Moral Stories Research Articles

What Makes Films Historical?

Whatever else has been said about that troubling admixture of home movie, testimony (true or false), and pederasty (alleged or actual) that comprises the documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003), the film was possible only because of the Friedman family’s fascination with filming, such that their home movies became the enduring matter of lives bereft of almost everything else. That fascination reflects the perception that, unlike words, film/video/moving pictures capture something. This premise holds as well for The Blair Witch Project (1999), a fictional film promoted as salvaged footage recorded by three young filmmakers attempting to investigate allegedly haunted woods in Maryland. The footage chronicles their inability to escape the woods, and the effects of unseen events that cause the disappearance (death?) of each. While the hyped (albeit bogus) authenticity of the footage made it a box-office success, that ploy may be less interesting than how the film explores a cinematic understanding of reality and national identity, as it contrasts the growing desperation of characters who, like the Friedmans, compulsively look into (either end of) a camera to validate their experience. The doomed filmmakers and comparably doomed Friedmans become characters in a horror story, fixating on making movies while they are losing their bearings. The Blair filmmakers, perhaps speaking as well for the Friedmans, repeatedly assert that if they persist they can’t be lost because “this is America!” The people in both films turn relentlessly to the camera for a real life. To the extent that the camera makes their presence historic at the same moment that history obscures their existence, they are trapped at a genre crossroads where visual authenticity meets fairy-tale narrative: the impossible space delimited by the “historical film.” That space, explored by all the books at hand, exists because a visual record suggests, for some, authenticity unavailable in print. “Somewhere outside the confining walls of these words,” writes historian Robert Rosenstone in History on Film/Film on History, “lies a world of colour, movement, sound, light, and life, a world on screen that points towards, refers to, represents” (1). From this premise, Rosenstone argues that specific films are works of history. In the postHayden White era of historiography, Rosenstone believes, history cannot claim accuracy because it is as much informed by narrative conventions and current tropes as by research and subject matter, although “film will never be able to do precisely what a book can do, and vice versa . . . history presented in these two different media would ultimately have to be judged by different criteria” (7). This truism anchors not only Rosenstone’s work but, to varying degrees, all these works, which use him as reference or inspiration. J. G. Smyth, in Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from “Cimarron” to “Citizen Kane”, supports Rosenstone by providing histories of several Hollywood historical films produced between World War I and World War II. William Guynn, in Writing History in Film, makes theoretical arguments for the claims that Smyth makes empirically, and Richard Francaviglia and Jerry Rodnitzky assemble essays in Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film to suggest “the unexplored potential of films to convey the intensity and complexity of history” (vii). Film’s pedagogical power focuses American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film by Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, who ostensibly share Rosenstone’s perspective, but in effect treat films chiefly as symptomatic of the moment and ideology that produced them. Partially incorporating and partially ignoring it, Rosenstone identifies three broad ways to represent history: dramatic film, documentary, innovative film. “The dramatic film aims directly at the emotions” (16), while the documentary “tells a linear and moral story” (17), and the opposition or innovative historical film “constitutes a baggy category” (18). The chapters that follow elaborate upon each of these types, drawing profitably both on Rosenstone’s expertise as a historian and his previous work on the subject—a collection of essays, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Film Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, pps 76–80, ISSN 0015-1386, e-ISSN 1533-8630. © 2009 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2009.62.3.76 BOOK REVIEWS

The Gulistan (rose garden) of Sa'di: bilingual English and Persian edition with vocabulary

Text in English & Persian. Is the Gulistan the most influential book in the Iranian world? In terms of prose, it is the model, which all writers of Persian seek to emulate. In terms of moral, philosophical or practical wisdom, it is endlessly quoted to either illustrate or prove a point. Sir John Malcolm even relates being told that it is the basis of the law of the Persians. It also travelled abroad. Voltaire, Goethe, Arnold, Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Franklin discovered, read, and took inspiration from the work. Moreover, travelers to Iran have often point out that to understand the mind of the inhabitants, one should read the Gulistan. Written some seven and a half centuries ago by Sa'di of Shiraz the Gulistan or Rose Garden is a collection of moral stories divided into eight themes: Conduct of Kings, Character of Dervishes, Superiority of Contentment, Benefits of Silence, Love and Youth, Feebleness and Old Age, Effects of Education, and Art of Conversation. In each section stories are told from which the reader learns how to behave in a given situation. Sa'di can be moral. Honesty gives God pleasure. I haven't seen anyone get lost on the right road. He may be practical. If you can't stand the sting, don't put your finger into a scorpion's hole. He is philosophical in these lines which are engraved at the entrance of the United Nations: members of the human race are limbs one to another, for at creation they were of one essence. When one limb is pained by fate, the others cannot rest. The Gulistan is considered the essence of elegant but simple Persian prose. For 600 years, it was the first book placed in the learner's hand. In Persian-speaking countries today, quotations from the Gulistan appear in every conceivable type of literature and is the source of numerous everyday proverbial statements, much as Shakespeare is in English. This is the first complete English translation of the Gulistan in more than a century. Wheeler M. Thackston, Professor of Persian at Harvard University, has faithfully translated Sa'di into clear contemporary English. To help the student, the original Persian is presented facing the English translation. A 3,600 word Persian-English and Arabic-English glossary is included to aide with the more difficult meanings. The Gulistan is imbued with a practical wisdom of life. Sa'di recognizes people for what they are. Every personality type that exists is found in the Rose Garden, the good, the bad, the weak, the strong, the pious, the impious, honest folk, and the most conniving of cheats. Hypocrites abound, foolish kings appear with their wily ministers, wise rulers vie with their malevolent courtiers, boastful young warriors turn tail and run. The beauty of Sa'di's wisdom is that it is timeless. What is expressed is in a setting so close and familiar to the modern experience that it is as relevant today as it was six hundred years ago.

“AN INFERNAL FIRE IN MY VEINS”: GENTLEMANLY DRINKING INTHE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL

Drinking was a seriouspreoccupation for mid-century English Victorians, and Anne Brontë'sThe Tenant of Wildfell Hallis a novel sodden with drink. This startlingly explicit novel is a troubled and troubling anatomy of upper-crust drunkenness, obsessed with issues of control and productivity, of appetites and class, as they play out across the body of its prime sot, the wealthy playboy Arthur Huntingdon. In telling her drinking tale, Brontë is doing more than simply crafting a prurient morality story, meant to scare drinkers straight. Arthur's fall into the bottle is emblematic of the increasingly untenable role of the landed gentleman in Victorian culture, and the dire consequences of his appetites suggest the possibility of a radical social revisioning across that gentleman's prone, overstuffed body.

HR fables: schizophrenia, selling your soul in dystopia, fuck the employees, and sleepless nights

Aesop's fables are used to gather HR fables and these fables are told mainly in the words of the protagonists of these moral stories, HR practitioners. Leaving the moral meaning of the fables for the reader to interpret so the reader can ethically connect with the morality of HR work, the personal narratives of practitioners and their humanity, the fables conclude with a critical commentary by the author, the promotion of a human virtue and HR moral maxim. The article, itself, then ends with an explanation of the research methodology adopted to compile the HR fables.

Poetic child realism: Scottish film and the construction of childhood

With this essay I suggest a move towards poetic realism in the representation of children in Scottish movies. After a brief discussion of the landscape context of film geographies I turn to the roots of Scottish film realism in British Free Cinema, with specific reference to filmmakers’ use of landscape and place‐characters. I then argue that Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay moves most fully towards the context of poetic child realism. Ramsay frames and foments a quirky poetic realism with non‐professional child actors placed in carefully crafted landscapes to create important moral and social stories that evolve from a series of shocks and an emotive collision of ideas.

Transnational Storytelling: Human Rights, WITNESS, and Video Advocacy

Video is increasingly utilized by human rights groups as a component in their advocacy strategies. This article looks at how video is used for a range of local, national, and transnational human rights audiences—both traditional and alternative. Drawing on a case study from the Philippines, it considers the challenges and issues faced by WITNESS (www.witness.org), its locally based human rights partners, and other similar organizations as they create and use video as visual evidence, testimony, and moral story before local, international, and transnational human rights audiences. These challenges include the contextualization of stories and sight bites, dilemmas of moving testimony between advocacy and media arenas, and the difficulties of establishing an ethical relationship, a community of witness, at a distance. This article is written in a personal capacity, although it draws on my experiences working as Program Manager at WITNESS.

Consistent Moral Formation in a Reformed Christian College

At Calvin College we embrace a particular moral story, one we believe is rooted in God’s truth as revealed in Biblical and natural revelation. The consistent teaching of this moral story across the entire college is based on our educational mission.

Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World-Wide Web

Propriety, and Appropriation Our comments extend our mutual scholarly interest in the articulation of discourses of in contemporary capitalist culture and how these are deployed in the narrative conjuring of as salvific moral virtue in global neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). We are interested in how narratives of and propriety, ownership, and entitlement come to be embodied and performed as moral stories in digital environments (Coombe and Herman 2000, Coombe and Herman 2001). As Marx argued capital a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical and theological niceties (Marx 1976[1867]:163). Capital strange for Marx because can apparently morph into so many different forms-as commodity, as debt, as labor, as knowledge, as brand image, and, underlying these, money as the universal, impersonal standard of value that makes these commensurable. Yet these strange and magical qualities of rest upon a foundation of metaphysics and theology-a particular set of ethical values that construe lifeworlds into monetary forms and human beings into autonomous individuals. We offer here a small slice of our ongoing work on the rhetorics of intellectual in the age of digital media and information-based capitalism.1 We use in the strong, Nietzschian sense of the term-as the act of ordering the chaos of life (Witson and Poulakis 1993:16). In this reading, a social and material practice of the pragmatics of power that punctuates the world with meaning and thereby renders social action possible. To use Barbara Biesecker's words, it in that the social takes (Biesecker 1997:50). Indeed, that makes the social a place of meaningful habitation. We do not mean rhetoric in the vernacular, pejorative sense as when someone says, Oh, that's just mere rhetoric, thereby connoting a fount of frothy words without real consequence (McGuigan 2003:1); nor do we restrict to discourse with persuasive force or intent. One of our favorite moments in teaching when we ask students to explain what the word property means. Given that the word a fixture of our everyday language and speech, students are remarkably perplexed when this question posed. Their reticence to give voice to their understanding of clearly doesn't have to do with their lack of knowledge of the word or the concept. Rather, rooted in the seeming obviousness of the answer. Property, one student will venture after an uncomfortably long silence, is when I own something. This rhetorical statement what legal scholar Jack Balkin (1998) calls a hegemonic meme in an argument that transports the concept of the meme from evolutionary biology to a critique of legal and political ideology. In brief, a meme an idea or rhetorical construct-a packet of coherent information-that passed on from generation to generation through the cultural transmission of communication, imitation, and replication called memesis (which should not be confused with the anthropological concept of mimesis). Cultures (Balkin shares none of the anthropologist's qualms about using the term as a noun) integrate such memes into quotidian ideologies because of their pragmatic utility in making sense of the world and allowing human groups to adapt to changing social environments. Through the memetic process of informational replication, to paraphrase Balkin, human beings become information made flesh. We have many reservations about Balkin's evolutionary theory of ideology. Aside from the conceptual overlay of evolutionary biology and the language and tropes of information science and technoculture, there not much in what Balkin has to say that hasn't already been said by Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Karl Mannheim, Berger and Luckmann, Foucault (especially), and even Marx himself. But the idea that the social power of ideology resides in its corporealization, in how embodied and performed, and how its makes the world habitable in the Heideggerian sense as an ethos, one worthy of further exploration when the location of this embodiment and performance takes place on the World Wide Web (the Web). …

Does Reading Moral Stories Build Character

The assumption of traditional character educators that children build moral literacy from reading or hearing moral stories is challenged based on research findings. First, research in text comprehension indicates that readers do not understand texts the same way due to differences in reading skill and background knowledge. Second, moral comprehension research indicates that moral arguments are understood differently based on differences in moral schema development. Third, moral texts (e.g., that contain embedded moral reasoning) are understood and distorted differently by readers with different moral schemas. Fourth, children do not extract moral story themes as intended by the writer.

Ethos, Morality, and Narrative Structure: Theory and Response

end of his how to negotiate between a writer's hunger for privacy and reader's appetite-voracious, insatiable-for more (322). Michael, the narrator of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, faces an issue that also has to do with texts and desires, dignity and freedom and accrued or inherited in his father's words (142-43). Each narrator bears some responsibility for the suicide of a loved one; each displays a certain emotional distance; each struggles with a personal response to the Holocaust. Each text also foregrounds issues of reading and writing in the characters' lives, connecting these issues to responsibility, guilt, and atonement. Last but not least, each text offers some grounds for distrusting the primary narrating voice. Because of these similarities and because of one significant technical difference- The Archivist includes a substantial section from a voice distinct from the narrator-the two books constitute a fertile field for exploring the relationship among narrative structure, the ethos that is suggested by that structure and conveyed by a text's main voice or voices, and the moral responses of actual readers. Wayne C. Booth, in The Company We Keep: An Ethics ofFiction, connects ethos to technique, and the technical difference between The Archivist and The Reader could cause readers to deem the former, as Booth would say, company-it may lead us to desire better desires. Finally, statistical analysis of a sample of actual readers' responses to these novels as posted on Amazon.com demonstrates that there may be more of a discrepancy than we would expect, based on the sort of anecdotal evidence cited by Booth, between what theory predicts and the behavior of ordinary readers. This study is consistent with much other work done during the past two decades on the relationship between moral development and narrating. The psychological researchers Mark B. Tappan and Lyn Mikel Brown, for instance, demonstrate that narrating and moralizing are inseparable and that authorship of one's own moral story partakes of the telos of moral development ( 188, 190-9 1). Simi

Talk as social suffering: Narratives of talk in medical settings

This paper concerns the relationship between emotion and the production of meaning in biomedical settings. It builds on Parsonian, interactionist and critical phenomenological analyses of medical encounters using the concept of social suffering and narrative analysis. Two narratives of diagnostic interviews are presented, drawn from a larger study of the conversational experiences of 21 people with multiple sclerosis living in Greater London. I draw on the dialogic nature of the narratives to discuss the suffering which the narrators typically associated with medical encounters. This had to do with the emotionality of the encounters themselves, rather than of the confirmation of disease. It was located in how structural processes may conceal the interdependence of medical knowledge and personal experience. This interpretation leads me to suggest that we may understand narratives of medical encounters as illness narratives which tell a moral story about suffering and culture. They provide a critique of universalising processes in the social experience of narrators as well as a perspective on suffering in everyday life. Recent approaches to narrative analysis suggest this critique is both performative and discursive.

Moral Reasoning and Story Telling

L'auteur livre les fondements des theories qui l'ont conduit a adapter ses methodes pedagogiques dans son enseignement de la pensee critique et de l'ethique. Les narrations servent de support au discours et au raisonnement, et le dialogue se trouve favorise entre l'enseignant et l'etudiant puisque les discussions viennent completer le travail ecrit, ce qui developpe leurs capacites a parler pour eux-memes.

Moral theme comprehension in children.

Although some claim that reading moral stories to children will improve their moral literacy (see, e.g., Bennett, 1993), little research has been done that bears on this question. The purposes of this study were to (a) test the idea that children can extract the theme from a moral story and (b) test for developmental differences in moral theme comprehension. Participants from 3rd and 5th grades and a university were tested on whether they understood the lessons (i.e., the moral themes) from several moral stories. They were asked to identify both the theme from a list of message choices and which of 4 alternative vignettes had the same theme. Participants also rated the set of message and vignette choices for closeness of match to the original story. Reading comprehension was used as a covariate. Developmental differences in moral theme understanding were significant even after accounting for reading comprehension.

The moral theme in Zulu literature: a progression

A moral theme in literature is not only unique to Zulu literature. Despite the relative youth of the modern branch of Zulu literature, any observer can make the interesting and important discovery that the moral theme is predominantly conveyed by the following three literary types: the folktale, the moral story, the detective story. The folktale, belonging to traditional literature, is a very well-developed form, that formed the principal means of teaching both children and adults about good and evil. The birth of modern Zulu literature in 1930 brought with it the emergence of the moral story, a literary type in which good triumphs over evil and in which justice prevails. Further development and changes have led to the appearance of the detective story in which crimes are solved and bad people are punished. This progression has developed due to ever-changing circumstances and a need for relevance.

MORAL THEME COMPREHENSION IN THIRD GRADERS, FIFTH GRADERS, AND COLLEGE STUDENTS

Proponents of character education (e.g., Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues) argue that children should hear moral stories in order to develop moral character. But do children necessarily understand the moral message of a narrative? Third and fifth grade students and adults were tested for their ability to apprehend the moral messages in three stories selected from The Book of Virtues and other sources. After listening and reading along with three moral stories, participants were asked to generate the message, select the message from a list of possible messages and select a vignette with the same message from three possible vignettes. Subjects also heard and read a non‐moral story and answered comprehension questions about it. Results indicate a developmental difference in moral theme understanding unexplained by reading comprehension scores alone.

The influence of moral schemas on the reconstruction of moral narratives in eighth graders and college students.

Much attention has been focused on the importance of reading moral stories to children (e.g., W. Bennett, 1993). Although research on general discourse comprehension is flourishing, little attention has been given to how moral discourse is understood by individuals; that is, what affects an individual's comprehension of a moral text? Eighth-grade and college students read and recalled four complex moral narratives in which moral arguments at different Kohlbergian stages were embedded. Participants then took the Defining Issues Test (DIT), a measure of moral judgment development. Those with higher reasoning scores on the DIT reconstructed more high-stage moral arguments during recall, including adding high-stage moral reasoning that was not in the original text. Significant age-level differences in cumulative moral judgment concepts were also found. Prior moral knowledge affected the comprehension of complex moral narratives.

The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries.

By the time Christianity became a political and cultural force in the Roman Empire, it had come to embody a new vision. This wise and eloquent book describes the formative years-from the crucifixion of Jesus to the end of the second century of the common era-when Christian beliefs and practices shaped their unique order. Wayne A. Meeks examines the surviving documents from Christianity's beginnings (some of which became the New Testament) and shows that they are largely concerned with the way converts to the movement should behave. Meeks finds that for these Christians, the formation of morals means the formation of community; the documents are addressed not to individuals but to groups, and they have among their primary aims the maintenance and growth of these groups. Meeks paints a picture of the process of socialization that produced the early forms of Christian morality, discussing many factors that made the Christians feel that they were a single and chosen people. He describes, for example, the impact of conversion; the rapid spread of Christian household cult-associations in the cities of the Roman Empire; the language of Christian discourse as revealed in letters, testaments, and moral stories; the rituals, meetings, and institutionalization of charity; the Christians' feelings about celibacy, sex, and gender roles; and their sense of the end-time and final judgment. In each of these areas Meeks seeks to determine what is distinctive about the Christian viewpoint and what is similar to the components of Greco-Roman or Jewish thought.

The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, edited by William J. Bennett

The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, edited by William J. Bennett

Suspense in Nyembezi's moral story ‘Mntanami! Mntanami!’

Nyembezi's moral story ‘Mntanami! Mntanami!’ displays diverse techniques with regard to suspense. These techniques can broadly be divided into two categories: those relating to the relationship bet...

Curriculum for homes: A study of a school letter1

Abstract Language, in the form of talk and printed materials, is the main medium through which parents and teachers meet and their relationships are constructed. Parent‐teacher contact language enables participants to present versions of their institutional selves and their worlds to each other. These worlds are not neutral, but reflect social ideologies as well as commonsense ‘practical’ concerns. This paper analyses a letter sent from an independent secondary school in Queensland to parents of attending students immediately prior to the commencement of the winter vacation. Textual features which construct the public image of the school, and position the readers in relation to the author‐as‐institutional‐agent will be discussed. Versions of parenthood, studenthood/childhood and the school are evidenced within the text by the use of competing moral categorisations and stories. The analysis provides a method that could be applied in observing the positioning of school personnel, parents and students in oth...