This book questions and hopes to trouble a well-entrenched commonplace concerning the relationship of speech to writing. It is no exaggeration to say that contemporary criticism is haunted by the paradox that speech is both extremely powerful and doomed to cultural obsolescence. “Writing is the destruction of every voice,” Roland Barthes famously proclaims in “The Death of the Author,” articulating a half-triumphant, half-guilty belief concealed at the heart of contemporary print culture. Most of us assume that orality is an attenuated relic of an era before the rise of modern print culture – and at the same time, a force latent in suppressed groups and indeed parts of our own selves, capable of disrupting writing with all the force of a resurrection. Contemporary literary criticism takes it for granted that members of pre-novelistic cultures relied on modes of oral communication exemplified by communal storytelling, and that the advent of print displaced the spoken word as the glue holding modern societies together – thereby driving speech into obsolescence. Studies of modern print culture have too often either neglected voice, speech, and orality entirely or romanticized the vocal as a remnant of a lost and mourned pre-modern past. The distinction between a pre-modern “oral culture” and a modern print culture thus becomes a narrative of the fall from an idealized folk to a degraded mass culture. Walter Benjamin provides the classic articulation of the longing generated by the supposed displacement of voice in his melancholic 1936 essay “The Storyteller.”

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Voice and the Victorian Storyteller: “The best man of all”: mythologies of the storyteller

This thesis introduces an innovative method for the analysis of the player character (PC) in offline computer role-playing games (cRPGs). It derives from the assumption that the character constitutes the focal point of the game, around which all the other elements revolve. This underlying observation became the foundation of the Pivot Player Character Model, the framework illustrating the experience of gameplay as perceived through the PC’s eyes.
Although VG characters have been scrutinised from many different perspectives, a uniform methodology has not been formed yet. This study aims to fill that methodological void by systematising the hitherto research and providing a method replicable across the cRPG genre. The proposed methodology builds upon the research of characters performed in video games, fiction, film, and drama. It has been largely inspired by Anne Ubersfeld’s semiological dramatic character research implemented in Reading Theatre I (1999).
The developed theoretical model is applied to three selected cRPGs, which form an accurate methodological sample: The Witcher (CD Projekt RED 2007), Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios 2008), and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Troika Games 2004). The choice of the game genre has been incited by the degree of attention it draws to the player character’s persona. No other genre features such a complex character development system as a computer role-playing game.

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Pivoting the Player:A Methodological Toolkit for Player Character Research in Offline Role-Playing Games

The Wings of the Dove ’s characteristic structure of silences is intimately connected to a dynamic of caregiving. Late-Victorian readers would have expected the novel to climax in a cathartic deathbed scene. Although this scene gets thwarted on the plot level, it surfaces on the stylistic level, its discourse characterized by the elements of care it has invoked: relationality, shifting, communalism. This reading aims to show the extent to which The Wings of the Dove develops a narrative theory of care.

The Silent Treatment of The Wings of the Dove: Ethics of Care and Late-James Style

Near the end of David Copperfi eld, when David has become almost as successful an author as the one who wrote this novel, his aunt Betsey says to him: “I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them!” David replies: “It’s work enough to read them, sometimes.”1 Betsey misses her cue here, but Mr. Omer, the merry undertaker, has earlier paid David the compliment for which his humble “sometimes” fi shes:

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Voice and the Victorian Storyteller: “The best man of all”: mythologies of the storyteller

Pivoting the Player:A Methodological Toolkit for Player Character Research in Offline Role-Playing Games

The Silent Treatment of The Wings of the Dove: Ethics of Care and Late-James Style

Unctuous: Resentment in David Copperfield

Hardy's Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus

Related Papers (5)

Aspects of the Novel

Reading for the plot : design and intention in narrative

The Country and the City

The Rise Of The Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act