Fictional Storytelling Research Articles

Storytelling for Social Justice: Reconceptualizing Invisibility, Legitimacy, and Self-Censorship via Stories of Failure

ABSTRACT Building upon scholarship on stories – including oral-history and oral-tradition – this article considers often-silenced narratives in the form of stories of failures. Comparison between empirical research and qualitative methodologies highlight value of fictional storytelling, which has been mobilized by researchers to protect the anonymity of vulnerable groups and the intersectionally marginalized in research. While hierarchies in power lead to self-censorship and self-delegitimization as observed by bell hooks and Paulo Freire, stories of failure may resist social pressures to present successes – which in themselves have led to widely disseminated cases of academic fraud. Additionally, stories of failures may help acknowledge Kemmis and Mezirow’s considerations of negative emotions as valid, toward resolution, resistance, and social change. Stories may help elucidate the hidden curriculum, which confounds efforts toward social justice under Rawlsian theories. Lastly, these stories may elucidate the impacts of interest convergence under critical race theory, towards the promotion of social justice intersectionally.

Creature Features: Character Production and Failed Explanations in Fiction, Folklore, and Theorizing

Abstract Fictional realism is the view that creatures of fiction exist. Mythical realism is the view that creatures of myth and mistaken theories exist. Call the combined view “Ecumenical Realism.” We critically evaluate three arguments for Ecumenical Realism and argue they are unsound because fictional storytelling differs from mistaken theorizing in important ways. We think these considerations support a more conservative view, “Sectarian Realism,” which results from subtracting “creatures of mistaken theorizing” from Ecumenical Realism. We close by considering an important challenge to Sectarian Realism involving immigrants in fiction.

Book reading: a compensation for rare personal contacts

This article deals with four books by Matjaž Kmecl, which belong to the early period of his writing academic and student manuals (Mala literarna teorija / Little Literary Theory, Od pridige do kriminalke / From Sermon to Criminal Story, Rojstvo slovenskega romana / The Birth of the Slovenian Novel) and a collection of essays (Slovenska postna premišljevanja / Slovenian Lenten Meditations). I present them in a way that summarizes Kmecl’s innovations in literary-historical writing, while at the same time recreating the experiences of a student on the path of becoming a professional reader. The discussions on the rise of the Slovenian bourgeoisie and fictional storytelling in the second half of the 19th century, as well as the reflections based on personal experiences from the times of crisis just before the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation, are permeated by the same attitude from the author: a witty discovery of the natural primordiality and integrity of existence, a tireless gathering of evidence for perseverance, defiance, vitality and faithfulness in the face of despondency, fear, and inhibition. This attitude is rooted in Kmecl’s insightful analyses of the literary past and evolves into a sympathetic assessment of contemporary anomies. In the former, in particular, he recognizes the rich cultural capital that generations of creators have accumulated, despite weak political and economic power, and passed on to their contemporaries and successors with the hope for a self-confident survival of the Slovenian people.

The fictional and transmedia representation of the urban space in the historical thriller: La Peste

La Peste series (Movistar Plus+) represented a pre-pandemic benchmark in transmedia and hybrid (online and offline) fictional storytelling. This research delves into the keys for the construction of suspense through the development of interactive actions that place the public in a leading position in the story through the dialogue between geographical, fictional and expanded space. Therefore, we will examine the resignification of the city through the image built up by the participation of the viewer –in the series– and the user –in the transmedia actions–. We address both the study of the fictional and augmented space, taking into account the territory occupied by the different strata that made up the city in the sixteenth century, and the processes of expansion of the contents through interactive cartographies, movie maps, and Alternative Reality Games (ARG). As a result, we observe an expansion of the series through the metaphor of the map in an expedition that flits between past and present; fiction and reality; geographical space and cyberspace; the traditional medium –television series– and multiplatform formats, which produces at the same time a novel approach to the urban space of Seville from an experiential perspective.

The personal and the fictional: Aesthetic mediation in the Indian documentary

This article traces two interrelated strands of documentary film aesthetics in India that have steadily developed since the early 2000s. One concerns the presiding influence of personal narratives and subjectivity, manifesting in diverse thematic interrogations. The other relates to the increased tendencies of working with the cinematographic tropes and idioms of fictional storytelling. These directions, evolving over distinctive historical circumstances, have significantly revised the generic assumptions of the documentary. Two films feature centrally in this discussion, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing and Shaunak Sen’s All that Breathes. Both uniquely explore the personal and fictional registers of working with the genre. While Kapadia intimately thinks through the reigning political crises in India, Sen devises inventive means to visualize the graded, interrelated layers of ecological catastrophe in the world’s most polluted capital city. A critical review of these films seeks to understand the emerging narratorial, formal and technical logic informing the hybrid nature of contemporary documentaries and their intersecting issues.

Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse

Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse

Storytelling as Playful Practice toward Social Cohesion and Overcoming the Fear of Death

Approaching Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s 2015 film, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl through an evolutionary literary perspective draws attention to the adaptive advantages of fictional storytelling with respect to the film’s treatment of three key universals of human evolution: the propensity toward social integration; overcoming one’s fear of death and dealing with grief; and transcending the emotional anxiety that accompanies the incomprehensible meaninglessness of a life that ends, inevitably, in death.

“La carne oscura de Fe”: Enfleshment and Subjectivity in Fe en Disfraz, by Mayra Santos-Febres

Aligned with the proposal of Sylvia Wynter in “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto” (2007), Mayra Santos-Febres used fictional storytelling to uphold new modes of being in Fe en Disfraz (2009). In this novel, Fe Verdejo is an Afro-Venezuelan historian working in the United States who activates connections with enslaved female ancestors when she finds some of their personal belongings and writings. This article analyzes the story of Fe (Faith, in English) as an example of fictional storytelling that challenges historiography and opposes the dehumanization of black females. Fe en Disfraz explores history and suffering, key elements in Western philosophy’s delimitation of humanhood, to uphold black subjectivity. It portrays ancestry and spirituality as crucial elements to contemplate black womanhood. Being mindful of contextual differences, I put Santos-Febres’ representation of black womanhood in dialogue with scholarship on black subjectivity, like those of Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Winter, Alexander G. Weheliye and Michelle Wright. Beyond a debate on power and oppression from the standpoint of those who are marginalized in these discussions, both as subjects and contributors, I add to an ongoing examination of the role of creative literature in reevaluating academic knowledge production.

How Audiences Engage With Drama: Identification, Attribution and Moral Approval.

Fictional storytelling has played an important role in human cultural life since earliest times, and we are willing to invest significant quantities of time, mental effort and money in it. Nonetheless, the psychological mechanisms that make this possible, and how they relate to the mechanisms that underpin real-world social relationships, remain understudied. We explore three factors: identification (the capacity to identify with a character), moral approval and causal attribution with respect to a character’s behaviour in live performances of two plays from the European literary canon. There were significant correlations between the extent to which subjects identified with a character and their moral approval of that character’s behaviour that was independent of the way the play was directed. However, the subjects’ psychological explanations for a character’s behaviour (attribution) were independent of whether or not they identified with, or morally approved of, the character. These data extend previous findings by showing that moral approval plays an important role in facilitating identification even in live drama. Despite being transported by an unfolding drama, audiences do not necessarily become biased in their psychological understanding of why characters behaved as they did. The psychology of drama offers significant insights into the psychological processes that underpin our everyday social world.

Preparing middle level teachers through a collaborative documentary novel study

This article describes how preservice teachers (and one inservice teacher) gained content knowledge and pedagogical skills through reading a documentary novel, a genre that combines fictional storytelling with historical primary sources. Preservice teachers read the novel as a required text in a site-based undergraduate course focused on children’s and young adult literature, while an inservice teacher conducted a novel study with her fifth-grade class using the same text. Analysis of course documents, observation notes, and individual and focus group interview transcripts highlighted layers of learning for inservice and preservice teachers and their young adolescent students that supported curriculum and instruction characteristics of successful middle school classrooms. Findings revealed that incorporating a documentary novel study in preservice teacher coursework resulted in increased content knowledge and pedagogical skills necessary for engaging middle level students in learning experiences around integrative and challenging texts. Furthermore, purposeful instruction around a documentary novel featuring highly relatable adolescent characters and a plot that integrated world and everyday life events fostered deep thinking and connections for middle grades students around themes of justice within the context of family, friends, and school and in the shadow of a major political crisis.

‘I know death. He’s got many faces:’ The presence of death in young peoples’ media

ABSTRACT The repeated use of death as a plot point or dramatic turn in the context of fictional storytelling might appear shallow and (occasionally) distasteful. Yet, the normative presence of death in drama serve as constant reminders that life and lives (including our own) will undoubtedly end. Death awareness and the power and intensity of death over life shifts across a lifespan and over time. This Special Edition holds an interest in the ways death remains in constant attendance, often as a veiled and transformed concept in our everyday lives (e.g. humour and entertainment). It specifically considers engagements with concepts of death accessed by young people, or exchanges (e.g. memes) across media platforms adopted by young people. Scholars were invited to give consideration to the manner in which death is woven into the stories and images that young people consume (often independently), and changing patterns of communication (the web is awash in death jokes and memes mocking our fragile mortality) and language in an attempt to stay abreast of the transformative nature and breadth of death as an inescapable concept.

Transmediating difference: Fictional filter bubbles and transmedia storytelling

Transmedia storyworlds often stem from a blockbuster “anchor property” that connects numerous extensions in multiple media forms. Consequently, transmedia can potentially diversify the media industry’s narratives since each medium may follow a different character whose perspective reinterprets the storyworld’s central themes and events. However, this article argues that a narrative strategy has emerged for “transmediating difference,” wherein politically contested storylines, LGBTQ characters, and the perspectives of women and people of color are sectioned off in low-budget transmedia extensions while blockbuster narratives remain primarily the domain of straight, able-bodied, white male protagonists. This story structure reveals the resiliency of industry assumptions about marketability while also isolating the experience of transmedia audiences, allowing companies to profit from inclusive and sanitized versions of the same narrative world. Like algorithmic “filter bubbles,” transmediating difference undermines cultural pluralism, and ushers in a paradoxical new form of invisibility despite increasingly diverse representation.

A Study on the Design and Application of Fictional Storytelling in Online Learning of Computer Security

Computer security is an important part of the computer science (CS) curriculum in all kinds of universities. Although the educational approach tends to be highly technical and practical, it cannot be avoided that some understanding and memorizing of the core concepts is necessary beforehand. One method that has been found to work in favor of human psychology, and of special interest in the case of online learning, where student motivation is at a higher stake, would be to present such content as memorable and relatable situations to the reader, using some form of fictional storytelling. However, this approach must always serve its educational purpose first, following a set of sound design principles. This paper presents a study including 111 participants to evaluate the convenience of using a digital book called the “novelette”, which relies on storytelling, to teach computer security concepts in the CS degree of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), a 100% online university. The study involved two questionnaires to gather quantitative and qualitative information about the format, content and students’ perception. This study shows that the validity and usefulness of this approach is on par with traditional ones, but also has a higher impact on student motivation and self-perception of the acquired knowledge.

Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and beyond, edited by Carolina Cupane, Bettina Krönung

Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and beyond, edited by Carolina Cupane, Bettina Krönung

Proto-Transmedial Narrative Structures: Lewis Carroll’s A Tangled Tale

This paper explores A Tangled Tale, a collection of mathematical puzzles that Charles Ludwick Dodgson serialized in The Monthly Packet between 1880 and 1885. The hybrid narrative patterns that present mathematical questions by means of fictional storytelling are a unique form of scientific knowledge dissemination that anticipates the breakdown of narrative linearity and the emergence of multiform formats present in transmedia. An inquiry into the Rule of Three and infinite regress tie the knots of a tale that highlights crucial insights on the algorithmic foregrounding of the strategies of transmedia design. Such strategies can be seen as the intersection of narrative as well as mathematical expertise that turn the media galaxy into a cosmic affair.

The Narrative Competence of Bilingual Jamaican Creole- and English-Speaking Preschoolers.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to characterize narrative competence of typically developing bilingual children using Jamaican Creole (JC) and English. Method Story comprehension and fictional storytelling tasks in JC and English were completed by 104 bilingual preschoolers aged 4-6 years. Story comprehension was analyzed using inferential story comprehension questions representing Blank's Question Hierarchy. Fictional storytelling was analyzed using the Monitoring Indicators of Scholarly Language framework for narrative macrostructure and microstructure. Results Story comprehension was significantly correlated within each language, but only questions from Level 4 of Blank's Question Hierarchy showed significant correlations between languages. Fictional storytelling was significantly better in English than in JC for macrostructure (total score, internal response, plan, consequence) and microstructure (total score, adverbs, elaborated noun phrases). Story complexity in JC and English was significantly correlated. In terms of developmental effects, children's macrostructure and story complexity appear to be better at 4 years than 5 years, with English outperforming JC. Furthermore, age correlated with story comprehension in JC. Conclusion Comparison of narrative competence in bilingual children provides much needed insights into language development, with examination of JC and English bilinguals representing an understudied bilingual context.

The Pleasures of Imagination. Aspects of Fictionality in the Poetics of the Age of Enlightenment and in Present-Day Theories of Fiction

AbstractInvestigations into the history of the modern practice of fiction encounter a wide range of obstacles. One of the major impediments lies in the fact that former centuries have used different concepts and terms to designate or describe phenomena or ideas that we, during the last 50 years, have been dealing with under the label of fiction/ality. Therefore, it is not easy to establish whether scholars and poets of other centuries actually do talk about what we today call fiction or fictionality and, if they do, what they say about it. Moreover, even when we detect discourses or propositions that seem to deal with aspects of fictionality we have to be careful and ask whether these propositions are actually intended to talk about phenomena that belong to the realm of fiction/ality. However, if we want to gain some knowledge about the history of fiction/ality, we have no other choice than to tackle the arduous task of trying to detect similarities (and differences) between the present-day discourse on fictionality and (allegedly) related discourses of other epochs. The goal of this paper is to make a small contribution to this task.The starting point of the paper are two observations, which also determine the approach I have chosen for my investigations. 1) In the 18thcentury the terms »fiction« or »fictionality« do not seem to play a significant role in the discussion of art and literature. However, some propositions of the discourse on imagination, one of the most prominent discourses of the Age of Enlightenment, seem to suggest that this discourse deals more or less explicitly with questions regarding the fictionality of literary artefacts as we conceive it today. 2) The concepts of imagination and fictionality are also closely linked in present-day theories of fiction. Naturally, the question arises how the entanglement of the concepts of fictionality and imagination can be understood in a historical perspective. Can it function as a common ground between 18th-century and present-day conceptions of fiction/ality? Is imagination still used in the same ways to explain phenomena of fictionality or have the approaches evolved over the last 250 years and if yes, then how? These kinds of questions inevitably lead to one major question: What do 18th-century and present-day conceptions of fiction/ality have in common, how much and in what ways do they differ?For heuristic reasons, the article is subdivided according to what I consider the three salient features of today’s institutional theories of fiction (i. e. theories which try to explain fictionality as an institutional practice that is determined and ruled by specific conventions): fictive utterance (aspects concerning the production of fictional texts), fictional content (aspects concerning the narrated story in fictional texts) and fictive stance (aspects concerning the reader’s response to fictional texts). The article focusses on the English, French and German-speaking debates of the long 18thcentury and within these discourses on the most central and, therefore, for the development of the concept of fiction/ality most influential figures. These are, most notably, Madame de Staël, Voltaire, Joseph Addison, Georg Friedrich Meier, Christian Wolff, the duo Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger as well as their adversary Johann Christoph Gottsched.The relevance of the article for a historical approach to the theory of fiction lies in the following aspects. By means of a tentative reconstruction of some carefully chosen propositions of 18th-century discourse on imagination I want to show that these propositions deal in some way or other with literary phenomena and theoretical concepts that in present-day theory are addressed under the label of fiction/ality. By comparing propositions stemming from 18th-century discourse on imagination with some major assertions of present-day theories of fiction I try to lay bare the similarities and the differences of the respective approaches to literary fiction and its conceptualisations. One of the major questions is to what extent these similarities and differences stem from the differing theoretical paradigms that are used to explain literary phenomena in both epochs. I venture some hypotheses about the influence of the respective theoretical backgrounds on the conceptions of fictionality then and today. An even more intriguing question seems to be whether the practice of fictional storytelling as we know and conceive it today had already been established during the 18thcentury or whether it was only in the process of being established.

Against mythical backward-looking creationism

ABSTRACT I want to hold an original position as regards the metaphysics of mythical entities, a kind of fictional entities that, typically at least, are not recognised as such by their purported authors, for they entertain no relevant act of make-believe. This position is weak mythical creationism, which lies between straightforward mythical creationism, the position holding that all mythical entities are on a par by being created by their purported authors (Braun, David. 2005. “Empty Names, Fictional Names, Mythical Names.” Noûs 39: 596–631; Salmon, Nathan. 2002. “Mythical Objects.” In Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics, edited by J. K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and D. Shier, 105–123. New York: Seven Bridges Press; Zvolenszky, Zsofia. 2016. “Fictional Characters, Mythical Objects and the Phenomenon of Inadvertent Creation.” Res Philosophica 93: 311–333), and mythical anticreationism, for which mythical entities are no artefactual creations (Goodman, Jeffrey. 2014. “Creatures of Fiction, Objects of Myth.” Analysis 74: 35–40; Goodman, Jeffrey. 2017. “On Inadvertently Created a, Fictional Storytelling, and Scientific Hypothesizing.” Res Philosophica 94: 177–188). According to weak mythical creationism, one must draw a distinction between standard and nonstandard mythical entities, i.e. legendary entities and post-empirical posits. For unlike legendary entities, a post-empirical posit is an artefact created only later by an audience. Thus, weak creationism rejects the form of mythical backward-looking creationism that straightforward mythical creationism entails: namely, the idea that the merely purported authors of post-empirical posits are nevertheless their original creators.

La polifonía del universo concentracionario en “El largo viaje” de Jorge Semprún

En este trabajo de investigación abordamos los mecanismos narrativos de la novela El largo viaje (1963), escrita por Jorge Semprún a modo de cierre vital de su experiencia en el campo de concentración nazi de Buchenwald. De esta manera, identificamos dos elementos fundamentales en la estructuración de la novela y que tienen una dimensión funcional insoslayable: las trampas de la memoria y la clandestinidad en el exilio. Cada uno de ellos, además, orientados hacia desvirtuar continuamente cualquier sentido único o cualquier certeza irrevocable. Por así decirlo, todas las categorías de las escrituras del yo se cumplen en esta magnífica novela, pero Semprún consigue dar un paso más allá. Su potencia literaria radica en la construcción de una narración memorialística, autobiográfica y en diferentes grados ficcional, pero convirtiendo dicha experiencia literaria en una realidad compartida y polifónica en el marco de la experiencia concentracionaria. En definitiva: el uso de la fragmentariedad desde el polo de la emisión del discurso, así como el empleo de la técnica del collage narrativo, no son estrictamente semprunianos, como es natural. Pero sí destacan en esta obra por tener una configuración todavía moderna y marcada por las vicisitudes históricas de toda una generación europea. In this research we tackle the narrative mechanisms of the novel Le Grand Voyage (1963), written by Jorge Semprún as a vital closure of his experience in the Nazi’s concentration camp of Buchenwald. In this way, we identify two fundamental elements in the novel’s structure and which have an unavoidable functional dimension: the traps of memory and the secrecy in exile. Each of them, moreover, oriented towards continually distorting any single meaning or any irrevocable certainty. In other words, all the categories of the scriptures of the self correspond in this magnificent novel, but Semprún manages to go a step further. Its literary power lies in the construction of a memorial, autobiographical and different fictional storytelling, but turning said literary experience into a shared and polyphonic reality within the framework of the concentration experience. In short: the use of fragmentarity from the pole of speech issuance, as well as the use of the narrative collage technique, are not strictly Semprunian, as is natural. But they do stand out in this work for having a still modern configuration, marked by the historical vicissitudes of an entire European generation.

The Past Isn’t What It Used To Be

Critical feminist theorists have pointed out how the idea of the singular, revolutionary Act tends to reinforce masculinist and colonialist imaginaries. In this essay, I argue for the need to elaborate other ways of revolting. Through a reading of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, I explore ways to consider the relationship between embodied acts of resistance and past bodies’ gestures, as a strategy to reformulate resistance away from the single Act, often enacted by an autonomous, male subject. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman merges archival research with fictional storytelling, giving voice to young, black women in the United States in the early 20th century. I argue that, when reading Hartman’s text through feminist ontologies of interdependency, acts of revolt appear as collective gestures, re-appearing through time, rather than as singularevents. thus, this reading of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, demonstrates how we can rethink the singular Act of resistance.