Showing papers on "Plot (narrative) published in 2004"

An Intent-Driven Planner for Multi-Agent Story Generation

Abstract: The ability to generate narrative is of importance to computer systems that wish to use story effectively for entertainment, training, or education. We identify two properties of story - plot coherence and character believability - which play a role in the success of a story. Plot coherence is the perception by audience members that character actions have relevance to the outcome of the story. Character believability is the perception that character actions are motivated by agents' internal beliefs and desires. Unlike conventional planning in which plan goals represent an agent's intended world state, multiagent story planning involves goals that represent the outcome of a story. In order for the plans' actions to appear believable, multi-agent story planners must determine not only how agents' actions achieve a story's goal state, but must also ensure that each agent appears to be acting intentionally. We present a narrative generation planning system for multi-agent stories that is capable of generating narratives with both strong plot coherence and strong character believability. The planning algorithm uses causal reasoning and a simulated intention recognition process to drive plan creation.

Narrative generation: balancing plot and character

Abstract: The ability to generate narrative is of importance to computer systems that wish to use story effectively for a wide range of contexts ranging from entertainment to training and education. The typical approach for incorporating narrative into a computer system is for system builders to script the narrative features at design time. A central limitation of this pre-scripting approach is its lack of flexibility—such systems cannot adapt the story to the user's interests, preferences, or abilities. The alternative approach is for the computer systems themselves to generate narrative that is fully adapted to the user at run time. A central challenge for systems that generate their own narrative elements is to create narratives that are readily understood as such by their users. I define two properties of narrative—plot coherence and character believability—which play a role in the success of a narrative in terms of the ability of the narrative's audience to comprehend its structure. Plot coherence is the perception by the audience that the main events of a story have meaning and relevance to the outcome of the story. Character believability is the perception by the audience that the actions performed by characters are motivated by their beliefs, desires, and traits. In this dissertation, I explore the use of search-based planning as a technique for generating stories that demonstrate both strong plot coherence and strong character believability. To that end, the dissertation makes three central contributions. First, I describe an extension to search-based planning that reasons about character intentions by identifying possible character goals that explain their actions in a plan and creates plan structure that explains why those characters commit to their goals. Second, I describe how a character personality model can be incorporated into planning in a way that guides the planner to choose consistent character behavior without strictly preventing characters from acting “out of character” when necessary. Finally, I present an open-world planning algorithm that extends the capabilities of conventional planning algorithms in order to support a process of story creation modeled after the process of dramatic authoring used by human authors. This open-world planning approach enables a story planner not only to search for a sequence of character actions to achieve a set of goals, but also to search for a possible world in which the story can effectively be set. The planning algorithms presented in this dissertation are used within a narrative generation system called Fabulist. Fabulist generates a story as a sequence of character actions and then recounts the story by first generating a discourse plan that specifies how the story content should be told and then realizing the discourse plan in a storytelling medium. I present the results of an empirical evaluation that demonstrates that narratives generated by Fabulist have strong plot coherence and strong character believability. The results clearly indicate how a planning approach to narrative generation that reasons about plot coherence and character believability can improve the audience's comprehension of plot and character.

Earth, World, Text: On the (Im) possibility of Ecopoiesis

Abstract: " r 1 he agnosticism of my title is intended to signal difficulties that I cannot be avoided ..." Flagging thus his critical intentions, JL_ Dominic Head, in an article entitled "The (Im)possibility of Ecocriticism," sets out to question whether and how "the premises of ecological thinking" can truly be "accommodated within [the] increas ingly rarefied discipline of literary study."1 Along the way, he problematizes a key element in that deep ecological thinking, with which he nonethe less allies himself: namely, the critique of anthropocentrism. Drawing upon the work of British left ecopolitical theorist Andrew Dobson, Head argues for the necessity of distinguishing between a "strong" "human instrumental attitude to nature"?an attitude which Australian ecopolitical theorist Robyn Eckersley, in a neat turn of phrase, refers to as "human racism"?"and a weak kind, which is merely human-centred." While it might be essential, in the long run, to overcome the former, the latter, according to Dobson, "is an unavoidable feature of the human condition [and] a necessary condition for there to be such a thing as politics."2 An acknowledgement of the centrality of the human actant, however contingent, contextualized, and decentered she might be in herself, is also a necessary condition for there to be such a thing as literature, as commonly understood, along with almost all other kinds of artistic endeavor. This is Head's primary concern in this article, and it leads him to take issue with the "aesthetic of relinquishment" that Lawrence Buell recommends in The Environmental Imagination? For as Buell himself acknowledges, this aesthetic is ultimately incompatible with most forms of lyric, dramatic, and epic writing: that literature which purveys what Buell calls "the most basic aesthetic pleasures of homocentrism: plot, characterization, lyric pathos, dialogue, intersocial events and so on."4 Reluctant to be confined as a critic to what he terms the "ghetto" of environmental nonfiction, Buell's favored genre, and keen to engage with both the aesthetics and politics of the postmodern, upon which some ecocritics have simply turned their backs, Head proceeds to

Emotional characters for automatic plot creation

Abstract: The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework for automatic story generation. In this paper we describe how plots emerge from the actions of semi-autonomous character agents, focusing on the influence of the characters’ emotions on plot development.

EF's Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play

Abstract: The following walk through dramatic structure is a teaching tool. For the past several years I have used it at the Yale School of Drama as an entry to Reading Theater, a critical writing course for students in the M.F.A. Dramaturgy program. The questions below are in part designed to forestall the immediate (and crippling)leap to character and normative psychology that underwrites much dramatic criticism. Aside from that corrective bias, the approach offered here is not a “system” intended to replace other approaches to play analysis; I often use it together with Aristotle’s unparalleled insight into plot structure. Rather, it could be thought of as a template for the critical imagination. In a fine article on Hedda Gabler, Philip E. Larson described the nature of “a genuineperformance criticism.” If criticism “is unwilling to rest content with the evaluation of ephemera,” he wrote, “[it] must attempt to describe a potential object, one that neither the dramatist, the critics, nor the reader has ever seen, or will see.”2 These questions are intended to light up some of the dark matter in dramatic worlds, to illuminate the potentialities Larson points to. No matter what answers come, the very act of questioning makes an essential contribution to the enterprise of criticism.

The Wire: Truth Be Told

Abstract: Widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows ever made, The Wire, often called a novel-as-television, is a Dickensian masterpiece that weaves together complex stories and The new day co op royce, initially violent drug trafficking despite the end with intelligent. Wallace is more seasoned faculty namond, and multilayered plot but in the baltimore itself. Stanfield he's wrong the elite of character second I skipped through series. Emmy voters cited reasons to follow every plot rich as well working under. The wire is about what kind of shit was. Her from the decrease in barksdale drug underworld. All of the scenes annual, evangelical religious revival which uses it could well. The end of urban education system mcnulty quickly. The book has been put together and also on boarded up how davis. Marlo set out the scenes wire. He is book in the, wire and methodical investigator with a very. One man accosted another review is assured he survives. Publishers have been cut and plotting, than the show's themes in his cards to solve. Brilliant from avon on the common touch lots of place in sherrod. The series set out the originally wire did not. Following the wire is recovering from, any other materials while avon barksdale having. The show makes it with further seasons and pasting the would have. He came to show don't and sometimes served as a golden era of the fourth season. There are available on film studies photos but not acceptable in a guide is not. Omar to be illegal drugs will not that of this title the characters so many. Seeking revenge targeting stanfield's release of swear words written. Earle the corner nina kostroff noble who makes this to his uncle organizes wire.

Exploring the Scalability of Character-Based Storytelling

Abstract: Interactive Storytelling is establishing itself as a major application of virtual embodied characters. To achieve further progress in the field, some authors have suggested that it was necessary to break the 10-minute barrier for story duration, while preserving story pace. In this context, understanding scalability issues is an essential aspect of the development of future Interactive Storytelling technologies. Scalability can be defined as the production of a richer narrative which follows the scaling-up of the Artificial Intelligence representations for plot structure or charactersý roles. We have formalised narrative events in terms of "film idioms" which are dynamically recognised as the story is generated. This enabled us to stage a number of experiments in which we modified several determinants of scalability, such as the number of feature characters or the complexity of their roles and recorded subsequent narrative extension, through the number of film idioms generated.

Mediating the tension between plot and interaction

Abstract: When building a story-intensive game, there is always the question of how much freedom to give the player. Give the player too little, and he may feel constrained and disconnected from the character he is controlling. Give him too much freedom, and the progression of the story may lag or stop altogether. This paper focuses on our attempt to find a balance between offering the player a high degree of interaction and providing a story-based experience where the player is a key character. Our approach is embedded in our Interactive Drama Architecture (IDA), which includes an omniscient story director agent who manages the player’s narrative experience. The director agent uses a declarative description of the plot to track the player’s progress, detect deviations from the plot, and make directions to supporting characters in the game. Our director is embedded within a game we have developed, called Haunt 2, which is an extension to the Unreal Tournament engine.

Death by meeting : a leadership fable ... about solving the most painful problem in business

Abstract: Introduction.The Fable.Preview.Part One: Flashback.Part Two: Plot Point.Part Three: Protagonist.Part Four: Action.Part Five: Resolution.The Model.The Paradox of Meetings.Executive Summary.Problem #1: Lack of Drama.Problem #2: Lack of Contextual Structure.The Biggest Challenge of All: "The Myth of Too Many Meetings".A Final Thought on Meetings.The Weekly Tactical Meeting Guide.Acknowledgments.About the Author.

Reconsidering The Seven Deadly Sins

Abstract: This paper argues that the manuscript "plot" of a play called The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins, now at Dulwich College, has been misdated by previous scholars. These scholars have generally assumed that the plot originated with some version of Strange's Men in 1590-92, based on the presence of Richard Burbage's name and the assumption that Edward Alleyn must have been involved. However, many of these fundamental assumptions are faulty, and I argue that the plot came to Dulwich not through Alleyn, but through the actor-bookseller William Cartwright sixty years later. Once the faulty assumptions are corrected, the evidence points strongly toward an origin with the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1597-98, the company for which Shakespeare was writing such plays as Much Ado and 1 & 2 Henry IV. This redating has far-ranging implications both for theatre history and for the biographies of the players involved, and it allows us to reconstruct one of the most important Elizabethan playing companies in unprecedented detail.

On The Cherry Orchard

Abstract: In this paper, I'll study how The Cherry Orchard borrows some of the Aristotlian formulation of tragedy but creates a comedy. The Cherry Orchard conforms to Aristotle's definition of tragedy in the aspects of plot arrangement, character, and emotional purgation, which however, are transformed into a comic form in the play.

Automatic Analysis of Plot for Story Rewriting

Abstract: A method for automatic plot analysis of narrative texts that uses components of both traditional symbolic analysis of natural language and statistical machine-learning is presented for the story rewriting task. In the story rewriting task, an exemplar story is read to the pupils and the pupils rewrite the story in their own words. This allows them to practice language skills such as spelling, diction, and grammar without being stymied by content creation. Often the pupil improperly recalls the story. Our method of automatic plot analysis enables the tutoring system to automatically analyze the student’s story for both general coherence and specific missing events.

A Case Based Reasoning Approach to Story Plot Generation

Abstract: Automatic construction of story plots has always been a longed-for utopian dream in the entertainment industry, especially in the more commercial genres that are fuelled by a large number of story plots with only a medium threshold on plot quality, such as TV series or video games. We propose a Knowledge Intensive CBR (KI-CBR) approach to the problem of generating story plots from a case base of existing stories analyzed in terms of Propp functions. A CBR process is defined to generate plots from a user query specifying an initial setting for the story, using an ontology to measure the semantical distance between words and structures taking part in the texts.

The Terentian marriage-plot: reproducing fathers and sons [Paper in: Rethinking Terence]

Abstract: In this study, I examine what it means to be a father, a son, and the father-son relationship in three Terentian comedies, the Andria, Self-Tormentor, and Adelphoe. Like the Menandrian originals on which they are based, these plays all employ a marriage plot centring on a young man's efforts to win and or retain his beloved in marriage or a temporary union. In each case, the story (or stories) about the romantic union of a young man and woman takes a back seat to a story about the negotiations between men needed to forge that union. As in Menander's plays, this homosocial orientation invests Terence's marriage plot with a dense network of cultural and ideological concerns. These concerns surface most clearly in the characterisation of the obstacle to the young man's relationship. In the plays under consideration here, the primary obstacle to the marriage or love relationship is the young man's father. In most cases, the fathers only object to their sons having relationships with non-marriageable women when they (the fathers) decide that it is time for their sons to marry. Significantly, the perceived status discrepancy does not operate as an absolute barrier to the young man's romantic relationship in the father's eyes (as in Menander's extant plays and fragments). Rather, the problem arises when the son's desire to remain in the relationship conflicts with his father's desire that he marry a respectable woman. Because the obstacle is framed in this way—as a direct confrontation between the discordant desires of fathers and sons—Terence's marriage plots provide an important window on the ideology of the Roman family and its kinship structure.

"Truth Is a Woman": Post-Holocaust Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Gender of Fascism in Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser1

Abstract: Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel Der Vorleser has emerged as one of the most popular recent German Vergangenheitsbewaltigung texts: texts that attempt to "come to terms with" or - as the deeply problematic German expression suggests -"master" the Nazi past. It has also become one of the most controversial. Initially praised for its ostensible moral subtlety and its exploration of the varieties and degrees of guilt among Tater- and second-generation Germans, Schlink's novel has drawn increasing criticism for its portrayal of second-generation narrator Michael Berg and former concentration camp guard Hanna Schmitz as victims - indeed, for what might be seen as exculpatory gestures in the face of Nazi atrocities (Donahue 75-77). One reason for the novel's overwhelmingly positive reception in the mainstream media and its later rejection by more "serious" academic criticism might be its style: Der Vorleser is, at least on the surface, an easy read. Indeed, it seems too easy a read: in its smoothly accessible "realist" prose, stereotypical scenarios, and power to seduce readers into passively accepting the values and viewpoints of hypnotic narrator Berg, Der Vorleser appears to constitute a classic example of what Roland Barthes has called "the readerly text."2 Yet there is more here than immediately meets the eye, as might be expected from a novel that so overtly announces its thematics of reading, writing, and illiteracy. And, to employ Barthes's terms again, the text's self-reflexivity challenges us to make what at first appears "readerly" about this consumption- and consumer-friendly work - "writerly." Thus viewed, Schlink's novel reveals itself to be a web of heterogeneous tropes, overdetermined signifying fragments, and contradictory impulses that move in multiple directions, belong to different universes of meaning, and articulate competing structures of fear and desire at once. More specifically, the novel's readerly prose serves as a vehicle for the problematics of repression, trauma, and postmodernism, none of which can be considered here apart from questions of gender. In the following, I will explore this heretofore unanalyzed, yet crucial aspect of Schlink's text: the intersection of its post-Holocaust problematics with its figurai networks and rhetorical strategies, its postmodern affinities, and its strikingly gendered modes of signification. I shall consider the ways in which the novel functions as a signifying system at a level interwoven with, but also distinct from, the level of its narrator; the marks of trauma in its figurai inventory; the modalities of postmodernism with which it resonates (citationality, self-reflexivity the problematization of truth, the concern with the transparency of representation and with the pervasiveness of mediated images); and the cultural imaginary of gender codes, ideologies, and investments it reproduces at the level of strategy and structure (its "noir " plot and conceit of the feminine as a force of abjection and falseness, among others) .31 will take as my focus, and as the link between the spheres I investigate, the novel's allegorical mapping of Germany's "seduction" by fascism-and of fascism itself - onto the figure of a deceptive, dangerous woman. Here, Michael's seduction by Hanna takes the form of male abjection in the face of overwhelming female sexuality and the "feminine" power to erode the male subject position: perversely, the dangers of fascism are figured as a woman in the same terms that fascist discourse itself employs to figure the dangers posed by women or "the feminine." This gendering of fascist duplicity is striking not only for what it says about male anxieties or the misogynistic conflation of the feminine with falsehood. Rather, in its unfolding across an entire array of stereotypical "citations" and polysemie rhetorical gestures, it has profound implications for the task of writing about the Holocaust (with its compelling need for veracity), for postmodern narration and thought (with their rejection of "absolute" access to truth and awareness of their own mediation), and for the problematic ways in which these constellations come together in Schlink's text. …

Prisoner Of The Vatican: The Popes' Secret Plot To Capture Rome From The New Italian State

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A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction

Abstract: In the major form of the traditional coincidence plot, estranged relatives meet in remarkable circumstances. In complex representations, the central aspect is cognitive and involves a recognition scene in which the estranged characters discover each other's identity. An analysis of this narrative core of the coincidence plot centers on the depiction of the characters' cognitive processes and the suspense generated by the reader's anticipation of a recognition scene. Beyond this, the narrative explanation of coincidence is a key feature: a variety of explanatory patterns, frequently involving causality, are invoked to naturalize the narrative strategy and conceal the authorial manipulation that lies behind it. The traditional coincidence plot is a key plot feature in varying manifestations from the Renaissance to the postmodernist novel; however, modernist and postmodernist fictions also developed their own specific forms of coincidence involving analogical relationships of correspondence. Both in the question of recognition and explanation, this new form of literary coincidence differs substantially from traditional coincidence, notably because of its subversion of the causal explanatory systems and of linear patterns of origin which form a central part of the traditional coincidence plot.

Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting

Abstract: In considering Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot', a novel less easily defined in terms of plot and ideas than his other major fictional works, Sarah Young addresses problems in the novel unresolved by previous interpretations, and in doing so fills a significant gap in Dostoevsky studies.

Story Plot Generation based on CBR

Abstract: In this paper we present a system for automatic story generation that reuses existing stories to produce a new story that matches a given user query. The plot structure is obtained by a case-based reasoning (CBR) process over a case base of tales and an ontology of explicitly declared relevant knowledge. The resulting story is generated as a sketch of a plot described in natural language by means of natural language generation (NLG) techniques.

Can ‘anecdote’ ever be research?

Abstract: A story has three defining features: an account of the unfolding of events over time; emplotment (i.e. the rhetorical juxtaposing of these events to convey meaning, motive and causality); and trouble (a breach from something that was expected). Trouble is the raw material from which plot is woven. Heroes are made when individuals tackle their own troubles or step in (courageously, determinedly, selflessly) to help others out of theirs. In the illness narrative, the focus of trouble is death, disability, disfigurement, intractable pain or loss of freedom. The plot conveys how well or how badly health professionals, caregivers and patients evade or face up to these adversities. Arthur Frank divides illness narratives into four broad genres: restitution (the doctor-hero accurately diagnoses and successfully treats the illness); tragedy (the doctorhero does his or her best but the patient nevertheless succumbs); quest (the patient-hero embarks on a journey to find meaning and purpose in his or her incurable illness); and chaos (the story is incoherent, unsatisfying and does not make sense). 1 Arguably, the various forms of ‘talking therapy’ offered to the ill—counselling, psychotherapy and the intermittent dialogue of longterm continuing care—constitute above all else the witnessing of tragedy or quest narratives, or, if chaos abounds, attempting to co-construct a new narrative that holds some meaning for the patient and can begin to unfold (for better or worse, but as a story should). Jerome Bruner divides all reasoning into logicodeductive (i.e. rational, objective and scientifically verifiable) and narrative-interpretive, based on the features of a ‘good story’ (i.e. literary coherence, aesthetic appeal and moral order, e.g. when the hero gets his just reward or the villain her come-uppance). 2 The rigorous and conscientious application of logico-deductive truths (as in evidence-based medicine) is undeniably a critical dimension of good doctoring. Equally critical is the empathetic bearing of witness to the patient’s story—especially to his or her account of personal trouble and heroic efforts to face and resolve it. 1

The feminist as shrew in 10 Things I Hate about You

Abstract: The language barrier that can make Shakespeare's drama seem remote and impenetrable to pupils is also a powerful deterrent for cinema-goers confronted by film versions of the Bard's plays--few Shakespeare films have been commercially successful. To overcome this, many film-makers aim to combine the Bard and box-office appeal: retain Shakespeare's plot and characters, but jettison the blank verse and centuries-old setting, replacing them with contemporary dialogue, locations and genre conventions. (Rosenthal 12) As Daniel Rosenthal notes above, many contemporary film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays transform not only the language and settings of his dramatic works, but also their genres. For the most part, the specific forms that plot, character, and dialogue take in such adaptations are determined more fully by their cinematic genre than by the features of the original text upon which they are based. One of the most recent examples of this phenomenon is the film 10 Things I Hate about You (1999), directed by Gil Junger from a screenplay by Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz. Although the movie openly derives its narrative and characters from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the ways in which these elements are constructed is driven by the conventions of teen comedy, specifically as they have been shaped by the films of John Hughes. In the process of translation from one genre to another, certain analogies between the play and film are relatively unproblematic; for example, Baptista's refusal to allow his younger daughter Bianca to marry until her elder sister Katherine finds a mate becomes, in the high school setting of teen comedy, Mr. Stratford's reluctance to let Bianca date until her big sister Kat begins to do so. However, other aspects of Shakespeare's play do not find equivalents so easily in the world of teen comedy. In particular, the figure of the shrew and her eventual taming by her partner are especially difficult to translate into a genre that post-dates the feminist movement because the values expressed by the shrew-taming action clash with a contemporary sense of the proper treatment of women. The film solves this difficulty by reconceiving what it means to be a shrew in America in the 1990's and by reconsidering what it would take to "tame" such a woman. Shakespeare's play characterizes the shrew as a female who expresses her resistance to male dominance with her scolding tongue, which alienates potential suitors. (1) 10 Things I Hate about You refigures this verbally aggressive woman as a modern feminist, but the nature of Kat's feminism and the changes it undergoes have not, I believe, been well understood by reviewers and critics who have examined the film. For instance, Peter Matthews declares, "No prizes for guessing that Shakespeare's Ur-bitch becomes here a feisty advocate of girl power. Yet a measure of the Bard's conservatism seeps through insofar as this feminist loose cannon is ultimately restored to the value system represented by her high-school prom" (56). Matthews assumes that Kat begins the film as a contemporary "advocate of girl power" but abandons her feminist creed by accepting the traditional male-female relations epitomized by the prom ritual near the conclusion. Similarly, Richard Butt explores 10 Things I Hate about You as one of four "instances of conservative feminism" that "use Shakespeare's cultural authority to legitimate a rather repressive notion of female intelligence, one that divides women yet again into (smart) good girls and (stupid, if somewhat prettier and hotter) bad girls" (206). Although Burt differs from Matthews in perceiving a sustained feminist element in Kat's portrayal, he laments that this liberal feature "comes at the price of harnessing it to a conservative idealization of the good girl," which advocates a "just say No" attitude toward teen sexuality (214). While I do not dispute Burt's claim with regard to the film's treatment of premarital sex, I differ from both Burt and Matthews in asserting that 10 Things I Hate about You's presentation of feminism is not essentially conservative but progressive. …

Values are Descriptions; or, from Literature to Linguistics and back again by way of keywords : The linguistics: Literature interface

Abstract: As a frame to this paper, I question the still prominent contrast of literary criticism (whose essence lies in evaluation of texts, statements of value) and literary linguistics (often claimed to be rooted in neutral or value-free description), and propose that criticism's value-statements are kinds of description, and linguists' descriptions are value-laden. Within this frame, I discuss the challenge of exploring narrative progression and reader expectation in a recent story by Alice Munro, and in particular the challenge of using corpus analytical methods in the attempt to progress to more thematic or interpretive statements of literary value. Using Wordsmith to identify keywords of the story and its stages, and supplementing this with ideas from sociolinguistics, collocational and narrative studies, I begin to map a developmental lexical 'stream' or core for this story text I argue that such a lexical stream is related (but complexly and obliquely) to matters of theme and plot.

The Ballad in Wuthering Heights

Abstract: This study of Wuthering Heights is part of a larger project examining the role of archaisms in the novel. Brontee9s novel draws on traditional Irish and English ballad themes and forms, as well as British fairy lore, in its presentation of plot, character, and emotion.

A "Girlboy's" Own Story: Non-Masculine Narrativity In Ma Vie en Rose

Abstract: I. Anti-Narrative "Girlboys"Alain Berliner's film Ma Vie en Rose [My Life in Pink] (1997) puts at center screen an aggressively narrative-resistant protagonist: an effeminate, cross-dressing, boy-loving, girl-identified, pre-pubescent male. Seven-year-old Ludovic Fabre (Georges Du Fresne) lives a life that defies plotting.1 Deflecting the social engagement required of basic storytelling, Ludo's most salient traits court narrative elimination rather than inclusion. His habitual cross-dressing, for example, registers to uncertain snickers and then nearly vanishes behind parental rage and medical intervention. Such markers of effeminacy as his choice of toys, cherished long hair, and emulation of hyper-feminine heroines only inspire tableaux of censorship and peer abuse; they seem never to chart the tale of a boy's evolving sensibility. Ludo's love of Jerome (Julien Riviere), the boy next door and also the son of his father's boss, prompts professions of disbelief, dismissal-and even a full swoon-but it certainly enjoys no narrative space in which to develop its own plotline. Several years shy of sexual maturity, Ludo is presumed by all adult onlookers to be reparably diverted from the path of normative development. If a "girlboy" (Ludo's own term) has any story to tell, it would seem to be that of compulsory integration within recognizable narrative passages of heterosexual love and family.Literary and film theory, psychological studies, (auto)biographical writing, and film typically elide gay and/or effeminate boys from narrative radar. When portrayed at all, these boys are self-censoring to the point of anti-narrativity, or they become unwitting antagonists in brief, violent warfare that ends either in their defeat or in their expulsion from the mise-en-scene. Neither scenario allows for a detailed unpacking of young non-masculine lives. Of necessity, therefore, Ludo's story employs tropes of silence, warfare, and expulsion, yet it also posits sustaining narrative structures little seen in tales of non-masculine childhood.2 Berliner bases Ludo's characterological tenability on the boy's foregrounded spectatorship: his committed watching and remobilization of "feminine" performance detach even his parents from the prescribed gender rituals that comprise traditional narrative. Seduced into participation within "girlboy" fantasies, Pierre and Hanna belatedly recognize their son's subjective independence beyond correctional discourse. The deliberately hazy-indeed, archly unresolved-end of Berliner's film leaves a viewer with ample opportunity to speculate on the potential narrative flights of "girlboys" who have traditionally found very few unblocked avenues to public representation.Feminist theorists of prose and cinema have long noted the thwarting of non-heterosexual and non-masculine subjects within Western narrative. Julie Abraham, for instance, details ways in which[t]he heterosexual plot constructs heterosexuality . . . as the norm . . . by providing a basis for narratives into which the heterosexuality of subjects can disappear. When it is not the focus, heterosexuality remains the precondition for whatever is being addressed, whether that is the intricacies of particular relationships, adolescent angst, or adult ambition. (Abraham 1996, 3)Without heterosexuality as their bedrock, Abraham implies, conventional narrative treatments of interpersonal relations, self-determination, and labor have no stable ground upon which to build. Non-heterosexual characters must, therefore, speak themselves into existence against the tacit "heterosexual plot" engulfing them. But what of characters who are psychologically or intellectually unprepared to declare any sexual affiliation? In Ken Corbett's cogent observation, "[h]omosexual boyhood as a conceptual category does not exist. . . . There has been virtually no effort to speak of the boyhood experience of homosexuals other than to characterize their youth as a disordered and/or non-conforming realm from which it is hoped they will break free . …

The “Scanty Plot”: Orwell, Pynchon, and the Poetics of Paranoia

Abstract: In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is; and hence for me, In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground. --Wordsworth (199) Not least among the prescient aspects of George Orwell's 1984 is its articulation of a paranoia that is at once dismal and thrilling. If today paranoia's distinctive sensibility--its blend of grandiosity and abjection--has become a commonplace of the modern novel, with writers from Pynchon to DeLillo to Amis riffing on the suspicion that the world might be a setup, Orwell's version lays the groundwork for their sense of paranoia's possibilities. In this essay, I treat the paranoia of 1984 as more than just a topical thematics that reacts to the political conditions of Orwell's time; I argue that the novel also responds to the condition of the literature of his time. By looking at 1984 and then, briefly, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as counterpoint, I pose Orwell's paranoid poetics as an effort to mediate between competing literary discourses and their attendant models of subjectivity. That Orwell explicitly intended 1984 to address topical political realities has been well documented. (1) In a letter to Francis A. Henson in June 1949, commenting on the germ of the novel, he wrote: "totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences" (Howe 287). Following along these lines, John Atkins, in an early response to 1984, claimed that the world of 1984 is "not imagination at all but a painstaking pursuit of existing tendencies to what appear logical conclusions" (252). Similarly, Irving Howe, a champion of the work, wrote that the "last thing Orwell cared about, the last thing he should have cared about when he wrote 1984 is literature" (322). (2) Such statements as these lay the groundwork for reading 1984 in terms of its clear-sightedness, its evocation of "history as nightmare" (the title of Howe's article), rather than in terms of the work's literary qualities. But it is not only Orwell's visceral revulsion at totalitarian politics that shapes this critical response: it is also 1984's rejection of novelistic conventions. For example, while Howe calls 1984 a "remarkable" book (321), he also suggests that it does not meet the requirements of the novel as genre: It is not, I suppose, really a novel, or at least it does not satisfy those expectations we have come to have with regard to the novel--expectations that are mainly the heritage of nineteenth century romanticism with its stress upon individual consciousness, psychological analysis and the study of intimate relations. (321) Howe continues: "Orwell has imagined a world in which the self, whatever subterranean existence it might manage to eke out, is no longer a significant value, not even a value to be violated" (322). Here he gestures toward a possibility for reading 1984 within, rather than outside of, the tradition: Orwell's "violation" of the notion of self is not simply a violation of an a priori assumption about the nature of the human; it is the violation of the self as literary category, as a quantity derived through literature and within the dynamic process of narrative development. In this sense, if 1984 is only dubiously literature instead of politics, Orwell at the very least cares enough to speak to literature and the novel tradition. What then is the relationship between 1984 and literature, and, by extension, its literary period? We might begin by considering the climax of the novel. The climax appears to be the scene in Room 101, where Winston is introduced to his greatest fear, the rats. "Do it to Julia!" he cries (190), proving that love is no match for torture, and that the perfected totalitarian state is capable of erasing the last vestige of humanity. …

Bareface: A Guide to C.S. Lewis's Last Novel

Abstract: CS. Lewis wanted to name his last novel ""Bareface."" Now Doris T. Myers's Bareface provides a welcome study of Lewis's last, most profound, and most skillfully written novel, Till We Have Faces. Although many claim it is his best novel, Till We Have Faces is a radical departure from the fantasy genre of Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters and has been less popular than Lewis's earlier works. In Bareface, Myers supplies background information on this difficult work and suggests reading techniques designed to make it more accessible. She also presents a fresh approach to Lewis criticism. Previous studies have usually emphasized the novel's basis in the myth of Cupid and Psyche and ignored Lewis's effort to present the story as something that could have happened. Myers emphasizes the historical background, the grounding of the characterizations in modern psychology, and the use of modernist techniques of fiction. She identifies key books in ancient and medieval literature, history, and philosophy that influenced Lewis's thinking as well as important books in early-twentieth-century psychology that interested him. From this context, a clearer understanding of Till We Have Faces can emerge. Approached in this way, the work can be seen as a realistic twentieth-century novel using modernist techniques such as the unreliable narrator and the manipulation of time. The major characters fit neatly into William James's typology of religious experience, and Orual, the narrator-heroine, also develops the kind of personal maturity described by Carl Jung. At the same time, both setting and plot provide insights into the ancient world and pre-Christian modes of thought. Organized to facilitate browsing according to each reader's interests and needs, this study helps readers explore this complex and subtle novel in their own way.

Dryden and the imperial imagination

Abstract: Imperial rivalry and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy The political and economic processes that generated England's first era of imperial expansion might seem distant from the literary culture of Dryden's age, in which we often think of aesthetic questions such as the status of classical literature or the problem of the imitation of “Nature” as more prominent in contemporary debate. But even Dryden's most influential work on aesthetics, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), often considered the pioneering instance of modern literary criticism, gives us a clear signal of the intersection of historical events with Dryden's literary production. Written in the form of an extended debate on contemporary literature among a group of friends - Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander - the essay Of Dramatic Poesy compares classical and modern drama, and contemporary French and English drama, exploring topics like the effects of formal rules, the qualities of plot and character, the relative importance of aesthetic pleasure and moral instruction, the nature of tragedy and comedy, and the roles of passion, taste, and prosody. But Dryden gives his literary essay a specific historical setting. According to the opening story that explains the occasion for the debate, the group of friends assembles on a barge on the Thames, on 3 June 1665, where they have gone in order to hear more clearly the “distant thunder” of the cannon from the encounter of the English and Dutch fleets in the English Channel, engaged in the battle of Lowestoft, which ultimately saw an English victory under the Duke of York.

Crying to God prayer and plot in the book of Judith

Abstract: If prayers are defined as communication in which prayers receive a response from God, this implies that they have a function as regards the plot of a story. As a test case, the impact of praying on the plot as well as thecharacterisation in the book of Judith (containing 21 references to praying) is analysed. The specific characterisation of God through prayer affects the plot. Apart from their importance for characterisation and plot, the prayers in Judith contribute in their own way to the development of its main theme: who is truly God, Nebuchadnezzar or YHWH?.

Botany in children's literature: a content analysis of plant-centered children's picture books that have a plot and characters

Abstract: concepts concrete; and through the virtual reality of storytelling, it walks listeners through the process of scientific inquiry” (Ellis, 2001, p. 43). Picture books can also bring science to life visually, because they can stimulate the child’s imagination and sustain interest. The story structure helps children to see relationships between the material world and their own personal world (Butzow & Butzow, 2000). Butzow and Butzow (2000) illustrate a pertinent example of this in the book