Nonfictional Narratives Research Articles

Looking for a way out: The dynamics of slum life, poverty, and everyday resistance in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers

This article looks into the implications of urban informality in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum (2012) as represented in slum life and urban poverty. It aims to investigate the impact of urban poverty on the everyday practices of slum dwellers and their endeavors to escape the trap of poverty in an attempt to highlight the human dimension of the slum. The article seeks to unravel multi-layers of the interaction between people and poverty and the differing models of resistance to poverty and social exclusion depicted in the nonfiction narrative. The article examines slum life from a descriptive sociological perspective with a detailed description of how people survive in poverty. The study of the culture of slums entails an analysis of the survival techniques and everyday practices of slum dwellers, the relations and patterns of behavior among the different categories of people inhabiting a slum, and the outcomes of the interplay between place, culture, and power relations in such communities. This is implemented through an eclectic sociological approach that comprises theories of space, culture, and resistance as proposed by James Scott, Theodore W. Schultz, and Henri Lefebvre.

Fungal Rhizomes: Mycorrhizae and Posthumanism

ABSTRACT As the material conditions of the Anthropocene continue to destabilise, urgent and heightened attention to diverse, more-than-human agents is imperative. One ecologically critical domain of life is that of fungi. Fungi, although important trophic links in their ecosystems, are often given short shrift as ecological agents when it comes to discourses around sustainability, whilst conventionally viewed (in Western thought) as either harbingers of disease and degradation, or primarily instrumental or aesthetic objects-in-the-world, reinforcing binary notions of anthropic exceptionalism. Drawing together the concept of fecundity, indebted to the non-fiction narratives of Annie Dillard, and the rhizomic model explicated by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this paper will argue that an effective means of undermining this ontological stratification between domains of life is realised through rhizoanalytic approaches to fecund contexts in fungal worlds, as they allow for the employment of methodologies which endeavour to articulate the multi-agential, embodied processes of worldmaking which occur ceaselessly within and around human bodies.

Art and sustenance in the work of Sara Baume

ABSTRACT The question of what role literature and art may play has become all the more urgent amidst the present intersectional crisis. This article discusses the oeuvre of author and visual artist Sara Baume which invites engagement with central aspects of this crisis: humanity’s impact on nature and the resulting climate change, and the effects of neoliberal capitalism. Discussing Baume’s three novels (Spill Simmer Falter Wither, A Line Made by Walking, and Seven Steeples) together with her non-fictional narrative Handiwork and the performance piece “The Alphabet of Birds,” the essay argues that while it might be justified to approach Baume’s work as poignant critique of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecological and spiritual devastation, it distinctly transcends such instrumentalist critical paradigms. Stoically lyrical about nature interlaced with variegated detritus, and using protagonists positioned on the margins of society, Baume offers an extended meditation on the role of art at the time of crisis and the possibilities of drawing sustenance from artistic creation. As such, Baume’s work engagingly illustrates what Derek Attridge has termed the “singularity” of literature and art, resisting predetermined agendas (including those vitally beneficial) and providing a repeatable opportunity for a potentially risky encounter with alterity.

Let’s Talk About Hair and Art

The objective of this paper is to critically reflect upon a cultural text in the form of a piece of mixed media abstract realism artwork titled Hair Power, made in 2020. This piece was inspired and motivated by my involvement with a World Afro Day event held on 15 September 2020. The paper draws on my personal, political, cultural, and historical rationale for making the artwork, and includes relevant background information and wider influences. I discuss the artistic process — composition, colour scheme, themes, materials— and how and why I made the painting the way I did. The paper also aims to show the intertextuality of visual art and community activism and the importance of art as a form of resistance against Westernised beauty standards and of the power of images in their ability to transport the audience in which they are intended. This paper will also seek to understand the connectivity between artists and the community, and the importance of representation within the visual arts. It will draw on my cultural heritage and African and Caribbean diasporic cultural connections. It will further seek to connect art with literary projects, working together to challenge those ideologies that do not work for Black people who choose to wear their afro hair in its natural state, so that pride is more important than hiding or changing afro hair to fit into society’s ‘norms’. Hair Power is a piece of personal and political abstract realism art that was made as a reminder that afro hair in its natural state is to be celebrated. Hair Power was also one of two pieces of artwork integrated as a symbolic gesture into my Birkbeck College “Race Law and Literature” assignment in April 2021. The assignment involved writing a creative nonfiction narrative of a historical event using the theme of everyday racism in the British education system. Hair Power marks my decision to make more political art.

“Like Home”: Gerrymandering the Physical Public Sphere in Female Journalist Narratives

AbstractThe cultural figure of the female journalist most clearly embodies the opportunities given to, and the anxieties caused by, the period’s working women. As writers, they fought for rhetorical space in the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and as women, they faced social pressure to avoid the male-dominated physical public sphere or move within it under specific conditions. Even the increasing number of female journalists at the turn of the century could not guarantee their place within the newsroom itself, let alone the world beyond its walls. Instead, their struggle to stake a claim in physical public spaces manifested in fiction and nonfiction narratives as a search for “home,” or a place of belonging. This article explores the exclusively white-woman fiction and nonfiction narratives by and about nonwhite and nonmainstream women through a human geography lens, arguing that their shared central issue is the social “gerrymandering” of women and other overlapping marginalized groups out of physical public spaces, as well as the efforts of women to “redistrict” the social spheres into a comfortable public place in which everyone could thrive.

Social Imaginary of the Just World: Narrative Ethics and Truth-Telling in Non-Fiction Stories of (In)Justice

The paper focuses on the issue of truth-telling in non-fictional narratives of (in)justice. Based on examples of rape narratives, domestic abuse narratives, human trafficking narratives and asylum seeker narratives, I examine the various difficulties in telling the truth in such stories, particularly those related to various culturally conditioned ideas of how the world works, which at the same time form the basis of, among other things, legal discourse and officials’ decision-making processes. I will also demonstrate that such culturally conditioned ideas, which are the basis of official discourse, can be considered within the category of both the social imaginary of the just world in the Taylorian sense of the term, and the social master narrative, which in the case of stories of (in)justice is often based on the just world hypothesis.

Modernist Non-fictional Narratives and Beyond (e-Rea 15.2, 2018)

Modernist Non-fictional Narratives and Beyond (e-Rea 15.2, 2018)

Liminality and Longing in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

In Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018) and At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), Zora Neale Hurston and Dionne Brand, two prominent African diasporic writers, pen narratives in which they centralize the challenges ingrained in the in-between spaces Black people occupy at the nexus of slavery and freedom. Through Hurston’s non-fiction narrative and Brand’s fictional narrative, they offer us important stories in which two African-descended men, Kossola and Kamena, bravely inhabit that nexus and willfully forge a space in which they assert and pursue their versions of freedom and fulfillment despite the tragedies and longing that haunt them. In Barracoon and At the Full and Change of the Moon, both authors document how persistent freedom quests and insistence on retaining and passing remembrances serve as forms of resistance to consumption by this liminal space. In both texts, then, Hurston and Brand provide us with important African diasporic narratives about the continuity of survival, resilience, and empowerment in the face of tremendous adversity.

Beyond Historicity: Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinematic Adaptations of Non-/Anti-Realist Fiction

Abstract The literature on authenticity in adaptation studies seems to be focused almost entirely on adaptations of either historical and (auto-)biographical literary texts or non-fiction narratives. The usual case studies are often generically limited to heritage and historical films, period dramas, documentaries, and biopics, to the exclusion of non-/anti-realist genres. However, there is more to adaptation than empirically and/or historically verifiable source texts, which warrants an examination of authenticity in adaptations of fantastical, science-fictional, and gothic fictions away from the fixation on historicity and veracity. This paper proposes an aesthetic (metadiscursive and experiential) outlook on authenticity in genre adaptations, namely George Miller’s adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022); Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, Arrival (2016); and the different adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Metadiscursively, authenticity depends on the self-consciousness of artistic representation, the extent to which the source text and its cinematic adaptation acknowledge their status as fictional narratives and their representational, medium-specific limits and potentials. Experientially, authenticity is judged by the degree of audience immersion in the storyworld, the feeling (generated by diegetic techniques) that what they are watching is experientially plausible despite the implausibility of the genre itself. Without lapsing in excessive realism and verbatim fidelity, an authentic adaptation is heedful of the paradoxes surrounding authenticity itself in any fictional narrative, attentive to their aesthetic and thematic treatment in the source text, aware of the representational affordances of the literary and cinematic media, and capable of offering the audience an immersive experience.

Fostering Positive Relationships Among Adapted and General Physical Educators in Support of Students With Disabilities

During an educational climate that is marked by teacher attrition and shortages, relationship-building among teachers is more critical than ever. The workplace relationships between adapted and general physical education teachers has been problematized and may negatively affect the education of their students with disabilities. Grounded in role socialization theory, we present three non-fiction narratives of adapted physical education teachers to highlight the growing workplace concerns emerging through research and their implications for kinesiology and physical education departments as they train preservice teachers. After each narrative we provide reflective prompts for faculty to engage their preservice teachers. Finally, we conclude with a series of practical strategies faculty may consider to improve the relationship-building skillset among their preservice adapted and general physical education teachers.

Forms of technostalgia: Understanding cultures of the obsolete

The term ‘technostalgia’ refers to a range of admittedly quirky and often collectible devices that frequently hit the market, promising customers the experience of past technology in the present. Using this marketing trend as a starting point, this article attempts to trace ‘other’ technostalgias in their plurality elsewhere in order to plump the philosophical dimensions of the concept. Upon unpacking the underlying structure of technostalgia (in terms of subject–object relations, as social practice, etc.), we may relocate the technological subject within the global–local horizon and rethink the social history of technology as a history of becoming-obsolete – i.e. a history of what we may do (or not do) with the fate of ‘becoming-obsolete’ other than being subjected to it. To this effect, the article describes the structure of technostalgia not once but thrice and from three different vantage points: the first being the most evident and ‘first’ market version of technostalgia, the second being technostalgia as contemporary art practice in the form of hand-drawn or graphic non-fiction narratives, and the third being technostalgia as a historical ‘incident’ of sorts related to the advent of photography against the colonial context.

Cross-Media Narratives of City Image: The case of Chongqing, China

In the era of media fragmentation, a story world mode brought about by multiple media platforms is on the rise. Cross-media narratives become the core force of city competition by catering to the audience’s preferences while generating rich experiences of different media, promoting the efficient communication of city images to promote city tourism. This case study is based on the cross-media narrative theory, the general narratology theory, the interaction ritual chains theory, etc. It investigates how the contents are produced according to the characteristics of Chongqing city resources and how the image positioning matches different media to complete the common narrative process. Through reviewing previous literature and exploring some cross-media narratives of city image in Chongqing, the main findings of this paper are:1) demonstrative narratives interpret Chongqing’s image artistically and metaphorically to present the contradictions and need in the social space of Chongqing; 2) non-fictional narratives employ multiple combinations of typical city symbols in an enumerative design of narrative symbols to exhibit the superior tourism resources and displays its spirit in the construction and development of the Chonqing city; 3) participatory interactive narratives make the abstract, stereotypical city image that was reflected in traditional film pieces become more modern, urban, and fresh through interaction ritual chains. These results provide great value for the construction of the city image, which can contribute to providing future research a reference.

Narrative discussions to support social work competence

ABSTRACT Few studies examine the relationship between instructional approaches and required social work competencies in graduate social work education. Further, effective social work education programs must infuse and address issues of social, racial, economic and environmental justice, creating opportunities for reflexive education. To enhance the integration of field and practice class, and support the development of core social work competencies, we developed a novel teaching method using nonfiction health narratives (memoir excerpt, article, newspaper editorial, etc.). Through engagement with written narratives, students enhance skills of critical self-reflection, deep listening, and analysis of social inequities. Using a qualitative approach we asked open-response questions about students’ experience of nonfiction narratives in supporting their acquisition of social work competence and quantified the extent to which the use of nonfiction narratives aligned with students’ development in the selected competencies. Overall, four themes emerged from student responses: cultivating empathy, deepening listening skills, fostering appreciation for diversity, and developing a professional identity, and quantitative data identified strong alignment between the use of nonfiction narratives and developing social work competence.

El tema de nuestro tiempo

Portuguese literature questions the concept of authoritarianism through a variety of discursive forms. Starting from an attempt to conceptualize it and restricting the corpus to fictional and non-fictional narrative, we try in this paper a diachronic theme approach concerning reference works published between the 15th and the 21st centuries.

A Creative Nonfiction Narrative Inquiry into an EFL Online Learning Community During the COVID-19 Pandemic

University libraries globally launch coronavirus memory archival projects inviting the documentation of personal experience. Elicitations such as journal entries and oral history interviews fall under the category of life-writing. This Narrative Inquiry focuses on creative nonfiction stories produced by an online high school community and edited by the EFL teacher during the first full lockdown in Greece. The shift to distance education caused students to use ELF as a means of contrasting their local archival endeavors with global ones. The EFL teacher as researcher used mentor texts, collected the coronavirus stories on e-me online platform, engaged the online members in a peer-reviewing process and reauthored a collective narrative. Narrative writing analysis was employed to reflect the teacher’s initiative to commemorate a student community’s physical disconnectedness from onsite learning. The use of e-me for this collaborative venture offers practical implications for EFL practitioners such as going beyond the bounds of the traditional curriculum whilst identifying self-regulation as indication of resilience among students experiencing unprecedented circumstances.

Immersive Journalism: The Effect of System Immersion on Place Illusion and Co-Presence in 360-Degree Video Reporting

Immersive journalism has been promoted as an alternative way of producing content that allows users to experience first-hand the events depicted in the news story. This mixed-method study examines how immersive journalism impacts the user experience of non-fictional narratives in news practices. A between-subject experiment (n = 104) was conducted to inspect the effects of system immersion on place illusion and co-presence. Using a 360-degree video news report produced by the Spanish newspaper El País as a stimulus, two viewing conditions were compared: magic window and 360 degree with a VR headset. The results show that VR technologies determine the effective potential of immersive journalism, namely the experience of place illusion and co-presence and that audiences do not actually explore the so-called whole picture, as a 90–180° movement for exploration prevailed.

Rohini Mohan's The Seasons of Trouble (2014): Sri Lanka's Tamil women in war and its aftermath

ABSTRACT The protracted armed conflict in Sri Lanka (1983–2009) has had a significant impact on the social fabric of the country. The Tamil community – the women especially – bore the brunt of the traumatic spill-over of decades of warfare that brutalised all areas of life, especially in the North. With the belief that narrative literature on war captures the complex ways in which gender, war, and peace interact and impact configurations of the female gender in turbulent war-torn and post-war societies, this paper critically reads Rohini Mohan's The Seasons of Trouble (2014), a non-fiction narrative of the life stories of three individuals that lay claim to ‘truth’ and therefore is placed in a strong position in relation to collective memory, archive, and history. The critical content analysis from a feminist theoretical standpoint conveys how the trajectories of Tamil women caught in Sri Lanka's war shine a light on the ways in which dominant configurations of war and peace construct the female gender identity in specific ways and thereby shape the way women are framed in war-torn and post-war societies with tangible implications on the lived realities of Tamil women in Sri Lanka.

‘1 Question 10 Answers’

'1 Question 10 answers' is a didactic exercise, designed to investigate the notion of interpretation in communication design, and to reflect upon issues that arise in the creation of non-fiction narratives. In particular, this research analyses the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, as well as the poetic devices of collection, tabulation and repetition in storytelling. The exercises discussed in this project were applied in various educational contexts: initially from 2017-2019 on the Typography module of the BA in Design at the Universidade da Madeira (Madeira, Portugal), and subsequently in February 2021 during an intensive workshop with MA Communication students in the School of Design at the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy). The exercise consisted of posing a question to ten people and collecting their narrative responses, before exploring how these might be interpreted as texts and translated into artefacts. The results produced by the students at the Universidade da Madeira were small books, while the students at Politecnico di Milano invented communication systems within several different types of media. This article discusses ‘the rules of the game’ applied during the exercises, describes the learning process, and analyses various works made by the students reflecting on delicate balance that exists between a work of interpretation and the processes of dialogue and active listening. The exercises discussed in this project were applied in various educational contexts: initially from 2017-2019 on the Typography module of the BA in Design at the Universidade da Madeira (Madeira, Portugal), and subsequently in February 2021 during an intensive workshop with MA Communication students in the School of Design at the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy). The exercise consisted of posing a question to ten people and collecting their narrative responses, before exploring how these might be interpreted as texts and translated into artefacts. The results produced by the students at the Universidade da Madeira were small books, while the students at Politecnico di Milano invented communication systems within several different types of media. This article will discuss ‘the rules of the game’ that were applied during the exercise: it will describe the learning process, analyse various works made by the students and reflect upon the potentialities of the method in future contexts.

The Family Photographs of Istanbul Memories and the City: A Constellation of the Past and the Future

After more than a decade since the publication of the book "Istanbul: Memories and the City", this article focuses on the case of family photo albums, used to animate a distant and blurred past that reveals signs of the anticipated decadence of the city. Other than the evidential, factual, and comparative qualities of the documentary photograph, this article questions how the silent frames of a family communicate with their "limited" universe. Here, the aim is to focus on photographs or snaps of Pamuk’s family spread over two decades. Although the book consists of many images and photographs within different contextual and formal appearances, family photographs seem to exist as a process of self-reflectivity or more to define critical access to the city where the author expressed his existence. In this paper, the aim is to focus on the photographs that widen, or on the contrary, immobilize the narrativeness of the text by creating another textual reference for the reader; photographs that appear as the visual references to emphasize what the text refers to in a documentary sense. Here, the book "Istanbul: Memories and the City" by Orhan Pamuk is compared to a literary tradition that employs the photographic image in fictional and non-fictional narratives to understand how the images reflect, change, or remove what the reader finds in the text.

Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

In 2009, Mary Cappello published a memoir that bravely, and intimately, focused on her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and “cure.” This prize-winning book has now been rereleased with an afterword by the author. The text is timely, given our national and world focus on health, disease, death, and immortality, sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic.Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry laid out the theoretical underpinnings for Cappello in the late 1970s and 1980s, and physician/writers have long animated American readers, particularly Abraham Verghese and Oliver Sacks. Cappello's book is neither theoretical nor “medical”: she is a forceful writer of nonfiction; she is an extraordinarily insightful reader of literature; she is deeply in love with her partner—she is in love with everything, especially the life that took on renewed meaning after her cancer diagnosis.So this is really a book about love. And gratitude. The author reminds us constantly of her privileged position on the battlefield of cancer—as a professional woman with health insurance, a woman with a supportive family and many friends; and she dedicates the book to the ordinary people who helped her heal: the acupuncturist, the hairdresser, the massage therapist, the physical therapist, all of whom gently guided her recovery. The literature in the text is introduced with skill and calm and without fanfare or pretension. There is a heavy reliance on Proust—the patient brought Swann's Way with her into the operating theater—and reports how, right before surgery, “My anesthesiologist recited lines from Proust that were his favorite” (43).The book is crisp in organization and completely unsentimental. Four sections map the cancer voyage in chronological order. Cappello directs the reader from “Diagnosis” to “Surgery,” “Chemotherapy,” and “Radiation.” Each segment of her specific (but not uncommon in terms of treatment protocol) cancer journey is written as a separate chapter. The final section, the coda, is entitled “Called Back: The Voyage Out,” and the author recounts a simple, moving story of the day she's essentially “released’ from treatment following a clear 2008 mammogram. “You live your life,” instructs Cappello's surgeon, “and leave the monitoring to me” (207). Everyone deserves this level of humane care and attention from a health-care professional.Called Back should find again a wide readership—in this new, updated edition—among women undergoing breast cancer treatment. But anyone facing the uncertainty of a scary diagnosis, multiple surgeries, and treatment with toxic chemicals and radiation will benefit from Cappello's clear-eyed nonfiction narrative. Physicians—to gain added perspective on the fear, courage, and resilience of their patients—might spend some time with this book, which should be required reading for medical students.As of late April 2022, we close in on one million reported deaths in the United States from COVID-19, and it's safe to say that the entire nation has been transfixed and, to some degree, transformed by a deadly pandemic that waxes and wanes. The virus has forced us to rethink, totally, the society we live in. “We read and write,” asserts Cappello, “to interrupt the daily tale we tell ourselves” (125). Her generosity, her truthfulness, and the love that pours from her pages helps all readers imagine and construct a better tale—a more hopeful tale—even in times of great uncertainty.