Showing papers on "Plot (narrative) published in 2006"

The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction: Beyond the Blockbuster part i: a real story 1. Continuing Tradition, by Any Means Necessary 2. Pushing the Premises 3. Subjective Stories and Network Narratives 4. A Certain Amount of Plot: Tentpoles, Locomotives, Blockbusters, Megapictures, and the Action Movie part ii: a stylish style 1. Intensified Continuity: Four Dimensions 2. Some Likely Sources 3. Style, Plain and Fancy 4. What's Missing? Appendix: A Hollywood Timeline, 1960--2004 Bradley Schauer and David Bordwell Notes Index

Declarative optimization-based drama management in interactive fiction

Abstract: Our work relates to automatically guiding experiences in large, open-world interactive dramas and story-based experiences where a player interacts with and influences a story. A drama manager (DM) is a system that watches a story as it progresses, reconfiguring the world to fulfill the author's goals. A DM might notice a player doing something that fits poorly with the current story and attempt to dissuade him or her. This is accomplished using soft actions such as having a nonplayer character start a conversation with a player to lure him or her to something else, or by more direct actions such as locking doors. We present work applying search-based drama management (SBDM) to the interactive fiction piece Anchorhead, to further investigate the algorithmic and authorship issues involved. Declarative optimization-based drama management (DODM) guides the player by projecting possible future stories and reconfiguring the story world based on those projections. This approach models stories as a set of possible plot points, and an author-specified evaluation function rates the quality of a particular plot-point sequence

The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630

Abstract: 1. Introduction PART 1: DIAGRAM, IMAGE, ICON 2. Practical Knowledge and the Poetics of Geometry 3. Sir Philip Sidney and the Practical Imagination 4. Noun, Foot, and Measured Line PART 2: STAGE, WALL, SCENE, PLOT 5. Theatre as a Spatial Art 6. The Topographic Stage 7. Dramatic Form and the Projective Intelligence 8. Ben Jonson's Scenography

Narratives of enterprise as epic tragedy

Abstract: Purpose – The pupose of this paper is to explore the power of narrative in management and enterprise research. It is inspired by Paul Ricoeur's philosophical understanding of the relationship between life and narrative. He draws on Aristotle's Poetics and the notion of emplotment (muthos in Greek), which embodies both imaginary story (fable) and well‐constructed story (plot). This study identifies aspects of narratives of enterprise, which resonate with Aristotle's key elements of emplotment in tragedy.Design/methodology/approach – This qualitative, interpretive study relies on narrative as a way of knowing and as a form of communication. The stories as told by 16 participants in in‐depth interviews, are analysed and interpreted in terms of the key elements set out in Aristotle's Poetics – reversals, recognition and suffering.Findings – This form of literary interpretation throws into relief aspects of the founding of a family business across the generations. The dynamics of the “family” in the business, ...

Dialogue and Drama: Elements of Greek Tragedy in the Fourth Gospel

Abstract: (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Dialogue and Drama: Elements of Greek Tragedy in the Fourth Gospel, by Jo-Ann Brant. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004. Pp. 320. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 1565639073. The purpose of this book is to explore the relationship of the Fourth Gospel (FG) to Greek tragedy (GT). It is not intertextual analysis that Brant undertakes, but rather the more generic study of the influences that the Greek tragedians may have exerted on the Gospel of John. Brant's overarching perspective is that in many ways the form of the FG is a performance text. Theatrical criticism, particularly of the structuralist variety, provides the perspective and tools with which the text is studied. Four chapters examine how Greek tragedy can enlighten the FG's dramatic structure (ch. 1), speeches (ch. 2), characterization (ch. 3), and distinctive portrayal of Jesus's death (ch. 4). As for how the FG could have knowledge of these tragedies when they appear to no longer have been performed publicly in the first century C.E., Brant notes that educational training in Greek was heavily influenced by past classics. Quintilian ranked the great tragedians with Homer as models to be studied, claims Brant. Quintilian appears to place, however, the comedie poets of Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus as second to Homer in Attic style (lnst. 10.1.65). But there is no need to cavil because Quintilian also holds up the three great tragedians as exemplars (10.1.67). Moreover, I note that another justification for this type of investigation comes from Dio Chrysostom, who placed the works of Euripides on par with those of Homer and Menander for the training of public speakers (Die. exercit. 6-8). Under the rubric of "Dramatic Structure," Brant proposes nine areas of similarity between the FG and the GT. The first two of them concern prologues and epilogues. Although not formally similar, the prologues in each are distinct from the start of the narrative and provide perspective, not shared by the characters, that allows the audience to jump into the story in medias res. Brant also argues that both Euripides and the fourth evangelist (FE) have contrapuntal imagery in their prologues, which sets up the tension in the body of their works, and that the first person plural pronouns in John 1:14 draws the audience into the performance of the Gospel. She provides but two examples of comparable devices to pull spectators into the tragedies, and only one of them, from Euripides' Alcestis, appears to unambiguously do so. As for the epilogues, in both the GT and the FG they encourage the reader's affirmation of the events that have preceded them. The third through sixth areas of dramatic structure which Brant compares are the settings, the entrances and exits of characters, the transitions between episodes, and the unity of composition. Brant contends that the FE is more attentive to the spatiotemporal matrix of the episodes than are the Synoptics, and that this attention is comparable to the careful location of the episodes by the tragedians. The appearance of characters in the FG is also considered by Brant to be more purposeful than in the Synoptics and more in correspondence with the way characters appear in the tragedies. Scenes are often demarcated by the appearances of characters whose ingresses and egresses have dramatic significance. Some transitions in the FG are said to resemble the choral ode (...) in tragedies by apprising readers of the feelings and beliefs of characters. The concern for the unity of composition found in the tragedies is said to be marked in the FG by (1) creating suspense by frequent references to Jesus's death (which, I note, has an analogue in the references to Jerusalem in the Lukan travel section); (2) a plot line with climax and closure; and (3) a logical set of movements within the plot. Peripeteia, anagnorisis, and pathos constitute the final three foci of this chapter. …

Narrative: Linguistic and Structural Theories

Abstract: This article surveys some of the most influential theory and commentary in the Western linguistic tradition on narrative as a genre or interactional activity. The fundamental domains of story and discourse, the structure and grammar of plot, and the complex narrative manipulations of temporal order and pace that characterize sophisticated literary narratives are all considered. The distinctive feature approach to character and effects of naming and of the dramatizing of setting are also outlined, before a fuller treatment is given of contrasting styles of narration (including narratorial unreliability) and of point of view (focalization).

The Remarkable Abigail: Story-Telling for Character Education

Abstract: As character education continues to be an objective of the social studies, the more effective educators have taken up the challenge by first understanding the principles of their discipline and opportunities for examining the values of character to be encountered. Strategy then comes to the forefront. Social studies is rediscovering the focus on the actual men and women of history as a major cog in teaching character, a method that John Dewey asserted was once widely used in American schools and is currently utilized successfully in foreign schools (Brooks and Goble, 1997). But this focus cannot be a matter of simply relating irrelevant facts. Rather, it requires the art of story-telling. History abounds with stories of the human struggle. When approached from that perspective as opposed to coldly looking at events only, a myriad of opportunities are available. Lockwood and Harris (1985) noted that true historical stories involving dramatic moments of moral conflict are especially useful in engaging students to reflect upon values. These stories relate individuals making personal decisions involving truth, integrity, honesty, and loyalty, among many others, and encourage students to analyze the issues and choices made. At the very least, such stories help students realize that others before them faced the same dilemmas that they do, by making the right choices, persevered. More importantly, they also prove that the values of good character are not restricted to people of a particular place or time (Sanchez, 1998). Egan's (1988) study of the way students successfully conceptualize and understand information about one's culture further supports the idea that applying the story metaphor may serve to bring in-depth, overall meaning to history instruction. Specifically, Egan noted that information such as historical/cultural/political values does not make sense to the contemporary student unless presented in a way which connects information with a larger sense-making picture, a picture which reveals the basic dynamics of why and how things happen; in other words, a story that relates an individual's values. He went on to point out that the story has all of the properties necessary to organize and connect bits of information into an overall understandable image. "The story works so well because of the way it encodes and makes sense of its contents. Our concern in teaching, also, is not simply to have students store knowledge.., but rather to have students remember because it makes vivid sense to them" (p.79). This dynamic is easy to see if one looks closely at the elements of a story itself. A story is essentially driven by characters and their actions. These characters are often in conflict with forces inside themselves (as in many Greek and Roman myths), with each other, and/or with some physical force or forces. Conflict in a social setting is further heightened by the basic circumstances of human existence noted by economists: humans have unlimited desires for things but resources are limited. Conflict within characters or between characters then shapes and generates the story's plot. Consequently, the basic theme of the story is usually about 1) conflict and resolution of the conflict to one degree or another; and 2) psychological/personal changes that may occur with the characters by the time of resolution. Note further that such resolution need not necessarily be an unqualified victory. The changes that may occur in a character's personal life because of decisions the character makes regarding the conflict often carry relevant personal/psychological truths for the listener/reader (Henderson, 1964). Campbell (1988) noted the sheer power of historical/cultural stories to impart important ideas and values to ensuing generations, stating that such stories "are about the wisdom of life" (p.4). He also lamented that present education lacks such emphasis. Because of educators' apparent reluctance or perceived inability to not only utilize the story-telling strategy but more importantly to relate social values, what student are learning in school is not the wisdom of life but merely information and technology. …

The Plot Thickens : bringing structure and meaning intoautomated story generation

Abstract: The Virtual Storyteller is a Multi Agent System (MAS) that can generate stories by simulating a virtual world in which Character Agents pursue their goals. The claim is made that the story emerges from the events in the virtual world. The goal of this project has been to make the stories more interesting. This thesis describes how to extend the Virtual Storyteller with a Plot Agent that will direct the events to generate more interesting stories. For this, three research questions have been tackled. Firstly, the system needed a better understanding of the emerging story. For this, a fabula structure has been designed that captures causality between story elements such as emotions, goals, actions, events and perceptions. A plot within the fabula revolves around a single goal and contains everything that is affiliated to that goal. Secondly, plot control techniques have been explored where attention has been paid to the fact that believable characters should be kept autonomous. Four ways to influence the story are: (1) generating events to mediate the plans of characters, (2) influencing their perceptions, (3) changing the setting, (4) suggesting goals or actions. Thirdly, an exploration has been made as to what decisions the Plot Agent needs to make to direct the story, and to aid these decisions, a creative problem solver has been designed that uses case based reasoning to solve problems

Event Extraction in a Plot Advice Agent

Abstract: In this paper we present how the automatic extraction of events from text can be used to both classify narrative texts according to plot quality and produce advice in an interactive learning environment intended to help students with story writing. We focus on the story rewriting task, in which an exemplar story is read to the students and the students rewrite the story in their own words. The system automatically extracts events from the raw text, formalized as a sequence of temporally ordered predicate-arguments. These events are given to a machine-learner that produces a coarse-grained rating of the story. The results of the machine-learner and the extracted events are then used to generate fine-grained advice for the students.

Jane Austen's "Wild Imagination": Romance and the Courtship Plot in the Six Canonical Novels

Abstract: tions of late eighteenth-century novels of courtship and romance, this omission is en tirely understandable, for they obviously bear what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "a family" resemblance (17). What distinguishes the plot of the courtship novel is its depiction of the entrance of a young woman into adult society and her subsequent choice among competing suitors. The choice is not without its anxieties, however, for one of the unstated conventions of the courtship novel is that the lovers must un dergo a traumatic experience, a violent shift from innocence to self-knowledge be fore their union can be consummated.

Narration for virtual storytelling

Abstract: The Virtual Storyteller is an agent-based system implemented in Java which can automatically generate simple fairy-tales. The system consists of several Character agents, a World agent and a Plot agent which together generate a plot. This plot is then passed to the Narrator agent which has to convert the plot into text in natural language. Earlier versions of the system used templates for the natural language generation process which resulted in rather monotonous texts. This document describes the design and implementation of a new Narrator agent which uses more sophisticated natural language generation techniques.

Narrative Universals, Heroic Tragi-Comedy, and Shakespeare's Political Ambivalence

Abstract: In The Mind and Its Stories (Hogan 2003b), I argue that three narrative patterns recur with remarkable frequency across cultures. Variations on these patterns account for as much two-thirds of the highly esteemed, prototypical plots in most, perhaps all, narrative traditions. Two of these structures-romantic and heroic tragi-comedy-dominate Shakespeare's work as well.1 The romantic plot involves two people falling in love, some conflict between the lovers and their society (often parents), the separation of the lovers, and-in the full, comic version2-their eventual reunion. The heroic plot involves a usurpation of social power inside a society (e.g., the overthrow of a king) and an invasion of the home society by a foreign power. In the full, comic version, the usurpation is overturned and the invasion is repulsed.3Most readers will probably recognize that many of Shakespeare's plots involve these elements.4 On the other hand, Shakespeare's plays are clearly not all the same. Indeed, most widely admired plots may approximate one or another of these structures. But it hardly follows that most widely admired plots are identical. There is a difference between Romeo and Juliet on the one hand and gakuntala (or, for that matter, Titanic) on the other. These differences result from the specification of prototypical structures (e.g., the development of the personality traits, appearance, and conditions of the lovers); the rearrangement of prototypical elements in discourse (e.g., altering the order in which the story is told or shifting the focus from the lovers to some apparently ancillary character); the deletion of prototypical events (as in tragedy, where the comic resolution is absent); the addition of further, complicating events, and so on.A cognitive account of narrative5 includes not only the isolation of universality, but the study of how universality works itself out in particularity as well. This study of particularization subsumes at least two tasks. The first is to articulate the general principles by which universal structures are modified and specified. The second is to isolate social, typological, or individual patterns in the use of these principles. Historical periods, literary traditions, or individual authors may favor one or another way of forming characters, structuring discourse, and so on. Thus we find times and places where tragedy flourishes at the expense of comedy; we find literary traditions developing distinct (though not unrelated) character typologies; we find authors cultivating their own, individual poetic "voice." In the following pages, I shall examine Shakespeare in relation to the final point. More exactly, I shall consider what makes a specifically Shakespearean heroic tragi-comedy (as opposed to the general, cross-cultural prototype for heroic tragi-comedy). However, before going into that, I need to outline the general features of the heroic plot more fully.Heroic Tragi-ComedyDue to the nature of the emotions involved in heroic plots, a complete, prototypical heroic tragi-comedy has two distinct components. The first is the usurpation sequence; the second is the invasion or threat/defense sequence. The two may and often do appear independently. The usurpation sequence involves the rightful leader being removed from his/her position of authority illegitimately. In the most common form of this plot, the ruler is sent into exile and nearly dies, but is ultimately able to return to his/her society and regain his/her position, defeating the usurper. The invasion sequence focuses on a conflict between societies rather than within one society. In this sequence, a foreign power attacks the home society, nearly causing the destruction or metaphorical death of the society. Ultimately, however, the invaders are defeated and the home society emerges triumphant. The two sequences may be combined in several ways. The most prototypical form links the defeat of the common enemy with the restoration of the proper ruler. …

Reading Like a Woman in Malory's Morte Darthur

Abstract: Women characters' position as involved spectators facilitates their use as readers and teachers in Morte Darthur. Malory's use of these characters to model the act of reading reflects his own position as a redactor and involved, analytical reader of his sources. (RD) Male identity in Malory's Morte Darthur is defined through action, particularly the action of knights. Women characters, on the other hand, most commonly assist in the construction of knightly identity, providing knights with opportunities to prove their abilities or serving as rewards for their prowess. The few female characters who take active roles, encroaching on the masculine right to control the plot, are represented as negative or, at best, ambiguous figures.' But women characters do have one active role that is supportive of the enterprise of knightly identity, yet also performative in its own right.2 Women in Morte Darthur enact the role of informed readers, interpreting and interconnecting disparate elements of plot and characterization. The female characters of Malory's text are thus models for the act of reading Morte Darthur, and they invite the scrutiny of Malory's own reader, engaged in an activity not unlike theirs. Their readings are participatory, for they more than read the text they inhabit-to a degree they transform it. Exploring this model, we may recognize ways in which our own interpretations constitute our active investment in a work. It is worth examining, therefore, the ways in which the female characters in the Morte participate through observation, and how their observations and analyses take on a role in the construction of the text. Reading in the Middle Ages encompassed activities that went well beyond simple visual reception of a textual narrative. Caroline Dinshaw argues that literary activity has a masculine structure, a structure that associates acts of writing and related acts of signifyingallegorizing, interpreting, glossing, translating-with the masculine and that identifies the surfaces on which these acts are performed, or from which these acts depart, or which these acts reveal-the page, the text, the literal sense, or even the hidden meaning-with the feminine.3 Clare Kinney interprets Dinshaw to mean that masculine reading is that which re-orders 'equivocal, disorderly narratives...and permits the reader to arrive at a "single, solid, univalent meaning firmly fixed in a hierarchical moral structure.'"5 By contrast, the feminine reader undermines and destabilizes patriarchal interpretation by revealing all that is left out in the process of ordering narrative. Such a reader is exemplified by the Wife of Bath, who introduces the idea of subjectivity in interpretation, and reveals the possibility of a multiplicity of readings of the texts she 'gloses.' Sir Thomas Malory's response to the equivocal, disorderly corpus of traditional Arthurian material he translated seems to have been to bring it more in line with his own definitions of morality and chivalry. His response to the text would have been, at least partially, personal, for not only did he respond feelingly to the material's appeal to national pride,5 but he also identified himself as a knight, one strongly invested in the construction of knightly identity. He is far from presenting himself as an authoritative narratorial voice; rather, he appears in his own work as a reader of Arthurian narrative, one experiencing the story in tandem with his own readership and responsive to it in similar ways. We may agree with Catherine Batt's assessment that 'In the Morte, the search for meaning depends more on the exigencies of the moment than on an all-encompassing moral prescription for human behavior.'6 Malory's position within the text is as an involved spectator of the plot's action, one who claimed to 'draw' his whole account of Arthur and his knights from French originals and who did not feel in a position to make significant changes. …

Genre en plot georiënteerde narratief-kritiese eksegese van Evangeliemateriaal : inleiding tot narratiewe kritiek

Abstract: Genre and plot oriented exegesis of Gospel material: Introducing narrative criticism This contribution to methodology and hermeneutics, consisting of two articles, aim to argue for combining historical criticism and narrative criticism. The first article shows how genre orientation can provide hermeneutical cues for determining an appropriate exegetical model and method. The article aims to apply Gerard Genette’s narratology as a narrative-critical model for the exegesis of Gospel material. The article focuses on the role plot analysis fulfills in narrative criticism. This discussion is illustrated with examples from the Gospels of Mark, Luke, Matthew and John. The article concludes with a preface to the second article in which aspects such as point of view and focalization, time and space, and characterization will be discussed, also applied to Gospel material.

Apontamentos para o game “Cozinheiro das almas”

Abstract: In 1918 and 1919 Oswald de Andrade and friends kept a journal of their activities in their bachelor pad. The book became to be known as “O perfeito cozinheiro das almas deste mundo”. From this journal, the Workgroup on Digital Poetics (Grupo de Pesquisa em Poeticas Digitais da ECA-USP) is developing a videogame in which the player travels back in time to Sao Paulo and visits places described or alluded to in the journal. In each place a plot develops and the player can arrive to any place at any poit of the plot. So the gameplay is twice labyrinthic: there are spacial labyrinths (the places) and temporal labyrinths (the different points within each plot).

Character and Plot Nodes: Writing Fiction With Concept Maps

Abstract: Using literary analysis as a starting point, my creative writing students begin by “reverse engineering,” or “disassembling,” stories to analyze how their “parts,” i.e. plot, character, setting and language, fit together structurally. Reading and constructing concept maps of these structures gradually deepen student understanding of both the form and the content of fiction. Midway through this process, we play constructivist “freeze-frame” games with the film As Good As It Gets, for example, to demonstrate to the students how much they already know about story and its character and plot structure. Finally, creative writing students are invited to complete scaffold maps for their own and their peers’ nascent stories to complicate their characterization and plot structures. While this work establishes that literature and writing also have their domain, content and structure, despite the misapprehensions of many, it also enhances our students’ ability to weave a convincing tale from the “characters” and incidents of their own lives.

Aristotle and episodic tragedy

Abstract: It is no exaggeration to say that Aristotle's Poetics is one of the most influential documents in the history of Western tradition. Not only, after its re-discovery in the early sixteenth century, did it dominate literary theory and practice for no less than three hundred years. Even after it had lost its privileged status – first to the alternative theories of literature brought forth by the Romantic movement and then to the literary theory and practice of twentieth-century modernism – the Poetics still retained its role of the normative text in opposition to which those new theories were being formulated. It will suffice to bring to mind the explicitly non-Aristotelian theory of drama developed by Bertold Brecht to see that, even when rejected, it was the Poetics that dictated the agenda of the theorists.This has changed in the last thirty years, with the emergence of post-modern literary theory. Although in the questioning of the notions of closure, of artistic illusion, of unity of plot the post-modern theory owes much more than it cares to admit to such modernists as Brecht or Adorno and through them to Aristotle, the damnatio memoriae it has imposed on the Poetics is so thorough that some theorists seem to be hardly aware of the very fact of its existence. This is probably why many theorists, in their privileging of emotional distancing over identification, meta-theatrality over illusion, formal and semantic openness over determinacy and closure, find their models in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other non-Western literary traditions rather than in ancient Greece. That is to say, in so far as Aristotle is no longer considered relevant to literary theory, Greek literary tradition too is not considered relevant. The tacit presupposition on which this attitude is based is that Aristotle's Poetics adequately represents ancient Greek literary practice.

Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis

Abstract: Current approaches to Renaissance drama, rejecting the older idea of mimesis as likeness to an essential ““nature,”” have also rejected the assumption that Shakespeare9s drama is especially mimetic. This article argues that these approaches neglect the contribution of narrative coherence or plot tomimesis and shows that a judicial conception of narrative underlies the mimesis of neoclassical Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare. Mimetic readings of Shakespeare may thus be appropriately legalistic responses to an evidentially based conception of plot.

Between the Lines: Master the Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing

Abstract: Plot, character, scene, any seasoned writer knows how to handle them. But what about the finer aspects of the craft that transform a short story, or memoir into a timeless masterpiece? With "Between the Lines", writers receive an unparalled reference that includes: step-by-step instructions, focusing on the most difficult elements of fiction, including transitions, prologues, subtext, revelations, misdirections and balance; strategies on blending these unique components seamlessly throughout a work; techniques for creating a cohesive and layered work that will turn casual readers into raving fans; and straightforward tips and examples from well-known authors provide writers of all experience levels easy-to-follow directions on these seemingly complex topics.

Revenge Stories of Modern Life

Abstract: his claim may come back to haunt me, but my sense is that of the limited number of basic plots we find in nineteenthcentury novels, the one that has received the least critical attention is the revenge plot If I am correct that the role of revenge has gone relatively unremarked, this may be because it seems relatively unremarkable: on the one hand, its mere presence is no surprise, as revenge is one of the oldest topics in Western literature and remains to this day a ubiquitous element in popular culture, while on the other hand revenge admittedly does not play the central role in nineteenth-century fiction that it plays in Greek or Elizabethan tragedy It is more often subplot than plot, and often comes across as a convenient, conventional source of motivation and narrative energy rather than a primary focus of interest Besides, as Becky Sharp says, "revenge may be wicked, but it's natural" (Thackeray 15): insofar as it is "natural," we treat its presence as a given, and insofar as it is "wicked," we take it at face value Unlike such virtues as disinterestedness, altruism, and sympathy, that is, revenge does not seem to stand in need of demystification Nevertheless, or perhaps therefore, I think that the time has come to look more closely at nineteenth-century revenge, and I will start with its relationship to time--in particular, the role revenge plays in novels concerned with the new, the present, the future-in a word, the modern Revenge is usually understood as belonging to the past, both structurally and historically: although the seeking of revenge involves planning for the future, this future is conceived of as a direct product of and response to events in the past, while the replacement of revenge by an impersonal system of law-based justice has stood as the foundational gesture of Western civilization since at least the Oresteia This standard narrative is summarized in an 1880 article in the Pall Mall Gazette

The McDonaldization of Macbeth: Shakespeare and Pop Culture in Scotland, PA

Abstract: "The best response I get is from the people who I was writing it for, the kids who are reading the Cliffs Notes and out getting stoned." Billy Morrissette, director, Scotland, PA "We're not bad people-just under-achievers who have to make up for lost time." -Pat McBeth, Scotland, PA According to the early eighteenth-century poet and essayist James Beattie, "laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex assemblage" (qtd. in Oring 2). This perhaps offers a starting point from which an exploration of the independent film, Scotland, PA (2000), can begin. In his first film, director Billy Morrissette takes on a daunting task: the transformation of Macbeth-one of Shakespeare's bloodiest, most macabre works-into a comedy. Shifting the action of the play from medieval Scotland to a small-town, Pennsylvania, drive-in burger joint in 1975, Morrissette mines humor from the juxtaposition of two disparate sets of cultural and chronological contexts. The result is a parody of the original work and a satire of modern consumer culture and class aspirations. For the film to succeed as either or both, the audience must recognize both contexts: the opening sequence-a clip from the 1970s detective show "McCloud"-assumes the audience's familiarity with both this show and the recurrence of the prefixes "Mc" and "Mac" in the surnames of the play's characters; the choice of the song "Bad Company" by Bad Company in an early scene is only amusing if the audience recognizes it and knows enough about the play to understand the implicit reference to the underhanded machinations of Macbeth and his wife. This central conceit-the film's references to both Shakespeare's story and the fast food, garish fashion, and testosterone-driven rock of the mid-1970s-is predicated upon the traditional distinction between high and low culture, and yet, the use of both contexts ultimately subverts such distinctions and invites a revision of the commonplace understanding of Shakespeare's place in our culture: Macbeth, the film suggests, is no less common a cultural experience than popular music, regrettable hair styles, and bad jobs in food service. The relationship between parody and satire in Scotland, PA is not one of simple complement, but rather, one of simultaneity. Any given contextual reference in the film necessarily draws from Macbeth and elements of popular culture, parodying the first and satirizing the second. The examples mentioned above-"McCloud" and Bad Company-illustrate as much, but this model functions more broadly, as well. In the film, Lord and Lady Macbeth become Mac and Pat McBeth (James LeGros and Maura Tierney), a somewhat tacky couple trapped in dead-end jobs in a local McDonald's-style fast food restaurant, Duncan's. Their plot to murder their boss (James Rebhorn) and usurp ownership recontexualizes Macbeth's assassination of Duncan and assumption of the Scottish throne: Mac McBeth does not wish to be King of Scotland, just the burger king of his town. The Macbeths' plot to achieve absolute monarchical authority is absurdly reduced to the McBeths' desperate bourgeois ambitions. The film's plot offers few surprises-it is Macbeth, after all; the fun, however, emerges from the discovery of the forms the film's analogues have assumed. Prompted by the chemically-enduced prophesying offered by three stoners (Amy Smart, Timothy "Speed" Levitch. and Andy Dick), Mac McBeth decides to heed his wife's nagging: together, he and Pat kill Duncan and convince his two sons, Malcolm (Tom Guiry) and Donald (Geoff Dunsworth) to sell the restaurant to them for a meager sum. Their machinations, however, are threatened by the snooping representative of the state police, Lt. Ernie McDuff (Christopher Walken); the plot is further complicated when their paranoia drives Mac to murder his friend and fry cook, Anthony "Banko" Banconi (Kevin Corrigan). …

Harry Potter: A comparison of the characters, themes, setting and plot with the Arthurian legend

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to attempt to predict if Harry Potter is a re-creation of King Arthur and if the ending of the Potter stories will mirror that of King Arthur. This research focused on one series of King Arthur books written by Howard Pyle and the Harry Potter series written by J.K. Rowling. A content analysis chart was created and implemented to compare the two series of books. A content analysis chart was completed, first of the King Arthur series and then of the Harry Potter series. This archetypal chart was used to map the characters, themes, setting and plots of the two series. The data were compared and analyzed. The researcher determined a parallel between the King Arthur and Harry Potter series. The researcher then predicted the ending of the Harry Potter series based on the ending of the King Arthur series. The literary patterns found add to children’s understanding of literature. The past works, as demonstrated by the King Arthur Legend, influenced current works, as demonstrated by Harry Potter. This allows children to build upon what they have already read and relate it to future literature.

Elements of Narrative Analysis

Abstract: This article is intended to be an introduction to narrative analysis. It introduces key terms in narrative theory (e.g. story and plot), discusses various types of narratives relevant for social studies and features three selected analytical approaches to narratives: a poetic classification, a tripartite way of reading and a deconstructive analysis. The conclusion presents some reflections on narratives as ways to make sense of time. References have been selected as to guide the reader to further studies of narratives and narrative perspectives.

Masterpieces of British Modernism

Abstract: Flourishing during the first 2 decades of the 20th century, British Modernism gave birth to some of the world's most influential literary works. Written expressly for high school students and general readers, this book succinctly yet thoughtfully discusses 7 masterpieces of British Modernism. Included are chapters on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, E.M. Forster's Howards End, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Each chapter provides biographical information; a plot summary; an analysis of themes, style, symbols, and characters; and a discussion of the work's historical and cultural contexts. An introductory essay surveys and defines Modernism, and a bibliography cites works for further reading. Included are chapters on: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness E.M. Forster's Howards End James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Each chapter provides biographical information; a plot summary; an analysis of themes, style, symbols, and characters; and a discussion of the work's historical and cultural contexts. An introductory essay surveys and defines Modernism, and a bibliography cites works for further reading.

Forbidden Forest, Enchanted Castle: Arthurian Spaces in the Harry Potter Novels

Abstract: The huge success of the Harry Potter novels has triggered a series of reactions, some of which are reasonably predictable, such as the mass-media machinery that has been built around each successive publication of a new volume, welcomed every time as an "event" rather than an ordinary book; others less so, and in this category I would include many critical reactions. Favorable reviewers have had little more to do than count sales, while even slightly unfavorable reviewers have been compelled to move very cautiously, since their mildest remark might suddenly draw them to the centre of the stage, asked to explain what seemed an inexplicable hostility to everybody's favorite. (1) Many commentators--and this, seen in perspective, is probably the strangest reaction--felt they had to account for the success of the novels, find the secret that made these novels memorable (or at least eminently saleable) and, presumably, hand down the formula of J. K. Rowling's success to future generations of children's novelists. This seems to me not a very profitable exercise, since we are, after all, dealing with a very much manufactured event: it would be probably more interesting to reckon with the success of the Harry Potter novels in, say, fifty years' time, to see if it could survive immediate furor and really become a children's classic. Whether criticism was favorable or not, however, it was generally agreed that the readers' enthusiasm found its main origin in the air of familiarity of these novels, in the lack of totally original, unheimlichen elements that might have confused and disoriented the younger readers in particular. Pioneering the movement was Wendy Doniger's extremely witty and informative article in the London Review of Books, "Can You Spot the Source?" Written as a review of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the article started by analyzing the novels hitherto published as a variant of the Family Romance, of the English boarding school story and of the jocular magic story, to continue thus: the fact that the Harry Potter books are an amalgam of at least three familiar genres works for, not against, their spectacular success. [...] Myths survive for centuries, in a succession of incarnations, both because they are available and because they are intrinsically charismatic. Rowling is a wizard herself at the magic art of bricolage: new stories crafted out of recycled pieces of old stories. (Doniger 26) It is clear at once that such a reading, illuminating as it is, offers no reason for the success of Rowling's novels, especially if we consider the number of relatively unsuccessful young-wizards-at-boarding-school novels that have been published after the Harry Potter books became outstanding best-sellers. It is, nonetheless, a true reading: true insofar as it states a fundamental principle underlying these books, rather than determining their literary value. Bricolage is, after all, what most narrative is made of. But, apart from the fun, playing the "can you spot the source" game offered little in the way of constructive criticism, especially since it was limited to the general lines of the plot of each novel: after all, the structure of fairy tales tends to be formulaic, and it can be imagined that Vladimir Propp had the same fun in analyzing Russian fairy-tales and looking for recurring narrative elements. For the same reason, it is hard to see why this interpretation should be turned ipso facto into a barbed criticism. Some of Rowling's detractors, though rightly sensing the conventionality that is at the back of most of the material used for her novels, seem to have confused conventionality with formulaic plot, predictable story with predictable narration. The use of traditional material per se did not bother writers until the nineteenth century, and, strictly speaking, should not bother children's writers even now; criticism has generally been more profitably employed in analyzing how the traditional material is used. …

Reading for the Plot? Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America

Abstract: In his study Reading for the Plot , Peter Brooks defines plot as that which “makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning.” Plot proves to be a rich and multifaceted concept to explore in reading Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America (2004), in which counterfactual histories, personal plotlines, a cluster of subplots, and the reader’s awareness of metanarrative (“masterplot”) all contribute to the complex shaping of the text.

"Some Things Which Could Never Have Happened": Fiction, Identification, and "Benito Cereno"

Abstract: Observing that Herman Melville9s most significant fictional addition to his source text for "Benito Cereno" (the San Dominick9s skeleton figurehead) reverses the terms of a trope used in the "Agatha" letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne of 13 August 1852, this article proposes that the skeleton9s role in the tale converts a perhaps frustrated attempt at professional identification with Hawthorne-detectable in the scheme of semi-collaboration broached by the letter-into a dismantling of the foundations of American identification, and of the identificatory lures involved in the processes of fiction-making and fiction-reading. Although there has been considerable focus on the narrative9smanipulation of identification (particularly the snare of Delano9s perspective), critics have not provided an account of the ways in which its total fictional structure, organized around the skeleton figurehead, systematically alters the meaning of its white protagonists9- and its readers9-potential affiliations. My essay attributes critical reluctance to offer such an account to the persistence of a nineteenth-century faith in the autonomous value of "sympathy" as a political resource, and to a neglect, evident in more recent, historicist analyses, of the political work that fictional artifice performs. It traces the functions and implications of "Benito Cereno"9s skeleton through an exploration of the tale9s reception history, showing this history to be comprised of a series of identificatory maneuvers which in seeking to complete or add "flesh" to the fiction, are parodied or compromised by its immanent "unbuilding" of plot and narrative teleology.

Watermarks in the Sesotho Novels of the Twentieth Century

Abstract: The paper considers novels in Sesotho by five authors, three of which were short-listed in the "100 Best Books" project conducted in South africa in 2003. It provides a critique of the style, structure, and content of five novels: Mofolo's Chaka, Segoete's Monono ke Moholi ke Mowane, khatketla's Mosali a Nkhola, Matlosa's Mopheme, and Maake's Kweetsa ya Pelo ya Motho. The paper summariZes aspects of plot for the english-speaking reader and draws comparisons and contrasts between the writers and their respective novels.

Birth equals rebirth.? Space, narrative, and gender in The Commissar

Abstract: Askol'dov's film The Commissar resonates across three decades: set during the post-revolutionary struggles of the 1920s, it was made around the time of the ‘Prague Spring’ and released only during the glasnost era of the 1980s. For all its historical interest and specificity, however, The Commissar also invokes very ancient archetypes in its narrative-based exploration of gender and ethnic identities.For perhaps obvious reasons most writing on this film has focused on its political circumstances. This article seeks to offer a new account around the three concepts of the title: space, narrative, and gender. The central premise is derived from Bakhtin and his claim that chronotopes function as organizational centres: it is in the chronotope that the plot is developed and advanced. This article considers a number of key chronotopes and related features, including the home, the provincial town, and the ‘desert’. It examines plot movement, basing the argumentation on Lotman's typology for plot: ‘The el...