ABSTRACT
As a rejoinder to Susan Stanford Friedman’s call for a transnational turn in narrative theory, this chapter attempts to draw attention to a comparativist turn in current narrative studies. It tries to address three broad questions: Why compare? What to compare? And how to compare? Acknowledging the efforts made by such narratologists as José Angel García Landa, Susana Onega, François Jost, Wilhelm Schernus, Eyal Segal, Sylvie Patron, John Pier, and Marina Grishakova, this chapter argues that in the wake of a second phase of postclassical narratology, transdisciplinary, transmedia, transgeneric, and transnational perspectives provide an intersectional potential for the in-depth and rapid developments of narratology in its various strands, which in turn offers us a rare opportunity or rather necessity to examine narrative and narrative theory in a global light. A comparative narratology is expected to decolonize and to subvert the hegemony of European and Anglo-American narrative theory, and thus both paves the way for the rise of those marginalized narrative theories and draws attention to those neglected and peripheral narratives. That said, a comparative narratology not only compares narratives produced in different geographical locations, cultures, nations, or strands but also compares narrative theories developed in those areas and fields. To exemplify a comparative study of this kind, this chapter presents a Chinese counterpart of Western narrative theory, focusing on its traditions and recent innovations. In addition, it tries to specifically engage with newly developed unnatural narrative theory by analyzing Chinese ghost stories, a particular type of unnatural narrative in Chinese literature, so as to display their unnatural features as well as their challenges to existing Western unnatural approaches.
