1 For recent work that explicitly seeks to break with the traditional equation of mobility and transnational migration, see e.g. Pfalzgraf (2021) and Toivanen (2021), as well as the contributions in Toivanen and Pfalzgraf (2024b) and Englert et al. (2021). Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology Carolin Gebauer 1 Mobility Studies and Narrative Theory: The Intersection of Two Research Fields When we hear stories about the current ‘age of mobility’, chances are high that these narratives deal with migration or forced displacement. The terms mobility and migration are often treated as synonyms - a practice that can also be observed in many approaches within literary and cultural studies, especially migration studies, diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies (Toivanen 2021: 1-2). 1 While migration undoubtedly deserves a prominent place among the topics covered by “cultural narratology” (Nünning 2009), the concept of mobility encompasses many other notions that define our lives today: We commute to work, we travel when going on vacation or business trips, we change locales for jobs - and we share these experiences in stories we tell each other on different occasions and in various contexts. From the perspective of a cultural narratology which seeks to examine how narrative enables us to better comprehend the nexus between culture and society in the wake of globalisation, equating mobility with migration can lead to practices of fostering “a reductive understanding that erases the holistic, relational, and the local, everyday dimensions of mobilities” (Toivanen and Pfalzgraf 2024a: 2). Rather, we need a concept of mobility which is flexible enough to recognise the different forms of movement that influence societies, cultures, and individuals on a daily basis. The project of a cultural narratology sensitive to mobilities that I would like to propose in this chapter draws on a rapidly growing body of research in the field of mobility studies which acknowledges (and vigorously defends) the ambiguity 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 2 The term new mobilities paradigm was introduced by Mimi Sheller and John Urry in 2006. Although new mobilities studies has since become a well-established field in the social sciences, Sheller and Urry’s term has been repeatedly considered a misnomer for a variety of reasons. Tim Cresswell (2010b: 18), for example, argues that the adjective new is inappropriate, whereas Richard Randell (2020) rejects the term for failing to meet Thomas Kuhn’s definition of a ‘paradigm’. For an overview of further criticism of the new mobilities paradigm thesis, see Randell (2020: 207). 3 It is important to note, however, that the humanities had had a longstanding interest in mobilities even before Urry and Sheller coined the term new mobilities paradigm (see Aguiar et al. 2019: 4-10; Merriman and Pearce 2018: 2-4). of the term mobility. In Sociology Beyond Societies (2000), John Urry suggests that “the diverse mobilities of people, objects, images, information and wastes” (1) should be prioritised in sociological studies concerned with the reconfiguration of social structures within an increasingly globalised and networked world. His programmatic call for a “sociology of mobilities” (2000: 4) initiated the “mobility turn” (2007: 6) in the social sciences, promoting mobility as “a different way of thinking through the character of economic, social and political relationships” (ibid.). This “new mobilities paradigm” 2 has been accompanied by a growing interest in the nexus between human movement, practices of mobility, and space in geography and anthropology (see, e.g. Cresswell 2010a; Salazar and Smart 2011). Together, these developments have led to the emergence of what is today known as new mobilities studies, a vibrant interdisciplinary field which foregrounds the significance of mobilities in the modern age (see Adey 2017: ch. 2). Over the last decade, and thus later than other disciplines (Pearce 2020: 76-7), literary and cultural studies have also started to contribute to the new mobilities framework. The “‘humanities turn’ in mobility studies” (Aguiar et al. 2019: 2) refers to a growing body of scholarship, mainly in the fields of English and postcolonial studies, that seeks to establish a cross-disciplinary dialogue by introducing mobility as a productive lens through which to approach literary texts and other semiotic objects (see also Merriman and Pearce 2018: 4-7). 3 The main objective of these studies is to investigate how mobility is depicted and ne‐ gotiated in literature, culture, media, and the arts. They explore representations of different forms of mobility, from migration and forced displacement (Bromley 2021) to tourism (Mathieson 2015), from automobility (Pearce 2016; Stork 2024) and air travel (Durante 2020) to public transport (Toivanen and Pfalzgraf 2024b), discussing the concept in relation to abstract notions of movement and space (Behrensmeyer and Ehland 2013) or transformation and power (Frank and Schreier 2022; Murray and Upstone 2014), as well as to specific phenomena such as cosmopolitanism (Toivanen 2021) and national identity (Mathieson 2015). These studies furthermore examine mobilities in different historical periods, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 352 Carolin Gebauer 4 See e.g. Toivanen (2021) and Pfalzgraf (2021), as well as the contributions in Gebauer et al. (2024) and Toivanen and Pfalzgraf (2024b). spanning the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and in various disciplinary contexts, including migration and diaspora studies (Pfalzgraf 2021; Toivanen 2021), psychology (Pearce 2019), literary urban studies (García and Toivanen 2024), and the medical humanities (Dinter and Schäfer-Althaus 2023). The field of literary mobility studies is flourishing. Yet, despite the crucial role that narratives play in developing and negotiating concepts of mobility, narrative theory has largely failed to engage with the new mobilities paradigm. The continuing lack of exchange between narratology and mobility studies comes as a surprise, given that approaches to mobility studies often work with the concept of narrative. For example, Tim Cresswell begins his programmatic study On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (2006) by describing mobility as “a fundamental geographical facet of existence” that “provides a rich terrain from which narratives […] can be, and have been, constructed” (1). In the introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2014), Peter Adey and his co-editors invoke popular “[n]arratives of novelty, accessibility and speed-up” that emphasise “the ease and smoothness of globalization” (1), only to dismiss these accounts as products of the imagination of a privileged elite (2). And in her “Foreword” to an edited volume on Cultural Mobilities Between Africa and the Caribbean (2021), Mimi Sheller stresses the potential of literature and other artistic productions to create “counter-narrative[s]” that “open up new ways of thinking about cultural mobilities” by reimagining and thus complicating our understanding of African-Caribbean relations (xiv). The observation that mobility scholars show a strong interest in narrative suggests that the time is ripe, if not overdue, to bring mobility studies and narrative studies into closer conversation. Indeed, both academic fields promise to complement each other, as they reveal different interests in the study of narratives about mobility: While the new mobilities paradigm concentrates primarily on the ‘what’, i.e. the content of such representations, narrative studies also focuses on the significance of the ‘how’, i.e. the ways in which this content is presented and negotiated. Prior work in the field of literary mobility studies has already taken first steps towards addressing “a poetics of mobility” (Toivanen 2021: 19-20) by explicitly foregrounding questions about form in literary and, more specifically, narrative representations of mobility. 4 This research proceeds from the assumption that, “[a]s aesthetic articulations of movement, literary texts not only draw on real-life mobilities and embodied experiences of mobility but also intensify, complicate, and question the meanings that are attached 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 353 5 Postcolonial, feminist, and gender-oriented narratologies, as well as econarratology, are all different thematic branches of a “contextualist or cultural narratology that puts the analytical toolkit developed by narratology to the service of a context-sensitive interpretation of narrative” (Nünning 2009: 50). The concept of “narrative dynamics” has recently been introduced to the field as a category for analyzing the complex relationships between narratives in public discourse (Sommer 2023: 498). to them” (Toivanen 2021: 16). “Literary representations of mobility”, these studies remind us, “allow for a deeper understanding of the complexities and contradictions of ‘real life’ mobilities”, while at the same time “inform[ing] our understanding of the meanings of mobilities” (17). They should therefore be afforded a more prominent position in interdisciplinary debates on the subject. Building on previous studies that foreground the value of narrative for the study of mobilities, this chapter sets out to make a few proposals for a new analytical framework I would like to call narrative mobility studies. Narrative mobility studies integrates approaches from (literary) mobility studies and “contextualist narratology” (Nünning 2009), particularly cultural narratology, in order to carve out clearly the influence of narrative on our practices and, by extension, lived experiences of mobility, as well as on the ways in which we make sense of mobilities in different social, cultural, and historical contexts. On a contextual level, narrative mobility studies aims to link findings from research on a “politics of mobility” (Cresswell 2010b) with insights from postcolonial, feminist, and gender-oriented narratology, econarratology, and a “narrative dynamics” approach (Sommer 2023). 5 On a textual level, narrative mobility studies takes its cue from recent work on the sociopolitical significance of form (Levine 2015; Olson and Copland 2018), as it seeks to develop a narratology of mobility that provides new concepts and categories which allow the formal analysis of narrative representations of mobility to be enriched with cultural, political, power-sensitive, and ideology-sensitive readings. 2 Definitions of Mobility and the Role of Narrative in Mobility Discourses The new mobilities paradigm operates with a very broad definition of mobility. This can be illustrated with the four key meanings of mobility identified by Urry (2007: 7-8) - i.e. the capability of movement, the mob, social or vertical mobility, and geographical or horizontal mobility - each of which has little in common with the others. Urry’s seemingly unsystematic discussion of the meaning of mobility is symptomatic of mobility scholars’ efforts to come up with a definition that incorporates all the nuances of the concept that different 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 354 Carolin Gebauer 6 By “representations of mobility” Cresswell (2010b) actually means narrative, which becomes obvious when he describes constellations of mobility as “historically and geographically specific formations of movements, narratives about mobility and mobile practices” (17; emphasis added). disciplines within mobility studies focus on. Yet, such a holistic understanding of mobility is susceptible to criticism. What, one may wonder, is the benefit of a category that potentially involves phenomena as diverse as social advancement or decline on the one hand, and transnational migration or global nomadism on the other? “If mobility is everything”, as the provocative title of an article by Peter Adey (2006) puts it, “then it is nothing”: The concept loses its purpose (76-77). Adey counters this criticism by arguing that mobility should be conceived of as a relational category which only “gains meaning through its embeddedness within societies, cultures, politics, and histories” (83). Manifestations of mobility, he contends, “are very different, and they also relate and interact with one another in many different ways” (ibid.). That “this relatedness impacts upon what mobilities mean and how they work” (ibid.) is reflected in the wide range of thematic approaches within the new mobilities paradigm, including “gendered mobilities” (Uteng and Cresswell 2008), “imperial mobilities” (Lambert and Merriman 2020), “Anthropocene mobilities” (Baldwin et al. 2019), and “material mobilities” ( Jensen et al. 2020). Mobility, then, is “movement imbued with meaning” (Adey 2017: 63), and this meaning is always produced and negotiated in social and cultural discourse (66). Tim Cresswell (2010b) consequently suggests that mobility is best understood through the interplay of three different aspects: “At any one time, […] there are pervading constellations of mobility - particular patterns of movement, representations of movement, and ways of practising movement that make sense together” (18; original emphasis). 6 According to Cresswell, the physical reality of any form of mobility is always encoded in narratives about mobility which are not only “based on ways in which mobility is practiced and embodied” (Cresswell 2006: 4), but which also determine how this form of mobility is experienced through practice. Since these constellations are ultimately always “implicated in the production of power and relations of domination” (Cresswell 2010b: 20), they “entail particular ‘politics of mobility’” (19). If narratives about mobility have a bearing on practices and lived experiences of mobility, as well as on a politics of mobility, they can also contribute to reshaping our understanding of the phenomenon. Giada Peterle (2023) has recently introduced the term “narrative mobilities” to foreground the role of storytelling practices in mobilities research. “Narrative mobilities”, she argues, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 355 7 The concept was originally introduced in the context of migration discourses (see Caracciolo et al. 2023); however, the idea can be transferred to any other discursive context. should be thought of as “emergent practices that are situated in space and time and performed in different contexts” (103). Seen from this angle, narrative serves as a “creative means” to produce new meanings of mobility as well as to challenge dominant discourses about the topic (102). Peterle’s reflections strongly resonate with narratological studies that con‐ ceptualise narrative as a means of worldmaking. Narratives, Ansgar and Vera Nünning (2010) remind us, “are at work in processes such as identity formation, ordering experiences, remembering and negotiating values, and fabricating storied versions of ‘the world’” (6). As such, they not only enable us to make sense of the role that mobility plays in our society and culture, but they also bear upon the ways in which we experience different mobilities. The analysis of literary and cultural representations of mobility can provide important insights into how constellations of mobility shape, and are negotiated in, different social and cultural contexts. Contextualist approaches to narratology - particularly feminist, gender-oriented, and postcolonial narratology, as well as econarratol‐ ogy - are concerned with narrative representations of the societal structures and power relations as well as the more-than-human entanglements that form the backdrop against which mobilities take place. They consequently allow us to uncover the power hierarchies underlying certain practices of mobility as well as to identify the worldviews and ideologies informing cultural discourses on mobility. But how, then, can narrative help us to better comprehend the complex ways in which we navigate and move in this world? A good point of departure in approaching this question is the notion of narrative ecology, which will be outlined in the next section 3 The Narrative Ecology of Mobility as a New Conceptual Framework for Cultural Narratology The term narrative ecology describes the complex relationships between cultural discourses, media environments, narrative dynamics, and audiences central to the study of how narratives emerge, circulate, and interact within cultural contexts (Caracciolo et al. 2023). 7 The narrative ecology of mobility can be conceptualised as a complex system structured within by different levels. The most abstract level consists of what can be referred to as ‘narratives on mobility’, i.e. cultural myths that function as attractors or catalysts for storytelling. These include not only conceptual metaphors involving abstract notions of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 356 Carolin Gebauer 8 I deploy the terms narratives on mobility and stories of mobility in analogy to Gebauer and Sommer’s (2024) distinction between “narratives on migration” and “stories of migration”. While the former depict the phenomenon from an outside (i.e. etic) perspective, the latter constitute life stories that present the phenomenon from an inside (i.e. emic) perspective. 9 Roy Sommer (2023) has introduced several analytical categories for the systematic analysis of such narrative dynamics. movement or dynamisation such as LI F E I S A J O U R N E Y O R A W O R L D IN F L U X , but also narrative templates suggesting that people or characters move geographically or change their social status (examples would be phrases like ‘in search of greener pastures’ or ‘from rags to riches’). The most concrete level of the narrative ecology is constituted by stories which reflect personal or collective experience. Such ‘stories of mobility’ can range from cases of conversational storytelling to (auto-)biographies and memoirs. 8 Cultural myths and stories of lived experiences are conjoined by an intermediate level which comprises representations of mobility in both verbal and visual media. Within this narrative ecology, stories interact with each other in various ways. 9 The influence of cultural myths on lived experiences of mobility can be best illustrated with what Cresswell (2006: 55) designates as “metanarratives” - i.e. culturally shaped ideas that inform attitudes towards mobility. Cresswell’s main examples in this context are narratives of sedentarism and nomadism: The former sees mobility “as morally and ideologically suspect, a by-product of a world arranged through place and spatial order”, whereas the latter “puts mobility first, has little time for notions of attachment to place, and revels in notions of flow, flux, and dynamism” (26). While ideas of nomadism have only recently come to the fore in Western culture (43), notions of sedentarism “[pervade] modern thought” (32), with the result that mobile subjects have often been portrayed “as figures of mobile threat in need of straightening out and discipline” (26). As an illustration of the mid-layer of the narrative ecology of mobility, I would like to discuss two randomly chosen examples from news media and literature. The first example is an article in The Guardian, written by Louise Dawson in 2011, about an activist project in Leicester which sought to revive female cycling culture. The article begins by evoking a narrative of gendered mobilities in the early twentieth century, as it recalls Alice Hawkins, a suffragette who cycled around the city to promote the women’s rights movement. The second example is Charles Dickens’s gothic story “The Signalman”, first published in 1866. Inspired by the Staplehurst disaster, a railway accident in 1865 that killed ten and injured at least forty (Cadwallader 2015: 57), it relates the tragic death 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 357 of the protagonist, who is run over by a train. Even though both narratives deal with the rise of new means of transportation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the impact of these developments on different groups within society, their depiction of mobility could not be further apart: While the Guardian article presents the bicycle as “a symbol of women’s emancipation” (Dawson 2011: n. pag.), which allowed the suffragette to extend her radius of mobility within the public space and thus reach a wider audience with her activist movement, Dickens’s story drastically stages the uneven mobilities in Victorian times, given that the working-class protagonist loses his life in his attempt to provide the necessary infrastructure for more privileged groups, as well as goods and materials, to be mobile. In one story, mobility signifies social progress; in the other, it stands for social inequalities. Read against each other, both stories moreover serve to highlight the differences between individual and collective forms of mobility at the dawn of a new era of mass transportation. My juxtaposition of these admittedly very different types of narrative serves to identify some of the premises on which narrative mobility studies builds the study of narrative ecologies: 1. Narratives of mobility can be factual, as Hawkins’s life story, or fictional, as Dickens’s short story; they can be told with the benefit of hindsight or with a view towards the future, as they engage in processes of retrospective or prospective worldmaking (see Nünning 2012; Sommer 2019). Dawson’s article about Hawkins thus looks back at female cycling practices in the past, while Dickens’s “The Signalman” anticipates Victorian fears about technological progress. 2. Even though narratives of mobility emerge at different points in history, they can persist over time. Together, all these narratives can converge and contribute to forming new master-narratives or narrative templates such as ‘mobility as emancipation’ (as illustrated in the Guardian article) or ‘mobility as social capital’ (as implied in “The Signalman”). In this respect, narrative mobility studies discerns a historical dimension in processes of “narrative aggregation”, i.e. the bundling of narratives into clusters (Sommer 2023: 502-3). 3. The same holds for “competing narratives” (503-4), which constitute the converse of narrative aggregation. Previous research has shown that counter-narratives typically emerge in the context of crisis situations when opposing narratives start to vie for discursive hegemony (see Gebauer 2023). The examples of the Guardian article and Dickens’s story moreover suggest that impactful events such as the invention of a new means of transportation or the rise of social movements can serve as another catalyst 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 358 Carolin Gebauer 10 To my knowledge, Alexander Matschi’s doctoral thesis (2016) is the only narratological study that extensively deals with movement and mobility. for “narrative-counter-narrative dynamics” (Lueg and Lundholt 2021), for such momentous developments hold the promise - as well as the threat - to change society permanently, and which perception is ultimately to prevail is a matter that needs to be negotiated. 4. Finally, if we read media and artistic narratives on mobility through the lens of context-oriented approaches such as postcolonial, feminist, gender-oriented, or ecocritical narratology, we can lay bare the diverse relations of power that underlie different constellations of mobility. Such readings can help us also to address issues pertaining to “mobility justice” (Sheller 2018) in the real world - i.e. questions “about how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, shaping the patterns of unequal mobility and immobility in the circulation of people, resources, and information” (14) - by encouraging us to scrutinise the metanarratives of mobility that permeate our culture and society. However, these broader implications of narrative mobility studies first require a thorough formal analysis of narratives. Caroline Levine (2015: 3) conceives of form as the sum of “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference”. According to her, the notion of form is more than just an aesthetic feature; it also comprises patterns of sociopolitical experience, the study of which “allows us to rethink the historical workings of political power and the relations between politics and aesthetics” (xiii). Acknowledging that “[f]orms do political work in particular historical contexts” (5), narrative mobility studies proceeds from the assumption that the power structures that influence real-life mobilities are reflected in narrative representations of mobility not only on a content level, but also on the level of narrative form. Yet, so as to unpack the “politics of form” (Olson and Copland 2018) that underpin narratives on mobility, and thus point to the “ideological ramifications of narrative strategies” (Alber 2017), we need new analytical categories that allow us to adequately and accurately describe the ways in which mobility is negotiated through narrative form. 4 Elements of a Narratology of Mobility While previous narratological models have emphasised both the aspects of time and space, movement or mobility has only played a comparatively minor role in the analysis of narrative form. 10 In the remainder of this article, I 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 359 11 On the distinctions between ‘static vs. dynamic’ as well as ‘flat vs. round’ character conceptions, see Neumann and Nünning (2008: 53). will identify some elements of a narratology of mobility which expand the narratological toolbox with categories and concepts introduced by the new mobilities paradigm. These elements relate to both the story and the discourse levels of narrative. 4.1 Categories for the Analysis of Mobility on the Story Level A useful grounding on which to think about representations of mobility on the story level of narrative is Seymour Chatman’s (1978) distinction between existents and events (19). With regard to existents, Chatman differentiates between characters and setting. From the perspective of a narratology of mobility, the most important question relating to characters is whether they can be described as “figures of mobility” (Salazar 2017) such as the flâneur, the migrant, the nomad, the pilgrim, the tourist, and the vagabond. While figures of mobility qualify as stereotypical conceptualisations of a specific group of mobile subjects, ‘mobile’ characters do not necessarily have to be presented as flat or static. More often than not, narrative fiction depicts ‘mobile’ protagonists as round and dynamic characters that develop as the narrative progresses. 11 The category of setting does not exhibit any sense of mobility, as it provides the space within which characters move. In mobility studies, however, the dynamics of the ‘mobility/ fixity’-divide is a central analytical variable which typically finds expression in binary opposites such as ‘mobility vs. moorings’ (Merriman 2023). Constituting what mobility scholars would identify as “the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities” (Hannam et al. 2006: 3), the category of setting therefore plays an important role for the analysis of representations of mobility in narrative. Postcolonial studies and mobility studies provide narratology with two estab‐ lished concepts that foreground the ways in which narrative space is informed by notions of mobility: the contact zone and the meeting place. The concept of the contact zone was introduced by Mary Louise Pratt (2008 [1992]: 26) to designate “the space of imperial encounter […] in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”. The meeting place, by contrast, imparts a sense of place that Doreen Massey (1991: 28) describes as “extroverted”, for it “includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 360 Carolin Gebauer 12 Although Augé’s concept has often been criticised by mobilities scholars (see Merriman 2012: 52-58), and the author himself even revised his position on the concept in later publications (see Merriman 2004: 150), the original definition of ‘non-places’ may prove fruitful for the analysis of representations of transit spaces in narrative texts. way the global and the local”. Whereas the contact zone suggests a power imbalance between the different ethnic groups that interact with each other in this space of intercultural collision, the meeting place conceptualises these encounters on a more equal basis. Both concepts have important implications for character constellations, as they provide the basis for central conflicts. As such, representations of contact zones or meeting places in narrative fiction can serve as effective strategies to negotiate notions of cultural hybridity which emerge in what Homi Bhabha (2004 [1994]) designates as “Third Space” (53-55) - that is, the “contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation” that challenges “hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures” (55). Types of narrative setting like the contact zone or the meeting place need to be distinguished from so-called “non-places” - that is, “space[s] which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (Augé 2008 [1992]: 63). Cases in point are airports, hotel rooms, or shopping centres, all of which constitute places of transit, where people typically pass through without forming any significant attachment to space. 12 In narratological terms, it is thus tempting to think of these settings as semantically empty. Yet, taking the example of the airport, Lena Mattheis (2021: 167) demonstrates that this space may very well constitute a non-place for travellers who are only passing through, but not for security guards, vendors, custodial personnel and other staff working at the airport, for whom this space forms an integral “part of [their] social network, livelihood and everyday routines”. The question, then, is how narratives depict settings that qualify as alleged ‘non-places’: Do they present them as spaces without any social or cultural meaning, or do they stress their ‘placeness’ by foregrounding their significance for the characters? With respect to events, it is important to note that character movement plays an important role for the development of plot. According to Yuri M. Lotman (1977 [1971]), the fictional worlds depicted in narratives are typically made up of two distinct subspaces that are topologically distinct (e.g. top-bottom, inside-outside), semantically polar (e.g. good-evil, familiar-strange), and that concretise in specific topographical opposites (e.g. town/ safety-forest/ danger, heaven/ good-hell/ evil) (218-29). A boundary separates both these subspaces, creating a spatial division which Lotman considers a structural prerequisite of narrative plot. For the “smallest indivisible unit” (232) of any plot is “the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field” (233). Lotman 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 361 13 For a more detailed discussion of Lotman’s semantics of space, see also Gebauer (2022). construes narrative texts, then, as plotted texts that feature at least one mobile character, the “hero-agent” (240), who crosses the boundary separating the different semantic spaces established by these texts (238). 13 Such boundary crossings can take various shapes. In Literature on the Move (2003), Ottmar Ette distinguishes five movement patterns that can typically be observed in travelogues and travel literature (38-48): (1) the circle, which constitutes “a circular travel movement in which the traveler returns to the place of departure” (39); (2) the pendulum, which can be thought of as a back and forth movement between two or several locations; (3) the line, which visualises a one-way journey from a starting to a destination point; (4) the star, which can be described as movement departing “from a definite center, which serves as a starting point for more or less circular journeys and leads to a stellate expansion of the traveled and registered space” (45-6); and (5) the jump, which can be characterised as movement “of a rather diffuse nature” (47). Ette’s categories help us see that character movement is also invested with meaning in narrative. As Matschi (2016: 18) explains, [t]he central point Ette makes with all of these movement patterns is that the deep-structural geometrical figure (such as circle, line or star) performed by the protagonists on the topological level of a literary text’s narrated world frequently resembles the hermeneutic movement of understanding the reader must perform in order to grasp (at least the essential of) its meaning potential. Whereas the fixed boundary divides the storyworld into topographical sub‐ spaces, it is the mobile character’s movement between and across these sub‐ spaces that ultimately enables us to make sense of their meaning. With recourse to Lotman’s and Ette’s theories, one can thus state that a text can only develop a plot if the protagonist crosses a boundary, and that this movement can take various routes and directions. However, as Matías Martínez and Michael Scheffel (2009 [1999]) point out, Lotman regards as narrative not only “revolutionary” text types in which the protagonist’s boundary crossing is successful but also “restitutive” text types in which this act of movement fails or is eventually reversed (142). According to Martínez and Scheffel, the occurrence of the border crossing itself does not qualify as a distinctive feature of narrative in Lotman’s model; instead, it is the existence of a semantic field, divided into two subsets by a conceptual boundary, which makes a text a narrative (140). This modified version of Lotman’s model shifts the analytical focus from narrativity to tellability, with the result that the protagonist’s transgression of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 362 Carolin Gebauer 14 On the relation between the concepts of narrativity, tellability, and eventfulness, see Hühn (2014). this conceptual boundary no longer determines a narrative’s eventfulness, but rather its quality as a narrative that is ‘worth being told’. 14 Combining these considerations about Lotman’s semantics of space with insights from mobility studies, one could argue that literary narratives evoke fictive mobility regimes which govern the characters’ radius of mobility: Essentially, the narrative configuration of the spatial dimension of a novel’s story‐ world […] always produces repercussions on the characters’ freedom of movement, either by inviting them to move about freely, or by restricting or even preventing movement through its presence as external friction. (Matschi 2016: 196) We can thus think of Martínez and Scheffel’s distinction of revolutionary and restitutive text types in terms of the differentiation between mobility and what mobility scholars refer to as “motility” - that is, “the way in which an individual appropriates what is possible in the domain of mobility and puts this potential to use for his or her activities” (Kaufmann 2016: 37, original emphasis). While revolutionary texts feature mobility to the effect that characters cross a boun‐ dary, hence performing an act that leads to some kind of transformative change within the storyworld, restitutive texts only display the characters’ motility within the structural and systemic constraints at play in a given storyworld. The reasons why a character may fail or refuse to realise their potential of movement are manifold, of course, depending on their specific circumstances. These circumstances, in turn, are not only inscribed in their character conception, but also determined by character constellations that reflect specific power structures underlying the storyworld the character inhabits. 4.2 Categories for the Analysis of Mobility on the Discourse Level When it comes to the analysis of mobility on the discourse level of narrative texts, the categories ‘time’, ‘mood’, particularly ‘perspective’ and ‘focalisation’, and ‘voice’, provided by Gérard Genette (1980 [1972]) prove helpful. With respect to time, it seems promising to begin with the spatiotemporal configu‐ rations of the storyworlds evoked by narratives. In his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (2014 [1981]), Mikhail M. Bakhtin argues that literary texts produce unified “chronotopes” whose temporal and spatial properties are inextricably interwoven. There is both a textual and a contextual dimension to Bakhtin’s concept, for “created chronotopes” always emerge 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 363 “[o]ut of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation)” (253; original emphasis). After having long been ignored in narratological research (Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan 2022: 430), newer work in the field has begun to emphasise the value of Bakhtin’s concept as a tool for narratological analysis. Most recently, Susan S. Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2022) have introduced what they designate as “the postclassical chronotope” - a model that operates within the framework of “a situated narratology”, which “recognizes the critical place of contexts, identities, and locations […] not only of narrative but also of narrative form” (431). Their readings of various examples from Anglophone literature, including, among others, Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), “conjoin Bakhtin’s delineation of social spaces with Genette’s categories of temporal arrangement” (ibid.) to uncover the functional interplay of plot development and narrative space. More importantly, however, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan’s considerations additionally highlight that the analysis of the ways in which narrative events unfold against different spatial backdrops always involves questions about the movement of characters and other narrative existents. This becomes obvious in their analysis of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894), which revolves around a wife’s coming to terms with the supposed loss of her husband, who is said to have died in a train accident. The short story follows the widow through the stages of mourning as well as the realisation of her new-found freedom, until her husband reappears, alive and unharmed, causing the wife to die of shock. The temporal dynamics of the narrative, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan argue, is accompanied by a continuous shift in setting, which they conceive as movement through narrative space: While temporality marks the story’s title, spatiality shapes the hour. In terms of story order, the narrative moves from the road (or, in this case, the train track) to the drawing room to the private chamber, and then back to the drawing room with another intrusion from the road. (433; emphasis added) Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan show that the ways in which the characters move between different spaces within the storyworld do not match the order of narration, for the events of the road are presented by instances of analepsis, whereas the drawing room constitutes the narrative present. The shifts between the different settings furthermore coincide with variation in narrative tempo: In the relatively public space of the drawing room, summary dominates: discourse or narrative time (NT) is far shorter than story time (ST). In the privacy of the chamber, however, narrative time slows toward story time as Louise undergoes the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 364 Carolin Gebauer transformation from grief to the liberating recognition that she can ‘live for herself ’. (433) Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan’s close reading of Chopin’s narrative offers some interesting insights for narrative mobility studies. First, it demonstrates that notions of movement and mobility inform their analysis not only on a spatial level (think of the continual changes in the narrative’s setting), but also on a psy‐ chological level (i.e. Louise is moved emotionally by the death of her husband, and these feelings change over time). Second, the fact that their analysis of the narrative’s progression through different spaces of the storyworld foregrounds variations in narrative pace reveals that Genette’s categories - i.e. pause, scene, summary, ellipsis - are well compatible with categories introduced by critical mobilities research - e.g. speed, flow, friction, pauses, stillness, and turbulence (Sheller 2014: 795). Finally, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan’s interpretation that Louise’s experience of liberation is restricted to the private sphere - “in late nineteenth-century America, a respectable married woman’s passion for free‐ dom has literally nowhere to go” (2022: 434) - illustrates that the combination of these categories can be fruitfully applied to investigate how “textured rhythms are co-produced, practiced, and represented in relation to the gendered, raced, classed mobilities and forms of dwelling and ‘grounding’ of particular others” (Sheller 2014: 795). The need to include the ideas of movement and mobility in the analysis of narrative chronotopes has already been emphasised by literary and mobility scholars alike. According to Matschi (2016: 70), it is the “mobile character” that links the different semantic spaces evoked by narratives: Their movement across the boundaries separating these spaces “brings about their mutual inter‐ twinement” (ibid.), which may result in effects of translocality, transnationality, and transculturality. Matschi therefore calls for a “dynamization of Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’”, stressing “the agentive dimension of human motion” (47) that transforms otherwise static spatiotemporal configurations (see also 70-3). Peterle (2023: 109) similarly maintains that the concept of the chronotope should be reconsidered from the perspective of mobility. Her approach complements Matschi’s reflections in that she suggests “explor[ing] the possibility of not only considering static places - for example, the city, the crossing or the road […] - but also, the moving elements and practices as possible narrative chronotopes”. In her understanding, narrative existents like the car, trains and trams, or the underground qualify as “mobile chronotopes”, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 365 15 Drawing on insights from an enactivist approach to narratology, Peterle (2023) is interested not so much in representations of characters’ experiences of mobility as in the experiences that these representations elicit within the flesh-and-blood reader. It is in this respect that she argues that the concept of the chronotope “serves as a ‘bridge’ between the real and fictional worlds”, for it has “the capacity to configure the real world […] through a mutual exchange between pages and places” (108). 16 Matschi (2016: 184) has coined the term “traveller-focalizer” for this scenario. 17 For detailed discussions of representations of animal minds in narrative fiction, see e.g. Caracciolo (2022: ch. 3) and Herman (2018: ch. 6). i.e. narrative spatiotemporal configurations that bridge the act of narration and the experiences of movement evoked by this act (109). 15 Matschi’s and Peterle’s arguments about the dynamisation of the chronotope also raise important questions about narrative perspective, in particular about focalisation. For the ways in which subjects and objects move across the time‐ spaces evoked by narratives are always represented from a specific point of view from within these narratives. Drawing on Rimmon-Kenan’s (2002 [1983]: 75-6) distinction of external and internal focalisation, this centre of consciousness can be either the narrator on the discourse level or a character on the story level, the choice of which has consequences for the mode of representation. In the case of external focalisation, the movements of characters and objects are typically depicted from an external perspective, with the modes of narration or description dominating, whereas in the case of internal focalisation, these movements are presented from an internal point of view through the use of representational strategies associated with the mode of showing. More specifically, this means that a narrative gives readers an idea of what it’s like to be ‘on the move’ by taking one or several mobile characters as focalisers. 16 Forms of representation that are typically used to convey these different perspectives on movement through narrative space are the “map strategy” and the “tour strategy” (Ryan et al. 2016: 27), the latter of which is sometimes even used as a plot theme whenever a narrative as a whole follows the journeys of a protagonist (31-2). Focalisation is not constrained to human characters, however; this category can also serve to question anthropocentric perspectives by taking, for instance, animals or plants as mobile focalisers, instead. 17 In this way, narrative fiction can provide imaginary entryways to nonhuman and material mobilities that otherwise remain largely inaccessible. The final category that is central to the analysis of representations of mobility in narrative is voice and its concomitant distinction of different narrative levels. According to Marie-Laure Ryan (2014: 805-6), narrative space is not only horizontally divided into subspaces, as suggested by Lotman, but narrative can also display vertical partitions into different ontologies, which create, among 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 366 Carolin Gebauer others, the different levels of fictionality in narratives with embedded stories. The narratological category of metalepsis has already taught us that character movement can also take place across and between these different narrative planes (Matschi 2016: 266-7). I would argue that, from the perspective of narrative mobility studies, such metaleptic transgressions not only serve as a violation of the structure of narrative; in most cases, these movements also constitute what Magdalena Pfalzgraf (2021: 248) describes as “countermobility” in that they challenge the social hierarchies and power structures represented in these texts. Seen in this light then, character movement within both the vertical and horizontal dimensions can serve to reflect, substantiate, or undermine the politics of mobility underlying specific narratives. 5 Conclusion Although mobility studies often draws on narrative in various contexts, and cultural narratology similarly addresses issues and concerns that are related to mobility, there has so far been very little exchange between the new mobil‐ ities paradigm and contextualist narratology. In pointing out some important overlaps between both research fields, this chapter has made a case for a new analytical framework that integrates findings from mobility studies on the one hand and cultural narrative studies and interdisciplinary narrative research on the other. My argument in favour of narrative mobility studies has first foregrounded the value of narrative in cultural discourses on mobility, introducing the notion of the narrative ecology of mobility that enables us to better fathom the ways in which narrative affects mobilities on cultural, societal, and individual scales. As a second step, I have introduced some elements of a narratology of mobility which integrates categories from both mobility studies and narrative theory for the analysis of the ideological operations of form that are at play in narrative representations of mobility. While this chapter could not offer a comprehensive overview of all the intersections between mobility studies and narrative theory, I nevertheless hope to have shown that further research in narrative mobility studies could be beneficial to both research fields. Given that mobility scholars and narrative scholars concur in the view that narrative is not only informed by, but also shapes social, cultural, political, and historical ideas of what it means to be mobile, the narrative ecology of mobility demands further examination. How do narratives of mobility interact with each other, forming clusters of master-narratives and counter-narratives that influence the ways in which we move in a globalised and networked world? In how far do narratives contribute 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 367 to the formation of cultural imaginations of mobility and to what extent have these narratives changed over time in light of social and cultural transformations such as colonialism and decolonisation, industrial and technological progress, as well as the growing threat of climate change? How do narratives of mobility shape cultural identity and intercultural encounters? What impact do they have on our understanding of how human practices of mobility change the spaces and environments we inhabit on this earth? And how do all these narratives inform politics of mobility, thus affecting lived experiences of being ‘on the move’? In addition to synchronic and diachronic research into the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of the narrative dynamics of mobility, narrative mobility studies could further explore the relevance of movement to the analysis of narrative form. Dynamisations of the chronotope, for example, could be used to systematically analyse the spatial semantics of narrative fiction by revisiting conventionalised binary pairs such as the public vs. the private spheres, centre vs. periphery, and interiority vs. exteriority to name but few examples. Another interesting endeavour would be an investigation of the link between represen‐ tations of mobility and multiperspectivity (see Nünning and Nünning 2000). How, for instance, do the different perspective structures in narrative fiction bear upon the ways in which mobility is depicted and negotiated in these texts? 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