Narrative Authority Research Articles

O hibridismo como estratégia de influência entre uma youtuber portuguesa e o seu público jovem

This study aims to identify how the young and successful Portuguese youtuber Sofia Barbosa manages personal and commercial content on her channel, perceiving which strategies she uses to reconcile self-expression and commercialism. Based on netnography and content analysis, the research focuses on the analysis of 13 videos published between January and October / 2018. The youtuber promotes a relationship of hybridization strategies that contribute to ‘blurring’ the boundaries between authorial narrative and advertising discourse.

State of Exception: The Birthplace of Kafka’s Narrative Authority

Across the postimperial East Central Europe, whose geopolitical space was reconfigured on the model of West European nation-states, unprocessed human residues proliferated as the collateral effects of politically guided national homogenizations. These positional outsiders, who were prevented from becoming legible within the newly established political spaces, take center stage in Kafka’s narratives, not only in the form of their characters but also their narrators and ultimate authority. They passionately attach themselves to the zones of indistinction, which the modern societies’ “egalitarian discrimination” has doomed them to, thus trying to turn their enforced dispossession into a chosen self-dispossession. I argue that Kafka’s narratives owe their elusive ultimate authority precisely to this persistent translation of the political state of exception of his agencies into their literary state of exemption. They are at constant pains to transfigure the imposed state of exception through its peculiar fictional adoption, but Kafka’s ultimate narrative authority nevertheless takes care to keep an edge over their efforts. It is precisely this never-ending gradation of subversive mimicry in Kafka’s works that his postcolonial successor J. M. Coetzee most admired.

Narrative Authority: Rethinking Speculation and the Construction of Economic Expertise

ABSTRACT Understanding and anticipating market movements plays a critical role in current capitalist activity. Through the assessment of the present and the engagement in the unknowable future, financial-market participants create financial opportunities. At the heart of this process is the work of experts who claim to provide ‘thorough analyses’ of economic trends and market movements. In this article, I illustrate how analysts – a powerful guild of economic experts – capitalise on ‘feeling’, individualised strategies and storytelling to come up with explanatory narratives about possible future market scenarios. In doing so, I build upon the notion of speculation as a practice that is grounded in imagination and show that narrativization of such futured-oriented images is a vital – yet often neglected – process: it allows to treat the unknowable as if it was anticipatable, uncertainty as if it was calculable risk, and thus speculation as if it was ‘investment’.

Corporate greenfluencing: a case study of sponsorship activation in Formula E motorsports

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how companies activate their sponsorship of Formula E (for Electric) championship races to influence consumers' opinion of them as sustainable businesses.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on an original combination of promotional outputs (YouTube spots, social media releases and sustainability reports) from Formula E race title sponsors in the 2017–2019 seasons, the paper is a qualitative analysis of how these sponsors solve the value clash between traditional motorsport imagery and environmentalism to achieve “narrative authenticity”.FindingsFindings show that sponsors do not address this clash directly. Instead, the conflict itself is reframed as a question of what sponsors do to improve the environment, not what they ndo not do. Second, the timeframe for action is redefined, which means that the future is what counts, not the situation today or given aims like the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.Originality/valueSponsorship activation through Formula E as way of generating green brand equity would come across as more credible if companies improved the use of cross-platform synergies to convey narrative authenticity. To qualitative researchers on sport sponsorship, the findings strengthen the understanding of brands as “cultural narrators”.

Free Indirect Speech in Northanger Abbey

The thesis mainly analyzes the Free Indirect Speech in Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (Volume 2). When Austen describes Catherine’s feeling for Henry Tilney, it is difficult for us to distinguish the subjective consciousness of the narrator from the character. Their calm and objective tone is prone to arouse the resonance with the readers. Authorial narrator sometimes appears to explain the fate of Catherine. When Austen describes Catherine’s expedition to Northanger Abbey, the character has more prominent subjective consciousness, and readers can distance themselves from the character and examine Catherine’s ridiculous and irrational behavior and feel the ironic effects. The thesis points out that Austen used this technique to portray Catherine, who was able to deal with her feeling for Henry reasonably, however, was influenced greatly by the Gothic novels at that time, and could not handle the relationship between reality and fiction very well.

Debts of Honor, Narrative Authority, and Southern Manhood in “Knight’s Gambit”

Abstract: This essay considers how a particular trace of Faulkner’s 1942 short-story draft of “Knight’s Gambit,” which he failed to place in any mass-market magazine, clarifies the stakes of his final 1949 novella with the same title. In the draft, the key motive for Max Harriss’s attempted murder of Gualdes (Gualdres in the published version) involves the repayment of a gambling debt. In revising, Faulkner recognized the weakness of the original motive. But while the novella completely changes Max’s motive, it does not erase male gambling debts as much as it displaces them throughout the narrative. While chess is the central metaphor in “Knight’s Gambit,” poker is nevertheless a crucial element in Gavin Stevens’ mentoring of his nephew, Chick Mallison. Learning the complementary narrative structures of chess (gambits) and poker (gambling), Chick achieves something unusual in the Faulkner canon: a young white Southern male’s successful movement into manhood.

The game of narrative authority: Subversive wandering and unreliable narration in The Stanley Parable

This article explores how players’ attempts at subversive wandering in The Stanley Parable (2013) render the game’s narration unreliable and thus reveal its comments on the nature of ‘agency’ in video games. Unreliability brings the act of narration itself to the fore and exposes its mechanisms of manipulation. Players of The Stanley Parable may seek to contradict the voice-over narration subversively. They must find out, however, that, even though the narrator’s authorial omniscience and power are an illusion, they cannot break away from the predetermined path the game lays out. The narrator and the player are constantly fighting over who gets to tell the story and who therefore wins the game of narrative authority. Subversive wandering, as will be theorized in this article, exposes the impossibility of true player agency in the game’s set structure and comments on how player movement and interaction construct parts of a game’s narrative.

From Bayt to Stanza: Arabic Khayāl and the Advent of Italian Vernacular Poetry

ABSTRACT At the twilight of Arabic literary culture in thirteenth-century Sicily, poets writing in the vernacular Italian use the term “stanza,” meaning a “dwelling,” to refer to a lyric strophe. Since there is no precedent for this use of the term “stanza” to refer to poetry, I suggest that “stanza” presents as a calque for Arabic “bayt,” meaning “dwelling” and a “unit of verse.” To understand how the implied relation between poetry and architecture might frame new approaches to the scuola siciliana, I examine the imbrication of linguistic and built form in Arabic poetry. The qaṣīdah, the preeminent Arabic lyric, often begins with an evocation of an architectural ruin, the effaced “dār” or “bayt” of a departed beloved. I argue that her phantom form or “khayāl,” haunting and taking the place of her ruined dwelling, articulates the fluidity of all apparently enduring structures and the performative power of poetry to delineate the real. Turning to the epistemological continuities between Arabic and Italian poetry, I study the relation between architecture, phantasms, and the theory of form in the work of Giacomo da Lentini, a poet-scribe in the court of Frederick II, concluding that the kinship between the qaṣīdah and sonnet subverts “Western” narratives of self-invention and cultural authenticity.

Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by Li Guo (review)

Li Guo. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, .  pp. Hardcover $., ISBN : . Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction presents thorough research on and eloquent analyses of selected works of women’s tanci 彈詞 (plucking rhymes), voluminous fictional texts written and sometimes performed by women at elite houses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. This is Li Guo’s second monograph on this fascinating genre, following her Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China published by the same press in . Overlapping in their coverages of historical period, the two books adopt a similar structure: each core chapter focuses on one tanci novel and hence gives well-deserved attention to these lengthy works, the longest one composed of  chapters. Guo has shifted her critical lenses since . While in her first book she explores the rich interiority of women as writing subjects fantasizing about adventures beyond their inner chambers, she now brings out the “realist tenor” () in the tanci narratives, that is, in the representation of the domestic space as reconfigured by female characters to challenge and subvert gendered authority through maneuvering Confucian conceptions of female exemplarity, to formulate nonnormative gendered relations within the space traditionally defined as feminine, and to eventually transcend gendered social and cultural boundaries for their pursuit of self-hood through nation-state building. The book includes an introduction, a conclusion, and five core chapters each of which analyzes one tanci work. In “Introduction: Toward a Spatialized Understanding of Women’s Literary Tanci,” Guo historicizes the writing of selected tanci texts and positions her study in the global discourse on the writing women tradition. All five texts were written in the social unrest either anticipating or resulting from the Taiping Rebellion (–), a radical religious revolt and a civil war that nearly ended the Qing government and forced at least two of the five featured tanci authors into a life of exile. Unlike the wartime poems written by their contemporary women poets to express their suffering and nostalgia, women’s tanci narrative, as Guo points out, requires the author to practice “authorial self-distancing in inscribing social realities onto the narrative tableau of tanci, : : : through stylized verses, historically framed Reviews©  by University of Hawai‘i Press narratives, character focalization, or transformed supernatural beings to voice ‘truth’” (p. ). This “fictional realism” sheds light on historical meanings in the “imaginaries of heroism, martyrdom, loyalty, and subjectivity” underneath the fantastic narratives and utopian visions in these tanci works. The other goal of her study, Guo emphasizes, is to discuss “the heritage of women’s tanci and its value in studies of gender, authorship, and global women’s writing traditions” (p. ). The concept of “spatialization as a strategy for reading the narrative” (p. ), which Guo draws from Susan Stanford Friedman’s synthesized understanding of Julia Kristeva’s notion of spatialization and of Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative chronotopes, promises a fertile approach to women’s tanci texts. As Guo elaborates in several pages, spatialization as a method of reading points the reader to the “dynamism and interrelations between the authorial narrator and her implied readership, between textual vivacity and intertextual visions” (p. ). Such imagined author–reader interactions can be seen in the recurrent authorial insertions in written tanci texts, at the beginning or the ending of individual chapters, for instance. As Guo evocatively put, these authorial insertions embody a “repetitive compulsion of narration that ultimately and inevitably gestures towards a broader realm of gendered consciousness that at once fuels the authorial desire of narration and awaits more effectual articulation” (p. ). “Womanly becoming” is another intriguing notion Guo borrows and applies to her current study most imaginatively and productively, connecting the female “characters’ travel, travail, and social growth in the fictional realm” to “the diachronic development of gender consciousness as articulated in an ongoing and distinctive narrative tradition” (p. ). This long and dense introduction was written with impressive theoretical rigor and exhaustive references to scholarship on women’s tanci in both English and Chinese languages, on the rise of fiction and that of feminist awareness and sentiments as a cross-cultural phenomenon in China and in...

Pernicious Science: Artifice and the Form of Narrative in Eliza Haywood's Secret Histories

Pernicious Science:Artifice and the Form of Narrative in Eliza Haywood's Secret Histories Helen Thompson Yet, Oh! how deceitful are Appearances! his Soul is the black Image of Hell's horrid Sovereign… By ways unknown even to the greatest Proficients in the deceiving Science, he rais'd his Fortune from an abject Station, and triumph'd in the Spoils of ruin'd Honesty. Eliza Haywood, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia1 This essay responds to scholarly calls for engagement with Eliza Haywood's secret histories Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1724–25) and The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727), which have received less critical scrutiny than Haywood's mixed oriental tale, secret history, and satire The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736).2 In what follows, I suggest that Haywood's secret histories define narrative authority as a formal articulation of extreme epistemological insight. By constructing narrators whose capacity to disclose secrets is enabled by superhuman acumen, Haywood marshals extra-empirical epistemological access as the formal condition of the secret history, a condition whose shaping conceit charts an intriguing progression across these three texts: from hypocrisy espied by a deity, to deflating insinuations of irony, to magically assisted sensory disillusionment. The narrative [End Page 9] postures enabling such perspectives do not always affirm the genre's characterization as, Rebecca Bullard writes, "narration 'from below'"3 or, as Michael McKeon puts it, "history from below,"4 but rather assume the even celestial vantage claimed by what Marta Kvande names an "outsider narrator."5 By investigating these secret histories' obtrusively nontransparent figurations of narrative authority, I agree with Srinivas Aravamudan's contention that "Haywood's fiction referentializes inexorably, but in a very different way from the realist novel;"6 as Aravamudan proposes, this is a "different realism" or "antirealist narrative"7 whose constitutive relation to form and the limits of empirical understanding my essay attempts to trace. A preliminary look at Haywood's engagement with political secrecy may illuminate the analytic significance of the category of form. A topical, excoriating scandal chronicle, Memoirs of a Certain Island could represent the first minister Robert Walpole as "Lucitario, a famous Necromancer" (I, 7) who cons London's citizens with a fraudulent investment scheme represented as an "Enchanted Well" (I, 7).8 To exemplify the ethical laxness that makes the City easy to fool, Haywood instances the failure of an undeceived individual to expose the trickery: "had [he] been possessed of a little more Fire in his Constitution, he would at once have demolished the ruinous Structure, and discover'd to the amazed Multitude the secret Passages through which the Wealth they had hoped to gain had been conveyed for other Uses" (I, 9). With this schematics of the reaction the Well should elicit from a man in the know, Haywood lays out her secret histories' mutually formal and epistemological mandate. The Well's "secret Passages" articulate ministerial duplicity in concretely spatial terms: financial abstractions like joint stock companies and public funds are reconverted into fathomless depths from which subterranean pipes expropriate liquid cash. In advance of the Patriot critique voiced in Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke's evocation of the "dark, intricate, and wicked mystery of stockjobbing,"9 Haywood concretizes incomprehensible economic legerdemain to motivate the revelation that unperceived permutations of structure are ruinous, thereby propelling the demand that the Well's hidden parts be "discover'd to the amazed Multitude." Conjured by necromancers, secret passages are refinements of space whose existence cannot be intuited in the regular course of empirical life. With this preliminary division of perceptible and mysterious, empirically thinkable and amazing, Haywood extends the secret history's revelatory remit beyond the novelistic pretense to verisimilar realism or simulated facticity theorized by Ian Watt, McKeon, John Bender, and Cynthia Wall.10 This is so because the duplicity sustained by Lucitario resembles the realist project itself, defined as lifelike naturalism, the provision of experimentally accurate detail, or any probabilistic mode that does not trigger the reader's active disbelief. The unperturbed experience of the real perpetrated by Haywood's necromancer-minister entails...

Self-Management as Socially Embedded Endeavor

When we first anticipated the research project concluded with this special issue, about eight years ago, it seemed timely and appropriate to investigate the opportunities and the challenges of self-management in mental health care. At the time self-management was well on the rise in general health care, offering both empowerment to patients and efficiency and cost-effectiveness to the health care system. It seemed a most promising approach in an era that celebrates individualistic self-reliance. And we were sure about our insight that self-management in mental health care would deserve comprehensive investigation because ‘the self’ that was supposed to do the management would itself be the core problem in psychiatric and psychosomatic conditions. Now that the project is over and done with some changes seemed to have happened in the general appreciation of individualism and of the dominant kind of management. As we are writing this during the COVID-19 crisis – locked up at home obeying the instruction to keep physical distance – these changes seem to accelerate. We cannot do it alone. And we shouldn’t think of self-regulation in terms of decisive control. Solidarity and entrustment markedly strike home. It may be that we have picked up the Zeitgeist in our research or have played a role ourselves in bringing about these changes. Either way, the results discussed in this issue certainly resonate with a transformation that might be in progress. In this concluding paper we want to highlight two novel features of our understanding of self-management as it turned out to find articulation in our investigations. One feature concerns a shift in our understanding of management, a shift away from decisive control towards an embedded facilitation. We can follow this shift along three lines of analysis, which concern different scaffolding resources: environmental cues, language and caregivers. The other feature concerns the acknowledgement of a potentially persistent ambiguity of the self as an element of self-management. The preceding papers display the conceptualization of this ambiguity along five different dimensions of ‘the self’: responsible agency, experiential subjectivity, personal integrity, narrative authority and existential concern.

Ellipsis as Resistance in Heinrich Böll's “Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa…” (1950)

One of the most salient features of Heinrich Böll's short story “Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa…” (1950) is its prominent and liberal use of typographical ellipsis. The ellipses that permeate this wartime story both underline the theme of loss and enable the narrator to use his tale to exercise one last measure of resistance to his fate. As part of a first‐person narrative, the ellipses can be read as an assertion of narrative authority and authenticity. Through the refusal to say certain words and phrases and by rejecting physical and chronological restrictions, the young narrator rejects Nazi ideology and creates for himself a limited yet meaningful sense of freedom. His resistance is mirrored by the final image of the text, an indelible cross on the wall which, like a textual ellipsis, persistently marks that which has been erased.

The Story Logic of Social Media: Co-Construction and Emergent Narrative Authority

The Story Logic of Social Media: Co-Construction and Emergent Narrative Authority

The Rise of Behavioral Economic Masculinity

AbstractThis essay begins a cultural history of the behavioral economic narrative mode in American popular media, in relation to the academic discipline but not coincident with it. From podcasts to Michael Lewis’s books and films, the behavioral economic mode of narration changes the character or figure of economic knowledge. Instead of the distant financial expert, this mode insists on the authority of the friendly explainer. In the years around the 2008 crisis, at a moment when financial scandals seemed to be losing their power to scandalize, this mode asserted behavioral economic knowledge as the new standard of realism. As the affective structures beneath earlier capitalist realist narratives diminished in power, the behavioral economic turn marked a reassertion of narrative authority. The behavioral mode instantiated a new relationship to a familiar misogyny and is perhaps best understood as a cultural shift with varied ideological commitments to economic philosophy itself. The behavioral economic mode is characterized by scenes of objectivity training or moments where the viewer or reader is trained to understand objectivity as a performance of distance from the subject’s gender or race. Not incidentally, this performance is demanded specifically of those who do not fit the neoclassical ideal of the rational agent and who are not white and not male.

A Goddess and a Pañcāyat President: Narrative, Sanctity, and Authority in Rural Tamil Nadu

In an examination of the interdependent relationship between narrative and ritual, this article discusses a ritual dilemma solved through narrative to explore how narrative sustains authority usually enacted, validated, and supported by ritual practice. In the Tamil village of Nagamalai Pudukkottai, Jeyakumar, the pancāyat president, must perform as a cāmiyāti (“god dancer”) possessed by the village’s most powerful form of divinity, Taṭātakai Ammaṉ, to substantiate his family’s long lineage of traditional authority. For seventeen years, however, Jeyakumar was unable to substantiate his authoritative claim through ritual; instead, he and his constituents relied on narratives, including a migration myth. Narrative did not replace the importance of ritual in Nagamalai Pudukkottai, but rather, the usually obligatory tie to the goddess was deferred and his legitimacy was maintained through narrative. Village claims to authority depend upon negotiating the connections among the village migration myth, the local goddess temple myth, personal experience narratives, and everyday conversational narratives and stories. Each of these narrative genres claims authority differently but works as part of an interdependent folklore system to confirm the village’s sacrality and leadership. Jeyakumar’s authority is further strengthened by local folk mythologies that integrate nearby Madurai’s more formalized Mīnākṣī tradition into local religiosity surrounding Taṭātakai Ammaṉ.

The Life in Stories, Life as Stories: <i>Hamlet</i> and narrative reanimation

This article studies Shakespeare’s employment of narrative and storytelling in terms of ‘life after death’ in Hamlet. It argues that Shakespeare posits and postulates the possibility of life after death not in spiritual terms but in terms of the narratives that one leaves behind, in the stories, enunciated and heard by others, that perpetuate, after a fashion, one’s life. Hamlet shows us, readers and viewers, that life and the afterlife are about stories and storytelling. I contend that while his natural life does end, Hamlet’s life continues via the narrative authority he bestows on Horatio, making Horatio the author of his story and in doing so prolonging it but also leaving it inconclusive. I identify a mode of reanimation, as one might think of it, in Hamlet: in addition to worms which live off a corpse and thus reanimate the dead there is also a revivification which takes place via the narratives and speech of the living about the dead. The narrative reanimation of those who die perpetuates their lives: keeping them alive in minimal ways and making of them a form of the living dead.

On Doubling and Dis/ability: The Voice and View of Difference in the Fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas

The award-winning collection of stories by Cristina Fernández Cubas, La habitación de Nona (2015), focuses on the fear of difference that lurks within apparent normality. The title story features the classic Fernández Cubas strategy of a first-person narrator who imposes narrative authority and the view of normality, in tension with other characters’ perspectives that subvert the center of power. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Disability Studies, this essay analyzes how Fernández Cubas wields doubling, difference, and voices in “La habitación de Nona” to set up and subvert the able body as an unstable and mutable identity position. This approach departs from her treatment of disability in her inaugural story, “Mi hermana Elba.” In examining how society views and voices difference and disability as a social construct, Fernández Cubas critiques notions of normality and unveils the abject as the double that dwells within the self as well as the other.

The Forgiveness Project: Stories for a Vengeful Age, MarinaCantacuzino, JessicaKinsley, 2016 (ISBN 978‐1‐78592‐000‐4), xx + 220 pp., pb $17

The Forgiveness Project: Stories for a Vengeful Age, MarinaCantacuzino, JessicaKinsley, 2016 (ISBN 978‐1‐78592‐000‐4), xx + 220 pp., pb $17

Authority, politicization, and alternative justifications: endogenous legitimation dynamics in global economic governance1

Recent mobilization against core tenets of the liberal international order suggests that international institutions lack sufficient societal legitimacy. We argue that these contestations are part of a legitimation dynamic that is endogenous to the political authority of international institutions. We specify a mechanism in which international authority increases the likelihood for the public politicization of international institutions. This undermines legitimacy in the short run, but also allows broadening the justificatory basis of global governance: Politicization allows civil society organizations (CSOs) to transmit alternative legitimation standards to global elite discourses. We trace this sequence for four key institutions of global economic governance – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the NAFTA – combining data on authority and protest counts with markers for CSOs and legitimation narratives in more than 120,000 articles in international elite newspapers during 1992–2012. The uncovered patterns are consistent with a perspective that understands legitimation dynamics as an endogenous feature of international authority, but they also show that alternative legitimation narratives did not lastingly resonate in the global discourse thus far. This may explain current backlashes and calls for active re-legitimation efforts on part of international institutions themselves.

The Path to Woolf Works and the Language of Design

Film technology has become an increasingly prominent component of theatre design. In the practice of Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage it may support what has been described as a ‘pizza style’ of presentation, in which disparate techniques and modes of presentation are used to disturb conventional ideas of narrative, context, and textual authority, while in the work of Motionhouse it creates a language of dance as circus. The longstanding collaboration between film designer Ravi Deepres and choreographer Wayne McGregor presents an alternative model, at once highly composed as narrative and based on meticulous research into textual evidence. In this interview with David Roberts, Deepres charts the evolution of his work with McGregor up to their award-winning Woolf Works, showing how a genuinely collaborative artistic process and attention to the graphic possibilities of different film technologies have transformed our understanding of the role of design in devised performance. Ravi Deepres is Professor of Moving Image and Photography at Birmingham City University. For the past nineteen years he has designed shows in collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Their most recent success, Woolf Works, won the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production and re-opened at La Scala Milan in April 2019. David Roberts is Professor of English at Birmingham City University. His recent publications include George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed (Bloomsbury, 2018), and he is currently working on a new edition of Congreve's The Way of the World.