Narrative Tension Research Articles

Reading on the Move

It is often said that proper reading relies on the art of taking a pause: On our abilityto suspend the pressing rhythms of the everyday and allow ourselves to absorb, and be absorbed by, alternative structures of temporality. The clocks of the imagination do not run at the same speeds as the timetables of the real; to read is to inhabit the present at one's own pace and in the light of a multitude of unknown pasts and possible futures. Recent years have witnessed a swell in publications pondering the state of reading in our world of instant connectivity and shrinking attention spans. In one of these books, Jane Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize winner, considers the peculiar acts of writing and reading a novel as profound contributions to the process of enlightenment—a kind of enlightenment enlightened about itself and no longer repressing the other of reason: “The way in which novels are created—someone is seized by inspiration and then works out his inspiration methodologically by writing, observing, writing, observing, thinking through, and writing again—is by nature deliberate, dominated neither by reason nor by emotion” (176). According to Smiley, the act of reading a novel re-creates an author's deliberate negotiation of affect and rationality. As readers follow the lines of a (good) book, they remain in relative control over the speed of their reading, able to pause when necessary, to hasten forward when desiring so, to reread passages at their leisure, and to close the pages of the book when overtaken by exhaustion. Good stories rely on intricate plot constructions and narrative tensions, but they also situate readers as subjects freed from the temporal determination and ideological drive of other time-based media. Good books can certainly move readers, but—following Smiley's logic—they will not curtail a reader's freedom to move along the text at his or her own speed, and hence they will allow this reader to simultaneously bring into play emotion and reason, the absorptive and the distant.

“Summoning Your Youth at Will”: Memory, Time, and Aging in the Work of Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing

“Summoning Your Youth at Will”Memory, Time, and Aging in the Work of Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing Susan Watkins (bio) In a 2009 interview with Sarah Crown in the Guardian newspaper, the novelist Penelope Lively remarked that “in old age you can close your eyes and summon your youth at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.” She added: “the idea that memory is linear … is nonsense.”1 Aging is clearly a topic of increasing interest for a number of contemporary women writers, and new critical approaches to aging and gender in this field are beginning to burgeon. The focus in the majority of critical work has often been on how literary texts address the theme or subject of aging; however, as Lively’s comments in the Guardian interview suggest, and as I will argue here, aging is capable of generating in fiction a new relationship among time, memory, family history, and form. Through a close study of Penelope Lively’s Family Album, which was published in 2009, and with briefer allusion to Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) and Doris Lessing’s Love, Again (1996), this essay will argue that these writers’ engagement with aging and gender allows them to create their own kind of “late style,” to borrow from Edward Said. Lively in particular draws on fictional devices (such as the deliberate refusal of narrative tension or suspense) that make us consider how we rethink the pattern of a life as we age. This essay begins with a brief survey of recent feminist writing about aging, arguing that this work tends to focus on how aging is represented, rather than how it might impact form. The critical work that does pay attention to the relationship between aging and form, or the idea of “late style,” will then be considered, particularly the work of Edward Said in his On Late Style. However, the majority of work on “late style” does not consider the issue of gender. The novelists we are concerned with here have all made comments in interviews and essays, which will then be discussed, about the importance of the gendered aging process in allowing them to rethink structure and form in fiction. However, I want to make a distinction between The Blind Assassin and [End Page 222] Love, Again, which both focus on the protagonist reflecting on her past life in relation to the present, and Family Album, which uses the family home as the central shaping consciousness. Lessing’s and Atwood’s novels emphasize the limitations of individual perception by focusing on vision, blindness, and the photograph or portrait as a “witness” to the past. In contrast Lively’s text makes use of the idea of the collage or kaleidoscope as a metaphor for shifting perspectives, but also as a device to structure the novel itself. In doing so, it references both high and low art forms and acknowledges women’s domestic work as part of their art. Thus, for Lively, I argue, aging generates a focus on the work involved in maintaining a home and parenting a child; she sees these as inseparable from the work of writing. The essay will then explore how the focus on domestic and emotional labor, and its relation to writing, is connected in Lively’s novel to the innovative formal device of refusal of suspense. The generation and final resolution of suspense around the secret of biological parentage is key to Blind Assassin and is intimately connected with the secret of authorship, but I argue that Family Album refuses that connection, perceiving it to be old and tired. This resistance to revelation can be instructively compared with what Said refers to as the unproductive productiveness of “late style” and its refusal of conventional narratives of maturation and development. The centrality of suspense in popular fiction, especially in romance writing, suggests that all three novelists can be understood as self-consciously deploying the strategies of romantic fiction, even if this is often ironic. This ironic, self-conscious use of popular forms can also be seen as characteristic of middlebrow fiction: the final part of the essay will discuss how all three writers...

Lorrie Moore Collection“Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers”: Lorrie Moore's Metafictional Feminism

Lorrie Moore's work offers up a comic exploration of the pain of womanhood and feminism, and a powerful metafictional critique of prevailing narratives. She melds a postmodern experimentation with a gendered sense of identity, focussing on the fragmented self not just as a reaction against the constraints of a realist narrative, but as an opportunity to explore multiplicity and artistic agency. The principal focus of this essay is onAnagrams, a collection of linked short stories that has also been marketed as a novel.Anagramsoffers a metafictional recycling of the alternative “stories” of the central character's life. This may be Moore's most overt play on masquerade and (re)invention, but, as will be explored, heroeuvreis suffused with women characters who attempt a variety of escapes from their presumed narrative closures and who also struggle with feminism and its consequent impact on their narrated lives. Moore admirably captures the angst attached to narrative disappointment; the desire for replication, reinvention and a shifting of responsibility; and the problematic landscape of feminism for her mature and maturing women characters. This essay explores Moore's fictional(ized) feminism and postfeminism and her characters' resort to masquerade as a legitimate response to contemporary angst and narrative tension.

Jezebel, Elijah, and the Widow of Zarephath: A Ménage à Trois that Estranges the Holy and Makes the Holy the Strange

This article offers a dialogical examination of 1 Kgs 17–19 that deconstructs traditionally accepted characterizations of Jezebel, Elijah, and the Widow of Zarephath. This study proposes that shifting emphasis from Elijah and Jezebel as polar opposites to a literary ménage à trois that involves all three characters makes it possible for the holy man to become a stranger and the strange women to become holy. The narrative tensions thus revealed question the validity of Israel's definitive identity markers. When reading the stories of Jezebel, Elijah, and the Widow of Zarephath in the Deuteronomistic History, clear-cut distinctions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ continually collapse.

El discurso apocalíptico en La guerra del fin del mundo

This article explores the visionary register of Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo (1981). In Vargas Llosa's novel, there is a narrative tension between the historical context in which the action takes place and the religious discourse that tries to transcend it. The context is the construction of a modern order on the continent; the Counselor's religious discourse represents the rebellion against that order being imposed on the countryside from the capital. Vargas Llosa's apocalyptic narrative is proof of the limits of the liberal oligarchy's modernizing project against the popular classes’ severe questioning. In the end, the State imposes its law through war and, with victory, founds a new order, but that foundation—modernity's cost—must be carried out by assimilating certain values espoused by the defeated rebels. The visionary register aims to transcend its historical context, but in all actuality, it represents it. This novel's apocalyptic discourse is the discourse upon which all of Latin America's uneven modernities are founded.

Pudeur et impudeur dans La rêveuse d’Ostende d’Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Abstract The article explores the actualisations of the concepts of pudency and indecency in Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s short story La Rêveuse d’Ostende. The author tries to demonstrate that the oscillation between pudency and indecency creates an intense erotic tension which maintains the narrative tension. The leading idea at the end of the analysis is that characthers’ interior tension due to sensual experiences influences the narrative’s process tension.

Dino Egger by Éric Chevillard

used for the first novel, of alternating between rugby and police work still holds here. As already noted about Match aller, Capron demonstrates an admirable fluency in street language, rugby terminology, police-speak, and the idiosyncratic speech of the chief investigator, Ferdinand Garamande, which is a strange blend of pedantry and slang. The term feuilleton suggests that readers should be familiar with a cast of characters and will have the pleasure of seeing them respond to new events. But Capron chooses to drill down on the same events in order to present new characters or develop the ones already at hand. The rugby story intensifies as the club replaces virtually all of its players with farm team rookies. This gives the author the opportunity to paint, with considerable sensitivity, a diverse landscape of young athletes. There is, for example, the rabbinical student who must balance his religious practices with the exigencies of athletic performance. Even more carefully rendered is the immigrant whose family has sought asylum from dictatorship and human rights abuse. Linguistically challenged but ample of soul, only his modesty and uprightness are recognized by his teammates. Cameo portraits like these make the reading particularly satisfying. The story of the police investigation also shifts focus without losing sight of the original story line. Mercifully, readers are not presented with a second spate of cadavers, having waded in the first volume through a dozen murder victims dispatched with uncommon sadistic flair. Instead, narrative tension is maintained in thriller mode: readers know the designated victims before they are struck down. Indeed, one of the potential targets is herself aware of her status. To add to the anxiety, the investigators are deprived of this same knowledge, making it difficult for them to track down the perpetrators. The long dry spell in the investigation allows for the development of the main character, Garamande, as an intellectual out of place in a world of forensic technology and SWAT team ambushes. In fact, at times his archaic methods become risible, as when he strikes up Socratic dialogues with his colleagues in an attempt to understand the minds behind the crimes. On the other hand, Garamande also comes to terms with his own ineptness even as he clarifies his personal values, making his character much more dynamic than a stock feuilleton character. If I were to register one complaint about this page-turner, it would have to be about the extravagant finale. For most of its many pages, the Match novels hold to an ironic realism, a style that tacks between that of Frank Deford and Dashiell Hammett, with whole passages of John Irving thrown in. The ending, however, draws out the suspense only to give us the most predictable of endings. To that, Capron adds a dénouement laced with purple prose and in which rugby is the One True Sport, justice is practiced everywhere in the land, and love (tempered by the most dismal human failings) can still conquer. I would like to think the writer is being tongue-incheek , but I will leave that judgment call to other readers. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March CHEVILLARD, ÉRIC. Dino Egger. Paris: Minuit, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7073-2143-5. Pp. 154. 14 a. Most of us would agree that great figures like Plato, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Mozart, Baudelaire, and Freud actually existed, and that their work left material 214 FRENCH REVIEW 86.1 traces in human history and culture. But what if they had not existed? In what ways would the world be different? Might we somehow appreciate those differences , and thereby infer an existence that ought to have been? Such is the question that launches Éric Chevillard’s latest novel. “Dino Egger” is the figure he invokes: he has never lived, yet the world misses him, and certain lacunas in the world’s fabric testify eloquently—and indeed unavoidably—to that fact. Had he existed, his influence would have rivaled that of any great thinker or artist one might care to name; like them, he would have stamped our past, present, and future in indelible manners. In short, he is cruelly lacking. It falls to one “Albert Moindre” to repair that lack, and to...

‘A la place de l'autre…’: Otherness, gender and nation in two films by Agnès Jaoui

ABSTRACTAgnès Jaoui has stated not only that all her films are ‘about what it is to try to be à la place de l'autre, which is by definition, impossible’, but also that attempting to understand the other is ‘one of the meanings and the goals of life’. This article addresses what it means to put oneself in the shoes of others in Jaoui's Comme une image/Look at me (2004) and Parlez-moi de la pluie/Let's Talk about the Rain (2008). It argues that, in a multiethnic, postcolonial France where the 2000 gender parity law has opened the way for a recognition of difference, the films' use of an ‘aesthetic of oscillation’, manifested in a narrative tension between the personal and public spheres, reveals a progressive engagement with a political understanding of both gender and ethnicity, leading to increasing questioning of the French universalist republican model. At the same time, the imbrication of the personal and the public leads to an exploration of the self—other relation as both moral and political.

Handling challenge and becoming a teacher: an analysis of teachers’ narration about life competence education

This article takes an interest in how teachers handle new challenges. The challenge in focus is a nonmandatory yet widespread subject in Swedish education called Livskunskap, Life Competence Education (LCE). The purposes of the present study are to identify and discuss notions of being a teacher actualized in teachers’ narratives about the challenge of LCE, and to discuss how narration may help teachers to handle and reflect upon professional challenges. Seven teachers were interviewed about their experiences from teaching LCE. The analysis showed how acts of defending, exploring, presenting, or resisting LCE were performed in the teachers’ narratives. LCE seems to actualize a narrative tension between two dominant aspects of teacher identity. On the one hand, there is an image of a socially committed teacher who cares about the emotional well-being of and relations to his/her students. On the other hand, there is an image of a knowledge-oriented teacher who connects with the students mainly by focusing on subject matters. Drawing upon the theoretical work, mainly by Michalinos Zembylas, I found that the teachers had opportunities to use narration as an arena for personal agency, but these opportunities were not necessarily taken in the present narratives.

IRONY AND THE REJECTION OF IMAGINED ALTERNATIVES IN EURIPIDES’ ALCESTIS

Euripides’ Alcestis employs irony and what I will call discrepant mythic subtexts to create narrative tension in the production of a play whose outcome is announced from the outset. Euripides uses these devices to involve his audience in the process of considering and rejecting imagined alternatives to the play’s announced outcome. Euripides introduces variant outcomes by dramatizing a verbal altercation between Apollo and Thanatos. Further, the drama includes several references to myths of unsuccessful or incomplete rescue from death along with the theme of death’s inescapability. These instances engage the audience by inviting us to consider and reject imagined alternatives to the play’s known conclusion. Finally, the sophisticated dramatic irony used by Heracles in the exodos serves as a formal, rhetorical iteration of Euripides’ technique of inviting consideration and rejection of imagined alternatives.

Narrative tensions

We focus on four major tensions pervading much narrative inquiry to date, tensions that threaten to divide the field into alienated enclaves. Of specific concern are psychological vs. social explanations of narrative, structural vs. process orientations to research, approaches that celebrate experience vs. those that textually deconstruct experience, and accounts that center on singularity of self-narratives vs. incoherent multiplicity. Finally, we open discussion on a relational constructionist account of narrative, with an eye toward reconciling these disparate orientations.

Gauguin: maker of myth

This major reevaluation of Paul Gauguin presents the artist and his work in an entirely new light. The vivid, unnaturalistic colors and bold outlines of Gauguin's paintings and the strong, semiabstract quality of his woodcuts had a profound effect on the development of twentieth-century art. Here readers will discover why Gauguin was one of the most important artists behind European modernism--yet one who also challenged its very tenets. Because while modern art largely rejected narrative, for Gauguin it remained central. Gauguin is the first book to fully examine his use of stories and myth to give powerful narrative tension to his paintings at a time when other painters thought storytelling was dead. Gauguin's life in French Polynesia is often portrayed as a quest for the other, with the artist as the romantic explorer encountering primitive cultures for the first time. In fact, he was deeply immersed in world art and a great reader of Polynesian stories and myths. This book cuts through the mystique surrounding Gauguin--one the artist himself cultivated--to show how he self-mythologized, presenting himself to the world as a suffering, Christ-like figure. Stunningly illustrated and unprecedented in scope, Gauguin features more than 200 museum-quality reproductions of paintings, works on paper, ceramics, woodcarvings, and writings, including Gauguin's beautifully illustrated letters and books. Exhibition Schedule: Tate Modern, London September 30, 2010 - January 16, 2011 National Gallery of Art, Washington February 27 - June 5, 2011

Ironic Genre Demarcation: Bacchylides 17 and the Epic Tradition

Irony is thought of as a subversive rhetorical strategy that accounts for the collapse of lengthy narratives. In this paper I examine the way irony conduces to the evolution of archaic Greek lyricism against the backdrop of epic. I argue that Bacchylides 17 displays a distinct narrative tension arising from the clash of the two main branches of the epic tradition, male heroic epic and female catalogue or ehoie -poetry. Bacchylides positions Minos and Theseus, the main characters, within this narrative tension and has them employ irony to establish their ties with respective genres of epic narrative. The predilection of matronymic language by Theseus and the insistence on patronymic language by Minos turn a genealogical conflict into a debate over the reception of the epic genres. The emphasis Theseus puts on maternal filiation alongside the underwater encounter with his stepmother Amphitrite constitutes a marked way of countermining the traditional norms of male heroic epic such as anger, violence and paternity. By setting itself in line with the agenda of female catalogue poetry, which highlights eroticism, marriage and maternity, the poem cross-fertilises selected traits of an epic legacy it chooses to host in a brand new generic environment.

Rosenfeld's plural constitutionalism

The Identity of the Constitutional Subject is an intricate and challenging study of the ways in which distinctly constitutional conceptions of the individual and of political community interrelate with other registers of individual and collective identity. Michel Rosenfeld’s monograph covers an impressive range of constitutional inquiry, offering a wealth of insights and mining a deep seam of conceptual innovation. Yet just because his concerns are so diverse and so diverting, Rosenfeld’s main thesis is slow to emerge, and his central arguments take a long time to come to the boil. Indeed, it is only really in the extensive part three of the book that the overall point and direction of the ambitious theoretical edifice elaborated in part one and the historical case studies pursued in part two become apparent. The carefully paced and complexly routed development of Rosenfeld’s main thesis is also a function of his distinctive methodology. Rosenfeld is remarkable in the present generation of Anglophone constitutional theorists for the way in which he combines a search for a general theory of constitutional significance with a full-blown comparative approach. Rosenfeld strives to say something of broad application about the role of constitutional thought and practice in the late modern political order. However, unlike many of his colleagues, he does not confine himself, either explicitly or implicitly, to a particular jurisdiction (typically, United States or United Kingdom) or to a particular family of jurisdictions (for example, common law or commonwealth constitutions) or even to a particular binary distinction between families or types of jurisdiction (such as common law versus civilian systems). Rather, his typologies are rich, multiple, and complexly overlain. Yet, while inevitably complicating his story and prolonging its narrative tension, Rosenfeld’s conscientious and finely woven comparativism also contributes significantly to the compelling quality of his central thesis—to our sense that it demands to be taken seriously. So to the thesis itself. In this latest work, Rosenfeld builds significantly upon the pluralist themes already prominent in many of his previous writings.2 Pluralism has become a popular and influential perspective among a particular type of constitutional

Fluid attachment: reframing peacebuilding through Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah n'est pas oblig

Through an analysis of Ahmadou Kourouma's novel Allah n'est pas oblig (2000), this article contends that literature must hold a place alongside political theory in peacebuilding. Kourouma's novel creates a tension between two modes of narration (historical and environmental) to explore the ethics of writing war trauma. Instead of advocating adoption of one of the classical frameworks for ethics, the narrative tensions in this novel push the reader to approach ethics from within a relational framework. By placing Kourouma's novel in the context of a wider literary discourse on peace and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa that has emerged from 1974 to 2005, this article demonstrates that a meta-ethics may be drawn from these novels. This meta-ethics, based on the concepts of the reaching gesture and fluid attachment, can aid in framing peace and conflict studies.

Runaway Romances: Hollywood's Postwar Tour of Europe (review)

Reviewed by: Runaway Romances: Hollywood's Postwar Tour of Europe William Graebner Runaway Romances: Hollywood's Postwar Tour of Europe. By Robert R. Shandley. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2009 The poster of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn scootering around Rome in William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953) has been a best seller in the Eternal City for years, probably decades. It has a lot to do with the Vespa they're riding, of course, but Robert R. Shandley's delightful and perceptive Runaway Romances offers a more complex understanding not only of that poster's ongoing appeal, but of a genre of films he calls "travelogue romances," appearing between 1947 and 1964. Most but not all of the films in the genre include a travelogue sequence; a woman who comes to Europe seeking renewal or self-discovery, often of a sexual kind; issues of social class; and the protagonist's decision to return home (usually America) to "remain morally anchored" (56). Because the women at the center of these films were (like Frank and April Wheeler of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road [1961]) in flight from the comfortable, uninspiring boredom of America life, and because most of the films were made all or partly in Europe by troubled Hollywood studios in search of a new business model, Shandley refers to them as "runaway" films. One of six chapters is given over to Roman Holiday (the "'runaway' princess" in a runaway film [39]), and another to explaining Hollywood's new inclination to overseas production. A chapter subtitled "Metaphors of Transatlantic Relations" offers brief but revealing treatments of September Affair (1950), Indiscretion of an American Wife (David Lean, 1953), Summertime (1955) and Interlude (Douglas Sirk, 1957). Other chapters deal with the problems presented to the genre (e.g., in Three Coins in the Fountain [1954] and Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief [1955]) by new widescreen technologies better suited to spectacle than narrative tension; changing ideas of the postwar occupation of Germany; and the decline of the genre as it turns dark (The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone [1961]) and moves into self-reflexive parody (Paris, When It Sizzles [1964]). Shandley's solid grasp of the basics of filmmaking is apparent throughout, and he is a careful, credible, trustworthy reader of film narrative, often getting at meaning by [End Page 180] looking at how films create and solve problems. But Shandley is perhaps on less secure ground in claiming that the "project" of the runaway romance was "investigating the newly reconfigured relationship between Americans and Europeans" (xvi). To be sure, the German occupation films fit that description, but, as Shandley says, they make up a sub-genre, not quite the real thing. Elsewhere, he notes that the Europe offered in the genre is "one that has no intrinsic meaning itself. . . . Europe and Europeans are not real" (69). Europe has meaning in these films, but it is meaning projected from afar, and meaning grounded, as Shandley's film narratives and readings make clear, in the domestic frustrations and desires of postwar American women, who wanted a ride on that Vespa. That's the main lesson of this thoughtful and engaging book. William Graebner State University of New York at Fredonia Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association

Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness

There is a basic tension between eyewitness narratives and archival records (which have attracted the attention for many artists and intellectuals in the last decade or two). Archival material bears the imprint of the bureaucratic, of that which has been institutionally preserved. It gives us traces of the dead, evidence of the past that has been recorded but not (yet) processed; it exists as a mnemonic device, as that which awaits the coming of the researcher to be brought back to life. The eyewitness narrative, on the other hand, is intensely personal, even if also collective. The opposition between these two modes of representation and of memory itself has a long history. In “Plato's Pharmacy” Jacques Derrida stages and deconstructs the opposition between memory and re- and com-memoration, between the living truth and the archive. More recently, Giorgio Agamben, writing about the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, analyzes the differences between the “unforgettable” and that which can be recalled to memory and archived. This paper examines the ways in which the dynamic relations between the living and the dead, the private and the public, the fragment and the whole, the personal and the institutional, and the autobiographical and the historical, inform and complicate -- in different ways -- both the eyewitness narrative and the archive. The discussion will focus on the Memorial at Hohenschönhausen to the East German victims of the Stasi (at the site of the former interrogation center and prison, where the tours are all conducted by former inmates), and the Stasi Museum at the site of the former Stasi headquarters, with its miles of archival files.

3D애니메이션에서의 내러티브에 의한 색채

영상 제작에 있어 내러티브에 적합한 연출은 관객에게 스토리를 전달하기 위한 중요한 수단이다. 특히 색채는 내러티브에 맞는 분위기 연출과 정서설정에 중요한 요소로써 영상 미학 및 제작에서 핵심적인 역할을 하고 있다. 3D애니메이션의 경우 컴퓨터를 통한 색채 구현의 자유도가 크기 때문에, 일반 영상 제작시 보다 그 중요성이 더욱 크다고 할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 내러티브와 색채와의 상관관계에 관한 연구를 통해, 극의 긴장 고저에 따른 색채변화 및 정서와 색채의 밀접한 연관성에 관하여 연구하였다. In directing a film, aesthetics are use for visual manifestation of narratives to audiences. Especially, colors have important roles in that process to express emotions and to convey the story. For 3D animation, they may play even more important roles due to the nature of colors being generated by computers. This paper studies the relationship between narratives and colors by analyzing how colors change by the rise and fall of tensions in narratives, and by investigating how emotional expressions are affected due to color changes.

Cinema e ensino de história: propaganda e crítica em outubro e o triunfo da vontade

This article discusses the movies October (1927) by Serguei Eisenstein and Grigory Alexandrov, and Triumph of the Will (1935) by Leni Riefenstahl. The text highlights the different connections between these movies, and the political regime of the country in which they were produced. Eisenstein and Alexandrov celebrate the Revolution of 1917, but maintain the narrative tensions over the significance of idols for politics. Riefenstahl restates Nazi ideals and defines his movie as propaganda. The two movies can help with the debates over the concept of Totalitarianism during History lessons.

Within and Without Family in the Icelandic Sagas

The Icelandic sagas reflect a deep social interest in the nature of family obligations. Narrative tension and drama often result from carefully plotted increases competition between families, while considerable space is given over to family biographies and genealogical information. As a result, the saga authors' conception of the historical seems closely bound to a desire to represent family life. In Gísla saga Súrssonar and Íslendinga saga , the representation of family life extends the situation of internal family conflicts, when the strict ethical codes underpinning the centrality of family obligations seem to be complicated and perhaps even threatened by characters' formation of stronger bonds outside the family. The portrayal of internal family conflicts in these two sagas enabled the authors express complex and often conflicting ethical issues.