Curious Incident Research Articles

The Role of Postmodern Hybrid Texts in Translation-oriented Text Analysis (TOTA) Courses in Translation Didactics

Translation Oriented Text Analysis courses offered at universities are one of the basic courses that concentrate on analysis, identification of text-types, and text reception. Within the context of this course, basic concepts such as functions of language, text conventions, and text typology are discussed, exemplified and studied. Being one of the text types, postmodern texts are hybrid texts in which polyphonic, multi discursive texts that cover intense intertextuality references are embedded. As they texts include different text types in their structure, hence their hybridity, they provide a valuable database for analytical studies in Translation Oriented Text Analysis courses. The aim of this paper is to analyze Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Among the texts and discourses covered in the novel are advertisements, prayers, announcements, signs, poems, songs, plays, legal statements etc. This novel provides unique opportunities for the identification of text types, discussion of text conventions and the practice of translation in Translation Oriented Text Analysis course in translation didactics.

Rise and fall

It's never easy to review a book that's already won a literary prize and is at the time of writing longlisted for a second. Nathan Filer's The Shock of the Fall was perhaps a surprising candidate for Costa Book of the Year, a first novel about psychiatric care from a creative writing lecturer who is also a mental health nurse. It's narrated by Matthew, a 19-year-old inpatient tapping out his life story on a psychiatric ward computer. We're made aware from the outset that Matthew might not be the most reliable of narrators since the first thing he tells us is that he is “not a nice person”, and the second is that he believes memory itself to be unreliable. We have to piece together the events of Matthew's childhood, in particular the death of his brother, but as we do so the ward environment begins to impinge. Filer reminds us of the boredom engendered by lack of therapeutic structure and notes how staff (the student social worker who reads over Matthew's shoulder; the chummy occupational therapist who permits Matthew short bursts of computer time) are often uncomfortable acknowledging the power they wield. The novel has a curiously light touch and a feel of the young adult market about it. Filer stated in an interview for The Guardian that he read both The Catcher in the Rye and The Curious Incident of The Night-Time while he was writing, so perhaps this is unsurprising. There is, however, a bitter edge to The Shock of the Fall as it explores Matthew's development within the jagged confines of a home irrevocably damaged by bereavement. The Shock of the Fall has been well received within the mental health community. Filer maintains his nursing registration by working occasional shifts and it shows; his depiction of the ward and tone of letters attempting to enforce Matthew's Community Treatment Order struck a chord with many service users. For me there is a slight sense of wanting more, engendered perhaps by such huge critical success. But there is much for professionals to reflect on regarding the purpose of inpatient treatment and the role of life experiences in psychosis, while those with no experience of mental health services should find a little light shed on the workings of “the system”. Amen to that.

Cross-Curricular Teaching: The Case of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The knowledge learners acquire at school has to be applicable in practice to ensure their motivation for learning. Both cross-curricular and interdisciplinary teaching provide a meaningful way in which students can use the knowledge acquired in one context as the basis for learning in other contexts in and out of school. By using interdisciplinary teaching, the instructor can present the topics in a holistic manner: this approach therefore allows us to activate more of the learners’ senses and intelligences. Since Mathematics is one of the least liked subjects by our students, and English one of the favorite ones, the article will demonstrate how we can integrate activities addressing all types of intelligences in a language learning class to achieve the whole range of Bloom’s levels of educational objectives on the basis of a novel which includes a wealth of references to mathematics: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, which has recently been compulsory reading in all Slovene grammar school programs.

Shakespeare’s Cross-Dressing Sister: The Curious Incident of Translating Gender from English to Spanish

While many theorists have discussed appropriate uses of feminist translation strategies, these techniques are still met with skepticism or worse by some publishers and critics. There is a perceptio...

Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room

Drawing on a corpus of online reviews, my article carries out a qualitative study of readers' responses to the child narrators of two contemporary novels, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Emma Donoghue's Room (2010). What these narrators have in common is that they are both are affected by developmental disorders: Christopher, the protagonist of The Curious Incident, is on the autistic spectrum, whereas Jack – the five-year-old narrator of Room – was born and brought up in captivity. Through my analysis of the reviews I explore the interplay of defamiliarization and empathy in readers' engagement with these “strange” narrators; I also show how empathetic perspective-taking can work in tandem with sympathy (feeling for a character from an observer position).

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese Ralph James Savarese (bio) and Lisa Zunshine (bio) This conversation began at MLA in 2012 when we recognized that cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies, two rapidly and independently developing fields, must start talking to one another. The subject is autism: how it has been divergently understood and deployed and how it can be convergently understood and deployed. Kept apart, the two fields seem vulnerable to caricature. The former sometimes applies scientific and medical insights uncritically (such as the assertion that autistics have no theory of mind and, thus, cannot read fiction); the latter sometimes advances a completely social-constructionist understanding of physiological distinction (as if stigma were the entire story of alternative embodiment). Scholars in cognitive approaches to literature need the insights of disability studies to think about mind, narrative, and agency in neurodiverse ways; scholars in disability studies need the insights of cognitive approaches to literature to give the concept of neurodiversity, [End Page 17] which is quickly becoming a kind of platitude, some actual neuroscientific content. Talking across conventional disciplinary divides has precipitated questions that we would never have thought to ask. It has also made us hope that an ongoing conversation between cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies will transform both fields. We cannot foresee the exact shape of this transformation, but the formerly distinct trajectories already feel more intertwined. A Postcolonial Neurology Lisa Zunshine (LZ): In her recent contribution to Disability Studies Quarterly, Paula C. Durbin-Westby, an autistic disability rights activist, builds on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to stress the importance of the “inclusion of autistics as active collaborators in research, rather than mere research subjects to be studied and then written about, often in language that many autistic people find demeaning. We must insist,” she writes, “on being ‘speaking subjects,’ with our participation and input used in meaningful ways, rather than being ‘spoken subjects,’ a position which can lead to misinterpretation of research results and to uninformed experiments.” Would you comment on the ramifications of this practice of adapting the rhetoric of postcolonial studies to disability studies? Ralph James Savarese (RJS): The postcolonial analogy can be traced back to a number of scholars, including Arthur Frank, who in The Wounded Storyteller likens medical patients to colonized peoples: the former’s bodies have been rationally conquered and their indigenous experience of illness or disability has been haughtily disregarded. In its place, an official narrative, in something like a foreign language, has prevailed, leaving patients feeling both alienated and disempowered. But over the last thirty years or so, patients, like postcolonial subjects, have begun to write back to this kind of empire. According to Frank, “Postcolonialism in its most generalized form is the demand to speak rather than to be spoken for . . . or, in the worst cases, rather than being effaced entirely” (13). The rhetoric of postcolonial studies thus helps us to think about the historical circumstances of the neurological other: the subaltern has not only learned to speak, it has also begun to organize, as the neurodiversity movement and organizations such as the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network make clear. Insisting on the right to self-determination and advancing a notion of autism as neurological difference, not pathology, ASAN has agitated for progress on a range of issues: from better education, employment, and housing opportunities to better, more respectful medical care and scientific research. The difference between the privileged outsider view and the newly empowered insider one is, however, considerable, and because the scientific community often has trouble with what autistic writer Dawn Prince calls “the superior part of speaking” (“The Silence Between”)—namely, listening—it continues to cause [End Page 18] damage. Think, for instance, of the common claim that autistics don’t experience empathy, which popular novels such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime have only further promulgated. This claim is prevalent in the many fields that make up cognitive aesthetics.1 If one actually listens to autistics, one hears a different story. Stephen Shore, for example, distinguishes between being...

Personality Temperament, Character and Behavior

A bstract- E xisting classifications of temperament, characters, personality types and ways of behaviour are the disputable issues of the present-day scientific world. The origins of the classifications rise from the ancient philosophy and medicine in China and India (VIII BCE), Greece (V BCE), Rome (II century AD), England and Germany (ХIХ century), USA and Russia (ХХ century). Tremendous amount of the classifications were worked out all over the world and not all of them withstood the test of time. The references to Hippocrates’ and Claudius Galenus’ classifications occur chiefly, which are tangential with regard to mentality and psychic setup and based on humoralism (humorism). Great empirical and experimental materials have been accumulated in scientific history without harmonious systematization in view of the absence of the integrated international system of classification that is the factor restraining the further development of typology. There were curious incidents during typology march. Fourier described three hundred characters, for instance. Unfortunately, any ordinary person could not be able to remember all these descriptions. Since then, researches, finding and admission of the optimum types became the task of paramount importance for the scientists. Ke ywords: temperament (TR), character (temper) (CR), personality type (PT), behavioral style (BS). GJH SS-A Classification : FOR Code: 750299, 170109

Raw Shok and Modern Method: Child Consciousness in Flowers for Algernon and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

This essay situates child consciousness in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon in the legacy of child consciousness pioneered in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew . Not only do Christopher Boone and Charlie Gordon bear kinship with Huck and Maisie in replaying similar themes as they explore both protective freedoms and confining limits of the human mind, but they also exemplify how the method of the modern novel came to focus on child consciousness to mark environmental conditioning and broader social problems.

The Signs and Symbols in Christropher’s Way of Thinking in the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Studi ini membahas refleksi dari tanda-tanda dan simbol dalam cara berpikir anak autis diwakili oleh Christopher John Francis Boone sebagai karakter utama dalam novel The Cuirous Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time oleh Mark Haddon. Untuk melakukan analisis, dua teori diterapkan; teori semiotika dan teori tanda-tanda dan simbol. Ada dua masalah akan dijawab dengan menggunakan teori-teori tersebut. Masalah pertama adalah apa tanda-tanda dan simbol-simbol yang digunakan dalam cara berpikir Christopher dalam novel. Masalah ini akan dijawab oleh teori tanda dan symbol yang telah dirumuskan oleh Ferdinand de Saussure. Masalah kedua adalah maksud tanda dan symbol dalam cara berpikir Christopher, pertanyaan ini juga dapat dianalisis dengan teori semiotika yang dirumuskan oleh Ferdinand de Saussure. Mengungkap tanda-tanda dan simbol adalah untuk memberikan refleksi bagaimana cara Christopher berpikir sebagai karakter utama dalam novel. Hasil dari diskusi ini menghasilkan arti dari tanda-tanda dan simbol-simbol yang terungkap dalam cara berpikir Christopher. Kata Kunci: Semiotika, Tanda-tanda, Simbol, Karakter Utama Abstract This study discusses in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time written by Mark Haddon the reflections of Signs and Symbols in the way of thinking of an autistic child represented by Christopher John Francis Boone as the main character. To do the analysis, two theories are applied; they are theory of semiotics and theory of signs and symbols. There are two problems will be answered by using those theories. The first problem is what are signs and symbols used in Christopher’s way of thinking in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This problem will be answered by the theory of signs and symbols that has been specialized and brought by Ferdinand de Saussure. The second problem is what the signs and symbols mean in Christopher’s way of thinking as the second questions will also be analyzed with the theory of semiotics brought by Ferdinand de Saussure. The revealing of signs and symbols is to give description of how Christopher thinks as the representative main character in the novel. The outcomes of discussion represent what the signs and symbols that revealed can be meant in Christopher’s way of thinking. Keywords : Semiotics, Signs, Symbols, Main Character

Normalcy, Knowledge, and Nature in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

This article analyzes Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, using a combination of both disability studies theory and ecocriticism. The author argues that the novel’s main character, Christopher Boone, presents a social model of disability by challenging dominant society’s treatment of him as “not normal.” Christopher is ostensibly diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, although the novel never explicitly labels him as disabled in any way. Through Christopher’s views of nature, language, knowledge, and social constructions of disability, we learn that disability is an unstable category, and that dominant society can be disabling. Importantly, though, Christopher’s critique of society is, as the author argues, fundamentally environmental. That is, Christopher’s views of language, knowledge, and even the more-than-human world itself are central to his destabilization of the category of disability. Christopher’s environmental sensibility and critique of society’s disabling qualities emerge primarily through his discussions of language, which he finds suspect because it distances humans from the world it describes. Thus, the novel suggests that the disabling features of society that Christopher encounters are the same features that distance humans from nature, particularly through language. Keywords: eco-phenomenology, ecocriticism, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Asperger’s Syndrome, nature, language, body, epistemology

Adapting The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A conversation with Simon Stephens

Abstract The following interview was completed by telephone on 10 September 2012. It focuses on Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The award-winning book tells the story of fifteen-year-old Christopher, who tries to solve the mystery of his next-door neighbour’s dog’s murder. This conversation gives an account of Stephens’ reading of Haddon’s work; his understanding and realization, onstage, of Christopher, who suffers Asperger Syndrome; his changes to the novel’s ending; and the staging of the play in the intimate setting of the Cottesloe at the National Theatre in London. The critically and commercially acclaimed production transferred to the Apollo Theatre in the West End and ran until December 2013, when part of the theatre’s roof collapsed. The play will move to the Gielgud Theatre in June 2014.

Talking at cross-purposes?

Following decades of feminist linguistic activism, and as a result of a greater awareness of the vital role that non-sexist language plays in achieving social equality, different campaigns were launched in many countries leading to a more frequent use of so-called inclusive language. Bringing this together with current theoretical approaches to translation studies which have been defining translation as an ideological act of intercultural mediation since the 1990’s, this article seeks to examine to what extent feminist linguistics have had any influence on translation studies. My purpose is to assess whether particular feminist linguistic interventions in vogue when writing ‘original’ texts within the realm of the source language are also adopted when (re)writing ‘translated’ texts in the target language, bearing in mind the double (con)textual responsibility that translators have towards the source and the target (con)texts. I will examine the arguments for and against the use of inclusive language in (literary) translation through an analysis of the “ideological struggle” that emerged from two ideologically disparate rewritings of gender markers into Galician of the British bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon (2003), focusing on the ideological, poetic and economic pressures that (still) define the professional practice of translation. It is my contention that the close scrutiny of these conflicting arguments will shed light not only on the existing gap between the theory and practice of translation, but may be also indicative of a possible ‘missing link’ between feminist approaches to linguistics and to translation studies.

The Curious Incident of the Curtain in the Night Time (P04.049)

The Curious Incident of the Curtain in the Night Time (P04.049)

Ernst Röhm versus General Hans Kundt in Bolivia, 1929–30? The Curious Incident

The role of German officers in the Bolivian military was domestically and internationally controversial in the interwar period. The most prominent of these officers, General Hans Kundt, played a major role in Bolivian history and politics. From 1929–30 the later Nazi leader Ernst Röhm was a military adviser in Bolivia. Historians of Bolivia have suggested that Röhm was the major force behind a coup that took place in Bolivia in June 1930. This article demonstrates that there is no credible evidence to support these claims. The claims are based on a misconception of Röhm’s politics and political activities in Germany. Röhm’s lack of political activity in Bolivia is further evidence that he was not the revolutionary figure many historians have suggested.

Protectionism and Multilateral Accountability during the Great Recession: Drawing Inferences from Dogs Not Barking

Economic stress is often thought to be a source of protectionism, which motivated Leaders of the new G-20 to promise repeatedly that they would refrain from trade restrictions in response to the global financial crisis that became apparent in 2008.They also promised to hold themselves accountable for this commitment using a novel transparency mechanism based in the World Trade Organization. At the same time a civil society organization, the Global Trade Alert, set itself up as an alternative accountability mechanism. The WTO and the GTA reached different conclusions both about how loudly the protectionist dog barked, and about whether G-20 governments kept their promises. I conclude from a detailed comparison of GTA and WTO data and interpretations using the notion of an 'accountability regime' that the protectionist dog did not bark, allowing inferences to be drawn from this curious incident about how transparency can help to close the gap between commitment and action, thereby contributing to accountable global governance.

The Curious Silence of the Dog and Paul of Tarsus; Revisiting The Argument from Silence

In this essay I propose an interpretative and explanatory structure for the so-called argumentum ex silento, or argument from silence (henceforth referred to as the AFS). To this end, I explore two examples, namely, Sherlock Holmes’s oft-quoted notice of the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” from Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Silver Blaze,” and the historical question of Paul of Tarsus’s silence on biographical details of the historical Jesus. Through these cases, I conclude that the AFS serves as a dialogical topos best evaluated and understood through the perceived authority of the arguer and the willingness of the audience to accept that authority, due to the “curious” nature of the negative evidence that the argument employed.

The curious incident of the Marriage Act (no 2) 1537 and the Irish statute book

During the 1530s Henry VIII remarried twice, each time annulling his previous marriage. The English laws outlining the prohibited degrees of relationship for marriage were changed upon each marriage in the First and Second Succession Acts. These Acts were passed in Ireland by an Irish Parliament in 1536–7 and became part of the Irish statute book. However, the second Act regulating Henry VIII's marriage to Queen Jane (Marriage Act (no 2) 1537) was never published and was unknown to Irish law for centuries. The Act made its return onto the Irish statute book in 2007, greatly extending the class of relatives prohibited from marrying and potentially annulling many Irish marriages. This paper traces the fate of the lost Act and analyses the consequences of its rediscovery both on Irish marriage law and the legitimacy of the Irish statute book.

On probing ions at the gas–liquid interface by quantum state-resolved molecular beam scattering: the curious incident of the cation in the night time

There has been a long standing controversy over the preferential presence or absence of cations vs. anions at the gas-liquid interface, dating back to early theoretical efforts by Onsager and co-workers [J. Chem. Phys., 1934, 2, 528]. In the present work, we describe our first efforts to selectively probe ions at the interface via a completely novel approach, based on scattering high energy, jet cooled molecular projectiles from the surface of hydrogen bonded liquids with dissolved alkali halide salts as the source of solvated charges. In particular, this work focuses on preliminary results from quantum state- resolved scattering studies as a function of anion (Cl-, I-), and cation identity (Li+, Na+, K+) in alkali halide/glycerol solutions. By way of physical picture, a quadrupolar projectile such as CO2 preferentially aligns parallel (anions) or perpendicular (cations) to the interface, which could therefore make rotational energy transfer sensitive to the sign of the ion charge. Experimentally, we find that the impulsive scattered (IS) CO2 rotational distributions reveal a clear dependence on anion identity (e.g., hotter for [I-] than [Cl-]), but with essentially no corresponding sensitivity to cation species (e.g., [Li+] indistinguishable from [K+]). Detailed trajectory calculations are used to provide additional insight into the anticipated and observed experimental trends.

School encounters with Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime (2003)

This article adds additional materials to the already large corpus available for inter preting and teaching Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime. First, the article adheres to a quite copious method of furnishing questions and possible an swers to prepare students for more detailed reading of the work. Further, it lists ideas for student essay titles or topics, letters, presentations, and role play activities. Some specific assignments are added to check students' understanding of the artistic work. In short, it offers a complex of diverse approaches and activities from which the teacher may freely choose.

Using Literature as a Strategy to Promote Inclusivity in High School Classrooms

Reports on school bullying of students who are different suggest that teachers need to be intentional about implementing strategies that promote inclusive attitudes and behaviors in diverse classrooms. Literature offers much to education in general, and it provides the pedagogic space to address issues of inclusion and exclusion, particularly of people with disabilities. Selecting literary texts that feature people with disabilities for high school students can be challenging, but once chosen, such texts can be used to promote inclusivity by developing sympathetic understanding, by addressing sensitive issues using the characters and context of the text, and by engaging in critical literacy that exposes power and positioning in texts. These strategies can be applied in classrooms through various written and verbal activities and can be used with a range of texts. One such text, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, illustrates how the strategies can be implemented.