Narrative Devices Research Articles

Vulnerability, Relationality, Fragmentation and Networking in Linda Grant’s A Stranger City (2019)

Set during the immediate months before and after Brexit, Linda Grant’s novel A Stranger City turns London into a microcosm where the misfortunes linked to migration, racism, violence, terrorism, capitalism and individualism make a group of dissimilar characters’ lives intersect around the mysterious death of an ‘unidentified’ migrant woman. Grant’s literary works tend to represent female characters’ journeys in search of personhood. However, this time, she addresses more transnational and present-day issues to the extent that it has been considered as illustrative of hybrid literature produced during the post-2016 era. By relying on close-reading tools, one of the main aims of my study is to demonstrate that A Stranger City displays some specific narrative devices which feature those fictional modes that have been defined as translit (Legget 2016), networked novels (Edwards 2019) and fragmented narratives (Gioia 2013). Further, I will claim that women writers like Grant are resorting to new narrative forms to denounce the fact that the global crisis of values affects women more intensely. Moreover, I will link the notions of home and exile problematized in this novel to the modern construction of Jewish identity and, finally, conclude that this relational narrative proves that twenty-first-century Jewish women are embracing the transnational arena to redefine themselves in our global world.

Migration is everywhere: The overlooked landscapes of Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001) by Yamina Benguigui

This article examines Yamina Benguigui’s 2001 film Inch’Allah Dimanche as a reflection of the transformative impact of past and ongoing migrations to France. While the narrative centres on an Algerian family reunification in the north of France during the 1970s, the film incorporates numerous landscapes as active aesthetic and narrative devices that, I argue, could be studied through a postmigratory lens. In an ecological reading that attends to the multiple discursive, historical and thematic threads embedded in the film’s physical environment, I analyse three landscapes featured as metaphors for the sets of struggles, conflicts and negotiations taking place in societies shaped by migration and colonialism. By taking such an approach, I aim to foreground the ecological dimensions of postmigration and their potential to further decentre the study of audio-visual narratives about migration.

The Clothes Maketh the Cult

The Clothes Maketh the Cult

Tying the knots

Alice Kettle’s stitched works can be viewed in the canon of English figurative embroidery. She uses stitch and thread as a narrative device and as a connecting line, which ties together individual and collective stories as multiple strands across time. The article gives an overview of Kettle’s works which integrate autobiography with mythology and contemporary event, tracing the lineage practices of women and offering a feminine viewpoint to chronicle experience. The works document the recent histories of sociopolitical disruption in Europe, which heralded the fragmentation of unity and Brexit. The recent project Thread Bearing Witness concerns people displacement, migration and global conflict. Stitch is used as a means to represent the marginalized and multiple voices of refugees and those seeking asylum. Stitch is viewed as an expressive and empowering means to change perceptions, promote change and as a common language of making.

Don Quixote Unbound

Abstract Comics adaptations of literary classics often struggle to step out of the shadow of their model. This article explores how the recent adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote by German comics artist Flix transposes the Golden Age classic to a contemporary German setting, updating the story to speak to some of postmodern society's concerns. Flix's approach is marked by an ironic distance from his textual and pictorial sources, which he repurposes without losing sight of the Spanish novel's story arc, character constellation, and narrative devices. The adaptation restores the original comicality to a classic that has mostly been read as a tragic story. While the adaptation inscribes itself into Germany's cultural fabric, it proposes a Don Quixote that transcends traditional notions of clearly delimited, monolithic national cultures.

Confined: Pregnancy, Birth, and Class in Esther Waters (1894) and Wuthering Heights (1847)

Victorian literary resistance to explicit discussion of female sexual reproduction mirrors the material segregation and confinement of parturient women in this era. Just as literary depictions of the pregnancy/labour of the gentry do not represent an embodied, material, clinical experience, so, too, does reproduction more generally serve as a plot device rather than an attempt to realistically and faithfully depict its nuances. Through this lens, George Moore's Esther Waters (1894) represents a fruitful contrast to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). For privileged characters, there is the characteristically Victorian deployment of implicature surrounding reproduction; for the poor, the punitive spectacle of visible pregnancy, birth, and childrearing. Either through its reinforcement or violation, the ubiquitous notion of Victorian propriety in the confinement room – by way of restriction and concealment – shapes our reading of the characters in these novels, as well as the messages imparted by their respective story arcs. I argue that class is a critical mediating factor in terms of both the experiences that pregnant and birthing characters are allowed, as well as the literary terms in which they are conveyed.

Narrative Devices of Metamodernism

Theorists of metamodernism have written a large number of scientific articles on metamodernism, but these articles only clarify the existence and meaning of metamodernism. It is important to reflect some of the narrative techniques used in literature, and this would contribute to a deeper acquaintance with metamodernism. The purpose of the study is to propose, analyze and reflect the narrative techniques of metamodernism, to enable the reader to better understand metamodernist practices in modern novels. Each era has its own storytelling techniques, and this article will introduce six of the main storytelling techniques used in metamodern novels. Six techniques: hesitation, thinking "as if", man, paradox, breaking boundaries within globalism and metanarrative. The object of the study is the analysis of the narrative techniques of metamodernism. In the article the author used analytical, descriptive and comparative methods. The author analyzes six narrative techniques, listing the reasons for their use. The author describes their use in the text using examples from the works of modern writers. It is also necessary to compare the metamodern narrative techniques with the narrative techniques of previous eras. The practical significance of the application in applying the results in the courses of modern Russian literature, theory and history of Russian and foreign literature. The novelty of the study lies in the reflection of six narrative techniques of metamodernism, which can help the reader to better understand metamodernism as a worldview. As a result, it is proved that metamodernism has its own unique narrative techniques that distinguish it from its predecessors. The six narrative techniques are an important fact proving that metamodernism exists and appears in literature and beyond.

서사적 특성에 기반한 <마리 이야기>의 재조명

Through The Story of Mari (2002), this paper intends to discuss the narrative characteristics in terms of rediscovering masterpieces that failed to hit the animation. With the domestic animation market centered on works from the United States and Japan, I would like to re-examine the aspect that this text was not loved by audiences in Korea and was evaluated as a lack of narrative even though it was recognized worldwide. This paper studies narrative characteristics centering on the narrative of time and space, focusing on the animation The Story of Mari as a research method to materialize this, the following two methods are applied in combination. First, based on Gerard Genette’s concept of time, which is the basis of narrative structure in movies and novels, the relational categories of order, duration, and frequency are discussed. Second, based on Seymour Chatman’s theory, it is analyzed through elements such as size, outline and texture, density, location, and color, which are spatial parameters that convey narrative. Third, through Lacan’s theory of ‘the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real’, the growth narrative of Namwoo is analyzed to show that this theory can appear as a method of narrative imagery. Through convergent reading of time and space, the sequential characteristics between story-time and discourse-time and Namwoo’s time are analyzed. The order of story-time and discourse-time creates plot time in a retrospective way. This is simply a narrative device to compose another plot by time modulation that is not made of an antecedent arrangement of past-present events. The narrative characteristics of duration and frequency and the fantastic space of memories are discussed. The fantasy world where Namwoo meets Mari is repeated overlapping, and the fantasy world continues to unfold in Namwoo’s gaze. A fantastic story with Marie, a surreal being, and the arrangement of space and time show their relationship well. In particular, the scene of re-entry into the world of fantasy shows the process of Namwoo’s inner division and at the same time, he finds the direction of his life. Finally, unlike previous studies, the significance of this paper is to analyze the narrative characteristics of the animation The Story of Mari based on time and spatial characteristics and to examine its meaning.

TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF RAP NARRATIVES VS. FAIRY TALES (SYNTACTICAL AND NARRATIVE FACETS)

The paper focuses on the linguistic and narrative manifestations of linear time in rap lyrics compared to fairy tales. It aims at scrutinizing narrative time by the criteria of its acceleration, retardation and generalization, based on syntactical, narrative and pragmatic devices, interpreted from the viewpoint of their iconic isomorphism to the expressed temporal relations. Linear time in fairy tales is self-sufficient, forward-oriented and isolated from external time, while rap narratives are consistent with historical time and free in its movement from the past to the present, and vice versa. Time acceleration in rap occurs in the past or dramatic present and involves syntactical devices aimed either at reducing syntactic patterns by means of detached constructions, asyndeton, nominative sentences and ellipsis, which iconically reproduce the events’ change rate, or at increasing emotional power through climax, reproducing time “condensation.” Instead, fairy tale time is accelerated by lexical-semantic means. The slowed time in rap lyrics relies either on the redundancy of the syntactical pattern, provided by anaphora, repetitions, polysyndeton and enumerations, iconically reproducing the time extension, or on meaning implicatures and their corresponding violation of pragmatic maxims, foregrounded by enjambment, catachresis, aposiopesis and parenthetical phrases, semantically incoherent with the clause they must qualify. Instead, the time extension in a tale never relies on the inference of the deliberately implicated meanings and is expressed by formula and plot elements repetitions. In contrast to subsequent and monotemporal tale narratives, rap lyrics time is often marked by the violation of the temporal sequence, indicating psychological time, inherent in poetry in general.

Sound, Smell, Objects, and the Discursive Space of Nagai Kafū’s 1920s Fiction

Throughout his life, Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) tackled crucial issues of modernity, such as the urban experience and conflicting notions of selfhood. This article explores some aspects of his narrative practice that enrich our understanding of his literary output while suggesting new avenues for future research on space-time representation in twentieth-century literature. I focus on passive senses such as hearing and smell, and on material objects and physical sensations as narrative devices employed by the author in order to broaden comprehension and enrich the experience of objective reality. In particular, I examine Yukidoke (Melting Snow), a 1922 short story understudied thus far but that offers useful insights as regards the author’s intent to defy superimposed notions of affect and space.

'A Taste of Hell': Fires, Landscapes, Emotions, and Renewal

Australian settler fiction and poetry stage shifting notions of temporality in relation to bushfires. The fire was an important plot device in settler writing, initially adding a touch of local colour for readers back home in England through stories of melodramatic rescue. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, understandings of fire had begun to change, as settlers began to learn that fires were not simply one-off catastrophes, but rather they were recurring phenomena. Underpinning my arguments with theories of affect, in particular Brian Massumi’s work on ‘fear of future fire’ and the philosopher Alexander Bain’s work on trauma, I argue that as settlers became increasingly conscious of the cyclicality of bushfires, their understandings of time and its relation to landscape altered. Realist writing responded to this deepening knowledge of the Australian environment, and instead of emphasizing the fleeting drama of a fire, fiction began to focus on its seasonal return. These stories and poems highlight the extreme vigilance that accompanies heightened knowledge and memories of the land. We see characters waiting for fires to arrive in scenes that are often agonizing in their slow pace, leaving them caught, as Barbara Eckstein expresses it, ‘between bushfire and approaching’ (Eckstein 2014, 256). Yet we also see bushfires, both actual and anticipated, accumulate memories of fires that have come before, and the devastation they have caused. Memory and nostalgia play important and complicated roles in attempts to mediate and manage the Australian landscape, exposing the fiction of a land that could be tamed or pastoralized to become just like the home settlers had left behind. Drawing on the fire historian Tom Griffiths’ notion of the amnesia that enables survivors of bushfires to return to the site of the blaze and to build anew, I examine representations of characters who doggedly rebuild their old lives. In particular, I consider the fraught nature of ‘willed amnesia’ or the denial of the reality that fire will return, while also considering connections between memory and place. Keywords: bushfires; memory; disaster; fear; Australian settler culture

"What are you doing here?": Narratives of border crossings among diverse Afghans going to the UK at different times.

Through the "hostile environment" migration policy, the UK government has expressed its commitment to do whatever possible to deter and expel unwanted migrants. Faced with the loss of power in the context of globalization, the Conservative administration, elected in 2010, presented itself as a guarantor of citizens' security. The political discourse of "taking back control" of the nation's borders has resulted in increasingly restrictive immigration and asylum policies. In this paper, we present narratives of Afghans who arrived in the UK at different times and through different routes. As well as those evacuated from Kabul airport in 2021, we also interviewed participants who traveled via insecure routes over land and sea often taking months, or even years, and involving expensive people smugglers. While the evacuation from Kabul was a very public and highly reported event, often with celebratory tones in the international media as Western governments sought to "rescue" Afghan allies, those Afghans who travel to the UK via illegal routes are often stigmatized; demonized in press and political discourses. Building on the emerging body of literature that uses "journey as a narrative device" and drawing upon our novel dataset, we analyze how diverse migrants tell their stories and present agency, within contexts of extreme hazards, to achieve their imagined future. Moreover, applying a spatio-temporal lens we advance understanding of the intersection of place and time in how Afghans traveling to the UK, including recent evacuees, are framed differently with resultant consequences for how border crossings are negotiated and narrated. In so doing, we complicate simplistic categories of deserving vs. undeserving, genuine vs. fraudulent, evacuees vs. irregularised migrants.

Love Objects: Eros and the Materialistic Aesthetics of Ernst Lubitsch

This article explores the role of filmic objects within the romantic relationships featured in Ernst Lubitsch’s silent The Marriage Circle (1924) and the comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932). I argue that these objects reflect a unique engagement with the materiality of film décor, which makes use of the strong presence of objects to portray intimacy as the site of inconclusive meaning. By examining both films together, I demonstrate how the world of inanimate objects brings erotic undertones to the surface while challenging the material conditions of the erotic itself. In order to do so, I examine the ways in which Lubitsch relies on material details not only as functional narrative devices, but as elements that challenge and complicate our interpretations of familiar things. While the underacknowledged use of objects in The Marriage Circle illustrates the logic of displacement that stands at the center of the director’s style, Trouble in Paradise provides a framework for recognizing the critical role of objects in the structure of desire in his films. This article sets up a new reading of tactility and materiality in Lubitsch’s use of mise en scéne and seeks to give objects a prominent role in the analysis of his style.

Repetition and Sentence Construction In Slogans of Arab Revolutions

This study aims to investigate slogans as used by Arabs speakers duringrevolutions. It shows one of the important lexical features that characterizedslogans namely repetition as a narrative device which has been used for thepurpose of emphasis in respect to its various kinds .The study also classifiedslogans according to Quirk and Green (1973:191)classification of sentence withrelation to the direct speech act theory .The data is collected from the internet ,TV channels and newspapers .

Ghadi, Bébé, Rabih, and By Chance: Disability as a Narrative Device in Lebanese Cinema (2010–2019)

Ghadi, Bébé, Rabih, and By Chance: Disability as a Narrative Device in Lebanese Cinema (2010–2019)

Narrative strategies in the stories by Vladimir Nabokov in the 1920s

The author argues that the features of the narrative structure in the stories by Vladimir Nabokov have repeatedly become the subject of researchers’ attention, both literary critics and linguists. Scholars have highlighted some features specific to the modernist narrative in the analyzes of particular Nabokov works and in the scholarly articles devoted to Nabokov in general. One of the most prominent feature is the uncertainty of the “deictic modus of the text” (Mikhail Dymarsky). However, in the early Nabokov works, when his individual style was just being formed, one can find examples of a consistently sustained traditional narrative. The material for this study was Nabokovʼs stories of the 1920s: this period accounts for almost half of the short stories he created; in addition, the instability of the authorʼs preferences when choosing narrative strategies attracts researcher’s attention. The fundamental differences between these strategies, their incompatibility, and their orientation toward solving mutually exclusive problems become more noticeable when comparing early Nabokov prose and the works by Anton Chekhov, a writer whose creative method evolved within the framework of the traditional narrative. So, along with all sorts of ways to violate the usual conditions of communication with the reader, Nabokov also uses the types of narration explored by Alexandre Chudakov on Chekhovʼs material. In other words, in the early stories, Nabokov actively masters the experience of his recent predecessors and looks for ways to overcome traditional narrative forms; in this sense, the arsenal of his artistic devices is more diverse than that of his predecessors. The results of the study allow to formulate a question about the plot conditionality of certain narrative devices in Nabokovʼs stories and, more broadly, in his prose.

Intersecting Realities: Exploring Partition Narratives

The present study investigates the representation of Partition narratives in literary novels. This study focuses on important works that attempt to disentangle the complex relationships between space and narrative in the representation of the 1947 Partition of India, including "Train to Pakistan" by Khushwant Singh, "Azadi" by Chaman Nahal, "The Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh, and "A Bend in the Ganges" by Manohar Malgonkar. This study attempts to elucidate how these writers employ geographical dimensions to portray the socio-political complexity, personal experiences, and communal memories connected to Partition using a multidimensional approach. The research will examine how spaces—both real and imagined—become effective means of expressing themes such as trauma, identity crises, displacement, and the search for belonging in the face of Partition's chaos. This study aims to offer light on the various viewpoints and voices present in Partition literature by investigating the relationship between space and narrative devices like setting, imagery, and symbolism. By closely examining the text and applying critical interpretation, it aims to provide fresh perspectives on how literary representation might influence readers' comprehension of historical events and human experiences. By clarifying the ways in which spatial dynamics and narrative techniques interact to produce rich and complex representations of one of the most important periods in South Asian history, this study ultimately seeks to further the conversation on Partition literature.

Disability as a Plot Device in Nicola Griffith’s “So Lucky”: An Analytical Study

Bharathi Mukherjee is a diasporic writer. Most of her novels focus on assimilation as well as encounter with the East and the West. The Tree Bride also goes in the same line of thought through an amalgamation of historical portrayal which represents the East whereas the colonial narration highlights the West. A per contra account, the article departs from this wider theme and attempts to explore from the perspective of ecological narration. It depicts the picture of the exploitation of nature for the sake of the greed of human beings. To this end, the article attempts to spotlight on the anthropocentric attitude towards nature through a few aspects such as the advancement in science and technology–in the form of bombs–leads to self-destruction, the colonial attitude, and the climate change because of the onslaught on nature which leads to ecological degradation. These are the theoretical underpinnings to analyse the novel.

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of Sister Carrie

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of <i>Sister Carrie</i>

Manejo de pastagens e narrativas em contraste na ficção audiovisual: análise discursiva da série The Crown

Abstract The agrarian universe is usually explored by statements of scientific or technical genres, aimed at the specialized public. However, an episode of The Crown explores it in a peculiar way by presenting Queen Elizabeth II interested in horse breeding. The episode is the instance of analysis of this article, which aims to establish a reading about how the meanings of the agrarian domain circulate in urban environments, in fictional narrative audiovisual devices through the understanding of the circumstances in which technical terms, such as pasture management, are inserted in the enunciative plot. The enunciation scenes indicate conditions of production and attribution of meanings that are evaluated under the theoretical-methodological support of French discourse analysis. The study identifies the construction of contrasting narratives as a way of placing the topic of interest in the background, although it recognizes convergences in relation to the meanings constructed in the enunciation.