Fantastic Characters Research Articles

The Embeddedness of Mind, Body and Spirit in Nature: An Exploration of Ecopsychological Tenets in The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien’s trilogy - The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955) - is among the most analysed and studied classics in the world. It contains various themes which can be explored from several perspectives and in different contexts. The way nature is represented with the attribution of strong agency and the significance of strong communication between the human psyche and nature are worth mentioning since the trilogy provides an opportunity to explore the ecopsychological cruciality of human-nature togetherness for tranquillity in the human soul and sanity in the human mind. Moreover, with fictional places like Mordor and Isengard, the trilogy brings the degradation and destruction of nature to attention. Elvish geographies and the Shire enable us to appreciate and celebrate reciprocal and affirmative relations with nature. The psychology, unity, and agency of Nature with spiritual and fantastic characters such as Ents are foregrounded in the novel. By focusing on the fictional characters, this article aims to explore the ecopsychological facets of the places in the trilogy and how the human psyche is affected depending on natural or greenless places.

Making the Fantastic Real: Exploring Transmedial Aspects of Cosplay Costumes

Abstract Cosplayers create elaborate costumes with fantastic details and effects imitating the visual and material culture artifacts and features of fictional characters. As such, cosplay costumes balance wearability for the cosplayer and accuracy to the selected character’s appearance. Further challenges to accurate portrayals are costumes that need to be animated or made from materials resembling the visuals originally created using animation or CGI. This article employs Tzvetan Todorov’s theory that suggests the fantastic is a liminal moment of hesitation between belief and disbelief. The author also draws on the concepts of Steven Shaviro’s “tactile convergence” and Sarah Gilligan’s “tactile transmediality,” where the material real-world qualities of cosplayers’ costumes cross between the fictional imaginative space of the story and the lived material body. This analysis further highlights how cosplayers spend extraordinary amounts of time and money on their costumes to portray fantastic characters with transmedial qualities and narratives regarding the character’s appearance.

Why are all dogs male?

Studies conducted over the past sixty years have reported stereotypical gender representation in school materials. Initiatives to counteract sexism have led to improvements, and the most overt gender-biased examples are less visible today. Despite this, studies still report gender imbalances. Since language has an enormous impact on how normative perceptions are created, increased knowledge about how we communicate and create knowledge about gender is needed. This study focuses on gender in EFL textbooks used in Swedish primary school. To reveal patterns of representation, a corpus was constructed and tagged to enable searches. The study reveals both equal and unequal representations. Equal patterns are shown in the numerical representation of proper names, and in verbs and adjectives collocating with females and males. However, animals and fantastic characters identified as either male or female in the books show traditional gender representations, with male characters not only occurring more frequently than equivalent female characters but also being represented as more active and innovative. The pronoun he is also considerably more common than she in the material.

Christmas at the Arcade: Public Spectacle, Consumer Capitalism, and the American Childhood

Christmas at the ArcadePublic Spectacle, Consumer Capitalism, and the American Childhood Ryan H. Reed (bio) The Dayton Arcade, like the rest of downtown Dayton, transformed into a dreamworld during Christmastime. Fantastic characters from tales of old marched down West Third Street, while the soft glow of lights, bright decorations, and the excitement of a reindeer pen at the courthouse led hundreds of Daytonians through a wonderland of Christmas cheer, and perhaps more importantly, Christmas presents. The Dayton Arcade remade itself during the holiday season, investing in print advertisements, decor, and ritual. Through this process, Arcade retailers created a hotbed for a new holiday commercial exchange that hinged on the parent-child gift-giving relationship. For many Daytonians, the parent-child relationship, reflected in the spatial and commercial holiday transformation of the Arcade, had already become an important element of childhood in America. The commercialization of Christmas stretches back to the nineteenth century. At that time, the rise of American middle-class culture fundamentally reshaped the holiday. Historian Stephen Nissenbaum argued in his history of Christmas, "Christmas itself had played a role in bringing about both the consumer revolution and the 'domestic revolution' that created the modern family."1 After the 1850s, Christmas celebration was radically transformed by middle-class values. A key component involved the commercialization of the holiday. In affixing the gift-giving relationship to the parent and child, new Christmas traditions, rooted in fantasy and wonder, [End Page 129] shaped the memory and identity of American children and adults. As many who personally experienced the Dayton Arcade at Christmas attest, this transformation generated powerful attachments to the space of the Arcade as a source of wonderment and joy. The evolution of the Christmas holiday is manifested in the Arcade's history. The Arcade opened in 1904 at a time when there was a marked increase in the commercialization of the Christmas holiday. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas celebrations differed greatly from what people recognize today. The Christmas holiday had its origins in medieval end-of-the-year celebrations. One such was Saturnalia, the Roman end-of-year festival. Other such celebrations included the visitation of Odin, the Festival of Lights, and the winter solstice. In medieval communities, end-of-the-year celebrations were characterized by "excess, carnality, and … 'social inversion.'"2 These types of practices were common throughout the world in agricultural societies. As Christian culture began to extend its sway over Northern Europe in the later Middle Ages and early modern era, the Christian holiday of the birth of Christ was grafted onto these local traditions. Visitors to the Arcade at the time of the first celebrations of Christmas would have experienced the frivolity of local European end-of-the-year celebrations akin to an "unrestrained carnival" or a "December Mardi Gras."3 At the end of the harvest, agricultural communities came together to commemorate a long year of work and shared in a common spirit of merriment and goodwill toward their fellow person. Peasants sought to suspend the course of everyday life through comedic representations of their rulers, sometimes grotesque or chaotic costuming, and extraordinary gaiety. Most especially, they targeted commonly understood hierarchies; they pretended (if only for a night) to become the local baron, and in turn, the baron became a peasant. The tradition of wassailing, typical among the lower classes of Europe from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, was characterized by poor revelers demanding gifts from more prosperous villagers and nobles upon threat of violence. When coupled with heavy consumption of alcohol, wassailing may have created a great deal of discomfort for the wealthier members of these agricultural societies. However, participation was largely voluntary. After all, the inversion of social roles meant that aristocrats were also exempt from their duties. The tradition served [End Page 130] as a peaceful way to address simmering frustrations revolving around inequality in societies that nonetheless possessed strong notions of mutual obligation. In treating the revelers, the prosperous and noble-born in the community acknowledged their dependence upon others in the community and their commitment to the collective whole. The pagan roots of Christmas were well known to the Puritans of New England. For...

Superman Takes a Taxi: Testing Theories of Validation with Inconsistencies in Fantastic Narratives

ABSTRACT According to theories of validation, people routinely check incoming information against prior knowledge during comprehension. On these theories, information is validated if it fits with prior knowledge. Some researchers argue that information needs to be successfully validated before being incorporated into the situation model. We report five experiments that tested these claims. In each experiment, participants read fantastic narratives with inconsistencies in the first half of the text. We measured the effect of these inconsistencies on subsequent reading times. In Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b, narratives were about familiar fantastic characters (e.g., Superman), and in Experiments 3a and 3b they were about unfamiliar characters. General linear models with fixed and random effects revealed that inconsistencies in the first half of the narrative (e.g., Superman taking a taxi) facilitated reading times on subsequent sentences that repeated the inconsistency (e.g., Experiments 1 and 3a) but novel inconsistencies did not (e.g., Superman running away from danger; Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3a). This facilitation disappeared when participants intentionally judged the plausibility of the inconsistency (Experiment 3b). Our findings suggest that during passive reading people incorporated information into their situation model even when it did not fit prior knowledge. Only when people made intentional evaluations did we find evidence that they did not incorporate inconsistencies into their situation models. We argue that these findings raise questions about theories of validation and provide suggestions for future research.

Демонологічні образи в романі Ю. Винничука «Аптекар»

The article analyzes the use of images of folk demonology, including witches, devils and others, by Yury Vynnychuk in the novel «Apothecary». The key factors of character formation of mythical characters have been revealed. The author's achievements are outlined in comparison with the folklore and fairy tale tradition. The writer moves away from the depiction of Ukrainian folklore characters. With the help of expanding the background, dialogues, building social connections, the fantastic characters in the novel are normalized, even domesticated. The peculiarity of the novel «Apothecary» consists in combining the real with the fantastic, giving color and identity to demonic images in the original author's reading of them. Among the images explored in the article are the following: a witch, a devil, a golem woman, a warlock, an alchemist, a werewolf, etc. It was found that the image of the witch is represented by two types. The first type is related to the modern stereotypical idea of the impossibility of the existence of such a being. Through the lens of the gaze of one of the main characters of the work, doctor Lukasz, who as a «scientist» is used to rationalizing everything he sees, the reader looks at women who go to prison due to accusations of witchcraft, and together with Lukasz understands the absurdity of these events. Tortured women confess to witchcraft, are forced to prove their own connection with diabolical forces, testify for themselves, sharing details of the witch's life. The second type of witches are «real» ones. The reader is offered an episode of witch orgies on Lysia Gora, which is replaced by a detailed description of the witch's life, presented without any comedy. Thanks to this technique, the image of the witch does not appear folk-comic, but original and very authentic. An old witch named Vyvdia is depicted as a recluse, she knows how to make magic potions, and often helps visitors solve personal problems for a fee. The author depicts the image of a witch-healer, a wise woman who knows about herbs and ancient wisdom, and personifies in it the second stereotypical image of a witch, which is related to the etymology of the name. Witch from the word «to know» («vidaty», that sounds similar to «vidma» (witch in Ukrainian)). The devil is personified by a character named Franz. Its peculiarity is the difference from the traditional depiction of this image in classical Ukrainian literature. Devil Franz appears as a descendant of the demonological images of the romantic tradition in Ukrainian literature, but was created in the vortex of the author's myth of Yury Vinnychuk. He is a unique character, different from his predecessors. It has been found that the devil and the witch are the most productive demonological images in the novel. Other fantastic creatures form a kind of artistic background for them, make their appearance organic. All demonological images are completely woven into the realistic course of events of the work. The article concludes that the demonological images depicted by Yury Vynnychuk in the novel «The Apothecary» are undoubtedly related to the literary tradition. This work reflects a long-standing culture of using mythical characters in works of various genres. As an expert in folkloristics and classical Ukrainian literature, Y. Vynnychuk skillfully weaves ancient folk beliefs into his work about the 17th century, playing with eras, weaving modern discourses into antiquity. The artistic world of the novel is saturated with images of Ukrainian and European demonology (the devil Franz, the witch Vivdia, the alchemist Kalkbrenner, his creation the golem Amalia, warlocks, werewolves, spirits, demons, etc.). These characters are surprisingly real, believable and incredible, belong to different eras, cultures and at the same time are very harmonious.

Фантастические существа в якутском зооморфном пантеоне: химеры и оборотни

The article is devoted to the study of the creatures in the Yakut zoomorphic pantheon. It is noted that fantastic qualities are an indispensable attribute of all zoomorphic characters in a view of the world and folklore of traditional culture. Special attention is paid to the analysis and typological ranking of chimeras and werewolves in Yakut folklore. Examples of fixation of other subgroups of the creatures are given. The problem is posed of constructing an exhaustive typology that allows ranking all the fantastic characters of the zoomorphic pantheon. The article contains many examples of fantastic characters taken from the Yakut epic.

Supernatural Characters in the Quasi-Historical Discourse of Modern Ukrainian Literature: Specificity and Functions

: The article is aimed at the study of Ukrainian quasi-historical novels of the early 21st century, characterized by the renunciation of “objectivity” of the narrative and emphasized the role of imagination. These are the pieces by Bakalets and Yarish (“From the Seventh Bottom”), Vynnychuk (“The Pharmacist”, “Lutetia”), and by Yatsenko (“Nechui. Nemov. Nebach”). The study reveals the features and functions of fantastic characters in the abovementioned novels. These fictional images of modern Ukrainian quasihistorical literary discourse are characterized by infernality, grotesque anthropomorphism, destruction of traditional antinomy “otherworldly– earthly/human”, philosophical and ironic coloring. Interpreting the fantasy in quasi-historical novels is expedient in the context of the global problem of perception of historical past by people of the 21st Century, with an emphasis on significant changes in public consciousness motivating writers to “Re-write/Reimagine the past”. The spread of this phenomenon reveals public distrust of the authorities, offering “correct” answers to the questions about past events, protest against permanent manipulation of historical facts (the tendency of growing consciousness and intellectualization of society).

Interfiguralitätsstrategien: Fontanes realistische Melusine als transfiktionales Phänomen

Abstract Realistic conceptions of genuinely fantastic literary or mythical characters, such as Theodor Fontane’s Melusine, represent what Umberto Eco refers to as “floating individuals.” These characters are transfictional as they are highly decontextualized from their narrative origin and thus a challenge for intertextuality and intermedia studies: the name implies a relationship with another text or medium but the representation does not offer any information about the relationship’s quality. To examine the range of (re-)presentation strategies and to shed some light on the transfictional background of the character as it is represented in Theodor Fontane’s novel Der Stechlin, I borrow ‘interfigurality’ as an umbrella term from Wolfgang G. Müller. Fontane’s myth-reflexive intermedia strategies come fully to the fore in contrast with the unknown novel Lady Melusine by Eufemia von Ballestrem on the one hand and in comparison with contemporary art on the other. The localization within an intermedia network reveals that the practice of the literary re-production of realistic characters as a “work on myth” (Blumenberg) is reflexive and critical or affirmative towards popular usage such as branding, labeling, or namedropping.

Hikmet Temel Akarsu’nun Çocuğa Yönelik Eserlerindeki Fantastik Karakterlerin Kişilik Özelliklerinin Analizi

Fantastic literature, which is also known as escape literature, stands out as a type of literature preferred by the authors with the unlimited imagination and self-expression opportunities it provides to its narrator. Especially in the recent period, the adaptation of some fantastic works to the cinema and the fact that these films have reached a high number of viewers have enabled the reader to show interest to the works that source them. This situation indirectly had a positive effect on other fantastic literature works. The fact that the works carrying such fantastic elements are interesting for children and young people has been seen as an educational opportunity and these works have also been used for educational purposes. In Hikmet Temel Akarsu's works aimed at children, it is seen that fantastic elements are used for educational purposes. The aim of this study is to determine the personality characteristics of the fantastic characters in Hikmet Temel Akarsu's works aimed at the child. In the research process, descriptive analysis method was used. The personality characteristics of the fantastic characters in the author's works directed towards the child were determined as environmentalism, benevolence and accuracy.

An Internet Meme as a Mean of Intercultural Communications

The article is devoted to the analysis of an internet meme as a means of intercultural communications. In our opinion memes reflect cultural stereotypes and phenomena of modern reality, which are relevant and interesting for Internet users. So, character memes are averaged portraits of representatives of certain professions or social strata; animals or fantastic characters. In general, the possibility of achieving a comic effect when using Internet memes of any type is related to the inclusion of the addressee in the context, the presence of certain preliminary knowledge. This is due to the relative fragility of the activity of memes. Distributing an Internet meme takes from several days to several years, including the process of its implementation in traditional areas of communication (although many memes disappear from active use without ever becoming known to a wide audience). After that, the replication process slows down or stops, the meme falls into the category of “old meme” (slaughterhouse) and is replaced by other, more recent memes. We made the conclusion that the possibility of successful implementation of many speech genres typical of Internet communication (understanding and comic effect) is associated with the definition of cultural connotations that Internet memes included in these genres have. An adequate interpretation of Internet memes requires a coincidence of the components of the cultural baggage of the participants in communication, a community of relevant presuppositions.

Scripted parallels: the paradoxical audacity of Scandal’s Papa Pope as the “Black fantastic”

ABSTRACTI theorize Rowan “Eli” Pope’s performance of Black masculinity on Scandal as a portrayal of what Iton terms the “black fantastic” (Iton, 2008. In search of the Black fantastic: Politics and popular culture in the post civil-rights era. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, p. 16). As a Black fantastic character, Rowan represents a material improvement in televised representations of Black masculinity; however, his character is theorized as paradoxical because he remains always already entrapped by the Black male as beast caricature. Although Rowan’s storylines and monologues do indeed refuse absolute foreclosure into the caricature—thereby signifying progressively deviant Black fantastic sensibilities (Iton, 2008)—ultimately his mitigated emancipation is dependent upon White male characters opposed to his own autonomy. As White male characters who lie, swindle, and murder, Fitzgerald Grant, Cyrus Beene, and Jake Ballard offer the primary assurance through scripted parallels that Rowan’s evil is not inherent to his Black masculinity. Ergo, I argue that Rowan simultaneously transforms and stagnates the television landscape by challenging and legitimizing the Black male as beast caricature. While the steadily increasing visibility of Black fantastic characters across multiple media genres is commendable, ideologically catering to Whiteness does not reflect innovative twenty-first-century television. Rather, such practices are tired and cliché—even in Shondaland.

The Real in the Magic: A Study of Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)

While many studies have focused on Salman Rushdie’s use of magic realism in his highly-acclaimed novels, the way it is employed in his children’s fiction remains understudied. This paper, hence, attempts to fill in this gap by applying Anne Hegerfeldt’s (2005)’s theoretical framework on magic realism onto its reading of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). This framework relies on five techniques or features namely: a realist mode of writing to describe fantastic events and characters; a marginalized focaliser; subverted scientific and historical discourses; a supernatural reality; and, finally, a literal manifestation of a figurative expression. This paper also suggests that Rushdie employs magic realism to undermine the realist narrative mode as well as scientific and historical discourses in order to present an alternative worldview that places narrative knowledge, gathered from stories with magical characters and events, as a legitimate source of knowledge regarding the world.

Unfolding of Romanian Fantasy Literature

민담에서 모호함과 마법은 자연의 법칙이 되며, 환상적 인물들과 사건은 필수적인 요소가 된다. 민담은 흔히 현실로부터 출발하지만 이내 일탈하여, 초현실 속에서 꿈의 세계가 아닌 인간이 추구하는 상상의 세계를 통과하는 데, 이는 환상계 속에서의 치환을 보여주는 전형적인 유형이다. 환상은 현실에서는 일어날 수 없는 사건들에 적절한 개연성을 부여하여 이 세계와 다른 세계의 경계를 허무는 것을 의미하게 된다. 루마니아 민담이 ‘환상성’ 을 담보할 수 있었던 것은 서사구조와 상징인물을 통한 여러 겹의 환상적 안전장치를 통해서이다. 구조적으로 볼 때, 민담의 서사전개 (도입상황 → 도입상황의 혼란과 난제 → 영웅적 행위에 의한 반전 → 상황의 재건 및 영웅의 보상)에 ‘서두와 결말의 동태’, ‘대조와 반복의 법칙’, ‘삼회화(三回化) 된 보조요소’ 등 다양한 서사법칙이 가미되어 환상구조의 발단과 매끄러운 전개를 보장하게 된다. 또한 다양한 모습으로 등장하는 인물들은 환상적 전통과 상징성을 위해 선과 악이라는 일반화된 관념을 대변하게 된다. 이 인물들 사이의 상관관계는 사건 진행의 간접적 반영이 되며, 더 나아가 사회질서와 연계하여 오랜 시간 그들 자신의 가치를 담보해준다. 루마니아 민담 으로부터 기원되고 구체화된 환상성의 전통이 근대에 이르러 크레안거에 의해 승계되고 진화하였다면, 본격적 예술장르로서 환상문학의 발전과 오늘날의 위상은 에미네스쿠와 엘리아데에 의해 이루어졌다고 할 수 있다. 민담의 다양한 실체들을 모태로 하여 전개, 발전된 루마니아 환상문학의 요소 들은 이후 20세기에 접어들면서 초현실주의나 부조리문학 등 다른 문학에 새로운 방향과 가능성을 마련해주었다.In folktales (especially in fairy tales), the ambiguity and the magic become the laws of nature, and the fantastic characters and episodes become essential elements. The story of folktale often departs from reality but deviates soon, and in a supernatural atmosphere it passes through the imaginary world that human beings pursue rather than the dream world. This is a typical type of substitution in the fantasy world. Fantasy gives appropriate probabilities to the episodes that can not happen in reality and breaks the boundaries of this world and the other world. The Romanian folktale was able to secure this fantasy through multiple layers of safeguards for fantasy literature such as narrative structures and symbolic characters. Structurally, various narrative laws or formulas (such as ‘basic formal unit of the beginning and ending of folktales’, ‘the law of contrast and repetition’, ‘auxiliary element of triple conversion’ etc.) are added to the unfolding of folk narration (initial situation → confusion and difficulties of initial situation → reversal by heroic action → reconstruction of situation and reward of hero), and then these ensure the smooth progress of narration and the development of the fantastic structure. In addition, characters appearing in various forms represent the generalized notion of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ for fantastic tradition and symbol. The correlation between these characters is an indirect reflection of the progress of the narration, and further assures their own value for a long time in connection with their social order. If the tradition of fantasy originated and embodied from Romanian folktales has been succeeded and evolved by Creangă during the transition to modern times, as a genuine art genre, the fantasy literature and its present status have been made by Eminescu and Eliade. The elements of Romanian fantasy literature, originated and developed with various figures of folktales, provided new directions and possibilities for other literatures, such as surrealism, absurd literature etc. in the 20th century.

Intersemiotic Bestiary

Abstract The phenomenon of intersemiotic translation from literature (source-sign) to graphic illustration (target-sign) is well known and has been exhaustively analyzed. Jakobson (2000: 114) defines the phenomenon as “transmutation⁄ or interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems”. This paper presents an intersemiotic translation of El libro de los Seres Imaginarios by Jorge Luis Borges, more specifically the chapter that describes a bestiary of Chinese fauna. Written in collaboration with Margarita Guerrero, El libro was first published in 1957 with the title Manual de Zoología Fantástica; later it was expanded and republished with the title El Libro de los Seres Imaginarios (“The Book of Imaginary Beings”). In this paper, we identify some formal aspects of the literary source-sign to be considered most relevant. Afterwards, we submit those aspects to graphic recreations directed by the construction of fantastic characters in the aesthetic domain of pixel art.

Flying to Neverland: How readers tacitly judge norms during comprehension

As readers gain experience with specific narrative worlds, they accumulate information that allows them to experience events as normal or unusual within those worlds. In this article, we contrast two accounts for how readers access information about specific narrative worlds to make tacit judgments of normalcy. We conducted two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants read stories about an ordinary character (e.g., a police officer in Boston) or a familiar fantastic character (e.g., Superman). Each story described a realistic event (e.g., the character being killed by bullets) or a fantastic event (e.g., bullets bouncing off the character's chest). Participants were faster to read events that were consistent with their prior knowledge about the story world. In Experiments 2a and 2b, participants read stories about familiar fantastic characters, unfamiliar fantastic characters (e.g., a Kryptonian named Dev-em), and unfamiliar ordinary characters. In Experiment 2a, participants were equally fast to read about the familiar and unfamiliar fantastic characters experiencing fantastic events, both of which were read faster than the unfamiliar ordinary characters sentences. In Experiment 2b, participants were fastest to read about unfamiliar ordinary characters experiencing realistic events and were equally slow for familiar and unfamiliar fantastic characters. Our experiments provide evidence that readers routinely use inductive reasoning to go beyond their prior knowledge when reading fictional narratives, affecting whether they experience events as normal or unusual.

Imagination, Computation, and Self-Expression: Situated Character and Avatar Mediated Identity

The ability to construct imaginative, computational self-representations such as characters in games and avatars in virtual worlds and social media can impact people’s self-perception in the real world and provide proxies for people to engage in communities as players, learners, and doers. It is clear, however, that some users view characters and avatars instrumentally to accomplish virtual tasks, whereas others see them as virtual selves for playful identity construction and performance. Open questions about design of character/avatar construction tools include better understanding the trade-offs between accommodating representation of aspects of users real selves vs. enabling extraordinary fantastic characters – and how enabling either plays a role in the users’ situated contexts, including the creation of coherent life stories, narratives of personal experience, and narratives of personal identity. This paper provides theory and pilot evidence as steps toward answering these questions. Our evidence was elicited using grounded theory techniques on data collected in a three-year design-based research study into fostering at-risk students’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning using virtual world technologies. 1 We propose a three-axis model of user stances in relationship to their avatars. Using insights from the cognitive science theory of conceptual blending in order to characterize users’ perspectives of their avatars as imaginative integrations of their real and virtual selves, we present a set of case studies illustrating users’ stances in terms of our three axes. The upshot is that students in the study tended to fall into one of three categories: (1) viewing their avatars as necessarily reflections of their real world identities, (2) viewing their avatars as mere proxies for building artifacts in the world, and (3) viewing avatars as characters external to themselves for engaging in a play of identity performance and presentation. Group (1) found the affordances of the virtual world tools they used to be inadequate, hence serving the needs of this group may require alternative design solutions in light of real world values, activities, and behaviors.

Magical Flight and Monstrous Stress: Technologies of Absorption and Mental Wellness in Azeroth

Videogame players commonly report reaching deeply "immersive" states of consciousness, in some cases growing to feel like they actually are their characters and really in the game, with such fantastic characters and places potentially only loosely connected to offline selves and realities. In the current investigation, we use interview and survey data to examine the effects of such "dissociative" experiences on players of the popular online videogame, World of Warcraft (WoW). Of particular interest are ways in which WoW players' emotional identification with in-game second selves can lead either to better mental well-being, through relaxation and satisfying positive stress, or, alternatively, to risky addiction-like experiences. Combining universalizing and context-dependent perspectives, we suggest that WoW and similar games can be thought of as new "technologies of absorption"--contemporary practices that can induce dissociative states in which players attribute dimensions of self and experience to in-game characters, with potential psychological benefit or harm. We present our research as an empirically grounded exploration of the mental health benefits and risks associated with dissociation in common everyday contexts. We believe that studies such as ours may enrich existing theories of the health dynamics of dissociation, relying, as they often do, on data drawn either from Western clinical contexts involving pathological disintegrated personality disorders or from non-Western ethnographic contexts involving spiritual trance.

Photorealistic Rendering: Making the Virtual into Reality

Studies of the optical properties of translucent materials help computer graphics wizards dream up ever more realistic scenes of fantastic movie characters and industrial design prototypes.

Florante at Laura and the History of the Filipino Book

The metrical romance Florante at Laura by Francisco Baltazar (1788–1862) is a unique case in the history of Philippine literature and publishing. It holds the distinction of being the only poem published in the country that has not gone out of print since its first publication, that has been translated into various local and foreign languages, and that continues to be read to this day. Baltazar, popularly known as Balagtas, has been hailed as the greatest of Tagalog poets and his Florante at Laura acclaimed as a masterpiece.1 But beyond literary merit, what has ensured the survival of both poet and poem through the years is the great historical, social, and cultural value they have been granted. The poem was written while Balagtas was serving time in a Manila prison, beginning around 1835 or 1836, and published in 1838 after his release. It comprises 399 monorhyming dodecasyllabic quatrains in Tagalog, and its original full title is Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa kahariang Albania, kinuha sa madlang "cuadro historico" o pinturang nagsasabi sa mga nangyayari nang unang panahon sa imperio ng Grecia at tinula ng isang matuwain sa bersong Tagalog (The History of Florante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania, based on various "historical scenes" or portraits relating events in ancient times in the Greek Empire and written by one who delights in Tagalog verse). The poem is, as one critic put it, "romantic and lyrical in inspiration, social in intent, and allegorical in conception."2 At one level, and as its title suggests, Florante at Laura is a love story. Balagtas drew from the literary tradition of courtly love in fashioning [End Page 131] Florante as the suffering lover, Laura as the beautiful beloved, and their love impeded by powerful forces. At the time of the poem's writing, Balagtas was himself an unfortunate suitor, imprisoned on false charges by a rich and influential rival. However, he apparently set out to do more with the poem than merely give expression to his misfortunes in romance. He indicated other levels of meaning in his preface, "Sa Babasa Nito" (To the Reader): Kung sa biglang tingi'y bubot at masaklap palibhasa'y hilaw at mura ang balat, nguni't kung namnamin ang sa lamang lasap, masasarapan din ang babasang pantas. (At a glance, this may look unripe and sour, because its rind is still green and immature, but when savoured, the taste of its meat will be enjoyed even by the discriminating reader.)3 Balagtas was thought to have employed elements far removed from nineteenth-century Philippine society to get his poem past the strict censorship of the government and the Church. Thus his fantastic characters and settings have been regarded as symbolic, and Florante at Laura has come to be read consequently as a stirring piece of patriotism—a depiction of the sufferings of the Filipino people under the oppressive Spanish colonial regime. Balagtas is now a Filipino hero and Florante at Laura one of the country's sacred texts. It was the longing for and imagining of a Philippine nation that engendered the secular canonization of the poet and his poem. This is evident not only in the historical developments that established, celebrated, and preserved Balagtas and Florante at Laura as part of the national heritage of the Philippines, but also in the printed versions of the poem themselves, which display this nationalist sentiment at work. Many volumes have already been written on the poet and the poem; however, very little attention has been paid to Florante at Laura's history as a book. This study seeks to address such a gap in scholarship. Premised on the concept of the book as a cultural artifact and its life cycle—publishing, manufacture, distribution, reception, and survival—influenced by political, social, intellectual, and commercial factors, it explores how Florante at Laura has survived in its printed form.4 This study surveys the publishing history of...