Narrative Aesthetics Research Articles

The Rhetoric of Knowledge and the Rhetoric of Delight: A Response to James Phelan

The Rhetoric of Knowledge and the Rhetoric of Delight:A Response to James Phelan Brian Richardson (bio) I wish to begin by identifying what I find to be particularly useful and important in the work of James Phelan. His general framework, emphasizing the mimetic, synthetic, and thematic aspects of narrative fiction, is an excellent model that is extremely capacious, able to cover a wide range of practices including the ideological, the verisimilar, and the distinctively literary, as well as the antimimetic aspects of fiction which I have termed the "unnatural." Jim has in fact made signal contributions to unnatural narrative theory and analysis in essays like "Implausibilities, Crossovers, Impossibilities: A Rhetorical Approach to Breaks in the Mimetic Code of Narration." His emphasis on the dynamic interaction of reader and text over the course of the reading is extremely important. Jim's framework and approach also allow for precision and are sensitive to nuance. We see these aspects in his account of narrative beginnings and endings and perhaps even more compellingly in his impressive though unfortunately underappreciated account of narrative aesthetics. As everyone knows, this is a diabolically difficult subject that has stymied critics, critical theorists, narratologists, and philosophers of art for centuries, yet Phelan has made real contributions to what constitutes literary value in narrative in his chapter "Rhetorical Aesthetics within Rhetorical Poetics" in Experiencing Fiction (133–49). [End Page 138] Having commented at some length fairly recently on many of the theoretical positions set forth by Jim along with Peter Rabinowitz (in Herman et al. 235–50), I will employ a more limited focus here, largely confining my comments to the questions of probability that are raised so intriguingly in the target essay. I find it an important discussion of an elusive subject that lies between the mimetic and the avowedly fictional; represented improbabilities can easily lead to what I have called the paradox of chance in fictional narratives (Unlikely 166-67). Such a discussion may also contribute to the theory of fictionality. This is the case, I suspect, even if these forays into rhetorically effective implausibilities and impossibilities can occasionally appear in non-fiction as well, as Jim has himself explored in his study of "off-kilter" nonfiction. I would like to ask him to reflect on the difference between the two. Even if these techniques appear in both fiction and nonfiction, I would think the stakes would be quite different: such impossibilities in a biography can be called mistakes, falsehoods, or lies; certainly, their use is far more constrained. I would also like to see Jim go further, not so much in his general framework but in the applications of that framework: more specifically, I see his practice as privileging the mimetic component to the neglect of what could be a greatly expanded conception of the synthetic. Jim writes, for example, that implausibilities and probable impossibilities are "deviations from the dominant system of probability in a narrative" (12). This begs the question of whether a realistic canon of probabilities does in fact operate in the narrative. In many cases, it does not. In a supernatural causal system, fate may determine the structure of events: there is nothing plausible about Oedipus just happening to run into Laius on the road as he is fleeing Corinth so as not to kill his father—to say nothing of the fact that he marries a woman old enough to be his mother after he had learned that his fate was to marry his mother. Real-world considerations of probability would also have us look askance at a number of other questions, not only the cunning ones raised by Sandor Goodheart concerning the conflicting accounts of Laius' death, but also more mundane explorations of the improbable (or impossible?), such as just how old Jocasta was when she gave birth to Ismene? Questions of probability are not central to all fiction. They are largely irrelevant in the plays of Aristophanes or Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, where an entirely different logic of connecting events rules; this is equally true of many postmodern works, as is graphically enacted when we see a flipped coin come up "heads" over seventy times in a...

THE POETRY AND ITS LITERARY RESOURCES AS QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGY

This article describes the main contributions of poetic inquiry as a critical qualitative methodology for the social sciences and health sciences. Are first explored the present research trends associated with the use of poetry as a narrative construction form; in a second, the use of specific exercises is analyzed to identify the potential of narrative aesthetics in the construction of alternative subjectivities as a way of recognizing the voice of the research participants. Finally, there is an academic and reflective discussion about the need to use this methodology in the different universities and study centers in Latin America. It can be concluded that poetic research is a critical way of approaching community problems based on the voice of its participants. It is also a methodology that unites researchers and their participants in a generative dialogue, which enhances qualitative research.

No happy returns: aesthetics, labor, and affect in Julie Dash’s experimental short film, Four Women (1975)

Shaped by Black feminist ideology, this essay examines how Black women, as informed by their embodied existence, manipulate film’s formal and narrative aesthetics to ask what does cinema do, and what can it do in its portrayal of Black expressive culture. I understand the cinematic (re)presentation of Blackness to be an ideological aesthetic battleground for filmmakers, and while there are a plethora of films and scholarship dedicated to “positive” (re)presentations of Blackness, this is not that study. My study examines how experimental cinema gets around, negates, and dismisses recursively predetermined film portrayals of The Black Experience through its refusal to provide answers. Black women’s experimental cinema demonstrates the expressive possibilities of cinema’s form through their use of Black expressive culture. In this way, Black women’s experimental cinema has always been representative of how cinema generates and conveys affect. To get at this, I will analyze the short experimental film, Four Women (1975) by Julie Dash. Additionally, I turn to Sylvia Wynter’s “Re-thinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” to draw out how Four Women’s experimental aesthetics counter dominant cinema’s relationship with affect through its disinterest in producing “positive” or “happy” affective returns for audience members.

The art of narrative construction and reconstruction in the care of the bereaved A film narrative analysis

This article describes the narrative construction and reconstruction in the care of the bereaved. Clinical examples are given for the narrative training on the story selection as based on interpersonal and intercultural communication issues. This view is assayed at the aesthetic narrative approach of a Canadian film --Monsieur Lazhar (2011) -- by analyzing the bereaved stories that are told among the professor and children at a school environment. Narrative experiences connected to an art outlook, concerning the Montreal socio-cultural environment are also explored: an interview made to a Canadian art theory professor on the issue of multicultural narrative development and Montreal urban groups, as expressed by citizens gathered through claims on sociocultural alienation done through literature and pictorial design. It is postulated that aesthetic narratives of bereavement ease the interpersonal sharing and understanding of deep emotional pain of grief in the group

Creating narratives from the Victorian photographic archive: re-imaginings of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work in Ulverton (1992) and The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (2014)

Contemporary historical fictions increasingly employ affective relations with Victorian photographs as nodal points within their narratives, introducing an archive-like structure of traces to the texts. The evocation of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s visual traces in contemporary neo-Victorian texts exemplifies this shift towards an archival subjectivity, particularly because such qualities are inherent in her original material. Photography critics have long noted that Cameron’s evocative portraits and illustrations suggest blurred relations between models and characters, outward appearance and the self, and the material and the ethereal. Drawing on work on creative readings of photograph albums, and on the idea of ‘rhythms’ of pictoriality in a text, I suggest that Cameron’s photographic albums create fluid meaning and narrative from a dialogue of image traces, intended to be interpreted by the viewer’s empathetic imagination. Taking this further, I argue that this Victorian form of visual narrative creates a kind of grounding for the modern use of pictoriality in fiction. I identify two novels that evoke Cameron’s character and style as part of multi-stranded narratives, Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton (1992) and Michelle Lovric’s The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (2014), discerning within them structured compositions of subjective ekphrastic images which produce a form of novel-as-archive. In this form, narrative meaning is created from a focus on the successive scrutiny of images. In an unorthodox and cross-temporal relationship between word and image, the narrative aesthetics of a Victorian photographer become productive of plays of identity, representation, and structure in contemporary fiction.

An Aesthetic Review of New Mothers as the Ultimate Weaver: Achieving a Harmonious Integration of Prevalent Discourses and Lived Experience

ABSTRACTExperiences in new motherhood are influenced by popular sociological discourses and ideologies. The narratives promoted in these discourses may or may not fit with the subjective experience of the mother. Lacking experience in motherhood, the new mother may misguidedly accept these mainstream discourses and ideologies as standard. The process of adapting and blending sociological narratives to fit with lived experience is similar to the art of weaving. This article, an original argument grounded in relevant literature, explores how new mothers can develop a balanced weave of popular social discourse and her subjective experience by: accepting motherhood as a creative process, being aware of the powerful influence of social constructs on her perceptions, and recognizing the influence of her body/biology on her lived experience. The aesthetic narrative of the spider, the ultimate weaver, accompanies the research presented. Complementary art therapy interventions such as weaving, art boxes, and dolls are discussed.

L'Interdiction, or, Balzac on the margins of law and realism

ABSTRACTHonoré de Balzac’s 1836 novella L'Interdiction is the story of a wife's attempt to have her husband declared legally incompetent by reason of insanity, and of an idealistic juge d'instruction's investigation of her request. In a procedurally detailed recounting of the investigation, Balzac reflects on the law's role alongside other discourses of authority in defining and adjudicating normal and abnormal behaviour. The eventual discovery that the husband is sane and that the wife's motives in claiming the contrary are grossly self-interested leads the narrator to familiar Balzacian conclusions about the marginalization of virtue – its depiction, indeed, as a form of madness – in a corrupt modern society. Yet the text's constant evocation of questions of plausibility, verisimilitude and realism draws these legal considerations into a self-reflexive dispute about narrative aesthetics, a mise-en-abyme of contemporaneous debates between the literary approach known as ‘idealism’, and Balzac's own nascent conception of the novelist's art, which would one day be known as ‘realism’. Despite its superficial moralizing, the text leads inexorably to the conclusion that idealism – the judge's, the husband's, Balzac's contemporary novelists' – is, simply, impossible, and must always yield to the demands of reality. The novella thus reveals how literature not only engages with legal issues and arguments, but appropriates them for the purposes of intra-literary aesthetic debates about how best to represent the world. Indeed, L'Interdiction gives a sense of how legal and representational disputes can in fact be two aspects of the same fundamental quarrel.

Od estetskog ka etičkom - mit i metafora kao modus narativa kod Levinasa

In this paper, I will try to show that Levinas's ethics contains the aesthetics of mythological narrative that has metaphorical ("as if" meaning) and archetypal dimension, while the relation between ethics and aesthetics will be explained by Levinas's perception of eros. These goals are based on the assumption that myth represents uroboric foundation of Levinas's philosophy by which he succeeded in getting rid of the egology of Western thought, but also from the experience of his own imagination. The myth speaks about universals through various representations, relations, characters, etc. Taking into account that universals are archetypes, and that all archetypes in history of mankind have aesthetic dimension, Levinas's philosophy "offers" this archetypal structure of myth through its operational concepts such as eros, infinity, feminine, trauma, maternity, fecundity etc. I will try to show that Levinasian establishing of ethics as philosophia prima is based on language of metaphors and imagination as material and unknowable foundation of psyche.

The Slave Narrative and Filmic Aesthetics: Steve McQueen, Solomon Northup, and Colonial Violence

The Slave Narrative and Filmic Aesthetics: Steve McQueen, Solomon Northup, and Colonial Violence

Milton Hatoum, intertextualidade e memória da literatura

O estudo do conjunto da obra do escritor brasileiro Milton Hatoum revela uma relação intrínseca com a memória. A concretização literária desta relação evidencia-se em níveis diferentes – as suas obras tematizam e problematizam o fenômeno e o papel da memória enquanto que a própria estrutura narrativa da ficção hatoumiana se realiza como o resultado da recordação, necessária para a reconstrução da história pessoal e familiar. No entanto, encontramos na obra deste escritor amazonense, mais um fenômeno que pode ser considerado em relação à memória: a intertextualidade. O objetivo do nosso artigo será, portanto, investigar esse dispositivo literário partindo da sua relação com a memória. Para tal fim, principiamos com o argumento da teórica alemã Renate Lachmann que oferece uma visão particular sobre a relação entre memória, literatura e intertextualidade. O texto literário, segundo ela, possui a sua própria memória na forma das relações intertextuais (Lachmann, 2004: 304). A partir desta perspectiva e do estudo da intertextualidade na obra de Milton Hatoum, pretendemos ressaltar nela o papel dessa «memória da literatura», acrescentando assim mais um elemento que completa o tecido mnémico hatoumiano.

Soma: Live Musical Performance in Which Congruent Visual, Auditory and Proprioceptive Stimuli Fuse to Form a Combined Aesthetic Narrative

Artists and scientists have long had an interest in the relationship between music and visual art, leading up to the present-day art form of correlated animation and music called visual music. Current live performance tools and paradigms for visual music, however, are subject to several limitations. The work reported here addresses these through a transdisciplinary integration of findings from several research areas, detailing the resulting ideas and their implementation in three interconnected software applications. This culminates in the art form of Soma, in which correlated auditory, visual and proprioceptive stimuli form a combined narrative.

The Deferral of Signification and Narrative Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Love

The Deferral of Signification and Narrative Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Love

Frames and fragments of European migration

Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss how the figure of the migrant is construed within the popular imagination as a ‘threat’ to the prosperity of the European Union, and the unique way in which Radivojevic seeks to critique both conservative and liberal discourses around migration through her film. Evaporating Borders examines the present-day experiences of asylum seekers and migrants in Cyprus, the majority of who are Palestinians, as they face increasing hostility and violence from Cypriot nationalists on the island. By framing the film through Radivojevic’s personal voice-over, disrupting linear narrativity, and juxtaposing visual imagery of life on the island with aural testimonials offered by refugees and Cypriots alike, Radivojevic subtly connects worsening economic conditions to the growth of nationalism and xenophobia in Cyprus and Europe more broadly. The film’s exploration of three national traumas – the occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkey, the denial of Palestinian statehood, and Radivojevic’s personal narrative of escaping to Cyprus from Yugoslavia during its collapse – makes visible the multiple temporalities migrants experience and the time politics used by nation states to limit migrants’ mobility. Through our examination of the film’s narrative structure and aesthetics, we show how Radivojevic renders more complicated the simplistic liberal approaches to the figure of the ‘migrant’ to reveal the fragmented and contradictory nature of national identities, and to compel an examination of the idea of the nation state.

La novela ideológica (1875–1880): la literatura de ideas en la España de la Restauración by Ignacio Javier López (review)

Reviewed by: La novela ideológica (1875–1880): la literatura de ideas en la España de la Restauración by Ignacio Javier López Sarah Sierra Keywords Novela Ideológica, Novela de Tesis, Hombre Nuevo, Restauración, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, José María de Pereda, Juan Valera, Benito Pérez Galdós, Realist Novel, Culture Wars, Guerras Culturales, Social Crisis, Romanticism, Folletín, Novela de Luis, Villarminio, Krausism, Ignacio Javier López, Sarah Sierra lópez, ignacio javier. La novela ideológica (1875-1880): la literatura de ideas en la España de la Restauración. Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 2014. 302 pp. Approaches to literary history have often undergone revision when critics recognized that the perception of a text, body of work, or literary period has been distorted by subsequent interpretations that obscure the original context. This is one of many reasons why Ignacio Javier López’s recent publication La novela ideológica (1875–1880): la literatura de ideas en la España de la Restauración is a significant contribution to the analysis of the nineteenth-century novel. As the title denotes, he examines the novela ideológica as a body of work between 1875 and 1880 by contesting the oft-cited evaluation of these texts as a preliminary and underdeveloped passage toward the Realist novel. With a carefully detailed analysis of the political, philosophical, and social realities during the period, Professor [End Page 113] López historically contextualizes the works and authors within their appropriate intellectual milieux pointing to one fundamental element that has often been overlooked: the novels of this period should take as their point of reference not the revolution of 1868, but rather its failure and the subsequent Restauración. He shows ample evidence that the novels in this study form a unified genre that, taken as a whole, offers insightful understanding of the historical moment, as well as substantial contributions toward new understandings of narrative aesthetics in nineteenthcentury Spain. Divided into two parts, Poética histórica and Crítica, López’s study examines multiple facets associated with the literary production of the members of the generation of ‘68, consisting of Juan Valera, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Benito Pérez Galdós, and José María de Pereda. All four contributed to changing the perception of the novel among the educated reading class, but only three participated successfully in the novela ideológica. Here López also includes the predominantly unknown text La novela de Luis written under the pseudonym of S. de Villarminio. In the first chapter, La literatura y las ideas, López identifies eight works that comprise the novela ideológica, noting that one of its prominent unifying characteristics is the genre’s discursive flexibility. He denotes four distinct orientations that point to this flexibility: the Romantic aesthetic (El escándalo, El niño de la Bola, and the first part of Gloria); the Realist aesthetic (Doña Perfecta, Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera, De tal palo, tal astilla, and La familia de León Roch); an intermediate position (the second part of Gloria); and one that is explicitly anti-Romantic, but does not implement Realist tendencies either (La novela de Luis). He examines how the emphasis on contemporary issues in these novels resonated with an educated class whose changing reading habits and expectations revealed an evolution toward a more acute consciousness of a problematic modernity in which individual aspirations and external demands were in conflict. He masterfully details how the stylistic changes created a complex narrative discourse that reflected an awareness of living during a period of intense ideological conflict. In chapter 2, Restauración frente a revolución, López uncovers the process by which a fairly benign exchange of ideas degenerated into a contentious ideological battle. He seamlessly intertwines national concerns with broader transnational issues, demonstrating that Spain did not experience the tensions of modernity in isolation. Chapter 3, El triunfo de la novela ideológica, considers Romanticism’s influence on these novels. He acknowledges that while writers rejected the vulgarities of popular literature, they continued to incorporate elements of the Romantic aesthetic in the first phase of...

Re-Writing Maturity: Coming-of-Age through Female Community in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorciére, noire de Salem and Nicole Brossard’s Le désert mauve

This essay explores two novels in which individual female maturity develops in relation to a wider female community: Maryse Conde’s 1986 Moi, Tituba, sorciere, noire de Salem and Nicole Brossard’s 1987 Le desert mauve . In both of these novels, coming-of-age is performed in large part through relationships between and among women, and female community is both the vehicle for and the marker of female maturity. Moreover, each work steps outside the confines of traditional narrative realism in its portrayal of female community and maturity. While the collective vision of each novel differs in terms of context and political engagement – Conde’s novel addresses the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean and the United States, examining racial as well as gendered oppression, and Brossard’s novel explores lesbian solidarity, bringing together feminism and postmodern narrative aesthetics in the context of Quebecois “ecriture experimentale” – both texts emphasize the importance of female community to the development of their protagonists, and to the process of resisting patriarchal definitions of femininity and womanhood. In this essay, my argument is two-fold: first, that the formative process in these novels is transformed by female communities and the relationships among women that they imagine; and second, that these novels’ combination of coming-of-age, community, and alternative narrative structures offers feminist writers promising avenues for resisting patriarchal reality and creating alternative feminist configurations of female maturity.

Entre fato e ficção: personagens compostos e fictícios ou fraude em jornalismo?

Placed between Literature and Journalism by amalgamating fact checking to the narrative aesthetics of fiction, Literary Journalism faces the challenge of producing works of ambiguous character. One of the factors in this dispute is the use of composite characters, created by combining biographic features of a number of sources in a single person. In this paper we discuss the borders between fact and fiction in this kind of narrative in two instances. The first is a historical one, with a focus on the profiles about Hugh Griffin Flood by American reporter Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996) published in the New Yorker magazine in the 1940s. The second one puts an emphasis on the separation between real and fake characters, treated as fraud in the press from the 1980s due to cases such as those of The Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke and The New York Times reporter Jason Blair, in 2003.

Rapunzel Loves Merida: Melodramatic Expressions of Lesbian Girlhood and Teen Romance in Tangled, Brave, and Femslash

This article explores the melodramatic expression of lesbian girlhood and teen romance in Disney's Tangled (2010) and Disney Pixar's Brave (2012), as well as “Meripunzel” femslash, fan-authored romantic pairings of the animations' female protagonists. First, Anne Sexton's poem, “Rapunzel,” offers a literary precedent for exploring lesbian themes in the fairy tale. The next section shows how Tangled and Brave invoke the narrative conventions of the family melodrama. This generic association reveals the films' uses of rhetoric familiar to youth coming-out narratives, as well as other visual and aural coding suggestive of queer styles. The last section shows how Meripunzel femslash taps into the films' existing melodramatic narrative forms and visual aesthetics, rehearsing their coming-out rhetoric while addressing the pleasures of and problems facing lesbian teen romance. I conclude by problematizing the often conventional expressions of lesbian girlhood in femslash, ultimately arguing for their empowering potential, especially as they indicate revised definitions of “princess.”

The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance by Thomas Hinton, and: Old French Narrative Cycle: Heroism between Ethics and Morality by Luke Sunderland, and: The Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending by Leah Tether (review)

Thomas HINTON. The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chretien de Troyes's Perceval, the Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance. Gallica 23. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. ix, 290. ISBN: 978-1-84384-285-9. $99.LUKE Sunderland. Old French Narrative Cycle: Heroism between Ethics and Morality. Gallicai5. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. xiii, 204. isbn: 978-1-84384-220-0. $90.leah tether. The Continuations of Chretien's Perceval: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending. Arthurian Studies 79. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. ix, 256. isbn: 978-1-84384-31600. $95.In addition to a shared focus on Old French chivalric narrative, these three releases from D.S. Brewer in the Gallica and Old French series have in common their positions as their authors' first published books of literary criticism. These volumes are concerned with core ideas in Old French literature-cyclicity, continuation, aesthetics, ethics, and the hero-and will be of potential interest for Arthuriana's readers as read-through volumes, broadly informing research notes and class lectures. Further, they will be an asset for personal and university library reference. Thomas Fdinton studies the development, authorship, and reception of Chretien's unfinished Conte du Graal (Perceval) and its Continuations as a cycle. Luke Sunderland considers cyclic aesthetics and the formation of the hero in the contexts of four Old French narratives, and Leah Tether, like Fdinton, turns to the Perceval and its Continuations, but she examines the texts to demonstrate a theoretical model of continuation viewed as a genre.Thomas Fdinton's study examines the place of the Perceval and its Continuations in the history and development of cyclicity and later Arthurian romance. Fdinton particularly interrogates the creation and reception of Chretien's texts as a unified cycle, arguing for its place in the evolutionary development of Arthurian romance though the century that follows and even into the genesis of the modern novel in the seventeenth century, an idea that Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner suggests in her 'Introduction' to Chretien Continued (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Fdinton organizes his work into four chapters and a highly serviceable set of appendices. Fdis stated aims are first, to provide an understanding of'cyclic aesthetics' and 'narrative aesthetics' in the Conte and its Continuations and second, to determine how audiences and authors of Arthurian romance were 'invited' to respond to the corpus as they encountered it. Hinton's critical goals are complementary in that authorial response to the invitation to continue the narrative creates the resulting 'aesthetic' from opposing, hierarchical narrative dynamics. Narrative proliferation, or movement away from the source (as the 'centrifugal aesthetic'), is countered by recurrent harkening back to the principal hero's biography (as the 'centripetal aesthetic'), resulting in narrative tension and coherence.Hinton addresses the ways in which Chretien's Conte and the Continuations respond to existing theoretical parameters and result in a narrative that is ultimately coherent, despite its fragmented chronological development and multiple authors. Providing a clear and concrete presentation of criteria for 'cycle' and 'cyclicity' and how these work in specific instances, Hinton agues for an early 'aesthetic of cyclicity' that drives the evolution of romance and works to establish the place and value of the Conte and its Continuations as a cycle in that evolution. The designation may be problematic, however, in that Chretien's Conte and its Continuations do not precisely fit the theoretical parameters, as Hinton acknowledges.In his first chapter, Hinton explores the distinctions between the First Continuation and the Second and the latter's influence on those that follow. Biography, with Perceval's development foremost, and 'interlace,' that allows movement through the adventures of knights other than Perceval, are catalysts for the 'narrative aesthetic' that Hinton soon styles a 'textual aesthetic' (29 ff)- Lucid critical readings and insights about the second continuator's modes and lapses populate much of this chapter, and Hinton's argument that the Second Continuation creates the cyclicity of the Chretien Conte corpus is insightful if not entirely convincing. …

Art and Labor in the Framing ofGuatemala's Dead

AbstractInGuatemala, how did photographers work to represent atrocity? Did they think of the images of death they produced as art? As work? InGuatemala, visual narratives provided by the camera were often more successful than the bullet at creating a sense of political clarity that actively obfuscated the disruptive and destructive force of political violence. Graphic reporters, as photographic journalists called themselves, actively worked to give images of violence their own aesthetic narrative: a narrative they had to negotiate with their editors, print reporters and, most importantly, the intelligence and public affairs arms of theGuatemalanArmedForces. In staging and orienting their images – defining what story they would tell and what characters and motivations they would allow into their frame of vision – graphic reporters consciously engaged in the production of a complexly authored narrative aesthetic that came to represent both atrocity and their own work as artists.

Student goes on a journey; stranger rides into the classroom: Narratives and the instructor in the design studio

Abstract Enthusiasm is growing in non-traditional environments for teaching design by adapting knowledge and approaches from studio pedagogy, described as a ‘signature pedagogy’ by Lee S. Shulman in 2005. Meanwhile, those in fields where some variation of studio pedagogy have been used for decades are engaged in addressing some of its experienced shortcomings. Within this landscape of change, the authors have been engaged in study of their own studio-based courses, (interior design, instructional design, and interaction/experience design), reflecting on how this form of pedagogy is contributing to students’ development as designers. In this study we consider the role of the instructor in the studio using a lens informed by narrative aesthetics and transformative education. The narrative that an instructor encourages students to experience with regard to themselves, to the instructor, or to both, has a profound impact in the studio environment. This article will explore that impact within the context of the authors’ own courses via review of course notes and collaborative reflection with colleagues.