Non-linear Narrative Research Articles

On the Postmodern Narrative Techniques in Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut is admitted as a great master of postmodern writer. Vonnegut’s success is mainly attributed to his unique narrative approaches, various expressive methods and dramatic artistic effects. The application of metafiction is particularly obvious and significant in his novels. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of typical examples of the successful adoption of metafiction. The metafiction of Vonnegut’s style, applied in Slaughterhouse-Five, shows itself in three distinctive approaches—non-linear narrative, collage and parody. Based on postmodern narrative theory, the application of these three distinctive narrative techniques will be analyzed in details in this thesis. The analysis mainly includes the reasons why they are applied in the novel and the functions how they work. The paper is mainly divided into five parts. Relevant information of Vonnegut, postmodern metafiction and previous researches are introduced in the first chapter. After getting better acquainted with basic knowledge, three narrative methods of Vonnegut’s metafiction including non-linear narrative, collage and parody are separately and detailedly analyzed in the following three chapters. Every method applied in the novel deepens the anti-war theme, and then exposes war’s evilness and absurdity further. Finally, the last part is a conclusion which is an emphasis on effects of Vonnegut’s unique narrative techniques.

A aplicabilidade de hipercontos nas aulas de Língua Portuguesa

Este artigo objetiva refletir sobre a aplicabilidade de hipercontos nas aulas de Língua Portuguesa, pois compreende que esse gênero textual contribui de forma significativa para a formação de leitores proficientes, além de aproximar os alunos do universo da leitura. Isso se justifica pelo fato de que o público-alvo das escolas atuais é composto em sua maioria por leitores “imersivos” (Santaella, 2004), ou seja, os alunos são internautas que navegam frequentemente nas redes do ciberespaço, composto por links, imagens, vídeos, áudios, entre outras linguagens. Esse perfil de leitor encontra nos hipercontos a interação que está habituado, pois esses hipertextos lançam mão das potencialidades do ambiente virtual para se concretizarem. Diante disso, esta pesquisa de abordagem qualitativa utilizou as contribuições de estudiosos, como Hayles (2009), Dias (2012) Santaella (2004) e Cosson (2011), com a intenção de construir e aplicar uma sequência didática do hiperconto “Um barulho no porão”, de Marcos Cecílio (2014). A experiência teve como público-alvo uma turma de 2º ano do ensino médio de uma escola pública do município de Choró/CE . Os resultados obtidos evidenciaram o interesse dos alunos pela sequência didática em questão, principalmente porque foi utilizado um hipertexto interativo, marcado pela presença de links e por uma narrativa não-linear, que possibilita a construção dos caminhos da leitura. Portanto, a utilização de hipertextos literários é um dos caminhos possíveis para despertar o interesse dos discentes pela leitura, uma vez que esse gênero textual utiliza recursos interativos e dinâmicos, que atraem esses jovens internautas.

‘A Man of Violent and Ungovernable Temper’: Can Fiction Fill Silences in the Archives?

ABSTRACT Biofiction can be defined as fiction about a named, real person and is characterised by creativity, invention, and imaginative exploration. In this essay I deploy a mixture of nonlinear narrative and theoretical writing to explore the argument that creative ways of responding to archival silences illuminate, and also complicate, our attempts to recover women’s lives from obscurity. As the text evolves, the narrative sections become more invented, more experimental, something more like fiction.

A system for generating storyline visualizations using hierarchical task network planning

Existing storyline visualization techniques present narratives as a node-link graph where a sequence of links shows the evolution of causal and temporal relationships between characters in the narrative. These techniques make a number of simplifying assumptions about the narrative structure, however. They assume that all narratives progress linearly in time, with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. They assume that the narrative is complete prior to visualization. They also assume that at least two participants interact at every event. Finally, they assume that all events in the narrative occur along a single timeline. Thus, while existing techniques are suitable for visualizing linear narratives, they are not well suited for visualizing narratives with multiple timelines, non-linear narratives such as those with flashbacks, or for narratives that contain events with only one participant. In our previous work we presented Yarn, a system for automatic construction and visualization of narratives with multiple timelines. Yarn employs hierarchical task network planning to generate all possible narrative timelines and visualize them in a web-based interface. In this work, we extend Yarn to support non-linear narratives with flashbacks and flash-forwards, and non-linear point-of-view narratives. Our technique supports both single-participant as well as multi-participant events in the narrative, and constructs both linear as well as non-linear narratives. Additionally, it enables pairwise comparison within a group of multiple narrative timelines.

Objects + Things = Stuff. A Visitor’s Guide to Berlin’s Museum der Dinge

Museology has shifted its focus in some places of the world: artefacts and historical objects are being repatriated, returned as permanent loans, institutions are questioning the ownership of indigenous objects, selections are made by kids, and texts are being written by visitors. The following case study discusses the reprioritization of a dynamic imagination around a museum’s purpose in a jejune way, from the perspective of an independent cultural worker, trained in visual communication and schooled in visual ethnography. The text, a non-linear narrative of the visitor's experience, is interspersed with excerpts from a recorded conversation between two visitors of the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge, Berlin. The Museum of Things does more than try to find a place for the Werkbund “stuff,” it opens up a continuous material dialogue that includes different perspectives on the history of design in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in Munich, in 1907, the Deutscher Werkbund or the German Association of Craftsmen was the organisation of artists, artisans and architects that strove to ensure good design and craftsmanship in times of mass-production of goods and architecture. The Made in Germany label is commonly associated with durable products and viable design precisely due to the work of the Deutscher Werkbund, which made efforts to create those associations linked today with German architecture or industrial, commercial, and household German products. A visit to this museum can last forever due to the extra satirical layer, combining ethnographic methods with personal narratives. This text is a sample of a specific visitor experience in an unusual educational institution that, using almost exclusively analogue methods, reaches remarkable levels of interactivity.

Beyond “toolness”

The hypothesis underlying this article is that new documentary practices potentially enable new forms of mediation allowing all interactors to experience complexity and deal with contingency in a world of polyvocality through multilayered configurations. An exploration of the Korsakow documentary Racing Home (Marianne McMahon and Phil Hoffman, 2014) brings into focus the epistemological and ontological status of these assemblages. A central issue is the question of how significantly specific modes of editing in Korsakow affect the overall experience for both the authoring instances and for the user-interactor: not only the authorship is shared between the interrelated agents, but also the heterogeneity of materials from various sources adds to the complexity of the assemblages. Central research questions include the role that polyvocality and algorithmic editing play in Korsakow, its specific embracement of contingency and its probing of nonlinear narratives. The answers provided through the analysis of the case study lead to the conclusion that Korsakow is more than just a tool to promote a special purpose and/or a platform to distribute material. Rather, Korsakow is best seen as a methodology to approach complex matters and provide multiple affective and cognitive ways to respond to them.

Profiling ethics orientation through play

ABSTRACTResearch studies and recruitment processes often rely on psychometric instruments to profile respondents with regards to their ethical orientation. Completing such questionnaires can be tedious and is prone to self-presentation bias. Noting how video games often expose players to complex plots, filled with dilemmas and morally dubious options, the opportunity emerges to evaluate player’s moral orientation by analysing their in-game behaviour. In order to explore the feasibility of such an approach, we examine how users’ moral judgment correlates with choices they make in non-linear narratives, frequently present in video games. An interactive narrative presenting several moral dilemmas was created. An initial user study (N = 80) revealed only weak correlations between the users’ choices and their ethical inclinations in all ethical scales. However, by training a genetic algorithm on this data set to quantify the influence of each branch on recognising moral inclination we found a strong positive correlation between choice behaviour and self-reported ethical inclinations on a second independent group of participants (N = 20). The contribution of this work is to demonstrate how genetic algorithms can be applied in interactive stories to profile users’ ethical stance.

Narrative Navigation: HIV and (Good) Care in Aceh, Indonesia

In this article, I elaborate the concept of narrative navigation to analyze the subjective and intersubjective ways in which people struggle through experiences of illness by constructing multiple, ambiguous and non-linear narratives that may continuously change, as they reposition themselves within changing circumstances. Drawing on ethnographic material on HIV care in Aceh, Indonesia, I show how subjunctivity and open-endedness are crucial narrative ways in which people living with HIV, their relatives, medical doctors and support group workers adjust to possibilities and limitations of care over time, thereby continuously negotiating what good care may be. Unfolding within a changing Indonesian healthcare system, their narrative navigations reveal caregiving to be a complex and contradictory process, thereby problematizing boundaries between good care and neglect.

“La 628-E8”: un récit d’avant-garde?

La 628-E8 breaks with the conventional narrative rules and rejects the aesthetic legacy of the past. Octave Mirbeau dedicates this hybrid novel to Ferdinand Charron, the man who designed Mirbeau’s motorcar. The title of the novel comes from his car’s number plate. This innovative work is an example of Mirbeau’s literary modernity at the turn of the century. It is a mise en abyme of the Futurist aesthetic thanks to the speed of the car that establishes a new relationship to the world. Whereas Mirbeau makes a clean sweep of the past and praises speed and technology, he is not blinded by the myth of Progress and superman. He is indeed a humanist and still defends oppressed people. Finally, in this hybrid novel, based on emotions and non-linear narrative, he extends aesthetic reflections that he started considering in the press articles he made as an art critic. The novel, as a free-form, seems to be the best artistic medium through which Mirbeau can develop and apply his aesthetic vision, without theorizing.

Linking Radical Traditions and the Contemporary Dalit Women's Movement: An Intergenerational Lens

Anti-caste movements in India have a long history. Cultural heritage became and remains a site of political contestation by excluded communities searching for identity and equality, and gender remains at the core of their engagements. The meanings underlying the more homogenous term of ‘Dalit’ used today are part of a historical process of self-definition. Moreover, diverse Dalit countercultures suggest varied social domains in which Dalit communities are located. South Asian historiographies have been critiqued as denying histories and historical agency to Dalits. Yet Dalit studies have developed epistemologies, bringing articulations and ideas from the margins to the centre of writings on history, leading to debates around caste that have transformed notions of politics. This paper draws from one such trajectory through a nonlinear narrative, juxtaposing the intergenerational contexts of engagements: my mother Dakshayani's political and life experiences, as narrated in her autobiography (1912–1978), and my own experience in the Dalit women's and other movements in the 1980s and 1990s. While my experience saw the onset of liberalisation and the emergence and growth of ‘new social movements’, the context of Dakshayani's narrations is the Pulaya (agrestic slave caste) community in the early 1900s in Cochin, a community in the process of transforming itself. Both narratives highlight how radical traditions within the Dalit women's movement over time have consciously and critically addressed anti-caste movements, social reform, the state, peoples’ movements and the nation within a conceptual framework of equality, liberty and non-discrimination.

Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’sMásnap

AbstractThe essay’s aim is to examine the relationship between perspective and nonlinear temporal structure in Attila Janisch’s 2004 film,Másnap, which is loosely based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’sLe Voyeur(1955). My analysis revolves around the understanding of two important narratological distinctions, that between a nonlinear presentation of events and a paradoxical plot, and that between narrative focalizalization and textual focalization. According to David Bordwell, the most widespread definition of linearity is when the successive events of A, B and C are presented in the narrative in their chronological order. Any other form of their presentation results in a nonlinear narrative. ButMásnapis a special type of narrative, which highlights the limitation of such traditional dichotomies, because a consistent order of events cannot be reconstructed. Many critics tried to grasp the core of the film’s narrative by trying to put together the original timeline of events, relying on false indicators of logic and coherence, while they failed to recognize the narrative’s real rhetorical purpose in preventing a consistent and unambiguous plot to be established. The narrative’s complexity lies in the fact that both assumptions – that it depicts asubjective experience of timeanda storyworld with strange temporality– are necessary to explain the film’s unusual, fragmented structure and interpret its events. I point out how the film requires us to reinterpret the meanings attached to the familiar techniques of continuity editing and how it converts the practices of the early Nouveau Roman, which marginalizes traditional plot-structures, the notion of character, and conventional descriptions of objects, to interact with a subjective vision governed by a fictional mind.

Thoughts on the Postpartum Situation

The event of childbirth carries with it a dominant narrative: that a pregnant woman happily gives birth to a baby. This appears to be quite a simple formulation – as if a natural fact, as if plain and common sense. Yet, the complexities masked by the mythological and whitewashed quality of this narrative, as I have already argued recently in my graphic novel narrative/philosophical analysis, The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (2017), harms and even kills women. In this paper, I expand on the problem of what I term ‘dismemberment after birth’ as operates invisibly in the ‘postpartum situation.’ The dominant narrative, combined with a pervasive cultural misogynoir as well as medicalized and ableist establishment of care, renders women without resource if they cannot maintain the desires and embodiments required of a contented and successful maternity. The naturalized assumptions about the narrative move from the birth event to ‘having a baby’ are disrupted here with hope of opening up an opportunity to validate and diversify the more non-linear narratives. As an afterthought to these disruptions I present here, I offer an additional challenge to anti-natalist thinking in its limited insight into the postpartum situation.

Impossible Choreographies

This exposition discusses the emergence of the database as a creative methodology, and key organising principle in the generation of a series of 3D digital animated artworks. Through detailed explication and demonstration of a complex creative process utilising a range of media formats including video, 3D model views, and interactive 3D, I aim to elucidate an intricate relationship between technology, process and artistic intent, framing this within relevant emergent critical frameworks around digital creative practice. This design strategy will enable the effective communication of some of the inherent qualities of 3D digital production, and the mapping of the operations of the ‘database’ as a pliable creative tool.
 Working directly into high-end 3D modelling and animation software, and taking the actions of a generic male figure as a point of departure, my animations are created in a modular fashion, building up units of performed movements, loops and cycles (both animated and motion-captured), creating a sometimes complex movement vocabulary. This recalls Lev Manovich’s notions of the database and the loop as engines of (non-linear) narrative in digital media work, in particular his principles of modularity, automation and variability as intrinsic to new media objects. In working with complex software tools I also acknowledge in the fabrication process what Rachael Kearney has termed the ‘synthetic imagination’, and Malcolm Le Grice’s conception of submerged authorship in the interaction with the ‘intelligent machine’ – the creative act as a collaboration with the embodied intellect of the software itself.
 Drawing on and remediating a range of sources including the photographic studies of Eadweard J. Muybridge, the choreography of Busby Berkeley, nineteenth century optical toys, and the contemporary digital video game, these works present figures which occupy a space between the animate and the inanimate, between automata (devices that move by themselves) and simulacra (devices that simulate other things).

Existential Features of Variety Numbers With a Puppet

The dramatic principles of the variety art puppet are fundamentally different from the principles of classical drama, the application of the principles leads to the creation of not concert numbers, but etudes, or small performances. At the empirical level, there is an understanding of the difference between the number and the etude, but the lack of a clear differentiation between them and the lack the principles by which the existence of the number becomes possible creates serious problems for practical work. Principles of classical drama, formulated in the era of the Enlightenment on the basis of the Aristotle’s unity of place, time and action, continue to dominate in the view of dramaturgy to this day. Search of the principles difference from classical ones leads us to turn to a non-classical picture of the world in general and to the philosophy of postmodernism in particular. So we apply the postmodern method of deconstruction to the subject of the research. Speaking about the binary opposition “etude and number”, let us pay attention to the broader opposition: “performance and concert”. It correlates directly with the concepts proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, described in the work “Rhizome”: “tree” and “rhizome”. The linear narrative as a performance corresponds to the “tree” concept, the nonlinear narrative as a concert number corresponds to the rhizome. Linear narrative is created according to the classical principles of decalcomania, but nonlinear narrative is created according to the rhizomatic principles of cartography. “Tree” is centred on the root – ideas, “rhizome” is not centred. Rhizome is the sum of the relationship of its points. The idea in the rhizome is secondary and may arise as a result of the relationship between points of rhizome. Analysis and deconstruction demonstrate that the concert and the numbers from which it is composed, in contrast to the performance and the etude, are rhizomatic systems, and therefore require radically other principles of drama. Application to rysomatic systems of the cartography method proposed by Gilles Deleuze, when instead of proving meaning, meaning is born in the process of the research, may become the main method of non-classical drama. The subject of the study in the concert number is the behaviour of the function, which may be a metaphor of the phenomenon of life, embodied in a certain form in the non-inherent for this function of the proposed circumstances. The form-function and the proposed circumstances become points of the rhizome, and their interaction creates rise to the meaning of the concert number. Principles of rhizomatic drama, built on the cartography method, can be applied not only in the concert number with the puppet, but also throughout the art of the postmodern era.

Reframing Buñuel through Neuroscience

This essay uses neuroscience to reframe the work of filmmaker Luis Bunuel. It shows not only how certain concepts in neuroscience illuminate his narrative experimentation but also how his experimental narratives expand our under-standing of human consciousness. Drawing on the translational writings of neu-roscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Antonio Damasio, who emphasize the role of narrative in the emergence of human consciousness, it tests these ideas against Bunuel’s life-long experimentation with non-linear narratives, which interweave post-structuralist theories of reading, modernist literary experimentation, and traditional picaresque fiction. In the process, it shows how simple genres like dreams, serial autobiography, case studies, and picaresque fiction are all database narratives that are crucial to understanding the emergence of consciousness

Reconsidering Aesthetics and Ideology in Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants

Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants went out of print soon after its release in 1967; attempts at its revival, following a 1987 reprint, failed to assert its place in American literary study. A non-linear narrative, chronicling the disintegrating relationship of two African American New York City transplants, The Flagellants offers a mixture of ideological commentaries—on patriarchy, women writers, and nationalism. In its time, it was a difficult novel to take. But as this article reveals, the novel’s difficulty did not lie in its depictions, but in how it challenged interpretations of its ideological position. This article uncovers how such an inventive novel was disallowed from leaving its impact on historical understandings of its time. The story of The Flagellants ’ disappearance emerges from historicizing the Black Arts Movement, in which it was read in 1967. This examination illuminates why, even today, the novel is rarely found in academic writing or on college syllabi.

THE STUDY OF SOUND AESTHETICS BASED ON THE NARRATIVES OF RADIO DRAMA

Abstract. The present study has been performed aiming at adopting a novel approach towards the sound aesthetics of radio dramas based on narrative analysis. In this regard, there is a question raised as to how can the audio elements be applied in order to maximally beautify the radio dramas based on the narratives they deliver? By narrative, the linear and nonlinear recounting of events is intended in the present study. The linear narrative is the one told based on the order and sequence of the events and the nonlinear narrative is the one in which the temporal and special constituents have been displaced. The contents of six radio drama were purposively selected and investigated based on narrative analysis method. The present study presents analyses of two radio dramas. The dramas utilized herein are inter alia the narratives told based on a nonlinear recounting of the events. Three indicators, i.e. Genette’s theory of order, continuation and repetition, have been combined with the aesthetical audio elements like repetition of sound, sound perspective and the speed with which sound is broadcasted. The sound design can make use of each of the audio design elements, like effect, music, voice and silence, based on the temporal and spatial components of the narrative. That is to say that the retrospective and futuristic approaches of the narratives should be firstly determined and then the aesthetical components of the audio elements can be taken into consideration based on the narrative’s timing. Also, the settings of the events are associated with the perspective’s aestheticism. The audio elements helped by the temporal disorders, repetition of the events and the duration which every incident lasts can add to the creation of new concepts. Based on perspective as an audio element in radio dramas, a sort of abstract location and also an actual locality should be taken into account for the temporal disorders. The perspective elements associated with the creativity of the designer and his or her perception of the elements’ arrangement (effect, music, voice and silence) are employed to create a type of locus that can be completely existent in the outside world and/or be completely symbolic. Moreover, the repetition of the sound, musical and verbal effects can provide for the spatial container of the retroactive narratives. Keywords: narrative, sound aesthetics, sound design, radio drama.

Malva by Hagar Peeters

revenge murder as a teen. He’s a young man when he seizes control of a government ministry, a post he’ll hold—and ferociously defend—for decades. His life, which spans most of the twentieth century, is primarily a series of horrible events, most of them orchestrated by Carnero himself. Embroiled in disputes over land, religion, and power, he commits murder, arson, and petty theft. His jacket, Monge writes, was stolen “years ago from the first man he ever stuffed in his iron trunk and left to die.” Loads of novels ask us to sympathize with—or at least try to understand—the criminal mind-set. This one, though, stars a character who appears to be incorrigibly evil. It’s disconcerting to spend a couple hundred pages in the company of such a person, but this isn’t your standard character study. The book’s first sentence announces that Carnero is the personification of “the era in which he lived.” Armed with this clue, a reader can unlock the novel’s allegorical elements. The Arid Sky was originally published in the author’s native Mexico, and it’s no accident that Monge’s protagonist embodies the corruption and predation that, at various times, has plagued his country and many of its neighbors, including the United States. As translated by Thomas Bunstead, Monge’s prose is crisp, and his nonlinear narration creates a heightened sense of unpredictability. Though this is often a dispiriting tale, Monge is contending with universal themes. His depiction of unchecked power is a warning , one that will always be worth heeding. Kevin Canfield New York Hagar Peeters Malva Trans. Vivien Glass. Los Angeles. DoppelHouse Press. 2018. 224 pages. Malva, the debut work of Dutch poetturned -novelist Hagar Peeters, had my commitment by page 6; for serious students of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his contemporaries , the courtship may be even briefer . Narrated by Neruda’s all-but-forgotten daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad, the book is as lush with speculative literary history as it is with lyrical prose, picking its way through the sticky webs of family dynamics and revolutionary politics with a focus on neglected figures that aims to outpace the accounts of “prejudiced biographers.” Malva was born in 1934 to Neruda and his first wife, Marietje Hagenaar, with hydrocephalus, a then-untreatable condition that contributed to an early death at the age of eight. Though Neruda’s only child, she makes just a single fleeting appearance in his poetry. In this novel, Malva appeals to Peeters from an omniscient afterlife where she keeps the company of other “disabled” children hidden by their literary fathers while they were still alive (Daniel Miller and Lucia Joyce make an appearance). As Malva reclaims her father’s pen to tell her story of abandonment, the novel probes the question of how to make sense of Neruda’s political outspokenness in light of his silence on the subject of his own mute daughter, Anjum Zamarud Habib Prisoner No. 100: An Account of My Days and Nights in an Indian Prison Trans. Sahba Husain Zubaan Books A moving documentation by a Kashmiri activist, this book tells the true account of one woman’s time in an Indian prison after being arrested circumstantially under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Part journal and part manifesto, the honest and emotionally resonant writing will move anyone interested in the plight of those imprisoned as well as their families, and Habib paints a realistic picture of state politics today. Nicolai Houm The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland Trans. Anna Paterson Tin House Books This short novel is the first appearance in English of one of Norway’s younger but most gifted authors. In The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland, Nicolai Houm turns the trope of a writer in search of a subject on its head by showing Jane’s tragedies in flashback, elaborating eloquently on her grieving process as she ill-fatedly stumbles through the Dovrefjell mountain range attempting to rediscover inspiration and closure. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 75 revisiting his poetry to find where Malva might fit among all the omissions. Malva is as much a triumphant meditation on disability as it is a fiercely...

Tantsitud „Kalevipoeg” läbi rahvuslike soostereotüüpide prisma

The idea for the present article emerged from a short, humorous dance sketch for a TV show from 1981 that was based on a scene from the national epic Kalevipoeg, which portrayed the nationalist gender stereotypes in an ironic fashion. The sketch, choreographed by director and former dancer Sulev Nommik, was not wholly original, but rather used earlier choreographic versions (1934, 1948) on the same theme as its reference point. Th is article discusses the creation of national dance language and the construction of gender in staged folk dance, as well as the gender stereotypes of the above mentioned choreographed versions of Kalevipoeg: the hero (Kalevipoeg/ Kalev’s Son), the bad guy (Sorts / the Devil), the pure maiden (Saarepiiga/ the Island Maiden), the mother (Linda, Kalevipoeg’s mother) and the evil woman (Sortsipiiga / the She-Devil). The article also discusses a later version of Kalevipoeg by Ulo Vilimaa (1986), which can be described as self-ironical and in which gender roles are portrayed in a slightly mocking manner. The analysis is based on reviews of the period, as well as recordings in the Estonian National Broadcast archives. The lack of sources allows only a brief mention of Exitus by Dmitri Harchenko (1998), which was written in a postmodern and post-dramatic manner with a non-linear narrative and in which gender was presented in a less stereotypical manner than in the earlier versions. This version did not make use of Eugen Kapp’s score, any folk dance materialor the original libretto by Andres Sarev. Keywords nationalism, gender roles and stereotypes, Estonian ballet, staged folk dance

Visualizing Nonlinear Narratives with Story Curves

In this paper, we present story curves, a visualization technique for exploring and communicating nonlinear narratives in movies. A nonlinear narrative is a storytelling device that portrays events of a story out of chronological order, e.g., in reverse order or going back and forth between past and future events. Many acclaimed movies employ unique narrative patterns which in turn have inspired other movies and contributed to the broader analysis of narrative patterns in movies. However, understanding and communicating nonlinear narratives is a difficult task due to complex temporal disruptions in the order of events as well as no explicit records specifying the actual temporal order of the underlying story. Story curves visualize the nonlinear narrative of a movie by showing the order in which events are told in the movie and comparing them to their actual chronological order, resulting in possibly meandering visual patterns in the curve. We also present Story Explorer, an interactive tool that visualizes a story curve together with complementary information such as characters and settings. Story Explorer further provides a script curation interface that allows users to specify the chronological order of events in movies. We used Story Explorer to analyze 10 popular nonlinear movies and describe the spectrum of narrative patterns that we discovered, including some novel patterns not previously described in the literature. Feedback from experts highlights potential use cases in screenplay writing and analysis, education and film production. A controlled user study shows that users with no expertise are able to understand visual patterns of nonlinear narratives using story curves.