Factual Narratives Research Articles

Political Participation Of Beginners In The 2024 General Election In Cirebon City

Political participation involves political awareness and faith in government, which is directly connected to the concepts of democracy and legitimacy. The relationship between political participation, democracy and legitimacy is very close. This research highlights the preparation of Cirebon City for the 2024 General Election with a focus on the participation of new voters. This research aims to explore the experiences and perspectives of new voters through interviews, documentation, and observation to understand their political participation in depth. In addition, this study also aims to record the efforts of the Cirebon City KPU in overcoming obstacles to the participation of new voters. This research uses a qualitative method with a phenomenological paradigm approach. Descriptive data, both written and oral, were collected directly from first-time voters through interviews, documentation, and observation. Descriptive research, as Whitney describes, plays an important role in building a systematic, accurate and factual narrative. The results of this study describe the phenomenon of political participation of novice voters in Cirebon City and reveal the relationship between various aspects that influence it. The research also notes the efforts of the Cirebon City KPU in overcoming obstacles to the participation of first-time voters, including the use of social media, especially TikTok, to effectively disseminate information and attract the attention of first-time voters. This research shows that the political participation of novice voters in Cirebon City has a close relationship with the concepts of democracy and legitimacy. The Cirebon City KPU's efforts in using social media as a means of communication have made a positive contribution in increasing the participation of novice voters ahead of the 2024 General Election. The narrative generated from this research not only describes the phenomenon of political participation, but also provides a deeper understanding of the various aspects that influence the participation of novice voters.

Use of narratives to enhance childhood vaccine acceptance: Results of an online experiment among Canadian parents

ABSTRACT Identifying effective interventions to promote children’s vaccination acceptance is crucial for the health and wellbeing of communities. Many interventions can be implemented to increase parental awareness of the benefits of vaccination and positively influence their confidence in vaccines and vaccination services. One potential approach is using narratives as an intervention. This study aims to evaluate the effects of a narrative-based intervention on parents’ attitudes and vaccination intentions. In a pre-post experiment, 2,000 parents of young children recruited from an online pan-Canadian panel were randomly exposed to one of the three videos presenting narratives to promote childhood vaccination or a control condition video about the importance and benefits of physical activity in children. Pre-post measures reveal a relatively modest but positive impact of the narratives on parents’ attitudes and intention to vaccinate their child(ren). The results also suggest that narratives with more emotional content may be more effective in positively influencing vaccine attitudes than the more factual narrative. Using narratives to promote vaccination can positively influence parents’ views and intentions toward childhood vaccines, but research is still required to identify the best components of such interventions.

Conspiracy theories and the epistemic power of narratives

ABSTRACT We often turn to comforting stories to distract ourselves from emotionally painful truths. This paper explores a dark side of this tendency. I argue that the way false conspiracy theories are disseminated often involves packaging them as part of narratives that offer comforting alternatives to ugly truths. Furthermore, I argue that the way these narratives arouse and resolve our emotions can be part of what causes people to believe conspiracy theories. This account helps to bring out some general implications about the power of narratives for misleading people into believing misinformation: I argue that narratives can cause intuitive judgments of truth that are especially difficult to dispel through critical reflection. I also sketch some practical implications for how the media can better frame their reports about both conspiracy theories and factual narratives.

GROUP MINDS IN ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE ANCIENT GREEK NOVEL: HERODIAN'S HISTORY AND CHARITON'S CALLIRHOE

AbstractThis article explores Herodian's History of the Roman Empire alongside Chariton's novel Callirhoe with an eye to how the minds of collective entities are represented and function in the two narratives. It argues that Chariton, unlike Herodian, elaborates on the diversity of emotions that characterizes a specific collective experience and has groups use direct speech throughout. These choices add vividness to the narrative and intensify the fictional sensationalism and dramatic character of the novel. It also shows that, whereas collectives in Chariton's narrative are primarily designed to highlight a specific characteristic of a hero, dramatize an event and enhance suspense, in Herodian's historiography they are an integral part of the plot and central to his historical analysis of contemporary political and social world. This article offers a new analytical tool geared towards the development of a poetics of the collective in ancient narrative as well as a poetics of fictional and factual narration in antiquity, and advances our understanding of the complex relationship between ancient historiography and novelistic writing.

Hip Hop Pantsula making Setswana fashionable: impact on Setswana orthography

The aim of this article is to investigate how South African hip-hop lyrics break language rules and promote South African indigenous languages. The article focuses on youth participation in linguistic change in South Africa and illustrates how youth linguistic cultures are practised in everyday interactions. In South Africa, most rap musicians consider hip-hop to be the voice of youth culture. The challenge is that hip-hop has a bad reputation, mostly because hip-hop rappers were associated with bad language and violence. However, motswako (a South African genre of hip-hop) lyricists want to be associated with creativity and freestyling that make sense to the youth in a contemporary era. The study of hip-hop and identity from a factual narrative perspective is not well represented. In this article, discourse analysis is used to examine how the linguistics and identities are presented by motswako lyricists to associate creativity with freestyling from an African perspective. A few examples of motswako lyrics were selected to analyse the creativity of the lyricists and their contributions to linguistic and cultural change. The results show that youth in these spaces are active creators and contributors to linguistic and cultural change, which has led to the popularity of this genre.

Synthesis of Documentary and Artistic Codes in Dave Eggers’ Story “The Monk of Mokha”

This article is devoted to the analysis of documentary fiction based on the material of the story “The Monk of Mokha” by a contemporary American writer Dave Eggers. The purpose of the study is to identify methods of implementing and synthesizing documentary and artistic codes in this work, as well as to determine the main functions of such a synthesis in the conceptual and thematic structure of the story. The study of factual and fictional narratives’ components in the story under consideration has shown that the factual narrative is determined by the author’s concern for authenticity, accuracy and truth, which is revealed through the following elements: using the names and descriptions of real geographical objects, depicting the typical attributes of the era, presenting historical facts and real-life events of our time, portraying real persons as characters. Fictional components include special forms of real facts interpretation: the author’s mode of narration, special narrative strategies, imaginative expression of ideas and themes, using various stylistic means and devices. As a result of such contamination, the author creates a certain model of artistic reality which is based on documentary materials.

Seeking Truth beyond Facts

This article analyzes concepts of factual narration in the Kongcongzi, a text that thus far has received little scholarly attention. The author argues that the text indicates a pronounced interest in this subject, and presents different points of view. The first ten chapters of the Kongcongzi tend to manifest a lenient attitude towards narrative factuality, whereas in Chapters Twelve to Twenty-one, the distinction between facts and falsehood seems to become increasingly important. Through a comparative analysis of narratives from both groups of chapters, the author attempts to explore the protagonists’ views on the meaning and purpose of factual narration. The author also explores various conclusions that can be drawn from these insights in the context of the textual history of the Kongcongzi and our understanding of early Chinese narrative prose in general.

Corona Haikus

When I moved from linear documentary production to the newly emerging field of interactive storytelling in early 2000, I was excited by the potentialities of the Web, especially the possibility of co-creation in factual storytelling. Looking back, I can clearly see that what attracted me was the exploration of how factual narratives could make use of two unique affordances of digital media: user agency and interactivity. More than twenty years later, I am still experimenting with ways to use interactivity to facilitate co-creation of reality and move away from the representational tendency of linear documentaries (Gaudenzi 2013). In this paper, I will use the Corona Haikus project (2020) to question the current understanding of user agency in participatory interactive narratives. I have chosen such project because I have personally been involved in it as a co-author, but also as a participant, and therefore I have both co-designed its user’s agency, and experienced it as a user. I will argue that agency in interactive documentary (i-doc) should be considered as a space of user empowerment that does not always have to affect the interactive narrative itself, because it can also be placed outside of the narrated story. The Corona Haikus example will be used to demonstrate that, in participatory narratives, deep individual and societal impact can be designed by mixing different types of mini-agencies and by orchestrating them as a journey of empowerment that is gradual and evolutive. Reflexive and evolutive agencies will be defined and presented as new ways to approach impact design in interactive narratives.

Iterative Loops

This scholarly essay is about research-creation in interactive, immersive and digital non-fiction storytelling. It seeks to shed light and update this research approach and to identify ways in which it can be rendered more accessible to both practitioners and researchers. The essay revisits two recent factual narratives—the web-documentary Field Trip (2019) and VR experience Myriad (2021), projects in which the authors were directly involved as practitioners. Then, it positions these two digital practices in the body of literature on media innovations before qualifying them as interactive and immersive documentaries (i-docs). Field Trip is a browser-based 92-minute documentary taking a deep dive into the history and social struggles around the Tempelhof Field, Berlin’s former airport turned public park. Myriad is a 32-minute immersive VR experience narrated from the perspective of globally migrating animals, sensitizing the audience to the interplay and interrelationship of all life forms. The authors explain how these projects have, in their separate and singular ways, opened spaces for iterative loops between creative practice and theory. Field Trip exemplifies how triangulation can be applied to creative media practice. This method, albeit a relatively classic in research, continues to be a challenge for practitioners. The case of Myriad, in turn, discusses two additional methods: core to audience and interdisciplinary iteration in experimental aesthetics. While these two methods in format development and artistic enquiry might sound familiar to practitioners, they are promising for closing some gaps in academic research design. The two case studies speak to the diversity of research-creation approaches, methods and formats while illustrating how research-creation, as a research mindset, can facilitate the output of two things at once: a more ‘educated’ artistic expression and more grounded academic knowledge. The essay further identifies the need to systematize and offer continuous support to researchers-creators. It argues that this fits the mandate of higher education art and design schools, which should be understood as research-creation competence centers. The paper ends with five learnings meant to encourage digital media practitioners to develop an enquiry reflex and media scholars to “get their hands dirty” in partaking in innovative, creative media projects.

Modalities of Fictionality in the Arabic Tradition: Kalīla wa-Dimna’s Readers from the Third/Ninth to the Sixth/Twelfth Century

Abstract This study interrogates the concept of fictionality in the premodern Arabic tradition through probing into different readings of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Book of Kalīla and Dimna. Instead of presupposing the applicability of the modern concept of fictionality, I suggest to use the concept as a hermeneutic category that can encompass different perspectives on what exactly is fictional in a text. After identifying the challenges of defining fictionality in the pre-modern Arabic textual tradition, I shall look into some of the readers of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s translation between the third/ninth and sixth/twelfth centuries to unpack different modalities. Some readers such as Ibn Qutayba in his ʿUyūn al-akhbār (Essential Accounts) and Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih in his al-ʿIqd al-farīd (The Unique Necklace) foreground the ethical function of parables and gnomic sayings and ignore the fact that most of Kalīla wa-Dimna’s stories contain animal characters. Others such as al-Yamanī in his Muḍāhāt amthāl kitāb Kalīla wa-Dimna (The Analogues of Kalīla wa-Dimna’s Parables) and al-Bīrūnī in his Geography of India tackle the ontology of fictionality from the perspective of reliability versus unreliability associated to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s claim over the authenticity of his transmission of “the Indian book.” Finally, focusing on Ibn Sīnā’s and Ibn Rushd’s Commentaries to Aristotle’s Poetics, I show how Kalīla wa-Dimna as a prime example of parables (amthāl) and invented stories belongs to rhetorical discourse and has to be distinguished from poetic discourse which generates images (takhyīl). By opposing the two types of discourse — poetry and stories from Kalīla wa-Dimna — in terms of both their ontological status and their functionality, they portray, I argue, a different taxonomy of fictionality. Although all these various readers might agree that Kalīla wa-Dimna contains fictive content, the different interpretations defy a classification of Kalīla wa-Dimna within the modern dichotomy of fictional versus factual narrative but allow us to uncover different ontological and pragmatic modalities of fictionality in the premodern past.

Narratives That Speak AI Lingua? AI Vocabulary in Listed Companies’ Annual Reports

Narratives about intelligent artefacts have influenced both the public’s imaginary and the actual development of the AI field since its foundation. Yet, in times where the field seems to be flourishing on the one hand, but rushing into an AI winter on the other, factual narratives about AI applications and advancements are more essential than ever. What is the gap between the actual capabilities of today’s AI and the vocabulary used to report about them? In particular, what is the AI lingua used in official, legal documents in business? To find out, we analysed leading share index companies’ annual reports from a representative fraction of the German economy (DAX 30), as a starting step in this direction. In this paper, we present a fact-based methodology for systematically assessing the true state of enterprise AI of those companies. Our initial empirical investigation covers only the annual reports of leading listed German enterprises in the DAX 30 as of May 2021 (i.e. before the DAX’s expansion to 40 members). For this concrete example, we collected their annual reports from 2010 to 2020 (N=312). We then built upon previous work by extending natural language processing (NLP) algorithms we developed for these purposes. The idea is to systematically process and automatically detect the use of AI-related terminology in those annual reports. Such a terminology is part of a classification schema we introduce for differentiating concrete types of AI-related terms. We also compare different NLP libraries regarding their suitability and speculate on the reasons behind the poor performance of some of them. Furthermore, we look at relevant AI keywords and phrases, thereby conducting a human-based semantic analysis of the context – tasks that machines still cannot do effectively. We also give guidance on how to proceed in similar studies, i.e. on how to extend our methodology and the key findings to other national economies. This way, we are contributing not only to an informed perception about the state of enterprise AI, but also to filling the gap between the narratives it uses and the actual state of AI development.

Narratives That Speak AI Lingua? AI Vocabulary in Listed Companies’ Annual Reports

Narratives about intelligent artefacts have influenced both the public’s imaginary and the actual development of the AI field since its foundation. Yet, in times where the field seems to be flourishing on the one hand, but rushing into an AI winter on the other, factual narratives about AI applications and advancements are more essential than ever. What is the gap between the actual capabilities of today’s AI and the vocabulary used to report about them? In particular, what is the AI lingua used in official, legal documents in business? To find out, we analysed leading share index companies’ annual reports from a representative fraction of the German economy (DAX 30), as a starting step in this direction. In this paper, we present a fact-based methodology for systematically assessing the true state of enterprise AI of those companies. Our initial empirical investigation covers only the annual reports of leading listed German enterprises in the DAX 30 as of May 2021 (i.e. before the DAX’s expansion to 40 members). For this concrete example, we collected their annual reports from 2010 to 2020 (N=312). We then built upon previous work by extending natural language processing (NLP) algorithms we developed for these purposes. The idea is to systematically process and automatically detect the use of AI-related terminology in those annual reports. Such a terminology is part of a classification schema we introduce for differentiating concrete types of AI-related terms. We also compare different NLP libraries regarding their suitability and speculate on the reasons behind the poor performance of some of them. Furthermore, we look at relevant AI keywords and phrases, thereby conducting a human-based semantic analysis of the context – tasks that machines still cannot do effectively. We also give guidance on how to proceed in similar studies, i.e. on how to extend our methodology and the key findings to other national economies. This way, we are contributing not only to an informed perception about the state of enterprise AI, but also to filling the gap between the narratives it uses and the actual state of AI development.

The Use of Fiction for the Study of Organizational Behavior in Extreme Contexts

In this paper, we conceptually explore whether narrative fiction such as in film, literature, theater, and music can be exploited as a data source for studying organizational behavior in the context of extreme events. In doing so, we deconstruct the putative dichotomy between fictional and factual narratives, arguing that they possess common features as fact is fictionalized and fiction is incorporated into reality. Organizational members utilize narrative strategies in a sense-making process to conceptualize their reality, whilst authors of fiction adhere to the principle of verisimilitude, thus resembling reality in their works. Our paper highlights that although fiction clearly has some limitations as a research tool, it offers advantages to researchers for studying organizational phenomena.

Corona Haikus

When I moved from linear documentary production to the newly emerging field of interactive storytelling in the early 2000, I was excited by the potentialities of the Web, especially the possibility of co-creation in factual storytelling. Looking back, I can clearly see that what attracted me was the exploration of how factual narratives could make use of two affordances that are unique to digital media: user agency and interactivity. More than twenty years later, I am still experimenting with ways to use interactivity to facilitate co-creation of reality and move away from simple representation in documentary making (Gaudenzi 2013). In this paper, I will use the Corona Haikus project (2020), to question the current understanding of user agency in participatory interactive narratives. I have chosen such project because I have personally been involved in it as a co-author, but also as a participant, and therefore I have both co-designed its user’s agency, and experienced it as a user. I will argue that agency in interactive documentary (i-doc) should be considered as a space of user empowerment that does not always have to affect the interactive narrative itself, because it can also be placed outside of the narrated story. The Corona Haikus example will be used to demonstrate that, in participatory narratives, deep individual and societal impact can be designed by mixing different types of mini-agencies and by orchestrating them as a journey of empowerment that is gradual and evolutive. Reflexive and evolutive agencies will be defined and presented as new ways to approach impact design in interactive narratives.

Learning by Doing

This scholarly essay is about research-creation in the field of interactive, immersive and digital non-fiction storytelling. It seeks to shed light and update this approach to research, and to identify ways in which it can be rendered more accessible to both practitioners and researchers. The essay revisits two recent factual narratives—web-documentary Field Trip (2019) and VR experience Myriad (2021), projects in which the authors were directly involved as practitioners. It positions these two digital practices in the body of literature on media innovations, before qualifying them as interactive and immersive documentaries (i-docs). Field Trip is a browser-based 92-minutes documentary taking a deep dive into the history and social struggles around the Tempelhof Field, Berlin’s former airport turned public park. Myriad is a 32-minutes immersive VR experience narrated from the perspective of globally migrating animals, sensitizing the audience to the interplay and interrelationship of all life forms. The authors explain how these projects have, in their respective and singular ways, opened spaces for iterative loops between creative practice and theory. Field Trip serves to exemplify how triangulation can be applied to creative media practice. This method, albeit a relatively classic one in research, continues to be a challenge for practitioners. The case of Myriad, in turn, is used to discuss two additional methods: core to audience and interdisciplinary iteration in experimental aesthetics. While these two methods in format development and artistic enquiry might sound familiar to practitioners, they are promising for closing some gaps in the design of academic research. The two case studies speak to the diversity of research-creation approaches, methods and formats, while at the same illustrating how research-creation, as a research mindset, can facilitate the output of two things at once: a more ‘educated’ artistic expression and more grounded academic knowledge. The essay further identifies the need to systematize and offer continuous support to researchers-creators. It argues that this fits the mandate of higher education art and design schools, which should be understood as research-creation competence centers. The paper ends on five learnings meant to encourage digital media practitioners to develop an enquiry reflex and media scholars to “get their hands dirty” in partaking in innovative creative media projects.

Miraculous, magical, or mundane? The development of beliefs about stories with divine, magical, or realistic causation.

Children's naïve theories about causal regularities enable them to differentiate factual narratives describing real events and characters from fictional narratives describing made-up events and characters (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, Cognition 113 (2): 213-225, 2009). But what happens when children are consistently presented with accounts of miraculous and causally impossible events as real occurrences? Previous research has shown that preschoolers with consistent exposure to religious teaching tend to systematically judge characters involved in fantastical or religious events as real (Corriveau et al., Cognitive Science, 39 (2), 353-382, 2015; Davoodi et al., Developmental Psychology, 52 (2), 221, 2016). In the current study, we extended this line of work by asking about the scope of the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments. Specifically, we asked whether this effect is domain-general or domain-specific. We tested children in Iran, where regular exposure to uniform religious beliefs might influence children's reasoning about possibility in non-religious domains, in addition to the domain of religion. Children with no or minimal schooling (5- to 6-year-olds) and older elementary school students (9- to 10-year-olds) judged the reality status of different kinds of stories, notably realistic, unusual (but nonetheless realistic), religious, and magical stories. We found that while younger children were not systematic in their judgments, older children often judged religious stories as real but rarely judged magical stories as real. This developmental pattern suggests that the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments does not extend beyond their reasoning about divine intervention. Children's justifications for their reality judgments provided further support for this domain-specific influence of religious teaching.

STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE TRANSCARPATHIAN REFORMED CHURCH ORGANIZATION (1946–1949)

The presented church history research provides a specific denominational study of a post-war transition from a regional perspective. Its purpose is to reveal the process during which (in the Transcarpathian region that became part of the Soviet Union in 1944) the new state power forced the Reformed communities to accept a radical structural transformation of their church organization. In addition, it presents the violent stages of the structural transformations, during which the Soviet bureaucracy gradually suppressed the former Reformed self-administration system which had been built according to the Synod-Presbyterian principle and was based on community autonomy. The research methodology is based on the analysis of little-known and unknown archival sources of the Archives and Museum of the Transcarpathian Reformed Church, the State Archive of the Transcarpathian Region, the State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine in Transcarpathia Region, the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine, the Synod Archives of the Reformed Church in Hungary, and the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the problem of the history of the Transcarpathian Reformed people after 1944 was carried out only as a partial mosaic-like study in the Ukrainian church history research along with other Protestant denominations, sometimes neglecting the chronological order and cause-and-effect relationship. Despite the fact that the history of the Protestants appears as a collective theme, or as the Protestant denomination with the largest organization, the history of the Baptists receives wide attention in the national church history writing. Our study is primarily not a factual narrative of historical chronology but rather focuses on thematic orientation. Following this point of view, it reflects on the issue (structural transformation) in the context of causality that is, when, why and how the organization of the Reformed church communities which had been based on traditional community autonomy was transferred to the hierarchical structural system. In conclusion, it can be said that the structural transformation through which the Reformed church organization underwent between February 1946 and December 1949, was a specific field for the manifestation of Sovietization. In the present study, the picture of the profound social changes that the Soviet occupation of Transcarpathia in 1944, initiated in the region clearly emerges. Based on its ideology, the openly atheistic imperial state believed that immediately after the annexation of the territory and sufficient transformations of the various denominations, it would be able to use them as ideological support in its interests. However, the Reformed church which had been built according to the council-presbyterian principle and based on the autonomy of parishes did not fit into the clearly hierarchical thinking system of the one-man dictatorship. That is why its church structure had to be transformed and adjusted to the form. Thus, the well-known and completely transparent Russian Orthodox Church served as a model for structural transformations in the Soviet imperial bureaucracy. As a result, the process of transformation of the Transcarpathian Reformed church organization into the Soviet model which ended up in the disappearance of the dioceses, deacons, the bishop, and the church districts is outlined.

NONFICTIONAL LITERATURE: NATURE, TYPOLOGY, TERMINOLOGY

The article is devoted to the reviewing of theoretical aspects of nonfiction literature. Similar in semantic content, but not identical terms as nonfictional literature, nonfictional writing, literature of fact, factography, fiction-documentary literature, fiction-documentary prose, fiction-documentary writing, literary nonfiction, literature of non-fiction, nonfictional prose, factual narrative, which have become commonly used in American, Spanish, Ukrainian, French, Slavic terminology, are analyzed. All these terms refer to a set of texts written on the basis of real events without the use of fiction. Typical features of this type of literature are the synthesis of documentary components and fiction, veracity, factuality, authenticity, objectivity, the use of real names, dates and geographical indications. At the same time, the reflection of real events and their participants is presented through the prism of the author’s self, and therefore subjectivity, personal component, merging of images of the author and the narrator are added to the leading features of nonfiction literature. The article focuses on the main structural and typological branches of nonfiction literature – historical nonfiction, literary biography, fictional journalism and memoirs. In compiling this classification, the main object of the non-fiction narrative was taken into account in the first place; sources of documentary information; varieties of author's presence in the text (in particular, as an outside observer, witness or main character); subjective factor of personal participation in the events described in the work, or personal acquaintance with the direct participants in the events; genre-typological characteristics of nonfictional works. The article highlights the main typological characteristics of each type of non-fiction, analyzes their genre system, presents the characteristics of varieties and subvarieties. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of memoirs, which is a complex and multilevel type of non-fiction, which, in turn, consists of several subvarieties – the memoirs, the autobiography, the diary, the epistolary. The article differentiates the subvarieties of memoir literature, considers options for the synthesis of its types and forms.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Bruce R. Burningham As I write these words, the world is still gripped by the COVID pandemic, and we have spent the better part of the past year hunkered down, "zooming" along, and rethinking all the things we used to take for granted. With the increasingly wider availability of COVID vaccines, we are starting to see a return to normalcy, but what "normal" might ultimately look like down the road is still up for debate. Still, the world of Cervantes scholarship proceeds apace. This Spring 2021 issue of Cervantes begins with three studies of the impact of Don Quixote on an increasingly globalized world, one that arguably began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Rendall's "Life is a Dream: Don Quijote and Honglou Meng" examines the way in which Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century, five-volume Chinese novel repeats many of the discursive gestures made famous by Cervantes, including the use of metafiction and what Rendall calls the iconoclastic questioning of received ideas. Rendall's study of Honglou Meng is followed by David Reher's study of Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil and his 2019 film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. "On the Shoulders of Giants: Social Fear and Male Self-Sufficiency in Cervantes and Gilliam" focuses specifically on the motif of giants in both Cervantes's and Gilliam's work, and argues that, while Cervantes's giants metaphorically demonstrate an anxiety of the unchanging—and unchangeable—abuses of the protagonist's social class, Gilliam's giants offer a less pessimistic approach to social change. Reher's work is then followed by Rosilie Hernández's examination of "desengaño" as it evolves in three interrelated works: Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, and Dale Wasserman's teleplay I, Don Quixote and subsequent musical Man of La Mancha. Following these first three articles, we present two more that also focus on Don Quixote but from within a decidedly seventeenth [End Page 7] century Spanish context. Luis López González's "Deadly Gaze and Divine Object: Marcela's Representation in Don Quijote" re-examines Cervantes's famously "proto-feminist" shepherdess (who is featured on the cover of this issue) and argues that Marcela is also constructed within a dialectical tradition of courtly love that sees women at one and the same time as both divine and dangerous. López González's piece is followed by Javier Lorenzo's "Sonnets over Forts: Rethinking Lyric Insertions in the Captive's Tale," which specifically links the narrative of this episode to two sonnets (also found in the novel) that treat the loss of La Goleta to the Ottoman Turks in 1574. The Spring 2021 issue of Cervantes then turns its attention to two pieces that examine Cervantes's other work. Felipe Ruan's "Crafting Factual Narratives: A Genealogy of Miguel de Cervantes's Información de Argel" analyzes the Información in order to explore the relationship between "documentary" texts and fiction, while Robin Kello's interview of LA-based playwright Julie Taiwo Oni explores her twenty-first-century theatrical adaptation of El retablo de las maravillas into The Woodingle Puppet Show. This issue concludes with three book reviews: José Montero Reguera on Antonio García Berrio's Virtus: El Q UIJOTE de 1615; William Clamurro on Clea Gerber's La genealogía en cuestión: Cuerpos, textos y reproducción en el Q UIJOTE de Cervantes; and Aliza Levenson and Ana Laguna on Luis Avilés's Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro. Thanks, as always, to our Associate Editors and other peer reviewers for all their hard work, to Ana Laguna for curating the book reviews, to María Dolores Morillo for helping me proofread the entire issue, and to John Beusterien for helping me manage the submissions process. [End Page 8] Copyright © 2021 Cervantes Society of America

Post-communist Interpretation of History in the Albanian Literature in Kosovo

This article focuses on stylistic choices in the novel Im atë donte Adolfin (My father loved Adolph) by the Albanian author in Kosovo Mehmet Kraja (2005) as a strategy to generate a post-communist perspective of interpreting history. By blending first-person narration as confidentiality and third-person narration as conventionality (Barthes, 1978), the possessive construction ‘my father’ in this literary text serves both as referential label and deictic, generating dual focalization (Phelan, 2005). The heterodiegetic narrator is positioned simultaneously as a neutral eye witnessing narrator and as a signal of subjectivity. Even in cases of intradiegetic role the narrator remains detached interweaving his voice with the voice of the character. The synchronized overt and distant narratorial stances in this novel correspond with the demonstration of historical discourse as both subjective and factual narration. The relationship between fiction and truth has been widely treated in the post-modern intellectual thought, and as Borg (2010) points out in his study on Beckett and Joyce, the radical narrative innovations are “examples of a peculiarly modernist engagement with the nature of factual and fictional truth” (p. 179), suggesting that in modern literary texts “every event exists factually and fictionally at the same time” (p. 187). As a resonance to Borg’s analysis of modernist literature, in Kraja’s novel the knowledge about history consists of both factual and imaginative elements, bringing “the moment of truth in all its potential” (p. 191).