Showing papers on "Plot (narrative) published in 2017"

Story Comprehension for Predicting What Happens Next

Abstract: Automatic story comprehension is a fundamental challenge in Natural Language Understanding, and can enable computers to learn about social norms, human behavior and commonsense. In this paper, we present a story comprehension model that explores three distinct semantic aspects: (i) the sequence of events described in the story, (ii) its emotional trajectory, and (iii) its plot consistency. We judge the model’s understanding of real-world stories by inquiring if, like humans, it can develop an expectation of what will happen next in a given story. Specifically, we use it to predict the correct ending of a given short story from possible alternatives. The model uses a hidden variable to weigh the semantic aspects in the context of the story. Our experiments demonstrate the potential of our approach to characterize these semantic aspects, and the strength of the hidden variable based approach. The model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and achieves best results on a publicly available dataset.

Research Fiction: Storytelling, Plot and Design

Abstract: What kind of stories and plots do researchers of Human Computer Interaction draw on when they make fictions? This paper applies the "basic plots" identified in the study of literature to scenarios, speculative design and design fiction. Traditional HCI scenarios employ the plot of "Overcoming the Monster" where the monster is some problem to be solved. Much of the commentary on critical, speculative or adversarial design also draws on this plot as it attempts to overcome monsters like public apathy or a lack of debate. Design Fiction more frequently takes the form of a "Voyage and Return" or a "Quest". The paper argues that a better understanding of plot and storytelling could contribute to more reflective research fiction.

The Melting Plot: Interethnic Romance in Jewish American Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract: The Melting Plot: Interethnic Romance in Jewish American Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century Jessica Kirzane This dissertation argues that interethnic romance narratives reflect and express central religious, political, racial, and gendered identities and agendas of Jewish American literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Chapter One shows that fin-de-siècle Reform Jewish women authors employed interethnic romance narratives to express a belief in America as exceptional as a place of religious and gender egalitarianism. Chapter Two turns to journalist and fiction writer Abraham Cahan, who wrote interethnic romance narratives to weigh the balance between idealism and pragmatism, socialist universalist values and the principles of Jewish nationalism in determining the character of Jewishness in America. Chapter Three demonstrates that Jewish American women’s popular fictions of interethnic romance in the 1920s employed interethnic romance plots to show women’s independence and mobility in light of early feminism and to express the limitations of feminist discourse when it ran counter to their ethnic identities. Chapter Four describes how narratives of interethnic romance written by Yiddish writers I. I. Shvarts, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and David Ignatov employ tropes of interethnic romance together with geographical border crossings into non-immigrant or nonJewish spaces, co-locating physical dislocation and disorientation and intimate interpersonal desire and unease. Together, these studies demonstrate the significance of interethnic romance in the American Jewish collective imaginary in this period and reveal the flexibility and longevity of this central theme in American Jewish discourse.

Diana, Dido, and The Fair Maid of Dunsmore: classical precursors, common tunes, and the question of consent in seventeenth-century balladry

Abstract: The tragedy of Isabel of Dunsmore—an English shepherd’s daughter who commits suicide after being impregnated by a social superior—is recounted in two similar, yet lyrically distinct seventeenth-century ballads: “The Lamentable Song of the Lord Wigmoore Gouernor of Warwicke Castle and the Fayre Maid of Dunsmoore” and “The Fair Maid of Dunsmore’s Lamentation Occasioned by Lord Wigmore Once Governour of Warwick-Castle.” What is remarkable about these two ballads is that, despite commonalities in plot and even pacing, they offer divergent interpretations of a shared series of narrative events. What is more, both ballads do so by suggestively juxtaposing Isabel’s story both textually and musically with varying mythological precursors: Lucrece, Diana, Callisto, and Dido. This essay seeks to untangle how these classically inspired intertexts serve to characterise Isabel and Wigmore’s relationship in each ballad, particularly when it comes to the fraught issue of female sexual consent.

Toward the Eco-Narrative: Rethinking the Role of Conflict in Storytelling

Abstract: Offered as a response to the increasingly popular call within the eco-humanities for stories that will help humankind adapt to catastrophic planetary conditions, this article proposes “the eco-narrative”—an approach to storytelling that strives to compose with, not for, its nonhuman characters. An extension of eco-critical projects that analyze stories for their depictions of nonhumanity, the theoretical research herein brings ecological analysis of narrative to the level of structure. In particular, it problematizes the dominant plot model of conflict/climax/resolution, suggesting that stories motivated by conflict reinforce dualistic and anthropocentric habits for approaching the animal other. Evaluating two narratives concerning the human practice of killing animals—the Pew Commission’s report on Industrial Farm Animal Production and Annette Watson and Orville H. Huntington’s “They’re here—I can feel them”—the article observes how the former’s efforts at animal rights advocacy are undermined by its very storytelling framework. Celebrating the latter story’s more playful approach to narrative instead, the article ultimately suggests that a theory of “infinite play,” as developed by James P. Carse, can be used to re-envision the dominant plot model. A template for cooperation in the absence of known outcome, infinite play thus becomes the basis for the eco-narrative—a storytelling framework flexible enough to cocreate with nonhumanity, even during an environmental moment characterized by crisis.

Steering Plot Through Personality and Affect: An Extended BDI Model of Fictional Characters

Abstract: The present paper identifies an important narrative framework that has not yet been employed to implement computational story telling systems. Grounded in this theory, it suggests to use a BDI architecture extended with a personality-based affective appraisal component to model fictional characters. A proof of concept is shown to be capable of generating the plot of a folk tale. This example is used to explore the system’s parameters and the plot-space that is spanned by them.

Plot systems and property rights: morphological, juridical and economic aspects

Abstract: The importance of the plot (also referred to as ‘parcel’, ‘lot’ or ‘property’) as one of the fundamental elements of urban form is well recognized within the field of urban morphology. It has been described as a basic element in the pattern of land divisions that works as an organizational grid for urban form. A distinctive feature of the plot is its ambiguous character: it is at the same time a legal unit defining property rights, a spatially defined physical entity and an institutional tool designating land use in urban planning. In urban space, these dimensions act together to drive the evolution of built form. In this paper, we will investigate the entanglements of the morphological, juridical and economic definitions of the term. By resolving these we may better address and compare the vital layer of plot systems in different urban contexts and identify common fundamental aspects of the notion of plot systems and private properties. What we more specifically aim to capture with this comprehensive concept is the relation between urban form and legal and socio-economic space, where the plot can be identified as an element that creates a generic affordance for occupancy, in contrast to mobility, in cities of most kinds. The intended outcome of the paper is to contribute to unveiling the complex nature of the plot systems, bridging between spatial and non-spatial dimensions of cities, that is, more precisely, a potential to establish, not least, a stronger interface between the urban design and urban planning practices.

Joint Functioning of Two Parallel Trajectories of Signification: Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky"

Abstract: In interpreting a literary narrative, we usually go along one trajectory of signification and explore what thematic message is conveyed by the verbal choices in the text. But in some literary narratives, there exist two parallel trajectories of signification. They are, on the one hand, independent, each functioning on its own, and on the other need each other in the meaning making of the text. Although working together in generating the thematic message, they do go in conflicting thematic directions. Paying attention only to one trajectory will lead to the suppression of the thematic meaning the linguistic choices simultaneously generate in the other trajectory, resulting in a one-sided picture. If we uncover how the two parallel trajectories contradict, condition, and complement each other, we will not only get a fuller and more balanced picture of the thematic significance of the text, but also come to see the tension and semantic density of this kind of literary texts from a new angle. Moreover, we are invited to see meaning not as meaning generated in a text but as meaning generated in a given trajectory of signification in the text. In what follows, I will first reveal, step by step, the dual trajectory of signification in Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky" (1891), prefacing the analysis with a brief summary of existing criticisms. Then I will compare this text with Bierce's "The Affair at Coulter's Notch" (1891), which only has a single trajectory of signification but which has been put on a par with the other text. Based on the analysis, I will explain how the dual trajectory of signification differs from various kinds of complicated meaning as previously investigated. In addition, I will suggest how to uncover the dual trajectory. PREVIOUS CRITICISMS OF "A HORSEMAN IN THE SKY" Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky" is one of the most famous American Civil War stories. It has a tragic plot: A young Virginian named Carter Druse joins the Union army, and while on sentry duty, he discovers a Confederate horseman spy at the edge of a cliff. The spy turns out to be no other than his own father, who he has to kill for the protection of five regiments of his comrades. Remembering his father's words that he should always do his duty, he fires at the horse, resulting in the falling of the father on horseback from the top of the cliff. Focusing on the victim, Allan Smith thinks that the story "might indeed reasonably be subtitled 'The Dead Father'" (72). Other critics pay more attention to the son as the central character, who is one of the protagonists of Bierce's war stories "trapped in an explicable nightmare world of sudden and often random destruction," a trap in this case constituted by "misplaced patriotism" (Morris 122-23). The story "expresses a deep psychological trauma," and the central character "becomes automatized, part of the military machine" (Solomon 150-51). This is a tale in which "the tragedy of the Civil War in splitting up families into enemy factions is unforgettably etched" (Joshi 46), and in which we "read of nothing but the minutest details of bodily and mental pain" ("Novels of the Week"). H. E. Bates asserts that "the famous A Horseman in the Sky' alone would put him [Bierce] into the front rank of all commentators on the futility of war" (50). Bierce himself joined the Union army in April 1861. Although he fought heroically for the United States, the internecine war was very traumatic for him. As a result, he became an antiwar writer, famous for his bitter irony against the horrifying, cruel, irrational, and inhuman nature of war. "A Horseman in the Sky" is a representative work among Bierce's war stories that convey with bitter irony "a fatalistic, defeatist vision of battle in which the noble and the simple-minded alike are consumed, or consume themselves" (Hunter 286). No nineteenth-century American writers "sustained an ironic approach to war so consistently as Bierce did" (Solomon 155). …

Flight, fear or fantasy: abduction plots in fiction of the Eighteenth century 1740-1811

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"along a road that may lead nowhere": J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the Postsecular Novel

Abstract: And call us?--but too late ye come! Too late for us your call ye blow, Whose bent was taken long ago. --Matthew Arnold, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," 1855 But to us modern folk it is no longer given to catch a glimpse of them, much less suffer their love. 'We come too late.' --J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 2003 "There is always something unmotivated about conversion experiences," writes J. M. Coetzee; the sins and shortcomings of a past life only become visible through hindsight, when the penitent's "eyes have been opened" ("Marquez" 263). Augustine's Confessions (397-400) inaugurated that retrospective quality, giving birth to autobiography and even perhaps the form of the novel. Reviewing the English translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memoria de mis putas tristes [Memories of My Melancholy Whores] (2004), Coetzee offers an outline of confession, beginning with Augustine--"the story of a squandered life culminating in an inner crisis and a conversion experience, followed by spiritual rebirth into a new and richer existence" (259). "[B]ehold how through the mysterious agency of the Holy Spirit," summarizes Coetzee, "even so worthless a being as I can be saved" (259). Yet, he thinks, there came a distinctly modern point in the development of the form, where the novel sundered its ties with Augustine: there is a degree of in built incompatibility between the conversion narrative and the modem novel, as perfected in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on character rather than on soul and its brief to show step by step, without wild leaps and supernatural interventions, how the one who used to be called the hero or heroine but i now more appropriately called the central character travels his or her road from beginning to end. (263) Coetzee's description is likely informed by Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957), which sees the form as part of a larger process of secularization, the decline of religious belief and authority in public and private life. For Coetzee, the novel most clearly assumes its secular form in its eighteenth-century iterations, turning, as he reads it, to "character" not "soul," to the contingency of the "step by step" rather than the deus ex machina, to the linear plot of a character's "road from beginning to end" (263). We contemporary readers, he suggests, balk at a sudden moment of insight, of conversion, as when Marquez's old man suddenly falls in love with the too-young Delgadina. "What is harder to accept for readers of a secular bent, since it has no apparent psychological basis," Coetzee writes, "is that the mere spectacle of a naked girl can cause a spiritual somersault in a depraved old man" (264). Coetzee's fictions consistently resist such seemingly religious conversions, which have their clearest literary form in the modernist moments of James Joyce's epiphanies. Coetzee's fictions often question instead whether any lesson has been learned at all. "To the last we will have learned nothing," the magistrate declares in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) (143). At the end of Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983), K reflects on what might be the "moral" of his story, if moral there is: "Is that how morals come, in the course of events, when you least expect them?" (183). What, we might ask, has David Lurie learned at the end of Disgrace (1999), giving up the dog in his care (220)? Though Elizabeth Costello (2003) is structured as eight "Lessons," what "lessons" have been taught to its eponymous protagonist, who thinks, "A curse on literature!" (225)? Lurie likewise ponders Bev Shaw: "Animals trust her, and she uses that trust to liquidate them. What is the lesson there?" (210). Coetzee's novels show that divine and human calls offer neither simple guidance nor direction, but often lead to profound disorientation. Yet, rather than commit to atheism or nihilism, Coetzee interrogates what remains of ethics and subjectivity in the fragmented ruins of western philosophy, particularly the post-Christian condition--"Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate," thinks Lurie when lecturing undergraduates (32). …

The masochist's masquerade: Kōno Taeko's ‘Beautiful Girl’ (Bishōjo)

Abstract: Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusi...

The Incident In Forming Adultery Motif In The Artistic Structure Of The Novel “Anna Karenina” By Leo Tolstoy

Abstract: This article examines the series of events in the artistic structure of the novel "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy in the context of the concept of case, which, as the basic symbol, becomes the focus of the semantic content of the novel. Separate episodes with casual events line up in structural episodes of storylines of the Tolstoy’s work. The symbolic concentration of the semantic content of case receives its transcription in cumulatively built episodes. The semantic content of the symbolically interpreted image of case in a number of random events is represented by the Russian thinker of the nineteenth century Leo Tolstoy as something that leads to disruption of the primordial order in Russian life, and this way case appears to be the historical grain of the novel’s narrative storytelling . Casual , as Leo Tolstoy understands it, becomes inevitable fatal force of destiny. The results of casual confront the reasonable necessity accumulated by age-old traditions. This casual as an event determines almost the entire series of events of the novel as a part of the plot. The basic plot situation of Tolstoy’s novel is reduced to the confrontation of reasonable necessity as the form of existence within the family to what is generated by the age of enframing (M. Heidegger).

Conspiracy as Plot Type in Herodian’s Roman History

Abstract: Despite positioning himself as a contemporary eyewitness and heir to Thucydides, Herodian has generally been judged to be a poor historian prone to the use of compression, formulaic scenes, and even free invention. This paper examines Herodian’s application of a specific plot type to conspiracies against the emperor by praetorian prefects. The use of this plot type reveals something of Herodian’s understanding of history and historical methodology, while also serving an important narrative function in his text.

The storied analyst: desire and persuasion in the clinical vignette.

Abstract: Beginning with the quintessentially psychoanalytic tales of Freud, the case history has held a privileged position in the history and practice of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts grow up with, grow i...

Extracting Character Networks to Explore Literary Plot Dynamics

Abstract: In this paper we apply network analysis to the study of literature. At the first stage of our investigation we automatically extract networks (graphs) of characters for each part of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and peace using two different techniques for network creation. Then we evaluate these two techniques against a set of manually created gold standard networks. Finally, we use the method that demonstrated better performance in our evaluation to test a literary hypothesis about Tolstoy’s novel. The hypotheses we intended to prove was that the parts of the novel describing war (i.e. those where the battlefield or military units are the primary settings), have statistically lower density of interaction between characters, resulting in lower network density, higher network diameters and lesser average node degrees. By showing this correlation we mean to demonstrate the applicability of network analysis to computational research of fictional narrative (e.g. detection of tension changes in the plot).

De Walter White a Heisenberg: el camino del (anti)héroe en la sociedad del riesgo

Abstract: In the new millennium, the thesis of ulrich beck (2008) focused on the risk society are continuously revitalized, not only by the 9/11 attacks and its consequences but by the economic crisis that starts seven years later in the USA. An environment strongly influenced by the uncertainty, where the so-called Third Golden Age of American Television also takes place. It is just that the bottom of this research that questions the role of fiction in reproducing the sensation of fear. For such purpose, the case study is Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-2013). A television series which is born between these two historic moments that impacts in its plot and in its sub-genres. In this way, the Qualitative content Analysis allows to analyze the influence of the risk society on the impact of the fear in this plot, specifically the anti-heroism. A research that shows that fiction is fundamental for a better understanding of the environment of uncertainty nowadays.

Governing in the space of the "Seam": Airport security after the liquid bomb plot

Abstract: This paper provides a detailed study of the liquid bomb plot from 2006, focusing on the ways in which the plot was constituted as “an event unlike others” (Adey, Anderson, and Lobo Guerrero 2011, 340). Engaging with a critical body of scholarship that examines how events are assembled and governed as emergencies, disasters, or catastrophes, the paper explores two sets of questions. First, the paper engages with the temporal dimension of the event, asking how the liquid bomb plot was mediated as a particularly risky event that required immediate action. Second, the paper focuses on the spatial dimension of the event and asks how the plot also threatened a seemingly interconnected system of global airline movements and a mobile form of life. Drawing on Cowen’s (2010) analysis of the “seam space,” I am particularly interested in developments of reform and experimentation at the airport and in how newly emerging technologies are targeted at keeping airports both secure and open. Ultimately, by examining the liquid bomb plot “in the middle of events” (Barry 2006, 244), the paper goes beyond an understanding of the security event as something that happens abruptly and by surprise, and sheds light on the ongoing work that is involved in constituting and governing events.

4. Nietzsche or Aristotle? Reflections on Alasdair Maclntyre’s After Virtue

Abstract: cism, for if Maclntyre is right, this is precisely the genre required for understanding moral philosophy, and for appreciating the tradition of the virtues which he seeks to defend. Like the English novels he so admires, it is crammed full with "characters" (who sometimes make rapid entrances and exits) and intricate "sub-plots," but so much so, that it is easy to lose the thread of the main plot. Since Maclntyre's primary intention is to provide a rational vindication of "the moral tradition to which Aristotle's teaching about the virtues is central" (p. 238), it is essential to outline the main story line even at the risk of neglecting the extraordinary richness of detail as his narrative unfolds.

The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Image in Japanese Culture. An Example from the Literary Tradition: Yukiguni [Snow Country]

Abstract: The novels of Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) have no well-constructed plot, but rather a series of situations that emerge directly from images, in a sort of concrete visual thought that overshadows the storyline. Yukiguni [Snow Country], his masterpiece, is known for its elliptical style. It consists of a series of impressions. The writer chose to omit all specific points of reference in order to maintain an evocative, rather than an assertive, register. Some images create a very expressive atmosphere. Snow Country comprises a series of visions generated poetically that communicate certain impressions, and it illustrates a quasi-cinematic mode of writing with images or painting with written words.

Metaphors of Postmodernism in Neo-Victorian Fiction: “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree” by Peter Ackroyd and “The Decorator” by Boris Akunin

Abstract: One of the features that characterizes postmodern fiction is an intense interest in the past, and especially so – in Victorian period, chiefly in its sensational aspects. Therefore we witness a revival of Victorian crime novel and this tendency can be traced not only in recent English literature, but in other literatures as well, Russian in particular. This gave birth to the term “neo-Victorian novel”, referring to the pieces, which recreate the atmosphere of the period, introduce a lot of intertextual allusions and references to the well-known Victorian novels and exploit most popular subjects of the 19th century literature. However as we will argue in this essay the authors often use these plots as implicit metaphors of postmodern art as such. It will be demonstrated on the example of two Neo-Victorian novels – “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree” by Peter Ackroyd (1995) and “The Decorator” by Boris Akunin; for the latter Ackroyd’s novel can be also regarded as one of the precedent texts. Both novels give their versions of the story of Jack the Ripper but what is more important in our case – employ akin plot structures, images and artistic devices, which in fact become metaphoric actualization of postmodern techniques.

Rethinking Reader Response With Fifth Graders’ Semiotic Interpretations

Abstract: Fifth graders interpreted the book Doll Bones by Holly Black through visual representations from the beginning to the end of the book. Each visual representation was analyzed to determine how students responded. Most frequently, they moved to inferential ways of understanding. Students often visually interpreted emotional plot elements and incorporated words, graffiti, and graphic organizers into their responses.

The Paranoid Prelate: Archbishop Laud and the Puritan Plot

Abstract: The seventeenth century provided fertile ground for the nurturing of conspiracy theories, far beyond the obvious fear of an international Catholic campaign against Protestantism: the Popish plot. This chapter advances the reader's understanding of the way in which the Puritan plot was understood by the government of Charles I. The aim is to demonstrate that there was more to Laud's fear of the Puritans than merely the ideas which they espoused. To the extent that the threat came from Puritan thought, efforts to undermine Puritanism required attacking the vehicles by which such ideas spread. Laud's fear of mere combination is evident, however, in more than just his treatment of those directly involved in writing and publishing Puritan tracts. Laud was clearly disturbed by the reaction to the 1637 trial and punishment of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne, and the 1638 trial of Lilburne. There exists evidence regarding Laud's treatment of his enemies which is of even greater significance.

“Springtime in the South is Like a Song in My Heart”: Raina Telgemeier’s Drama, the Romanticization of the Plantation South, and the Romance Plot

Abstract: This essay explores the complex relationship that exists between the romance plot and the romanticization of the antebellum South in Raina Telgemeier’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful graphic novel, Drama. The text’s use of a Gone With the Wind-style musical as its romantic and thematic pivot point complicates its political message and calls into question its seemingly progressive stance on social issues. While critics have praised Telgemeier’s text for its racially and ethnically diverse cast of characters, the moonlight-and-magnolias musical that forms the centerpiece to Drama traffics not simply in a historical myth, but in a white-centric fantasy. In so doing, the graphic novel demonstrates the limitations of LGBTQ youth advocacy that does not remain cognizant of intersectionality, while it also highlights the problem with millennial forms of liberal multiculturalism that omit critical discussions about race.

Bad Plots and Objectivity in Maria Edgeworth

Abstract: Drawing on the protocols and structures of experimental science, the early nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth develops objectivity as a dimension of plot rather than of narrative viewpoint. In her novels, plot becomes a means of producing legitimately objective facts within a fictive universe.