Narrative Virtualities
When is narrative? For whom, in what context, based on what expectations, and to what extent can an object become a narrative (or function as one) be considered narrative, or take on a narrative quality? Framing the question in terms of degrees of narrativity (rather than asking “what a narrative is”) means defining narrative not by its constitutive elements (events, sequences, actants, structures, etc.), but as a virtuality or potentiality awaiting actualization by its recipients. The experience of narrative is not limited to what is explicitly told; it is woven from hypotheses, expectations, alternative resolutions, counterfactual scenarios, and competing interpretations.
The 2026–2027 seminar aims to explore these narrative virtualities by approaching narrative as a poetics of the possible organized around three axes that articulate different meanings of the term:
1) Narrative as virtualization, or narrative power as energeia (to borrow a term from Greek antiquity): under what conditions can situations, events or experiences not spontaneously perceived as narrative come to be seen as such? The work of David Herman on narrativity, Monika Fludernik’s studies on experientiality, William Labov’s concept of “tellability,” and Michel Charles’s theory of “possible texts” – not to mention certain short stories by Borges – invite us to conceive of narrative as a field of interpretive virtualities rather than as a fixed, established object. We might, for instance, examine the cognitive competence involved in constructing a narrative from minimal prompts, such as an image, an anecdote, or even an interaction with a conversational agent.
2) The virtualities of narrative, that is, the possibilities opened up and organized by the narrative itself. Every narrative is enveloped in a halo of virtual situations imagined or foreseen by the reader, declared possible or impossible by the narrator, or feared or desired by the characters. It is within this profusion of indeterminate situations, rather than in a linear sequence of events, that the narrative tension analyzed by Meir Sternberg and Raphaël Baroni unfolds: suspense arises less from what actually happens than from what “might” happen. In some cases, these virtualities are explicitly formulated or even formalized: the various leads pursued by detectives in crime novels prior to the resolution; scenarios envisioned by characters like Emma Bovary; the branching paths of alternate histories or multi-world narratives; the multiple choices found in video games or “choose-your-own-adventure” books; and fanfiction that develops alternative plotlines. This thematic focus allows for the examination of concepts such as the “disnarrated,” “denarrated” or “unnarrated” (Gerald Prince, Franck Wagner); ellipses and paralipses (Gérard Genette); narrative implicits; parafictionalization (Richard Saint-Gelais); and “possible worlds” conceived not as closed universes, but as tools for conceptualizing the modalities of the possible within a narrative (Lubomír Doležel, Marie-Laure Ryan). More broadly, the aim is to interrogate the role of the implicit and the potential in the unfolding of narrative.
3) Narratives in a virtual context. As Marie-Laure Ryan notes, the digital realm offers matrices of simulated stories that can be manipulated by the user: video games, virtual reality environments, interactive simulations, and AI-generated narratives invite us to rethink the relationships between storytelling, immersion, and simulation. Thus, in conversational narratives generated by language models, the story is, in a sense, calculated and negotiated during the very process of its telling. In light of these recent developments, the aim is to bring Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s analyses of fiction as simulation into dialogue with contemporary research on virtual worlds, interactive narratives, and generative systems: the virtual is no longer merely the interpretive horizon of a story but constitutes the native context of its creation and experience.
The concept of virtuality, understood not as an epiphenomenon but as a potential for triggering narrative, thus offers a framework for examining new narrative modalities (digital media, interactive systems, generative AI, etc.) as well as interpretive pluralities in all media. The various contributions will thus highlight the significance of the dynamics of actualization and narrative appropriation by readers, viewers, players, and fans, as well as the shifts and frictions accompanying the sociocultural circulation of stories.
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