Narrative Turn Research Articles

The Narrative Turn, Corporate Storytelling, and Oral History: Canada’s Petroleum Oral History Project and Truth and Reconciliation Commission Call to Action No. 92

As business historians embrace the narrative turn, they would do well to consider the opportunities provided by oral history. For-profit corporate storytellers offer one approach. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s call to action no. 92, however, offers a better one. This article explores the potential impact on business historians of the TRC, using the Petroleum Industry Oral History Project as an example.

Là (L.-A., Loire-Atlantique): variations autobiographiques et départementales, suivi de Frères oiseaux by Jean-Claude Pinson

Reviewed by: Là (L.-A., Loire-Atlantique): variations autobiographiques et départementales, suivi de Frères oiseaux by Jean-Claude Pinson Aaron Prevots Pinson, Jean-Claude. Là (L.-A., Loire-Atlantique): variations autobiographiques et départementales, suivi de Frères oiseaux. Joca Seria, 2018. ISBN 978-2-84809-311-6. Pp. 279. Loosely a memoir, this lucid, accessible essay collection explores personal and family history, emphasizing relationships with parents and grandparents as well as the author's own trajectory with regard to space and place, briefly in Paris but otherwise within the three parts of the Loire-Atlantique—Nantes, Saint-Nazaire, and Tharon-Plage—that continue to shape his own and others'"géographie intime" (12). Though tangents inherent to personal essays do appear, this volume's honest, focused reflections touch consistently and with welcome depth on how the past and present interweave. The overall approach is relatively modest, attuned to the world's murmur and avoiding lyrical flourishes, yet subtly and effectively conveying through this very restraint a great many sights and sounds, narrative twists and turns, and historical and interpretive nuances. The tales, told within twelve sections and their various subsections, reprise at times Pinson's fascination with what he sees as a movement today toward individual creativity, in the form of a poétariat quietly formed by workers of many kinds and a related attitude of poet(h)ical awareness of the Other. However, they primarily delve into other, related themes: sensitivity to class differences and community; awareness of a multifaceted "pulsion vitale" (175); the desire to consecrate human beings' collective time by arriving—humbly, patiently, circuitously—at a "vérité vivante" formed by our surroundings, particularly the range of local settings, people, and events through which one can "ménager toutes sortes de fenêtres pour des arrière-pays nombreux, multiples" (176). Local color, so to speak, appears in abundance, whether with tenderness or with self-deprecating clarity and humorous turns, not least Pinson's avowals concerning his early years as a staunch militant. Careful editing, in the form of asides and reminders that anticipate questions we might have, helps the reader track the Pinson family story. Astute, selective references to fellow writers, notably Gracq, Aragon, Vallès, Lyotard, Mallarmé, Quignard, Bailly, Bachelard, Michelet, Corbin, Hegel, and Leopardi, reinforce important points regarding, for example, how imagination structures our immersion in urban and rural spaces, including how we can rethink the sacred when we gather sensory information "capabl[e] de rendre à la vie toutes ses couleurs et sa ferveur entière" (91). A considerable strength in this respect is the regular evocation of locations in and around Nantes. We gain insight into its postwar, pre-banlieue decades and the calming effect of the Loire's waters, as well as its spatial and sociological divisions, for instance via chapters that discuss pastoral settings, rugby, the train station, and the highs and lows of the author's "famille de cheminots" (221). As the book progresses, we learn much about Saint-Nazaire, in its idiosyncratic way a colorful and luminous port city "qui vous habite au plus profond des affects, des entrailles et des neurones" (179). We also are sensitized to the difficulties of aging and of seeing loved ones pass, against the [End Page 245] backdrop of beach settings further south where retirees and others do their best to stay young and free. In sum, an articulate, cogent, often moving look at "les contours d'une existence" (276). Aaron Prevots Southwestern University (TX) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Entangled Feminisms: #MeToo as a Node on the Feminist Mesh

Entangled Feminisms:#MeToo as a Node on the Feminist Mesh Sarah Afzal (bio) and Paige Wallace (bio) FemMesh: An Introduction #MeToo and #TimesUp movements must not be treated as isolated social media campaigns against sexual violence, but as a part of a larger feminist network that we will call the Feminist Mesh or the FemMesh.1 We borrow the term "mesh" from Timothy Morton's The Ecological Thought, which defines mesh as "a vast, sprawling [network] of interconnectedness without a definite center or edge," or even "a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled."2 The mesh consists of both "infinite connections" and "infinitesimal differences"3 which allows for continuous interactions between nodes; the concept of a Feminist Mesh helps us imagine a "metaphysics of interconnectedness"4 within which difference and solidarity are entangled rather than set against each other. Just like the ecological mesh, the Feminist Mesh is neither static nor linear. The mesh is a fourth-wave, cyberfeminist mode of knowledge production that mends together the individual subject and the collective to combine second-wave activism and consciousness-raising, and third-wave individual choice and responsibility. Although the internet has proven to be well-suited for organizing collective action, fourth-wave feminism exists both online and offline—the flux between the real and the virtual entangle in the Feminist Mesh. Cyberfeminism has facilitated a narrative turn through which "cacophonic stories" are making the systems of power that Sara Ahmed argues "are not visible unless you come up against them"5 visible. As a method of telling stories, cacophonic story-telling consists of "different kinds of stories, told in different kinds of voices, which are meant to jar rather than harmonize." Cacophonic stories are "multiple, discordant, [and] grating."6 Movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp have made the pervasiveness of sexual assault and violence across genders and sexual representations more visible than ever before. This visibility is enmeshed in the connections being drawn between different stories to show that the forces we come up against as individuals are often not isolated but connected to fixed structures of oppression. These stories are cacophonic—there are [End Page 131] points of intersection and overlap, and as each individual narrative calls out those who have abused their positions of power, it contributes to a larger feminist objective to name structural inequality and injustice, and adds a voice to the collection of women and feminists that came before, ultimately paving the way for other marginalized people to come forward and tell their stories in the future. The Feminist Mesh is a new way of looking at feminist knowledges through intricate connections and entanglements. Feminist knowledge is traditionally described through the wave metaphor with each wave feeding into the next. This cyclical ebb and flow encourages new feminist knowledges and practices. But waves collect energy and grow steeper as they approach the shore, collapsing when they reach it. Thinking of feminism as waves ensures that once a feminist agenda has been achieved another wave will bring about the next change. While the Feminist Mesh does not aim to replace or to reject the wave model, it is a model that connects and stores the energy of each wave by holding together our lines of feminist knowledge. The simultaneous action of holding together feminist stories and allowing them the freedom to continue moving and intersecting with new knowledges is made possible by the flexibility of the mesh. The organizing characteristic of the Feminist Mesh is to illustrate the intersectional nature of patriarchal oppression—a topic which has often been discussed and written about in academic circles. But the mesh is connected to what Donna Haraway explains as "making-with" or sympoiesis.7 Haraway uses the borrowed8 term sympoiesis to describe "complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems."9 The FemMesh is a model for feminist knowledges but as Haraway posits "a model is not the same kind of thing as a metaphor or analogy. A model is worked, and it does work."10 Similarly, the FemMesh does work and must be worked. The FemMesh works in entanglements rather than isolated...

Функції наративного інфінітива в дискурсі франкомовної преси

Introduction. The article analyzes the functions of narrative infinitiv in the french-language and its use in journalism. Purpose. The author stresses on the importance of the ability to use the narratives properly in the press and to identify them in journalistic materials. Results . The use of infinitive in a journalistic discourse that meets editorial standards can reveal different aspects of quoted statements and forms of indirect speech. Using the infinitive as an editorial, the author often moves from monstersization of the text to an illusive statement, and vice versa, because the infinitive is easily accompanied by the process of theatricalization of indirect statements. Conclusion. Using the narrative infinitive, we observe underscoring the specific frameworks of the event, this form accompanies the narrative turn in the narrative, the transition between the two statements, or the change in the sequence of indirect messages.

語りの後の精神保健看護を語り合う—私のナラティヴ・ターン—

語りの後の精神保健看護を語り合う—私のナラティヴ・ターン—

The Incubus of Necessity in Mill’s Autobiography

ABSTRACTWhen nineteenth-century public intellectual John Stuart Mill turns his philosophical craft upon himself he encounters the immobilising weight of an ‘incubus,’ a metaphorical ogre he associates with the Doctrine of Necessity as implicated in his ‘Logic of the Moral Sciences.’ Committed to an empiricist and mechanistic view of human nature, he wonders how to surmount the proposition that we are ‘the helpless slaves of antecedent circumstances.’ The perennial struggle over free will versus determinism pervades Mill's life story. For he must rid himself of the ‘incubus’ if he is to successfully defend cherished principles of self-determination and individual liberty. Mill's first-person narrative turns out to embody the central features of the philosophical autobiography: one or more scenes of self-transformation triggered by conceptual and emotional impasses, a theory of life stages linked to a philosophy of historical change, and the effort to reconcile the dialectical tension of reason and emotion and, in Mill's case, empiricism and Romanticism.

The Pragmatics of Financial Communication. Part 2: From Public Sphere to Investors

Research in financial communication has long been dominated by scholars in accounting and finance, who largely focused on the extratextual aspects of financial disclosures, such as the choice (not) to reveal information or the impact of new regulatory standards. In contrast, the past decade and a half has witnessed a significant shift of attention toward the linguistic and textual elements of financial communication. Finance scholars have started to develop text analysis approaches to investigate, in particular, market sentiment and its impact on stock prices. At the same time, accounting scholars have engaged in the so-called narrative turn by investigating the rhetorical aspects of voluntary disclosure. Recent developments in the field, however, dig deeper and are beginning to shed light on the crucial functions of language use in financial communication. There is a growing interest throughout the disciplines to analyze the interplay of micro and macro structure in financial communication, which has been clearly reflected in academic initiatives and rapidly evolving subject areas in recent years. Bringing together these initiatives on a higher level, the AILA (International Association of Applied Linguistics) research network in financial communication, set up in early 2018, enables scholars from all over the world to strengthen and elaborate on their research and its dissemination. The two parts of the special issue “The Pragmatics of Financial Communication” aim to reflect these recent developments and to foster current and future initiatives in the field.

Performing Pan American Airways through coloniality: an ANTi-History approach to narratives and business history

This paper centers on the role of narratives in business history from an ANTi-History perspective. We focus on the networked processes through which narratives are told of, for, and by multi-national companies embed the development of ‘new imperialism’ and coloniality. We set out to achieve this through a discussion and application of ANTi-History to a study of Pan American Airways and particularly its performance as a maturing multi-national company and its relationship to postcoloniality. In the process, we also hope to contribute to recent calls in business history for more explicit accounts of the methods used in the development of historical accounts. We are concerned to encourage ‘a narrative turn in business history’ but also to do so critically, i.e. to reveal some of the strengths and limitations of a narrative turn. We conclude with reflections on the relationship between methods and the production of (business) history.

Narrating the narrative turn in narrative accounting research:

PurposeThis paper aims to analyse the nature and extent of convergence within the literature of the narrative turn in narrative accounting research.Design/methodology/approachThe paper offers an actor–network–theoretic perspective drawing on Latour’s theory of citation and Shwed and Bearman’s development of that theory to analyse patterns of convergence.FindingsThe paper finds that across the exemplars of narrative turn research examined, there is only a limited level of epistemic engagement so that exemplars achieve their status without undergoing trials of strength.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper argues that the resources of the relevant academic community are spread so thinly that each seam – each research question, methodology or method and research context – is mined by no more than a small handful of researchers unable to generate a meaningful volume of contestation. Steps are suggested to better focus research activity.Originality/valueThe use of Latour’s theory of citation to analyse patterns of convergence in accounting research is innovative. The paper proposes a substantial change in the community’s approach to narrative turn research on accounting narratives.

Institutional storytelling and personal narratives: reflecting on the ‘value’ of narrative inquiry

With the ‘narrative turn’, a momentum gathered in the wider social sciences that asserted that listening to, asking for, gathering and analysing stories provided a new impetus to researching human behaviour. The argument evolved: people are storied beings and to generate a more in-depth understanding of people and their experiences, researchers need to begin with their stories. But the stories people tell are also deeply embedded in narrative frameworks and narrative environments that make up what I conceptualise as institutional storytelling. Arguably, institutional storytelling has a profound impact on the stories people can and do tell. Narrative inquiry has much to offer to the analysis of institutional and personal narratives. In this article, I will address the question of the relevance of narrative inquiry to gather and analyse the stories that people and institutions tell. Drawn from an empirical sociological study of women’s narratives of their weight management experiences in the context of their participation in weight management classes, I present a case for narrative ethnography as a critical methodological strategy to analyse the complex relationship between institutional and personal narratives.

The Pragmatics of Financial Communication. Part 1: From Sources to the Public Sphere

Research in financial communication has long been dominated by scholars in accounting and finance, who largely focused on the extratextual aspects of financial disclosures, such as the choice (not) to reveal information or the impact of new regulatory standards. In contrast, the past decade and a half has witnessed a significant shift of attention toward the linguistic and textual elements of financial communication. Finance scholars have started to develop text analysis approaches to investigate, in particular, market sentiment and its impact on stock prices. At the same time, accounting scholars have engaged in the so-called narrative turn by investigating the rhetorical aspects of voluntary disclosure. Recent developments in the field, however, dig deeper and are beginning to shed light on the crucial functions of language use in financial communication. There is a growing interest throughout the disciplines to analyze the interplay of micro and macro structure in financial communication, which has been clearly reflected in academic initiatives and rapidly evolving subject areas in recent years. Bringing together these initiatives on a higher level, the AILA research network in financial communication, set up in early 2018, enables scholars from all over the world to strengthen and elaborate on their research and its dissemination. The two parts of the special issue “The Pragmatics of Financial Communication” aim to reflect these recent developments and to foster current and future initiatives in the field.

Narrative: Common Ground for Literature and Science?

Narrative:Common Ground for Literature and Science? Daniel Aureliano Newman (bio) Back when I was a graduate student of biology, I was charmed to hear senior scientists sincerely praising research talks by equally senior peers as "such a good story." At the time, I simply accepted that science involves gripping tales of discovery, mysteries solved through ingenious hypothesis and experiment. Now a literary scholar who teaches communications to graduate science students, I better recognize the importance of narrative in science communication but also, more profoundly, in scientific theories, models, and procedures. Narrative suggests to me a means of interesting more scientists in the study of Literature and Science, offering common ground that might help alleviate remnants of suspicion and diverging goals that continue to inhibit truly interdisciplinary work. What's more, attending to narrative promises an exciting but also productive endeavor for both humanistic inquiry and for science communication, aligning them more closely at a time when both are under threat. ________ The real impediment to collaboration between science and humanities is not lack of interest, as Jay Labinger argues in the previous "State of the Unions" issue of JLS. A more serious problem may be the priority implicitly given to the "Literature" in "Literature and Science." Some scientists are indeed drawn to humanistic enquiry, but it isn't surprising to find so few in a field where research may be about science but rarely forms part of the scientific enterprise. No wonder scientists "attracted to interdisciplinary activities outside [End Page 277] their field generally perceive that little or no professional benefit is to be expected therefrom."1 Another obstacle is the sense, all too common among the scientists I know or teach, that science is demonized or discredited by "the arts." Fair or not, this suspicion lumps those in the humanities with real opponents of science—climate-change "skeptics," anti-Vaxxers, "scientific" creationists, and other such denialists. These two barriers to interdisciplinarity are not unrelated. Because the humanities so dominate the field of Literature and Science studies, much of the research in it is done on humanistic terms. In such circumstances, literary approaches to science—notably "suspicious reading" practices—may seem as alienating and invasive to scientists as E. O. Wilson's dream of consilience can seem to humanists.2 It is time to accept that a truly interdisciplinary exchange will require something other than business as usual in Literature and Science (which does not mean eliminating business as usual). What is needed to attract scientists is real common ground, with direct interest and professional benefit for both them and literary scholars. Such common ground might include strategic political and institutional alliances against anti-intellectualism and cutbacks to public education and blue-sky research. Another approach, already flourishing in some quarters, is the study of narrative using insights and methods from neuroscience. What I'm proposing as common ground—narrative—is more concrete and more directly embedded within the professional practices of both literary and scientific scholars. Because I assume that few literary critics would dispute, in principle at least, the value of narratological studies of science, what follows focuses instead on the interests narrative might hold for scientists. "Storytelling often has a bad reputation in science," admits Michael Dahlstrom,3 but scientists are increasingly receptive to evidence showing that information communicated in narrative formats "enhances memory, interest, and understanding."4 Attesting to this [End Page 278] growing receptivity, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS)'s recent special issue on science communication includes a consistent focus on the potential uses of storytelling.5 Promising as it is, the problem with this "narrative turn" is its tendency to understand "narrative" as a set structure, a preformed story template. Using narrative in science thus becomes a matter of shoehorning scientific facts into preexisting narrative molds. A case in point is biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson, who reduces all good communicative acts to the "three-act structure" identified by Aristotle in the Poetics.6 An extreme case, Olson exemplifies how most science communicators view the promise of narrative: as a tool for making scientific information more communicable by "impos[ing] upon it the form of a story."7 This...

Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson by James D. Rice

Reviewed by: Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson by James D. Rice Isaac J. Emrick Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson. By James D. Rice. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 338.) Much like the work of environmental histories from the late twentieth century, Rice's second book connects the regional history of the Potomac River to the ecological interactions of human residents to the development of the region. His 2009 work advances the conversation way beyond the environmental determinism of previous analyses and instead focuses on the similarities and conflicts between human ecological imaginations and their real-world effects across a wide span of history. He begins with the development of indigenous ecological practices along the Potomac in the deep past and traces the complex interplay between human choices and climate change from 900AD till the development of maize agriculture and onward into the height of the Little Ice Age. Mirroring the historical reality, Rice begins placing Europeans in the Indian-controlled landscape and examines the gradual process of shifting influence in ecological decisions in the Potomac throughout the seventeenth century. The second half of the book shifts toward more traditional geopolitical narratives as Rice examines the changes in western Potomac land control and usage during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The discussion closes where it began, highlighting the legacy of indigenous ecological imagination in the overall history of the human occupation along the Potomac River. Native Americans' active and diverse roles within the Potomac region and beyond are handled with nuanced cultural understanding and scientific supports throughout Rice's writing. Native people are neither determined by their landscape nor are they inscrutable ecological marvels. In fact, Rice's discussions remain grounded in the realities they faced and experimented with regularly to maintain themselves. Likewise, Rice complicates the assumption that English ecological desires were incompatibly different from Indians, as seen in the work of Patricia Seed's Ceremonies of Possession. Rice explains that until the 1670s the English "embraced a diversity of landscapes within an encompassing market economy and thus did not require the Potomac Valley should be remade into a Little England" (82). This desire for cohabitation was marked by a great similarity and compatibility with entrenched Algonquian ecological practices. Far from flattening the indigenous understanding of landscapes and their interactions, Rice is careful to explain different indigenous groups' diverse ecological imaginations, effectively treating them with the same historiographical care as one would when discussing European environmental history. While land ownership always lingers in the background of Rice's discussion in the first seven chapters, the narrative turns away from ecological [End Page 123] and environmental concerns and focuses on more traditional "ownership" and geopolitical mechanisms during the intercultural chaos of the late seventeenth century through the mid-eighteenth century. Though extremely well researched and exciting to read, this section veers away from the environmental focus and strengths of previous chapters. It is a solid and balanced ethnohistorical synthesis of the period but is loosely connected to previous ecological analysis. In the last few chapters, Rice returns to the environmental concerns and what happens as the English gained demographic control over the Potomac above the falls. He explains why the English continued to restrict their settlements below the falls until well into the eighteenth century by focusing on the cross section of tobacco agriculture, Indian-Indian warfare, and limited geographic knowledge of the interior (175). This echoes the prevailing understanding of much of the eighteenth-century historiography. There is a final, noticeable but certainly understandable, shift in the last two chapters that focuses more on the dramatic shifts in landscape allocation through land title and the new economic concerns of small-scale backcountry farmers. The conversation does not ignore Native American involvement; in fact, it underlies each of the decisions of the European settlers in the far western regions of the Potomac River. Rice suggests that the economic shifts of farmers toward "regional exchange economies" is shortlived after the Seven Years' War and Pontiac's Rebellion, and they returned to connected market economy (237). The economic concerns...

Historic constructions of the early multinational: on power, politics and culture in Pan Am narratives

This paper examines how Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) & an early incarnation of a multinational enterprise (MNE) & developed its image as an international company. In particular, we examine how the company developed and managed potentially conflicting narratives, including the modernising US company and the airline of 'the Americas' (specifically South America); the carrier of US national interests and the politically neutral actor serving to unify cultures; the purveyor of exotic experiences and the pioneer of modernism. Through a focus on organisational narratives, we reveal the powerful influence of such story telling (through design and serendipity) on images of the peoples and countries where the MNE operates. In contributing to the narrative turn in business history we argue for a relational approach to narrative analysis.

How to describe and evaluate \u201cdeception\u201d phenomena: recasting the metaphysics, ethics, and politics of ICTs in terms of magic and performance and taking a relational and narrative turn

Contemporary ICTs such as speaking machines and computer games tend to create illusions. Is this ethically problematic? Is it deception? And what kind of “reality” do we presuppose when we talk about illusion in this context? Inspired by work on similarities between ICT design and the art of magic and illusion, responding to literature on deception in robot ethics and related fields, and briefly considering the issue in the context of the history of machines, this paper discusses these questions through the lens of stage magic and illusionism, with the aim of reframing the very question of deception. It investigates if we can take a more positive or at least morally neutral view of magic, illusion, and performance, while still being able to understand and criticize the relevant phenomena, and if we can describe and evaluate these phenomena without recourse to the term “deception” at all. This leads the paper into a discussion about metaphysics and into taking a relational and narrative turn. Replying to Tognazzini, the paper identifies and analyses two metaphysical positions: a narrative and performative non-dualist position is articulated in response to what is taken to be a dualist, in particular Platonic, approach to “deception” phenomena. The latter is critically discussed and replaced by a performative and relational approach which avoids a distant “view from nowhere” metaphysics and brings us back to the phenomena and experience in the performance relation. The paper also reflects on the ethical and political implications of the two positions: for the responsibility of ICT designers and users, which are seen as co-responsible magicians or co-performers, and for the responsibility of those who influence the social structures that shape who has (more) power to deceive or to let others perform.

Une amitié capitale: correspondance Victor Hugo-Alexandre Dumas par Claude Schopp

Toussaint, would seem to belie such neat distinction. To be fair, a history of race and masculinity, as Saint-Aubin points out, would require a sequel; in this regard, the book’s postscript might be read as a preview. The methodological slippage between cultural theory and historiography is a well-known point of disciplinary contention. Questions can be raised here with respect to certain decisions made by Saint-Aubin, including the emphasis on the fictional dimensions of political reports and the conflation of the juridical and autobiographical modes of the memoir. Nevertheless, as Saint-Aubin demonstrates convincingly, the insights provided by a range of theoretical schools of thought lead to a necessary and fruitful rethinking of historical texts and figures. In this manner, the book not only restores the place of Critical Race Studies within intersectional inquiry but also updates both with its attention to affect and masculinity. Mimi Sheller and Kobena Mercer, among others, loom large in SaintAubin ’s repertoire. Written for readers well-versed in these fields and in the history of the French Caribbean, The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture is a welcome contribution to a growing body of transdisciplinary scholarship. University of Pittsburgh John Patrick Walsh Schopp, Claude. Une amitié capitale: correspondance Victor Hugo-Alexandre Dumas. Paris: Bibliothèque, 2015. ISBN 978-2-909688-70-1. Pp. 318. The friendship between Hugo and Dumas père—“tous deux nés lorsque le siècle avait deux ans”(5), as Schopp puts it, evoking the opening line of Hugo’s well-known poem—was forged in the charged atmosphere of la bataille romantique, in the years leading up to the triumphant staging of Hernani. Tested early on by the very fact that both were prominent literary figures, and inevitably competitors on occasion, the relationship nevertheless endured until the death of Dumas in 1870, just a few months after the Prussian invasion had put an end to the Second Empire, allowing Hugo finally to return to France from almost two decades in political exile. Dumas greatly admired Hugo as a poet, in Schopp’s view, but thought him less gifted as a playwright or novelist, while Hugo, although more acclaimed, envied the popular success of Dumas’s romans feuilletons (9–10). The correspondence between the two, limited in the early years to relatively brief exchanges on practical matters, took on a more personal cast after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’État forced Hugo to flee the country. Upon reading Les contemplations, for example, Dumas conveyed his reactions in lyrical terms, praising Hugo for turning personal suffering into great poetry:“Je conçois que, dans vos moments de doute, [...] vous demandiez à Dieu la raison de vos souffrances. Homère et Dante lui ont fait la même question [...]. L’Iliade et La divine comédie sont la réponse du Seigneur” (159). The book’s subtitle notwithstanding, relatively few pages are devoted to actual correspondence between Hugo and Dumas. In tracing the ebb and flow of their relationship over the years, Schopp draws on a variety of other 238 FRENCH REVIEW 91.1 Reviews 239 sources: Dumas’s Mes mémoires; letters from or to acquaintances of each author; an article accusing Dumas of plagiarism, published in a journal associated with Hugo; articles by Dumas himself on the publication of Les voix intérieures or the reprise of Marion Delorme at the Théâtre-Français; periodic entries from Adèle Hugo’s diary; Dumas’s letter to his son in 1862, with his dismissive assessment of Les misérables, “une œuvre ennuyeuse, mal rêvée dans son plan, mal venue dans son résultat” (181); or his invited contribution to the Figaro on the occasion of the restaging of Hernani at the Comédie-Française during the 1867 Exposition universelle.Schopp’s own account of the relationship between the two literary figures is not always easy to follow. His treatment is concise, at times even cryptic, and the numerous endnotes that punctuate his narrative turn out frequently to yield little more than a simple reference that might have been provided parenthetically. At the end of the book as well is an extensive...

A travel in the narrative turn of the consciousness of a diaspora ghost in The Hounding of David Oluwale

Abstract There is a sense in which African Diasporic contemporary narrative-centred drama helps in the reconceptualization of images, identity and the perception of ‘self’ against the ‘others’ within the totality of the experiences of the individual that form the sum of his/her consciousness. And, if we agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that consciousness is intentionality, it means that such images, identity, conceptualization and perception are prompts for narrative performance action and counter-action. In essence, narrative consciousness is not a mere dormant awareness and recreation of a state of being; it is perhaps an agent provocateur of crisis that often motivates characters to destructive actions. This is what we see in the recreation of Oluwole’s life in The Hounding of David Oluwale. The tragic end of Oluwole appears to have a link to the consciousness of his black ‘self’ against that of the white ‘others’, and this seems to, even now, underscore the uneasy life of the new African Diasporas in their host communities. It appears that there is an inherently sustained overt and covert conflict in the relationship between the Diasporas and their host. It is for this reason that one feels that the understanding of the narrative consciousness of the playwright and that of the characters in the play in existential dialectical terms is necessary as we continue to engage with the challenges of the life of the African Diasporas. This article, therefore, analyses the consciousness of the African Diaspora ‘selves’ against the ‘others’ of their hosts as reflected in the play.

The forbidden first word: Discourse functions and rhetorical patterns of and-prefacing in student essays

AbstractThis article investigatesand-prefacing and its environments in student essays. Specifically, the focus is on those instances when a writer uses the Finnishja‘and’ as an opening element (“preface”) to the sentence. Whileand-prefacing is most commonly a single-usage feature employed by a small minority of writers in the essay genre analyzed here, the detailed functional-rhetorical analysis reveals a rich picture of these usages and the respective discourse norm that emerges and evolves in practice. This paper identifies eight micro-level discourse functions forand-prefacing in the essays: (i)rhetorical, accumulative listing; (ii)emphasizing continuity of argument; (iii)dialogical aligning; (iv)unconventional intertextual linking; (v)evaluating a narrative turn; (vi)resolution; (vii)fantasy as coda; and (viii)plain cohesive linking. Significantly,and-prefacing is not limited to the failed essays, nor to the low-graded essays more generally. The differences found in high- and low-graded (failed) essays may, however, suggest that some discourse functions and rhetorical patterns are associated with a higher institutional value than others. Methodologically, this study highlights the benefits of Rich Feature Analysis and dialogically oriented linguistic discourse analysis for exploring a relatively infrequent and yet distinctive rhetorical resource that has a complex form-function relationship in student essays.

The Unnaming of ‘Aliass’

As a durational, site-specific performance practice that involves both nomadic journeys and daily acts of ‘barnyard ontological choreography’ with a special domestic donkey (a member of the species Equus asinus, and also a registered American Spotted Ass), the Unnaming of Aliass wrangles with linguistic authority shot through with conflicted desires: How can one name an inscrutable ass, or any other individual, with respect for her unfathomable depths? How do names ascribe or disavow intimate connections, supposed to be captured in arbitrary attachments of words to bodies? Over nearly two decades, the project has engaged various species and ecologies in an ongoing ‘assthetic’ and ontological adventure, a performance-research practice wherein ‘Aliass’ also stands for something harder to grasp than the body of one lovely little spotted ass: protagonist, setting, and even narrative turn inside-out inside this ‘name-that-ain't’, making room for unwritten tales and lacunae found across meshes of myriad lives in any environment. The project explores new strategies to evade certain dangers of names and taxonomies in the making of multispecies stories. Toward radically altered sensibilities of who, where, and how human tongues are entangled within earthly places, how can we crack open habits of naming (and their oft-hidden hierarchies and narrative structures) so that all kinds of bodies might inscribe their tales, in their own specific ways and idioms, into the mapping of time-places?

Brussels: What European urban narrative?

The ‘narrative turn’ in European studies mainly focused on the documents and speeches about European integration. Another dimension has largely been left aside: a possible narrative of the Europe as conveyed by the urban landscape of the main seat of the European institutions, Brussels. The city is not as impressive as a capital such as, Washington, and European monuments and buildings are discreet because the city was only confirmed as the European Union (EU) seat in 1992. The European narrative is therefore embodied in monuments and buildings scattered across the city. An analysis of the European monuments and buildings in Brussels shows three different layers of this narrative: pre-EU cultural and historical elements related to mythology or the European Middle Ages, the founding fathers of the EU, and the cold war period as well as European reunification. Nevertheless, these components lack the ordering and emplotment necessary for a strong narrative, even if the European institutions recently unveiled projects of mobile applications which put those elements in a wider framework.