Distinct Subgenre Research Articles

Graphic Novel Adaptation as a Subgenre (Franco- and Anglophone Texts)

The objective of this study is to define the graphic novel adaptation as a distinct subgenre of the graphic novel and to develop a cohesive methodology for its examination. The research material comprises Franco- and Anglophone graphic novel adaptations published since the early 2000s. It is noted that this subgenre has become one of the most popular forms of mass literature, characteristic of the twenty-first century as an era of visual culture. Based on a review of theoretical studies, the fundamental characteristics of graphic novel adaptations are articulated. An analysis of works from the past decade demonstrates the evolution of the subgenre under consideration. Specifically, it is observed that (1) the original narrative line is modified through the incorporation of themes and issues relevant to twenty-first-century individuals; (2) there is an increased complexity in character development, structure, and chronotope; (3) a philosophical dimension is foregrounded. It is shown that graphic novel adaptations can be categorized into two types based on target audience: mass (“low brow”) and intellectual (“high brow”). The “low brow” type primarily aims to popularize the reading of classic texts, while the “high brow” type represents an authorial interpretation of a well-known literary work. The intellectual form (“high brow”) has become increasingly prevalent since the 2010s.

The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais

At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale.

The Audiovisual Style of Malcolm Clarkes Oral History Documentary

This article is primarily dedicated to an in-depth examination of the audio-visual style employed by documentary filmmaker Malcolm Clarke. This analysis is achieved through a meticulous dissection of scenes, shot composition, and sound elements within three of his notable oral history documentaries, namely, A Long-Cherished Dream, The Lady in Number 6, and Soldiers in Hiding. The article initiates by offering insights into the concept and evolution of oral history documentaries as a distinct subgenre within the broader documentary realm. Subsequently, the article embarks on a critical evaluation of how Clarkes documentaries align with the specific attributes and expectations associated with oral history documentaries. It scrutinizes how Clarke adeptly harnesses a diverse array of cinematic techniques to unearth and present the often-overlooked facets of history, which remain concealed or marginalized within the grander narrative of historical discourse. Through this comprehensive analysis, the article provides a comprehensive assessment of Malcolm Clarkes contribution to the realm of documentary filmmaking and his unique approach to elucidating the lesser-explored dimensions of history.

ZANU-PF’s bigwig rallies as performative politics during Zimbabwe’s 2008 and 2013 elections

ABSTRACT In rally-intensive campaigns, the rally is an essential mode of political communication between politicians, parties and citizens. This article moves beyond the exclusive focus, in most literature, on rallies convened for presidents and presidential candidates to include similar rallies convened for others significant enough to act as a proxy but are not themselves presidential candidates. It develops a broader category of what it refers to as ‘bigwig' rallies. In Zimbabwe, the bigwig rally constitutes a distinct sub-genre that occupies a distinct place in election campaigning. I ask: what do parties communicate through bigwig rallies? How do they produce rallies to generate those communications? Little prior research considers what is particular to the rallies convened in electoral-authoritarian regimes. In this article, I ask: what do ruling parties in electoral-authoritarian regimes communicate and how do they achieve this? It answers these questions through studying ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe’s 2008 and 2013 elections.

The African Novel and Conflict Management

The novel is a very distinct sub-genre of literature, in fact, the most popular in terms of use of all the literary forms in African literature. The form is not only graphic and elastic in deployment to reflect and portray conflict situations among people, classes and institutions involved in political and syndicalist contestations, for example, it is the most encyclopaedic in recording momentous instances of revolts and revolution arising from conflicts among classes and peoples. Thus, literature has been and still is a handy tool to African writers in portraying the colonial and neocolonial emasculation of the masses of the African people during and after the European imperialist subjugation of the African continent and its peoples. The unremitting and continuous deployment of the novel to address such issues by African writers has led to what I have characterized in another study as the “rise of the proletarian novel in Africa” (Agho 2012: 53-64). This paper discusses the portrayal of conflict situations in Africa through the agency of the African novel.

An Elusive Happy Ending: The Complexities of Indian Courtesan Films

This paper examines the complexities of characters, narratives and aesthetics in the Indian courtesan film genre by analyzing three classic courtesan films: Pakeezah (dir. Kamal Amrohi, 1972), Umrao Jaan (dir. Muzaffar Ali, 1981), and its more recent remake Umrao Jaan (dir. J.P. Dutta, 2006). First, from the perspective of screen characters, the paper summarizes the necessary condition for a courtesan character to achieve a happy ending—the marriage between the heroine and the hero, and then illustrates the decisive factors and difficult process to fulfill this condition. Then, from the perspective of audiences, this paper explains the elusiveness of happy endings in courtesan films by analyzing the multiple relationships between audiences and screen characters and the differences within audiences. The paper also attempts to provide a glimpse of the Muslim nawabi culture, in which courtesan films are rooted, in order to help the readers to appreciate the cultural significance and myriad appeals of this distinctive subgenre of Indian cinema and Indian film art in general.

Spectral Nation: Characterizing British Haunted Landscapes through the Lens of the 1970s ‘Ghost Gazetteer’ and a Folk Horror Perspective

Within the wider context of popular occult publishing in the United Kingdom, a distinctive subgenre can be defined. The ‘ghost gazetteer’ combines the function of a road guide with additional information on supernatural happenings, all tied to specific locales within Great Britain. Taking four popular and important examples of the genre dating from the 1970s, this article analyses the content and context of the books in terms of branding, selection of sites, use of imagery, and geographical and historical content, and shows how this content reflects perceptions of identity and nationhood during a period of profound social and cultural flux. The article argues that in emphasizing an attachment to place and rurality, these works essentially belong within the continuum of the recently defined concept of folk horror, albeit expressed in a more populist tone.

Branding the manifesto

ABSTRACT Brand manifestos are one of the most recently advanced and popular guises of the manifesto form. Presented in heterogeneous formats (printed, outlined on websites, or as images, podcasts and videos), they constitute exemplars of contemporary brand management. Based on a content and thematic analysis of online discourses that attempt to define the genre and of Apple’s paradigmatic brand manifesto ‘Here’s to The Crazy Ones’, in this article I aim at developing a comprehensive understanding of the form and content of contemporary brand manifestos. My findings demonstrate how brand manifestos recast traditional profit-oriented marketing practices by conjuncting the ‘ideology of the gift’ with discourses of the avant-garde. Following a ‘gift logic’ that can be viewed as fundamentally embedded into a ‘brand logic’, brand manifestos aim at manifesting the inalienable ‘spirit of the brand’ and at creating mutual relations of reciprocity by means of commercial exchange. Moreover, I argue that at a broader level the appropriation of the unconventional and creative connotations of the traditional manifesto form renders brand manifestos into a distinctive subgenre of a larger capitalist marketing discourse, premised on a revolutionary avant-gardist rhetoric that can be labelled as ‘manifesto marketing’.

Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 By Katherine Isobel Baxter

Reviewed by: Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 by Katherine Isobel Baxter Nathan Suhr-Sytsma Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 BY KATHERINE ISOBEL BAXTER Edinburgh UP, 2019. viii + 205 pp. ISBN 9781474420839 cloth. The opening claim of Katherine Isobel Baxter’s Imagined States is that we can locate a crucial continuity between Nigeria as colony and as postcolony in “the state of exception” or “the suspension of the rule of law” (1). Even as Baxter evokes Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, her book challenges Agamben’s lack of interest both in colonial contexts and in the role of the imagination. By contrast with Agamben, Baxter aims “to show how British and Nigerian fiction writers … attended to and made visible the inventive force of the law [in Nigeria], not least in the suspension of the rule of law” (5). There’s a dialogic relation, then, between the law and literature of the book’s subtitle: on the one hand, Imagined States shows how narrative genres—“popular, middlebrow, and literary fiction,” along with memoir and newspaper journalism (6)—portray the law and related concerns from corruption to treason; on the other hand, the book demonstrates “the role of invention and imagination not only in the representation of the law but also in its operation and in its suspension” (11). At stake is a question that is both theoretically intriguing and politically urgent: “at what point does such invention become an exception to the law—an action with the force of law which nonetheless is no longer within the bounds of the law?” (24). Across seven chapters, beginning with the formation of the protectorates of Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria in 1900 and ending with the fall of the First Republic in 1966, Imagined States examines texts that include Edgar Wallace’s Sanders adventure series, Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, Onitsha market literature, journalism covering the trial of Obafemi Awolowo and other Action Group members in 1962–63, and especially early novels by Cyprian Ekwensi and Chinua Achebe. I found much to appreciate in Baxter’s literary analysis, from the explication in chapter 2 of District Commissioner fiction as a distinct subgenre of colonial adventure fiction, which casts the colonial officer as synonymous with civilization and thus with the law, through the virtuosic reading in chapter 7 of Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966), in which varieties of violence repeatedly displace the law. Reading the book in a year when critical race theory had become a political football in the United States, I also found myself interested in how Baxter handled race in law (most often common law, though she mentions customary and Islamic law) and literature. While earlier chapters tend to treat the racism of [End Page 198] colonial governance and British fiction in the register of caustic irony, chapter 4, focusing on Achebe, more directly acknowledges “the racist representations of West Africa found not only in popular fiction, like Wallace’s, but also in middle-and highbrow fiction, such as that of Cary and Conrad” (86). How do we decide when to ironize and when to call out racism in literature? The fourth chapter suggests a potential third option by analyzing the protagonist of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, Obi, in terms of “deracination” (103). Rather than judging Obi for his moral failing, writes Baxter, “we must attend to the way Obi is deracinated by the systems of privilege and exception introduced by colonialism” (103). It is not entirely clear, however, whether the author is referring to the way Obi is caught up in the racial hierarchies imposed by colonialism or just the (etymologically warranted) sense of “deracination” as uprooting. In order to compare numerous forms of prose narrative, Baxter reasonably brackets drama and poetry. Still, Baxter’s lens offers insights beyond the selected genres. In Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, set in the 1940s though written in the 1970s, one of the most famous District Officers in Nigerian literature, Simon Pilkings, tries to prevent the titular horseman, Elesin, from committing ritual suicide. Although Soyinka insists that his play is not a “clash of...

“Down Beside where the Waters Flow": Reclaiming Rivers for American Studies (Introduction)

Over the past three decades, rivers have become a fascinating and popular subject of scholarly interest, not only in the field of environmental history, where river histories have developed into a distinct subgenre, but also in the emerging field of environmental humanities. In this scholarship, rivers have often been reconceptualized as socio-natural sites where human and non-human actors interact with the natural world, generating complex legacies, path dependencies, and feedback loops. Furthermore, rivers have been described as hybrid “organic machines,” whose energy has been utilized by humans in many different ways, including the harvesting of both hydropower and salmon. Indeed, as several environmental historians have noted, in many regions of the world, watercourses have been transformed by technology to such an extent that they increasingly resemble enviro-technical assemblages rather than natural waterways. Rivers have also been discussed through the lens of “eco-biography,” a term coined by Mark Cioc in his influential monograph on the Rhine River, a book informed by “the notion that a river is a biological entity—that it has a ‘life’ and ‘a personality’ and therefore a ‘biography’.” Quite surprisingly, despite this “river turn” (to use Evenden's phrase), rivers have played a marginal role in recent American Studies scholarship. To address this gap, this issue of RIAS brings together scholars from different disciplines, countries, and continents to analyze a wide variety of river experiences, histories, and representations across the American hemisphere and beyond. Hence the title of this volume, Rivers of the Americas, should be seen as both an allusion to the Rivers of America book series (a popular series of sixty-five volumes, each on a particular US river, published between 1937 and 1974) and as a reminder of the still untapped potential of hemispheric, transnational, and comparative modes of critical engagement with rivers in American Studies.

Law and Dementia: Family Context and the Experience of Dementia in Old Age

Not all older persons will experience dementia but dementia is, by a wide margin, most likely to be experienced by persons age 65 and older. This chapter examines how characteristic relationship patterns and family dynamics of later life intersect with the experience of dementia in old age, and the ways in which law has responded to those intersections to create a distinct subgenre of family law focused on the older parent/adult child and late-life spousal relationships. At a historical moment when family members are normatively independent, no longer defined in relation to one another by traditional socially defined roles, family caregiving of older parents/spouses with dementia remains the expectation (despite decreased availability of the “free” female labour provided by daughters and daughters in law in the past). Concerns about capacity, undue influence, caregiving expectations, exploitation, and abuse may arise in the context of both old and new spousal relationships (with distinctive causes and implications). The older parent/adult child dynamic is multifaceted and complex, as old resentments and sensitivities about intra-familial fairness mix with new obligations and concerns about parental vulnerability to exploitation and harm (of which adult children may also be a source).

Changed Forever, Volume 1: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat, and: Changed Forever, Volume 2: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat

Reviewed by: Changed Forever, Volume 1: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat, and: Changed Forever, Volume 2: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat Tadeusz Lewandowski Arnold Krupat. Changed Forever, Volume 1: American Indian Boarding-School Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. 406 pp. Hardcover, $95.00; Paper, $33.95. Arnold Krupat. Changed Forever, Volume 2: American Indian Boarding-School Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. 436 pp. Hardcover, $95.00; Paper, $34.95. Arnold Krupat prefaces his two-volume study of American Indian boarding-school literature, Changed Forever, with a question posed by K. Tsianina Lomawaima in her award-winning book They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (1994): “What has become of the thousands of Indian voices who spoke the breath of boarding-school life?” Krupat is not the first who has tried to recover these voices. Others, such as Brenda Child in Boarding School Seasons (2000) and Amelia Katanski in Learning to Write “Indian” (2005), and more recently Jacqueline Emery in Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (2017), have done their part to answer Lomawaima’s query and revive a literary legacy marginalized within the Euro-American canon. What Krupat offers, however, is an act of recovery and more: the first attempt to establish boarding-school writing as a distinct subgenre of American Indian literature, replete with its own unique loci and topoi. Both volumes of Changed Forever begin with lengthy and in-depth introductions laying out the history of Indian boarding schools, with an emphasis on Richard Henry Pratt’s (in)famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879 and shuttered in 1918. Krupat documents the types of abuse, both physical and sexual, that plagued some of these institutions, but at the same time he highlights the affection many students held for Pratt personally, while noting examples, such [End Page 400] as the Albuquerque Indian School, of which students recorded positive experiences. Also emphasized is the apparent gratitude expressed by some Indian parents for the education provided their children. This discussion goes beyond black-and-white renderings of Indian boarding schools as places of unmitigated horror—what Krupat calls “reductive generalizations”—and allows us to appreciate the often messy, gray area and complex implications of assimilationist efforts (Volume 1, xv). Such attention to nuance is reflected in the diversity of texts that Krupat has selected for analysis, some widely studied, some entirely obscure. What these boarding-school writings have in common, however, is what Changed Forever seeks to distinguish, almost in a structuralist vein. In offering an interpretive framework, Krupat points to the regularities of expression characteristic of such literature. Referring to “voices” that “speak of a range of experiences,” he indicates how “a number of scenes of initiation or initiatory loci, and also a number of topoi,” thematically undergird each. Initiatory loci comprise the Dining Room, the Clean-Up (including hair-cutting), and the Dormitory, while topoi encompass Discipline, Clock Time (or “Living by the Bell”), Food, Religion, Resistance, Outing Labor, Running Away, Identity, and even Sex (Volume 1, xxix–xxx, 6). In explicating and defining these loci and topoi, Krupat provides further basis for boarding-school literature’s status as a subgenre, and establishes analytical tools with which to approach such texts. Given the variety, scope, and combined length of Krupat’s essays, a detailed account of both volumes is impossible within the short space of one review. Volume 1 treats six book-length Hopi boarding-school autobiographies—written by Edmund Nequatewa, Albert Yava, Don Talayesva, Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Helen Sekaquaptewa, and Fred Kabotie—and four Navajo autobiographies authored by Frank Mitchell, Irene Stewart, Kay Bennett, and George P. Lee. This volume also includes an essay on Stories of Traditional Navajo Life and Culture, an edited collection published by the Navajo Community College Press in 1977, containing twenty-two “life histories” dating from between 1882 and 1920, fourteen of which discuss boarding school experiences (217). The study concludes with three appendices that give greater context to the preceding chapters: a history of the 1906 Orayvi Split, a “climactic event” in Hopi history brought on by the US government’s...

Temporalitatea internă a romanului românesc (1844-1932)

The present article follows the relationship of the Romanian novelistic output between 1901 and 1932 with time and temporal distribution. Its emphasis falls on the degree of correlation between the time of publication and the time during which the events unfold for each corresponding novel, expressed through a variable coined “distance”. By making use of this variable, the temporal distribution of the novelistic corpus in the article clearly shows that the novelists’ focus gradually shifts towards contemporary events; while during the period between 1900 up until the outbreak of World War One, novelists were inclined to place the events of their works in the past, the War seems to have triggered an acute preoccupation with the immediate present. Lastly, the text touches upon two distinct subgenres of the novel, arisen out of their relationship to time, namely the historical novel and the so-called ‘contemporary novel’.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

Poachers in view: the representation of poaching in early British film, c.1903-14

ABSTRACT For early film-makers in Britain the countryside was a highly valuable resource. As a modern urban culture acquired a distinctly ruralist orientation, the landscapes and lives of rural Britain became popular subjects for a rapidly developing visual mass media. Within this expanding visual economy, rural settings provided both picturesque space for the screen and interesting situations and characters to fill it. Forming a distinctive sub-genre to the Edwardian countryside film were those that focused on poachers and poaching. Already a popular subject in drama, literature and song, it now attracted the attention of most of the period’s leading domestic film producers. Demonstrating the richly intermedial nature of early cinema, these poaching-based films relied heavily on Victorian game-law melodramas and the regular coverage of so-called poaching affrays in the national and regional press. They also traded on audience pre-engagement via a general sympathy for the poacher coupled with a broad dislike of the game-preserving class. Through a study of three surviving poacher films from 1903, 1906 and 1912, this archetypal rural figure emerges as a significant presence on the early twentieth-century screen. At a time when the politics and culture of the land occupied a central place in public discourse, and when the causes and effects of poverty were being conceived in new ways, the poacher on view was a surprisingly complex and modern one.

Magical Feminism: The Female Voices of Magic Realism in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate

Magic realism is a distinct subgenre of writing that works on the mechanism of paradoxes of placing two opposites together to make a rich and complex meaning – the fusion of real and fantastic as Angel Flores calls it ‘amalgamation of realism and fantasy’. Magic Realism can also be read as a Postcolonial weapon as it fight backs the traditional tendencies and the staunch realism of western literature. Female voices have also employed magic realism to say aloud the problems of women across the globe. Magic Realism has thrived well in the hands of women writers across cultures and continents. Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee, Arundhathi Roy, Sarah Addison Allen, Yaa Gyasi, Raja Alem etc. This paper proposes to bring into limelight the Latin American Women Writers who are often left out to be mentioned along the list of men Latin American writers.

Dwelling in difference: narratives of arrival and accommodation

ABSTRACTAt the intersection of life writing and travel writing, “relocation narratives” form a distinct subgenre of travel memoirs concerned with the everyday experiences of travellers who become settlers abroad through a process of voluntary migration and long-term foreign residency. This article examines works by two contemporary travel memoirists who recount a bilingual and intercultural education acquired through transnational relocation: first, Tim Parks's Italian Neighbours (1992) and An Italian Education (1996); second, Pamela Druckerman's Paris-based memoirs, Bringing Up Bébé (2012) and Bébé Day by Day (2013). More than chronicles of lifestyle makeovers by travellers who “go native” in foreign locales, these multipart memoirs map out a process of cultural accommodation over time, revealing that learning the language, interacting with locals, and raising children according to adopted cultural precepts are forms of deep immersion in place that can lead to the development of dialogical identities through ethical engagement with cultural differences.

Caught in the cross-fire: Tackling hate speech from the perspective of language and translation pedagogy

Abstract Hate speech is a phenomenon which has been in the focus of scholarly interest of linguists, philosophers, sociologists, human-rights advocates, legal and media experts. Much of this interest has been devoted to establishing criteria for identifying what constitutes hate speech across disciplines. In this paper, we argue that hate speech has profiled as a distinct subgenre of the language of politics with typical patterns and ways of addressing which can be recognized in political campaigns across the world. Therefore, we present the findings of the case study of translation exercises of English and Serbian texts containing samples of hateful language during presidential campaigns in the USA and Serbia in 2016 and 2017. Our aim is to identify the linguistico-pragmatic commonalities of hate speech in Serbian and English and examine students’ attitudes towards ethically and morally challenging language contents in their mother tongue (L1) and English as their foreign language (L2). The results indicate that in both English and Serbian the same groups (e.g. members of ethnic minorities or LGBT population, women etc.) are targeted with the hateful language which in both languages uses vulgarisms, taboo words, sexist and chauvinistic declarative expressions to achieve political goals. In addition, L1>L2 and L2>L1 translation data indicate that personal moral and ethical norms in translators are stronger in L1 thus restrictively affecting translational L2>L1 output.

Discourse Functions of Kama in Arabic Journalistic Discourse from the Perspective of Rhetorical Structure Theory

The study aims at examining the functions of the discourse marker Kama in the Arabic journalistic discourse in the light of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) proposed by Mann and Thompson (1987). To this end, the study compiled a small-scale corpus of journalistic discourse taken from two prominent Arabic news websites: Aljazeera.net and Alarabia.net. The corpus covers three distinct sub-genres of journalistic discourse: opinion articles, news reports, and sport reports. The journalistic discourse is chosen on the basis that it is considered as the best representative of the contemporary written Arabic and it receives a wide readership in the Arabic-speaking countries. The motivation for the study is that although it is frequently used in the written form of Arabic (particularly in the language of Arabic media), the discourse marker kama is largely neglected and very few has been said about it in the present literature on Arabic discourse markers. The current findings show that kama is found to achieve 290 occurrences in the corpus under investigation. This obviously indicates that kama is commonly used in the language of Arabic journalistic discourse, which calls for paying attention to its usage in such a type of discourse. In the light of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) proposed by Mann and Thompson (1987), kama was found to serve four common functions: elaboration (around 50 %), similarity (around 19 %), evidence (16 %), and exemplification (13 %). Two functions of kama (similarity and exemplification) are listed in RST while the other two are incorporated.

History, Verse, andChanson de gestein French Chronicles around 1400

Around the end of the fourteenth century, several French verse chroniclers tried to revive an older literary form dating back to the twelfth century, which blended the style of the chronicles and epic. They often called their works a geste or a chancon, such as the Geste de Liege by Jean d’Outremeuse, the Geste des ducs Philippe et Jean de Bourgogne, and the Chanson de Bertrand Du Guesclin. This article investigates a wide range of rhymed chronicles, in order to establish whether or not they share common features and may be considered a distinct subgenre. It also discusses the question of the reliability of verse chronicles compared to contemporary prose chronicles. After a few observations on the relevance of some hallmark features of the chansons de geste (the words geste or chanson, the use of epic stanzas), the article suggests a typology of verse chronicles based on their relationship to the epic genre. Finally, this article compares ‘epic chronicles’ to contemporary ‘historical chansons de geste’ in order to better grasp the rapport between truth claims in epic and the reliability of chronicles.