Marina Grishakova is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Tartu in Estonia. She is the author of The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames and the coeditor of Intermediality and Storytelling. Maria Poulaki is a lecturer in film and digital media arts at the University of Surrey and the coeditor of Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Narrative Complexity
Marina Grishakova and Maria Poulaki
Part 1. Narrative Complexity and Media
1. Narrative as/and Complex System/s
Marie-Laure Ryan
2. Caution, Simulation Ahead: Complexity and Digital Narrativity
David Ciccoricco and David Large
3. The Wave-Crest: Narrative Complexity and Locative Narrative
Emma Whittaker
4. Complexity and the Userly Text
Noam Knoller
5. The Complexity of Informative Autobiographies
Ulrik Ekman
Part 2. Cognition and Narrative Comprehension
6. Sources of Complexity in Narrative Comprehension across Media
Joseph P. Magliano, Karyn Higgs, and James Clinton
7. Structural Complexity in Visual Narratives: Theory, Brains, and Cross-Cultural Diversity
Neil Cohn
8. Simplicity, Complexity, and Narration in Popular Movies
James E. Cutting
9. Heteronomy of Narrative: Language Complexity and Computer Simplicity
Hamid R. Ekbia
Part 3. Experience, Subjectivity, and Embodied Complexity
10. Narrative Here-Now
Mieke Bal
11. Body Forth in Narrative
Ellen J. Esrock
12. Between Distancing and Immersion: The Body in Complex Narrative
Maria Poulaki
13. Intersubjectivity, Idiosyncrasy, and Narrative Deixis: A Neurocinematic Approach
Pia Tikka and Mauri Kaipainen
14. Jazz as Narrative: Narrating Cognitive Processes Involved in Jazz Improvisation
Martin E. Rosenberg
Part 4. Narrative Complexity and Cultural Evolution
15. The Predictive Mind, Attention, and Cultural Evolution: A New Perspective on Narrative Dynamics
Marina Grishakova
16. Necessary Fictions: Supernormal Cues, Complex Cognition, and the Nature of Fictional Narrative
James Carney
17. In Hindsight: Complexity, Contingency, and Narrative Mapping
José Angel García Landa
Contributors
Index