Showing papers on "Narratology published in 2007"

Empathy and the Novel

Abstract: Does reading novels evoking empathy with fictional characters really cultivate our sympathetic imagination and lead to altruistic actions on behalf of real others? Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, Keen finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive (and exaggerated by defenders of literary reading). She offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. Empathy and the Novel engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, Keen brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. Keen surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. She argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. She confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, Keen suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, then women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.

The Narrative Reader

Abstract: "The Narrative Reader aims to provide a comprehensive survey of narrative theories ranging from Plato to Post-Structuralism. The selection of texts is bold and broad, demonstrating the extent to which narrative permeates the entire field of literature and culture. It shows the ways in which narrative crosses disciplines, continents and theoretical perspectives and is a long overdue and welcome addition to the field. The Narrative Reader will fascinate students and researchers alike, providing a much needed point of entry to the increasingly complex field of narrative theory." -- Publisher's website.

Reframing Conflict in Translation

Abstract: This article draws on narrative theory and the notion of framing, the latter as developed in the literature on social movements, to explore various ways in which translators and interpreters accentuate, undermine or modify contested aspects of the narrative(s) encoded in the source text or utterance. Starting with an outline of the assumptions and strengths of a narrative framework compared with existing theories of translation, the article goes on to define the concept of framing in the context of activist discourse. It then outlines some of the sites—or points in and around the text—at which (re)framing may be achieved, and offers various examples of framing strategies used in written and screen translation. The examples are drawn from translations between English and Arabic in the context of the Middle East conflict and the so-called War on Terror, but the theoretical issues outlined are not language specific or context specific.

Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: Brian Richardson. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 166 pp. $55.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Brian Richardson's Unnatural Voices is a major contribution to narratology. Its starting point is the highly convincing thesis that 'narrative theory, despite its emphasis on narrative and narrators, has not yet systematically examined the impressive range of unusual postmodern and other avant garde strategies of narration', in part because postmodernism 'has often proven resistant to traditional narrative theory' (ix). He explains that the book is intended to rectify these unfortunate absences. It explores in depth one of the most significant aspects of late modernist, avant garde, and postmodern narrative - the creation, fragmentation, and reconstitution of narrative voices - and offers a theoretical account of these unusual and innovative strategies. This is an empirical study that describes and theorizes the actual practices of significant authors . . . Such an inductive approach is essential because many extreme forms of narration seem to have been invented precisely to transgress fundamental linguistic and rhetorical categories, (ix) In essence, the book comprises an inventory and theoretical overview of a large number of innovative contemporary uses of narrators and narration. These are contrasted with current theories of narrative poetics that, Richardson plausibly argues, cannot fully comprehend them. Such innovations include a new kind of narrative that hinges on the unexpected disclosure of a homodiegetic narrator towards the end of an apparently heterodiegetic text (for example, Ian McEwan's Atonement); 'it', 'they', and passive voice narration; second person narration (divided into standard, hypothetical, and autotelic); 'we' narration; multiperson narration (for example, texts that employ first and third person narration); indeterminate speakers; impossible acts of narration; interlocutor narration (for example, the 'Ithaca' episode in Ulysses); 'denarration' (narrators denying the truth of what they have just said); 'permeable' narration ('the uncanny and inexplicable intrusion of the voice of another within the narrator's consciousness' [95]); distinctively postmodern types of unreliable narrators such as fraudulent, contradictory, incommensurate, and disframed narrators; and unusual narrators in contemporary drama. And all in one hundred and forty pages! The final chapter, after discussing the modernist origins of contemporary anti-realist practices, ends with a plea for a general 'anti-poetics' of narrative that should be considered as a supplement and foil to traditional poetics. The proposal is not for a different poetics but for an additional one; that is, for an anti-mimetic poetics that supplements existing mimetic theories. Such a model will allow us to greatly expand the area covered by narrative theory, and will allow it to embrace a host of earlier non-mimetic literatures. And only in this way can we begin to do justice to the most effective imaginative achievements in narrative in our time. (138) Specifically, he suggests that 'we will be most effective as narrative theorists if we reject models that insist, based on categories derived from linguistics or natural narrative, on firm distinctions, binary oppositions, fixed hierarchies, or impermeable categories' (139). In Richardson's view, instead of such rigid typologies, we need an alternative model that stresses the permeability, instability, and playful mutability of the voices in non-mimetic fictions. Unnatural Voices is just what a narratological book should be: its proposals for narrative theory are original and important, and it also contains a number of illuminating readings of individual works. The book features an encyclopedic reference to a wide range of narratives from various countries, both postmodern and other (although the regular use of Samuel Beckett narratives provides a thread of continuity). …

The Blackwell guide to literary theory

Abstract: Part I: Introduction: Part II: The Rise of Literary Theory: Timeline Part III: Scope of Literary Theory Critical Theory: Cultural Studies Deconstruction Ethnic Studies Feminist Theory Gender and Sexuality Marxist Theory Narrative Theory New Criticism New Historicism Postcolonial Studies Postmodernism Poststructuralism Psychoanalysis Reader-Response Theory Structuralism and Formalism Part IV: Key Figures in Literary Theory: Theodor Adorno Louis Althusser Mikhail Bahktin Roland Barthes Jean Baudrillard Walter Benjamin Homi Bhabha Pierre Bourdieu Judith Butler Hazel Carby Helene Cixous Teresa De Lauretis Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Paul De Man Jacques Derrida Terry Eagleton Frantz Fanon Stanley Fish Michel Foucault Henry Louis Gates Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar Stephen Greenblatt Stuart Hall Donna Haraway bell hooks Linda Hutcheon Luce Irigaray Wolfgang Iser Fredric Jameson Julia Kristeva Jacques Lacan Jean-Francois Lyotard J Hillis Miller Edward Said Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Elaine Showalter Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak Raymond Williams Slavoj Zizek Part V: Reading with Literary Theory: William Shakespeare, Tempest John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener" Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness James Joyce, Ulysses Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God W B Yeats, "Leda and the Swan" Samuel Beckett, Endgame Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus Conclusion: How to Read Theory Recommendations for Further Study Glossary Index

Generating narrative variation in interactive fiction

Abstract: A general method for the generation of natural language narrative is described. It allows the expression, or narrative discourse, to vary independently of the underlying events and existents that are the narrative's content. Specifically, this variation is accomplished in an interactive fiction (IF) system which replies to typed input by narrating what has happened in a simulated world. IF works have existed for about 30 years as forms of text-based computer simulation, instances of dialog systems, and examples of literary art. Theorists of narrative have carefully distinguished between the level of underlying content (corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer and user) since the mid-1960s, when the field of narratology began to develop, but IF systems have not yet made use of this distinction. The current project contributes new techniques for automatic narration by building on work done in computational linguistics, specifically natural language generation, and in narratology. First, types of narrative variation that are possible in IF are identified and formalized in a way that is suitable for a natural language generation system. An architecture for an IF system is then described and implemented; the result allows multiple works of interactive fiction to be realized and, using a general plan for narrating, allows them to be narrated in different ways during interaction. The system's ability to generate text is considered in a pilot evaluation. Plans for future work are also discussed. They include publicly released systems for IF development and narratology education, adding a planning capability that uses actors' individual perspectives, and adapting automatic narration to different sorts of interactive systems.

Story and discourse: A bipartite model of narrative generation in virtual worlds

Abstract: In this paper, we set out a basic approach to the modeling of narrative in interactive virtual worlds This approach adopts a bipartite model taken from narrative theory, in which narrative is composed of story and discourse In our approach, story elements — plot and character — are defined in terms of plans that drive the dynamics of a virtual environment Discourse elements — the narrative’s communicative actions — are defined in terms of discourse plans whose communicative goals include conveying the story world plan’s structure To ground the model in computational terms, we provide examples from research under way in the Liquid Narrative Group involving the design of the Mimesis system, an architecture for intelligent interactive narrative incorporating concepts from artificial intelligence, narrative theory, cognitive psychology and computational linguistics

Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel

Abstract: Since the landmark publication of The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961, Wayne Booth's theoretical legacy can be found at the heart of at least two major schools of literary criticism. On the one hand, narratologists turn to Booth's theory for its insights into the anatomy of narrative form. Seymour Chatman and, more recently, Brian Richardson both defend, for example, Booth's notion of the implied author on "pragmatic" grounds (Chatman 75): Chatman believes that the implied author helps "to account for features [of narrative texts] that would otherwise remain unexplained, or unsatisfactorily explained" (74); Richardson similarly argues that the notion of the implied author is "a coherent and useful one for a wide range of critical practices" (165). But for a second school of American theorists, the narratological value of Booth's work cannot be detached from what for Booth makes narratology itself worth pursuing: the ethical effects of rhetorical practices. The ethical dimension of Booth's work has notably been furthered by a younger generation of neoAristotelians who advanced Booth's project within Booth's life time through their "coduction" with Booth into the ethical power literary texts have upon their readers.' In part because James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and David Richter are contributing to this special issue and can speak for themselves about Booth's centrality for narratology and for Chicago-School ethical theory, I would like instead to

Narrative research in psychotherapy: a critical review.

Abstract: Purpose. This paper is a review of studies which utilise the notion of narrative to analyse psychotherapy. Its purpose is to systematically present this diverse field of research, to highlight common themes and divergences between different strands and to further the development and integration of narrative research in psychotherapy. Methods. The paper reviews studies which employ an applied textual analysis of narratives produced in the context of psychotherapy. Criteria for inclusion of studies are, firstly, the analysis of therapeutic and therapy-related texts and, secondly, the adoption of a narrative psychological perspective. The studies were examined on the basis of the notion of narrative they employ and the aspects of client narratives they focus on, and were grouped accordingly in the review. Results. The majority of the studies reviewed assume a constructivist approach to narrative, adopt a representational view of language, focus primarily on client micronarratives and relate to cognitive-constructivist and process-experiential psychotherapeutic approaches. A smaller group of studies assume a social constructionist approach to narrative and a functional view of language, focus on micro-narratives, highlight the interactional and wider social aspects of narrative and relate to postmodern trends in psychotherapy. Conclusions. The range of conceptualisations of narrative in the studies reviewed, from a representational psychological view to a constructionist social view, reflects tensionswithinnarrativepsychologyitself.Moreover,twotrendscanbediscernedinthe field reviewed, narrative analysis of therapy, which draws from narrative theory and utilisestheanalyticapproachesofnarrativeresearchtostudypsychotherapy,andanalyses of narrative in therapy, which study client narratives using non-narrative qualitative methods. Finally, the paper highlights the need for integration of this diverse field of research and urges for the development of narrative studies of psychotherapy which employ a broader social understanding of narrative production and transformation.

Reconsidering the unreliable narrator

Abstract: The concept of the unreliable narrator is among the most discussed in current narratology. From being considered a text-internal matter between the personified narrator and the implied author by Booth, or the implied reader by Chatman, cognitive and constructivist narrative theorists like A. Nunning have described it as a reader-dependent issue. The detection of a narrator's unreliability is an act of 'naturalization,' he claims, with reference to Culler. This article concentrates on this long and ongoing debate and considers the different approaches critically with special attention to the position of A. Nunning. In the final section, a four-category taxonomy for the different textual strategies that establishes unreliable narration is suggested. The headlines for the taxonomy are intranarrational unreliability, internarrational unreliability, intertextual unreliability, and extratextual unreliability.

The "Narrative is Travel" Metaphor: Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence

Abstract: The understanding of narratives is closely tied to the experience of travel. In narrative theory, the travel story features regularly as either the model narrative or the model for narrative. In Vladimir Propp’s classic study of story grammar, for instance, the narrative functions are structured along a travel pattern between the hero’s departure and return. In more recent narratology and literary history, and in certain interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, the notion of travel may even function as a code or key revealing how the narrative works. In the history of the novel, travel writing has helped to shape the genre. Narratives of travel to exotic lands have informed the modern novel with detailed foreign settings and a sense of authenticity in viewpoint. 1 Since the time of the Greek epics different types of journey—the quest, the odyssey, and the adventure—have served as powerful masterplots in literary narratives. For instance, the chronotope of the road, and the metaphor of “the path of life” that it realizes, is a central feature in Mikhail Bakhtin’s history of novelistic plot patterns and especially important for what Bakhtin calls the adventure novel of everyday life (120). The journey is universally recognized as a narrative in our culture. The narrative potential of travel lies in the fact that we recognize in it temporal and spatial structures that call for narration. The different stages of travel—departure, voyage, encounters on the road, and return—provide any story with a temporal structure that raises certain expectations of things to happen. Perhaps because of this pervasiveness of the travel narrative, we have come to understand personal life and mental development as a voyage. The travel metaphor is therefore not only a way to think about narrative; it also provides one with the means to think through narrative.

Reading network fiction

Abstract: This is an in-depth history and analysis of hyperlinked fiction. The marriage of narrative and the computer dates back to the 1980s, with the hypertext experiments of luminaries such as Judy Malloy and Michael Joyce. What has been variously called "hypertext fiction," "literary hypertext," and "hyperfiction" has surely surrendered any claim to newness in the 21st century. David Ciccoricco establishes the category of "network fiction" as distinguishable from other forms of hypertext and cybertext: network fictions are narrative texts in digitally networked environments that make use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and recombinant narratives. Though they both pre-date and post-date the World Wide Web, they share an aesthetic drive that exploits the networking potential of digital composition and foregrounds notions of narrative recurrence and return. Ciccoricco analyzes innovative developments in network fiction from first-generation writers Michael Joyce ("Twilight, A Symphony", 1997) and Stuart Moulthrop ("Victory Garden", 1991) through Judd Morrissey's "The Jew's Daughter" (2000), an acclaimed example of digital literature on the Web. Each investigation demonstrates not only what the digital environment might mean for narrative theory but also the ability of network fictions to sustain a mode of reading that might be called "literary." The movement in the arts away from representation and toward simulation, away from the dynamics of reading and interpretation and toward the dynamics of interaction and play, has indeed led to exaggerated or alarmist claims of the endangerment of the literary arts. At the same time, some have simply doubted that the conceptual and discursive intricacy of print fiction can migrate to new media. Against these claims, "Reading Network Fiction" attests to the verbal complexity and conceptual depth of a body of writing created for the surface of the screen.

Plot monitoring for interactive narrative games

Abstract: Interactive narrative and video games are two fields divided between the will to follow a scenario and that to offer a maximum of freedom and interaction. We propose a method combining emergent narrative theory and game monitoring to create a new system of dynamic generation of narrative. This method is based on a multi-agent architecture, which supervises and monitors the game execution.allIt uses of narrative structures descriptors as a reference to lead the evolution of an emergent narrative world. A first application has been developed to test the validity of the system in term of effectiveness and computational cost.

Life story methods and care for the elderly. An empirical research project in practical theology

Abstract: The focus of the research project presented in this article is on the structure of the life stories of elderly people living in old age homes and its relationship to wellbeing or quality of life and the quality of the caring relationship. In an experimental design, we are testing the hypothesis that intervention with narrative methods has a positive effect on existential well-being and quality of the caring relationships because of the impact it has on the quality (content and structure) of the life story. We used a specific narrative intervention called the Life Book method in an experimental group of 70 elderly people and provided extra attention to a control group of 30. The theory of narrative identity (Paul Ricoeur) offers some building blocks for developing a tool for assessing the process and structure of the life story and its impact on existential well-being. This project is conceived as an effort in practical theology in the public square. Its particular perspective is that of spiritual care, which is located on the intersection of two social spheres: health and worldview. Possible outcomes are described (including an expected corroboration of our hypothesis (strengthening the caring relationship on microand meso level) and contributions are indicated to narrative theory, theory of care, practical theology and spiritual care and counseling.

Mind style 25 years on

Abstract: In this article I show how work on mind style over the last 25 years has built on the account provided by Leech and Short in Style in Fiction. I begin by pointing out the central role of “fictional minds” in current work in narratology. In particular, I endorse the claim, made by many scholars, that fictional minds are primarily (although not exclusively) constructed on the basis of what we know about “real” minds, and can be usefully analysed by means of models developed by cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists. I then consider the contributions of cognitive theories such as Schema theory and Cognitive Metaphor theory, and of theories from pragmatics such as Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Politeness theory. I finish by considering the use of corpus-linguistic techniques to investigate the systematic linguistic patterns that can be responsible for the projection of mind style.

Writing History in Film

Abstract: WRITING HISTORY IN FILM William Guynn New York: Routledge, 2006, 225 pp. Reviewed by Michael Meneghetti "It is a risky business to write seriously about the historical film," William Guynn reminds us. Until fairly recently, professional historians have offered "mostly negative" judgments on the cinema's capacity to accurately and legitimately render histories. Lacking traditional historiography's overt argumentation and erudition, the historical film has often been dismissed for its tenuous connection to historical fact, "costume drama" being the typical "term of disparagement" for such films. Over the past decade several book-length studies have tried to redress this no longer tenable characterization of historical filmmaking. Rather than emphasize a particular film's relation to existing written accounts of historical events, recent work has tended to look at the historical film as a certain type of relationship to the past, or a distinct mediation of our ties to past reality. Understanding the precise nature of this mediation has been augmented by our growing awareness of historical representation, its forms, and the various means at the medium's disposal for making meaningful histories. Writing History in Film returns to this occasionally treacherous terrain to offer a "cross-disciplinary understanding of what constitutes historical representation in film." In my anticipation, or pre-reading, of the book's subject matter, I expected yet another defense of history on film in terms of its utility to those spectators who receive it in specific cultural and historical contexts. Guynn, however, has a fundamentally different project in mind. The aim of his study is "not only to defend the historical film but also to construct a framework within which to judge approaches to historical representations in film." Guynn is uncommonly forthright in his desire to judge the seriousness of the historical film's intentions, and he insists upon distinguishing between "historical spectacles like those of Cecil B. De Mille" and what he clearly considers the more serious "work of a Rossellini or an Eisenstein." The grounds for making such distinctions and the criteria for judging what he calls the "validity" of historical representations in film are the principal theoretical concerns of his study. Over the course of five chapters, Guynn elaborates this theory by appealing to the work of philosophers of history, rhetorical studies, narratology, and semiology. The result is a multidisciplinary perspective on the "philosophical commitments historians make to the past and to the public they address, and the basic structures of meaning and techniques of representation they deploy. " After a brief summary and refutation of the academic historian's skepticism about history in film, Guynn addresses the central problem of all historical narratives: how are these stories to be distinguished from fictional stories? If history is indeed a "narrative of a particular kind," what accounts for its particularity? Guynn draws upon the philosophy of history to examine the fundamentally narrative character of historiography and its seemingly paradoxical epistemological claims. Constructing an account of the causal development of events through time, he tells us, is a precondition for historical understanding; and to recount the past in this manner is to create plots and a story. Historiography, however, retains its particularity in the following way: although fictive plots may enjoy a relative freedom of invention, a "representation of the past...adheres to a principle of fidelity" and credibility. Of course, the line is frequently blurred, insofar as the historian is obliged to imagine a past that s/he has not necessarily experienced, while the novelist may in turn make precise reference to concrete details and real events. Nonetheless, although history and fiction are both species of the genus story, Guynn insists that the former can be defined in terms of its distinct discursive posture and the constraints of veracity on its tale-telling. …

Storytelling in Time and Space: Studies in the Chronotope and Narrative Logic on Screen

Abstract: This paper is intended to contribute to the theoretical studies of two issues: chronotope, and narrative architectonics. It explores the narrative forms of the ritual journey, and expands the notion of the chronotope of ordeal, associated with a journey. A new type of chronotope, a derivative from the chronotope of ordeal proposed by Bakhtin, and yet a separate form of artistic time-space continuum—the chronotope of rise and fall—is introduced and explored in this paper. In narrative theory after Bakhtin and in film theory after Deleuze an interest in the exploration of fictional time-

Horror films: tales to master terror or shapers of trauma?

Abstract: The authors review the literature of cinematic-related psychiatric case reports and report the case of a 22-year-old woman who presented with intrusive thoughts of demonic possession and flashbacks of the film The Exorcist. Cinematic neurosis may be considered a form of psychological crisis shaped by exposure to a film narrative that is emotionally and culturally significant to the individual. The structure of horror films are examined from the perspectives of trauma theory, narrative theory, and borderline personality organization theories, using the film The Exorcist as an example. Within this framework, the horror film can be seen as a cultural tale that provides a mechanism for attempting mastery over anxieties involving issues of separation, loss, autonomy, and identity. An individual will identify with narrative elements that resonate in personal life experiences and cultural factors embedded within the film, which carry levels of either stress that will be mastered, or act as a trauma to the viewer. The outcome of this exposure is related to how the individual's personality structure is organized in combination with the stresses they are experiencing.

Generating educational tourism narratives from wikipedia

Abstract: We present a narrative theory-based approach to data mining that generates cohesive stories from a Wikipedia corpus. This approach is based on a data mining-friendly view of narrative derived from narratology, and uses a prototype mining algorithm that implements this view. Our initial test case and focus is that of field-based educational tour narrative generation, for which we have successfully implemented a proof-of-concept system called Minotour. This system operates on a client-server model, in which the server mines a Wikipedia database dump to generate narratives between any two spatial features that have associated Wikipedia articles. The server then delivers those narratives to mobile device clients.

Singular Text, Multiple Implied Readers

Abstract: In narrative theory and literary analysis, it is regularly assumed that a text has a single implied author and a single implied reader. This is no doubt usually the case, but there are a number of interesting examples that cannot fit within this simple framework. In the last chapter of my book, Unnatural Voices, I argued the case for multiple implied authors; in this article, I would like to examine the other side of the narrative transaction and explore the possibilities of multiple implied readers inscribed within the same text. Perhaps the most obvious class of works written for two distinct audiences is one well known to all parents: children's literature. Many works of this genre appeal both to the child's mind and sensibility and at the same time to the very different interpretive frameworks of adults. In a stimulating essay on this subject, Per Krogh Hansen quotes Hans Christian Andersen on his intentions to address both groups simultaneously (101). For a notorious example from American popular culture, we may point to the Betty Boop cartoons of Max and Dave Fleischer, which are filled with brazen sexual innuendo that a child cannot fully comprehend. Defining the implied reader [implizierte Leser], Wolfgang Iser stated that the implied reader "incorporates both the prestructuring of the potential meaning of the text, and the reader's actualization of this potential through the reading process" (Implied xii). But much children's literature has two different prestructurings, one for the simple child and the other for the knowledgeable adult. And both are equally privileged, though in very different ways. And when literary authors like Lewis Carroll or William Makepeace Thackeray get into the act, yet another reader may be prestructured in the text as well, adding the highbrow sophisticate who understands the playful references to logic and parodies of Wordsworth ("The White Knight's Tale") to the more ordinary parent and, of course, the child audience of the Alice books. (1) Political censorship produces its share of double codings. To take one notorious example, a conservative Irish newspaper, Irish Society, printed an unsigned poem called "An Ode of Welcome" to celebrate the return of the Royal Navy ships from South Africa in June 1900 during the Boer War. It contains appropriately patriotic and indeed jingoistic stanzas like: The Gallant Irish yeoman Home from the war has come Each victory gained o'er foeman Why should our bards be dumb. How shall we sing their praises Our glory in their deeds Renowned their worth amazes Empire their prowess needs. So to Old Ireland's hearts and homes We welcome now our own brave boys In cot and Hall; neath lordly domes Love's heroes share once more our joys. Love is the Lord of all just now Be he the husband, lover, son, Each dauntless soul recalls the vow By which not fame, but love was won. United now in fond embrace Salute with joy each well-loved face Yeoman: in women's hearts you hold the place. The amorous turn toward the end of the poem further enhances the praise of the warriors by affirming their status as heroes in a gendered national allegory as well as promising each the love awaiting them in "women's hearts." The poem, however, turned out to have been written by Oliver St. John Gogarty, and the first letters of each line form an acrostic that produces an entirely opposite assessment of the virtues and rewards of British imperialism from that inscribed in the poem proper. Conditions of political censorship have produced such compositions for some time; one thinks of Milton secreting his radical politics within the story of the Fall of Man in Paradise Lost, perhaps the only way he could get them into print after the restoration of the monarchy (see Hill 341-412, esp. 380-90). Similarly, one may point to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's rousing depiction of Hindu nationalists' victorious struggle over British forces in Anandamath (1882) by framing the text with anti-Muslim rhetoric and a pacifistic epilogue. …

Contributions and challenges to vocational psychology from other disciplines: examples from narrative and narratology

Abstract: Other disciplines offer new perspectives, concepts, and models that would help vocational psychology reinvigorate itself. The paper identifies contributions (such as narrative) that post-modern sources and scientific disciplines could make, though with reservations about importing ideas from the physical sciences into the social sciences. There would also be challenges for vocational psychology, primarily to its core values as a science but those could change over time. As an example, the paper then discusses how some of the lessons of narratology could enrich post-modern approaches, while its structuralism could enable vocational psychology to take advantage of the potential contributions of narrative.

Enunciation and Narration

Abstract: There are no stories without a storytelling instance. Virtually all narratologists agree on this point. Films differ, however, from novels in that a film can show an action rather than tell it. In that regime of showing (monstration), notably in theatrical staging or in the “documentary” recordings of the LumiGre Brothers, the discursive instance is less apparent than in a written tale. Events seem to tell their own stories. Yet this is misleading, because without any mediation there would have been no recording and we would not have seen the events at all. This perception of events recounting themselves, which some spectators might have (for example in watching a surveillance video) or certain critics might argue for (such as Andre Bazin, when he invokes the “impartiality of the camera” or “the fragment of ‘raw reality’ in Italian neorealism” [Bazin 1981: 280-l]), does not stand up to analysis. We are confronted with a key question: should narratology start from spectatorial perception, however flawed, or look for a system of narrative instances capable of explaining the textuality of film? This question was posed at a time when the possibility of a film as a narrative was no longer accepted as a postulate and after the decline of the euphoria of those who believed there was a necessary correspondence between messages sent and messages understood in a communication system where every message encoded by a sender was supposed to be received intact, or almost intact, by a receiver. Since then, narratologists have responded diversely to this methodological question. T o simplify what is at stake, consider this image: a ventriloquist and his dummy, for example the impertinent Hugo of Dead o f the Night (Albert0 Cavalcanti, 1945). Here, the dummy has a monologue, confiding his love for this or that well-known singer. If the situation seems comic, that is because the spectator believes (or pretends to believe) that the dummy is responsible for what it “says”. But if it turns to the man holding it on his knee to begin a dialogue, the spectator momentarily adheres to the fiction that these two figures are autonomous subjects, sometimes in disagreement with one another. That belief will be strong or weak, depending on whether the viewer is a child or an adult, a “good”

Engaging imagination and the future: frontiers for clinical work.

Abstract: Narrative theory indicates that assessment using narratives is expectant, collaborative, and has the potential to begin a process of change. A shift from thinking exclusively about meaning (subjectivity in the child) to thinking also about shared meaning (intersubjectivity between child and clinician-examiner) seems appropriate in the clinical context. Recent knowledge from the cognitive neurosciences makes a shift of this sort compelling and has further implications. More story stem narrative research at the level of assessing individual children needs to be done so there can be explicit links to treatment.

Narrative and Identity: An Ethical Reading of Exodus 4

Abstract: Using key features of Ricoeur's narrative theory, this creative Asian re-reading of Moses' reverse migration in Exodus 4:18-26 charts the way for a multi-dimensional OT hermeneutic which explores the theme of identity formation in light of the liminal experience of migration.