Narrative Level Research Articles

Above the heteronormative narrative: looking up the place of Disney’s villains

Abstract The article proposes a re-examination of the role and position of the so-called “Disney villains” within the narrative framework of animated films and popular culture as a whole. In the first part, the historical evolution in the representation of these villains will be explored according to the practice of “queer coding,” which involves attributing stereotypically queer traits to them without explicitly stating their gender and sexual identity. It will be observed how their non-conforming gender and sexuality, used to mark their moral deviance, challenge and defy dominant gender and narrative norms. It is precisely through their queer performance and camp aesthetic that “evil stepmothers,” “sissy-villains,” and “drag-queen-like” sea witches can emancipate themselves from their traditional roles as antagonists (narrative level) and as social outcasts (discursive level) to seize the spotlight through the screen (manifest surface). This study combines tools of Greimasian text analysis, including the canonical narrative schema and the generative trajectory of meaning, with Lotman’s theory and notion of “semiosphere,” to investigate the centrality and criticality of these “quillains” within the heteronormative narrative framework and the broader cultural context. To capture (or being captured by) the queer aspect of these characters and their stories, the invitation is to look at their visage not as a coded symbol of an underlying identity and truth, but as an image that exceeds any defined meaning thanks to its iconic power.

How Does the Bible Refer to Christ? Interacting with Augustine the Allegorist

AbstractAbstract: Traditional Christianity teaches that the Bible's primary referent is Jesus Christ, the Messiah, and Christians have long looked for ways to connect every passage in the Bible to the Christ. One venerable strategy is the allegorical or figurative approach of creatively interpreting any unit of biblical meaning, sometimes down to the individual words, as referencing Christ. Alternatively, we might take the biblical narrative itself as referencing Christ and find the connection of smaller units of meaning to Christ through their place in that narrative. My article clarifies this topic through interaction with an exemplary practitioner of the strategy of figurative reading, the Church Father Augustine. I will first explain Augustine's reasons for his hermeneutics, which stem largely from his focus on smaller units of reference such as the word and the sentence. Then I will argue that his reasons are not persuasive if indeed the Bible does refer to Christ at a broader level, the level of narrative.

Anti-hero in The Seventh Day of Creation: A Campbellian Reading

From the mythological point of view, the hero of a literary text is an archetype in the collective unconscious who embodies the collective ideals of a culture while searching for his/her individual identity at the narrative level. In his seminal The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Joseph Campbell addresses the archetypal function of the hero in three main stages: departure, initiation, and return. Drawing on Campbell’s model, this study examines the journey of the hero in the second storyline of The Seventh Day of Creation, i.e., Al-Sirah al-Mutlaqiyeh. Sirah al-Zatiyeh is a sequence to another study by same authors that examined the first storyline of the novel (Al-Sirah al-Zatiyeh) with regard to the author’s personality and individuation. Proceeding from the analysis of Al-Sirah al-Zatiyeh, this study considers Mutlaq as an antihero based on Campbell’s model and identifies a Hegelian dialectic relationship between the two storylines of the novel. Al-Sirah al-Zatiyeh and Al-Sirah al-Mutlaqiyeh, which respectively represent the individual code and the social code, are designed to showcase an ideal Iraqi society. More precisely, highlighting the opposition in the two main parts of the narrative points at the movement and dynamism desired by the author for changing the future of the country.

Lo storytelling come elaborazione cognitiva delle esperienze in bambini con DSA

This article aims to explore a linguistic dimension’s aspect that significantly characterises human forms of communication: the ability to elaborate stories. Since narration represents the main cognitive tool involved in the data of experience storage operation, the proposal is to identify the intrinsic pedagogical potential that resides in it. Starting with an investigation of the cognitive properties underlying their interpretation on a narrative level, brain mechanisms underlying the act of writing are observed. A conceptual reformulation of the narrative experience as an educational strategy is suggested: this idea made it possible to develop a linguistic analysis of narrative processes in a group of children with specific learning disorders or other fragilities. Narrative constitutes a space for a recapitulation of experiences during the child’s stages of cognitive development. The elements of the storyworld are interwoven, resulting in an overall representation of the narrated events. The texts produced highlight the need to narrate an own autobiographical experience and the conviction that our link with storytelling is the only possibility of constructing contexts of meaning.

The New Anthropomorphism Debate and Researching Non-Human Animal Emotions: A Kantian Approach

Researchers of non-human animal emotions tend to defend some forms of anthropomorphism and seek ways to make it more critical, self-aware, and useful for scientific purposes. I propose that to achieve this goal, we need first to conduct a Kantian investigation into the deeper structure of anthropomorphism. I argue that we can distinguish at least three levels of anthropomorphising: a narrative level, a cognitive level and an in-between, metatheoretical level which is the deeper structure determining how we anthropomorphise. Because the current debate tends to focus either on the narrative level or on the cognitive level, this paper concentrates on the metatheoretical level, discusses its role in emotion research, the possible errors it may cause, and how we can work on it, drawing on predictive processing-based theories of emotions and an evolutionary approach. The key to being critical in anthropomorphism is to be aware of the complexity of this whole structure, as well as to be able to challenge and put into question all and any of its elements.

Learning-skill stories completion: A study on the development of 3–6-year-old children's narratives

The development of children's narrative language is an essential part of their language development, which has a unique value to children's future learning and growth. Many research studies focus on children's narrative ability, but few focus on the completion of Chinese children's stories. In this study, 191 Chinese children aged 3–6 years old in the Shanghai area were selected to collect a story corpus by using the international and general completion pictures of learning stories, supplemented with the method of corpus study to explore the characteristics of children's narrative language development in the learning-skill stories. The study found that the development of vocabulary, syntax, and other aspects of 3–6-year-old children showed an apparent upward trend. The variety of words, the types, and the frequency of nouns and adjectives increased with age. Regarding the perspective of syntactic analysis, the critical stage in the development of syntactic length was about 5 years old. The narrative situation of the learning-skill stories could help children to show a better narrative level. At the age of 3–6, the story structure of children's learning-skill stories gradually became complete and three-dimensional with age, and the richness of children's life experiences was an essential factor in promoting the integrity of the story structure. In the Chinese context, reactive sequences and abbreviated episodes were the main types of story structure in children's narration. The narratives of children's learning-skill stories were influenced by Chinese culture.

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AS EMBODIED CONSTANTS OF NONVERBAL EXPERIENCE IN A FICTIONAL TEXTS

Fiction is a valuable source of knowledge — any text can be viewed as a communicative phenomenon that verbally presents a fragment of a complete system of knowledge about the world. Nonverbal communication or nonverbal behavior the characters use is an embodied nonverbal experience the narrator presents and the reader perceives. Constants of nonverbal experience become visible as linguistic units or words denoting different kinds of characters’ motion: gestures, movements, face expressions. The notion of experience is connected with the notion of knowledge that presuppose revealing a textual meaning in terms of a scheme containing constants of nonverbal experience. The sphere of cognitive narratology makes visible the connection between nonverbal communication, nonverbal experience embodied in a multidimensional meaningful fabric of a fictional text. Cognitive narratology seeks to reproduce the connections between the narrative levels of the text and the modes of cognitive activity of the reader, turning to conceptual analysis and linguistic analysis of the text.

THE SPECIFICITY OF THE FUNCTIONING OF POLYPHONIC ELEMENTS AT THE NARRATIVE LEVEL OF MODERN NOVEL (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS OF E. VODOLAZKIN, M. SHISHKIN, V. SHAROV)

THE SPECIFICITY OF THE FUNCTIONING OF POLYPHONIC ELEMENTS AT THE NARRATIVE LEVEL OF MODERN NOVEL (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS OF E. VODOLAZKIN, M. SHISHKIN, V. SHAROV)

УБАКТЫЛУУ-КӨРҮНҮШТҮК ФОРМА – МОРФОЛОГИЯЛЫК ДЕҢГЭЭЛДИН БИРДИГИ

From the point of view of the morphological level, some phenomena beside the system are a systematic part of a higher level of integration, which proves that language is a global phenomenon. When creating the grammar of the text, it is at the functional-verbal level, i.e. it is necessary to consider the structure of the invariant scheme created in the text and the discovery of integrative relations. Analyzing the text's structural regularity, finding its complex parallel dependencies based on an integrative approach to a significant extent, makes understanding the text possible. The plan of the conversation is the level of narration, the plan of the plot is the level of the text. Temporal-visual form is a unit of morphological level. When they enter as a structural element at the level of narrative, or at the level of text, they create multiple levels simultaneously. This feature shows the features of the text structure, its multiplicity and other features. Also, in the temporal-visual form, the spoken and written forms of the language involved and they differ from each other. The communication situation is implemented by the oral form of communication, and the plot situation by the written form.

Decolonized Trauma: Narrative, Memory and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract Even though literary works serve as excellent media for bearing witness to trauma, postcolonial and diasporic literary texts are often dismissed for their falsified accounts of traumatic life experiences. Recent studies on African American literature have stressed the need for a decolonized conceptualization of trauma that would not only disrupt the long-existing white Global Northern perspectives but also recognize feelings of empathy and solidarity among members of the community in these literary corpora. The present study adopts a hybrid analytical framework to examine the representations of trauma in the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). Specifically, we draw upon Gérard Genette’s narrative levels, Ron Eyerman’s collective memory, and Jeffrey Charles Alexander’s collective identity to argue that the novel defies conventional forms of narrative by depicting postcolonial and diasporic identities as volatile and dynamic constructs. The findings indicate the multiple ways in which the story presents diasporic Africans – that is, the female protagonist Ifemelu and her male lover Obinze – as capable of overcoming the adverse effects of traumatic memories by chronicling an authentic record of their experiences. The study also reveals that the leading female character, like the novelist Adichie, creates an empowering platform for migrants of various ethnicities to speak up about their traumatic experiences, and thereby establish what is called ‘cross-cultural solidarity’ in reconstructing a new community.

Quranic Intertextuality in Naguib Mahfouz’s Novel: “Hadrah Al Muhtaram” As an Example

The Holy Qur’an is irrefutably considered one of the most important sources from which ancient and contemporary novelists drew inspiration and projected them into their creative works due to its connection to people’s conscience and its great influence on their souls due to its sanctity. The present study has started from the realization that Naguib Mahfouz’s novel is believed to be highly intertextual with the Quranic texts and that readers who are unfamiliar of this type of intertextuality may misunderstand and misinterpret a text that contains intertextual references to the Quran. Therefore, the study aims to investigate the Quranic intertextuality in Naguib Mahfouz's 1975 novel "Hadrah al Muhtaram" for the purpose of comprehending the reason behind its utilization in the texts. The researcher's hypothesis is that by revealing such potential intertextual features, it will be possible to read, understand, and interpret Naguib Mahfouz's literary works more effectively. The study found that Naguib Mahfouz is deeply influenced by Islamic culture and inspired by the Holy Quran as evidenced by the significance presences of Quranic verses that the novel imbibed at the levels of events and narration in order to enrich the fictional texts to produce new connotations in line with the contexts. The result of the study also indicates that novel writing is in dire need of such literary vitality from the overlap and mixing of texts mechanism known as intertextuality since it is a significant and practical tool for both text creators and readers.

Enfoque lingüístico a la escritura creativa: un paseo por los lugares donde se manifiesta la creatividad

This article describes the phenomenon of creativity through an approach that focuses on linguistic aspects, beyond the narrative level of linguistic-literary description, based on the main theories of Linguistics. The concept of linguistic creativity, a phenomenon that only manifests itself in human language, is little explored and known in Languages and Literature, although it is extremely productive for writing practices, inside and outside the classroom. In the first part of the article, the concepts of writing, creative writing, creativity and linguistic creativity are discussed; in the second one, the relations between linguistic theories and creativity are discussed based on the concepts of phrase, paradigm, recursion, change, variation and grammaticalization; in the third part, we bring some points from the works of Guimarães Rosa. In the final considerations, we emphasize the expansion of the sense of “creativity”, in order to encompass all textual productions, as a means of making these productions more expressive. This work adopted a bibliographic review as a research methodology.

On Dissonance and Late Style: Spenser with Theodor W. Adorno

This essay makes a case for a reassessment of The Faerie Queene in light of Adorno’s philosophical thinking about dissonance. Focusing on Book II, I analyze Spenser’s productive use of dissonant elements at the different levels of narrative and style, which produce a similar effect to the alienating techniques that Adorno praises in literary and musical forms of expression. I then consider Adorno’s discussion of dissonance as an essential aspect of late style and bring it to bear on Spenser’s poetic practice in the conclusive Mutabilitie Cantos of the epic. I suggest that this comparative analysis may not only open up new avenues for interpreting Spenser’s epic but also help us to reassess the significance of Adorno’s more neglected discussions of dissonance in his minor works of literary criticism, which gesture toward the importance of this concept as a tool for textual analysis.

THE USE OF PARADOX IN PROSE: AN EXPLORATION OF CONTRADICTION AS A LITERARY DEVICE

The paper is devoted to the intriguing realm of paradox in prose, investigating its role as a powerful and captivating literary device. Paradox, characterized by the simultaneous existence of contradictory elements, challenges readers' conventional understanding and invites deeper contemplation. Through a comprehensive examination of renowned literary works and critical analysis, various functions and effects of paradox in prose will be outlined. How paradox can be employed at different narrative levels, such as character development, plot construction, and thematic exploration is a truly intriguing issue. By examining key examples from classic and contemporary literature, including authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Shakespeare, Herman Melville etc. the article demonstrates how paradox enriches storytelling by creating tension, ambiguity, and cognitive dissonance.

Higher levels of narrativity lead to similar patterns of posterior EEG activity across individuals.

The focus of cognitive and psychological approaches to narrative has not so much been on the elucidation of important aspects of narrative, but rather on using narratives as tools for the investigation of higher order cognitive processes elicited by narratives (e.g., understanding, empathy, etc.). In this study, we work toward a scalar model of narrativity, which can provide testable criteria for selecting and classifying communication forms in their level of narrativity. We investigated whether being exposed to videos with different levels of narrativity modulates shared neural responses, measured by inter-subject correlation, and engagement levels. Thirty-two participants watched video advertisements with high-level and low-level of narrativity while their neural responses were measured through electroencephalogram. Additionally, participants' engagement levels were calculated based on the composite of their self-reported attention and immersion scores. Results demonstrated that both calculated inter-subject correlation and engagement scores for high-level video ads were significantly higher than those for low-level, suggesting that narrativity levels modulate inter-subject correlation and engagement. We believe that these findings are a step toward the elucidation of the viewers' way of processing and understanding a given communication artifact as a function of the narrative qualities expressed by the level of narrativity.

(De)constructing Nationalism: Understanding Irony in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925), and Mario und der Zauberer (1929)

ABSTRACT In the background of the European era of nationalism, Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925), and Mario und der Zauberer (1929) reveal the authority of narrative in the discursive construction of identity. By analysing the interrelation of Mann’s characteristic irony and productions of discourses of racialization, this essay draws attention to the constructed nature of German national identity. This identity is revealed to be underpinned by colonial tropes of difference which simultaneously structure internal European hierarchies. Yet, far from simply affirming a naturalistic or fixed hierarchy of cultural authority, irony at a narrative level elucidates how norms are both socially and textually constructed, and, by extension, unstable. In this way, troubling the distinction between cultural truths and social fictions, this essay explores the way in which the works problematize to what extent norms are, in fact, normative.

Āpiti hono, tātai hono: A collaborative bicultural social work research approach

INTRODUCTION: This article introduces the qualitative research design of a research report completed in 2019 that focused on collaborative bicultural social work practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. A major focus of this article is the relationship between the Pākehā researcher (and tauira) and the Māori social work research supervisor. Therefore, reflective accounts are provided throughout the article where we have emphasised the value of the supervision process and bicultural collaborative relationship. METHODS: The research utilised social constructivist theory and a decolonising, Te Tiriti o Waitangi lens. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with four registered social workers. An integrated narrative approach to analysis allowed for multiple narrative levels to be considered. The researcher and supervisor modelled a collaborative bicultural relationship in the research design process. FINDINGS: The article presents the process of research design and a critical reflection on the challenges and benefits of a collaborative bicultural supervision relationship. We argue that an interrogation of the cultural positioning of the researcher and supervisor is essential in research design in Aotearoa New Zealand. These were also reflected in the findings reported in a separate article in this issue (Deverick & Mooney, 2023). IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE, RESEARCH OR POLICY: Reflections of bicultural research will be of interest, particularly to other Pākehā, Tauiwi tauira interested in exploring how they can contribute to the bicultural discourse in research. Research supervisors may also be interested.

Parental personality disorder and child maltreatment: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundParental pathology may affect parenting capacity and is deemed a risk factor for child maltreatment. Especially parental personality disorder (PD) can significantly burden the relationship and interaction between parents and their children. ObjectiveThis meta-analytic review aims to summarize and quantify the influence of parental PD on the occurrence / the risk of child maltreatment. Participants and settingStudies had to meet the following inclusion criteria: They had to analyze a sample of parents with a diagnosed PD and the occurrence / risk of maltreating their children. To be included in the narrative synthesis and/or meta-analysis, they had to be case-control, cross-sectional, or longitudinal studies. Literature research was conducted in the databases Web of Science, Psychinfo, and Google Scholar up to January 2023. MethodsFirst, studies were analyzed on a narrative level, and eligible studies for the meta-analysis were identified. Studies were grouped according to the diagnosed PDs. Five different groups were included: borderline PD, antisocial PD, narcissistic PD, nondifferentiated PDs, and Cluster B PDs. Three different random-effects meta-analyses were computed (borderline PD, antisocial PD, Cluster B PDs). Meta-analyses were controlled for publication bias and different covariates (e.g., study quality, sample size). ResultsAfter screening 41 full texts, 17 studies were included in the narrative synthesis, out of which 14 samples from 11 studies were included in the meta-analysis. Analysis of borderline PD showed an association with the occurrence / risk of child maltreatment (OR = 8.08; 95 % CI [2.51, 25.93]). However, after taking into account possible publication bias, this association was no longer significant. We found a significant and stable association between antisocial PD and the occurrence of / risk of child maltreatment (OR = 4.92; 95 % CI [3.26, 7.43]). Analysis of Cluster B PDs (antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic) revealed a significant overall association (OR = 4.23; 95 % CI [2.75, 6.5]), indicating that the presence of Cluster B PDs in parents significantly increases the occurrence of / the risk of child maltreatment. ConclusionsAnalyses indicated a significant association between of Cluster B PDs, and specifically between antisocial and borderline PD, with the occurrence of / the risk of child maltreatment. However, methodological limitations have to be taken into account, because results for borderline PD were no longer significant after controlling for possible publication bias. Moreover, the number of studies included was rather small, and results showed a substantial amount of heterogeneity. OtherThis work was not supported by any funding.

РАБОТЫ П. ХЮНА: НАРРАТОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ КАТЕГОРИИ СОБЫТИЯ

A significant phenomenon in modern narratology is a complex concept of eventfulness, which P. Hühn has been developing for many years in several books and numerous articles. In his theoretical elaborations P. Hühn relies on a close reading of individual texts, considered in comparative and historical context. P. Hühn interprets event as a hermeneutic category, reflecting not only objectively existing intratextual structures, but also the significance of changes in narrative situation for perceiving subject, which can be a character as well as a narrator or an implicit / real reader. For P. Hühn an event is not any change of situation, but a change that is relevant, unexpected and unusual, so the researcher links it not to a minimalist definition of narrative, as many other narratologists do, but to the concept of tellability. Hühn refers to Lotman’s plot model and R. Shank and P. Abelson’s theory of cognitive schemata as a theoretical bases, he also demonstrates their complementarity in the practical analysis of artistic narratives. P. Hühn puts special accent on the historical and cultural variability of eventfulness, which manifests itself, on the one hand, in a more or less frequent occurrence of events in literary narratives, and on the other hand, in the variablity of changes that might be interpreted as events in different historical and cultural contexts. An important feature of P. Hühn’s theory is the analysis of events on several narrative levels – not only on the level of happenings (the level of the story / histoire), but also on the levels of presentation and reception. Another original element of Hühn’s theory is the notion of non-event that covers cases when the absence of relevant and unexpected changes is perceived as an event, since it contradicts readers’ expectations. Hühn analyses eventfullness not only in fictional prose, but also in dramatic and lyrical works.

Superimpositions and Vampires in Jess Franco’s Cinema

Within fantastic and horror cinema, the technique of superimposing images has played a fundamental role since its inception when it comes to representing the supernatural. In this text we will focus on the adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a range of vampire films, which, starting with Murnau’s Nosferatu (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, 1922), have their own peculiarities in the use of superimposition as a visual effect. To delve into the effectiveness and narrative uses of the technique, we will compare two films that adapt the novel from very different times and perspectives: Count Dracula (El conde Drácula, 1969) and Vampire Blues (Los blues del vampiro, 1999), both directed by Jesús “Jess” Franco. We will distinguish the superimposition made in 35mm and the technique that digital video allows today, and we will analyze the technical and rhetorical functions that this device performs in the narrative levels of the story and the discourse of both titles.