JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory

06/04/2026

Hello Friends! I would like to announce that our Special Issue is now live! It is available on Project Muse, so I hope that you all will get a chance to read it!

05/26/2026

JNT Special Issue CFP:

Narratives and Storytelling Cultures in Contemporary Times

Every society is shaped by the stories it tells and the storytelling cultures through which those stories circulate. Some societies privilege narratives grounded in scientific rationality and empirical logic, while others draw upon myths, folklore, memory, spirituality, or fantasy. Yet across cultures, narratives remain central to the
ways human beings interpret reality, negotiate identity, and organize social life. Storytelling is never neutral; narratives are deeply political in the ways they construct truth, authority, belonging, and exclusion. Narratives are inseparable from the cultural conditions in which they emerge. They are shaped by questions of who tells a story, to whom it is addressed, how it is
narrated, where it circulates, why it is produced, and what kinds of social, cultural, or political effects it generates. Storytelling cultures therefore reflect the values, anxieties, aspirations, and normative structures of particular societies. In many ways, they participate in defining what counts as “truth” within a given historical and cultural
moment.

In contemporary times, storytelling practices are undergoing profound transformations. The emergence of large language models, AI-algorithmic systems, digital platforms, and globally networked media environments has altered both the
production and circulation of narratives. Stories now move continuously between physical and digital spaces. Narratives are increasingly mediated by machines, algorithms, and transnational flows of information, giving rise to new forms of authorship, audience participation, cultural memory, and ideological influence.
This special issue seeks to explore the shifts happening in narratives and storytelling cultures in the contemporary era. It invites contributions that examine how narratives are created, circulated, contested, and transformed across literary, cinematic, cultural, digital, visual, and social contexts.

Interested contributors should contact: Dr. Dhanesh Mankulam at [email protected]

03/17/2026

As the Dialogue approaches, I invite you to visit our website to learn more about our upcoming Dialogue on Thursday, March 19 at 6:30!

JNT Dialogue: Speaker Series The JNT Dialogue is JNT's annual speaker series. Each year, the JNT Dialogue invites keynote speakers to present on topics at the forefront of discourse about narrative theory. Previous Dialogue topics include "Detroit as a Narrative Space," "Environmental Futures," and....

03/02/2026

Hello Again! I hope everyone is enjoying the break if they have one! I would like to highlight our second JNT Dialogue speaker, Stephen Best! Here's a little bit about him:
Stephen Best is Rachael Anderson Stageberg Professor of English and director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. His publications include The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago, 2004), and None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018). Of late, he has been thinking about the phatic and the apophatic in black life, or the way the connectedness we call blackness often sticks to expressions of the cannot-be-said -- as often in memes as in the writings of James Baldwin.

02/23/2026

Hello! In light of our Dialogue event coming up, I would like to introduce you all to our speaker, Julie Beth Napolin! Here's a little bit about her for you all to know:
Julie Beth Napolin is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at The New School and author of The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020). The book returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form.

02/18/2026

This year's JNT Dialogue will explore the impact of Sound Studies on narrative theory. For those interested in learning more about what Sound Studies is, we recommend checking out the blog Sounding Out!

pushing sound studies into the red since 2009

02/05/2026

Hello! I would like to present our authors for this year's dialogue! Dr. Julie Beth Napolin and Dr. Stephen M. Best will be presenting this year's dialogue: Hearing Voices: Reading, Race, and the Acoustic Imagination on March 19th at 6:30 in the Student Center Rm 300. I hope to see all of you there!

01/29/2026

Hello! If you have time, please head to our website where we have some new blog posts from some of our featured authors for our newest special issue, 55.3!

Featured JNT Authors "Having a crisis of faith is essentially the new normal in the humanities, but refracted through the world's new abnormal, it became something else entirely, especially when teaching a student population disproportionately hit by the virus, as I do." - JNT 51.1 Featured Author:....

01/15/2026

Hello everyone and Happy New Year! I would like to announce that our issue 55.3 is live on internet databases! Please go check it out wherever you get your journal access from!