Beginning Of Narrative Research Articles

Narrative reconstruction of events in novel translation: A case study of the English translation of Xuemo’s works

Drawing inspiration from Prince’s (2012) discourse on narrative events, this study investigates how translators reconstruct narrative events in novel translation. The results indicate that, in terms of narrative completeness, the addition of events such as detailed conflicts, background explanations, and narrative beginnings mitigates the cognitive disparity among target readers. This is achieved by furnishing them with the cultural knowledge necessary to decode text originating from a different cultural context. Regarding the temporal arrangement, the translator restructures the sequence of events by commencing with emotional events and reinstating the original chronological order to cater to target readers’ reading habits. Additionally, the reorganization of interconnected events according to thematic and character-based considerations enhances the readability of the target text. This research illuminates the significance of event reconstruction in novel translation and provides implications for both translators and scholars. By comprehending the effects of adding, rearranging, and reorganizing events, translators can adeptly adapt the narrative structure of a novel to align with the cognitive context and the reading preferences of readers in the target language.

Character education through poetic inquiry: teaching poetry as a means of moral self-cultivation

ABSTRACT This paper offers retrospective reflections following on from a poetry-based character-education intervention, conducted in an Icelandic secondary-school setting. The object of the intervention was to assess the use of poetry in the classroom to enhance students’ virtue literacy. This paper discusses the theoretical frameworks undergirding this research project. It assesses Linda Christensen’s poetic inquiry as a means of moral self-cultivation. It then compares this approach to the framework of Aristotelian character education. Subsequently, this paper introduces samples of poetic inquiry, namely Gina Edghill’s “The Culture of My Community Revealed. Poetic and Narrative Beginnings” and Jacquie Kidd’s “White Skin, Brown Soul. A Poetic Autoethnograpy”, to show how poetry in the classroom can encourage the development of virtue. More specifically, the paper makes use of the components in a recent Aristotelian phronesis model (APM) to illustrate comparisons of poetic inquiry with Aristotelian character education.

Narrative Beginnings: Relations between First Full-Fledged Scenes and the Beginning of the Main Action

ABSTRACT: This essay focuses on two important phenomena in the context of narrative “beginnings”: the beginning of the action proper and the first full-fledged scene (FFS), namely, the first time-section in the text that the author finds to be of consequence enough to deserve full scenic treatment. The point of departure for my discussion is Meir Sternberg’s claim that the FFS always signals the beginning of the action proper (and the end of the exposition) in the fabula. To refute this as an absolute claim, I examine several types of openings where the FFS either succeeds or precedes chronologically the beginning of the action proper. I thereby also try to demonstrate it is instructive to consider the FFS more generally as significant on aesthetic and rhetorical grounds within the narrative whole; it can perform various and possibly alternative functions to the one Sternberg attributes to it as necessary and constant. Moreover, regarding the question of establishing the beginning point of the action proper, I suggest as an alternative signpost another full-fledged scene—the first in what I call the “main linear sequence” of the work (the application of both criteria often leads to the same result, but not always). This alternative indicator is not without its limitations either, but these limitations are methodologically useful since they help us identify and explain cases where the demarcation between exposition and action proper is genuinely problematic (when it is difficult to identify a main linear sequence in the work).

Tree Stories: Assessment Making as Relationally Respecting, Dynamically Listening with Care, and Inviting Celebratory Journeying

Through my recent Master of Education journey, I am becoming increasingly awake to the ways in which I value “place” when thinking of my autobiographical beginnings, teaching, learning, and assessment making alongside children. As a forest and nature kindergarten teacher in a K–6 elementary school, who is facing increasing class sizes, classroom complexity, parental anxieties, and children’s wide-awakeness to all these influences, I worry about early childhood development and the knowing that each of us, from an early age, holds embodied experiences which guide us and either nurture or hinder our development. I see the importance of co-creating environments to invite children, parents, and educators to think collaboratively, and emergently to come to learning and knowing and assessment making. Basso (1996) writes, “relationships to places are lived most often in the company of other people, and it is on these communal occasions – when places are sensed together – that native views of the physical world become accessible to strangers” (p. 109). We teach and learn in social contexts across time and in the world of formal education on landscapes called schools. However, my hope is for schools to be thought of in a broader context, which bends and sways as we ground ourselves in experiential pedagogies (Dewey, 1938). Pedagogies which are always in the midst and in the making. Narrative beginnings matter. With this thinking, we become awake to knowing that our collective approaches to the education of young children will significantly affect future leaders and the environment which sustains us. My current research puzzling for the purpose of this special issue is as follows: in what ways can land-based, place-based, emergent, and playful experiential learning approaches in school outdoor settings increase child, family, and teacher collaboration? What role might assessment making have in this collaboration and the child’s learning? Do the stories that children come to live and tell through this collaboration and their dynamic interaction with one another, their families and teachers, and more-than-human beings influence the lives they are making in the present in their early years of schooling i.e., K–3, and into their futures?

The Power of Limit

This project analyses the field of current geographic political partitions offering an interdisciplinary evaluation able to describe the space in the borders as ‘narrative beginning’, as ‘contact infrastructure’ that crosses territories where inhabitants are neither citizens nor refugees but only ‘border people’. At the end, cognitive horizons able to breach the Wall, going beyond the political-territorial divisions which have always existed in a world which is a sort of more or less fortified bulwark able to suggest ‘border worlds’ that are ‘city’, ‘border land’. We observe a porous border with a rhizomatic trend that reformulates a synergistic relationship between the individual and the territory in an antinomic game of actions and reactions. Appears an idea of multiplicity in which the ‘rhizome-like’ structure becomes decentralized configurations where each part can be connected to another without go through specific points, as the infrastructure network or even the virtual system of global contacts. So, the space in the borders results in a new map of the delocalized space that increasingly requires of a design thinking that, on the basis of critiques of data, variables and statistics, sometimes becomes ‘hard’ and sometimes ‘elastic’, sometimes ‘insurmountable’ and sometimes ‘flexible’ and that finds an answer in the connivance between opposites and in the territorial synergy.

How the past becomes the past: The temporal positioning of collective memory.

Recognizing that the past does not necessarily pass of its own accord but rather is made to pass is crucial for understanding relationships between collective memory, temporality and the past. Analyzing processes of temporal negotiation reveals that changing the ending (or, in some cases creating one at all) requires re-envisioning the entire sequence of events. Thus, the ending (if there is one) depends on the beginning. British prime ministers' references to 9/11 in public addresses demonstrate this process of temporal negotiation about whether and how to create an ending. Tony Blair constructed the attacks as a legacy, thus sustaining the past as part of the present. To unwind this construction and consign 9/11 to the past, Gordon Brown and David Cameron needed to disrupt the flow of contingent incidents in which Blair had embedded 9/11. By redefining the narrative's beginning, they made it possible to bring 9/11 to an end.

Dan Shen's Theory of Dual Narrative Dynamics Linked to Ian McEwan's <em>Atonement</em>

Dan Shen's Theory of Dual Narrative Dynamics Linked to Ian McEwan's <em>Atonement</em>

Reader, I Married Him, or the Mechanism of Attentional Convergence in the English-Language Narrative

The current paper investigates the mechanism of attentional convergence viewed as a type of formal text organization which is based on the convergent potential of several types of foregrounding and is used by writers to stimulate cognitive activities of their readers. The article offers the analysis of the "attentional effects" produced by the combinatorial use of the false expectancy mechanism, coupling, convergence of stylistic devices, salient textual positions of the ultimate narrative beginning and ending, intertextual markers. The hypothesis formulated in the article suggests that the effect of the attentional convergence might be responsible for causing cognitive dissonance as an inherent component of the interpretational programmes modern writers devise for their readers. The article describes the effect caused by the attentional convergence on the readers of short stories created by renowned English-Language female authors, such as J. Briscoe, T. Chevalier, E. Freud, T. Hadley, S. Hill, S. Vickers, to name just a few of the 21 writers, who contributed to the collection entitled "Reader, I Married Him" inspired by "Jane Eyre" and Charlotte Bronte's bicentenary. The analysis carried out in the article focuses on the linguocultural features of gender constructing, undertaken in these modern stories and reflecting diverse attitudes of modern female authors to the issues of gender stereotypes, gender roles, gender motivated patterns of behaviour. The findings presented in the article prove the relevance of a further investigation of various attention focusing mechanisms enhancing the expressiveness of the literary texts and increasing their pragmatic effect on readers.

Cute monsters and early birds: foreignness in graphic novels on migration by Shaun Tan and Paula Bulling

ABSTRACTThis paper contrasts two opposite approaches within the presently booming field of comics on migration, namely Paula Bulling’s German documentary comic book Im Land der Frühaufsteher (In the Land of Early Birds or Early Risers) and Shaun Tan’s wordless fictional narrative The Arrival. Both engage with the topic of migration and aim to (re)create a sense of foreignness and alienation for their readers that mirrors the experiences of the characters portrayed in the comics. However, the paper suggests that The Arrival leaves readers with a sense of strangeness mastered and enjoyed while Im Land der Frühaufsteher elicits a sense of constant confusion. Drawing on research on the rhetorical effects of narrative beginnings, the paper demonstrates that the reader’s initial experiences with the text foreshadow the reading experience of the entire graphic novel. It then discusses two aspects of specific relevance to the theme of foreignness: first, the relationship between different points of view and the depiction of communication and second, the use of visual strategies ranging from a visual mode to specific symbols. It also reflects on the autobiographical background of both comics and the ethics behind the authors’ different uses of the theme of foreignness.

Traces of Territory: Alexis Wright's Grog War (1997)

Traces of Territory:Alexis Wright's Grog War (1997) Geoff Rodoreda (bio) I have heard white people say cynically, "We couldn't clean them up with poison and guns, but you watch, we'll do it with the grog." —Rev. Jim Downing This quotation, which appears as an epigraph on the title page of part 1 of Alexis Wright's 1997 book Grog War, immediately frames the problems associated with alcohol in Aboriginal communities as belonging to the legacies of colonialism. Grog is not a passive killer. Poison and guns were killers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries; nowadays, alcohol is being used to destroy Aboriginal people, families, and whole communities. Grog is contextualized here, at the beginning of Wright's narrative, as an active force in the continuing destruction of communities, a legacy of colonial control and oppression. And if grog is a legacy of colonialism, then both the colonizer and the colonized are compelled to address its destructive force in postcolonial times. A whole community response is needed to address this historical, structural, and social problem. There is no attempt here either to reinforce victimhood or to elude responsibility in relation to the misuse of alcohol. On the contrary, Grog War tells the story of an Aboriginal community's preparedness to face up to the problems of alcohol abuse, to take initiative in working toward solutions, and to encourage a shared sense of responsibility for managing misuse in one Northern Territory town. Grog War, published in the same year as Wright's first novel, Plains of Promise, is principally a work of nonfiction, although two fictional vignettes are woven into the narrative in order to tell the story of a family "whose lives are affected by grog" but who "preferred not to be identified in the book" (Wright, Grog ix). In essence, Grog War documents the Tennant Creek–based, Aboriginal-owned Julalikari Council's struggle through the 1980s and 1990s to deal with problems associated with the use and abuse of alcohol in the town of Tennant Creek. Its specific focus, however, is the Julalikari Council's battle to restrict alcohol sales in the town, against the wishes of the white-dominated Tennant Creek council, hoteliers, and other power brokers. The story climaxes in a courtroom-drama-like victory for the Julalikari Council in a hearing before the Northern Territory Liquor Commission: the commission agrees to impose tougher restrictions on the sale of alcohol in Tennant Creek as part of a package of measures aimed at reducing the effects of alcohol abuse. For Michele Grossman, Grog War is a "groundbreaking materialist study of the ways in which the politics of the drink itself are embedded in and sustained by the uneven structures [End Page 67] of power and polity in local Australian contexts" (82). However, Wright embeds this contemporary story of struggle—the "grog war" of the book's title—within the historical story of the colonization of Warumungu land in and around Tennant Creek. Drawing on historical research, government documentation, newspaper reportage, and interviews with community members, Wright tells Tennant Creek's story from an Aboriginal perspective. Although Grog War is about one Aboriginal community organization's resourcefulness and perseverance to overcome racism and white indifference in one remote town, it can also be read as an allegory for Indigenous campaigning across Australia in an ongoing struggle for community improvements at a local level.1 Grog War defies easy classification as a work of literature. It is neither, in its entirety, scholarly-analytical nor journalistic nonfiction; it is neither a novel nor "testimonial fiction" or life writing, which was the key storytelling genre of Aboriginal writers at this time (Heiss and Minter, "Aboriginal" 7). Instead, the book conglomerates all of the above writing modes and their associated stylistics to reveal "the great range" of Wright's writing (Tregenza 78). Although Wright is named as the author, the Julalikari Council is identified as retaining copyright over the text. In an interview, Wright explains that she wrote what the Julalikari Council wanted her to write and followed a set of protocols because she was not writing on or about her own traditional country (see Vernay 120). While...

Cuestión de principios: sobre dos novelas de César Aira que solo comienzan

This article aims to explore the implications of a narrative device used by Cesar Aira in Como me hice monja and La costurera y el viento, by means of which the author seems to stop his fictions in a recurrent and permanent beginning. This deliberate interruption of the narrative process questions the notion of literary narration understood as a causal and teleological sequence, and at the same time it offers to the readers the possibility of elaborating critical interpretations which allow them to access to the aesthetic, political, and philosophical background of the elusive phenomenon of the narrative beginning. Using conceptual and theoretical reflections by David Lodge, Peter Sloterdijk, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, the beginning is studied in this article as a problem and this problem, at the same time, as the beginning of alternative readings of the two mentioned novels as well as other Aira’s works.

Traces of Territory: Alexis Wright's <em>Grog War</em> (1997)

Traces of Territory:Alexis Wright's Grog War (1997) Geoff Rodoreda (bio) I have heard white people say cynically, "We couldn't clean them up with poison and guns, but you watch, we'll do it with the grog." —Rev. Jim Downing This quotation, which appears as an epigraph on the title page of part 1 of Alexis Wright's 1997 book Grog War, immediately frames the problems associated with alcohol in Aboriginal communities as belonging to the legacies of colonialism. Grog is not a passive killer. Poison and guns were killers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries; nowadays, alcohol is being used to destroy Aboriginal people, families, and whole communities. Grog is contextualized here, at the beginning of Wright's narrative, as an active force in the continuing destruction of communities, a legacy of colonial control and oppression. And if grog is a legacy of colonialism, then both the colonizer and the colonized are compelled to address its destructive force in postcolonial times. A whole community response is needed to address this historical, structural, and social problem. There is no attempt here either to reinforce victimhood or to elude responsibility in relation to the misuse of alcohol. On the contrary, Grog War tells the story of an Aboriginal community's preparedness to face up to the problems of alcohol abuse, to take initiative in working toward solutions, and to encourage a shared sense of responsibility for managing misuse in one Northern Territory town. Grog War, published in the same year as Wright's first novel, Plains of Promise, is principally a work of nonfiction, although two fictional vignettes are woven into the narrative in order to tell the story of a family "whose lives are affected by grog" but who "preferred not to be identified in the book" (Wright, Grog ix). In essence, Grog War documents the Tennant Creek–based, Aboriginal-owned Julalikari Council's struggle through the 1980s and 1990s to deal with problems associated with the use and abuse of alcohol in the town of Tennant Creek. Its specific focus, however, is the Julalikari Council's battle to restrict alcohol sales in the town, against the wishes of the white-dominated Tennant Creek council, hoteliers, and other power brokers. The story climaxes in a courtroom-drama-like victory for the Julalikari Council in a hearing before the Northern Territory Liquor Commission: the commission agrees to impose tougher restrictions on the sale of alcohol in Tennant Creek as part of a package of measures aimed at reducing the effects of alcohol abuse. For Michele Grossman, Grog War is a "groundbreaking materialist study of the ways in which the politics of the drink itself are embedded in and sustained by the uneven structures [End Page 67] of power and polity in local Australian contexts" (82). However, Wright embeds this contemporary story of struggle—the "grog war" of the book's title—within the historical story of the colonization of Warumungu land in and around Tennant Creek. Drawing on historical research, government documentation, newspaper reportage, and interviews with community members, Wright tells Tennant Creek's story from an Aboriginal perspective. Although Grog War is about one Aboriginal community organization's resourcefulness and perseverance to overcome racism and white indifference in one remote town, it can also be read as an allegory for Indigenous campaigning across Australia in an ongoing struggle for community improvements at a local level.1 Grog War defies easy classification as a work of literature. It is neither, in its entirety, scholarly-analytical nor journalistic nonfiction; it is neither a novel nor "testimonial fiction" or life writing, which was the key storytelling genre of Aboriginal writers at this time (Heiss and Minter, "Aboriginal" 7). Instead, the book conglomerates all of the above writing modes and their associated stylistics to reveal "the great range" of Wright's writing (Tregenza 78). Although Wright is named as the author, the Julalikari Council is identified as retaining copyright over the text. In an interview, Wright explains that she wrote what the Julalikari Council wanted her to write and followed a set of protocols because she was not writing on or about her own traditional country (see Vernay 120). While...

A Relational Approach to the Digital Self: Plus-Sized Bloggers and the Double-Edged Sword of Market-Compromised Identity

A Relational Approach to the Digital Self: Plus-Sized Bloggers and the Double-Edged Sword of Market-Compromised Identity

Reading for the Plotter

For the "plotters" at the forefront of this article—literary characters whose plots spark narrative into being—the act of plotting constitutes an arduous effort to secure a better life, higher status, greater recognition, and a stable sense of identity. The promise of plotting is, for these knowing characters, a belief that their striving will finally pay off, the consoling yet often deluded faith that, by their schemes, their strategies, and their intrigues, they might one day be rewarded with the sense of assimilation or belonging for which they have so long and so laboriously struggled. In addition to serving a necessary narrative function, plotters alert us to a central paradox at the heart of novel form: while these figures rouse the novel's narratable contents into being, novels often secure their eventual closure by requiring the failure of precisely those plots and plotters on which they have previously relied. As such, the fictional representations of these social ambitions necessary for animating narrative beginnings often find themselves constrained by the discursive logic of narrative emplotment. Situated at the intersection of these contradictory impulses, the plotter emerges as the figure for the novel's incompatible aesthetic and epistemological claims, showing how a set of affective dilemmas—melancholy, ressentiment, social anxiety, resignation, and passing, among others—take shape in the novel as representational problems embedded in the relationship between literary character, plot, and narration.

The Rhetoric of Knowledge and the Rhetoric of Delight: A Response to James Phelan

The Rhetoric of Knowledge and the Rhetoric of Delight:A Response to James Phelan Brian Richardson (bio) I wish to begin by identifying what I find to be particularly useful and important in the work of James Phelan. His general framework, emphasizing the mimetic, synthetic, and thematic aspects of narrative fiction, is an excellent model that is extremely capacious, able to cover a wide range of practices including the ideological, the verisimilar, and the distinctively literary, as well as the antimimetic aspects of fiction which I have termed the "unnatural." Jim has in fact made signal contributions to unnatural narrative theory and analysis in essays like "Implausibilities, Crossovers, Impossibilities: A Rhetorical Approach to Breaks in the Mimetic Code of Narration." His emphasis on the dynamic interaction of reader and text over the course of the reading is extremely important. Jim's framework and approach also allow for precision and are sensitive to nuance. We see these aspects in his account of narrative beginnings and endings and perhaps even more compellingly in his impressive though unfortunately underappreciated account of narrative aesthetics. As everyone knows, this is a diabolically difficult subject that has stymied critics, critical theorists, narratologists, and philosophers of art for centuries, yet Phelan has made real contributions to what constitutes literary value in narrative in his chapter "Rhetorical Aesthetics within Rhetorical Poetics" in Experiencing Fiction (133–49). [End Page 138] Having commented at some length fairly recently on many of the theoretical positions set forth by Jim along with Peter Rabinowitz (in Herman et al. 235–50), I will employ a more limited focus here, largely confining my comments to the questions of probability that are raised so intriguingly in the target essay. I find it an important discussion of an elusive subject that lies between the mimetic and the avowedly fictional; represented improbabilities can easily lead to what I have called the paradox of chance in fictional narratives (Unlikely 166-67). Such a discussion may also contribute to the theory of fictionality. This is the case, I suspect, even if these forays into rhetorically effective implausibilities and impossibilities can occasionally appear in non-fiction as well, as Jim has himself explored in his study of "off-kilter" nonfiction. I would like to ask him to reflect on the difference between the two. Even if these techniques appear in both fiction and nonfiction, I would think the stakes would be quite different: such impossibilities in a biography can be called mistakes, falsehoods, or lies; certainly, their use is far more constrained. I would also like to see Jim go further, not so much in his general framework but in the applications of that framework: more specifically, I see his practice as privileging the mimetic component to the neglect of what could be a greatly expanded conception of the synthetic. Jim writes, for example, that implausibilities and probable impossibilities are "deviations from the dominant system of probability in a narrative" (12). This begs the question of whether a realistic canon of probabilities does in fact operate in the narrative. In many cases, it does not. In a supernatural causal system, fate may determine the structure of events: there is nothing plausible about Oedipus just happening to run into Laius on the road as he is fleeing Corinth so as not to kill his father—to say nothing of the fact that he marries a woman old enough to be his mother after he had learned that his fate was to marry his mother. Real-world considerations of probability would also have us look askance at a number of other questions, not only the cunning ones raised by Sandor Goodheart concerning the conflicting accounts of Laius' death, but also more mundane explorations of the improbable (or impossible?), such as just how old Jocasta was when she gave birth to Ismene? Questions of probability are not central to all fiction. They are largely irrelevant in the plays of Aristophanes or Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, where an entirely different logic of connecting events rules; this is equally true of many postmodern works, as is graphically enacted when we see a flipped coin come up "heads" over seventy times in a...

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

The Centrality of Reflexivity Through Narrative Beginnings: Towards Living Reconciliation

Autobiographical narrative inquiry is an approach with a specific set of methodological commitments that guide research practice, yet its place and position within the work on reflexive practice are lost or misrepresented. Reflexivity in the form of autobiographical narrative inquiries comes out of the relational ontological commitments of narrative inquiry. By inquiring into Michael’s (the first author) experience as a researcher–practitioner, the purpose of this article is to show how reflexivity, in the form of narrative beginnings, is situated in the ongoing stream of experience. It provides narrative inquirers with avenues to make clear their research justifications/puzzles, become wakeful and open in their inquiries, and support shifts in relational knowing and being. By looking back and noticing the ways stories work on us, rather than us on them, this research explores the reverberations of past experiences and the ripples that carry forward into our future inquiries.

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction by Catherine Romagnolo

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction by Catherine Romagnolo

“The Dark Unaccompanied Moment”: Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife and the Problem of the Origin

This paper is a critical examination of Louise Erdrich's novel The Antelope Wife, one that has a particular focus in conceptualizations of origins. That is to say, it is an analysis of the novel that scrutinizes the various ways in which “origins” are a vitally important aspect, both of the narrative and of the conceptual paradigms that might be used to interpret it. The Antelope Wife thus problematizes the ways that historical and epistemological foundations are predicated on certain crucial moments of origin, which are then used to legitimate particular interpretations. A concept of a definitive origin is also used to underwrite ideas about cultural authenticity which are then placed in the service of social and political perspectives, with wide-ranging consequences. Such origins concern the beginning of narrative, the politics of ethnicity, and the original innocence of a fall from grace. In each case, the novel is notable for its subtle examination of where such concepts begin, and of the political implications of the very concept of beginnings.

Review: From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism, by Alina Payne

Alina Payne From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 360 pp., 62 color and 108 b/w illus. $80 (cloth), ISBN 9780300175332 As Alina Payne explains, From Ornament to Object “is not a book about industrial design. It is about architecture and Kleinarchitektur , about furniture and small portable objects” (21). It is also not a book about the design or use of such objects; rather, it is concerned with how, beginning in the nineteenth century, these objects motivated theoretical questions of style and form. Through textual sources, Payne traces the rhetorical decline of ornament in relation to the rise of everyday objects in art and architectural theories from the German-speaking countries of Europe. The primary interlocutors include well-known heroes of modernism Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos, and Hermann Muthesius, as well as Gottfried Semper, Heinrich Wolfflin, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, and Aby Warburg, in addition to lesser-known figures such as Ernst Kapp, Richard Streiter, and Cornelius Gurlitt. By revealing their links through shared teachers, publications, and language, Payne argues against a normative historiography, which has long placed Adolf Loos's 1908 Ornament and Crime at the beginning of modernism's narrative, privileging functionalism and structure as the highest values of architecture. She masterfully demonstrates the enmeshed themes and intersecting threads in their texts, aggregating a diversity of objects from armor to altars, tattoos to tureens, column capitals to chairs, and typewriters to trunks. These objects and the texts that deployed them in their formulations about style were both product and productive of Sachkultur , the culture of objects. A term that emerged in the nineteenth century within the context of European industrialization and the concomitant emergence of a consuming bourgeoisie, Sachkultur characterized objects less by their luxury status and more by their scale and mobility. Thus, in an effort to outline a theory of style, a dialectic was conceived insofar as objects were placed in relation …