Narrative Mode Research Articles

New Aesthetic Characteristics Emerging in the Digital Cinema Era

Digital film technology has constantly transformed and enhanced the fundamental aesthetic elements in the traditional aesthetic categories of film aesthetics during its gradual penetration into the film art system, enabling these fundamental aesthetic elements to take on new forms and appearances that enrich the artistic communication of film and mark This is a sign of artistic advancement. The fusion of old and new technologies in synergy with the original film system has also accelerated the development of digital film technology as an aesthetic model, and in adapting to the original film art system, digital film aesthetics has produced aesthetic implications that transcend the original system, in terms of virtual images, spatial and temporal concepts, narrative modes, sound and picture relationships, and movement characters. They all exhibit new aesthetic characteristics that are distinct from traditional film aesthetics in terms of virtual images, spatial and temporal concepts, narrative modes, sound and image relationships, movement characteristics, and interactive methods. When one examines existing discussions on digital cinema in China and globally, it is easy to see that they primarily focus on expanding the audiovisual expression of images and on the study of the expressive power and image effects of digital special effects, while research on expanding film concepts and expanding film aesthetics is superficial, or even nonexistent. From a film aesthetics standpoint from the standpoint of film aesthetics, as digital technology has gradually displaced traditional modes of film production and concepts, audience viewing styles, and human aesthetic concepts, the aesthetics of digital film under the new digital technology can be a new construction in terms of time and space, reality, narrative techniques, virtual reality, and aesthetic acceptance. Based on established film theories and aesthetic notions, this study will seek to develop film aesthetics in the digital era, highlighting the study's uniqueness and systemic character in light of shifting aesthetic categories and the incorporation of new aspects in digital cinema.

Unveiling the reasoning processes of robots through introspective dialogues in a storytelling system: A study on the elicited empathy

The work studies the empathy elicited by a storytelling system in which the characters in the story are interpreted by humanoid robots and modelled as cognitive agents. The ACT-R architecture is exploited to shape the characters’ personalities and equip them with knowledge and behaviours typical of social practices. The narration is enriched with gestures and emotional expressions obtained by setting parameters that can be correlated to some emotions, such as the pitch and speech rate, the LEDs colour and the head inclination. The system has been evaluated by comparing a simple narrative modality with an enhanced one, where an introspective dialogue is adopted to explain and let transparent the internal reasoning processes of the characters. The obtained results show that storytelling affected the cognitive component of empathy, especially through the advanced narrative mode.

Philosophy in the Narrative Mode

Histories of Arabic and Islamic philosophy tend to focus on texts which are systematic in nature and conventionally classified as philosophy or related scholarly disciplines. Philosophical principles, however, are also defining features of texts associated with other genres. Within the larger field of philosophy, this might be especially true of ethics and within the larger body of literature this might be especially the case for stories. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the very purpose of storytelling is to reinforce and disseminate moral conventions. Likewise, the moral philosopher can be conceptualized as a homo narrans.The aim of this contribution is to apply the approach to narratives as a mode of debating ethical or moral principles to biographies of Alexander the Great. More than any other figure of the classical world, Alexander was religiously validated in the Islamic tradition due to his quasi-prophetic status as the ‘man with the two horns’ in the Qur’an. He appears prominently in the larger orbit of Arabic and Islamic philosophy as interlocutor and disciple of Aristotle and is adduced anecdotally in philosophical literature as an example to teach larger lessons of life. As a world conqueror, he provided an attractive model for those who sought to reconcile philosophical insight with worldly ambition.Focusing on biographies of Alexander, this article explores ethical principles which are inscribed in this body of literature and thus reads the texts as a narrativized form of philosophy. The analysis is comparative in two ways. Biographies of different periods and regions of the Islamicate world will be discussed, but comparisons with pre-Islamic biographies of Alexander (notably Roman biographies and the Alexander Romance) are included as well.

New Perspectives on Ethics in Islam [whole issue

Complete volume, containing all articles CONTENTS Introduction: Feriel Bouhafa, Towards New Perspectives on Ethics in Islam: Casuistry, Contingency, and Ambiguity I. Islamic Philosophy and Theology Feriel Bouhafa, The Dialectics of Ethics: Moral Ontology and Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy Frank Griffel, The Place of Virtue Ethics within the Post-Classical Discourse on ḥikma: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Nafs wa-l-rūḥ wa-sharḥ quwāhumā Ayman Shihadeh, Psychology and Ethical Epistemology: An Ashʿarī Debate with Muʿtazilī Ethical Realism, 11th-12th C. Hannah C. Erlwein, The Moral Obligation to Worship God Alone: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Analysis in the Tafsīr Anna Ayse Akasoy, Philosophy in the Narrative Mode: Alexander the Great as an Ethical Character from Roman to Medieval Islamicate Literature II. Islamic Jurisprudence Ziad Bou Akl, From Norm Evaluation to Norm Construction: The Metaethical Origin of al-Ghazālī’s Radical Infallibilism Felicitas Opwis, The Ethical Turn in Legal Analogy: Imbuing the Ratio Legis with Maṣlaḥa Robert Gleave, Moral Assessments and Legal Categories: The Relationship between Rational Ethics and Revealed Law in Post-Classical Imāmī Shīʿī Legal Theory Omar Farahat, Moral Value and Commercial Gain: Three Classical Islamic Approaches III Hadith, Quran, and Adab Mutaz al-Khatib, Consult Your Heart: The Self as a Source of Moral Judgment Tareq Moqbel, “As Time Grows Older, the Qurʾān Grows Younger”: The Ethical Function of Ambiguity in Qurʾānic Narratives Enass Khansa, Can Reading Animate Justice? A Conversation from Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) Nuha AlShaar, The Interplay of Religion and Philosophy in al-Tawḥīdī’s Political Thought and Practical Ethics William Ryle Hodges, Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Notion of Political Adab: Ethics as a Virtue of Modern Citizenship in Late 19th Century Khedival Egypt

Speaking through Manbhum films: between song, dance and peripheral video industries

ABSTRACT This paper grows from the research conducted on the video industry located in Purulia District, West Bengal, India, namely ‘Manbhum videos’. ‘Manbhum’ signifies both place and idiom, and the videos are imagined and produced in relation as well as in opposition to its big Other(s), which include Bollywood, and reputable Bengali language cinema. Manbhum feature-lenghth videos, comprise discreet episodes, which are intercepted by songs and dances; working within popular narrative strategies and modes of address, some of these videos use unique voices, of both singers and dubbing artists, to tell the story. Such application of music and voice do not only re-present specific conditions of production, but also inform us about the ways in which the actor’s ‘body’ and ‘voice’ may be used within parallel industrial practices. Therefore, besides addressing the industrial contexts and proliferation of video industries across Global South in the era of the digital, this paper considers subjects of language, community, culture, geography, politics and the problem of Jhumur (songs) transfiguring into a so-called ‘vulgar’ form, and thereby, examines particular videos to study the characteristics of production, and the question of narration and recounting, in such intermittent videos.

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

On the pre logic of film and television explosion

with the development and popularization of digital media, network literature has gradually become one of the popular literary forms. Network reasoning novel has ushered in the development situation of beginning and climax, and has become an important branch of network literature. Among them, "forensic Qin Ming" series novels continue the narrative mode of "solving cases" of previous reasoning novels, adopt a unique narrative mode and narrative angle, and form a creative style with local characteristics. The distinctive characteristics make it stand out from many works that imitate mainly Japanese, European and American reasoning novels. The significance of the study on the success of the series of Chinese novels after the Qin Dynasty.

Compound words in the work of the Swiss German-speaking author Urs Widmer “Hand und Fuß – ein Buch”

The phenomenon of word composition in the German language is actualized: generally accepted classifications are given and problematic aspects are clarified. The purpose of the study is to consider the use of compound words in a chosen literary text and to define the artistic potential of this word formation. For this purpose, compound words in the text of the Swiss German-speaking writer Urs Widmer are analyzed and systematized in accordance with existing classifications. The methods used are analysis of theoretical approaches, linguistic analysis, methods of corpus linguistics and literary text interpretation. We found that besides complex definitive nouns prevailing in the text there are three-component compound words, compound adjectives and adverbs. A number of compound words used are not recorded in dictionaries, but they can be identified through their components and lexicalized in the language, which is proved by examples from electronic text corpora. As a result of the study, it is revealed that U. Widmer uses lexicalized compound words and creates occasionalisms, including for modeling the expressive mode of narration. The language game with compound words in puns forms the carnival discourse of the “inverted” language; moreover, the use of complex words also enables the author to create an ironic discourse. A compound word as an expressive language unit within the framework of the author’s individual style can be a promising topic for further research at the intersection of linguistics and literary criticism.

Refashioning History: Women as Sartorial Storytellers

My dissertation, “Refashioning History: Women as Sartorial Storytellers” illuminates the relationship between history and literature as fields of cultural production within the African diaspora. By examining clothes and textiles as narrative forms of individual self-expression and of diasporic connectivity, “Refashioning History” shows how twentieth and twenty-first century women writers from Haiti, the United States, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe mobilize the authorial possibilities of fashion to counter colonial archival silences around the everyday experiences of enslaved women. “Refashioning History” contends that fashion is a powerful narrative mode in history and is critical to understanding how Black women claim—and have been claiming—agency over the fashioning of their own bodies and stories in public and private space. By telling the stories of enslaved, indentured, and free African women and women of African descent that national and colonial histories often ignore, I argue that authors such as Toni Morrison, Marie Chauvet, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Andrea Levy collectively offer a powerful vision for a decolonial Black feminist history of slavery in the Americas.

Second person in different genres and cultural practices

The editorial introduction shows the richness of traditional literary genres (fictional and non-fictional), new cultural practices (digital literature, games, and playable media) in which second-person address may be encountered. The presence of a direct address to “you” (indi­vidual or collective) is also a distinct marker of contemporary marketing, advertising, and so­cial media communication. There is a number of transitional forms in-between print and digital literature and games, in which the presence of the second-person pronoun is one of the main features of poetics. These include narrative role-playing games (RPGs), game books, interactive text games, and paragraph games/books. Complementing the existing gap in Pol­ish interdisciplinary research, the editors discuss both the historical forms of second-person narrative and its potential to cross the boundaries between various media. Additionally, the article reconstructs the fuzzy status of you-narrative in 20th-century narrative theory, since the semantic ambiguities of the multifaceted “you” address resulted in multiple theoretical attempts at defying and analyzing the second-person storytelling. We summarize the main threads of the heated debate on the semantics, poetics, and pragmatics of second-person nar­rative that took place at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The editorial discusses the reasons why narrative theory gradually recognized the typological equivalence of second-per­son storytelling to the third- and first-person narrative mode. Another recurring problem in research on second person is its impact on reader’s immersion and identification processes. Moreover, we indicate the new cultural context (the digital revolution) as an important fac­tor in the current dissemination and popularization of second-person narratives.

«По избитой дороге европейских туристов»: репрезентация пространства Германии в «Парижских письмах с заметками о Дании, Германии, Голландии и Бельгии» Н. И. Греча

The paper deals with German spatial images represented in the travelogue “Parisian Letters with Notes about Denmark, Germany, Holland and Belgium” by N. I. Gretsch in connection with the tradition of describing Germany in Russian literature of the 19th century. Several types of spaces are determined in the text by Gretsch. One of them is formed by deminatural and home idyllic loci for which the motives of orderliness, coziness, cleanness, lightness, domesticity, plentifulness, visual appeal are typical. There is a connection of this spatial kind with the sentimental world-image of Germany in Russian literature represented in its ‘wasted’ variant having no expression. Urban German loci are also marked with the motif of orderliness connected with the space not of the idyll but of the modern rational civilization. Prussia is determined as the main center of ordering the German space and contrasted with several conflicted liminal places bordering France and Denmark. Describing regulated non-idyllic, liminal as well as historical loci of Germany tends to the neutral factual world-image. Finally, there are some elements of the travestycomical German narrative mode in the text by Gretsch, they basically deal with representing the German philistine space.

On Pluviality: Reading for Rain in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

Pluviality, a term I have developed in relation to heavy rainfall and flooding – its timescapes and material and textual conditions – is the focus of this analysis of Namwali Serpell’s magisterial 2019 novel, The Old Drift. Located largely in Zambia, it is nevertheless a novel of the Zambezi watershed, and of hydrocolonial and southern African regional proportions. Encompassing both human and non-human narrators and protagonists, its centrepiece is the Kariba Dam, the largest hydro-electrical dam in the world at the time of its construction. This is a very rainy novel, alert to the region’s histories of flooding and to the ever-heavier rainfall of accelerating climate change, in one of the regions of the world most susceptible to its present and coming effects. I focus on the novel’s pluviality as material, historical and narrative mode, traced in its registers of water and wit, prescience and prophecy, as it surges, silts and drifts across the literary landscapes of African fiction.

Still Point of the Turning World

Schubert’s late instrumental music evokes a distinctive time-sense which not only expands the expressive potential of stylistic norms, but also invites deeper reflections on the relationship between the self and the world through his multilayered construction of temporal consciousness. The sense of now, towards which past and future gravitate, is particularly salient. In this article, I examine the formal, harmonic, topical processes through which Schubert constructs a vivid sense of the now in two movements from his late period, D. 956/ii and D. 959/ii, through the lens of phenomenology, drawing on conceptions of time as formulated by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I aim to bridge two fields together: first, the general theory of musical time, as has been delineated by Kramer, Barry and Clifton, which examines concepts such as linearity/nonlinearity, silence and stasis; and second, the scholarship on late Schubert, with key conceptual tools such as landscape, late style, lyricism, songfulness and interiority, formulated in the works of Adorno, Burnham, Mak and Taylor. I will also provide the cultural context of musical time in the early-nineteenth century, focusing on the wider paradigm shift from form-as-architecture to form-as-process in music. My analysis reflects a phenomenological orientation within a hermeneutic, narrative mode. I highlight the often disorienting subjective experience of time as evoked by moments that deflect from norms and expectations, specifically the tension between the transient nature of music and the sense of permanence evoked through Schubert’s cyclic, paratactic procedures. I then show how Schubert’s construal of temporal consciousness acquires a historiographical import and resonates with the broader intellectual world by framing it in terms of Schlegel’s three stages of history. I conclude by promoting phenomenological approaches in analysing Schubert’s works and nineteenth-century music at large.

Contesting Discourses and Transmodalization in J.M.Coetzee’s Fiction


 
 
 South African metafictive literature by white writers, specifically J. M. Coetzee (Nobel laureate, 2003), is essentially pivoted on the black-white dialectics of discourse. The narrative is informed with a variety of sociopolitical inflections that pronounce in various ways the contemporary ideology in South African literature. Critics have greatly delineated the racio-political quagmire of the colonial subject in metafictive literature appearing in the last few decades of twentieth century. However, a deeper analysis of the representation of the colonial subject that interrogates the discourses in narrative is still untapped. J.M.Coetzee’s South African-based novels, mainly Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990), manifest a metafictional consciousness that investigates the constructs of reality of the colonial subject. It is significant to explore the logocentric premise in the representation of colonial subject and how this contributes to the meaning of the fictional word. This study is a narratological research of Coetzee’s technique of transmodalization (narrative mode shifts) between two types of discourses, the pedagogical and performative, and employs Homi K Bhabha’s (1994) theoretical framework of representative discourse. In examining the narrative mode shifts between frame breaks, metanarrative, narrative of words, narrative of dreams, and narrative of topography, this research argues that a non-position is generated between the contesting discourses. This research becomes a model for the study of colonial dynamics in metafictive white writing. It aims to unravel the elements integral in voicing the conditionality of the colonized subject and the contention of representation. This study also explores the metonymical relationships in narrative that reflect intrinsic aspects of the signification of representation.
 
 

Het tweedepersoonsperspectief als autobiografisch masker: verdichting van auteur, verteller, protagonist, en “narratee” in Herman Teirlinck, “Zelfportret of het galgemaal”

This article explores the novel Zelfportret of het galgemaal (The Man in the Mirror, 1955) by the Flemish author Herman Teirlinck, who planned it as a literary self-portrait. Its interpretation as an autobiography hinges on one’s understanding of the second-person point of view that makes up substantial parts of this novel. Multifocality of the “you” appears to be a key feature characterizing this little explored narrative mode in autobiography. Departing from structuralist narratology by Genette and Lejeune, I investigate reader-driven reading modes as elaborated by Fludernik, Bonheim, and Schmitt to explore how the deferred referentiality of the “you” blurs the traditional dichotomy between factual historical reality and the narrative world. The narrator involves the reader in interpreting the “you” to address both the narratee (Teirlinck) and the protagonist (Henri) at the same time.

«КАРМАННАЯ КНИЖКА ДЛЯ ПРИЕЗЖАЮЩИХ НА ЗИМУ В МОСКВУ» Н. И. СТРАХОВА: ПОЭТИКА САТИРЫ

“A Handbook for Winter Moscow Visitors” is an example of late Enlightenment satire. Nikolai Strakhov exposes the vices and follies of high society fops obsessed with fashion and ignoring reason. This is a usual topic of 18th-century satire. Why the “Handbook” deserves attention is mostly because of its form rather than content. Its primary source is the genre of satirical essay embodied in moral weeklies. But in comparison to essays Strakhov greatly widens the scope of his work. The book’s plot follows the calendar, embracing several months showing fops arriving to Moscow, indulging in all ways of entertainment and finally leaving for their estates in spring. For the fops, this means the whole year circle, as life in the country, out of high society, has no value for them. The satirist’s view is, however, opposite: in his opinion, fops waste all their time, as their lifestyle is nonsensical. The characters are nameless, which is a method of generalization. Narrative modes are extremely various. The major mode is a rare form of narration in the imperative, the story presented as advice to fops. The satirist recommends them to indulge in unreasonable behavior. The reader is sure to understand that such advice should not be taken seriously and must not be followed, irony being the predominant principle in the book. Advice in the imperative alternates with narration and description in the indicative. In this case the characters are often addressed in the second person or spoken of in the third person. There is also first-person narration where the author pretends to identify with the characters. The book’s syntax is characterized by parallel constructions, particularly based on anaphora.

Writing Animality in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Yoko Tawada, an author writing in both Japanese and German, is what critics call an exophonic writer, that is, a writer who uses a language other than one’s mother tongue for creative purposes. Writing from a foreign point of view is part of Tawada’s interest in acquiring perceptions of otherness both linguistically and culturally. We might apply Tawada’s exophonic writing when entering animal worlds by creating what Frederike Middelhoff terms ‘literary auto-zoographies’. Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear contains three generations of polar bear narratives: two circus performers and one zoo inhabitant. The text takes a postmodern metafictional approach to problems that arise in speaking for the animal other, a subject under much discussion in Animal Studies scholarship today. My article examines each of the three characters and their corresponding narrative modes. First, the grandmother polar bear writes a first-person autobiography of her life as a performer; in doing so, Tawada combines fiction and nonfiction to deconstruct the bear character’s identity thus resulting in what might be called a more authentic animal autobiography. Second, the article focuses on Tawada’s fascination with translation through the human-animal shared spaces between Tosca (the daughter of the unnamed grandmother polar bear character) and her human trainer. Lastly, the article examines the grandson, Knut, as an example of the current humanimal subject of ecopoetics with an emphasis on Knut as an environmental figure.

WHOEVER ARE HISTORIES FOR? PLURALIZATION, BORDER THINKING, AND POTENTIAL HISTORIES

ABSTRACTHow are contemporary philosophies of history articulated in resistance to the long legacies of colonial rule and practice that continue to shape presuppositions of knowledge? By foregrounding the performative dimension of modes of historical narration, this article considers how practices of engagement with alterity can be conceptualized as constituting new spaces of encounter. The “whoever” invoked in this article's title is presented as a site of indeterminate identity, the futural antidote to an epistemic regime, and the addressee of a question that is as much about what we might become as what we have been. Exploring versions of this figure in the work of Walter Mignolo, Ariella Azoulay, and Judith Butler, the article demonstrates how these theorists all problematize the presumptive universality of the West, and the historically established status quo that underpins it, without adopting in its stead a naive or merely fragmented account of difference. Each approach to the politics of knowledge considered here suggests a way of capturing the significance of the performative and mediated space of separation and relatedness between “same” and “other” as potential sites for decolonizing history, and each seeks to activate the interference and disturbance of the “exteriorities” at once produced and repressed as aspects of the institution of a “center” or “origin.” The theorists I discuss variably describe such exteriorities via the resources of “border thinking” (Mignolo), “potential history” (Azoulay), and the “exilic” (Butler) and provide means not only to acknowledge histories of oppression but to imagine a transformative politics premised on these vital interventions.

Literary Form and Ethical Content

Abstract The paper offers a qualified endorsement of Terry Eagleton’s striking claim that “a work’s moral outlook … may be secreted as much in its form as its content”. A number of points are raised in defence of the claim: an argument for the inseparability, under certain conditions, of form and content in a literary work; an idea of moral content, not as derived moral principle, but as inward-facing interpretation grounded in an ethical vocabulary; the possibility of internal and external perspectives on fictional characters; and an emphasis on emotions expressed in, rather than caused by, narrative. Three literary examples are explored, to show how vocabulary, syntax, implicature, and tone, contribute to the emergence of moral salience. A consequence drawn is that the ethical stance readers take to a scene or incident is partially shaped by the narrative modes of its presentation. The overall perspective of the paper is that of aesthetic autonomism: the view that the aesthetic value of a work of literature is distinct from, and not reducible to, any instrumental moral values (positive or negative) attributed to the work.

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OUTSIDE: THEORETICAL PREAMBLE

History and TheoryVolume 60, Issue 4 p. 3-19 Article THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OUTSIDE: THEORETICAL PREAMBLE ULRICH TIMME KRAGH, ULRICH TIMME KRAGH Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, PolandI wish to dedicate this theme issue of History and Theory to my dear friend and erudite guru Frank R. Ankersmit, a genuine intellectual. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. 615574, “Narrative Modes of Historical Discourse in Asia” (NAMO) hosted by Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.Search for more papers by this author ULRICH TIMME KRAGH, ULRICH TIMME KRAGH Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, PolandI wish to dedicate this theme issue of History and Theory to my dear friend and erudite guru Frank R. Ankersmit, a genuine intellectual. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. 615574, “Narrative Modes of Historical Discourse in Asia” (NAMO) hosted by Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.Search for more papers by this author First published: 15 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12233 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume60, Issue4December 2021Pages 3-19 RelatedInformation