Narrative Performance Research Articles

Narrative discourse production in Parkinson’s disease: Decoupling the role of cognitive-linguistic and motor speech changes

Introductionthe interplay between neuropsychological and communicative abilities in Parkinson’s disease (PD) has been relatively overlooked, and it is not entirely understood which difficulties are consequent to impaired motor control, and which have a linguistic/cognitive basis. Here, we examined narrative discourse in PD using a multi-level analysis procedure considering sentence-level (productivity, lexical-grammatical processing) and discourse-level processes (narrative organization, informativeness), and partialling out patients’ motor speech impairments. The interaction between cognitive (i.e. linguistic and executive) and communication abilities was also investigated. MethodsTwenty-nine PD subjects in the mild stage of the disease were compared to 29 matched healthy comparators (HC) on quantitative measures of narrative discourse derived from two picture description tasks. Multivariate (considering articulation rate and educational attainment as covariates) and univariate (with group membership as independent variable) analyses of variance were conducted on separate linguistic domains. The contribution of executive/linguistic abilities to PD’s narrative performance was explored by multiple regression analyses on narrative measures significantly differentiating patients from HC. Resultssignificant reductions in patients were observed on measures of productivity (less well-formed words, shorter sentences) and informativeness (fewer conceptual units, less informative elements, lower number of details) and these alterations were explained by variations in linguistic abilities (action and object naming) rather than executive abilities. Articulation rate and educational attainment did not impact the observed reduced productivity and under-informativeness. Conclusionreferential narrative discourse is altered in PD, regardless of motor impairments in speech production. The observed reductions in productivity/informativeness aspects of narratives were related to naming abilities and in particular to verbs processing, consistently with the neurocognitive model of motor language coupling. Since narratives are amenable to recurrent and automated analysis for the identification of linguistic patterns potentially anticipating the development of PD and the onset of cognitive deterioration, discourse abilities should be quantitatively and repeatedly profiled in the disorder.

Feasibility of Using the Global Tales Protocol to Elicit Personal Narratives in 10-year-Old Children in Ireland

Introduction: This small-scale study explored the feasibility of the Global TALES protocol in eliciting personal narratives in typically developing monolingual Irish children, using the online Zoom platform. We investigated children’s performance on measures of productivity (total number of utterances; total number of words) and syntactic complexity (MLU in words). We also documented the topics children talked about in response to the six emotion-based prompts contained in the Global TALES protocol. Methods: Nineteen typically developing children (6 male, 13 female), aged between 10.0 and 10.11 years produced personal narratives in response to the Global TALES protocol. Given COVID-19 pandemic-related public health restrictions, the language samples were elicited using Zoom. All stories were transcribed and analysed using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software. Qualitative content analysis was used to code the topics of the children’s stories. Results: Sixteen participants responded to all prompts. One participant only responded to three of the six prompts. The prompt that was least successful in eliciting a response was the “problem” prompt; 15.7% (n = 3) of the children did not provide a response to this prompt. On average, children produced 40 utterances, although individual variability was high. On average, MLU was 8.7, ranging from 6 to 11. Children’s topics closely resembled those reported in the Global TALES feasibility study despite the fact, the current study took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. The most frequent topics were related to family (events, illnesses, relationships, siblings) and finding or fixing something. Conclusion: The Global TALES protocol was successful in eliciting personal narratives from 10-year-old Irish English-speaking children. Future larger scale studies are now needed to investigate if the results generalise to the wider Irish population with a view to create local benchmarks of personal narrative performance.

Performing marginalized embodiment in fitness culture: co-storytelling in/exclusion through personal narrative

ABSTRACT This analysis of personal narrative as performance identity explores the reperformance of marginalized embodiment in group fitness classes in the national fitness affiliate CrossFit and the national Pure Barre franchise. The researcher re-connects with a participant from a study two decades ago focused on bulimic identity as a personal narrative performance. The participant and author struggle through the re-emergence of past co-performances of marginalized embodiment as they participate in national boutique fitness culture. The narratives illuminate the role of co-meaning-making in daily performances of self that reiterate rather than resist marginalization, even when cultural spaces offer opportunities for potentially inclusive co-performance.

Integrating an Intercultural Aesthetic World: Hong Liu’s The Magpie Bridge and The Touch

ABSTRACT Representing China’s history is a narrative tradition of Anglophone Chinese literature, and it is usually considered an effective way for authors to participate in multicultural marketing. This study, however, expounds that Hong Liu’s two novels on Chinese history, The Magpie Bridge and The Touch, featured with cultural translation, represent cosmopolitan literary practice beyond the frame of nation-state and ethnicity. Both address the Chinese in diaspora: their present lives are frequently linked with the past via specific Chinese symbols – the ‘mirror’ and the ‘touch’, which are endowed with English connotations through translation and reveal the intercultural aesthetic world Liu crafts. Analysis of intercultural symbolism, where different aesthetic traditions are treated equally, distinguishes her writing from the marketing of exoticism that subordinates the ‘foreign’, demonstrating her contribution to the discursive diversity of English-language literature by minority writers. In this sense, Liu’s narrative performance of Chinese history engages in the negotiated process of transformation of Anglophone Chinese literary discourse and practices post-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism towards boundary-crossing world literature.

Contribution of Working Memory and Inferencing to Narrative Discourse Comprehension and Production in Traumatic Brain Injury.

The goal of this study was to identify some potential key cognitive and communicative processes underlying narrative discourse ability following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Specifically, this study (a) investigated the contribution of working memory (WM) and inferencing to narrative discourse comprehension and production; (b) tested key assumptions posited by the Structure Building Framework (SBF), a discourse model; and (c) evaluated the potential for inferencing to contribute to discourse ability beyond a shared variance with WM. Twenty-one individuals with TBI completed six tasks yielding seven measures: verbal and nonverbal WM updating (WMU-V and WMU-NV, respectively), predictive inferencing, the Discourse Comprehension Test (DCT), a picture story comprehension (PSC) task, and story retelling (story grammar and story completeness). Regression analyses were performed using WM and inferencing as predictors for narrative performance. WM measures were significant predictors of DCT performance and approached significance as predictors of PSC. Inferencing approached significance as a unique predictor for the DCT and story completeness. WMU-V and WMU-NV were highly collinear, and neither WM measure predicted discourse outcomes over and above the other's contribution. WM was more strongly associated with comprehension processes, whereas inferencing may be associated with both comprehension and production outcomes. Findings were interpreted as supporting SBF assumptions of domain generality of cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in discourse while also challenging assumptions that the same cognitive substrates are marshaled for comprehension and production processes. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23148647.

Interdisciplinarity in the design of assessment instruments: the Ecological Battery for the assessment of cognitive and linguistic functions

In recent decades, there has been increasing criticism regarding the predominance of an experimental environment in cognitive and linguistic performance assessment methods, especially in the child population, given that there is ample evidence that the task environment determines the possibilities of resolution and cognition, which implies that the subjects under assessment are not considered in their cognitive integrity (Stromswold, 1996; Silva et al., 2014). The ecological paradigm, on the other hand, promotes the development of assessment environments that seek that the assessed subjects recreate the conditions demanded by cognition in situation (Wittrock and Baker, 1998). Technological advances, especially in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), have made it possible to speed up the assessment procedure, streamline the application process, control the stimulus conditions, among other characteristics. This paper presents the guidelines of an assessment instrument designed under these requirements, the Digital Ecological Battery for Cognitive and Linguistic Assessment (Silva et al., 2015), succinctly describes the preliminary results of its application in a population of children with Typical Development (TD) and ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). The Battery is an assessment software comprising 13 tests (adaptations, versions and original tests) designed to measure: Working Memory (storage and functioning), Attention, General Intelligence, Narrative Performance, Establishment of Referential Relationships and Conversational Interaction Performance in children aged 5 to 14 years. Preliminary results point to the need to reconsider certain descriptions of the population, especially with regard to developmental aspects of social cognition.

COMING OUT AND COMING UP: QUANTIFYING QUEER IMMATERIAL LABOR

Like the broader beauty industry, YouTube’s beauty vlogosphere has historically been dominated by gender- and sexually normative White woman. However, in recent years, a new class of racially diverse, queer-identified beauty vloggers have risen to fame on the platform, garnering millions of subscribers and lucrative brand deals. Previous scholarship has identified the specific type of labor that queer online content creators undertake as “queer immaterial labor,” which recognizes that (1) immaterial labor is not performed in the same way by creators in online spaces, but rather is structured by complex interplay between a variety of social identities; and (2) that queer influencers undertake labor that is specific to the queer community (e.g. performance of the coming-out narrative, employing queer cultural resources) (Homant and Sender, 2019). Our goal is to use a computational approach to measure its two primary facets: amount of labor and unique labor practices. This can be accomplished by returning to YouTube and expanding the sample of queer and non-queer beauty vloggers with broader metrics for comparison. We will use a mixture of comments, transcripts, and video metadata to characterize and contextualize the amount and type of labor performed by a sample of popular queer beauty vloggers (>100,000 subscribers) in comparison to their straight peers. Our goal is to provide a series of descriptive comparisons across this large sample of beauty vloggers on YouTube. Insights will allow us to directly point to areas of potentially inequitable output and differences in labor practices across these two groups.

Nat Turner and the Affective Power of Religious Fanaticism

ABSTRACT This article draws on insights from scholarship on religion, race, and affect to understand the affective power of Nat Turner’s prophetic religion and critiques of Turner that dismissed him as a “fanatic.” It does so through a close reading of The Confessions of Nat Turner and an analysis of diverse newspaper and governmental reports responding to Turner’s religious narrative performance. It situates these sources within an antebellum affective economy in which Turner and his detractors sparred over the meaning and morality of the Southampton Rebellion. They did so through diverse appeals to powerful feelings, divine forces, and religious “truth.” The language of fanaticism was at the center of this sparring.

Narrative Abilities at Age 3 Are Associated Positively With Gesture Accuracy but Negatively With Gesture Rate.

Though the frequency of gesture use by infants has been related to the development of different language abilities in the initial stages of language acquisition, less is known about whether this frequency (or "gesture rate") continues to correlate with language measures in later stages of language acquisition, or whether the relation to language skills also depends on the accuracy with which such gestures are produced (or reproduced). This study sets out to explore whether preschoolers' narrative abilities are related to these two variables, namely, gesture rate and gesture accuracy. A total of 31 typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children participated in a multimodal imitation task, a context-based gesture elicitation task, and a narrative retelling task. Results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between the children's narrative scores and their gesture accuracy scores, whereas higher rates of gesture use did not correlate with higher levels of narrative skill. Further multimodal regression analysis confirmed that gesture accuracy was a positive predictor of narrative performance, and moreover, showed that gesture rate was a negative predictor. The fact that both gesture accuracy and gesture rate are strongly and differently linked to oral language abilities supports the claim that language and gesture are highly complex systems, and that complementary measures of gesture performance can help us assess with greater granularity the relationship between gesture and language development. These findings highlight the need to use gesture during clinical assessments as an informative indicator of language development and suggest that future research should further investigate the value of multimodal programs in the treatment of language and communication disorders.

Developing narrative performance of 5–6-year-old children through combined use of narrative elements in their speech

ABSTRACT This paper aims to investigate to what extent preschoolers' narrative speech can be affected by the combined use of five narrative elements: narrative framing, narrative basic structure, intertextual hero, plot subversion and image–text interaction. It presents an intervention aiming to teach these elements to an experimental group of preschoolers, while a control group followed the regular curriculum. A novel evaluation tool, P.R.O.S.E, was designed to evaluate the level of the five elements' comprehension and use and applied to both groups. To assure regularity and homogeneity, the differences in performance were evaluated by the mixed-design two-way RM-ANOVA analysis. The performance of the experimental group after the intervention confirmed that the combined use of narrative elements can lead to the production of contemporary narrative types by 5–6-year-old children. Statistical analysis showed a notable differentiation of performance after the use of combined narrative elements. The empirical observation validates practices aiming at the development of narrative skill at preschool age, such as the particular teaching intervention which showed that 5–6-year-old children are capable of combining narrative elements in their narrative speech.

‘Não fala o nome dele, senão ele vai aparecer aqui’: interseccionalidade e performance em narrativas de crianças pequenas

ABSTRACT This paper is based on a narrative event that took place among 5 and 6-year-old children at a Brasília/Brazil public kindergarten, in which characters such a s God and Zé Peli nda (among others) were evoked, to promote a debate about how young children use social markers of difference. Religious, ethnic-racial and gender issues arise from their narrative performances in intersectional distinctions, which enable us to understand how these markers, and the politics of fear that often impose them , operate in children’s social liv es from a very early age.

The glamour of the Muhteşem Yuzyil: The fashionable Ottoman court in the twenty-first century

The Magnificent Century series, which was aired in more than 70 countries after its screening in Turkey, narrates the events of the most powerful period of the Ottoman empire (sixteenth century). The series, which was popular from the first episode, has received various criticism from many angles. In particular, the historical reliability of the series has been questioned the most on a local scale. The article aims to interpret the movement called Hürrem Sultan fashion that emerged through the hybridization of time and space in the female characters’ costume, hair and make-up design as a significant component of global audience attraction in the wider context of the historiographical performance of fictional narratives.

Investigating Narrative Performance in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Narrative assessment is one potentially underutilized and inconsistent method speech-language pathologists may use when considering a diagnosis of developmental language disorder (DLD). However, narration research encompasses many varied methodologies. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to (a) investigate how various narrative assessment types (e.g., macrostructure, microstructure, and internal state language) differentiate children with typical development (TD) from children with DLD, (b) identify specific narrative assessment measures that result in greater group differences, and (c) evaluate participant and sample characteristics that may influence performance differences. Electronic databases (PsycINFO, ERIC, and PubMed) and ASHAWire were searched on July 30, 2019, to locate studies that reported oral narrative language measures for both DLD and TD groups between ages 4 and 12 years; studies focusing on written narration or other developmental disorders only were excluded. We extracted data related to sample participants, narrative task(s) and assessment measures, and research design. Group differences were quantified using standardized mean differences. Analyses used mixed-effects meta-regression with robust variance estimation to account for effect size dependencies. Searches identified 37 eligible studies published between 1987 and 2019, including 382 effect sizes. Overall meta-analysis showed that children with DLD had decreased narrative performance relative to TD peers, with an overall average effect of -0.82 SD, 95% confidence interval [-0.99, -0.66]. Effect sizes showed significant heterogeneity both between and within studies, even after accounting for effect size-, sample-, and study-level predictors. Across model specifications, grammatical accuracy (microstructure) and story grammar (macrostructure) yielded the most consistent evidence of TD-DLD group differences. Present findings suggest some narrative assessment measures yield significantly different performance between children with and without DLD. However, researchers need to improve consistency of inclusionary criteria, descriptions of sample characteristics, and reporting of correlations between measures to determine which assessment measures reliably distinguish between groups. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21200380.

‘Talent Offends, Genius Terrifies’

Christopher Langford James (1952 – 2008) was a Zimbabwean-born composer, orchestrator and pianist, whose style conflated traditional European musical textures with southern African instrumentation, rhythms, and harmonies. His compositions include works such as Four Portraits for Pianoforte in Four Movements (1982), Songs of Lamentation and Remonstration (1985), Images of Africa (1987), and Paradise Regained (1999). While my research on James’s life and music has uncovered multiple angles for critical inquiry, the dominant narrative that emerged from interviews with his family, and discussions with colleagues, was that of mental illness. This article argues that mental illness – while being a very real condition experienced by James – can simultaneously be understood as doing persona work. Through the intersecting frameworks of persona studies and life writing, this article critically interrogates the understanding of stereotypical concepts of mental illness within the construct of what Kim Barbour terms ‘artistness’. Through critical examination of how mental illness is understood and interpreted as a central construction of artistness, this article speaks to the complexity of the construction of James’s biography, and how the narrative performance of James’s mental illness can be understood within the framework of persona studies.

Searching for Home: Autoethnographic Reflections of a Black Girl

Stories serve as entry points—bringing us together and bringing us to ourselves. Critical autoethnography bridges the space between scholarship and personal storytelling as a method of theorizing. Holman Jones explains, “The ‘critical’ in critical autoethnography reminds us that theory is not a static or autonomous set of ideas, objects, or practices. Instead, theorizing is an ongoing process that links the concrete and abstract, thinking and acting, aesthetics, and criticism . . . ” Through autoethnography from a critical perspective, I share stories of silence, grief, fear, loss, and rediscovery as a Black woman in a world where the values of White supremacy run rampant. Through narrative performance, I trace my experiences of race, place, gender, childhood, and movement into adulthood. I describe my sense of feeling pulled away from my roots and the beginning of my process of reclamation. Boylorn shares with us, “Our stories are not our own, and we constantly negotiate entrances and exits in the stories of others and in the delicate balance between our public and private lives. Our life stories often mimic the way our lives are lived: layered, complicated, interconnected, with blurred lines of distinction.” Without stories, we cannot heal.

Desarrollo del discurso narrativo en niños ecuatorianos de 6 años

There is a consensus in the literature about the importance of adult scaffolding in the development of children’s cognition and language skills (Bruner, 1986; Nelson, 1996; Vygotsky, 1978). This document analyzes first grade children’s narrative development in order to verify the incidence of adult intervention and teaching methodology. For this purpose, the performance of two groups of children enrolled in first grade of school in the district of Quito was analyzed. Two different teaching methodologies were observed: while one of them exclusively adheres to the guidelines of the curriculum design proposed by the Ministry of Education, the other one incorporates strategies from the books Letters and Sounds I (Jara de Torres, 2001) and Learn and Write I (Jara de Torres, 2003) –adapted from the proposal by editorial Abeka. The narratives performed by the children at the beginning and at the end of the school year were analyzed and each performance of both groups was compared based on the amount of information retrieved and the type of information and linguistic resources used. The stories were presented to the children in audiovisual format (steady images and recorded voice). For task administration, the children were instructed to listen and look at the story very carefully because they had to recount it to a friend or family member. The children’s remarks were recorded on audio for later analysis. Descriptive and inferential statistical methods were used in order to analyze and compare the linguistic and cognitive performance in the production of stories of the two groups of children in the different evaluation. Significant differences were observed in the variables analyzed, which provides evidence about the positive incidence of dialogic reading and the teaching of story production skills in narrative development. Differences in the performance of schools, especially in first graders, cannot be attributed to maturational factors since both groups are conformed by children of the same chronological age. Neither by the socioeconomic factors, since, in fact, group A was composed of children who attend a rural school and most of them happened to have low resources. Therefore, the significant improvement in the performance of the children of group A at the end of the school year could be attributed to the intervention of their teacher’s work. It is thought that this advance in retell story skills is due to an improvement in the understanding of the basic story, however there are studies that observe that the level reached in this process does not directly affect the quality of children’s narrative performance (Bustos Ibarra et al., 2014). In consequence, the improvement in the children’s narrative performance of group A can be linked not only to the work carried out by the teachers with texts but also to the situations of story production involved. Many investigations have observed that adult scaffolding during story reading has a positive effect on children’s linguistic and discursive development (Sénechal, Le Fevre, Hudson & Lawson, 1996; Trabasso & Nickels, 1992; Wasik & Bond, 2001; West et al., 2021). In fact, as Wells (1988) points out in a pioneering study, while reading stories contributes to children’s linguistic development, the parallel text generated by teachers through their interventions to explain vocabulary, make inferences explicit, relate events and post-reading reconstruction has shown a greater effect than just reading any kind of story aloud. Thereupon, the results obtained in this work show the relevance not only of the teacher’s texts daily reading but, mainly, of the intervention strategies and methodologies that they use to promote comprehension and textual production in the classroom. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2022.39.3.3

Habilidades de comprensión y producción narrativa en niños montevideanos de 5 años. Una comparación por nivel socioeconómico

Narrative abilities are an important part of communication, academic success, and healthy relationships. These abilities involve complex language and cognitive skills, such as precise vocabulary, control of the coherence markers, relations of cause-effect, and planning. They are also relevant during the elementary school years and interact with the socio-emotional skills necessary to understand different points of view. Oral narrative production develops dramatically from 3 to 5 years of age and is a key factor in a child’s ability to communicate about the world. During this period narratives are a product of increasing linguistic sophistication over the preschool period and there is a complex relationship between early narratives and language proficiency. So far, most research about this topic has been pursued in populations other than Latin American preschoolers. At the same time, a considerably lesser number of studies about narrative abilities development have been carried out comparing typically developing children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. To our knowledge, there are no studies in Uruguay that assess the narrative abilities development in typically developing preschool children who grow up in vulnerable contexts. It is therefore of the utmost relevance to produce empirical evidence for this population. For these reasons, this study aimed at characterizing and comparing narrative abilities and receptive vocabulary in a group of a total of 54 Uruguayan preschoolers from different socioeconomic backgrounds (middle and low socioeconomic status, SES). Children were assessed in receptive vocabulary and narrative abilities across two task conditions: (1) narrative comprehension through a story retelling task which included some final questions about the story; (2) narrative production elicited from a set of thematically related puppets. The examiner gives a child a puppet set and asks him/her to elaborate a narrative using them. After that, puppets are removed and the child is asked to retell the story without puppets. Children’s oral productions were video-taped and then transcribed and categorized using the ELAN software (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2019). The verbal information was categorized according to Stein and Glenn’s (1979) story grammar and considering the microstructural aspects (productivity and complexity). Analyses showed that both groups performed according to their stage of development in both narrative task conditions. With regards to the narrative comprehension task, no differences in the number of recovered categories, extension, or narrative complexity were observed. Concerning the narrative production task, there were no differences between the groups in narrative sequences, nor in the number of completed episodes in conditions neither with puppets nor without puppets. Results showed that children who grow up in poverty perform more poorly than their peers from middle-income families in receptive vocabulary, in the number of recovered episodes, ask-answer items of narrative comprehension tasks. Moreover, concerning the microstructural parameters analyses showed that children from middle socioeconomic backgrounds scored better in syntactic complexity in the without puppets condition. No differences between the groups were observed in syntactic complexity in the puppets condition. Taken together these results indicate a complex link between vocabulary and narrative abilities. It is worth noting that important differences in vocabulary did not reflect in the children’s narrative performance. These findings are also relevant as a contribution to an ongoing debate about the role of vocabulary in the development of narrative abilities. Furthermore, these results could inform the discussion about the ecological validity of the test of cognitive and linguistic development. Finally, to provide some additional evidence to Uruguayan Spanish language about the relationships between oral language and cognitive development allows to carry out early interventions before formal schooling sets children for success in school and life. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2022.39.3.4

Copies of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī’s Book on the Star Constellations as Patronage Objects and Their Properties

Abstract In this paper we discuss a number of copies of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī’s Book on the Star Constellations with the aim to elucidate which of them can be justifiably called “patronage object” and which properties they share. We argue that such an object is always a material, not merely an intellectual product. Thus, the analysis of the patronage status of a scientific work needs to go beyond its scholarly content and narrative performance and include features of execution, purpose and addressee of copying and acts of re-appropriating the work on its various scholarly, cultural and political levels. We present a few examples to demonstrate the usefulness of such a holistic approach to the question of what is a patronage object in the mathematical sciences.

An Exploratory Study of Fiction Writing's Relationship to Additional-Language Narrative Performance and Ownership

An Exploratory Study of Fiction Writing's Relationship to Additional-Language Narrative Performance and Ownership

Mythologies of Genesis and Neo-Nazi Palingenesis: Commemorating the Battle of Thermopylae in the Political Rites of the Golden Dawn

This article examines the public commemorations of the battle of Thermopylae held by the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn in the wider context of fascist appropriations of classical antiquity. The discussion focuses on the rhetorical and cultural mechanisms involved in transforming the historical event into a fascist mythology. Drawing on methodologies of narrative analysis and performance studies, I examine the narrative patterns and ritual practices deployed in these commemorations to engross the participants in stories of genesis and rebirth. During the commemorations of Thermopylae, Golden Dawn strove to revive both the spirit of the Spartan soldiers and the ideals of Nazism. The example of GD demonstrates that the persistence of the narrative of rebirth within neo-Nazi cultures is instrumental in the resurgence of fascism. By looking at this example closely, we can conclude that commitment of neo-Nazi groups to classical antiquity invites reflection upon the role of classical traditions in Western culture.