Narrative Authority Research Articles

Helpful elements in a brief work-oriented intervention targeting musculoskeletal and mental health literacy.

Musculoskeletal and mental health complaints are common in the general population and frequent reasons for healthcare utilization and work absence. Illness perceptions, coping expectancies, rumination and self-stigma are important factors in the management of these health complaints and factors closely linked to health literacy (HL). The aims of the study were to identify helpful elements in a brief intervention (BI) targeting HL regarding common musculoskeletal and mental health complaints and to identify patient perceptions of how the intervention was helpful and whether it affected their subsequent coping. Three focus group interviews with 14 patients were conducted. Systematic text condensation was used for the analysis, supported by the health literacy skill (HLS) framework to sharpen the focus on intervention elements related to the acquisition and utilization of HLSs. Results revealed the importance of receiving comprehensible health information and guidance, the use of metaphors to create recognizable narratives and the use of practical examples and exercises. Normalizing the experienced health complaints, together with a safe and accommodating clinical environment, facilitated the change process. The BI initiated processes that contributed to acceptance, resilience and empowerment, aiding work-life balance and return to work. The study presents authentic narratives of value for future focus in BI.

Melancholia and Traumatic Reenactment in Contemporary American Fiction: A Caruthian Reading of Gillian Flynn's Novels

Gillian Schieber Flynn's fiction is laced with such recurring themes as dysfunctional nature of families, childhood abuse and neglect, and tragic murder of the loved ones. The current study, therefore, will set out to prove that the central characters of Flynn's Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl have been traumatized in their childhood, the effect of which still haunts them through hallucinations, traumatic flashbacks, and nightmares. It will be contended that the characters are still melancholic after many a year, thus fixated on past traumatic events, which they reenact through diverse psychological phenomena. In addition, it will be averred that the traumas of individuals and a collective body of people are ineluctably intertwined with each other in Flynn's fiction; consequently, not only are the characters' traumas transferred to the other members of society, but also the collective trauma of fictional communities gets transmitted into the private sphere of characters' lives. To that end, the article will have recourse to Cathy Caruth's trauma theory and terminology as the underpinning theoretical framework of the foregoing study. Furnishing a novel Caruthian reading of Flynn's novels, the current research intends to contribute to the existing literature addressing the said author's narratives.

“Console Us for Our losses”: Representing Dementia in Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the portrayal of dementia in Emma Healey’s novel Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), which brings together fictional exploration of dementia and the detective genre framework. This pairing may seem curious, even counterintuitive, yet it foregrounds important issues regarding subjectivity and personhood in the context of cognitive decline. In Healey’s novel, the protagonist with dementia is endowed with narrative authority and appears as the central participant in the mystery quest. These aspects of the novel seek to build empathy and preserve the agency of the person with dementia, and have been at the forefront of critical interest. However, while the use of the detective framework mediates and contributes to these selfhood-preserving effects, its solution-oriented formula also serves to mitigate fears and anxieties provoked by the disease. The ending of the novel, which allows no closure for its protagonist and underscores her progressive deterioration, also reveals a bleaker, more ambivalent stance, sometimes overlooked in critical investigations. The article will, therefore, salute the novel’s efforts to preserve the protagonist’s agency, but also examine the ways in which it acknowledges the limits of this endeavor, and the sources of reassurance it offers to its readership.

Disraeli and the Bible

Abstract Benjamin Disraeli has often been represented as a mercurial self-fashioner who adopted various expedient personae over the course of his public life. The biographical emphasis on his eccentric personality has caused many historians to distance Disraeli from his nineteenth-century intellectual contexts in their analysis of his thought. Disraeli wrote within a literary culture that remained invested in the Bible as an important narrative authority. The poetry and fiction of the period inflected, transformed, and challenged this authority, but it also remained in purposeful conversation with the Bible as it forged new moral and literary territory. Disraeli participated in this discourse throughout his fiction, especially in two of his works: Alroy (1833) and Tancred (1847). In these novels Disraeli drew considerably on biblical patterns of kingship and nationhood and often used language from the King James Bible. In surfacing his interest in Scripture, this article suggests that Disraeli represented the Bible’s ancient wisdom as an important bulwark against some of the fast-paced social and political changes of his time and particularly against the ‘Whiggish’ tendencies of his political opponents.

“This Girl Changed the Story of the World”: Queer Complications of Authority in KindaTV’s Carmilla

This article investigates the intersection of adaptations of narrative content and form as exemplified in the KindaTV YouTube series Carmilla (2014–2016), a contemporary revisioning of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 vampire novella of the same name. By contextualizing Le Fanu’s text within the emerging medicalized discourse around so-called deviant sexualities and close reading the invocations of medical, legal, and narrative authority within Carmilla, I reveal an approach to authority which upholds hegemony. Consequently, in engaging with KindaTV’s YouTube adaptation, the rehabilitating of queer feelings and connections reframes authority within the narrative, while the interactive platform and active fan communities resist the idea of a single textual authority. By considering the source text and adaptation through the lens of authority, it becomes clear that, as part of addressing the homophobic history of the Gothic, KindaTV’s Carmilla presents a world full of possibilities that directly opposes the way authorities like legal, medical, and academic systems have historically pathologized queer people.

European Union’s Regulating of Social Media: A Discourse Analysis of the Digital Services Act

Traditional conceptions of democratic publics are changing due to the rise of social media as a global communication tool. While social media brings people together globally and creates new spaces for creativity and resistance, it is also a space of harassment, discrimination, and violence. As recent debates about hate speech and the distribution of “fake news” have shown, the political responsibilities and consequences of regulating online content remain unclear. More recently, the EU is increasingly paying attention to platform providers. How is the EU legitimizing its new approach to social media platform regulation and how will this legislation shape transnational publics? This article contributes to ongoing debates on platform regulation by governments and other political authorities (especially the EU as a transnational legislator) and discussions about the shape of online publics. By applying a discourse analytical perspective, key legitimation narratives can be explored. I argue that the EU claims political authority over corporate interests by introducing new legislation to regulate social media platforms with the Digital Services Act. On the one hand, the EU imagines an idealized democratic online public without harmful and illegal content. On the other hand, the new legislation serves the EU’s agenda on digital sovereignty, taking back control from big and US-based enterprises. There is a strong consensus about four legitimation narratives: (a) “What is illegal offline has to be illegal online”; (b) the EU is “taking back control”; (c) the EU is “protecting small businesses, consumers, and our citizens against big tech”; (d) the EU is developing “a golden standard and rulebook beyond the EU.” Held together by the idea of democratic procedures, authority, and sovereignty, these narratives are demanding more action from social media providers to act on harmful and illegal content.

(De)constructing Nationalism: Understanding Irony in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925), and Mario und der Zauberer (1929)

ABSTRACT In the background of the European era of nationalism, Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925), and Mario und der Zauberer (1929) reveal the authority of narrative in the discursive construction of identity. By analysing the interrelation of Mann’s characteristic irony and productions of discourses of racialization, this essay draws attention to the constructed nature of German national identity. This identity is revealed to be underpinned by colonial tropes of difference which simultaneously structure internal European hierarchies. Yet, far from simply affirming a naturalistic or fixed hierarchy of cultural authority, irony at a narrative level elucidates how norms are both socially and textually constructed, and, by extension, unstable. In this way, troubling the distinction between cultural truths and social fictions, this essay explores the way in which the works problematize to what extent norms are, in fact, normative.

"خدا کی بستی" اور" نیلی بار" میں" کارنیوال" کی صورت حال کا تقابلی جائزہ

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most influential literary critics of 20th century. He was the Russian Formalist. Bakhtin’s idea of dialogue an authority is rooted in the Medieval. Carnivals were unusual events which were completely against the daily life. In these events, there was a confusion of status. The power classes of the society were ignored in these carnivals. Bakhtin lists the stylistic features into which the “unity” of the novel is usually divided, direct authorial narration, stylization of everyday speech, stylization of semi-literary discourse such as letters and diaries, various types of speech such as moral philosophical scientific statements and the individualized speech of characters.

The Putin Myth

Over the past decade, the narrative of competence that Putin established during his first two presidential terms was steadily undermined as the quality of governance worsened. Since 2012, the regime has gradually been relying less on persuasion and more on generating fear in its population—a trend that has accelerated in the face of Russian military failures in Ukraine. That ill-fated war now risks the complete annihilation of the myth of autocratic competence. The Russian example demonstrates the importance of identifying and analyzing changes in the quality of autocracies, and calls for a better understanding of why autocracies become more reliant on violent repression than on spinning an informational narrative of legitimacy and competence.

In the Shadows of the Cosmos

Clarice Lispector’s texts are a peculiar combination of socio-political analysis and cosmological excess. Commentators on her works have explored either of these two dimensions but have not yet brought them into a singular dialogue. I argue that Lispector insists upon an ethical responsibility in her refusal to disregard the microcosm of a “marginal” life even within a cosmos of her own creation. For this reason, her critique is inextricable from these excesses. The displacement of narrative authority in a method of literary production that refuses conquest opens upon an underlying, and not yet “pre-coded,” primordial cosmology characterized by night, incompleteness, and (sensory) impression, rather than self-assertive knowledge. I focus on The Hour of the Star and The Besieged City, two works that illustrate this dynamic, to capture how the interstices of social marginalization is the site from which a cosmo-political vision takes shape. Lispector’s works do not promote supra-territorial community over a privileged nationalist singularity, but rather the vertiginous excess of open possibility.

A Tale of Two Theories

A Tale of Two Theories

Transnational Strategies of Legitimation in the 1990s: The Togolese Regime and its Exiled Opposition in Ghana

AbstractAfter a failed transition to democracy in the 1990s in Togo, the opposition took refuge in Ghana, outside of the regime’s reach. Why and how did the regime react to transnational dissent? Analyzing an unpublished RPT-produced press review and the opposition press in Ghana and Togo, Raunet argues that the Togolese regime used the foreign press, the language of legality, and the politics of belonging to consolidate itself and shape a public image of apparent legitimacy. She suggests that the skillful adaptation of legitimation narratives is key in understanding the “internal logic” of authoritarian regimes and their prospects of survival.

The Elephant in the Room-Recording Devices and Trust in Narrative Interviewing

Narrative interviewing is a commonly utilized methodology, and the conventional practice of documenting interviews through audio-technical recording is seldom challenged. However, based on interviews conducted with mothers receiving basic income support, this paper demonstrates that recording devices may engender a lack of trust on the interviewee’s part. Such mistrust can impede the achievement of the methodological goals of narrative interviewing, which include eliciting rich, profound, and authentic narratives. This effect can be attributed to both the social and physical characteristics of the recording device itself, which interact with issues related to intimacy, deviancy, sanctionability, or the social undesirability of the interviewees’ attitudes or behaviors. This mistrust often becomes apparent through signs of discomfort exhibited by the interviewees – akin to the metaphorical ‘elephant in the room’. It can also manifest as extensive and in-depth conversations occurring before and after the recorded portion of the field interaction or through non-verbal signals indicating a desire to interrupt the recording. To address this restrictive effect, four strategies are suggested: (1) Conducting an evaluation of trust risks before planning the fieldwork; (2) Expanding trust-building measures during the interview situation, possibly including sharing control over the recording device with the interviewee; (3) Viewing the entire research interaction as a document in itself; and (4) Exploring supplementary or alternative documentation techniques beyond audio recording.

Paul and the Philosophers: Intercultural Communication in Hellenistic Athens (Acts 17:18)

In this article, an encounter of the apostle Paul with Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens during his second missionary journey is interpreted as an instance of intercultural communication in the Hellenistic world. This is shown in only two illocutions which the authorial narrator of the Acts ascribes to narrative charactersrepresenting the two philosophical schools. The article aims at showing what is to be perceived and interpreted as intercultural communication, how textual pragmatics conveys interculturality in communication, and which theoretical concepts of this kind of verbal interaction are visible in the examples.

First-Person Paralepsis as Narratorial Invention: Desiderio’s Impossible Knowledge, Reliability, and Narrative Authority

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the unnatural narration in Angela Carter’s novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and addresses the issue of how to make sense of it. Drawing upon unnatural narratology, it examines the first-person narrator Desiderio’s paralepsis, i.e. how he violates the mimetic rules of first-person narration by presenting knowledge that should be inaccessible to him. In terms of interpretation, the study first evaluates two options – the naturalizing one that reads Desiderio as an unreliable narrator and the unnaturalizing one that foregrounds the nonrepresentative nature of the narrative – and identifies their respective deficiencies. It further proposes a form of naturalization that sees first-person narration as modeled on the genre of novel and attributes Desiderio’s paralepsis to his narratorial invention. It is argued that in coming to terms with the narrator’s omniscient qualities, we should duly consider his characterological motivation and overall performance of narrative authority. Desiderio’s assumption of competencies that he does not properly have in fact reflects a desire for control and mastery over his life.

“Yong, and the unworthiest of thousands”: Youth and Subjectivity in Shakespeare and Speght

This article explores youthful subjectivity in both dramatic and non-dramatic verse, considering representations of female youth in Shakespeare’s late romance Pericles alongside the work of poet and polemicist Rachel Speght. The complex, unstable category of youth contributes both to Shakespeare’s rendering of his fourteen-year-old female character in his play and to Speght’s portrayal of herself in her poetry. Shakespeare’s Marina narrates her own tale and reconstitutes narratives spun about her, creating space for youthful self-fashioning. Nineteen-year-old Speght undertakes a similar project of self-making in her prose treatises and particularly in her two published poems, “A Dreame” and Mortalities Memorandum. This article compares self-fashioning in the work of a young female writer to the construction of the young female self by a contemporary male writer, suggesting that youthful subjectivity inheres for both girls in principles of authorship and narrative authority.

“Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?” — The Indigenous Female Body in the Colonial and Post-Colonial

In 2012, the Mohawk saint Catherine Tekakwitha was finally canonized by the Catholic church. She has been the subject of many accounts and narratives —both historical and fictional—and figures as the main subject of Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers. While having been lauded for its post-modernist and presumably postcolonialism stance on Tekakwitha’s figure, Cohen’s novel remains controversial in its depiction and appropriation of Indigenous womanhood. Beautiful Losers relies heavily on missionaries’ accounts of Tekakwitha and is entrenched in the male protagonist’s sexual claim and fixation on her character. Given the significant status of women in Indigenous communities, I argue that Cohen’s novel not only participates in an ongoing violation of the Indigenous female body but also denies the integrity of Indigenous family structures and their social as well as narrative authority. It hinders, rather than encourages, a shift in narrative authority pertaining to Canada’s colonial heritage. While Cohen’s text remains a necessary testament to the shortcomings and failures of history and its criticism, what is required in forthcoming scholarship and narratives dealing with Tekakwitha and figures similar to her is a narration originating in Indigenous communities. An emergence of such narratives requires a definite reckoning with Canada’s violent history of mistreating Indigenous womanhood that continues to this day.

Transfiguring Depression: Personal and Collective Identity in Cioran’s Interwar Writings

Abstract Comparative research conducted recently proves that the antimodernist national characterologies produced by interwar authors from the mesoregion make up a transnational genre. This article looks into the texts of the young Romanian Emil Cioran, a prominent writer of the group, in order to support two lines of argument. First, that it is topical for researchers to consider the ways in which these authors construe the relationship between personal and collective identity, since their historical discourses often draw on narratives of authenticity or self-actualization. Psychological and political patterns can merge, and we will examine how the semantic field of mental depression imbues Cioran’s ideological vision. Second, we will illustrate the pivotal role played by the metaphor of the “leap” in his discourse. Finally, the inclusion of literary studies in the analysis of national characterologies is advocated in the spirit of identity research after the narrativist turn.

“We have nothing to hide”: Legitimacy narratives, researcher positionality and the ethics of accessing the Dutch deportation apparatus

AbstractThis article presents a reflection on the contentious access negotiations involved in researching the Dutch deportation apparatus. Previous studies described how hostility towards researchers and the opacity within migration control regimes more generally lead to difficulties for conducting academic research. This article instead relies on a self‐reflexive account of two successful access negotiations to question what acquiring access tells us about the workings of migration control, and what consequences entering into a relationship with powerful actors has for academic knowledge production. I argue that granting access as such serves an important function for the deportation apparatus, as it helps to legitimise state power and assert their moral authority. By selectively facilitating access and enabling scrutiny by researchers, journalists and the wider public, I argue that the deportation apparatus strategically performs transparency and “voluntary accountability.”

STYLISTIC DIVERSITY OF ALTERNATE-HISTORICAL LITERARY TEXTS

The article explores the stylistic diversity of alternate history literary texts on the example of works belonging to different national literatures, namely A. Anikin's novella «Death in Dresden», F.K. Dick's novel «The Man in the High Castle» and K. Newman's novel «Anno Dracula». In the course of the analysis, the following problems have been considered: why the variety of styles is characteristic of the alternate history genre, whether the stylistic models of the classical and fantastic types of alternate history novels differ, thanks to which method of narrative organization a sense of narrative authenticity is created, and in which cases the reader immediately manages to understand that what is written is fiction. The results can be used in the further development of the typology of alternate history fiction and the identification of trends in the development of the modern literary process. The article uses typological, structural and cultural-historical methods of literary analysis.