Richard Walsh

Profile

Biography

Richard Walsh came to York from a Research Fellowship at Cambridge, where he worked on innovative American literature, publishing Radical Theatre (1993) and Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction (1995). His research on innovative fiction then extended to a theoretical interest in fictionality within the context of narrative theory, and he is now primarily known as a narrative theorist. Much of his work in this field has retained a strong literary focus, while articulating a fundamental critique of some basic concepts and assumptions in narratology: the narrator, story and discourse, mimesis, voice, emotional involvement, narrative creativity and fictionality itself—see The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007). In this literary vein of research he has also co-edited volumes of essays on Narratology and Ideology (2018) and Fictionality in Literature (2022), as well as a special issue of Style on “Fictionality as Rhetoric” (2020).

His engagement with narrative theory, however, is increasingly interdisciplinary in scope. The study of narrative inherently transcends media and disciplinary boundaries, and his research has extended to film, graphic narrative, interactive media, AI, scientific narratives, narrative selfhood, music and dreams. His work on the challenges that complex systems present to narrative understanding resulted in, among other collaborations, the co-edited volume Narrating Complexity (2018), an interdisciplinary dialogue between narratologists and complex system scientists. More fundamentally, he is interested in the scope and (especially) the limits of narrative as a mode of cognition - as, most fundamentally, the innate form in which we grasp process. This basic cognitive conception of narrative form raises large questions about the continuities between its elementary function in embodied sensemaking and the many elaborate cultural manifestations of narrative.

He is the leader of the Fictionality Research Group and the Narrative and Complex Systems group (NarCS), and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies. He is also the founder of the British and Irish Association for Narrative Studies. See also his page on Academia.edu.

Research

Overview

As a narrative theorist, Richard has published and given papers internationally on various aspects of narrative, building upon the pragmatic rhetorical perspective he developed in The Rhetoric of Fictionality and pursuing the topic of narrative beyond cognitive narratology to develop a view of narrative cognition as a fundamental mode of human sensemaking with far-reaching interdisciplinary implications. Accordingly, his work addresses not only literary topics (such as reflexiveness in narrative and fiction, the ideology of narrative voice and narrative theory, and the public value of literary study); but also broader cultural topics (for example work on emergent and interactive narrative, on narrative explanation, and on the common basis of narrative and music); and cognitive topics (narrative cognition and its evolution, narrative and selfhood, the contrast between narrative and complex systems models of behaviour, narrative and spatial cognition). Much of this work is in dialogue with scholars working in different periods, cultures, or disciplines; to accommodate these overlapping circles of interest he has established the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies, and leads several research projects and groups associated with it. The co-edited volumes Narrating Complexity and Narratology and Ideology are the results of such collaborations.

Projects

The Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies has provided the means and occasion for a number of collaborative projects, including the Fictionality Research Group (Narratives and Worlds; Historicising Fictionality); the interdisciplinary Narrative in Question programme; the Narrative and Complex Systems group (Narrating Complexity); the Aarhus Centre for Fictionality Studies (Fictionality Before and Beyond Fiction); the RIDERS project (interactive and emergent narrative); the Narrative and the Senses series (embodied cognition); and the Threshold Worlds project (dreaming). It has also led to the founding of the British and Irish Association for Narrative Studies (2020).

Supervision

Past supervision topics have included projects on various 19th and 20th century novelists and short story writers from the perspective of narrative or literary theory, as well as directly theoretical subjects (structuralism/post-structuralism, rhetoric and reader-oriented theories, narrative memory and trauma; literature and philosophy; authorship; the discipline of English; history of narrative theory; unreliable narration). He has also supervised interdisciplinary topics, for example on interactive narrative. 

He would be interested in any new research proposals in the field of narrative theory, especially topics on fictionality, narrative and complexity, narrative and cognition, narrative across media (including new media and interactive/emergent narrative), interdisciplinary narrative studies and narrative creativity. He would also welcome inquiries about projects on innovative fiction (especially American), early film, ideological criticism, and interdisciplinary dialogue across the “two cultures.”

Teaching

Undergraduate

Richard has taught modules in American literature (19th-century to present), Victorian literature, approaches to literature, philosophy and literature, critical theory, early film, ecological criticism, narrative theory, and visual narrative.

He currently offers two advanced option modules in narrative studies: Stories with Pictures, which extends the scope of narrative study beyond the literary by exploring narratives in visual media  (narrative art, comics, film and computer games); and The Sense of Stories, which sets narrative theory in interdisciplinary context in order to explore its adaptive and developmental place in cognition, its role in selfhood, its epistemological strengths and limitations, its ideological and emotional dimensions, as well as the reflexive forms it takes in culture and literature.

Postgraduate

As well as supervising PhD and MPhil students, he teaches MA option modules on Innovative Fictions since 1950, and on Narrative, Fiction and Theory. Innovative Fictions pursues, through an eclectic range of examples, the idea of fiction as a rhetoric rather than simply a representational strategy; Narrative, Fiction, Theory traces the history of the literary lineage of narrative theory.

External activities

Memberships

Richard is a past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and a member of the society since 2002.  He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark (2011), the Institute for Advanced Study in Durham (2016), and the Durham Centre for Medical Humanities (2020). He is the founder of the British and Irish Association for Narrative Studies (2020). He has served as a reader for several presses and journals, and as an advisor, external examiner or opponent for PhDs in various universities across Europe. He has given talks and keynote lectures on narrative theory worldwide.