1 Narrative Theory at the Limit Richard Walsh [in Theory Matters: The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today, ed. Martin Middeke & Christoph Reinfandt. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. p. 265-279.] Introduction This essay is concerned with literary narratology in its interdisciplinary contexts; it aims to give a view both of narratology's current state in literary studies and of its potential as a vehicle for interdisciplinary research, and to examine the tension between its interdisciplinary scope and its literary centre of gravity. 1 Throughout the history of narratology it has been explicit that the object of study, narrative, vastly exceeds the bounds of its literary manifestations. Such a premise, in fact, was foundational for structuralist narratology, with its aspirations to be a general science of narrative; and in practice the methods of narratological inquiry have been applied and developed very productively on a broad interdisciplinary front, encompassing narratives across media (film, digital and interactive media, oral narratives, comics, narrative art) and across research domains (historiography, law, medicine, management studies). Nevertheless, the continuing dominance of literary narrative as a privileged object of narratological analysis is both striking and problematic. Is this just academic inertia, or does literary narratology still have a key role in the interdisciplinary project of narratology as a whole? )ǯll begin by considering the ways in which the field has developed in recent years, and the lines of force apparent in that development, in order to articulate a view of what narratology is or should be. )ǯll then address the question of how this view frames the relation between literary and interdisciplinary narratology. My aim is to affirm both, whilst accentuating the difference between them; )ǯll do this by installing an idea of discontinuity within the compass of narratological inquiry itself, using the relation between narrative and complex systems as a limit case example for the model of interdisciplinarity I favour. The underlying idea, to which )ǯll return at the end, is that the relation between interdisciplinary inquiry and the distinctive contribution of literary narratology can itself be conceived by analogy with the relation between complex systems and narrative.