About This Issue
Abstract
This issue of DIEGESIS, edited by Matías Martínez and Michael Scheffel, brings together selected contributions from the 8th Conference of the European Narratology Network (ENN), held at the Center for Narrative Research (CNR), University of Wuppertal, Germany, from September 29 to October 1, 2025, under the title “Limits of Narrative.” The articles address a fundamental question in contemporary narratology: What are the limits of narrative, and how can we identify and define them?
The remarkable success of the concept of narrative, both within academia and beyond, has made these questions increasingly urgent. Since Roland Barthes famously declared that, “like life itself, it [i.e. narrative] is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural” (Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits [“An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”], 1966 [1975]), the conviction that narrative is a universal category of cognition and representation – indispensable for understanding and engaging with reality – has become increasingly widespread. Narratives are now studied in virtually every discipline of the humanities and social sciences, while storytelling has become a commonplace term in politics, journalism, marketing, and everyday communication. In his recent book Nexus. A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024), Yuval Noah Harari writes: “Whether through implanting fake memories, forming fictional relationships or creating intersubjective realities, stories produced large-scale human networks. [...] Story-based networks made Homo sapiens the most powerful of all animals, giving it a crucial edge not only over lions and mammoths but also over other ancient human species like Neanderthals.” Today, the terms narrative and story are ubiquitous in public discourse – from the search for ‘A New Narrative for Europe’ to the ‘stories’ featured on the websites of companies such as Siemens and Johnson & Johnson, and the ‘patient narratives’ examined in narrative medicine.
This expansion of where, when, and how narrative is applied has undoubtedly contributed to the visibility and interdisciplinary relevance of narratology. At the same time, however, it has also encouraged the indiscriminate use of the term narrative, threatening to undermine its analytical precision. If almost everything can be described as ‘narrative,’ what distinguishes narrative from non-narrative forms of communication and representation? Given the widespread use of this term and its cognates – often without a clearly-defined meaning – it is time to critically examine its limits. Are we perhaps witnessing what Peter Brooks calls a “mindless valorization of storytelling” (Seduced by Story. The Use and Abuse of Narrative, 2022)?
The articles in this issue of DIEGESIS address this problem from a variety of perspectives. They examine the boundaries between narrative and other literary genres and discourse types, the possibilities and constraints of storytelling across different media, and the cognitive processes through which recipients construct coherent stories from necessarily incomplete representations. Other contributions explore the limits of tellability, historical transformations of narrative forms, and the challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence. Further questions take on the role of narrative in constructing personal and collective identities, the social expectations and pressures associated with storytelling, and the ethical and political implications of narrative representations of reality. Underlying these diverse approaches is a shared concern with the conceptual scope and explanatory power of narratology. Narrative is not merely a formal structure but a situated communicative practice, shaped by specific intentions, contexts, and expectations. Its capacity to organize experience, produce knowledge, and establish social identities is inseparable from its potential to distort, manipulate, or exclude. Exploring the limits of narrative therefore means not only distinguishing narrative from non-narrative phenomena but also critically examining the possibilities and limitations of storytelling itself.
