Narrative and Becoming

What is narrative? Ridvan Askin answers this question by bringing together aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, Gilles Deleuze, narrative theory and the recent speculative turn. Through this process he develops a transcendental empiricist concept of narrative. Against the established consensus of narrative theory he argues for an understanding of narrative as fundamentally nonhuman, unconscious and expressive. Narrative and Becoming provides close readings of a number of contemporary North American fictions, most prominently Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), showcasing their genuine metaphysical quality.