Character Dialogue Research Articles

Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800-1937 by Margaret Wan

Reviewed by: Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800-1937 by Margaret Wan Mark Bender (bio) Margaret Wan. Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800-1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. xxii, 430 pp. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 978-0-674-24118-3. Margaret Wan's latest monograph, Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture in North China: Drum Ballads 1800-1937, is the culmination of years of [End Page 118] careful and intense scholarship on the subject of northern Chinese "drum ballads" (guci) (p. 71) in the culmination of not only some of the author's major academic interests, but just as importantly the integration of over three generations of scholarly work in the still-understudied field of Chinese oral and oral-connected literature. It is a landmark work in the fullest sense. The work is a deep study of prosimetric narratives transmitted by parallel, and distinct, oral and written means. Numerous styles of orally performed drum ballads that mixed verse, speaking, and simple monologue or dialogue of characters to the accompaniment of patterned percussive beats were performed throughout parts of north, northeast China, and to an extent, southward. The major focus of the book, however, is on the written strand of the tradition, spanning a period from 1800 to 1937. These texts seem in various ways connected to oral traditions, though what those connections may be has been an ongoing question, as with similar situations between other regional oral and written traditions in China. Discussions throughout the chapters utilize a corpus of about fifty drum ballad texts, most with plots concerning judges and court cases, contextualized within intimate social settings, larger historical trends, and regional contexts, and transmitted in various written formats. The model of transmission of themes, ideas, and even material texts typically includes moves from a nexus of works associated with regional capitals to those "deep in the countryside" that "suggest nested layers of identity" within local cultures (p. 286). In the author's words, a main goal of the work is to see how drum ballads help "investigate important inter-related questions about the relationship between popular literature (oral and written), the formation of regional cultures, and 'national' culture; and about the role that printing (in a variety of technologies) plays in spreading culture" (p. 23). The volume draws comprehensively on relevant studies in vernacular literature and related fields to give readers tools to examine the larger picture of traditions of Chinese oral performances (close to four hundred) and especially the oral-connected written text traditions (fewer in comparison), often marked with regional characteristics, including local conventions, dialects, and audiences/readerships. While other studies have explored questions related to regional Chinese oral performance and oral-connected literature, few to date have presented such a focused and thought-provoking discussion of a particular "genre" in multiple spaces of circulation and reception in terms of "regional literature" (p. 10), an area that the author feels is understudied in the field of Chinese literature. Chapter 1 directly examines the idea of "regional" or "local" literature (pp. 17-19) in regional and national contexts, which is not only important for understanding drum ballads and other localized styles of oral traditional literature, but also contributes to the larger discussion of the transmission of information and knowledge in the context of a modernizing state and culture. [End Page 119] These topics in a multicultural China are highly deserving of attention simply due to the vast number of regional oral literatures historically in the country. Yet the study is valuable in many more ways. The author offers a pragmatic "connect the dots" manner of dealing with this complexity of local tradition that allows readers to understand the situation of drum ballad traditions in the north, but in southern areas as well, particularly multicultural Shanghai of the early twentieth century. Inspired by Cynthia Brokaw's 2007 work on the distribution of Qing dynasty commercial printing products,1 the author illustrates methods for dealing with local/regional oral-connected text traditions within complex webs of transmission and appreciation that will serve as a model for future studies. Charts showing places and production numbers and corresponding...

The Analysis of Three Dimension Aspects of the Main Character in the Novel The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner

Literature is one of the written works that express aspect of human life. This study is using a novel entitled The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. It is analyzing the main character in terms of physiological, psychological, and sociological dimension aspects. Dramatic and character on the other character method were used in analyzing the study based on character dialogue, action, opinion, and feeling. These were explained descriptively in order to have a clear understanding of the aspects implied in the story. The result of findings were three dimension aspects, as of; physiological, that influenced the main character are the age and physical appearance. The psychological, about the situation that she was ran away from her father when she still human. The sociological background and human relationship are influenced in sociological aspect. It can be concluded that the whole three dimension aspects of the main character showed in physiological, Bree was fifteen years old girl almost sixteen years old when she became a vampire,but she did not remember how old she was when she was a human. Her body will sparkling like a crystal when exposed to sunlight and also have a bright and red eyes. In psychological, she is an introvert vampire with few friends and does not really like to make trouble andspare time with other vampire. In sociological, before became a vampire, Bree was a girl who lived with her father. But, after her mother died, her relationship with her father not good, because her father was rude person.

Dual Narrative Progression as Dual Authorial Communication: Extending the Rhetorical Model

Dual Narrative Progression as Dual Authorial Communication:Extending the Rhetorical Model Dan Shen (bio) From the middle to the end of the twentieth century, the critical field witnessed first the death of the author (focusing on the text), and then the "death" of the text (focusing on the reader or sociohistorical context). It is the rhetorical approach to narrative led by Wayne Booth and more recently by James Phelan that has consistently put stress on authorial communication, especially the author's rhetorical purposes (in the words of Phelan's target essay "a teller [author] using resources of narrative to achieve a purpose in relation to an audience"). The new century has seen the "resurrection" of the author and the critical field is moving toward a more balanced concern with the author, the text, and the context, a balance that is, in effect, inherent in the rhetorical approach, although its contextual potential was for a long time suppressed or hidden from view for various reasons (see Shen "Implied;" also see below). An important aim of Phelan's target essay is to extend the rhetorical model or the model of narrative communication in general by taking into account character–character dialogue. To see things in perspective, I would like to introduce the diagram (Figure 1) of "discourse relations involved in the novel" as offered by Leech and Short (215–16). First of all, I have to point out that the distinction between the upper two levels of communication is based on a misunderstanding of the "implied author." As I argued at length elsewhere (see Shen "What"), Booth's distinction between the Implied Author and the Real Author is actually that between the (role-playing) person in the process of writing and the same person in daily life, out of the writing process. As far as the creative process is concerned, we only need to consider the implied author (whose image is implied by all the textual choices he or she has made during this process), but if we want to know how the textual choices are affected by life experiences in historical context, we need to examine the relation between the implied author and the real author (the same person out of the writing process). [End Page 61] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. In light of this, we can leave aside the first level of discourse relation in the above diagram. As for the second, the "message" is the whole text the implied author has created with the implied reader in mind. Since the implied author has no voice, he or she has to use a narrator (or multiple narrators in the case of multiple levels of narration) to convey the story to the audience (narratee, narrative audience, authorial/actual audience). [End Page 62] As regards the third level, character–character dialogue is part of the message the narrator conveys to the audience. To know the implied author's rhetorical purposes and the thematic meaning of the text, we need to examine character's dialogue together with character's action, thought, emotion, and so on as represented through various structural and stylistic devices (in Phelan's term, "resources"). But as far as communication is concerned, character–character dialogue can be singled out to form another level of discourse relation. In this sense, Leech and Short's model lends itself to Phelan's concern with the "synergy" among the channels of communication involving character–character dialogue and the channel(s) of communication involving the narrator's (or narrators') telling the story (with the implied author as the creator and authorial/actual readers as part of the audience). With this clarification paving the way, I try to extend the rhetorical model of narrative by considering dual narrative progression and dual authorial communication. In many fictional narratives, there is a textual movement behind the plot development. I have elsewhere designated the former "covert progression" which complicates the audience's response in various ways (Shen "Covert," Style, "Dual Textual," "Dual Narrative"). The double narrative progressions involve two channels of authorial communication, conveying the implied author's different rhetorical purposes, arousing contrastive or even opposed response from readers. The relationship between the covert...

СУБСТИТУЦИЯ КАК СРЕДСТВО СВЯЗНОСТИ В ДРАМАТИЧЕСКОМ ТЕКСТЕ

Within the framework of the article research attention is focused on substitution as a frequency means of grammatical cohesion of a dramatic text. The paper emphasizes the problem of the types of substitution that are observed in dialogues of dramatic texts, their role in ensuring the cohesion of such texts. The drama “Pygmalion” by B. Shaw is chosen as the factual material of the study. The dialogues of the drama characters, according to the author’s observations, are characterized by semantic transparency and syntactic simplicity, and therefore the researcher (and the reader) has the opportunity to identify easily substitution models and their text-forming functions.

The Story/Discourse Distinction

The Story/Discourse Distinction Emma Kafalenos (bio) James Phelan is the best reader of first-person fiction I know. But in his work on character narration he deprives himself of a major resource: the story/discourse distinction. Further, in his essay on character–character dialogue and probability to which this issue of Style is devoted, he proposes that the story/discourse distinction blinds theorists to the role of character–character dialogue as narration. "Characters," he says, "fall on the story side of the binary distinction" ("Multiple Channels of Communication"). He is wrong about this; characters fall on both sides of the distinction. Character narration and character–character dialogue are aspects of discourse. Probability (probable impossibilities and improbable possibilities), in contrast, is an aspect of story. [End Page 39] Story is the content plane: who does what, when, and where. Discourse is the expression plane: a representation of story in language or some other medium. The section headings in Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse (note the word "discourse" in the title) name aspects of discourse: order, duration, frequency, focalization, and voice.1 The Russian Formalists (c. 1915–30), who were the first to describe the two trajectories, were interested primarily in discourse—including character–character dialogue. According to D. W. Fokkema, the Formalists devoted most of their attention to the formal aspects of literature. In the field of narratology they investigated the way in which the various episodes of a story are connected; they examined the technique of the frame-story and the relations, often family relations, between characters. Their primary interest was to discover the technique of how a story was made. The conversation between characters is not interpreted in isolation, but seen as a means for advancing the action by introducing new material. (160) The character–character dialogue that the Formalists recognize can forward the plot is an aspect of discourse, as is the intermingling of the golfer's, Luster's, and Benjy's voices that Phelan perceives is complex communication. The Formalists seem to have conceived of story as preexisting discourse. In some of the examples they studied, story even had a prior existence as a folktale, which was then retold in a new, presumably more interesting, more aesthetically pleasing discourse. That is not the case for the French Structuralists for whom story and discourse are synchronic. In Seymour Chatman's description, for instance, Structuralism "does not assume that either telling or told 'precede' each other: they are coexistent, cotemporal parts of the model" ("On Deconstructing Narratology," 14). And now that we have seen the repeated questioning of the possibility of communication by twentieth-century thinkers Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and others,2 theorists can now argue, as I do, that discourse precedes story. When I read a narrative, what I perceive is the discourse. In the process of reading the discourse, I construct the story. One reason that the temporal position of story in relation to discourse matters is that it affects the communication diagram. For me, the communication diagram has two parts, text and reader. For Phelan, "the two constants in the communication [are] the somebody who tells and the somebody who [End Page 40] listens," author and reader ("Authors, Resources, Audiences"). His diagram begins with the author and ends with the reader. And he is right that "theorists who want to reject the implied author as the constructor of the text have far more in common with rhetorical theorists than those who want to reject the implied author [as I do] because they believe meanings arise primarily out of text-audience interactions" (#4 in "Chart"). At issue is the epistemological status, in the story a given reader constructs, of the elements that are not specifically stated in discourse. Among these unstated elements are the rhetorical intentions of the author, the implied author, and (with exceptions) the narrator. In much of his published work, Phelan analyzes unreliability by comparing what a narrating character says to what Phelan claims that the author or the implied author intended readers to understand. Poetics is the study of how works achieve the effects they do. Famously, Aristotle determines the effects of plays he admires...

Drama for developing integrity in Higher Education

Developing academic integrity is context-based and ineffective through formal courses. The article explores the meanings of academic integrity, reviews literature on educational strategies towards its development and presents the design and results of the author’s research on how drama may augment development of academic integrity of MBA students in the innovation camp setting. The philosophical framework for integrity learning and its perception by students comes from Bakhtin’s dialogical theory of self and critical pedagogy of Freire. Drama is offered as a learning medium which provides context to explore multiple perspectives and imaginary dialogues of characters who may take ethically dubious positions. Assessment of integrity at the input stage and after completion of the drama sessions was two-fold. A self-efficacy test was used for standardized measurement and sociometry was applied to asses four areas of ethical education: (1) being sensitive to ethical dilemmas at stake; (2) reasoning/reflective skills and; (3) motivation/conviction to give over other considerations to the values, principles, or ideals that prompt the action to be taken; (4) strategizing to act ethically. The findings suggest that drama effectively augments the development of otherwise stable integrity of MBS students by making them more optimistic about their courage to adhere to values in face of adversity, especially to defend diversity as a human right and pre-condition for innovation. This article is published as part of a collection on integrity and its counterfeits.

Взаимодействие вербального и визуального текста в творчестве братьев ван Эйк и Рогира ван дер Вейдена: выявление позиции зрителя

Although the use of labels in visual arts has millennia of practice, it was the brothers Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden who managed to intertwine verbal and visual aids in their work in such a unique way as are the sources of written texts that include prophecies, apocrypha, “Golden legend”, “Imitation of Christ”, the words of the Saviour, the apostles and the church fathers, personal mottos, and the works of ancient authors.The inscriptions and signatures in the works of the two masters of the Northern Renaissance are among the least studied problems. Many features of the inscriptions on the works by Van Eyck and Van der Weyden are close to each other and reveal different aspects of the viewer’s position, which is expected by the artists. The dialogues of Gospel characters manage emotions and direct the audience’s attention by means of a written text, scrolls with texts in the hands of the Sibyls and Angels create the effect of trompe-l’oeil, inverted writing responsesreminiscent of the “internal viewer” works. It should be noted that Van Eyck uses three languages — Greek, Latin, Flemish, as well as the letters of the Jewish alphabet, whereas in van der Weyden’s works only Latin letters have been found. And the most interesting fact is that Jan van Eyck often makes a viewer look into a picture tosee the text as part of embroidery on a dress or an inscription on a stone pedestal. On the other hand, Rogier van der Weyden often puts a text on floating ribbons (“banderole”), thereby creating an “interpretive gap”, which allows a viewer to reflect on the relationship between the visual and the verbal.

VISUALIZING NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY: DIVISIO TEXTUS REVISITED

The early thirteenth century saw the rise of a new exegetical technique: divisio textus, or text division. Commentators engaged in subtle structural analyses, parsing texts into increasingly smaller units, and at times represented these structures as complex tree diagrams. For a case study of this technique, this essay presents a previously unnoticed series of such marginal diagrams in MS Assisi, Bib. Com. 51 that depict the structure of the first three chapters of the Book of Job. Following the manner in which the author analyzes the narrative functions of character description, dialogues, and other aspects, the essay reconstructs the narratological principles embedded in these diagrams, and compares them with other divisions of Job by thirteenth century theologians. It sets the diagramming of divisiones textus in its the broader context of medieval horizontal tree diagrams and discusses the peculiar implications of the spatialization of biblical narrative. Appendices include full transcriptions, translations and auxiliary materials for comparison.

A comparative study of dialogue in common anecdotes of Shaikh Attar Neishabouri’s works and Molana Jalal-al-Din’s Masnavi (first, second, and third books)

In comparing Molana Jalal-al-Din’s Masnavi and the available works of Shaikh Attar Neishabouri, there are significant common points which are the result of undue influence of Attar on ideas and works of Molana. In this regard, it can be said that a great part of Molana’s mystical genius and masterpiece is developed thanks to his teacher, Attar. The approaches that he uses in fiction stories is associated with statement of transcendental concepts and means in context of dialogue; so, there are always proposed new subsidiary stories in the dialogue of characters without disrupting the continuity of main body of story. With the morphology and classification of forty-two stories’ dialogues, a comprehensive and systematic review is obtained. This review helps to get quickly more familiar with this valuable works and their structure and content.

Storyboard-based accurate automatic summary video editing system

The recent popularity of smart mobile devices has led to a significant increase in the needs of multimedia services. Finding new more efficient methods for automatic classification and retrieval of a large number of multimedia files will significantly reduce manpower costs. However, most current video content analysis methods adopt low-level features to analyze video frame by frame, and need to improve high-level semantic analysis on a number of issues. Hence, this study presents a storyboard-based accurate automatic summary video editing system that uses storyboard information, such as character dialogue, narration, caption, background music and shot changes, to enable accurate video content retrieval and automatic render summary videos. The proposed system can be applied to the course video trailer and the commercial video trailer for quick preview video content or suitable viewing configuration for smart mobile devices. Consequently, the audience can quickly understand the whole video story and the video editors can substantially reduce the time taken to publish videos.

Maximalism as a Cosmopolitan strategy in the art of Ruth Novaczek and Doug Fishbone

This article looks at the work of the experimental filmmaker Ruth Novaczek and the artist Doug Fishbone to think through the relationship between the cosmopolitan imagination, Jewishness and the visual arts. The author suggests through her analysis of their artwork that both artists proffer a cosmopolitan subject that arises out of their Jewish subjectivity. The author does this in different ways, discussing the artworks both in their various forms as well as the subject matter within the films. The author thinks through two recent publications on the cosmopolitan and art by Marsha Merskimmon and Nikos Papastergiadis to discuss what is at stake in the cosmopolitan in relation to the two artist case studies. Central to her argument is a maximalist tendency that goes against the usual current paradigmatic trend of the ‘long look’ that was first articulated by the influential André Bazin as more real than the dialectical editing techniques argued (and performed) by Sergei Eisenstein. But neither is she arguing for a return to Eisenstein. Maximalism, as offered by the work of these artists, signifies an excessive overloading that allows the viewer to insert themselves into the narrative of the work through the editing, the collage and in the density of the range of the material. Finally, the author brings the formal discussion into dialogue with the explicit meaning developed by the artwork. Each of these artists proffer an unstable subject that is profoundly formed out of their Jewish and Diasporic subjectivity. This arises not just out of the formal structural scaffolding of the work but in terms of the subject matter within the work. They both explicitly use Jewish cultural references as normative navigational tools in the work and as a way of forming their cultural worlds. These references range from dialogues of Jewish characters in cinema, to Jewish jokes and use of Yiddish or Hebrew. Importantly Jewish religion or ritual is absent. For both of these artists the Holocaust is a backdrop but not as way to valorise a victim status, but as a way to reach out to a wider humanity and to understand its legacies. This is done through multi-positionality and the questioning of what a ‘home’ might be outside of an attachment to a nation-state or a singular geographic location and embracing that estrangement. In sum, the author argues that the work offers a reiterative provisionality as a refusal to judge or to know the world; instead there is an attempt to incorporate its complexities and range into the vision of the work, challenging the viewer to identify what is at stake in the work and in the subject.

Character interaction network analysis of chinese literary work‐ A preliminary study

ABSTRACTConsidering the shortages of character interaction network analysis from literary work by literary theorists and computer scientists, this paper combined their methods and conducted qualitative and quantitative approach to extract and analyze character interaction network from literary text. Firstly, it proposed the analysis framework of character interaction network from literary work: one‐mode and two‐mode network analysis. One‐mode network analysis was applied in macro‐level (chapters), meso‐level (social events) and micro‐level (character dialogues). Two‐mode network analysis was applied in meso‐level (social events). Then two literary scholars manually extracted social events and character dialogues from the fiction “Journey to the West Prequel” and manually recognized characters in different levels. Then it constructed the one‐mode and two‐mode matrices based on the proposed standard formula which was based on the idea of co‐occurrence. Different matrices were computed and visualized by SNA software. The results validated by literary scholars showed that the proposed analysis framework was applicable in interpreting and revealing the contents of the fiction. Finally, the discussions and further researches were summarized.

Off-record politeness in Sophocles: The patterned dialogues of female characters

AbstractThis paper tests the applicability of Brown and Levinson’s concept of off-record politeness on a specific sub-set of patterned dialogues in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, i.e., those involving the participation of female speakers. Brown and Levinson’s framework still provides the most suitable model for empirical analysis, but with refinements concerning the interrelation between emic and etic politeness, the notion of face, the extension of analysis to longer stretches of conversation, and the absolute ranking of the super-strategies. The survey suggests that a strict connection between the use of off record and the mitigation of FTAs can be established quite straightforwardly and that the hearer’s reactions to off record can help to identify the valid instances of the phenomenon. Moreover, it is argued that (a) female speakers frequently resort to off record, most notably in cross-sex interactions with men invested with high power; (b) few restricted categories of male speakers, i.e., strangers and lower-status characters, do use off-record politeness towards women; (c) off record in same-sex interactions among female characters is limited to when the imposition is of extraordinary seriousness.

Power in Play: A Foucauldian Reading of A.O. Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero

This work utilizes Foucault’s articulations on the power strategies of our contemporary society. To him the subject’s constitution is never a purely passive effect of power on the subject but requires the subject’s own activity. This necessitates the existence of a dynamic, mutually affecting relationship, implying that one can be both dominated and dominate at different times and in different contexts. This article aims to analyze the Nigerian Noble Laureate, Wole Soyinka’s play The Trials of Brother Jero , a prophetical play that criticizes the ills of society through its satirical depiction, in the light of Foucault’s conceptualizations on power. To do this, the article first clarifies Foucault’s mature understanding of the operation of power and then attempts to provide an in-depth analysis of the structure of the power regime and its relations in the play, tactics of domination, and more importantly, the characters’ relations to the existing system of power. The study of the language and the dialogue of the main characters, Brother Jero, Amope, Chume and a Member of Federation House not only exposes the sources of operating power relations, but it also highlights the characters’ desire for power and the way it flows and slips from one character to another. The findings of the paper reveals that power is not concentrated on merely one character or institution within the play, rather, it circulates, and through the active resistance of the dominated characters, it constantly engenders new meanings within the structure of the play. In The Trials of Brother Jero, different characters have the desire to use power against each other and the resistance of each of them indicates that power is neither possessive nor repressive. Keywords: Michel Foucault, Power, Pastoral Power, Resistance, Wole Soyinka

Isolation and connection: unbounded sound in the films of Paul Thomas Anderson

When Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master was released in September of 2012, many critics hailed it for its inventive and spellbinding filmmaking while simultaneously noting – and often criticizing – its enigmatic and perplexing narrative. This article argues that one can most productively understand and explore The Master in two ways: (1) as an entry in Anderson's larger oeuvre, and (2) as an unusual instance in US filmmaking in which much of the film's meaning emerges via sound–image relationships and music rather than character action, dialogue and narrative development. In particular, I focus on Anderson's use of what I call unbounded sound, which refers to sound whose source cannot be definitively pinpointed within the film frame. This term encompasses offscreen diegetic sound, but it also includes nondiegetic sound and sound that occupies an ambiguous space between the diegetic and nondiegetic poles. Throughout his career, Anderson's soundtracks – and especially his uses of unbounded sound – have helped convey key ideas pertaining to human isolation and connectedness, two key Anderson thematic preoccupations. Attending to sound patterns in Anderson's prior work can help shed new light on the sometimes-obscure ideas that drive The Master, as well as offer broader indications of film sound's capabilities.

Audio Description on the Thought-Action Continuum

1. INTRODUCTION term audio description refers to the spoken commentary is added to film soundtracks to enable visually impaired people to follow the action on the screen by supplementing the information is already available from character dialogue and other parts of the soundtrack. As this essay explains, there is currently a debate within this field regarding the possibility and desirability of objectivity in audio descriptions. Although this debate may appear to be of limited interest to anyone who is not directly concerned with the production and reception of audio descriptions, we feel it raises large and important issues are of relevance to all those who work in the much wider fields of narrative theory, stylistics and literary theory generally. We have in mind, in particular, our questioning of the apparently obvious distinction between descriptions of characters' actions and descriptions of characters' mental processes in fictional narratives. Specifically, this essay seeks to show how concepts from narratology and techniques from corpus linguistics can be applied to the analysis of audio description. We are concerned with the issue of what should be described in audio description for feature films, and how it should be worded. We introduce narratological concepts can help to better articulate this issue and to better analyze and compare examples of audio description. To complement the application of narratological concepts for a close reading of audio description samples, we show how corpus linguistics techniques can be used to learn about what is being described, and how, in a corpus of ninety-one audio description scripts. Our focus is on how an audio description utterance can, and, as it turns out, often does, describe a character's actions as depicted on-screen while simultaneously giving some information about the character's thoughts. Central to the practice and theory of audio description is the question of what should be included in a description (Vercauteren). Concerning the issue of what to describe, and how to describe it, some recent guidelines for audio description state: The best audio describers objectively recount the visual aspects of an image. Subjective or qualitative judgments or comment get in the way--they constitute an on the part of the describer and are unnecessary and unwanted ... Describers must differentiate between or (which requires an on the part of the observer) and the physical characteristics of or (which are more concrete and allow description users to conjure their own interpretations). (Snyder 17) While striking an exceptionally unequivocal tone, these guidelines reflect a point of view has been prevalent among audio description practitioners. Earlier guidance on standards for audio description provided by ITC is similar in advising not to interpret events or away the plot (ITC). ITC guidance also flags a contentious point about whether or not to give information that is not on the screen, without really explaining how to determine what is apparent. It seems to us such guidelines leave unanswered questions about what information is necessary for an audience to understand and enjoy a film, and what interpretation means in this context Also, and this becomes the main theme of the essay, with regards to what can be seen and hence described, we take issue with the supposedly clear-cut distinction is made between a character's emotion or reasoning (thoughts, which should not be mentioned according to the guidelines) and their apparent physical manifestations (actions, which may be described). This essay seeks to contribute to audio description theory and practice in two ways. First, we introduce more rigorously defined terms from narratology to clarify and simplify the issues alluded to in the previous paragraph. …

An Explication: Phrase 'Quintessence of Dust' in Shakespeare's Play the Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark.

In this paper, I am attempting to decipher and interpret connotations conveyed through idiosyncratic semantic structures of dialogues between characters. After line by line analyses of certain passages, it appears that in Elizabethan England most arguments and thoughts could not have been said directly to the ultimate monarch or his nearest assistants. Through close reading, this paper reveals Shakespeare's cautionary message that was presumably designated to the royalty of that time. The ultimate moral of the medieval producer is derived from the main character's dialogue lines in which his strengths and weaknesses are exhibited.

The Violating Maxims of Main Characters in the Hangover Movie's Script

ABSTRACT The study deals with the types of maxims violation in The Hangover movie’s script used by the main characters. The objectives of study were to describe the violation of maxim, to describe the dominant type of maxim violation and to elaborate the reason for the maxim violation. The data were the dialogue of main characters in The Hangover movie. This research was conducted by using descriptive qualitative and limited on the main characters. The data analysis findingsshowthat there are 22 violation of maxim of quality, 2 violation of maxim of quantity, 9 violation of maxim of relation, and 8 violation of maxim of manner.The reason of the violations areto give the lack of evidence, to lying to other speaker in hiding the truth, to save face the embarrassment, to present the strongest information, to represent what is in the speaker’s mind, or to trick audience or listener for making a joke or not. Keyword : cooperative principle, violation of maxim, movie.

“Impossible Narrative Voices”:

“Impossible Narrative Voices”:

Embedded dialogue and dreams: the worlds and accessibility relations of Inception

In this article, Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) and Ryan’s model of fictional worlds (1991a, 1991b) are both applied to Nolan’s blockbuster film, Inception (2010) to explore the multi-layered architecture of the narrative. The opening two scenes of Nolan’s screenplay are analysed using Text World Theory, with particular attention to the embedded nature of character dialogue, or, more generally, ‘represented discourse’ (Herman, 1993), otherwise known as Direct Speech (Leech and Short, 2007). Based on this analysis, I suggest a modification to the way in which Text World Theory deals with represented discourse, which improves the framework’s applicability to all text types. Moving from the micro-analysis of the screenplay text, to a macro-analysis of the film narrative as a whole, I outline the various different worlds that make up the reality, dream and ‘limbo’ layers in the film, explaining how most of the action takes place at a remove from the world at the centre of the textual system. I use Deictic Shift Theory’s terms PUSH and POP (Galbraith, 1995) to describe the movements between the ontological layers of the narrative and suggest that these terms are better suited to describe hierarchies of ontology rather than horizontal deictic shifts. Ryan’s taxonomy of accessibility relations is used to describe the ways in which the film differs from reality, as well as the ways in which the dreams differ from the internal reality of the film. The complex ontological structure and asymmetric accessibility relations between the worlds are ascribed as the reason for many viewers’ difficulty in processing the film’s narrative. With its attention to discourse-world factors, Text World Theory is then used to account for the myriad of reactions to Inception – as expressed on online discussion forums – which range from engagement and enjoyment to frustration and resistance.