Dramatic Fiction Research Articles

Nested Cinema: An Immersive Fiction-Film Experience

Abstract Nested Cinema is an original immersive experience that complicates the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, between the real and the imaginary. Nested Cinema reimagines film through the orchestration of technology across three distinct layers of experience—traditional screens, the installation space, and cinematic virtual reality—giving rise to a new immersive mode of dramatic fiction and expanded cinema. By combining established and emerging production and presentation technologies, the project explores the narrative and atmospheric effects of a nested multimodal environment, as well as new modes of visitor engagement and novel audiovisual expression and communication.

Looking at cyberbullying from different perspectives and roles: an online process drama research with Turkish participants

ABSTRACT This research explores how a process drama workshop on cyberbullying can be carried out in digital space with adults, aiming to understand participants’ perspectives on cyberbullying and the workshop itself using online tools. During the research, process drama was used as a participatory research method. Participants from various cities in Türkiye created a dramatic fiction collectively and performed improvisations on cyberbullying. They evaluated the process drama workshop, and various drama strategies, and Web 2.0 tools employed during the workshop. They discussed how process drama can help in understanding cyberbullying issues, and they proposed various solutions to address the problem.

Entangled worlds: the becoming of interpretive spaces in pupils’ engagement with literature through process drama

ABSTRACT This article explores the potential for engaging 7 and 8-year-old school pupils in performative literature interpretation through process drama. Inspired by new materialism and affect theory, we focus on how literature interpretations come into being in dramatic fiction, and on how these becoming interpretations merge with the classroom. The study explores interpretive spaces as entangled worlds in mutual engagement of pupils, teachers, and researchers in interpretation through process drama. The study establishes a theoretical framework in pointing out ways in which process drama performances contribute to engage the youngest school pupils in literature interpretation and present social problems.

Circumventing Censorship on the University Campus Through the Analysis of a Dramatic Text

ABSTRACT In 2016, Beninese police moved onto the university campus in Abomey-Calavi to control the violent student demonstrations which led to the invalidation of the 2015-16 academic year in the Faculté des Lettres, Arts et Sciences Humaines and the turmoil that turn of events subsequently risked causing. This local form of censorship was amplified by nationwide breaches of freedom of speech and opinion. How did the university react to all this? Certain teachers and students used educational activities as a pretext for overcoming the drastic restrictions to their freedoms. This article argues that the analysis of purposefully selected dramatic fiction can be employed in the critique of genuine infringements to freedom, and also in the identification of ways in which individuals overcome those infringements. Participant observation and the concept known as the “Horizon of Social Expectation” are applied to dramaturgical texts. The first part of the article provides a brief description of the political context, the strategic positioning of contributors and their respective levels of involvement in the pedagogical experience. This contextualisation then leads to the second part: a presentation of the results of the analysis conducted on paratextual data and the two dramaturgical categories of the theatrical text itself.

Richardson’s first experiment in dramatic fiction: Pamela, or virtue rewarded

Richardson’s first experiment in dramatic fiction: Pamela, or virtue rewarded

Improvisation Strategies in Online Drama Lesson

In drama lessons based on improvisation and role playing, participants express themselves spontaneously, take on various roles and act out by pretending. With improvisation, which is one of the two basic strategies used together with role playing in drama, the participants act in accordance with the designed dramatic fiction. The goal of this research is to determine opinions of the participants about the improvisations performed in online drama lessons. It was attempted in this context to show the influence of participants and instructors on improvisation by determining which strategies were employed throughout the online drama lesson. In this study, interpretative qualitative research design was used and the experiences of the participants were tried to be explored, made comprehensible and interpreted. Participants consist of 21 undergraduate students studying in different departments who attended online drama lessons at Ankara University in 2021-2022 academic year. Participants answered the questions in the "Assessment Form for Improvisations in Digital Platform" online. The data obtained in the research were analyzed with the descriptive analysis, and the findings were explained in accordance with the determined themes and categories. The results showed that the participants used some strategies before and during the improvisation, and these strategies made improvisations more qualified. Participants also stated that while improvising on the digital platform, some situations have positive or negative effects, and they try to adapt themselves according to these situations. The research also reveals that the films watched and the topics discussed during lessons facilitate the participants to take roles while improvising, and the examples given about the elements of drama contribute to the improvisation. According to the results, it is recommended to inform the participants before the improvisations in online drama lesson, to create the dramatic fiction with the participants and to make the improvisations in accordance with this dramatic fiction. The elements of drama may be discussed, short films and feature-length films can be shown, examples can be offered, and improvisations can be made more qualified throughout the drama lesson.

Veiled Visions: Female Creativity, Persecution, and Oppression in Mar Gómez Glez’s Fuga Mundi

This study explores how Mar Gómez Glez’s play Fuga Mundi (2008) foregrounds gender issues and the oppression of women artists in order to further contemporary efforts aimed at rescuing history’s forgotten female figures. Focusing on Juana de la Vega, a protagonist largely inspired by the first female professional sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652-1706), the play is set within the historical context of the Morisco expulsion from Spain. Gómez Glez employs both an all-female cast and the conventions of the historical drama to shed light on how the ramifications of gender anxieties and the persecution of minority populations based on differential notions of race and religion permeated seventeenth-century Spanish society. By drawing on metatheater, intertextual references, and the interpolation of historical documents as framing devices that juxtapose with the action of the play, Gómez Glez stimulates a critical spectatorship geared toward establishing a dialogue between dramatic fiction and historical reality.

Tattered Theatres: Fleeting Performances in Concentrationary Theatre

This paper explores the presence of dramatic fiction in plays dealing with imprisonment within the Nazi and Communist concentrationary systems. Whether we talk about performances belonging to the pre-concentrationary past, which ghost the prison or camp world, about plays that the prisoners tell in secret to their fellow inmates, or about embedded performances, all these spectacular forms are structured by the idea of absence (of the text, of the actor), and are to be seen as instrumental in getting away from the concentrationary experience and at the same time bearing witness to it. We will consider these embedded theatrical forms (which are based on repertoire plays or attempt to dramatize (pre)concentrationary realities) as devices meant to articulate trauma. We will analyse the dramatic strategies enabling dramatists to foreground an oblique approach to the concentrationary experience.

Ein Opfer für Ares

Abstract This paper analyses the human sacrifice of Menoeceus in Euripides’ Phoenissae. In the third epeisodion, Teiresias draws on the history of Thebes and its royal family to justify the sacrifice and the choice of Menoeceus as its victim. But what are the ritual or cultural models outside the dramatic fiction that inform this sacrifice and made it under­standable for the contemporary ancient Athenian audience? To answer this question, I discuss possible similarities to pre-battle sacrifice, the pharmakos-ritual, and the mythical pattern of a hero who sacrifices himself for the community. The relation of this sacrifice to the foundation of Thebes, which itself plays a prominent role in the play’s choral odes, is then examined in a concluding section. Here, the crucial question is whether the sacrifice restates the act of foundation and its violence or instead negates and invalidates it.

Más que un drama histórico: Comentario dramatológico de Fuerte Bulnes (1955) de María Asunción Requena

The article makes a dramatological review of Fuerte Bulnes by Maria Asuncion Requena, the first work of his southern trilogy, based on the method of analysis proposed by Jose Luis Garcia Barrientos. After a review under the categories of Writing, diction and dramatic fiction, space, time, characters, it is affirmed that this dramatic work is not only a historical drama as it recognizes the scarce literary/theatrical criticism, but there is an appreciation of space and, above all, of the female characters from Chiloe.

Ethnodrama with Hong Kong problem gamblers and their family: between ethnographic reality and dramatic fiction

ABSTRACTThis Hong Kong project features recovering gambling addicts and their family. During the research, devising and performance sessions were observed, and actors, audience members, artists, and social workers were interviewed. The performing gamblers presented stressful and distressing stories in which their partners struggled to maintain the family while suffering from long-term financial and emotional crisis. Audience members expressed positive views on the value of ethnodrama, including the artistic quality of the performance. The research also focused on the role of the researcher-cum-playwright in the process of creating ethnodrama, highlighting the need to carefully navigate the relationship between reality and fiction.

Eugene O'Neill's Irish “Con” Man: Charles Lever

Abstract In his late plays Eugene O'Neill attends to forms of inheritance he received from growing up in a family of Irish origin. In 1946 he wrote that Irish heritage is the “thing that explains more than anything about me,” and the odd syntax is telling. A Touch of the Poet has been interpreted as O'Neill's take on his Irish émigré father James O'Neill, an actor in the romantic tradition whose overcoming of class limitations required the devices of dramatic fiction and theatrical aggrandizement, but it also reveals the influence of a novel the young O'Neill seems to have enjoyed along with his father. Confessions of Con Cregan, the Irish Gil Blas is an 1849 picaresque novel by Charles Lever, who centered his light-hearted novels on Irish characters. It contains features of characterization and plot that match elements in O'Neill's play, suggesting direct influence. The self-reflective project of O'Neill's late work reads differently in light of this intertextuality, which leads to the idea that he might have conceived his Irish identification not as a return home but ironically in terms of displacement into the transnational—an appropriate distancing given that he wrote these intimate plays far from home in the isolation of California. The pseudo-confessional aspect of Lever's novel suggests “other” ways of reading O'Neill's sly sincerity.

Television in Portugal (2000-2016): the curious case of Portuguese fiction

Portuguese television has always struggled with the country’s demography, geography and permeability to foreign contents. Until 2001, Portuguese television was unable to fulfil any of the Directives regarding minimum European production quotas, and one of its key features was the undisputed dominance of Brazilian telenovelas over Portuguese audiences. Today the situation has changed dramatically and the number of Portuguese telenovelas being broadcasted raised exponentially, as well as its ratings and share. In this article we will examine a very specific period, from 2000 to 2016, and study the dramatic fiction produced in Portugal during this timeframe. We will analyse Portuguese telenovela’s hegemony over prime-time, and the impact it is having on other television genres.

“Mountains of Flesh and Seas of Blood”: Reflecting Philosophically on Animal Sacrifice through Dramatic Fiction

Despite recent moves among philosophers of religion to avoid undue abstraction by giving closer attention to religion’s practical dimensions, such moves commonly remain limited to a relatively narrow range of religious traditions. What D. Z. Phillips has termed the “radical plurality” of religious and nonreligious forms of life, comprising morally troubling as well as edifying varieties, thus continues to be neglected. This article promotes an expanded approach to philosophy of religion with regard to both methodology and scope. Methodologically, it explores the potential of narrative works, and of dramatic fiction in particular, not only to constitute resources for philosophical reflection but also to actively philosophize themselves. To this end, two plays, by Rabindranath Tagore and Girish Karnad respectively, are discussed. With regard to subject matter, the article examines the complex phenomenon of animal sacrifice, and opposition to it, in South Asian contexts.

American Mythmaker: Walter Noble Burns and the Legends of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquín Murrieta. By Mark J. Dworkin.

The myth of the West rode into twentieth-century America with Walter Noble Burns. Already a famed journalist and editor, Burns was covering the pursuit of Pancho Villa by General “Black Jack” Pershing when he met a friend of Pat Garrett in El Paso, Texas. Inspired, Burns returned to New Mexico, interviewed many of the actual people involved, and, in 1926 published his first book honoring the American West. The Saga of Billy the Kid (c. 1920s), “history as it should have been,” introduced the rugged individualism of the idealized western hero. Reviewers over time have criticized it as romanticism while others laud it as dramatic fiction. Between 1911 and 1999, fifty-two films portrayed Billy as never changing but ever changing. Literature and television continue to feature his story well into the twenty-first century. Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest (1929), Burns’s next step into the mythical West, forever seared the legend of Wyatt Earp and the O.K. Corral into American and international minds. Previously published with little veracity, Burns conducted hours of newspaper research, interviewed many of the original participants, and spent miles on horseback, familiarizing himself with local landmarks. Vignettes of the major characters, coupled with Burns’s classic narrative style, launched Earp and the entire lineup well into the next millennium. The films Tombstone , in 1993, and 1994’s Wyatt Earp bear living tribute to Burns’s contribution to western history.

The Postdramatic Turn – Recasting the Dramatic Curriculum

The article presents a new educational design for the subject drama pedagogy in light of the paradigm shift in contemporary theatre towards a postdramatic theatre (Lehmann, 2006). Going out from a historical perspective a basic concept of aesthetic doubling based on dramatic fiction is successively identified as constitutive of the classic subject drama pedagogy. The historical exposition is followed by a brief introduction to the postdramatic theatre by means of the concepts postdrama, theatReality and f(r)iction, which is seen as a hybridization of the classic notion of fiction. Recent examples of postdramatic theatre performances are given, and the outlines of a new educational design for drama and theatre pedagogy inspired by this form of theatre is demonstrated by explanation and examples from educational practice at the Master’s Programme of Theatre Pedagogy at Metropolitan University College Copenhagen. Finally, it is argued with additional reference to Lawrence Grossberg’s (1992) forms of authentic inauthenticity that drama and theatre pedagogy must turn postdramatic in its curricular basis in order to stay relevant for future generations of young people and other target groups.

Mad Men fans speak via social media: What fan voices reveal about the social construction of reality via dramatic fiction

Abstract Fans of complex television dramas often watch because of eudaimonic motivations – the desire to make meaning from media, to explore their own emotions and to learn about the human experience through the exploration of novel experiences that audio-visual fiction affords. This study analyses the psychology of how fans of Mad Men (2007) construct social realities via online discussions of some of the major relationships and storylines on the show. Our primary goal was to understand how fans create reality from fantasy and our focus was on social relationships and individual character analyses. Using a social science approach, we performed both a computer-automated and an expert-driven thematic analysis on 209 fan comments harvested from social media. The automated analysis revealed common emotional expressions, such as associating hate with the character Betty Draper. The expert analysis revealed that many of fans’ social media conversations centred on evaluating Don and Betty Draper as parents, spouses and people, either condemning or defending them in each of these roles. Fans were evenly split between Betty supporters and detractors. Betty was most likely to be defended as a person and condemned as a mother. In contrast, three fourths of fans condemned Don. This condemnation was mostly directed towards him as a person and spouse, not as a father. We situate these findings in an interdisciplinary literature and explain the psychology behind why and how fans use fiction both to empathize with others and to explore their own realities. We explain from a positive psychology perspective that our analysis of fans’ social media commentary exemplifies how television fandom for complex dramas can be healthy and psychologically beneficial.

“Not a soul in sight!”: Beckett's Fourth Wall

While the theatrical device of “breaking the fourth wall” has come to be seen as a characteristic technique of modernist theater, it is not often associated with the plays of Samuel Beckett—perhaps the quintessential modernist playwright. While Beckett employs the device in some of his early plays—most markedly in the lesser-known Eleutheria—he eventually moves away from anything resembling the “alienation effect” (as theorized by Bertolt Brecht), in which the fourth-wall break asserts the supremacy of objective reality over that of the dramatic fiction. In rejecting Brecht’s methodology, Beckett does not, however, return to a naturalist theatrical model. In the “failed realism” of his most successful plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Beckett’s nuanced treatment of the fourth wall helps to present the stage as a space of complete ontological indeterminacy, reflecting the unstable metaphysics of lived experience.

Putting it on the Floor: Naturalism and the Verfremdungseffekt in The Tempest and The Witch of Edmonton

This essay considers the floor of the stage or set in productions of The Tempest and The Witch of Edmonton , in order to explore the juxtaposition of post-Stanislavskian acting techniques and Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte in the production of early modern drama today. Whilst students often come to our undergraduate programs having learned a theater history that opposes Brecht and Staniskavsky aesthetically and ideologically, current performance practice draws upon both cultural heritages. Escolme explores the ways in which scenography has recently endeavored to include the audience in the playworld, on the one hand, producing emotional engagement and empathy, while on the other foregrounding the dramatic fiction as theatrical. Her final case study is a workshop exploration of The Witch of Edmonton by Chris Goode and Wendy Hubbard that took place at the National Theatre Studio, London, in 2013. Goode’s practice used little by way of “table work”: the process initiated by Stanislavsky where a theater company discusses a text in detail before “putting it on the floor” and thereby often reaches consensus about the universal meanings inherent in a historic text. Goode’s approach exposed and theatricalized the processes by which we come to “understand” historical drama by staging discussion, rehearsal materials and the processes of putting on costumes, and making up Morris dances, alongside moments from the The Witch of Edmonton . Exploring and evaluating a range of theater practices, Escolme interrogates the value judgments inherent in metaphors of depth and surface as they pertain to character psychology and subtext, scenography and theatricality.

Emotionalization in new television formats of science popularization

The fierce struggle for television audiences is greatest when the content shown is not strictly entertainment, such as, for example, when specialized knowledge is brought to a wide audience. However, the appearance of new television formats has enabled scientific and technical contents to be brought closer to an unprepared and very diverse audience. What resources do these programs use to achieve this? Is emotionalization, which is increasingly dominant in the media, an important strategy in programs that seek to spread scientific knowledge among the general public? Do they use the pluri-locutionary nature of their discourse to promote understanding of the contents and to capture the viewers’ attention? Our research, which forms part of a broader study of new television formats and the communication of knowledge, is the first study on the discourse of the mediatization of knowledge in Spain. The topic is of particular interest because it coincides with the production of innovative television formats that endeavor to capture the interest of sections of the population that usually do not access this type of content. They have an important social function since, as Semir (2011: 19) points out, the knowledge of the world they promote reduces the fear generated in human beings by that which is opaque or unknown, thereby increasing the ability to make decisions and increasing efficiency. Through the linguistic analysis of the statements uttered by the diverse voices of a popular communication program, Quèquicom (Whatwhohow), we will determine which emotions are more present in the program and, therefore, contribute towards its communicative success, and which speakers (presenters, experts or affected individuals) use them more. Determining the resources leading to the success of this program can provide effective tools for other programs with very diverse aims. Studies of this type in Spain have focused on the press but very little on television. This study forms part of a wider research project on new television formats and the communication of knowledge to different audiences and diverse levels of specialization. It has been proven that emotions join together to provide a dramatic progression, based on the tension-relaxation binomial, a progression that holds the audience’s interest, in a similar manner to dramatic fiction programs. Moreover, the emotions can be examined in three ways: they can be referred to as a fact in the reality being narrated, expressed by the speakers or triggered in the audience. Lastly, it was also observed that the emotional charge that justifies the presence of affected individuals or witnesses in the majority of television programs spreads to the voices of the presenters themselves. The transmission of emotions is almost as important as that of knowledge.