Poetics of Disturbances

Deborah de Muijnck, Dr. phil. (1988) is a postdoctoral researcher at Justus-Liebig University. Formerly a researcher at RWTH Aachen University (2019 - 2023) and an Institutional Affiliate at Harvard University (2023), she publishes in the fields of cognitive narratology, post-trauma autobiographical storytelling, and in the medical humanities. Jessica Jumpertz, M.A. (1992) is a research and teaching assistant at RWTH Aachen University. She is currently completing her PhD thesis on the representation of highly intelligent female characters in 19th to 20th century literature. Ralf Schneider, Prof. Dr. phil. (1966) is Professor and Chair of English Literature at RWTH Aachen University and co-founder of the Aachen Center for Cognitive and Empirical Literary Studies (ACCELS). He publishes on British literature and culture, with a focus on cognitive narratology. Teresa Turnbull, M.A. (1987) is a research assistant at RWTH Aachen University. Her PhD project focuses on impossible bodies and reader cognition. Her journal articles include “Reading Bodies as Space in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’” (2023).

List of Figures and Tables

Notes on Contributors



Introduction – Poetics of Disturbances

 Deborah de Muijnck, Jessica Jumpertz, Ralf Schneider and Teresa Turnbull



PART 1: Minds, Narratives and Normativities



1 Through the Looking Glass: Narrating the Madgirl in Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House

 Laura de la Parra Fernández

2 Tense, Focalisation, and Mind: a Triangulate Relationship in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

 Xinran Yang

3 Narrating Mental Health and Distress: the Twin Motif and Intermediality in Diana Evans’s 26a

 Christina Slopek

4 Whose Story Is That? Experimental Narrative Strategies in Rethinking Normality and Age

 Daria Baryshnikova

5 Altered Consciousness in 1960s American Science Fiction: a Corpus-Stylistic Analysis

 Elizabeth Oakes



PART 2: The Body-Mind Nexus, Narratives, and Normativities



6 All to No a Veil: Crip Humour and Neurodiversity in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996)

 Gunther Martens & Liselotte Van der Gucht

7 Altered Narration: Unreliability in Narrators Living with Alzheimer’s Disease

 Simona Adinolfi

8 Communicating Eating Disorders: Metaphor, Embodied Simulation and Experiential Understanding in Autopathographies

 Jakob Summerer

9 De-Pathologising Non-Normative Bodies and Minds of Persons with Dominance-Oriented Sexualities – the Role of Narratives about and in BDSM

 Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen

10 Plastic Bodies, Plastic Minds? Transforming Transgender Childhood through Fiction

 Sven Van den Bossche

11 Politics of Mobility and Mental Health: Representations of Refugeedom in the Mini-Series Stateless (2020)

 Carolin Gebauer



PART 3: Embodied Non-Normativities



12 Side-Effect Narration: Unreliable Embodiment and Ideological Repositioning in Clare Allan’s Poppy Shakespeare

 Sandra Marzinkowski

13 “She is not Ours, We are Hers”: We-Narration and Embodied Selves in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater

 Anke Sharma

14 Who Sees and Who Speaks with Our Head? Non-Normative Bodies, Minds, and Acts of Narration

 Ellen Peel

15 Embodied Being and Non-being in Bernard Rose’s FRANK3N5T31N (2015)

 Kit Schuster

16 Playing with Speculative Bodies and Minds: Moral Imagination at Work in Primo Levi’s Science Fiction

 Marzia Beltrami



Index