Imaginative Immersion Research Articles

Active video games in fully immersive virtual reality elicit moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and improve cognitive performance in sedentary college students

BackgroundActive video games are a new method for increasing physical activity (PA). Fully immersive virtual reality (VR) is a hardware device on which an active video game can run. Active (video games in) VR (AVR), might increase immersion, game engagement, and moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), thereby yielding greater exercise-related benefits, e.g., cognitive performance. MethodsWe examined the induction of MVPA via an AVR and a sedentary VR (SVR) as well as the effects of VR play on cognitive performance, which was monitored using 2 different methods. Each of 29 sedentary college students attended three 20-min laboratory sessions (AVR, SVR, or control) in a randomized order; during the control session, they sat quietly doing nothing. A fully immersive headset was used for the 2 video game sessions. We monitored and computed participants’ PA using hip-worn accelerometers (wGT3x-bt; ActiGraph, Pensacola, FL, USA) and a heart rate band (Polar H7; Polar, Kempele, Finland). After each session, the participants completed a mnemonic similarity test (MST) to measure recognition memory. They also filled out a motion sickness questionnaire and an abbreviated game experience questionnaire. ResultsThe AVR session induced a significantly greater heart rate and more time spent in MVPA than did either of the other 2 sessions regardless of the PA monitoring method. AVR elicited greater game experience questionnaire-assessed sensory and imaginative immersion, challenge, and positive affect than did SVR. The mnemonic similarity test recognition score was marginally higher post-AVR session than it was post-SVR session. ConclusionAVR elicited MVPA without a significant increase in motion sickness and induced a better game experience and better borderline cognitive performance than did SVR.

Muster der Sünde

Summary Konstanze Kemnitzer takes up Armin Nassehi’s sociological theory „Muster“ on digitization and, based on this theory, presents new facets of a contemporary, practicaltheological understanding of „sin“. Against this background she develops for the Christian existence and church action the potential of the „imagination of the gospel“ and the daily, imaginative immersion in the baptismal grace, also in view of the pattern of de-churchification.

Imaginative immersion, regulation, and doxastic mediation

This paper puts forward an account of imaginative immersion. Elaborating on Kendall Walton’s thesis that imagining aims at the fictional truth, it first argues that imaginings are inherently rule- or norm-governed: they are ‘regulated’ by that which is presented as fictionally true. It then shows that an imaginer can follow the rule or norm mandating her to imagine the propositions presented as fictional truths either by acquiring explicit beliefs about how the rule (norm) is to be followed, or directly, without acquiring such beliefs. It proceeds to argue that to the extent that an imaginer follows this rule (norm) without holding such beliefs, she is more immersed in her imaginings. The general idea is that immersion in an activity is a matter of following rules or norms that apply to that activity without explicitly thinking about how to follow them, that is, without ‘doxastic mediation.’ Lastly, the paper shows that this thesis can explain various features associated with imaginative immersion, such as the sort of attentiveness it involves, the emotional response it generates, and its relation to spoilers.

Studying the Effect of Display Type and Viewing Perspective on User Experience in Virtual Reality Exergames.

Background: Physical inactivity has been identified as the fourth leading cause of death globally. It is now well established that a sedentary lifestyle is a unique risk factor for several diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, which account for about 30% of global mortality. Diabetes is a major preventable cause of costly and debilitating renal failure, heart disease, lower limb amputation, and avoidable blindness. In recent years, the idea of using interactive computing systems that leverage gamification to promote physical activity has been widely researched. Prior studies have shown that exergames, that is those that encourage physical activity, can increase enjoyment and intrinsic motivation compared with conventional exercises; as such, they can be effective in promoting physical and mental health. There has been some research on immersive virtual reality (VR) exergames; however, to the best of our knowledge, it is limited and preliminary. This work aims at filling the gap and investigates the effect of display type (DT) and viewing perspective (VP) on players' exertion, engagement, and overall game experience in immersive VR exergames. Objective: This article aims at examining whether DT and VP can affect gameplay performance, players' exertion, game experience, cybersickness, and electroencephalography (EEG) engagement index when playing a gesture-based (i.e., body motion) exergame. Materials and Methods: Study 1 employed a one-way between-subjects design with 24 participants equally distributed in two groups (immersive VR and 50-inch TV) to perform 12 pre-defined gestures. The main outcome measures were National Aeronautics and Space Administration-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) workload for each group as well as 7 Likert scale and EEG engagement index for each gesture. Study 2 included 16 participants in playing a game with the gestures selected from study 1. All participants played 4 versions based on combinations of DT (immersive VR and 50-inch TV) and VP (first-person and third-person) to assess exertion (%HRmax, calories consumption, and Borg RPE 6-20), game experience, cybersickness, and EEG engagement index. Results: Study 1 results showed that DT had no effect on the ratings of the gestures, NASA-TLX workload, and EEG engagement index. Study 2 results showed that immersive VR not only resulted in a significantly higher exertion (%HRmax, calories consumption, and Borg RPE) but also helped achieve better positive game experience in challenge, flow, sensory and imaginative immersion, as well as lower negative affect. We also found that nausea and oculomotor were significantly higher in immersive VR. Conclusion: This pilot study demonstrates that youth who played gesture-based exergame in immersive VR had a higher level of exertion (%HRmax, calories consumption, and Borg RPE), although the number of performed gestures were not significantly different. They also felt that immersive VR was much more challenging, immersive (flow, sensory and imaginative immersion), and had a lower negative affect than a 50-inch TV; however, immersive VR was more likely to make youth have higher cybersickness.

Imaginative immersion in the Cistercian Cloister

This article uses analytical concepts from cognitive science to explore and deepen our understanding of how medieval monastics imagined themselves as characters within biblical narratives. It argues that Cistercian monks - and in particular Bernard of Clairvaux - used techniques of imaginative immersion to enter and blend themselves into biblical viewpoints and events, thereby engaging the monks in epistemically and personally transformative experiences. The article concludes that this served to build community and to enculture monks and converts. Specifically, the article offers a close reading of two of Bernard's liturgical sermons, Sermon Two for Palm Sunday and Sermon Two on the Resurrection, to show how his sermons 1) traverse time and space and 2) blend viewpoints. Examples are also taken from texts by John Cassian, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and William of St. Thierry.
 Keywords: Bernard of Clairvaux, blended viewpoint, deictic displacement, lectio divina, liturgical time and space. 
 On cover:Monks singing the Office and decorated initial A[sperges me.]. Gradual Olivetan Master (Use of the Olivetan Benedictines), illuminated manuscript on parchment ca. 1430-1439. Italy, Monastero di Santa Maria di Baggio near Milan, Ca 1400-1775.Beinecke Ms1184: The olivetan Gradual. Gradual. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Being Private in Public: Claudia Rankine and John Lucas's "Situation" Videos

Being Private in Public:Claudia Rankine and John Lucas's "Situation" Videos Chad Bennett (bio) 1 On November 9, 2015, johari osayi idusuyi, then a student at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois, attended a rally for presidential candidate donald trump, and, unimpressed with Trump's rhetoric and the ugly treatment of protestors, began to read a book. Because she, along with a number of other people of color in the predominantly white crowd, had been strategically invited to sit behind Trump, footage of her engrossed in claudia rankine's celebrated Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), with its already iconic cover featuring david hammons's artwork In the Hood (1993), was broadcast across cable news (Figure 1). Images of this moment and its juxtaposition of trump's bigoted bombast and idusuyi's quietly absorbed reading quickly went viral, trending on Twitter and appearing everywhere from Jezebel to Jimmy Kimmel Live! to the Wall Street Journal to damon young's VerySmartBrothas site, which named idusuyi its "Blackest Person Who Ever Lived This Week."1 The rash of media coverage of idusuyi's inspired reading [End Page 377] in turn inspired renewed sales of Citizen, returning it to The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller list thirteen months after its release.2 Asked for a comment on the episode by The Rachel Maddow Show, rankine herself responded, in part, "I love [idusuyi's] resistance against being managed in the name of good manners. She is a citizen shaping her own dialogue within and against trump's performance of racism and violence."3 The unlikely shape of that dialogue—assuming not the more overt dissent of the activists forcibly removed from the rally but instead the intimate exchange between a reader and her book—sparked both curiosity and contempt: contempt from the Trump supporters seated behind idusuyi, who found her public display of private absorption irritating enough to confront her, insisting she put down her book; curiosity on the part of the larger public, who spent the next few weeks wondering who she was, what she was reading, and why.4 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Lyric Reading. One of many online images of footage of Johari Osayi Idusuyi reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) during a November 9, 2015 Donald Trump campaign rally in Spring field, Illinois. [End Page 378] Among the many scenes of resistance to Trump's toxic campaign, why did this one in particular attract such interest? Surely Idusuyi's act of reading involved a degree of deliberate political protest. Although she claimed that she wasn't "trying to make a scene and it wasn't originally planned to be a protest," Idusuyi nevertheless added, "I'm not going to waste my time listening to somebody who I can't respect anymore, so I started to read."5 Her choice of reading material certainly suited the occasion: Rankine's Citizen centers on a choral account of racial microaggressions and relentlessly tracks the damaging effects for people of color negotiating public spaces shaped by and for whiteness. Moreover, whatever Idusuyi's intention, the circulation of the image of her reading itself carries with it a long and ongoing history of overdetermined responses to both female and Black readers as loci for cultural anxieties about the subversion of white patriarchy—as rebellious or even unlawful figures whose imaginative immersion proves alluring but whose dangerous energies ultimately must be repressed or contained.6 As Young succinctly put it, "she's a Black woman reading a book in a public space. And you can't get much Blacker than that."7 In this regard, the image of Idusuyi reading in public more specifically evokes a history of civil rights resistance distilled, for example, in photographs of Black men and women antagonized while reading during lunch counter protests (Figure 2). The power of such images might be ascribed to their visible protest, or to "the canonical idea," in Jeffrey Clapp's words, "that visibility, recognition, and representation can serve as solutions to injustice and inequality."8 Yet the animating charge of Idusuyi's reading, I suggest, has as much to do with how its moment of...

The Influence of Rewards on Perceptions, Competence, and Sensory and Imaginative Immersion of Malaysian Digital Traditional Games

Rewards in games are among the essential features to attract players to engage with the game. Prominent scholars claimed that rewards have positive influences to game engagement. Despite the importance of rewards in digital games, none of the existing Malaysian digital traditional games incorporated rewards in the games. Therefore, this study is conducted to investigate the influence of rewards on digital games engagement which focusing on perceptions, competence, and sensory and imaginative immersion on one of the Malaysian digital traditional games, Congkak. The existing Congkak has been enhanced by incorporating rewards. Fifty respondents among the millennials were involved in the experiment to measure the influence of rewards using Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ). Findings revealed that all constructs tested demonstrate positive influence of rewards on game engagement. The findings serve as a guideline to game developers to improve the games in order to foster better engagement of Malaysian digital traditional games.

Reverse engineering the human: artificial intelligence and acting theory

ABSTRACTIn two separate papers, Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Robotics researcher Guy Hoffman takes as a starting point that actors have been in the business of reverse engineering human behaviour for centuries. In this paper, I follow the similar trajectories of AI and acting theory (AT), looking at three primary questions, in the hope of framing a response to Hoffman's papers: (1) How are the problems of training a human to simulate a fictional human both similar to and different from training a machine to simulate a human? (2) How are the larger questions of AI design and architecture similar to the larger questions that still remain within the area of AT? (3) Is there anything in the work of AI design that might advance the work of acting theorists and practitioners? The paper explores the use of “swarm intelligence” in recent models of both AT and AI, and considers the issues of embodied cognition, and the kinds of intelligence that enhances or inhibits imaginative immersion for the actor, and concludes with a consideration of the ontological questions raised by the trend towards intersubjective, dynamic systems of generative thought in both AT and AI.

Imaginative Content, Design-Assumptions and Immersion

In this paper, I will analyze certain aspects of imaginative content, namely the content of the representational mental state called “imagining.” I will show that fully accounting for imaginative content requires acknowledging that, in addition to imagining, an imaginative project—the overall mental activity we engage in when we imagine—includes another infrastructural component in terms of which content should be explained. I will then show that the phenomenon of imaginative immersion can partly be explained in terms of the proposed infrastructure of imaginative projects.

Symbolic and cued immersion: Paratextual framing strategies on the Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour

ABSTRACTThis article employs autoethnographic reflections to contribute towards debates concerning film-induced tourism by analysing the officially endorsed Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour around filming locations from the BBC series in Cardiff Bay, Wales. Approaching this tour as an example of paratextuality, the article pursues two arguments. First, it reflects upon the attempts used within the tour for encouraging connection between participants and the locations visited from the perspective of immersion. However, noting preceding positions, it is recognized that the tour constructs forms of imaginative immersion. The terms symbolic and cued immersion are subsequently introduced to consider the strategies that the tour employs to position fans and engage them with its frequently quotidian spaces. Second, the article explores the links between the tour’s immersive strategies and its institutional context, arguing that these assist in reinforcing core brand values regarding BBC Worldwide.

Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination by Sophie Vlacos (review)

Reviewed by: Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination by Sophie Vlacos Brian O’Keeffe Sophie Vlacos, Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, 232 pp. i In the preface to her book, Sophie Vlacos wonders why Ricoeur’s place within the order of the great literary theorists seems somehow in doubt. Certainly, few would dispute his renown as a philosopher. But in literary-theoretical contexts, Ricoeur often serves merely as a foil to more radical positions, as a person to whom reference is made when it proves necessary to acknowledge, en passant, something true about literature—to say why it is a precious stimulus to the imagination, and why literature’s own sense of imaginative possibility is valuable to re-envisioning the world itself. But then theory moves on, and affirmations of literature’s value become [End Page 364] harder to find in the midst of austere talk concerning its irresolvable ambiguity, such ambiguity apparently rendering all acts of reading wrong or “aberrant.” Theory brings us up short, confronts us with interpretive impasse, and proclaims that literature will ineluctably bring us to this, whatever are our desires as readers to read for the pleasures of an imaginative immersion in fictional worlds. Theory liked it this way, however. It liked the taxing rigor of interpretive reading doomed to a kind of failure. It preached, often in the teeth of stiff resistance to theory, the virtue of doing hard critical work at the coalface of texts that had become peculiarly forbidding to those who ventured to read them at all. This is a caricature. It caricatures literary studies during the age of High Theory, and it also presents a rather disobliging portrait of the interpretive approach of Paul de Man—my allusion to The Resistance to Theory will not, I trust, have gone unmissed. But that age has been declared over, and so perhaps one quick answer to Vlacos’s question about the place of Ricoeur in literary-theoretical contexts is that he simply had to wait it out. High Theory’s day is done, and we may now return to Ricoeur and affirm the value of reading literature: reading is an act of feeling, an imaginative feeling-into a fictional world; reading literature is good for our general cultivation, our Bildung; reading helps us make sense of the world and our place in it; literature is a creative activity, and it powerfully re-describes the world to us; it teaches readers to imagine themselves otherwise; it hones our sympathies and our empathies—these, the basic components of the specifically ethical imagination. One mentions ethics, and already there is another possible answer to Vlacos’s question, namely that Ricoeur had to wait for the “ethical turn” in literature and philosophy. In this respect, it is notable that Martha Nussbaum features prominently in Vlacos’s book: in the last section, which addresses Ricoeur in terms of the turn to ethics, and Nussbaum also provides the epigraph to Vlacos’s introduction. The quote, from Love’s Knowledge, is well-known: “After reading Derrida, and not Derrida alone, I feel a certain hunger for blood; for, that is, writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all” (1). We will get to Derrida, because literary theory’s debt to Derrida provides another explanation as to why Ricoeur’s hermeneutics met with such little enthusiasm during the age of theory. It is not quite that the wax-and-wane of theoretical prestige during that time can be reduced to Derrida versus Ricoeur, as if theory simply chose to put itself under the aegis of “Derrida,” and in so doing, Ricoeur was eclipsed. But their fortunes seem entwined, especially in the contexts of Anglo-American academia, where the importation of French theory, I think it is fair to say, did produce a certain “star-system.” But if, and reverting to Nussbaum’s criticism of theoretical anemia, the problem with theory was that it seemed oddly impersonal, and reduced literature to a similar impersonality, Vlacos evidently considers Ricoeur to be exempt from her charge. For he does speak about literature, [End Page 365] and does acknowledge that what matters is how...

Beowulf ’s Poetics of Absorption: Narrative Syntax and the Illusion of Stability in the Fight with Grendel’s Mother

Beowulf ’s Poetics of Absorption: Narrative Syntax and the Illusion of Stability in the Fight with Grendel’s Mother Evelyn Reynolds In Beowulf, the last survivor stands before the barrow in which he has just interred his kin (lines 2236–2246).1 Absorbed in grief, he then speaks his famous lament for his lost people. The poem allows us partly to imagine the survivor and his world as his lament unfolds, but it also bars us from becoming fully affectively engaged with him by positioning him as alone (he has no audience, and he does not address us; we only overhear him) and by setting his elegy in syntactically negative, imagistically sketchy forms (lines 2247–2254). “Heald þū nū, hrūse, nū hæleð ne m(ō)stan, / eorla ǣhte” [Earth, hold now the possessions of earls, what heroes cannot] (lines 2247–2248), the survivor opens, but in this sentence he gives no more precise direct object than “eorla ǣhte” [possessions of earls]. Instead of describing his people’s treasure, he says that “hyt ǣr . . . / gōde begēaton” [good men earlier obtained it] (lines 2248–2249). Beowulf does not allow its audience to picture the treasures or the survivor or his people, and by preventing a full mental picturing, it lessens affective engagement.2 We are thus barred from sympathy with the survivor’s grief at the same time as we hear his expression of grief. The poem focuses the audience’s attention on the survivor, yet denies them their full ability to sympathize with him. This state of imaginative and affective suspension I call the absorption-denial dynamic.3 The absorption-denial dynamic exemplified by the lay of the last survivor characterizes several passages in Beowulf and provides a useful means of understanding how Beowulf ’s formal elements operate on the imaginative and affective states of the poem’s audience.4 As I define it, the absorption-denial dynamic is the way in which a poem immerses its audience while at the same time distancing that audience. We are familiar with the sense of being absorbed in a text—that sense of having our imaginations filled with imagery and emotion. Yet the absorption-denial dynamic makes explicit the paradoxical fact that the artwork also forces its audience [End Page 43] to realize that they are outside its world, ultimately not able to sympathize with or picture its characters fully. One effect of the absorption-denial dynamic is a stilling of time: the audience finds itself suspended between immersion in and separation from the artwork. Often, absorptive pieces represent moments in which something is about to change but has not yet done so—the survivor is about to die from heartbreak; Heorot is about to burn—to enhance the audience’s sense of imaginative or affective suspension with a sense of temporal suspension. In this article, I will focus on a passage in Beowulf that embodies this liminal temporality in a surprising way. This passage is Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother, which runs from line 1399 to line 1569. Depicting Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel’s mother in her underwater cave, the fight scene is an example of an epic set piece. It is an unusual example of an absorptive scene since it is not contemplative or explicitly affective, as is the lay of the last survivor or the poem’s concluding depiction of Beowulf’s funeral pyre. Beowulf and the monster are absorbed in fighting each other; the audience expects a dynamic, quickly moving battle narrative, a narrative that invites complete imaginative immersion in the action. Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother contains syntactic structures that are not present during Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, syntactic structures that might seem aesthetically counterintuitive to a modern audience. Indeed, whereas Beowulf’s fight with Grendel often receives scholarly attention because the poet renders the fight in gripping synesthetic detail, his fight with Grendel’s mother has seldom been discussed in aesthetic terms.5 However, the poem’s linguistic structures here actually slow the narrative’s pace and prevent audience immersion. A reexamination of Beowulf ’s formal elements in light of the way they position the poem’s audience, particularly...

Belief and Desire in Imagination and Immersion

I argue that any account of imagination should satisfy the following three desiderata. First, imaginations induce actions only in conjunction with beliefs about the environment of the imagining subject. Second, there is a continuum between imaginations and beliefs. Recognizing this continuum is crucial to explain the phenomenon of imaginative immersion. Third, the mental states that relate to imaginations in the way that desires relate to beliefs are a special kind of desire, namely desires to make true in fiction. These desires to make true in fiction do not differ from regular desires in kind, but only in content. I argue for these three desiderata in turn by critically discussing several recent accounts of imagination.

Identification and Categorization of Digital Game Experiences: A Qualitative Study Integrating Theoretical Insights and Player Perspectives

Digital game experience is not a one-dimensional concept. Great variety exists in game genres and players, and game experiences will differ accordingly. To date, game experience is studied in a differentiated way, meaning that most studies focus on one specifi c game experience dimension. The objective of our study was twofold. First, we wanted to obtain a comprehensive picture of fi rst-hand experiences of playing digital games. We conducted six focus group interviews including different types of gamers with the aim of eliciting a wide array of lay-conceptualizations of game experience. Second, we aimed to develop a categorization of game experience dimensions. This was established by discussing and integrating theoretical and empirical fi ndings. Our categorization revealed nine dimensions: enjoyment, fl ow, imaginative immersion, sensory immersion, suspense, competence, tension, control and social presence. This categorization has relevance for both game scholars and game developers wanting to get to the heart of digital game experience.

Tzoni kai Loulou

Perihan Magden Ali and Ramazan Ruth Whitehouse, tr. AmazonCrossing Ali and Ramazan is a tragic story of abuse and poverty in the city of Istanbul. Based on a short newspaper article, the story chronicles the love between two boys suffering from the hardships of living in an orphanage and on the streets. Liu Zhenyun Cell Phone Howard Goldblatt, tr. MerwinAsia Accidentally leaving his cell phone at home one day sparks a massive explosion in a popular television host’s happy home. Filled with comedy, social commentary, and romance, this novel mulls the implications of technology in the world’s largest population of cell-phone users, China. NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 69 Nota Bene personal, different for each viewer, accessible only through imaginative immersion. Stalker must be experienced uninterrupted, in solitude, in darkness. All of which makes it singularly ill-suited to Geoff Dyer’s approach in Zona. Whatever their ostensible topics , most of Dyer’s books turn out to be about one thing: Geoff Dyer. They are rambling, free-associational, egocentric . When this approach works, it works sublimely. My favorite is Out of Sheer Rage (1997), a painfully funny book about Dyer’s inability to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. In Zona, he uses Stalker as a trigger for personal reminiscences, remarks about other films, and endless further digressions, most of which seem to have little or no connection to Tarkovsky’s film. At first, these sometimes interesting , often funny asides—many in footnotes, others embedded in the text itself—are mildly amusing. Then they become frustrating. Then infuriating . Their unpredictable, eruptive nature makes it maddeningly hard to focus on whatever Dyer is trying to say about the film. Zona is not without merit. Dyer writes engagingly. Reading Zona is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. But if you’re interested in Stalker, watch the film instead, discover it for yourself. In any case, by all means read Roadside Picnic. In the next year or so, Chicago Review Press will publish Bormashenko’s translation of the Strugatskys’ Hard to Be a God (Trudno byt’ bogom, 1964). With luck, these releases will herald a series of new English-language versions of major works by the Strugatskys who, along with Stanisław Lem, were arguably the finest Eastern European sf writers of the twentieth century. Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Vasia Tzanakari. Tzoni kai Loulou. Athens. Metaihmio. 2011. isbn 9789605014940 Vasia Tzanakari’s first novel, Tzoni kai Loulou (Johnny and Loulou), is a love story set in contemporary Athens during a time of crisis, unemployment , and despair. It begins as an urban story depicting the dark reality of contemporary Athens and continues as a road novel, following the protagonists’ long drive from Athens to Istanbul. The author, born in 1980, belongs to the generation hit the hardest by the current economic crisis in Greece. When Tzanakari’s protagonist , Loulou, is abruptly fired from her job as a photographer for a lifestyle magazine, the world around her collapses. Her husband, Johnny, an engineer by training, is chronically unemployed, occasionally playing the piano in a bar. After three months of looking for a job, Loulou realizes that they are both not just unemployed but unemployable, part of a growing tribe of ex-middle-class creative people in their thirties, now wandering in an empty city with their dreams suspended. Johnny’s aunt proposes an escape out of scorching summer Athens: a friend of hers invites Loulou to photograph her new boutique hotel in Istanbul. So the journey begins in Johnny’s ancient blue Škoda; a journey in space but also in time, as Johnny and Loulou revisit their past, their childhood summers, their loneliness, 70 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews and the sorrows of growing up. Their love story is played and replayed in their memory like the music tapes in the car’s cassette player, a soundtrack that combines Led Zeppelin, Jeff Buckley, and the Walkabouts with Greek popular music. Past and present come together and apart through Tzanakari’s skillful narrative technique , which also merges humor with emotion, songs with images: the ugly rest stops of the national highway, the promenade of a provincial city, the smells of insect repellent...

Dreaming of the Middle Ages: The Place of the ‘mittelalterlich’ and Socialist Awareness in Christina’s Stead’s Early Fiction

[Extract] The Middle Ages have proved to be imaginatively a fluid and artistically enticing entity. As Umberto Eco has underscored, many have turned to the Middle Ages for inspiration and diverse forms of confirmation (66-72). These range from nostalgia-enshrouded models of craftsmanship and social organisation to repugnant images of the alien and intellectually benighted other, which needed to be overcome in the interests of enlightenment and progress. Moreover, a single work can entertain antithetical verdicts on the period, or an individual's reaction to it change in response to socio-historical or personal impetuses - a point well illustrated by the early writings of Christina Stead. Born in Sydney in 1902 into a strongly socialist family, Stead followed her father from an early age in publicly avowing her atheism (Rowley 26; Williams 36), and had embraced communism by the early 1930s.^1 Stead, however, was far from being doctrinaire on all matters (Rowley 254-55; Sturm 90-93), and her early compositions reveal an abiding fascination with a nebulous, romantic image of the Middle Ages, which was difficult to align with the dictates of engaged writing. Her efforts to reconcile the two, though noted, deserve more detailed attention than they have received,^2 as does evidence of her awareness of the dangers of ideological derailment which imaginative immersion in this period might portend. In particular, the evocation of the Middle Ages in the Salzburg Tales bears witness arguably to her determination not to produce merely escapist bourgeois fiction, while in Michael Baguenault, in Seven Poor Men of Sydney, she drew an admonitory portrait of a potential comrade who succumbs to the spell of 'mittelalterlich' (or the medieval), rather than turning his creative gifts to socially productive ends.

William Melvin Kelley's Real Live, Invisible South

Like many African American writers born and bred outside the southern United States, William Melvin Kelley is attracted to the South, its people, its soil, and its history. In A Different Drummer(1962), Kelley creates an invisible southern state (located between Mississippi and Alabama and south of Tennessee) in which he can work through a range of complex attitudes toward the South and the people who reside in that territory. By creating a novel about African Americans in which the narrators of the tale are all white, Kelley is able to explore race relations that originated during slavery and that still have consequences in 1957. Tucker Caliban, the diminutive chauffeur who is a descendant of "the African," a gigantic black man enslaved by Tucker's employer's great grandfather, must sever the bonds between his family and the Willsons, in whose family several generations of his ancestors have been employed following their enslavement to the Willsons. The primary narrator, Mister Harper, speculates that the blood of the African, dead since early in the nineteenth century, nonetheless courses through Tucker's veins; it eventually awakens Caliban to reclaim his family and his history. Through narration and character, Kelley creates a unique lens through which to view black heroism, white male cowardice, white female sexuality, black activism, the possibility of friendship across racial lines, the failure of that potential for friendship, and the consequences of misdirected violence. In a narrative unusual in its formation as a text composed by an African American, A Different Drummeris an inviting site on which to explore mythmaking, the meanings of southernness to African Americans and specifically to African American writers, and the impossibility of any African American writer, no matter his or her state or city of origin, to escape imaginative immersion in the South.

Emotional expression and physical heath: Revising traumatic memories or fostering self-regulation?

Health benefits derived from personal trauma disclosure are well established. This study examined whether disclosing emotions generated by imaginative immersion in a novel traumatic event would similarly enhance health and adjustment. College women, preselected for trauma presence, were randomly assigned to write about real traumas, imaginary traumas, or trivial events. Yoked real-trauma and imaginary-trauma participants wrote about real-trauma participants' experiences. Imaginary-trauma participants were significantly less depressed than real-trauma participants at immediate posttest, but they were similarly angry, fearful, and happy. Compared with control group participants, both trauma groups made significantly fewer illness visits at 1-month follow-up; however, real-trauma participants reported more fatigue and avoidance than did the other groups. Imaginary-trauma group effects could reflect catharsis, emotional regulation, or construction of resilient possible selves.