Non-Linear Narrative

Baby Steps with A Prayer for the French Republic

Can an audience be taught to follow, like and then love a non-linear narrative?

We are going to find out. I wish I could turn my chair around and watch the audience watching this upcoming season of shows at the Huntington in Boston. Loretta Greco, the new artistic director at the Huntington used that phrase non-linear narrative when I described the supposedly un-producible plays of Victor I. Cazares. She has hope that the Boston theater audience will soon be able to follow, like and love a show that writes its own laws of time and space.

A couple of digital humanities scholars, Andrew Piper and Olivier Toubia, study how readers react to non-linearity in storytelling. Their specific field is called computational narratology. Heh. I wonder how students would respond to being called narratologists in class. The imagery of taking a scalpel to a book might have broad appeal amongst the middle school set. Some narratologists do “laboratory” experiments. I was hoping that this meant people ha…