Kind Of Narrative Research Articles

TARGUM: TRANSLATION IN HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN IMPERIAL PROSE FICTION

Hellenistic and Roman Imperial prose fiction sprang from the ashes of the Haxāmanišiyan Empire (c.550-330 BCE). The multicultural autonomy that Iranian regents afforded their subject peoples laid the groundwork for social policy under Alexandros, the Diadokhoi, and Roman governance of the Near East. As literary fiction developed over the course of the ‘long’ Hellenistic period, the diversity of languages and cultures not only shaped the kinds of narratives produced: polyglossia became a subject of representation in and of itself, as did the possibilities of translation between one language and another.

The Twinkling of a Bedstaff

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the social history of the bed in England 1500–1700. It proposes an approach that uses legal records to recover the emotional resonances and social practices of an object in its context. The legal records are particularly useful for their use of narrative: their reliance on storytelling, it is argued, is not incidental but central for their importance as a source. Beds were sociable places, often shared: the crimes of illicit sex, infanticide, and theft encouraged witnesses to remember and recount the words and deeds of a shared bed in detail. An attention to these kinds of narratives both restores some of the emotional and social resonance of the material object, and adds depth and complexity to existing narratives of the transformation of the domestic sphere in this period.

Remembering: A Narrative with Different Characters

Abstract I recently attended a conference at which a speaker from Romania posed this question: How do we transmit the memory of atrocities, victimhood dictatorship, to people who have already heard that story, only with different characters? In this article I take remembering in Northern Ireland as a story with different characters. A shared narrative to transmit the memory of what happened over thirty years of Northern Irelands Troubles remains to be told by and for the whole society. The purpose of a shared narrative is to contribute to a number of mechanisms that direct society to a future in which what happened in the past will never happen again. By a shared narrative I mean one that reflects the different characters and experiences, from different local experiences to different individual and community experiences. An agreed narrative is not possible at this time and perhaps that should never be the ambition for it would obscure the many characters within the one narrative. The kind of narrative that is shared may be defined as a ‘composite’ narrative that tells about individuals within the broader context of what was happening across Northern Ireland. It is important that remembering is understood to be narrative and not event, composite and not obscuring the characters involved. I will reflect on visits to Yad Vashem and the Kigali Memorial Centre as place where narrative was evoked about how to remember well for a better future where there has been conflict. I will share some of that challenges to remembering together in Northern Ireland and I will look to the Passover Seder and Lord's Supper for wisdom. I will conclude with some challenges to remembering as a contributor to peacemaking but without betrayal.

Preface

Preface Brian J. McAllister (bio) The essays in this special issue of Narrative offer a small sample of a growing field of study within narrative theory: narrative in poetic form. More precisely, the essays here investigate the potential intersections between the concerns of narrative theory and the concerns of poetry studies, using one to inform the other in a mutually productive discourse. Brian McHale’s essay “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry” offers perhaps the most explicit call for new work in this field. Though he acknowledges from the outset that this work stands on the shoulders of a “huge body of precedent” (11)—from Plato to Bakhtin to Genette—this earlier work avoids addressing poetic narratives’ differences from other kinds of narrative. As McHale makes plain, “We need to begin thinking about narrative in poetry … because we have not been doing so very much lately, and because, whenever we have done so, we have rarely thought about what differentiates narrative in poetry from narrative in other genres or media, namely its poetry component” (11; emphasis original). When considering narrative poetry through the lens of narrative theory, one cannot simply brush aside the poetic aspects of the text. That seemingly obvious consideration of [End Page 151] the poetic in concert and in communication with the narrative directs the critical work in the essays that follow. With this larger objective in mind, this collection includes critical approaches that attempt to answer these questions about poetry’s position in and as narrative, considering narrative theory and poetic studies through a variety of methodologies—from rhetorical narrative theory to reader response to deconstruction—and with a range of poetic texts—from modernist poetic sequence to Romantic verse narrative to visual poetry. Peter Hühn’s essay begins the collection by exploring lyric poetry in either fictional or factual modes. Hühn situates the genre within larger fields of literary form in order to recognize lyric poetry’s ambivalent position between the two categories, as exemplified in his argument by the sonnet. Jason M. Coats then turns to Chistopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden’s problematically structured travel book, Journey to a War, in order to refine rhetorical considerations of the lyric by expanding theories of progression in lyric poetry. This refinement allows Coats to reconcile lyric poetry’s inherently weak narrativity with rhetorical narrative theory’s attention to judgment and the ethical implications of narrative form. Further investigating the narrative potential of lyric poetry, Stefan Kjerkegaard explores the ways that poetic form influences and interacts with narrativity and lyricality, as well as fictionality and non-fictionality, within the autobiographical lyric poem. Kjerkegaard employs narratological approaches to voice and narrativity in an effort to illuminate this understudied poetic genre. Lasse Gammelgaard pays similar attention to the reader by situating poetic studies within the larger concerns of recent reader-oriented studies of narrative production. Building from early work in reader response theory, Gammelgaard investigates the characteristics of poetic and narrative tracks within narrative poetry and locates the reader at the point of interaction between these two tracks. Lewis S. Gleich considers the influence of sonic and visual elements on reader engagement with a textual narrative, refining discussions of the relationship between poeticity and narrativity by incorporating studies of phonetic and oculomotor functioning. While both Gammelgaard and Gleich employ works by John Keats in their essays and build from reader-response foundations, their poetic intersection at Keats reveals how these two approaches offer distinct methodologies that ultimately take narrative theory, reader response, and poetic studies in different directions. My contribution takes an intermedial approach, surveying narrative’s capacity within visual poetry. First teasing out the form’s visual and poetic affordances, I then explore the material on which poetry appears, considering the ways that textual layout and textual surface enrich an understanding of narrative intermediality. Steven Nardi’s deconstructivist approach sheds light on the disruptive tendencies of poetry. Nardi examines the ways that poetic disruptions enrich current narrative theory by troubling distinctions between fabula and sjuzhet. The collection concludes with a conversation between Bruce Heiden and Brian McHale that returns us to a foundational question of this collection: can narrative theory enrich and be enriched...

Regal Memory

Making an inventory of postcolonial scholarship on India reveals both its criticality and its limits. While the body of postcolonial work has been remarkable for pointing out the oppression under the British, it has been stubbornly silent about the Indian princes. This article does four things: First, it points out the uneven development of scholarship on the Indian princes and attempts to demonstrate why the Indian princes, their history and politics remain unappealing to postcolonial theorists. Second, it posits that the continued neglect of the Indian princes is part of a larger malaise of modern India. The remaining part of the article prises upon the Indian princes to look at how their subjectivity and gaze have been overlooked to produce a certain kind of narrative about them, which is coarse and unable to accommodate their complexity. It finally reverses the gaze by looking at the kingdoms from inside out. By looking into the works written by insiders, it offers a previously unheard voice.

The key is not to forget to be awesome: identifying narratives in an online community

As online communities emerge in different settings all over the web, they continue to develop different ways to communicate online and to encourage participation in their activities. Scholars have proposed that one of the ways in which these communities do so is through the use of narratives. A case study was done on an open online community to establish if online communities develop narratives, what kind of narratives, and if these influence participation. This paper contains the analysis of the identifiable narratives that are useful to promote culture and participation and proposes three types of narratives that are more effective to do so. Implications of such findings and proposed future research are discussed.

Immoral Traffic: Mobility, Health, Labor, and the “Lorry Girl” in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

AbstractThe story of the lorry girl and the lorry driver, the roads they traveled on, and the responses toward them allows for some telling insights into a strange kind of “immoral traffic” in 1930s and 1950s Britain. Whether seeking employment or adventure, leaving the “distressed areas” or absconding from an approved school, the lorry girl was linked to anxieties about women's mobility, unemployment, venereal disease, and delinquency. At the same time, the figure of the lorry driver, both romanticized and marginalized, showed that deviant and commercialized sexuality could be linked to the economic and social inequality of both men and women. Concerns about lorry jumping and hitchhiking in this period also reveal a different kind of narrative in the development of British roadways, which not only were tied to both the health and efficiency of the nation but also were spaces of sexual danger and sites of social delinquency.

Bruken av historie i Putins Russland: Kremls søken etter konsensus 2000–2010

The Use of History in Putin's Russia: The Kremlin and the Search for Consensus 2000-2010 Since the year 2000, the Russian government has been seeking to promote a new atti- tude to Soviet history - one that has been duly noted by commentators and resear- chers. This article argues that the conventional analysis offers a one-sided view of Putin's history politics. The core argument is that the Kremlin has sought to build con- sensus in a society that is deeply divided over its own history. In doing so, the Kremlin borrows from both sides of society's divide and is creating a new narrative that can constitute the basis for a shared understanding of the past. The problem is that the Kremlin's narrative simultaneously includes mutually exclusive understandings of Rus- sian history and conflicting values, giving it an incoherent or dual nature. This kind of narrative is hardly an effective instrument towards achieving a genuine and durable consensus. Indeed, the irony is that the Kremlin's attempt to create a single historical narrative that can generate societal consensus merely perpetuates the very division that the Russian leadership seeks to overcome.

Tragedy and Teaching: The education of narrative

This is the second of two articles that are connected in a reading of The plague by Albert Camus. The other article is a determined narration of the events of a tragedy that befalls a city on the coast of Algeria. That article resists analysis beyond the decisions that are made regarding text to use, and of course interpretations to make. This article is juxtaposed to the first, with the intention of taking key themes of education and narration and considering them within the context of another tragedy and another kind of narration. In this article the narratives of government education policy are considered in relation to the event of a tragic earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. The government narratives are then replaced by the narratives of Oran to consider alternative ways of thinking about tragedy and education and in particular to think about the ways in which the narrative relates to the tragedy and to any learning that might happen as a result of, and during, a tragedy.

Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East by Mark Allen Peterson (review)

Mark Allen Peterson, Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. 263 pp.Connected in Cairo is an ethnography primarily focused upon the socio-economic elites of Egypt, specifically those whom Mark Allen Peterson identifies as investing in a prestigious form of cosmopolitanism as part of their attempt to justify, bolster, and defend their privileges in Egyptian society. Peterson cites a classroom interaction with his students at the American University in Cairo (AUC), which itself is one of the markers of elite prestige par excellence in Egypt, as a starting point for his thinking. The AUC students vehemently rejected the idea that rural villagers could be modern, arguing instead for a Jamesonian concept of modernity founded upon a combination of educational access and conspicuous consumption of various forms-what Peterson glosses as style (5-6). Peterson does not accept this claim of modernity at face value, but carefully and thoroughly deconstructs the blunt class difference marked by the students' understanding of their own modernity. Indeed, later in the book, he concludes that much of the elite modernity of which the students are so proud is less a matter of educational achievement and judicious acquisition than a birthright, reinforced and recapitulated, rather than created anew by their designer clothing, facility in several languages, and knowledge of films.The introductory chapter is largely an unspooling of Peterson's analytical framework and methodology that flows from the anecdote mentioned above. In large measure, Peterson concentrates his ethnographic efforts on the children and adolescents of these upper classes in order to illuminate how these attitudes toward modernity develop and embed themselves in people's identity constructions. He balances this ethnographic trend by interviewing a number of these children's parents and teachers, who must contend with youthful fashions and desires that may not only conflict with a family's means to afford such things, but may also threaten the larger worldview of modernity, authenticity, and local identity in which the adults are deeply invested.The second and third chapters of Peterson's ethnography focus on children-that is, upon pre-teenaged children who represent the target market for a variety of toys and snack foods. Adult ethnographic interviewees appear in these chapters as well, but as counterpoints to their children or students. The second chapter deals primarily with children's magazines, including, but not limited to what English speakers might call comic books. Peterson examines the consumption patterns of these magazines, which may be composed in Arabic and conceived for an Arabophone-and implicitly Muslim-readership, translated from other languages into Arabic, and thereby repurposed for an Egyptian readership, or purchased in their original language, particularly English. In his analysis, Peterson argues that the locally created magazines, which often carry religious or secular moral lessons that reflect a sense of Arab-Islamic identity, are of so little interest to the children of upper-class families that one can distinguish the class backgrounds of Cairene children simply by marking which comic books and magazines they choose to buy. The corollary to this observation, which also supports Peterson's assertion, is that the more prestigious foreign comic books are generally far too expensive for the household budgets of the Egyptian middle classes. Beyond these material facts, Peterson observes that the kinds of narratives that tend to draw the attention of children in each class category also tend to reinforce a differential sense of global citizenship: while the middle classes consume children's magazines that emphasize Egyptianness, Arabness, and, to a lesser degree, Muslimness, the upper classes consume magazines that emphasize a broader (and elite) cosmopolitan identity, one that begins to cultivate the reader's sense of connection to a complex of consumer desires tied to the West. …

Vanguard Total Index: Conceptual Writing, Information Asymmetry, and the Risk Society

Vanguard Total Index:Conceptual Writing, Information Asymmetry, and the Risk Society Paul Stephens (bio) Ubu usurps much usufruct. Ubu sums up lump sums. Christian Bök, Eunoia Why is an index dear to him. He has thousands of gesticulations. Gertrude Stein, “Advertisements” No index was wholeso our indexwill sometimes lead us to usLouis Zukofsky, “A”–14 The past decade has seen a proliferation of works of constrained and appropriated writing that incorporate the forms of the index, the database, and the catalogue. These forms embody what Lev Manovich describes as “the database logic” of new media.1 Manovich asks, “How can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search, and instantly retrieve it, lead to new kinds of narratives?” (237). If one replaces the word “narratives” [End Page 752] with “poetry,” that question could be considered the central theme of this essay. Conceptual writing’s appropriation strategies, I suggest, offer some preliminary answers. Robert Fitterman maintains that conceptual writing’s distinguishing feature is its use of appropriated texts “in large, unmodified chunks—a paragraph, a page, a whole book” in order to “reframe works that already exist in new contexts,” which “in turn, instigates new ways to potentially realize our place as text artists in a network culture” (Rob the Plagiarist 15). According to Kenneth Goldsmith, “In the face of [an] unprecedented amount of digital text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance” (Uncreative Writing 24–25). Flarf poetry, by contrast to conceptual poetry, is composed of smaller, more discrete textual fragments and is said to more closely resemble earlier poetic appropriation strategies that allow poets greater agency in the selection of source materials.2 I make the case here that by adopting strategies of passive indexing, conceptual writing demonstrates considerable selfreflexivity with respect to the conditions of its own existence and dissemination in an era of instantaneous global information flows. Moreover, this writing points to distinctive changes in the nature of the global economy over the past two decades, highlighting the emergence of what Ulrich Beck has termed the “risk society” and Jacob S. Hacker calls “the great risk shift,” wherein financial risk has shifted from governments and corporations to individuals (in the form, for instance, of privatized retirement plans).3 All of the works surveyed in this essay thematize in some manner the relation of a writer to a data set—raising [End Page 753] important questions concerning matters of privacy, authenticity, identity, and information asymmetry. These works are not, for the most part, directly prescriptive of social change. They more often take the form of parodic compendia. Rather than refusing conventional syntax at the level of the sentence in the manner of the Language poets, these works for the most part operate by restructuring and reframing aggregate data. Broadly speaking, I am construing conceptual writing concerned with the nature and structure of information systems as indexical in form. In using the term “index,” I am referring more to the bureaucratic forms taken by large quantities of information than to the linguistic sense of indexicality developed by Charles Sanders Peirce.4 Indexes are the ultimate archival form—no library, not even a Borgesian one, can ever pretend to completeness. Indexical art and writing presents tricky theoretical questions with regard to originality, translation, and transcoding. Indexes can be used to measure almost anything—including, perhaps, the impossibility of “getting outside” of the institutions of late-capitalist bourgeois culture. Financial, bibliographic, biomedical, and demographic indexes all bear witness to the forms taken by the bureaucratic mechanisms of contemporary capitalism—to which conceptualism bears an uneasy relation. The writer or artist herself is often subject to the index. The index fund, a comparatively recent financial innovation, exemplifies this phenomenon. Most knowledge workers, poets included, participate in retirement plans that own index funds that passively track stock and bond markets. Does this mean that poets, too, are owners of Apple, the world’s largest corporation by market capitalization? This is not the place for an extensive consideration of the ethics of investment; my point here is simply that [End Page 754] every index...

On The Clock and Christian Marclay’s Instrumental Logic of Appropriation

After a century of creating the basis for an audio-visual technical memory, a new cultural practice of mnemonic immediacy is about to emerge: the recycling and feedback of the media archive (a new archival economy of memory). With new options of measuring, naming, describing and addressing digitally stored images, this ocean needs to be navigated (cybernetics, literally) in different ways and no longer merely ordered by classification (the encyclopedic enlightenment paradigm). digm). Such a media-archaeology is the opposite of iconographic history: What is being digitally excavated by the computer is a genuinely media-mediated gaze on a well-defined number of (what we still call) images.-Harun Farocki and Wolfgang Ernst, Towards an Archive of Visual ConceptsHow many stories have I seen on the screen? All those characters carrying out dumb tasks. Actors doing exciting things. It's enough to put one into a permanent coma.-Robert Smithson, A Cinematic AtopiaWhen Christian Marclay accepted the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, he thanked the jury for giving The Clock its fifteen minutes. His joke will ultimately be unsubstantiated. It will be considered a monumental work of art in the twenty-first century due to its scale, labor intensity, and aspirations towards a total reflection of time in narrative cinema.It seems incontrovertible that The Clock does not provide an exploration of the dynamic expressions of duration in cinema, due to its rigid parameters and structures. This is because its constitutive materials are split between shots of time-keepers and numerous motif clusters-that is, alarm clocks waking disgruntled workers, rushing travelers narrowly missing train departures, school bells ringing and emptying classrooms, angry housewives waiting for husbands to arrive at dinner, and so on. While this certainly conveys the hailing function of the clock, the administrative functions it serves modernity, and the many dramaturgical devices of narrative cinema itself, in the nearly twelve hours of The Clock I was able to watch time appears organized only in the terms of task-orientation. One finds oneself focused on The Clock's obsessive assemblage of iconography, daily routines, dramatic exposition, and what appears to be an index of the gestures of narrative cinema.These themes offer some of the most interesting entry points to The Clock and help to map the present landscape of found footage work and a move towards the atlas, the encyclopedic or archival ordering of cinema's constituent motifs, gestures, and iconography. The last two decades of found footage have increasingly ingly moved from the refuse of cinematic materials (leader, production discards, B movies, ephemeral cinema) towards the film canon itself. Iterations of such work have been referred to both in the terms of Lev Manovich's database, online as the supercut, and in cinema-encyclopedia projects.1 The found footage films discussed in this essay harmonize with what Christa Blumlinger has elsewhere called cataloguing, iconographic-serial work.2 The Clock is the most monumental cinematic contribution to this mode of filmmaking to date.In broader art practice, iconographic seriality reflects an approach to the archive as a system of discursivity3 engaged with the logics and structures of taxonomy and classification. Frequently employed to present intertextual interpretations of art and mass-cultural objects, this archival discourse interrogates art history might produce cultural memory and media archives become centres for interpretation. 4 These priorities and drives form the crux of a broader crisis in the landscape of found footage today and a move towards a database aesthetic where film fragments are serialized through an archival discourse according to iconography and narrative motifs. The central question of digital platforms in relation to the digital archive for Lev Manovich is: how can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and instantly retrieve it lead to new kinds of narratives? …

A ficção científica e o estranhamento cognitivo no ensino de ciências: estudos críticos e propostas de sala de aula

Este trabalho, partindo da apresentação de propostas de ensino de ciências com o uso da ficção científica e fundamentando-se em referenciais dos estudos literários críticos sobre o gênero, objetiva argumentar que sua maior contribuição para a educação científica não se situa nem na precisão científica, nem na qualidade didática e nem mesmo no potencial lúdico que esse tipo de narrativa desperta. Sem desconsiderar a importância desses aspectos, mostramos que o sentido de levar a ficção científica para as aulas de ciências está nos mecanismos de produção ficcional que, por características que lhe são próprias, envolve um modo especial de raciocinar sobre o mundo natural. Tais mecanismos baseiam-se em conjecturas que promovem o chamado estranhamento cognitivo capaz de promover, nos estudantes, a problematização que pode ser o ponto de partida para uma abordagem crítica, não apenas de conceitos e leis, mas, também, de suas implicações e motivações epistemológicas e socioculturais.

Tennessee Williams in the 50s: A Mirror Competing Discourses

Modern fiction has a certain way of achieving ‘literariness’ and ‘sophistication’; it does so by means of “ambiguity”. Being “witty” or “deceitful”, to quote William Empson, ambiguity seems to press home the writers’ intention of deferring the meaning by making the ontological status of the text as implicit as possible. Ambiguity, therefore, forms a kind of narrative that determines the writer’s style. In James Joyce, however, particularly in the stories of Dubliners, this ambiguity is meant to reach a ‘mysterious’ level. Joyce’s “mysteries” are utterly different from commonly-believed, so-called textual “problems”. The problems can be solved, but mysteries should be “witnessed” and “attested” to be unfolded. Joyce’s mysterious ambiguities bear his unique signature: they represent the complexity, significance, and survival of a “gnomonic” patterning. Being a geometric figure, a gnomon is the part of a parallelogram which remains after a similar parallelogram has been taken away from one of its corners. The gnomon, therefore, represents an incomplete figure, like Joyce’s vaguely elliptical and incomplete stories. Joyce introduces the gnomon as the personification of imperfection, hopeless, paralysis, and damnation. The following study is going to elaborate this main principle of Joycean ambiguity in the opening story of Dubliners, “The Sisters”, and demonstrate its distinctively gnomonic narrative and characterization.

A RECONFIGURAÇÃO DA LITERATURA (FICÇÃO) NO CONTEXTO DOS NOVOS MÉDIAS (FICÇÃO, E-TEXTOS, HIPERTEXTO E VIDEOJOGOS: «MÁQUINAS LITERÁRIAS»?)

Neste ensaio propomo-nos refletir sobre a (re)configuração da noção clássica de Literatura e de ficção literária à luz da evolução das tecnologias, até à emergência e consequente desenvolvimento da indústria videolúdica e dos jogos digitais. Será que a alteração da materialidade do(s) suporte(s), neste caso, do papel e do livro para os ecrãs do(s) computador(es) ou das televisões, altera ou mantém a possibilidade de, nalguns casos, de acordo com um certo tipo de narrativa e de género ludológico, continuarmos a falar de ficção e de Literatura? Em que medida a (i)materialidade algorítmica, ao desmaterializar e virtualizar o conteúdo de uma forma diversa do que acontece com o livro – desde logo, como se prefigura nos e-textos, hipertextos e cibertextos, alterando, igualmente, a literacia, bem como o modo de autoria, emissão e recepção -, mantém ou altera o que, até aqui, se designou por Literatura? Será que estamos no mesmo plano da alteração que se verificou aquando da fixação da oralidade pela escrita, isto é, da própria emergência da paradoxal (e contraditória nos termos) «literatura oral»?

SISTER OF THE TYPE: THE FEMINIST COLLECTIVE IN GRANT ALLEN'STHE TYPE-WRITER GIRL

Grant Allen's short novelThe Type-Writer Girl(1897) opens with a problem. In the first lines we are introduced to our narrator who, we are promptly told, is unemployed: “I was twenty-two and without employment. I would not say by this that I was without occupation. In the world in which we live, set with daisies and kingfishers and undeciphered faces of men and women, I doubt I could be at a loss for something to occupy me” (23; ch. 1). As the second half of this quotation suggests, our narrator is confident that this problem of employment is quite easy to solve, for all around is a world teeming with life, and as we learn by the start of the next paragraph, our narrator does indeed have an occupation, something to fill his/her time. Our narrator is a storyteller: “I cannot choose but wonder who each is, and why he is here. For one after another I invent a story. It may not be the true story, but at least it amuses me” (23; ch. 1). So the real problem, beyond the question of employment, emerges as a question of narrative subject. Who is this narrator, the subject of this first-person story? We do not even know if our narrator is male or female. It is as if he/she is lost amidst that sea of “undeciphered faces of men and women.” Connected to this problem of subject is also the question of form. The first-person point of view would suggest an autobiographical narrative. Yet any expectations of an autobiographical account are immediately undermined in chapter two when we learn that our narrator is named “Juliet Appleton.” This narrative subject does not match the novel's signed author, “Olive Pratt Rayner.” So we are again left with questions: what kind of narrative is this, who is the real subject of this story, what is the form of this narrative, and does our narrator find employment?

Invisible City or the Search for the Best Guide to Klaipeda’s Culture

The aim of this article is to find the best guide to Klaipeda’s culture. “Guide” means an appropriate narrative, which constructs urban and cultural identity. The main questions are to be answered: How Klaipeda’s culture changed from 1990 to 2010? What is the best representation of cultural transformations in post-soviet Klaipeda? What kinds of narratives are told on Klaipeda’s culture? Who are their authors? What is their content? Are those narratives commensurable? Is it possible to find the most appropriate guide to Klaipeda’s culture? Four narratives are investigated: narratives provided by historian, writer, philosopher and journalists (with the help of experts and vox populi). Those narratives about Klaipeda’s culture are deconstructed applying Italo Calvino’s metaphor of invisible cities, i.e. the cities that never existed, do not exist anymore or do not exist yet. These narratives instead of dealing with reality of current situation project an invisible city, which manifests as orientation towards past or future; fiction or abstraction; lost or projected etc. Different perspectives analyzed are incommensurable; therefore, these narratives present Klaipeda as an invisible city.

The problem of time in a general narratology

The profound narrativization of contemporary culture in the large-scale “Narrative Turn” forces narratology to leave the paradigm established on the study of the novel, and a general narratology that embraces all kinds of narratives is urgently called for. The “fundamental retrospectiveness” for the definition of the narrative becomes an obstacle for such a narratology. This essay proposes a new definition for the minimal narrative by removing the “recounting” part, and, based on the new definition, an all-narrative typology as distinguished by three criteria: factuality/fictionality, media, and moods (intentional temporality). Finally the essay attempts a detailed analysis of the live television news since they occupy an important position in today’s culture and emphasizes that the uncertainty of the plot could lead to recycling of intention.

Discourse-level structuring of information in narrative:Signalling structural, interactional and cognitive shifts

Discourse-level structuring of information is explored in narrative in the light of three parameters subsumed under this umbrella notion: (i) the structural concepts of “theme-rheme”, connected to “position”; (ii) the interaction-oriented pair of concepts “topic-comment”, grounded in the notion of “aboutness”; and (iii) the cognitively motivated gradient from “given” to “new” information, related to interlocutors’ assumptions of their memory constraints as well as those of others. In each pair/gradient of concepts one member/pole – “theme”, “comment”, and “new” – is argued to constitute the Figure, against the (necessary) Ground of the other. The linguistic signalling of the structural, interactional and cognitive shifts in information structuring is examined in two different kinds of narratives in written French. The analysis of a short legend, in its entirety, and a narrative paragraph from a news story both point to high context-sensitivity in the signalling of the three parameters of discourse-level structuring of information, with that of the discourse level “newness” differing most markedly from the others.

Mind the gap

The paper aims to take a reflective stance on the relationship between policy/evidence and practice, which, the authors argue, is conceptually under-developed. The paper aims to show that current research perspectives fail to frame evidence and policy in relation to practice. A qualitative study was conducted in the English NHS in four Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). Seventy-five observations of meetings and 52 semi-structured interviews were completed. The approach to data analysis was to explore and reconstruct narratives of PCT managers' real practices. The exploratory findings are presented through two kinds of narratives. The first narrative vividly illustrates the significance of the active involvement, skills and creativity of health care practitioners for policy implementation. The second narrative elucidates how problems of collaboration among different experts in PCTs might emerge and affect evidence utilisation in practice. The findings exemplify that policies are made workable in practice and, hence, policy makers may also need to be mindful of practical intricacies and conceive policy implementation as an iterative process. The contribution of this paper lies in offering an alternative and important perspective to the debate of utilisation of policy/evidence in health care management and in advancing existing understanding of health care management practice. The paper's rich empirical examples demonstrate some important dimensions of the complexity of practice.