Experimentation with Narrative Techniques and Modes of Writing in 'Abd al-Rahmān Munīf's Mudun al-milh: al-tīh

In Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War , two important features of the historian's narrative art point to the double legacy of the Homeric and Herodotus' Histories in this work. The difference between the narrative mode of Herodotus and Thucydides and that of previous quasi-historical narratives also indicates that Thucydides consciously adopted the Homeric (and Herodotean) narrative mode. This chapter concentrates on a number of aspects of Thucydides' narrative technique, in particular from the perspective of their relation to the Homeric and Herodotean antecedent. It first discusses the direct speeches and the internal focalization and then attempts to shed some more light on Thucydides' narrative art by means of a more detailed treatment of the structure of the work as a whole, the presentation of time, epic suspense and narrative patterning. Thucydides received his narrative education at the school of the Homeric epics. Keywords: History of the Peloponnesian War ; Herodotean heritage; Homeric epic; narrative technique; Thucydides

In this research I discuss the narration technique in three of William Faulkner works Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, and As I Lay Dying. Faulkner uses multiple narrators in those three works. The aim of my thesis writing is to discuss how the narration technique with multiple narrators is used in those three novels. Faulkner applies multiple narrators in a form of narration that completes each other in certain modes of narration hence the readers could understand the story of each novel in many different point of views. There are several modes of narration that Faulkner applies such as supporting narration mode, negating narration mode, questioning narration mode, and dominance narration mode

Digital film technology has constantly transformed and enhanced the fundamental aesthetic elements in the traditional aesthetic categories of film aesthetics during its gradual penetration into the film art system, enabling these fundamental aesthetic elements to take on new forms and appearances that enrich the artistic communication of film and mark This is a sign of artistic advancement. The fusion of old and new technologies in synergy with the original film system has also accelerated the development of digital film technology as an aesthetic model, and in adapting to the original film art system, digital film aesthetics has produced aesthetic implications that transcend the original system, in terms of virtual images, spatial and temporal concepts, narrative modes, sound and picture relationships, and movement characters. They all exhibit new aesthetic characteristics that are distinct from traditional film aesthetics in terms of virtual images, spatial and temporal concepts, narrative modes, sound and image relationships, movement characteristics, and interactive methods. When one examines existing discussions on digital cinema in China and globally, it is easy to see that they primarily focus on expanding the audiovisual expression of images and on the study of the expressive power and image effects of digital special effects, while research on expanding film concepts and expanding film aesthetics is superficial, or even nonexistent. From a film aesthetics standpoint from the standpoint of film aesthetics, as digital technology has gradually displaced traditional modes of film production and concepts, audience viewing styles, and human aesthetic concepts, the aesthetics of digital film under the new digital technology can be a new construction in terms of time and space, reality, narrative techniques, virtual reality, and aesthetic acceptance. Based on established film theories and aesthetic notions, this study will seek to develop film aesthetics in the digital era, highlighting the study's uniqueness and systemic character in light of shifting aesthetic categories and the incorporation of new aspects in digital cinema.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) is a semi-autobiographical novel in the form of a frame narrative (a story within a story). And to grasp the true meaning and purpose of the novel, it must be read not only as an adventure story, but also as a social critique of imperialism and an exploration of the human spirit and human morality. The novel explores the problematic of humanity’s inner savagery, hence the title Heart of Darkness. To better convey his message to the reader, Conrad creates a mode of narration in which the style and structure are well organized. Heart of Darkness is an extremely complex novel that comments on and highlights many of the major issues related to the colonization of Africa. The narrative structure is usually described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which the story is presented to the reader. Conrad’s particular narrative structure allows him to make his messages clearly perceptible. My analysis will focus on three main areas: Ifirst discuss the narrative structure of the novel, then I talk about the narrative techniques in the novel and finally I analyze the symbolism in the novel. Keywords: Novel, Narrative, Narrative Style, Narrative Structure, Symbolism

Narration according to Getrude Stein is what anybody has to say in any wayabout anything that can happen, that has happened or will happen in any way [iv]. Narration can be nuncupative when it is printed and read as fiction. It is the point at which the writer articulates all the modes or techniques ofnarrating within his confine to produce a fine story. Jeremy Hawthorn seesnarrative technique as a technique that is used when one is told of “what ishappening rather than witnessing the happening directly as we can with aplay or film” [57]. Writing on its own has an implicit notion of findingtechniques of expression that will make the work accessible. The BeautyfulOnes Are Not Yet Born is a novel in which Armah expresses his disgust on the level of corruption prevalent in Ghana during its first republic underNkrumah. Corruption was so rampant and deep that every nook and cranny of Ghana showed it. This paper, through a systematic and close reading of the, examines the narrative modes or techniques through which the novelistdepicts the level of corruption prevalent in Ghana as at the time of the novel. Armah uses the progressive tense form of the verb, ellipsis, analepsis and prolepsis, characterization, homodiegetic narrator, and narrative situation to tell his story in the novel. The language he uses mesh with the theme of the novel.

Narrations become very important such that, we tend to try to make others want to fit into them to identify with us, which is why narrative is often used in the recount of events, the past, geared to justify the systems of domination and control evident in the plight of South Africans during the apartheid period. Moreover, the narrative also shelters realities against which the truth can be judged, and they also have some sense or measure of proper world order, against which moral action can be judged. As such, narration point of view can also be determined through the perspective the story is being told. Be it the first person narrative where the author or narrator refers to himself with the personal pronoun of I, me, my, myself, however, this mode of narration may also use second and third-person pronouns in addition to the first-person point. Wherefore, the second Person narrator sees the author or narrator addresses the reader directly as you, and may use the words we and us as well in the process. The third person pronouns still could be used in a novel, in addition, where the narrator or author refrains from using a first or second person and only refers to characters as he or she or it to demonstrate his narrative techniques in this process. To this effect narrative technique employed by J.M. Coetzee’s as accounted in the selected novels used for this paperwork to explore Coetzee’s capabilities of developing a true sense of self as well as communicate to others through the Narration

Carlos Ceia, in his article, "Modernism, Joyce, and Portuguese Literature," discusses parallels between James Joyce's work and texts by modernist and contemporary Portuguese novelists such as Antunes, Brandão, Negreiros, Pessoa, Saramago, Sá-Carneiro, Silva Ramos, and Velho da Costa. In his analysis, Ceia focuses on the role of myth, the notion of the (anti-)hero, the solipsism of interior consciousness, narrative techniques, and linguistic experimentation. Ceia argues that while it is impossible to detect direct influence by Joyce on Portuguese writers, it is in the context of the parallel paradigms of modernism we are able to discover the Joycean impact on both modernist and contemporary Portuguese literature. For example, in Velho da Costas novel Casas Pardas, the author's fictionalization of the stream-of-consciousness mode of narrative is innovative because it goes beyond Ulysses's Molly Bloom's exemplary discourse and the modernist pattern for self-reflexivity. The post-modern novelist is obsessed with the mastering of fictional discourse and with the fictional discourses of his/her literary heritage and thus, in order to achieve this, the novel has turned into metafiction, metafiction has turned into discontinuities, and textuality has turned into intertextual relations with well-known works of art of the past. Joyce and his experimental novels opened up new possibilities and vistas to literature and Ceia argues that it is in this sense and context we should understand the impact/influence of Joyce's work and of modernism in modern and contemporary Portuguese literature.

“Racial Stereotypes as Narrative Forms:Staging the English Gentleman in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim”1 Marta Puxan-Oliva (bio) It still seems that it is a problem for literary criticism to find ways of understanding the complex relationship between the linguistic craft of a literary text and its expression of historical and cultural problems. If Edward Said warned us long ago to beware the “worldliness” of literary texts, it appears that we are still struggling to provide critical paths to comprehending its formal specification. As a modality of the philosophical relationship between Art and Life, this question is almost certainly one to which criticism will keep returning. For the past three decades, postcolonial literary critics adopting Said’s definitions of alterity have considered racial conflicts and racial discourse as important historical and cultural dimensions in literature, and have assigned historical specificity a prominent place in the study of the different spheres in which colonial and racial discourse operate. However, it appears that the technical strategies used to mold this historical context, which have endowed these texts with the force and impact they have produced, are still awaiting our full attention. Literary critics like Dorrit Cohn, J. Hillis Miller, and Brian Richardson have remarkably advanced the interrelations between historical context and narrative technique, further research on which Sue Kim has called for in the JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory special issue “Decolonizing Narrative Theory.” This difficult enterprise entreats us to read across disciplines, the [End Page 333] intersections of which are not always clear. Nonetheless, it might be precisely at these intersections where we should search for integration specific to the craft of fiction. In this essay, some insights on Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim serve as guide to finding one of these intersections through which to read the technical shaping of racial issues and the discourse of race in fiction. If we understand “race” as a discursive social and cultural construction historically intended to draw lines of distinction between human beings, it is not surprising that its literary representation should be tied to recurrent representations, whether positive or negative, used to define oneself or others. I would refer to these codified representations as stereotypes. Even when attempting to reject them, it might be the case that writers who struggle with the representation of racial difference and racial conflicts cannot completely ignore the stereotypes, since the disappearance of codified representations in a literary work risks the removal of the very issue of “race” itself. Indeed, if we reject the notion that “race” corresponds to any essential biological distinction, then we are implicitly attributing “race” to a cultural construction that only makes sense when the set of established beliefs and images that shape this historical distinction are present in the representation of characters, since those beliefs are the only basis—even if socially active—for any definition of “race.” For the writer, therefore, the representation of race might well be perceived as a negotiation with stereotypes. To fully apprehend this negotiation, however, we should move beyond the superficial consideration of the stereotype which colonial discourse mostly presents, and we as readers tend to accept. In fact, from a theoretical perspective—as Homi Bhabha suggests—its fixity reveals a dual structure that implies the negative image or absent side in the form. In other words, the stereotype implies much more than it displays and that should also be part of any reading, simply because it is an integral part of the literary work. While subscribing to this perspective of the stereotype, which is historical on the one hand and discursive on the other, I would like to take a step forward in our comprehension of this form in literature. My claim in this essay is that we might view stereotypes in fiction as narrative forms, or, as a strategy for telling stories. The stereotype is neither fixed in content nor merely a secondary assumption used to advance the narrative, but it is a mode of narration that unfolds in, and has specific functions within the [End Page 334] narrative, which completely determines the representation of race in our particular case. We find outstanding examples of such deployment of the stereotype in Modernist...

This paper will compare Chinese and Russian sports movies from four aspects of theme, characters, narrative mode, and audio-visual language, and then show the similarities and differences between Chinese and Russian sports movies in theme and characters. By analyzing the different narrative techniques and audio-visual designs of the two directors, we can feel the charm of sports movies of the two countries.

Editor's Column:Exploring Storyworlds across Media and Disciplines David Herman Like the first issue of the journal, Storyworlds 2 features contributions by specialists in a range of fields for which narrative constitutes a key concern. Again, the emphasis is on documenting storytelling practices across a variety of media, and also on stimulating cross-disciplinary conversations about how to develop productive methods for analyzing and interpreting those practices. This double emphasis carries with it, in turn, a twofold benefit. On the one hand, it promotes efforts to identify core features of narrative—the commonalities that cut across all modes of storytelling—while fostering the use of multiple frameworks of inquiry to create a detailed, layered profile of those shared features. But on the other hand, exploring narratives across media and via different disciplines can also illuminate the particularities of a given environment for storytelling. Hence analysts can, even as they sift out basic and general features of narrative, examine the different ways in which those features may be instantiated—and how the differences in question affect (constrain but also enable) the process of building and engaging with narrative worlds. Collectively, the six articles assembled here investigate narrative practices both across media and by way [End Page vii] of diverse analytic frameworks. Working at the intersection of science studies and narrative theory, and focusing on turn-of-the-twentieth-century narratives of conversion (in the broad sense of personal trans-formation), H. Porter Abbott explores how those attempts to narrate conversion experiences relate to two models of change: (1) the gradualist model influenced by Darwin's evolutionary theory and (2) modernist "momentism," grounded in a logic of sudden alteration and radical discontinuity. After a probing discussion of how narrative modes of representation break down when they are brought to bear on events that exceed a certain scale of complexity or compression, Abbott suggests that the momentist paradigm for understanding conversion is not so much a reaction against Darwinian gradualism as a "way to acknowledge its causal complexity—a complexity so extreme as to frustrate all efforts to narrativize it without distortion." Next, Richard J. Gerrig shifts the focus from a discussion of how modes of narration might have been shaped by scientific paradigms to a discussion of how humanistic research on narrative can both inform and be informed by empirical research on text processing. Examining three kinds of narrative gaps—those associated with readers' inferences beyond the information given, those created when initial mentions of characters withhold details about their roles in the story, and those stemming from unreliable narration—Gerrig makes a case for closer collaboration between literary narratologists and text-processing researchers. Arguably, it will require cross-disciplinary cooperation of this sort to (dis)confirm hypotheses concerning how various sorts of narrative structures and techniques shape readers' experiences. Moving from monomodal print texts to multimodal graphic narratives, Karin Kukkonen draws on another area of inquiry pioneered by psychologists—namely, research on mental models—to explore interpretive challenges posed to readers of superhero comics. These comics were produced serially over many decades, by different sets of creators, resulting in more or less obvious discontinuities and inconsistencies. Kukkonen examines how interpreters can use cues deployed by the comics' creators to navigate this superhero "multiverse," which features not a baseline reality and various counterfactual scenarios but rather multiple parallel realities inhabited by any number of character versions. Sean O'Sullivan continues Kukkonen's investigation of the affordances and constraints presented by serial narratives, but he focuses on the medium [End Page viii] of television rather than comics. Seeking to develop new tools for the study of television serials, O'Sullivan argues that shows such as Six Feet Under and The Sopranos can be analyzed as prosodic structures. Thus the recent innovation of the thirteen-episode season can be compared with the fourteen-line sonnet, with clusters of episodes functioning like stanzas in those "sonnet-seasons." Similarly, recurrent thematic and plot-related elements can be likened to beats distributed in a metrical pattern—by analogy with the pattern that governs, more or less stringently, the individual lines of a sonnet. Apostolos Doxiadis also looks to the patterns of poetry—specifically, narrative poetry—in...

Experimentation with Narrative Techniques and Modes of Writing in 'Abd al-Rahmān Munīf's Mudun al-milh: al-tīh

Although the first theories about the short story originate with Poe' s Philosophy of Composition (1846), historically the first forms of the genre go back to the emergence of the medieval tale. Some scholars acknowledge in passing that the medieval tale lies at the origins of the short story, yet very few critics have explored these connections further. As W.S. Perm aptly remarks:Historically, the earliest genre of the story ... is the tale .... The description of the tale as a genre of the story is only a beginning; yet, as long as we are able to describe the genre, structure, enunciative and narrative postures, mode and tropical convention, the beginning is a valid one.1This is an old, complex controversy2 whose full elucidation lies beyond the scope of the present study, which takes Penn's affirmation as a point of departure and attempts to demonstrate that the examination of medieval tales offers interesting approximations to the study of the modern short story. At present only a few studies have considered the relationship between the short story and the medieval tale, and even then they have done so only briefly.3 This study aims to fill the gap in the literature in this field.Especially interesting for our purposes are those medieval tales that deliberately fuse the oral tradition (in which moral trials and individuals' triumphs over desire are predominant) with the literary tradition (which attempts to capture the world's unique, inexplicable or mysterious aspects). Destined to become one of the most successful and surprising genres of the twentieth century, and predictably one of the predominant artistic forms of the twenty-first, the short narrative underwent several developmental phases before emerging as a new genre in the nineteenth century. The short story is indebted to the medieval literary tale, which represents one of the most fruitful phases of its evolution.This essay argues that some of the Canterbury Tales announce the ulterior evolution of the modern short story. It focuses on Chaucer's new narrative techniques, which center on the manipulation of the most important narrative elements, such as time, space, characters, narrators, and endings that prefigure the dynamics of the modern short story and modify the final meaning of the tale.Critics have regarded the fourteenth century as the culminating moment of collections of popular tales,4 which had existed for more than three thousand years. Translations and adaptations of collections of oriental and classical stories were popularized by Christian preachers and flourished in the works of authors such as Boccaccio, Chaucer and Gower. Scholars commonly agree on the division of these collections into three main groups according to their organizing structure: unframed tales, tales with an introduction and tales with a fully developed frame.5The first group consists of unframed tales - loose stories without any kind of organizational criteria. Probably the most famous collection of unframed tales is the Gesta Romanorum (towards the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth), a compilation of more than 1 80 stories, all of which end with a moral exemplification. There is no link among these stories, and in some cases there even seems to be no correspondence between the story and its moral.The second group comprises tales with an introduction. These are collections of unrelated tales preceded by an introduction or a prologue that instructs the reader as to the content and the aims envisaged by their publication. Miracles and the lives of saints generally belong to this category. A good example is the South English Legendary, compiled during the late thirteenth century, or the Aesopets, a collection of animal fables, compiled during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.Tales with a fully developed frame form the third group. Preceded by an introduction, these tales show explicit links to each other that are meant to give an overall meaning to the story. …

The disciplinary rapprochement between various disciplines across the arts and social sciences that have had an interest in narrative forms and functions has been slow and is still far from being completed. An area which has not been extensively covered yet is the question whether certain forms of third-person consciousness, i.e. the representation of the consciousness of a third party, are at all possible in oral narratives. One mode of depicting third-person consciousness in literary narratives is free indirect discourse (FID), which is commonly viewed as a dual-voiced narrative technique that entails both a reference to the thinking subject and to the narrating instance. The evaluation of FID as a literary narrative technique that is deemed less possible in oral stories results from the attribution of qualities of fictionality and factuality to the respective narrative genres and modes, whereas claims of truth-commitment and sincerity are made for spoken language. This paper discusses the methodological implications of FID for a cross-disciplinary narratology by looking at oral narratives from a sample of illness narratives on the UK’s DIPEx website. While FID can hardly be found in the spoken data, third-person consciousness is still made possible through the use of hypothesizing discourse markers and through devices such as constructed dialogue, which can be used to ascribe thoughts and feelings to other people in an indirect way. The paper demonstrates how third-person consciousness is used by speakers to come to terms with the motives behind other people’s actions. On a more abstract level, the paper explores the limits of a crossdisciplinary narratology when it comes to rigid methodological frameworks while at the same time arguing for a re-conceptualization of defining criteria such as fictionality and truth-commitment that allows for more flexibility.

Experimentation with narrative techniques and modes of writing in ‘Abd al‐Rahman Munif's Mudun al‐milh: al‐tih

This article discusses issues concerning the impact of translations on literature in a given target culture, as exemplified by British detective stories translated into Chinese in the early twentieth century. In China, the introduction and popularisation of British detective stories played a decisive role in introducing new narrative techniques and modes in popular fiction and gave rise to modern Chinese detective stories. The first translations were adapted to traditional Chinese narrative structures, but subsequent translations rendered those of the source texts adequately, thus illustrating an evolution in cultural receptivity. Furthermore, translated British detective stories inspired Chinese authors to create detective fiction largely dependent on the European genre and different from the crime stories of Chinese traditional fiction: the Gong-an stories. The article concentrates on the work of Cheng Xiao-qing (Ch'eng Hsiao-ch'ing), whose protagonist, Huo Sang, embodies elements from both Western and Chinese cultures. The present study thus highlights the importance of cultural confrontation and fusion, that is, in translation of popular literature in the target culture.