Narrative Genre Research Articles

The miraculous in Islamic prose fairy tale talk by choice

The text you sent is a summary of a research paper that deals with the topic of the marvelous in Islamic prose, especially the narrative genre of the fable, which involves transformation and metamorphosis. The paper examines the main features of this genre, and studies the conceptual variation of the marvelous in light of the Islamic culture. The paper also explores the cultural sources that nourish the concept by reviewing the Arabic heritage in this regard, and relates it to the technique of imagination that the Arab creative used in his texts, which was evident in its reliance on the lexical dimension, as the old Arabic dictionaries did not lack words, such as the marvelous, the wonder, and the awe. The paper studies the character, the time, and the place, and tries to shed light on the effectiveness of the narration by referring to the main character and the secondary character, whether human or animal, and the paper aims to clarify the marvelous time, dealing with it in terms of retrieval and deletion, as well as the paper studies the place and its patterns in the text, analyzing the overall view in the narrative fabric and monitoring the most important variables on the sentence of transformation in it.

Психоаналитический случай как нарратив и текстовая репрезентация пациента

In the article a special type (form) of clinical history – a psychoanalytic case is considered as a narrative genre that has developed in the discursive practice of psychoanalysis at the intersection of medicine and literature under the influence of S. Freud’s classical works. According to the narrative approach, author of the article discusses, how the narration is constructed within the framework of psychoanalytic cases; the functions of case-narratives are clarified. It is noted, that in practice these forms of narration serve as models for understanding and structuring the experience of dialogic interaction between the analyst and his patient (analysand). At the same time, a case narrative is a means of professional self-identification, self-presentation and positioning of a practicing specialist in his collegial environment, a way to maintain and strengthen a sense of belonging to the psychoanalytic community. Apart from this, a psychoanalytic theory also has a narrative basis, which is extremely heterogeneous. Behind any theoretical construct of classical psychoanalysis there are one key (basic) narrative and series of additional ones. These are not only clinical stories, but also myths, literary works, psychobiographies of outstanding personalities. In content, a psychoanalytic case is always an epistemological narrative, a story about self-knowledge and knowledge of each other; struc-turally, it is a double narrative that unites two stories correlated with each other: “raw” or primary, compiled from the words of the analysand and his / her relatives, and processed or secondary, formed as a result of the analysis and including the dynamics of the transformative psychotherapeutic relationships. It is also stressed, that a distinctive feature of the narration in the case is the use of embedded narratives, in particular, analysand’s dreams or fantasies. Two questions are discussed: what happens when analysand becomes the personage of his psychoanalyst, and how we can characterize the representation of patient’s personality in the text of a psychoanalytic case.

The Power of Graphic Narrative for Dementia Stories: Trauma, Aesthetics and Resilience in Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (2012) and Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s (2013)

This article has three aims: it first argues that the aesthetics of graphic novels, rarely considered in Humanities dementia research, are especially suited to narratives about traumatic dementia. Second, it argues that, within the graphic narrative genre, both indirection and realism can facilitate dementia representations. Third, it argues that the realism each author uses ‘corrects’ well-meaning, idealising, dementia images aimed at challenging negative stereotypes. In this study of Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles and Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s, I show that each benefits from a particular style of realism that I call, for Tangles, ‘abstract realism’, and for Aliceheimer’s ‘adapted’ or ‘fantastic’ realism. Each graphic realism style opens up for viewers the trauma of dementia for both the dementia subject herself and for those caring for her. Images move beyond stereotypes (while not idealising), furthering, via compassion, empathy and resilience, our understanding of this challenging condition so much a part of life today.

(Un)Usual Stories about Drunkenness: An Example of Vinjak as a Cultural-Symbolic Resource

This paper aims to map and analyse the central themes in narratives of alcohol intoxication caused by a popular type of strong alcoholic beverage – vinjak. Stories of being “drunk on vinjak” are distinctive compared to other forms of intoxication, and the specific events and atmosphere of such drunkenness are attributed to the characteristics of said beverage. Vinjak thus takes on a specific cultural-symbolic potential within and, accordingly, to the broader social context in which it was created and is being consumed. Narratives of drinking and intoxication are generated post-festum, through the reconstruction of events and actors, and are treated as a specific form of narrative genre. By emphasizing and exploiting the mismatch and lack of order, as well as the transgression of social rules and conventions, drunken stories are intended to arouse curiosity and ‘scandalise’ the listeners, while also sending cultural messages about the potential risks and consequences of vinjak-intoxication.

Designing and sharing travelogues on Chinese WeChat Moments: a social semiotic analysis of Nine Picture Limit

Sharing travel experiences through words, pictures and videos on social media has become a popular activity and means of presenting the self. In China, WeChat is the most widely used social media platform. It offers the Moments (朋友圈pinyin: péng yǒu quān, literally ‘Circle of Friends’) feature which provides a tool for users to post photos, short videos and accompanying texts. This study investigates how digital travelogues are technologically afforded and multimodally constructed on WeChat while exploring users’ self-presentation in their travelogues as presented on Moments. To this end, a total of 115 WeChat Moments screenshots are examined. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, this study examines these travelogues’ multimodal design, how social life is presented in them and how users display their identity. Specifically, the authors examine how the practice of the Nine Picture Limit (九宫格, pinyin: jiǔ gōng gé) of WeChat Moments is multimodally constructive for producing travelogues. They found that the multimodal strategies adopted in the Nine Picture Limit are not only a matter of designed aesthetics or style for narrating travel experiences, but also a purposeful process of working with images for self-presentation in the spatial narrative. Furthermore, the possibilities that a digital travelogue is viewed as a creative narrative genre in Moments is addressed. Finally, related exploratory research interests such as digital identities, authenticity of travel and mobility are also discussed.

On Antiutopianism in Pragmatics and Narrative

ABSTRACT This article refurbishes the view of antiutopianism as the ruling orthodoxy of late-capitalist common sense (pragmatics) and writings plus media (narrative). After a half-century descent into a contemporary neofeudalism (Fascism 2.0), the operation of totalized antiutopianism on utopian narrative genres is powerfully evident in the TV series Game of Thrones, a rigidly Social Darwinist fantasy world, reveling in mass slaughters and presupposing neofeudalism: a black fable for lesioned personalities.

Theorizing exclusionary and inclusionary people-making: from narrative genres to collective learning processes

ABSTRACT The article offers a normatively-informed theorization of people-making as a (blocked) collective learning process. More specifically, people-making, namely the mobilization of individuals into a collective actor, draws symbolic boundaries around the sovereign, thereby contributing to the imagination of ‘the people’ in more inclusionary or exclusionary ways. To account for differences along this continuum, Habermas’ notion of collective learning is introduced, resulting in the conceptualization of inclusionary (exclusionary) people-making in terms of (blocked) collective learning processes. The authors supplement Habermas’ account and situate it in the context of people-making by arguing that shared stories, in particular their underlying genres, can produce more or less (un)certainty, which in turn enables or blocks collective learning processes. Drawing on Frye, four genres are distinguished: romance, comedy, tragedy and irony. The theorization of how genres are variously associated with uncertainty leads to the argument that mobilizations drawing on romance and, to a lesser extent, comedy can be expected to block collective learning processes, thus to be more exclusionary. In contrast, mobilizations relying on irony and, to a lesser extent, tragedy, can be expected to enable collective learning, thus to be more inclusionary.

Her Feet Hurt: Female Body and Pain in Chen Duansheng's Zaisheng yuan (Destiny of Rebirth)

This paper investigates the female writer Chen Duansheng's tanci fiction Zaisheng yuan, a story centered on a cross-dressed female protagonist. Evoking storytelling and stage performance, tanci fiction is a lengthy, rhymed narrative genre favored by female writers in the early modern Jiangnan region. This paper approaches Zaisheng yuan from the perspectives of gender and the senses to examine its representations of the female foot and pain. Zaisheng yuan repeatedly associates pain with the female practice of footbinding and spotlights the bound foot to address the female characters' distress and identity crisis. While the haptic-oriented descriptions of female feet speak to the gender stereotypes, through depicting both passive and active revealing of female feet, Zaisheng yuan demonstrates the emerging possibilities of female agency. In contrast to the male literary tradition, which treats the female body as a static spectacle, Zaisheng yuan endeavors to portray bound feet as an ongoing experience that causes pain from daily movements and calls for sympathetic audiences and mutual support from the female community. However, there are also times when the experience of pain, physical and especially psychological, cannot be shared, not only between genders but also between mothers and daughters, and this may indeed create obstacles to female companionship. To sum up, pain caused by bound feet provides a framework to shape the way women experienced the world, identified themselves, and interpreted the possibilities and limitations of their ways of living in early modern Chinese society.

A Humble Blind Singer's Autobiographical Song: Oral Creation Facing a Hong Kong Teahouse Audience

Abstract In 1975, I arranged for the blind professional singer Dou Wun (1910–1979) to sing a traditional narrative genre called naamyam in an old Hong Kong teahouse, three times weekly for three and a half months, facing the teahouse diners. Of the forty-five hours he sang there, he sang an original song composed by himself on his own life for six hours, which he reluctantly did after I pressed him on the idea. It totaled about 1,800 lines of verse, interspersed with spoken prose. In this essay, I shall first report on my concept, construction, and implementation of the fieldwork. Second, I use selected passages from his song to outline his life story. Born to a poor peasant family and blind at three months of age, Dou Wun wandered alone on the streets of Canton from age nine, received training to sing naamyam from a master singer, and finally arrived in Hong Kong in 1926, where he sang in brothels and opium dens. He lived through the difficult periods of the Japanese occupation, changing tastes in entertainment, and the early days of mass media. When times changed and his songs were no longer in demand, he ended up singing on the street. In the last part of the article, I argue for the significance of this epic autobiographical song in world oral literature and assess Dou Wun's creativity and artistry.

Kill Stories: A Critical Narrative Genre in the Zhuangzi

Kill Stories: A Critical Narrative Genre in the Zhuangzi

A Technical and Stylistic Study of Travelogues

Travel is a very important part of human life. Since time immemorial, every human used to travel from one place to another and would save the events and observations that occurred during the journey in his heart and mind and on his return, he would include other people in his travel experiences. This desire to tell a story led to the writing of a travelogue. A travelogue is a narrative genre of prose literature in which a traveler describes in writing the events, experiences, and observations he has witnessed. It not only describes external conditions, but also expresses internal emotions and feelings. Travelogue is a very important genre of Urdu literature which is increasing day by day. In all the travelogues that have been written to date, different techniques and styles have been experimented with.

Investigating user behavior in slideshows and scrollytelling as narrative genres in medical visualization

In this study, we explore the impact of genre and navigation on user comprehension, preferences, and behaviors when experiencing data-driven disease stories. Our between-subject study (n=85) evaluated these aspects in-the-wild, with results pointing towards some general design considerations to keep in mind when authoring data-driven disease stories. Combining storytelling with interactive new media techniques, narrative medical visualization is a promising approach to communicating topics in medicine to a general audience in an accessible manner. For patients, visual storytelling may help them to better understand medical procedures and treatment options for more informed decision-making, boost their confidence and alleviate anxiety, and promote stronger personal health advocacy. Narrative medical visualization provides the building blocks for producing data-driven disease stories, which may be presented in several visual styles. These different styles correspond to different narrative genres, e.g., a Slideshow. Narrative genres can employ different navigational approaches. For instance, a Slideshow may rely on click interactions to advance through a story, while Scrollytelling typically uses vertical scrolling for navigation. While a common goal of a narrative medical visualization is to encourage a particular behavior, e.g., quitting smoking, it is unclear to what extent the choice of genre influences subsequent user behavior. Our study opens a new research direction into choice of narrative genre on user preferences and behavior in data-driven disease stories.

The Development of Storytelling in the Literature of Eastern Countries during the First Half of the Twentieth Century (In the Example of Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Afghan Storytelling)

Literature is a measure of a nation’s spiritual development, as well as an expression of its spiritual and educational experiences. It is well known that fiction, which embodies a great social power, exerts an active influence on the expansion of human consciousness and the formulation of aesthetic taste. In the evolution of Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Afghan literature, the progression of the narrative genre toward prose, the plot of the stories, and the compositional structure are analyzed. This article explores the issues surrounding the evolution of Arabic, Chinese, and Afghan narratives.

Reconsidering the syntactic complexity measures on L2 spoken English: A multi-dimensional perspective

Based on a review of previous measures employed in English syntactic complexity investigation, this article, following Biber's Multi-dimensional approach, re-establishes a comprehensive new measure system which is composed of four dimensions i.e. Subordination, Length of Production, Coordination and Nominals using factor analysis upon a collection of indices in reference. Under the newly established framework, the research examines the effects of grade level and genre factors on second language English learners' syntactic complexity in oral English in terms of the four indices representing the four dimensions. ANOVA results show that all indices except C/T, the one representing the Subordination dimension, which shows stability across grade levels, are positively related with grade level and susceptible to genre. In the argumentative genre, students generally produce more complex sentences than in the narrative genre as regards all the four dimensions.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

“Nothing's changed, baby”: How the mental health narratives of people with multiple and complex needs disrupt the recovery framework

The dominant narrative in mental health policy and practice has shifted in the 21st century from one of chronic ill health to a ‘recovery’ orientation. Knowledge of recovery is based on narratives of people with lived experience of mental distress. However the narratives of people experiencing structural inequalities are under-represented in recovery research. Meanwhile, uses of recovery narratives have been critiqued by survivor-researchers as a co-option of lived experience to serve neoliberal agendas.To address these twin concerns, we undertook a performative narrative analysis of two ‘recovery narratives’ of people with multiple and complex needs, analysing their co-construction at immediate/micro and structural/macro levels. We found two contrasting responses to the invitation to tell a recovery story: a narrative of personal lack and a narrative of resistance. We demonstrate through reflexive worked examples how the genre of recovery narrative, focused on personal transformation, may function to occlude structural causes of mental distress and reinforce personal responsibility in the face of unchanging living conditions. We conclude that unacknowledged epistemological assumptions may contribute to co-constructing individualist accounts of recovery. A critical, reflexive approach, together with transparent researcher positionality, is imperative to avoid the epistemic injustice of a decontextualised form of recovery narrative.

How Activated Self-Concepts Influence Selection and Processing of Body-Positive Narratives

ABSTRACT Guided by the self- and affect–management (SESAM) model, the current study employed a selective exposure quasi-experimental design in which women (N = 381; Mage = 31.50, SD = 4.89) chose a narrative genre (romance or career) they would like to read, featuring a thin or large character with low or high body esteem, to examine individual differences that influence story selections and subsequent impacts on their self-concepts. Results indicated participants’ salient self-concepts pertaining to romance and career predicted story genre selection. Participants with higher BMI were more inclined to read narratives featuring a large character. Those who read about thin characters with high body esteem reported the highest state appearance esteem. Participants who read about large, high body esteem characters reported more positive affect than those who read about thin, low body esteem characters. Perceived discrepancies between oneself and the character dampened some positive impacts of exposure to high body esteem characters with greater discrepancies resulting in lower state appearance esteem and less positive affect. Implications for self-consistency in media selection and the role of self-discrepancy are discussed.

Preliminary Investigation into the Affordances of Evaluative Resources in Multimodal Texts of an Established Textbook Series in Vietnam

The paper aims to initially examine the deployment of Attitude in multimodal reading texts in Solutions (Falla & Davies, 2013), an English textbook series being used as textbooks in most universities in Vietnam. To reach its aim, it first deployed the Appraisal framework proposed by Martin and White (2005) to examine evaluative resources in the fifteen verbal texts of the five genres of Anecdote, Biographical recount, Exposition, Narrative, and Review (Rose & Martin, 2012). A closer examination of how images contribute to articulating evaluation is then conducted on five of these multimodal reading texts in light of the Visual Appraisal frameworks suggested by Economou (2009) and White (2014) and the terms Convergence and Divergence proposed by Painter, Martin and Unsworth (2013). It was found that various aspects of Attitude are exploited with a range of frequency in different genres. It was also indicated that Convergence tends to be more frequently deployed than Divergence. In the same multimodal text, both cases of Convergence and Divergence may occur or only one of the two types. In any way, they all have the function of co-articulating attitude. The paper concludes by highlighting the necessity of selecting appropriate images in textbooks among editors and deploying images in effectively teaching multimodal texts among lecturers and teachers.

Life as Prime Minister: A Genre Study of Speeches Made by Australian Prime Ministers Following Leadership Spills

ABSTRACT Between 2010 and 2018, four Australian prime ministers were removed from office outside of a federal election, by leadership spills initiated by their party colleagues. Each of the prime ministers—Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull—delivered a televised speech shortly after the leadership spill. The speeches provided an early opportunity, long before the preparation of any book-length political memoir, for each departing prime minister to narrate their political life and affirm their political legacy and identity. The speeches can be conceptualised as a rhetorical genre of life narrative in an Australian context. Applying Carolyn R. Miller’s theory of genre as social action (“Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70: 151–167. 10.1080/00335638409383686.) confirms the speeches as a rhetorical genre, not because of their similarities in form and content but because they respond to the same recurring rhetorical situation—the leadership spill—and have shared social functions in their assertion of the rhetor’s (speaker’s) achievements, integrity and authenticity. All address the past, present and future; project a defining aspect of character; refer to significant others; and place life as prime minister in other contexts. In doing so, the speeches resemble but differ from some other forms of life narrative.

Landscapes of Memory: Visualizing Holocaust Testimony in But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust

ABSTRACT: We are now at a time that will see the end of direct survivor testimony, and thus the transmission of Holocaust memory is increasingly complicated by its mediation through the voices and narratives of subsequent generations of Holocaust writers and scholars. The rendition of Holocaust testimony has expanded to include not only visual and textual forms of representation, but the hybrid genre of Holocaust graphic narratives. But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust , a polyphonic dialogue among scholars, survivors, and graphic artists, is an innovative approach to Holocaust representation that depends upon not only a conversation among text and image but also past and present. At the center of this book are the testimonies of child survivors, whose accounts of resilience and resistance are illustrated by comics artists. This article discusses the ways in which comics artists, in reinscribing survivors' narratives, create a visual testimony to memory by recreating a material landscape of trauma.