration. Taking our cue from previous research on cultural, media, and narrative ecologies, we argue that narratives on migration travel through different cultural and discursive contexts where they encounter other stories which either sustain or challenge their significance. Our argument unfolds in two steps: After providing a survey of previous research on narrative ecologies, which we see as a subset of media ecologies, we describe the levels of the narrative ecology of migration by discussing the ways in which different narratives on migration, as well as stories of migration, interact with each other on local, national, and European scales.

The current debate on slowness and narrative offers an ideal opportunity to re­consider the structuralist aversion to pragmatics and context. The article argues that a well-constrained approach to context is possible if we revise the concept of narrative dynamics to include transtextual and transactional dimensions; this theo­retical contribution to contextual poetics sheds new light on dialogical constella­tions in narrative fiction, e.g. the interdependencies between Karl Ove Knaus­gård’s ‘slow’ autofiction and the autobiographical novel October Child (2021) by Linda Boström Knausgård.

Marina Grishakova / Maria Poulaki (eds.): Narrative Complexity. Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 2019 (= Frontiers of Narrative Series). 468 pp. USD 75.00. ISBN 978-0-8032-9686-2

Roy Sommer’s essay “Libraries of the Mind. What Happens after Reading” engages with the nexus between narrative, reading and the future – the resonance of texts in our long-term memory. It explores various aspects of forgetting and remembering literature, including the potential and the limits of empirical and experimental approaches to our Kopfbibliotheken (‘libraries of the mind’). Blending concepts and metaphors from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and narrative theory, the featured article offers a phenomenological account of forgetting and remembering fiction. It introduces the metaphor of “architexture” to describe a hypothetical neuronal trace of our reading experiences, a vital element of worldview curation in a reader’s mind.

“Empirical Approaches to Narrative” is launching a series of special issues covering the wide range of theoretical, methodological and interpretive projects that contribute to narratological knowledge. This issue is dedicated to studies of narrative using empirical methods such as reading experiments, questionnaires and computer-aided tagging.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen an unprecedented growth of interest in narrative and storytelling. While classical narratology was mostly regarded as the domain of a small group of structuralist scholars dedicated to narrativity, who sought to identify and classify universal structures and patterns shared by all verbal narratives, the various new or postclassical approaches to narratology have also been interested in non-verbal and non-fictional storytelling, audio-visual media, and the cultural and historical contexts of narratives. Given this expansion in aims and objectives, it is hardly surprising that surveying narrative studies in general, and so-called contextual narratologies in particular, has become increasingly difficult. This article shows that there is considerable variation between existing attempts at mapping the field, and offers a new integrative model that is designed to clarify the relationship both between structuralist and postclassical narratologies, and between corpus-based and process-oriented contextual approaches. The systematic survey of current approaches is intended as a contribution to the ongoing consolidation of postclassical narratology. Ultimately, it might also facilitate communication between narratological approaches in literary and media studies on the one hand, and narrative research in other disciplines on the other.