Emma Kafalenos

Titles

Director of Undergraduate Studies; Senior Lecturer, Comparative Literature

Books
Narrative Causalities. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. Explores the effect of context on interpretations of consequences and causes, and argues that narratives, by determining the contexts in which events are perceived, shape readers' interpretations of causality, whether the narratives being read are nonfiction or fiction.

Ed. Narrative 9:2 (May 2001). Spec. issue on contemporary narratology.

Articles

"Reading Functionally Polyvalent Events." In Structuralism(s) Today: Paris, Prague, Tartu. Ed. Veronika Ambros, Roland Le Huenon, Adil D'Sousa, and Andrés Pérez-Simón. New York: Legas, 2009. 111-20. Considers the effect of reading translations without the rudimentary sociopolitical information of a native speaker by comparing a naive to a better informed interpretation of the early twentieth-century Chinese writer Lu Xun's "Ah Q - The Real Story."

With Roland Jordan. "La Duplice Traiettoria: Ambiguità in Brahms ed Henry James." In La narratologia musicale: Applicazioni e prospettive. [Musical Narratology: Applications and Perspectives]. Ed. and trans. Angela Carone. Torino: Trauben, 2006. 87-117. Trans. of "The Double Trajectory: Ambiguity in Brahms and Henry James." 19th-Century Music 13.2 (Fall 1989): 129-44. Demonstrates a similar structural instability, unusual even in the late 19th century, in two works from 1892 that hold open to the very end alternative possibilities: the B minor or D major tonality of Brahms's Intermezzo, op. 119, no. 1; the courage or cowardice motivating the protagonist of James's "Owen Wingrave."

"The Power of Double Coding to Represent New Forms of Representation: The Truman Show, Dorian Gray, 'Blow-Up,' and Whistler's Caprice in Purple and Gold." Poetics Today 24:1 (May 2003): 1-33. Analysis of the representational possibilities of artworks contained within artworks in several media.