Narrative Manipulation Research Articles

Translating Spacetime Intensities of Movie Barcodes

This article proposes a methodology to identify rhetorical energies that form within the diegetic timeline of movies and to translate these to creative sculpting of spacetime designs. In turn, the narrative manipulation of rhetorical spacetime correlates with that of the audience's emotional states. I achieved this by indexing fictional spacetime with movie barcodes to create a visual compression of sequential film frames into one solid image. I also discuss how patterns of spatial and temporal arrangement within the selected film trailer occurs. I utilise the short form movie trailer The Monster (2020) as my case study as it is a work that I co-directed. Essentially, I propose a method to show how temporal designs of a fictional dimension may be sculpted and intensified. For comparative purposes, I discuss a related study on Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015). I conclude that the spacetime relationships of the timeline exhibit a propensity to result in dramaturgic tension patterns.

Shifting Narratives of the Alternative for Germany.

This article examines the evolving narratives of the German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and its potential as a hybrid threat. Through narrative manipulation, the AfD has demonstrated its ability to influence public discourse and distort reality via disinformation dissemination. The AfD established in 2013 in response to the financial crisis and dissatisfaction with the European Union, has transitioned into a populist party, and along with this change, it has also changed its narrative. This shift was notably evident during the migrant crisis in 2015, showcasing the party's adeptness at evoking fear and animosity among German voters. The AfD's narratives have been for years similar to those of the Russian Federation, which has used almost identical narratives on some topics. The German party is consequently working with Russian politicians to reshape democratic politics within Europe, and the AfD is accordingly acting as a hybrid threat to the entire European Union. The study is based on a discourse analysis of interviews conducted with German experts on the topic as well as a content analysis of selected German media to explore these narrative dynamics and their broader implications.

Performing exemplarity: the “two faces” of a village cadre in North China

This article investigates the practice of exemplarity in rural China through Secretary Xu’s oral narratives to provincial leaders and local villagers in a northern model village. It applies a performative narrative analysis to reveal how Xu constructs his persona, utilizing narrative structures, chronotopes, and the interplay of events to forge exemplary images suited to each audience. In presentations to leaders, Xu highlights rural development achievements, while to villagers, he emphasizes common prosperity and community service. This strategic narrative manipulation not only showcases Xu’s skill in aligning with both state and local values but also fosters cultural intimacy and community cohesion despite narrative discrepancies. The case study expands the discourse on narrative techniques and representational strategies within rural revitalization and social governance, offering a nuanced perspective on the intersection of narrative, identity, and governance.

THE NEXUS OF POWER AND OPPRESSION: A FOUCAULDIAN AND GRAMSCIAN STUDY OF PROSPERO’S DOMINANCE IN THE TEMPEST

This study focuses on the intricate power dynamics and hegemonic structures in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, focusing on Prospero’s dominion over his subordinated subjects, Ariel and Caliban. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s power relations and Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony, the study reveals that power within the narrative transcends physical coercion, encompassing the manipulation of cultural, political, and ideological elements. The findings unveil the complex interplay of forces governing authority, subjugation, and the imposition of cultural and intellectual control in the context of the master-slave relationship. Prospero, as the master, employs language and narrative manipulation to assert his dominance over Ariel and Caliban, yielding both physical and psychological control. The themes of oppression and colonialism within the play are distinctly portrayed, notably through the enslavement of Caliban and Ariel, emphasizing their resilience against prevailing power imbalances. Moreover, this research extends beyond Shakespeare’s work, functioning as a metaphor for contemporary societal challenges related to power, dominion, and resistance. Ultimately, the interplay of power and oppression within The Tempest provides a profound lens through which to examine the intricacies of power within the broader spectrum of human existence, enriching our understanding of power dynamics in literature and their significance in contemporary societal issues.

Operating on Anxiety: Negative Affect toward Breast Cancer and Choosing Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy.

Rates of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM)-removal of the healthy breast following breast cancer diagnosis-have increased, particularly among women for whom CPM provides no survival benefit. Affective (i.e., emotional) decision making is often blamed for this increase. We studied whether greater negative breast cancer affect could motivate uptake of CPM through increased cancer risk perceptions and biased treatment evaluations. We randomly assigned healthy women with average breast-cancer risk (N = 1030; Mage = 44.14, SD = 9.23 y) to 1 of 3 affect conditions (negative v. neutral v. positive narrative manipulation) in a hypothetical online experiment in which they were asked to imagine being diagnosed with cancer in one breast. We assessed 1) treatment choice, 2) affect toward CPM, and 3) perceived risk of future breast cancer in each breast (cancer affected and healthy) following lumpectomy, single mastectomy, and CPM. The manipulation caused women in the negative and neutral narrative conditions (26.9% and 26.4%, respectively) to choose CPM more compared with the positive narrative condition (19.1%). Across conditions, women's CPM affect did not differ. However, exploratory analyses addressing a possible association of affect toward cancer-related targets suggested that women in the negative narrative condition may have felt more positively toward CPM than women in the positive narrative condition. The manipulation did not have significant effects on breast cancer risk perceptions. The manipulation of affect had a small effect size, possibly due to the hypothetical nature of this study and/or strong a priori knowledge and attitudes about breast cancer and its treatment options. Increased negative affect toward breast cancer increased choice of CPM over other surgical options and might have motivated more positive affective evaluations of CPM. This study used narratives to elicit different levels of negative integral affect toward breast cancer to investigate the effects of affect on breast cancer treatment choices.Increased negative affect toward breast cancer increased the choice of double mastectomy over lumpectomy and single mastectomy to treat a hypothetical, early-stage cancer.The narrative manipulation of negative affect toward breast cancer did not change the perceived risks of future cancer following any of the surgical interventions.Negative affect toward breast cancer may have biased affective evaluations of double mastectomy.

Augmenting television narratives using interactive home appliances

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the use of everyday objects as new media for enriching digital storytelling experiences, especially as they pertain to viewing television narratives in living room environments. Through a design ideation workshop, we develop a strategy for augmenting television narratives using interactive home appliances. The ideas obtained through the workshop revealed that interactive home appliances connected to television systems can serve as both input and output channels capable of delivering narrative elements as additional output and can support active viewer engagement in narrative manipulation. Another strategy involved mirroring the environments of television narratives with the physical world to enable spatial immersion into such narratives. Based on the strategies, we discuss the criteria valued by the designers when it comes to designating interactions between home appliances and television narratives and the critical aspects that should be considered in further configurations and applications of such strategies.

Political Narratives and the US Partisan Gender Gap.

Social scientists have devoted considerable research effort to investigate the determinants of the Partisan Gender Gap (PGG), whereby US women (men) tend to exhibit more liberal (conservative) political preferences over time. Results of a survey experiment run during the COVID-19 emergency and involving 3,086 US residents show that exposing subjects to alternative narratives on the causes of the pandemic increases the PGG: relative to a baseline treatment in which no narrative manipulation is implemented, exposing subjects to either the Lab narrative (claiming that COVID-19 was caused by a lab accident in Wuhan) or the Nature narrative (according to which COVID-19 originated in the wildlife) makes women more liberal. The polarization effect documented in our experiment is magnified by the political orientation of participants' state of residence: the largest PGG effect is between men residing in Republican-leaning states and women living in Democratic-leaning states.JEL Classification: J16, D83, C83, C99, P16, D72.

Supplementary Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Reports: Readability and textual choice

SYNOPSIS Investing in a mining venture can be risky and stakeholders need transparent, unbiased reports to understand the Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves a mining company holds. Readability and textual choice can be used consciously to manipulate perceptions, or it can be done unconsciously. This exploratory study investigates the readability and textual choice of supplementary Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Reports of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The results indicate that narrative manipulation occurs in these reports through word choices that make the reports difficult to read, as well as specific narrative selections. This reduces the informational value of the reports. The results of the study will be useful to various stakeholders, such as mining company management, investors, investment specialists, financial analysts, and even employees and the general community, who all use these reports to make important decisions. It is also useful for the preparers of the Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Reports, Competent Persons, and other technical specialists to be aware of readability and that certain textual choices can affect the interpretation of these reports. It is recommended that bodies such as the JSE and the SAMREC and SAMVAL Code committees consider adding a plain language requirement to regulations, guidelines, and codes to ensure transparent, unbiased, and objective reports. Keywords: Corporate reporting, Mineral Resources. Mineral Reserves, narrative style, readability.

The influence of narrative disclosure readability, information ordering and graphical representations on non-professional investors' judgment: evidence from an emerging market

PurposeThis study examines whether manipulation in attributes of corporate narrative disclosures and the use of graphical representations can bias non-professional investors' judgment towards firms' future performance, in an emerging market context.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conduct three different experiments with a 2 × 2 between-subjects design, using accounting and finance senior undergraduate students to proxy for the non-professional investors.FindingsResults show that simple (more readable) disclosures improve non-professional investors' judgment towards firms' future performance. In addition, it is found that non-professional investors are prone to a recency effect from the intentional ordering of narrative information, when using complex (less readable) narratives. However, no primacy effect is found, when using simple (more readable) disclosures. The results further provide evidence that the inclusion of graphical representations, along with the manipulated narrative disclosures, can moderate the recency effect of information order, when using less readable and complex narrative disclosures.Research limitations/implicationsThe results reveal that although the content of corporate disclosures can be objective, neutral and relevant, manipulation in textual features and the use of graphical presentations, can interact to impact how non-professional investors perceive and process the disclosed information. This study provides an Egyptian evidence regarding this issue, as the majority of prior studies concentrate on developed capital markets. In addition, it contributes to prior studies evaluating the appropriateness of the Belief Adjustment Model predictions about the effect of textual presentation order on decision-making, by providing evidence from an emerging market.Practical implicationsResults attempt to increase the awareness of investors and encourage them to use multiple sources of information to avoid the probable bias that can result from management's manipulation of narratives. In addition, the study could be of interest to regulators and standard-setters, where the results reveal the need for guidelines and regulations to guide the disclosure of narrative information and the use of graphical information in corporate reports.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effect of two impression management strategies in narrative disclosures (readability and information order), along with the use of graphical representations, on non-professional investors' judgment in an emerging market, like Egypt.

Characterizing social media manipulation in the 2020 U.S. presidential election

Democracies are postulated upon the ability to carry out fair elections, free from any form of interference or manipulation. Social media have been reportedly used to distort public opinion nearing election events in the United States and beyond. With over 240 million election-related tweets recorded between 20 June and 9 September 2020, in this study we chart the landscape of social media manipulation in the context of the upcoming 3 November 2020 U.S. presidential election. We focus on characterizing two salient dimensions of social media manipulation, namely (i) automation (e.g., the prevalence of bots), and (ii) distortion (e.g., manipulation of narratives, injection of conspiracies or rumors). Despite being outnumbered by several orders of magnitude, just a few thousands of bots generated spikes of conversations around real-world political events in all comparable with the volume of activity of humans. We discover that bots also exacerbate the consumption of content produced by users with their same political views, worsening the issue of political echo chambers. Furthermore, coordinated efforts carried out by Russia, China and other countries are hereby characterized. Finally, we draw a clear connection between bots, hyper-partisan media outlets, and conspiracy groups, suggesting the presence of systematic efforts to distort political narratives and propagate disinformation. Our findings may have impactful implications, shedding light on different forms of social media manipulation that may, altogether, ultimately pose a risk to the integrity of the election.

Utility, Artistry, and Narrative Control in Herman Melville's "The Bell-Tower"

For many commentators, nineteenth-century technological innovation epitomized the long-overdue elevation of the useful over the artistic, as witnessed in the Crystal Palace Exhibitions of the 1850s. Herman Melville, however, challenges this inevitable transition, and in his tale "The Bell-Tower," he reveals how the public understanding of artistic labor is suppressed in public discourse. In this essay, I argue that Melville uses the structure of his tale to highlight the narrative manipulation of the public understanding of mid-nineteenthcentury practical inventions and how this level of control shapes our understanding of art and the work of the artist.

Swearing and Cursing in San Juan Quiahije Chatino

Building on the work of Joel Sherzer, this article explores the ways in which a woman creates verbal art in Chatino by narrating a false accusation against her. The narrative contains parallelism, repetition, and narrative manipulations through which verbal art is created (Sherzer 2002 ). The narrator, Celia, is a woman who has an amazing capacity to argue and curse in Chatino, which has repercussions for her in the community. She demonstrates the arts of swearing, cursing, and humor in this narrative. I show that swearing and cursing share interesting structural features with ritual speech and political oratory (H. Cruz 2014, 2017).

“They don’t have a name for what he is”: The strategic de-characterization of Hannibal Lecter

This essay challenges the myth of Hannibal Lecter, in Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, as an enigmatic and unclassifiable character. Lecter’s enigma is generated through a largely unexplored process of de-characterization, i.e. by recurrently presenting him through the speech of other characters who describe him as unknowable. After considering Lecter’s case against the background of well-known literary unknowabilities, a deductive phenomenological exploration of Lecter’s de-characterization is carried out with the assistance of tools from the disciplines of personality and social psychology, and supported by empirical evidence from those fields. The demystifying of Lecter’s unreadability does not entail a debasement of the film or the character. On the contrary, Lecter’s de-characterization, albeit a form of narrative manipulation, is viewed as responsible for much of the film’s impact and success. It produces sensitivity-boosting effects; it mediates the indirect characterization of the other characters; and it engages the spectators’ self-image thus contributing importantly to the enjoyment and appreciation of the film.

Murder and Rape: Reading Flannery O’Connor alongside Eudora Welty

Murder and Rape: Reading Flannery O’Connor alongside Eudora Welty Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty are rarely talked about together, except perhaps in brief statements linking them as southern women writers.1 There is good reason for this, as they are very different types of writers, though both do struggle with a basic question: how does the writer communicate a sense of life’s mysteries, a sense of the ineffable and the transcendent? Exploring how the two writers approached this question, together with their quite different conceptualizations of the mysterious, provides a way to highlight their similarities as well as their differences. Also significant for both writers, though more so for O’Connor than for Welty, is the literary use of violence and the employment of extreme narrative strategies. As I will show, the literary use of violence is the most challenging and most troubling aspect of these two writers’ work, particularly in our increasingly violent era, and may for some readers finally be an insurmountable barrier for accepting each author’s imaginative vision—unless, that is, they are such diehard fans of the writer that they resist thinking through the unnerving implications of her work. O’Connor never swayed from her commitment to portray the world as she saw it as a believer. “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy,” she declares forthrightly in “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” adding that “this means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that. I don’t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction” (804–05). O’Connor here lays out the key tenets of her fiction and of her position as a writer: that the ultimate meaning, no matter what the surface action, touches upon the divine; that there is no comfortable middle ground—you either make a choice for Christ or the Devil; and that, given the modern temper of unbelief, it is extremely difficult for her to communicate her stark religious vision. How to bridge the great divide she perceived between author and reader remained a central concern for O’Connor throughout her career, one that [End Page 89] she repeatedly agonized over and commented upon. She found no easy answers and she advocated various strategies for overcoming the divide. Over time two concepts became central to what she came to call her “Christian realism” (942). The first was that she had to depict the world as accurately as possible, not glossing over or ignoring aspects of life in order to create a rosy, feel-good view of Christian life and commitment. Drawing inspiration from two of her favorite writers, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, O’Connor came to see that only by depicting the visible world in all its fullness might the invisible world in all its mystery be glimpsed. Conrad, she notes in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” “was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one,” while James championed the idea that “the business of fiction [was] to embody mystery through manners” (“Nature” 80; “Teaching” 124). “The mystery [James] was talking about,” O’Connor observes in “The Teaching of Literature,” “is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery” (124). But revealing mystery by realistically portraying conventional manners, O’Connor realized, was not sufficient for communicating her vision to an unbelieving audience. O’Connor never aspired to be a southern Jane Austen. She knew that she needed to be more confrontational and disruptive, using tactics of narrative manipulation and distortion, what Christina Bieber Lake has chillingly termed O’Connor’s “shock and awe campaign” (27). Most of O’Connor’s readers know her famous comment from “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” that in writing to a largely unbelieving audience, writers of faith had to “make [their] vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and...

“Anarchist Beauties” in Late Meiji Japan

This article examines narrative manipulation of police violence involving journalists, the police, and activists in late Meiji Japan to explore the political potential of popular media. I scrutinize the so-called Red Flag Incident of 1908, in which fourteen socialists were arrested for fighting with policemen in the streets of Tokyo over red flags with anarchist slogans. Scholars have studied this incident as a prologue to the nationwide crackdown on socialists, which in turn led to the 1910 High Treason Incident that resulted in the execution of twelve socialists for allegedly plotting to assassinate the emperor. Immediately after the Red Flag Incident, however, newspapers highlighted the four female socialists taken into custody, embroidering their stories with a variety of theatrical metaphors. Simultaneously, the gendered narratives allowed the radical political message to circulate in the form of entertainment, eventually inspiring both intensified state persecution of radicals and women's diverse engagement in politics.

How to inspire value-laden collaborative consumer-generated content

Marketing is evolving into true participatory conversations. Once-tidy, controlled marketing communications with distinct, identifiable corporate spokespeople are giving way to a messy tangle of market-based communications consisting of multiple authors including customers, competitors, observers, employees, and interested collectives. Amidst this, we find consumer-generated content (CGC) that is predominantly antithetical to previous studies, which assumed CGC to be inspired by personal brand attachment and/or the desire to see discrete-authored CGC disseminated, or even motivated by monetary reward. Authorship of collaboratively-produced CGC is virtually untraceable, unknown, and monetarily uncompensated. The true reward is the process, and the outcome is not reliant on technical prowess but rather semiotic manipulation, narrative manipulation, and complex brand character development. Consumers—especially those who are members of active consumer collectives—are skillful, proficient, and prolific in the creation of CGC, with high resonance among very engaged consumers. We advocate harnessing collaborative CGC efforts toward long-term marketing objectives, and offer a brief tutorial.

“It’s all by someone else!”

James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover is the outstanding visionary long poem of late twentieth-century American literature. Despite its somewhat unusual mode of composition and the rather eccentric heavenly pantheon with which Merrill claims to have communicated, Sandover is presented as the transmission of an authentic prophetic message and the narrative of the manner in which that message was received. One of the more intriguing aspects of the text is its self-reflexive nature. A substantial amount of the poem’s dialogue and a number of narrative manipulations interrogate the technologies of the poem’s composition and the relation of Merrill’s medium and method to his task as the author of a sacred text in a skeptical age. These internal tests ultimately confirm his efforts by celebrating the most basic element of any author’s craft—language—as not only the medium for the message but also the mechanism of humankind’s redemption.

Painting Counterfeit Canvases: American Memory Lienzos and European Imaginings of the Barbarian in Cervantes's Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda

I propose a new reading of the intersection of image and text as a site for reworkings of barbarian identity in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's last work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: Historia setentrional (1617). Through narrative manipulations of the half–barbarian character Antonio el mozo's relation to painting, Cervantes crafts complex interrelations among American pictographic language, European alphabetism, and colonial models of barbarian identity to demonstrate the adaptability and ingenuity of indigenous people. I analyze the function of ekphrastic passages that reflect American pictographic language and demonstrate the influence of Mexican painting on the literature of the Spanish golden age. Descriptions of paintings in the Persiles ultimately provide a metafictional critique of European paradigms of graphic representation and challenge the authority of European colonial rationalizations of power dynamics in the New World. (EB)

Encounters with Conrad: Self-experience and narrativity

This article begins by examining a recent essay by the British analytic philosopher Galen Strawson entitled “Against Narrativity,” in which he not only rejects claims about the psychological and ethical necessity of narrative but also distinguishes, en route, between “episodic” and “diachronic” personalities, taking writers as examples. His attempts to label Joseph Conrad within this typology gave rise to subsequent discussion, which is briefly summarized here as a preliminary to a fuller analysis of some of Conrad’s own writing from different genres. My objective is not to endorse or refute Strawson’s schema but to make some cross-disciplinary moves, bringing this particular philosophical debate about self-experience and narrativity back into a framework where well-tested literary approaches can be deployed. Questions are raised about the kind of (written) evidence that can be used in trying discern a person’s self-experience, and about the philosopher’s assumptions of universal and autonomous individuality. I argue that writers are problematic exemplars of Strawson’s categories, having both complex identities (“writing selves”) and specialized skills in the manipulation of narratives that render their expressions of self-experience too opaque for the philosopher’s purposes.

Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita': A Casebook by Ellen s> Pifer (review)

332 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 appraisalor investigation.This is a significantomission in his analysis,for it is not clear, given Kharms'slove of parody, that we should regardthis work or others like it as having unequivocal or genuine philosophical intent. Why should we not treat 'On existence, time, space' as a parody of a philosophical treatise?Heinonen does not even raisethe question. Finally, Heinonen's conclusion that one should more properly define Starukha as paradoxical rather that absurd can be challenged. Paradox is intimately connected with the absurd. The advantage of calling something a paradox is that you tame its power to baffle, frustrate, and threaten understanding (removing the impediment so to speak). It is essentially a human response to the dread that incidents are beyond rational explanation. Paradox does not necessarilyremove the absurd;it may simply appear to do so. In this monograph, Heinonen conducts a dialogue with previous analyses of Starukha. His current work itself forms a basis for further dialogue and discussion that can only benefit and enrich the study of Starukha in particular and Kharms in general. Dublin NEIL CARRICK Pifer,Ellen (ed.). Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita': A Casebook. Casebooksin Criticism. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2003. viii + 209 pp. Notes. Bibliographies.Suggestedreading.f30?.o; Ci 2.99. THIS volume collects nine previously published essays on Nabokov's most famous novel, including Michael Wood's review of Adrian Lyne's controversial film version of 1997, and Herbert Gold's interview with Nabokov which appeared in the I967 Summer/Fall issue of the ParisReview.The purpose of Oxford University Press's'Casebooksin Criticism'seriesis to 'offeranalytical and interpretive frameworksfor understanding key texts in world literature and film' (back cover). Considering the vast arrayof critical studies on Lolita alone, gathering together a cohesive set of essays which demonstrate the variety of responsesto the novel is not an easy task.Apart from the inevitable repetitions, particularly concerning the novel's publication history and reception, the pieces both reflectLolita'smajor themes and addressits central questions. These provide a useful starting point for new readers, but for Nabokov scholars, Pifer has taken the opportunity to bring together articles that might well have otherwise escaped their attention. These include, particularly,the essaysbyJohn Haegart (English LiterayHistoiy,I985),Jenefer Shute (Amerikastudien/American Studies,I985) and Nomi Tamir-Ghez (Poetics Today,I979). The volume falls into three distinct sections of three essayseach. The first, following Pifer's introduction, addresses the problems Lolitapresents to the readerin termsof narrativevoice, intent, reliability,and structure.The second considers representationsof childhood and innocence in the novel, whilst the thirdand final section explores the ramificationsof culturalconflict centralto Humbert Humbert'sexperience. Nabokov scholarswill be most familiarwith the essays by Boyd, Frosch, Pifer, Sweeney, and Wood, all of whom are REVIEWS 333 leading figuresin Nabokov studies,but it is interestingto see workby scholars essentially from outside the mainstream alongside them, all of which offer challenging and dynamic perspectives on issues that have dominated the preoccupations of critics during the almost half century since the novel's publication. The volume opens with Nomi Tamir-Ghez's strong and lucid analysisof the novel's narrativemechanics which detailsHumbert Humbert's narrative manipulations, the strategy of his use of literary forms and conventions, particularly the diary and memoir, his narrative self-consciousness , the multiple audiences he addresses, and his sustained 'internal polemic' (p. 32). Continuing the theme of narrative unreliability, Thomas R. Frosch'sessayon parodyexploresthe novel's self-reflexivity,itsplayfulness, itsreworkingofliterarygenre anditsdistortedmoraluniverse.The concluding piece in this section turns from the novel's narrative dimensions to its structuralcomplexities. BrianBoyd'sresponse to revisionistinterpretationsof Humbert Humbert's revenge scenario which firstappeared in Nabokov Studies in I995, essentiallyserves to introduce new readersto the debate concerning Quilty's murder and the novel's chronology. One cannot help but feel, however, that in this context the issuewould have been better representedby an example of one of the many excellent and provocative theories to which Boyd refers, rather than by his very emphatic and apparently conclusive counter-argument. Also, such a closed and finite perspective is oddly out of keeping with the very open character and approach of the first two essays, indeed, of much of the remainderof the volume. Nevertheless...