Unnatural emotions in contemporary narrative fiction

The beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed not only an affective turn in contemporary fiction but also an affective turn in literary criticism. In the current scholarship of emotion studies, critics mainly focus on the mimetic aspects of emotion from a cognitive perspective while neglecting its antimimetic aspects. This article argues that not all stories are created by the normal and usual emotions. Instead, there exist so-called unnatural emotions in contemporary avant-garde and antimimetic narratives, which are physically, logically, or humanly impossible. Through presenting unnatural emotions, contemporary avant-garde narratives not only foreground the fictionality of unnatural narratives but also generate defamiliarizing effects. Taking Ian McEwan's Dead as They Come as an example, the article proposes a synthetic approach to unnatural emotions by combining both naturalizing reading strategies and unnaturalizing reading strategies, so as to make the unnatural narrative work readable without losing its unnaturalness.