Congratulations Dr. Justin Carpenter!

Congratulations to our newest PhD graduate, Dr. Justin Carpenter! Justin's dissertation is titled "Relationality and Ecosystem: On the Narrativity of Generative Systems in Literature and Video Games." His supervisor was Dr. Ken Hirschkop and readers were Dr. Michael MacDonald and Dr. Heather Smyth. His external examiner was Dr. Stephen Ramsay and the internal/external examiner was Dr. Mina Momeni. His defence was chaired by Dr. Jenine McCutcheon.

Abstract

This dissertation is an examination of the aesthetic relationship between generative art theory and narrative theory in literature and video games. More specifically, this dissertation observes the narratological implications of the imposition of a generative system—a set of rules or algorithms which in some fashion contribute to the completion of an artwork—within the context of narrative works. This approach to textuality, commonly seen in computational contexts, is part of a longer history which outlines the relationship between authorship, audience interpretation and/or agency, and systematic emergence. I argue that the imposition of a generative system frames the various layers of narrative in such texts, rendering the relationship between intra-and-extratextual situations—or, put differently, between what is being read/played and the situation in which it is being read/played—as part of the same narrativized rhetorical situation, rendering the text into a spatialized ecosystem in which continued reading or playing becomes a continuation of the text’s diegesis. Thus, the narrativity of these generative systems must be observed as a process of conception, production, expression, and reception which is informed by the narrativized tension between authors, agents, and emergent systems.

To better examine this ecosystemic conception of narrative artworks, I interrogate the narrativity of generative systems. This begins with an examination of contemporary conceptions of generative theory. I then proceed to outline a longer-form, composite history of generative approaches in literature, up to and including the emergence of the computer as the ideal generative artmaking tool. Following these theoretical accounts of generative art theory, I perform close readings of three texts: Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch; Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water; and Hello Games’s video game No Man’s Sky. Each of these texts are useful examples of the narrativity of generative systems, namely because each of these texts relies upon narrative ‘generators’—figurative and structural devices which produce narrativized ‘situations’ for the reader while simultaneously impacting the diegesis—such as metalepsis (the transgression of narrative levels, which produces new narrative levels) and mise en abyme (the reflexive doubling of the narrative whole within some smaller part of the diegesis). By examining each of these texts as an unfolding process which concerns both the diegetic and the meta-diegetic levels of a narrative simultaneously, I suggest the especially ‘relational’ capacity of a narratology built upon the ecosystemic model described in the first chapters, arguing that this model is a reasonable approach to account for the kinds of interactive and emergent texts which are becoming increasingly common in the digital era.