Non-linear Narrative Research Articles

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.

Double-crossing Time: Pinter Roughs Up the Past

Abstract One productive way to interpret Pinter's Betrayal as emanating from and building on the modernist tradition of what Suzanne Guerlac calls “thinking in time” is through a Benjaminian lens in which a traumatic confrontation triggering the sudden shifts in reverse chronology disrupts the expectations of realism. Pinter relies on a disruptive nonlinear narrative that moves toward disillusion and revelation, denies the distortion of nostalgia, and culminates in reclaiming what was lost and fixing what was found forever in his art.

From the Editors

From the Editorstânisi kiyawôw June Scudeler June Scudeler nitisiyihkâson. nichâpanak Red River Manitoba, Batoche Saskatchewan êkwa Castelfrance- Veneto, Italy ohci niya. My maternal Métis ancestors come from Red River, Manitoba, in what is now known as Winnipeg, Batoche, Saskatchewan, and my father is from Castelfranco Veneto, Italy. I am honored to live and work on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), and Tsleil- Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) Nations. I am excited to be the new coeditor at Studies in American Indian Literatures and to work with Siobhan Senier; its editorial board; and its editorial assistants, Jeremy Carnes and Shanae Aurora Martinez. My research is at the intersections of queer Indigeneity, Indigenous ways of knowing, literature, and film. My current project explores Indigenous Gothic, horror, and science fiction film and literature. Being the 2017–20 Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University and term assistant professor in First Nations studies enables me to pursue these various research and community interests. I have chapters in Performing Indigeneity (Playwrights Canada Press) and Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (University of Arizona Press) and articles in Native American and Indigenous Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Although most Indigenous people do not acknowledge national boundaries, the reality is that there is often a disconnect between Indigenous literatures in the Americas. I hope to bring more linkage to Indigenous literatures in Canada to SAIL. In 2013 I attended the first- ever Indigenous Editors Circle workshop in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on Treaty 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation. We pondered how to "Indigenize" publishing. What does it mean to treat manuscripts like gifts? How do we center Indigenous literatures? What do ethical [End Page vii] approaches to Indigenous literatures entail? The Indigenous Literary Studies Association, founded in 2013 at the University of British Columbia on Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) territory, provides a motivating governing code on its website: To honour the history and promote the ongoing production of Indigenous literatures in all forms; to advance the ethical and vigorous study and teaching of those literatures; to reaffirm the value of Indigenous knowledges and methodologies within literary expression and study; to foster respectful relationships within and between academic and non- academic communities; to facilitate mentorship and professional development; and to advocate for responsible institutional transformation. The 1991 ASAIL bylaws state that the purpose of the organization is "to promote study, criticism, and research on the oral traditions and written literatures of Native Americans; to promote the teaching of such traditions and literatures; and to support and encourage contemporary Native American writers and the continuity of Native oral traditions." While the field of literary studies has changed and evolved, the similarities between the principles, which are twenty- two years apart, still ask us to honor wâhkôhtowin, or the Cree concept of kinship or interrelatedness. In other words, how are we good relatives to Indigenous literatures? This issue questions how the past impacts the future and how stories of and by Indigenous people counteract dominant narratives. More importantly, rather than reacting to colonization, how are Indigenous people writing their own narratives? Of course, dominant narratives always need to be challenged, but some of the essays place the onus on non- Indigenous people to do the necessary work of decolonization. ________ Salma Monani's "The Cosmological Liveliness of Terril Calder's The Lodge: Animating Our Relations and Unsettling Our Cinematic Spaces" explores how bringing together ecocinema and Indigenous studies, particularly in animated works, illustrates how Métis filmmaker Calder's stop- motion film asks us to rethink boundaries between the human and other- than- human worlds. Most importantly, Calder's film is a specifically Métis film in its critique of the Eurowestern objectification of other- than- humans and its use of nonlinear narratives. [End Page viii] Similarly, in "Inhabiting Indianness: Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and the Phenomenology of White Sincerity," Zachary S. Laminack employs an underutilized critical lens to argue that Alexie's novel "takes aim" at white masculinity. Moving...

Chanson douce

Combined with rigid dialogue, The Ninety-Ninth Floor becomes hard to bear at times. Whether it is the translation, the original text, or a combination, the lack of vernacular intervenes with the dizzying nonlinear narrative, while excessive allegory creates a limited scope for literary exploration . As a result, the recurring themes of lost identity, alienation, and displacement become redundant. The best thing about literature is that you can write about anything. As potent as Elhassan’s subject is, The Ninety-Ninth Floor fails to evoke an emotional response beyond existing works on the same subject. Sherif Dhaimish London Martin Felipe Castagnet. Bodies of Summer. Trans. Frances Riddle. Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 2017. 105 pages. The central concept of Bodies of Summer is a good one: what if, after death, your consciousness uploaded to the Internet, where you could either float around with other disembodied souls or choose to “burn” yourself into a new body? The possibilities seem endless. For the first third of Martin Felipe Castagnet ’s debut novel, the author delights in the prospects of a world where the afterlife has become a tangible reality. Of course, some people are killing themselves en masse, but of course others aren’t. The ability to place your consciousness into a new body, a new sex, a new race is ripe for investigation, and Castagnet writes through those rabbit holes with deft, spare prose that borders on the laconic. Ramiro has been dead for some time. He eventually uploads himself into a new body, that of a middle-aged woman, in the interest of confronting an old friend. He sees his son, now senile on his deathbed. He bonds with his fully grown grandchildren . He looks into the lives of his ex-wife’s second family. He follows a man who uploaded himself back into his own body. He swelters in the heat. Throughout the book, that sense of oppression looms. Strange for a book so light to feel so crushing and heavy. That, in itself, is quite an accomplishment. Then, somewhere halfway through, the narrative seems to lose interest, which is, in itself, also a remarkable occurrence for such a short book. The novel raises questions on every page, questions of race and gender and sexuality and propriety. It moves quickly, and it’s very well written, but under all that pressure and heat there seems to be something of a shrug. Maybe that’s for the best; maybe simply presenting these weird what-ifs is enough in itself. J. David Osborne Tigard, Oregon Leïla Slimani. Chanson douce. Paris. Gallimard. 2016. 226 pages. The novel that won the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 2016 begins on a grim note: “The baby is dead.” Most of the ensuing narrative is recounted in the form of an extended flashback, with occasional tangents devoted to minor characters. The grimness of the opening section is quickly relieved by relatively bland descriptive passages about a typical French middle-class couple, Myriam and Paul, who are trying to balance the pressures and time constraints of their respective careers while raising their two young children. They decide to hire a nanny and quickly choose the middle-aged and recently widowed Louise who, despite being estranged from her own daughter, has an uncanny ability to interact with children. While Myriam and Paul are busy at work, Louise not only takes up most of the activities linked to raising their children but also starts to manage their household, rearranging and cleaning their apartment, taking care of the shopping and cooking, etc. Myriam and Paul are delighted: Louise is not only able to soothe their children and make them behave; she also relieves the couple of most of the burden of household chores. Louise, who seems to have no life of her own, becomes an essential part of the family, even accompanying them during their summer vacation. However, she never really loses her status as an unknown outsider. While Louise remains active and essential to the functioning of the family unit, she seems to be invisible, to have no desires or needs of her own. In this sense, the class distinction between the upwardly mobile family and the impoverished servant...

An Exploratory Method for an Alternative Narrative of Housing History in Istanbul

Analysis and visualization of spatial data has proven to be an effective tool in communicating apparent or latent spatial information in an efficient way. Here a specific data processing and visualization method is employed in creating an original base for a nonlinear historical narrative of a specific urban phenomenon. Housing development in Istanbul is selected as a case to be explored through a heuristic method involving correspondence analysis (COA) complemented by clustering methods and Bertin's graphics theory. COA is an exploratory method for cross-tabular data analysis, which facilitates the interpretation of data by visualizing the relative relationship between its variables. Two sets of data on the shares of the state, the private sector, and housing cooperatives in housing development in Istanbul between 1987 and 2007 have been processed by COA. The outputs of the process are correspondence maps and Bertin graphics. Maps create a basis for a spatiotemporal analyses of public and private housing development in Istanbul, while revealing certain relation networks and breaks in housing history that are not quite perceptible by looking at the data tables only. Thus, drawing upon the discoveries from the maps, a nonlinear narrative of housing history is proposed as a collection of several thorough analyses of the discoveries within the economic, political, and social setting particular to this geography.

<em>Bayonetta</em>: A Journey through Time and Space

<em>Bayonetta</em>: A Journey through Time and Space

Uprooting genealogy in G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica

G.B. Tran’s graphic memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010) is a text marked by fragmentation: from its non-linear narrative to its cover image of many deconstructed faces held within the disconnected pieces of a dissolving puzzle, the memoir’s most compelling trope is of brokenness. Tran’s family is broken – compromised by occupation and colonialism, severed by a nation at war and fractured by the trauma of displacement as refugees from their home in Vietnam. This article asserts, however, that non-linearity, deconstruction and visual tropes of fracture are strategies towards envisioning the migrant memory as a generative space that promises constant reconnection to the world, rather than defining it as a space bereft of its roots.

Material

Material

The e ‐ Narrated Self

A common question asked about the web 2.0 by the offline population is: "What do people do there?" The paper addresses this question with respect to Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory of the self. According to his essay Life in Quest of Narrative, a person drifts through time experiencing events happening to them, but none of it is actually lived when it is not "recounted" or "storied". In this light, "storytelling may be said to humanise time by transforming it from an impersonal passing of fragmented moments into a patter, a plot ,a mythos". Blogs and sites like Facebook represent the most recent development in the human attempt to weave this "mythos". A profile page and a tweet are first and foremost stories that appear to its critics "truncated or parodied" by design "to the point of being called micro-narratives or post-narratives", and to it s advocates"multi-plotted, multi-vocal and multi-media". The paper introduces notions of e-Self and e-Narrative, examines their dangers and benefits, and concludes that "the advent of cyber-culture should be seen not as a threat to storytelling but as a catalyst for new possibilities of interactive, non-linear narration".

Estrategias Transmedia y enunciación desde los márgenes: El universo narrativo de The Undocumented, Marco Williams, 2013.

El auge de las narrativas no lineales multimedia, ha propiciado un aumento exponencial de la producción de contenidos audiovisuales que exploran las potencialidades discursivas asociadas al tipo de consumo visual contemporáneo caracterizado por la reticularidad y conectividad del medio, la transmedialidad, la posibilidad de interacción, de geolocalización, de navegación, la movilidad de las pantallas, la atomización de las audiencias o la fragmentación del relato.En este contexto multiforme, se abre un espacio para ciertos proyectos independientes de carácter transmediático que despliegan sus propuestas significantes como un modo de poner en cuestión los mecanismos propios de la representación, de llevar más allá de la referencialidad discursiva sus creaciones, de proponer un marco interpretativo alternativo al hegemónico desde el que el interactor pueda construir su propia interpretación del universo narrativo. En este caso, nos detendremos en el estudio y análisis del proyecto The undocumented (Marco Williams, 2013), cuya estrategia discursiva principal estriba en la triple materialización del producto: un documental cinematográfico transmedia que complementa la narración fílmica con una aplicación interactiva multimedia on line The map of the undocumented y el videojuego crítico The migrant trail. La hibridación de formatos y medios propone el camino para una reflexión metalingüística y política, con (y desde) estas nuevas formas audiovisuales, dirigidas a aquellos espectadores dispuestos a sumergirse en experiencias narrativas activas que se extienden indefinidamente.

Heroes of the Open (Third) World: Killing as Pleasure in Ubisoft’s Far Cry Series

Heroes of the Open (Third) World:Killing as Pleasure in Ubisoft’s Far Cry Series Christopher B. Patterson (bio) From the back of a decommissioned army truck, I observe the white crescent peaks of Kyrat, a fictional war-torn country modeled after Nepal. The beauty of the landscape is disrupted by border guards armed with AK-47s, who toss my United States passport in the mud before mercilessly gunning down my travel companions. Their despotic leader, Pagan Min, takes a selfie of us with his blood-soaked hand, showing me that I look like the locals: black hair, darkened skin, an Asian American returned to the homeland (see fig. 1). As the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” plays in the background, Min spirits me to his palace to eat crab rangoon from a table decorated in monkey heads while we admire a breathtaking view of what appears to be the Nepalese valley. I follow the groans of a rebel leader being tortured by electric wires, and after a blurred rush of explosions and gunfire, I am whisked away again, this time to a mountain village decorated with Tibetan prayer flags strung up alongside traditional skirts, dresses, and cotton jackets hung to dry. There I meet Amita, a gorgeous faction leader with a South Asian accent, who offers me the first real challenge of the video game I am playing: “We’re in the middle of a fucking war,” she says. “We don’t need tourists.” I witness this experience while immersed in the 2014 open world game Far Cry 4.1 The images of the snowcapped Himalayas are products of a Radeon graphics card leveled to operate at 1080 pixels, its code-rendering firepower pushing pixels of both Nepalese art murals and the gore of a soldier stabbed in the neck by Pagan Min’s pink pen. I experience these scenes while sitting in the comfort of a living room couch, anchored to one spot by a game controller tied to a television set, speakers, and consoles. In the game I am Ajay Ghale, both a gun-toting killer seeking vengeance for my father and an Asian American tourist looking for my roots. As a diasporic returnee, I am co-opted by my family history to fight for rebel factions using a multitude of military weapons, all while hang gliding, zip-lining, cliff jumping, and hunting endangered species (see fig. 2). Indeed, my avatar’s Asian American identity—meant to be played primarily by white users—enables me to undertake militaristic acts while fulfilling [End Page 769] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Far Cry 4: Selfie with Ajay Ghale and Pagan Min. Screenshot by author. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Far Cry 4: Hang glider near rebel village. Screenshot by author. [End Page 770] a diasporic debt to my family, my home, and my nation. Then there is the real me: a Filipino American gamer who has grown accustomed to playing games as a white hero and has tolerated many uncomfortable reiterations of Asian stereotypes in games. Will this game, which also promises to give me the pleasure of killing, be any different from the others? Like Far Cry 4, more and more open world games are now taking place in the global South. They commonly feature white male protagonists who are positioned to kill thousands of enemies and save brown locals while participating in tourist fantasies that include hunting game, water sports, and hang gliding. These games are “open” in that they give the player a sense of freedom in choosing his or her own path and follow nonlinear narratives. They are large in the sense that they contain elements of other genres: driving, first-person shooters, role-playing, mini-games, flying games, and text-based romance. The first open world games took place in farcical settings (the faux New York of Grand Theft Auto III), but since the peak of the Iraq War, more of these open world games have taken place in “exotic” locales. In Crysis (2007), the player investigates a space-alien structure just off the eastern Philippines coast, while in Dead Island (2011...

“Because if we don’t talk about it, how are we going to prevent it?”: Lucidity, a narrative-based digital game about sexual violence

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an interactive, narrative-based, multimedia game to promote learning and communication about sexual violence and health topics. High school-aged participants created the game concept in a three-week workshop, after which assets were assembled and refined by a university-based game design lab. The outcome, Lucidity, was a multimedia game with a nonlinear narrative that led to two different outcomes based on player decisions. The narrative followed the life of one character, an African American woman named Zaria who remembers and grapples with a sexual assault from her past. The player discovers parts of the story by reading comics, watching videos, navigating interactive websites and playing short videogames. The final evaluation consisted of gameplay, a post-game focus group and follow-up interviews. Twenty-four young people participated in three focus group discussions (n = 9, n = 5, n = 10); 23 participated in the follow-up interviews. Salient themes identified in the focus group discussions included: overall approval of the game, the acquisition of new knowledge and minimal past exposure to conversations or education about sexual violence. At follow-up, almost all (n = 22) had initiated a conversation about sexual violence with a parent, peer and/or teacher. Lucidity succeeded in engaging young people and facilitating communication with adults and peers regarding sexual violence and other sexual health topics. Ultimately, a game-based intervention such as this represents a feasible approach for introducing issues of sexual violence, with potential for future implementation in educational settings.

In search of lost space: The process of space planning through remembering and history

This article explores the role of remembering and history in the process of planning new spaces. We trace how the organizational remembering of past spaces enters the conception (i.e. planning) of a large culture center. By drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s reflections on history, time and memory, we analyze the processual interconnections of his spatial triad, namely between the planned, practiced, and lived moments of the production of space. We find that over time space planning involves recurrent, changing, and contested narratives on ‘lost spaces’, remembering happy spaces of the past that articulate a desire to regain them. The notion of lost space adds to our understanding of how space planning involves, through organizational remembering, a sociomaterial and spatiotemporal work of relating together different spaces and times in non-linear narratives of repetition.

Outside the Four Corners: Exploring Non­-Traditional Scholarly Communication

Traditional outputs of scholarly communication, such as monographs and journal articles are being supplemented by new forms of scholarship, particularly in fields such as digital humanities. Canadian university libraries have long played a role supporting the creation, distribution, and preservation of scholarly objects. That support must be extended to include new formats and modes of scholarly work, such as digital portfolios, non-linear narratives, social media, scholarly video journals, etc. As the means of production and forms of scholarly output diversify, libraries will need to understand the impact of these digital shifts and identify areas where library efforts can have the most influence. This article examines developing areas of non-traditional scholarly communication and discusses implications for members of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL).

Historical time in Tony Oursler's media arts

Stemming from the 1980s up to the present, the media arts by American artist Tony Oursler have characteristically featured new artistic configurations of spatiotemporal movement, lack of association between audiovisual elements, nonlinear narratives, immersion in emotive images and expansion outside institutional spaces. These decentralized and antihierarchical pictorial experiences have expanded the idealized experiences of the visual regimes of Western traditions in the fashion of new media and installation art. The essay will examine Oursler's adaptation of experimental processes of remediation, which rely on the repetition of different media elements and the subversion of entertainment industry imagery and techniques. The essay will examine how, by the means of experimentation with new media technologies, the artist creates new modes of audience experience, which challenge established notions of temporality and of historical time. The essay will situate these works in the historical and philosophical contexts of avant-garde art. The essay will argue that Oursler's formalizations of temporality in new media offer a new model for reconsidering historical time, which extends historicist accounts of cultural production and their respective politics of spectatorship and audience reception. This artistic reconsidering opens up to a radical rethinking of the sociopolitical significance of contemporary media arts, as formalized by new technologies, within the sphere of public culture.

Reprises textuelles dans The Dew Breaker d’Edwidge Danticat

In her recent novel, The Dew Breaker (2004), Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat weaves together the lives of her bruised Haitian characters and their torturer, a former Tonton Macoute, all gone into exile in the US. Seven of the nine chapters were previously published as separate short stories and have been rearranged to form a novel. The reader is then led to unravel a narrative tangle made of many threads. The disparate nature of the book, its non-linear narrative, the plurality of stories and voices, the gaps in a fragmented, elliptic text all partake of an alternative approach to creative writing. Like a seamstress, the novelist pieces together individual stories, connecting them as the multifarious facets of a great whole. In the wake of francophone Haitian writers (namely Jacques Roumain, the author of Masters of the Dew, or Jacques Stephen Alexis who wrote General Sun, My Brother), Edwidge Danticat fictionalizes the traumatic history of a people confronted with violence and terror and engages in a complex intertextual play. Combining ethics and aesthetics, temporal and textual memory, the novelist explores facts and, rather than give answers, raises difficult questions. Her characters, whether victims or perpetrators, all strive to free themselves from a haunting past : is it ever possible to forgive so as to heal the pain ? Can one make amends for the harm that has been done to victims who seek redress ?