Showing papers on "Narratology published in 2003"

"Mourning in America": ritual, redemption, and recovery in news narrative after September 11

Abstract: This article analyzes coverage of the events of September 11 in 20 issues of American newsmagazines published during the month following the attacks, as well as at the end of the year 2001 Drawing on anthropological and narrative theory, it contends that news coverage contained the elements of a funeral ritual, creating a forum for national mourning and playing a central role in civil religion It further argues that coverage constructed a cohesive story in which vulnerability and fear were replaced by heroism and patriotic pride This transformation offers evidence that journalists make sense of even "senseless" news events by placing them within a broader, cultural grand narrative of resilience and progress By the one-month anniversary of the event, "the story of September 11" had emerged--through a process that involved readers as well as journalists--in American news media, providing a set of lessons and offering closure to a national grieving process

Towards a narrative theory of virtual reality

Abstract: Virtual Reality (VR), by its nature and characteristics, is of specific interest to the AI community, particularly in the domains of Storytelling and Intelligent Characters. We argue that VR must be considered a particular narrative medium alongside Theatre, Literature or Cinema. This paper reviews relevant work in narrative theory from Plato onwards, including the work and theories of literary critics [1], cinema critics [2–4] and theatrical dramaturges [5], and analyses the specific characteristics of VR relevant to this theory. Less studied media such as Live Role Playing Games, improvisational drama and participatory drama are also considered. Finally, this document argues for a participatoryprocess-oriented narrative, with particular attention to the specificities and particularities of stories and their possible representation, adapted to the narrative medium Virtual Reality.

Solving the Narrative Paradox in VEs – Lessons from RPGs

Abstract: Narrative within Virtual Environments (VEs) is a compromise between pre-authored narrative structures and user freedom in terms of interaction and physical movement. We present results of a recent investigation on the narrative structures and mechanisms of Role Playing Games (RPGs), and assess the potential of non-conventional narrative forms for computer implementation. We address the potential benefits for the research currently undertaken by the AI community in terms of storytelling and interactive storytelling.

What is narratology? : questions and answers regarding the status of a theory

Abstract: What Is Narratology? sees itself as contributing to the intensive international discussion and controversy on the structure and function of narrative theory. The 14 papers in the volume advance proposals for determining the object of narratology, modelling its concepts and characterising its status within cultural studies.

Narratology meets Translation Studies, or, The Voice of the Translator in Children’s Literature

Abstract: When critics identify ‘manipulations’ in translations, these are often described and analysed in terms of the differing norms governing the source and the target languages, cultures and literatures. This article focuses on the agent of the translation, the translator, and her/his presence in the translated text. It presents a theoretical and analytical tool, a communicative model of translation, using the category of the implied translator, the creator of a new text for readers of the target text. This model links the theoretical fields of narratology and translation studies and helps to identify the agent of ‘change’ and the level of communication in which the most significant modifications take place. It is a model applicable to all translated narrated literature but, as examples illustrate, due to the asymmetrical communication in and around children’s literature, the implied translator as he/she becomes visible or audible as the narrator of the translation, is particularly tangible in translated children’s literature.

The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt

Abstract: Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction, both high and low. But few have asked why suspense played such a crucial role in the Victorian novel and in Victorian culture more broadly. This study argues that a startling array of 19th-century thinkers - from John Ruskin to Michael Faraday to Charlotte Bronte and Wilkie Collins - saw suspense as the perfect vehicle for a radically new approach to knowledge that they called "realism". Although by convention suspense has belonged to the realm of sensational mysteries and gothic horrors, and realism to the world of sober, reformist, middle-class domesticity, the two were in fact inextricably intertwined. The real was defined precisely as that which did not belong to the mind, that which stood separate from patterns of thought and belief. In order to get at the truth of the real, readers would have to learn to suspend their judgement. Suspenseful plots were the ideal vehicles for disseminating this experience of doubt, training readers to pause before leaping to conclusions. Far from being merely low or sensational, the mysteries of many plotted texts were intended to introduce readers to a rigorous epistemological training borrowed from science. And far from being complacently conservative, suspense was deliberately employed to encourage a commitment to scepticism and uncertainty. Carole Levine argues convincingly that the 19th-century critics were not wrong about suspense: the classic readerly text was indeed far more writerly - dynamic, critical, questioning and indeterminate - than modern critics have been inclined to imagine. Offering official readings of canonical texts, including "Jane Eyre", "Great Expectations", "The Moonstone" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray", and drawing on a range of historical sources, from popular fiction and art criticism to the philosophy of science and scientific biography, Levine combines narrative theory and the history of ideas to offer a rereading of 19th-century realism.

Narrative archetypes: A critique, theory, and method of narrative analysis

Abstract: The application of narrative theory to music has been an important aspect of theoretical research in the last twenty years or so, with significant articles, books, and conference papers appearing on the topic by Edward T. Cone, Anthony Newcomb, Fred Maus, Robert Hatten, Eero Tarasti, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Carolyn Abbate, and numerous others.1 However, after a period of intense interest in musical narrative between about 1987 and 1994, the topic has moved somewhat out of the spotlight, leaving the impression that enough may have been said on the matter. I believe that there are three significant reasons for this:

Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode

Abstract: When Gerard Genette coined the term "metalepsis" in the fifth chapter (on "Voice") of his Discours du recit, he defined it as "any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse (as in Cortazar) [...]" (Narrative Discourse 234-35; Figures IH 244). Genette had already given an example of metalepsis in the second chapter ("Duration") when he refers to a typically Balzacian narrative pause in La Vieille Fille in which narrator and reader together "enter" the Cormon townhouse in order to gain a view of the scene: But we know that the Balzacian novel, on the contrary, established a typically extratemporal descriptive canon [...], a canon where the narrator, forsaking the cause of the story [...], makes it his business, in his own name and solely for the information of his reader, to describe a scene that at this point in the story no one, strictly speaking, is looking at. For example, as the sentence in the Vieille Fille that opens the scene at the Cormon townhouse certainly indicates: "Now, however, it will be necessary to enter the household of that elderly spinster toward whom so many interests converge, and within whose walls the actors in this Scene are to meet this very evening." This "entering" is obviously the doing of the narrator and reader alone, who are going to wander over the house and the garden while the real "actors in this Scene" continue to attend to their business elsewhere, or rather wait to go back to their business until the narrative agrees to return to them and restore them to life.(100-01; 134-35) In this passage the narrator accompanied by the "reader" seemingly moves into the world of the fiction, pointing out to the narratee the setting of events to be described in the following pages. This technique is very similar to one common in Fielding's novels, first pointed out in his doctoral dissertation by Wilhelm Fuger, one of the doyens of German narratology: "But we will be more courteous to our reader than he [the coachman] was to Mrs Slipslop, and leaving the coach and its company to pursue their journey, we will carry our reader on after Parson Adams [...]" (Joseph Andrews 2.7). In these examples, two characteristic features are to be noted. First, the discourse level and story level in an authorial narrative (heterodiegetic narrative with zero focalization) seem to merge ontologically or existentially (the narrator and narratee seem to have entered the story world at least in imagination if not in real fact). Second, this curious imaginative transgression of narrative levels occurs in a pause of the story, as a narratorial insertion corresponding to no action on the plot level. The term "transgression," actually, is quite inadequate to the effect of these passages since they tend to enhance the realistic illusion of storyworld representation, aiding the narratee's (as well as the reader's) imaginative immersion into the story rather than foregrounding the metafictional and transgressive (nonrealistic) properties of such an imaginative stepping into the story world. In the footnote attached to the paragraph in chapter 2 of Narrative Discourse from which I began by quoting, Genette in fact compares the device to a metaphoric Gygean ring--a figure that Genette borrows from Theophile Gautier--that allows narrator and narratee to be present but invisible on the scene: Gautier will use this technique to the point of a flippancy that "bares" it, as the Formalists would say: "The Marquise inhabited a separate suite, which the Marquis did not enter unless he was announced. We will commit this impropriety that authors of all times have allowed themselves, and without saying a word to the buttons who would have forwarned the lodger, we will penetrate into the bedroom, sure of disturbing no one. …

Fictionality and Mimesis: Between Narrativity and Fictional Worlds

Abstract: The concept of fictionality has been undermined by developments in two distinct areas of research in recent years: on the one hand, the interdisciplinary ambitions of narrative theory have tended to conflate fictionality with a general notion of narrativity that encompasses nonfictional narrative; on the other hand, fictional worlds theory, in response to philosophical and linguistic concerns, has sought to disarm fictionality by literalizing fictional reference. Dorrit Cohn, in The Distinction of Fiction, has made a case against the former tendency in the interest of her own reassertion of a generic focus upon fiction as "nonreferential narrative," although this involves no confrontation with fictional worlds theory, which does not contest the generic integrity of fiction (12). My concern here is somewhat different, in two respects: I want to allow a little more force to those narratological perspectives that tend to merge the concept of fictionality with that of narrativity; and I want to distinguish more sharply between my own understanding of fictionality and the way it is framed by the philosophical and linguistic perspectives of fictional worlds theories. These differences arise because in my view the concept at stake is not fiction as a generic category, but fictionality as a rhetorical resource. By identifying what is excluded by the perspectives of a generalized narrativity and fictional worlds theory, I hope to make some progress toward a fuller characterization of the rhetorical nature of fictionality. This undertaking will lead me to a reconsideration of the concept of mimesis in relation to narrative fictions, from which vantage point I want to draw an analogy between "fiction" and "exercise" that I think captures something of the distinctiveness of the fictional use of narrative.

Computing Action: A Narratological Approach

Abstract: The study takes a new approach to the phenomenon of narrated action in literary texts. It begins with a survey of philosophical approaches to the concept of action. In the second part, the combinatory model of action proposed is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided investigation of the action constructs logically implied by narrative texts. The third part presents a case study of Goethe's "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten".

When Narrative Fails

Abstract: Lloyd Wells' four examples of loss of self challenge both philosophers and clinicians to ponder just what it is that has been lost in such cases If a self has been lost, who lost it? And how can personal identity be so insecure that it can be lost in so many different ways? Empiricist thinkers, both Western and Eastern, have questioned the very existence of a self; much recent thought about the nature of the self has converged on notions that it is not a substantial reality, but a narrative, the product of the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives so that we can knit together our experiences into a continuous plot Owen Flanagan and Valerie Hardcastle have already brought one version of this theory to bear on one of Wells' cases and James Phillips explores the capacity of narrative theory to account for each of these cases in an accompanying essay In this essay, I challenge the adequacy of narrative theories of the self in general and their application to these particular cases The details of Wells' cases highlight the limitations of narrative theories to discursive, secondary process thought by directing attention to the richer and more expressively forceful resources of metaphor and nondiscursive forms of symbolism Narrative unity or continuity is no guarantee against experiences of the loss of self The monological character of narrative masks the sociality of the self, the ways in which each individual self is constituted and threatened by interactions with other selves I argue for the power of drama, opera, music, dance, and spatial forms of symbolism to cope with the diversity of what Flanagan has dubbed the multiplex self, (Flanagan 1994) especially when narrative fails Language and narrative certainly play a crucial role in human self-consciousness But human imagination and art command other resources as well and a theory that acknowledges their contributions can accept and incorporate the insights of narrative theories without confining itself to the limitations of story telling

Intertextual turns in curriculum inquiry : fictions, diffractions and deconstructions

Abstract: This thesis is based primarily on work published in academic refereed journals between 1994 and 2003. Taken as a whole, the thesis explores and enacts an evolving methodology for curriculum inquiry which foregrounds the generativity of fiction in reading, writing and representing curriculum problems and issues. This methodology is informed by the narrative and textual 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences - especially poststructuralist and deconstructive approaches to literary and cultural criticism - and is performed as a series of narrative experiments and 'intertextual turns'. Narrative theory suggests that we can think of all discourse as taking the form of a story, and poststructuralist theorising invites us to think of all discourse as taking the form of a text; this thesis argues that intertextual and deconstructive readings of the stories and texts that constitute curriculum work can produce new meanings and understandings. The thesis places particular emphasis on the uses of fiction and fictional modes of representation in curriculum inquiry and suggests that our purposes might sometimes be better served by (re)presenting the texts we produce as deliberate fictions rather than as 'factual' stories. The thesis also demonstrates that some modes and genres of fiction can help us to move our research efforts beyond 'reflection' (an optical metaphor for displacing an image) by producing texts that 'diffract' the normative storylines of curriculum inquiry (diffraction is an optical metaphor for transformation). The thesis begins with an introduction that situates (autobiographically and historically) the narrative experiments and intertextual turns performed in the thesis as both advancements in, and transgressions of, deliberative and critical reconceptualist curriculum theorising. Several of the chapters that follow examine textual continuities and discontinuities between the various objects and methods of curriculum inquiry and particular fictional genres (such as crime stories and science fiction) and/or particular fictional works (including Bram Stoker's Dracula, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, and Ursula Le Guin's The Telling). Other chapters demonstrate how intertextual and deconstructive reading strategies can inform inquiries focused on specific subject matters (with particular reference to environmental education) and illuminate contemporary issues and debates in curriculum (especially the internationalisation and globalisation of curriculum work). The thesis concludes with suggestions for further refinement of methodologies that privilege narrative and fiction in curriculum inquiry.

n Teoretiese inleiding tot narratiewe hermeneutiek in die teologie

Abstract: A theoretical introduction to narrative hermeneutics in theology The premise of this article is that narrative hermeneutics as a method of research in theology departs from a dialectical relationship between hermeneutics and the method of interpretation. The article aims to describe and explain narrative as a “way of knowing”. It focuses on the form, content, function and context of myth. Myth is foundational to the lifestories of people and groups. The discussion on narrative theory applies Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “hermeneutical arch” in narrative hermeneutics. The article concludes with the idea that narrative as a way of knowing is ideological critical and deconstructs dominant socio-cultural narratives. The story of Jesus of Nazareth as the foundational myth of the Christian faith community can function as a contra narrative in order to give meaning to people’s lives in the presence of God in a postmodern world.

Linguistics, language, and the real world : discourse and beyond

Abstract: GURT is nationally and internationally recognized as one of the world's star gatherings for scholars in the fields of language and linguistics. In 2001, the best from around the world in the disciplines of anthropological linguistics and discourse analysis meet to present and share the latest research on linguistic analysis and to address real-world contexts in private and public domains. The result is this newest, invaluable 2001 edition of the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. This volume brings together the plenary speakers only, all leaders in their fields, showcasing discourse contexts that range from medical interactions to political campaigns, from classroom discourse and educational policy to current affairs, and to the importance of everyday family conversations. The contributors expand the boundaries of discourse to include narrative theory, music and language, laughter in conversation, and the ventriloquizing of voices in dialogue. Frederick Erickson explores the musical basis of language in an elementary school classroom; Wallace Chafe analyzes laughter in conversation. William Labov examines narratives told to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, while Deborah Schiffrin compares multiple accounts of Holocaust narratives, and Alessandro Duranti considers competing speaker and audience interpretations during a political candidate's campaign tour. Robin Lakoff uncovers contrasting narratives shared by different cultural groups with respect to such current events as the O.J. Simpson trial. Deborah Tannen examines the integration of power and connection in family relationships, while Heidi Hamilton considers accounts that diabetic patients give their doctors. Shirley Brice Heath looks at discourse strategies used by policymakers to deny research findings, and G. Richard Tucker and Richard Donato report on a successful bilingual program.

Narrative and Cognition in Beowulf

Abstract: This essay explores ways in which narrative functions as a "cognitive artifact," i.e., something used by humans for the purpose of supporting or enabling cognition. The essay grows out of our ongoing attempt to blend insights from several fields, including narrative theory, discourse analysis, cognitive science, anthropology, and literary studies. Synthesizing ideas developed in these disciplines, and using Beowulf as our tutor-text, we argue that stories provide crucial representational tools facilitating humans' efforts to organize multiple knowledge domains, each with its attendant sets of beliefs and procedures. (1) Relevant domains include not only those associated with social cognition, the mode of thinking that both enables and is shaped by social experience (see Fiske and Taylor), but also a variety of problem-solving activities extending beyond those connected with social life. More specifically, our essay uses Beowulf to show how stories afford resources for thinking in five broad problem domains, to be characterized below. We focus on the cognition-enabling role of narrative in the Old English poem Beowulf for several reasons. For one thing, the text bridges Anglo-Saxon traditions of oral narration with early medieval English literature, revealing how narrative--from before the start of literate culture--has served as a support for the formulation, systematization, and transmission of communal as well as personal experiences and values. (2) Beowulf, in other words, testifies to the longlastingness of narrative as a tool for thinking. Further, with its inclusion of multiple embedded narratives; its representation of stories as a means of making promises, saving face, and navigating other aspects of social existence; its shifts between homodiegetic (or "first-person") and heterodiegetic (or "third-person") accounts of one and the same set of events; and its use of nearly parallel life-stories for the Danish king Hrothgar and for Beowulf as king of the Geats, the poem itself represents and thus helps illuminate the cognitive functions of storytelling). (3) What is more, we believe that our approach provides a framework for the comparative study of narrative texts belonging to different periods, cultures, and genres, nonliterary as well as literary. Our thesis is that everywhere and always stories have functioned to make the world more understandable and manageable; but in addition to having core features that make it a cognitive and communicative universal, narrative has over time supported thought in culture-, genre-, and situation-specific ways. Consequently, although a continuum stretches between modes of narrative thinking found in an early medieval epic and those at work in a police interrogation or a ludic postmodern novel, it is important to establish the location of a given story artifact on the continuum at issue. In short, while sketching general and basic principles by virtue of which narrative organizes human understanding, our essay also suggests that those principles are implemented differently in different kinds of narrative texts. A task for future research is to explore how such variation might be correlated more exactly with historical, cultural, and generic factors bearing on the design and interpretation of stories. The first part of the essay reviews recent work on cognitive artifacts and situates the study of narrative in this research context. Then, anchoring our discussion in Beowulf, we survey tire (overlapping) problem-solving activities--"chunking" experience into workable segments, imputing causal relations between events, managing problems with the "typification" of phenomena, sequencing behaviors, and distributing intelligence across groups--for which the representational tools bound up with narrative can be argued to furnish crucial support. These activities encompass but are not limited to problems entailed by social cognition. Further, the five modes of problem-solving are pertinent to narrative viewed both as product and as process; they reveal ways in which particular narratives like Beowulf can be exploited as a tool for thinking about specific situations, as well as ways in which narrative in general constitutes a fundamental resource for building, recognizing, and using cognitive artifacts across highly variable circumstances. …

Narratology meets Translation Studies, or, The Voice of the Translator in Children's Literature

Abstract: When critics identify ‘manipulations’ in translations, these are often described and analysed in terms of the differing norms governing the source and the target languages, cultures and literatures. This article focuses on the agent of the translation, the translator, and her/his presence in the translated text. It presents a theoretical and analytical tool, a communicative model of translation, using the category of the implied translator, the creator of a new text for readers of the target text. This model links the theoretical fields of narratology and translation studies and helps to identify the agent of ‘change’ and the level of communication in which the most significant modifications take place. It is a model applicable to all translated narrated literature but, as examples illustrate, due to the asymmetrical communication in and around children’s literature, the implied translator as he/she becomes visible or audible as the narrator of the translation, is particularly tangible in translated children’s literature. MOTS-CLES/KEYWORDS implied translator, narrator of the translation, implied reader, invisibility, visibility When scholars or critics identify ‘changes,’ ‘adaptations’ or ‘manipulations’ in translations of children’s literature, they often rightly describe and analyse them in terms of the differing social, educational or literary norms prevailing in the source and the target languages, cultures and literatures at that given time. 1 A rich source of such observations are the many translations of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Langstrump (1945), which give a good indication of what was perceived by the target cultures, at the time of translation, to be inacceptable for child readers. In a scene in the novel Pippi, Tommy and Annika are playing in the attic when Pippi finds some pistols in a chest. She fires them in the air and then offers them to her friends who delightedly accept. In the German translation Pippi doesn’t give the pistols to her friends, instead she instructs them – and the readers – by changing her mind, putting them back in the chest and declaring “Das ist nichts fur Kinder!” (Lindgren 1965,205) (“that’s not right for

Narrative Beginnings in Amy Tan's the Joy Luck Club: A Feminist Study (1)

Abstract: Like virginity, literary introductions are often seen as an awkward embarrassment, an obstacle to be overcome as quickly as possible in order to facilitate vital experiences. On the other hand, "the first time" is a supremely privileged moment, to be lingered over, contemplated, and cherished. Which is the more telling conception we can only begin to imagine. --Steven Kellman, "Grand Openings and Plain" Even feminist narratology ... has tended to focus on women writers or female narrators without asking how the variables "sex," "gender," and "sexuality" might operate in narrative more generally. --Susan S. Lanser, "Queering Narratology" Few extensive studies of narrative beginnings exist, and not one takes a feminist perspective. Offering almost exclusively formalist readings, existing analyses neglect the ideological implications of beginnings, especially as they relate to gender, race, and cultural identity. (2) Even as scholars overlook ideological valence in narrative beginnings, their own readings often indicate, perhaps unexpectedly, that social and cultural concerns adhere to any conception of beginnings. For example, Steven Kellman, one of the first to study narrative beginnings in an extended analysis, evokes ways that cultural bias is embedded in these studies. The sexualized metaphor he uses to illustrate the trouble inherent in starting a literary text testifies to this bias. The problem with his description arises when one considers the historical importance placed on female purity and virginity in numerous cultures. Not only is the conception of virginity as an "awkward embarassment" a specifically heteronormatively masculinist perspective, but it also posits the proverbial pen-as-penis, page/text-as-female-body metaphor with whose ideological valences we are all familiar. Furthermore, the analogy obscures cultural differences that shape the relationship of a given individual to gendered sexuality. Similarly, A.D. Nuttall, while recognizing that his text on narrative beginnings is a "spectacle of alternating (male) authority and (male) sequence [that] will certainly be unpleasing to some people," (3) never interrogates this exclusively white male focus (vii). These studies serve as examples of the way gender concerns, however invisible, are often already linked to beginnings. They invite us to examine seriously the identificatory variables that have been elided and to take up the challenge identified by Susan S. Lanser to explore how social categories operate in narrative (250). The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is an ideal vehicle with which to begin such a project. (4) It is suggestive of a new way to look at narrative beginnings, one that emphasizes a destabilization of conceptions of history that exclude women, particularly those of non-European descent. This way of reading narrative beginnings encourages an interrogation of the relevance of both European American and Asian American cultural and national origins for Asian American female subjects, as well as promoting a resistance to the notion of an alternatively authentic origin. If we attend to the ideological significance of beginnings in Tan's novel, a critique of the very concept of origins--especially in its relation to "American," "Chinese," and "Chinese American" identity--becomes apparent. Moreover, doing so illuminates the discursive constructedness of authenticity, origins, and identity, thereby problematizing reductive cultural representations of female, American, and Asian American subjectivity. Building on recent scholarship about Asian American literature and subjectivity, which has suggested that The Joy Luck Club has been misread, (5) this essay attempts to extend, if not disrupt, the readings of many scholars from different disciplines who impose certain kinds of master narratives onto this novel. (6) While these readings are not so much "wrong" as they are incomplete, an examination of this text's narrative beginnings can at once help us to theorize narrative with an attentiveness to difference and to recognize this help as integral to the cultural work Tan's novel performs. …

Metaphors, letters, and stories: narrative strategies for family healing.

Abstract: This article introduces the reader to the use of narrative strategies in a holistic approach to family nursing. It presents congruence with holistic nursing practice, narrative theory base, and key elements of narrative therapy. Emphasis is on creative adaptation and integration of narrative strategies in a variety of clinical situations to promote family healing. Many suggestions for practice and some resources for further learning are given.

How Stories Make Us Smarter. Narrative Theory and Cognitive Semiotics

Abstract: In everyday life people incorporate stories into a wide range of activities. Stories enable humans to carry out spontaneous conversations, make sense of news reports in a variety of media, produce and interpret literary texts, create and assess medical case histories, and provide testimony in court. In the present essay, I build on the interdisciplinary research tradition that has grown up around the study of “cognitive artifacts”2 –that is, material as well as mental