Original Short Story Research Articles

Manipulating Metacognition in Witness for the Prosecution

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), can manipulate their viewers into believing something that they, on some level, know cannot be true. In this case, viewers accept the not guilty verdict by the jury even though “the facts in the case” are “simple” and point to the guilt of the defendant. I show how different versions of Witness for the Prosecution—from Agatha Christie’s original short story (1925) and her subsequent play based on that story (1953), to the Hollywood film (1957), and the BBC mini-series (2016)—trigger our reflective beliefs about the defendant’s innocence, so that we find the verdict satisfying (at least for a short while). I conclude by considering literary payoffs of this manipulation, especially in the context of a culture that subscribes to a view of the mind as, in principle, knowable, and thus readable by skillful others.

중국과 한국의 영화 각색 사례에 나타난 텍스트 확장성과 의미론적 체계 연구

This paper is a study that started from the fact that in the production and formation of new content, not only the remediation of the original source, but also the relationship of mutual content influence between countries is constantly being considered. We will focus on cases where the novel was remade into a movie, then moved to a country, and then remade into a movie. Annie Baobei's novel 『Qiyue and Ansheng(七月与安生)』 was remade into the Chinese movie <Soulmate(七月與安生)> directed by Zeng Guoxiang(曾國 祥). In Korea, it is reborn as <Soulmate> directed by Min Yong-geun, and the characteristics of media transformation and adaptation revealed in this process are extracted. As novels are adapted into films, changes are accompanied by differences in narrative style and video media. In particular, it shows the characteristics of transformation and adaptation in the form of narrative loosely integrating not only the original short story but also several other short stories. This goes beyond the 'faithful adaptation' of the original work and materializes the generational critical mind of 'Beifiao', which is different from the original work, through the change of viewpoint and the expansion of narrative details. Meanwhile, the secondary creations made in this way are remade again in Korea, and in this third creation, more emphasis is placed on the characterization of the characters, breaking away from the 'faithful adaptation' of the existing films. In addition, while bringing the womance of female characters and generational critical mind, it is reset to fit the reality of Korea in the 2020s. In this process, it shows a critical look at the situation in which the problem of the gap between the rich and the poor and the value of vulgar success are particularly problematic for female characters. Through the adaptation work according to such media transformation, each creation shows a different point of view while sharing one original narrative. As the process of adapting the original work overlaps and expands through stages, the works acquire their own unique aesthetic system and thematic direction. This overturns the hierarchical relationship of original narratives in comparative studies and shows that adaptation can function as a free creative work without being conscious of anxiety about influence.

Vasyl Stefanyk and the German Literature (on the question of typology of translations and original short story heritage of the Ukrainian writer)

Aim. The idea of the article stems from an insufficient number of scientific investigations that would help to better understand the creative engagement in the German literature of the young Ukrainian master of narrative V. Stefanyk, who had a deep understanding of the problem of mutual enrichment of aesthetic perception by means of translation as one of important aspects of literary relations. He himself creatively perceived other writers’ achievements, thus placing the Ukrainian literature on an adequate pan-European spiritual level. The purpose of this research is to supplement the existing explorations with the studies of German parallels in V. Stefanyk’s creative work. Methods. For comparative analysis, a number of scientific research methods have been applied, such as the historical-literary, typological and biographical approaches. Results. For translation, a translator usually selects those creative works that are closest to him, that correspond to his aesthetic preferences, and are consonant with the author’s mood. Though V. Stefanyk’s German-language literature translation heritage is scarce, it nevertheless witnesses the Ukrainian short-story writer’s awareness of the world literary process, his constant search for creative works close to his own literary sentiments, in particular works on peasant topics, which raise complex moral and social issues. Therefore, his translation activity, though indirectly, contributed to the development of creative literary manner and original unique writing style. Scientific novelty. By means of comparative juxtaposition, the authors analyze the comparative-typological features in creative works of V. Stefanyk and some selected representatives of the German-language literature. Practical significance. Key outcomes of the research can be applied in further investigation of the common motives in short stories and their translations.

The literary genesis of Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt’s film project the Situation of the Wolf (1971–1972)

The study uses Ian W. Macdonald’s concept of the screen idea to reconstruct the literary genesis of the film project The Situation of the Wolf (1971–1972) by screenwriter Pavel Juráček and director Jan Schmidt. The reconstruction is based on a comparison of individual written phases of literary preparation of the intended film – original short story by Jack London, synopsis, short story and literary script. The development of this project was influenced on the one hand by artistic factors, as it was a film adaptation of London’s Alaskan short story The Unexpected (1906) which has some aspects of the western genre and which Juráček, as the author of all texts of literary preparation of the film, had to adapt to the conditions of the film medium. On the other hand, the genesis of the project was fundamentally shaped by the contextual conditions – the sociopolitical situation of Czechoslovakia after the August occupation (1968), which led to the return of totalitarianism and to the normalization of the Czechoslovak cinema.

El embarazao

Original short story in Engish by Isabel Crooke Ellison

Adapting to Loiterly Reading: Agatha Christie’s Original Adaptation of “The Witness for the Prosecution”

Adapting to Loiterly Reading: Agatha Christie’s Original Adaptation of “The Witness for the Prosecution”

A Literary and Cultural Stare of the Red Thread Eka Kurniawan

This study is a literary and cultural stare of the red thread Eka Kurniawan. As a young writer, Eka Kurniawan successfully spawned three novels that brought her name increasingly known in international literature. His works are also considered capable of inheriting a 'moving' literary tradition, in which the literary notions of socialist realism are echoed. As a results The language of Eka in Beauty, an elegant wound, and the wealth of his imagination provided excitement, like joy when he saw the snow falling for the first time. Ben Anderson even mentioned Eka as Pramoedya's replacement. He also mentioned Eka as the novel writer and the most original short story in Indonesia. Eka claimed to imitate Pram's discipline in making story details. Eka's comment? "I'm still far from Pram," Eka said in response to her comparison with Pramoedya. But it was precisely there that was the challenge for Eka to continue working as Ben Anderson and Pramudya had hoped for him.

The Relationships Between Dream Recall, Motivation to Remember Dreams, and Waking Memory Ability

Dream recall ability can vary between and within individuals, dependent on a number of influencing factors, including personality dimensions, number of nocturnal awakenings, and attitudes towards dreaming. Only a few studies, however, consider the possible connection of dream recall ability to general waking memory ability, or the influence of being motivated to actively remember dreams. The present survey-based study had two major aims: 1) To search for correlates and relationships between memory for dreams and memory for waking experience; 2) To address the effect of motivation on dream recall ability, split for both dream recall frequency (DRF) and dream recall detail (DRD). These questions were assessed in 57 participants who completed an online survey, consisting of questions from the Mannheim Dream Questionnaire (MADRE) and a memory exercise for an original short story. DRF and DRD were positively related, but showed different patterns of relation with the other measures. Of most interest, participants who reported high DRD also remembered the most details from the story, suggestive of an overlap between waking and dream recall ability. However, this relationship was non-linear, as the lowest memory score came from the intermediate DRD group, not the low DRD group, hence a non-significant correlation between DRD and score. DRF was unrelated to memory score, with no significant differences between high and low DRF groups, and no significant correlation between measures. This is likely due to the nature of the task being more compatible with memory for details. Correlations showed a consistent relationship between motivation and attitude measures, particularly the motivation to understand dreams. The most important points to be taken away from this study are: 1) there is apparent partial overlap between dream recall and waking memory for details; 2) being actively motivated to remember or understand dreams is an important variable to consider in future experiments; 3) and dream recall should be studied as its constituent parts of frequency and detail.

Outside the box

There has been little scholarly work looking at the use of creative writing pedagogy within non-creative writing courses. However, ‘Outside the box: Incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into non-major literature courses, a case study’ demonstrates promising findings when incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into the curriculum for core English literature courses. This article gives an overview of the Progressive history of ‘creative’ writing in the academy and then outlines contemporary sources that reference the burgeoning field of Creative Writing Studies and how creative writing pedagogy may be used more broadly in classrooms in a variety of disciplines. Then the case study details the assignments and experience of teaching a high stakes creative assignment in a non-major literature course at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. Using 25 representative student responses from among 50 total students over multiple semesters, the article concludes by asserting the findings that the inclusion of a high stakes creative assignment – in this case an original short story that is workshopped by peers and then revised – results in students who note increased confidence and creativity, and who state making connections between the relevance of writing instruction and workshopping to their lives outside of the classroom. While further, more formalized study would be beneficial on this topic, this study provides a useful perspective not just to teachers within the English department but also has ramifications for interdisciplinary scholarship.

The Dark Heart

Abstract ‘The Dark Heart’ is an original short story. The author comments: ‘I have long been intrigued by B. S. Johnson’s approach to writing The Unfortunates, a novel in a box with chapters that were designed to be read in any order, apart from the first and last chapters, which were fixed. However, while I would appear to have followed his example with “The Dark Heart”, in which the sections may be read in any order, apart from the opening and closing sections, in fact, in the writing of the story, I was following the same method I used for In Camera (Negative Press London), a collaboration with artist David Gledhill, for which I wrote self-contained sections one page in length that were then printed in an order that was more or less arbitrary.’

Working with People with Dementia: A Social Worker Uses Creative Writing to Recreate a Life Story

This article offers a social worker’s narrative perspective on working with a client suffering from dementia. The author provides an original short story as the vehicle to piece together the fragments of a person’s life in order to understand and recreate a life that could no longer be articulated. Through creative writing a bridge could be built from what was seen but not understood and help to give meaning to a life which had lost its context.

“The Drover’s Wife”: Celebrating or Demystifying Bush Mythology?

The essay aims to show the cultural, aesthetic and identificatory displacements at work in the successive revisions and reinterpretations of Henry Lawson’s “drover’s wife” figure who became a national icon right away. It is quite interesting to note the surprising abstract and bare nature of both the figure and the bush, even in Lawson’s original short story. They seem to crystallize national character precisely because they leave it rather unspecified and open to interpretation, except as a struggle to cope with one’s adopted land and the acceptance of possible failure.

When Page Won't Go to Stage: Adaptation-Resistant Embryos of Theatricality in Agatha Christie's 'Three Blind Mice' and 'Witness for the Prosecution'

This article discusses two overlooked modes of Agatha Christie’s crime fiction, short story and drama, and analyzes transmodal self-adaptation. Two of Christie’s self-adaptations, The Mousetrap (1952) and The Witness for the Prosecution (1953), prove particularly illuminating in that poetical perspectivee because the clues to the true identity of the culprit, voice and gesture, are highly theatrical. This article shows that objects, as clues and pieces of evidence, do not function similarly in the short stories and their stage adaptations, since Christie’s poetics wrong-foots the reader’s and the audience’s modal assumptions as well as their generic expectations. It also proves that embryos of theatricality, understood as these textual elements supposedly easily adapted from the diegetic mode to the theatrical, are precisely elements that resist adaptation, thus contradicting the definition of theatricality as theatre in gestation, as it were, within the narrative. It thus appears that adaptation is best understood as resistance and that there is no necessary coherence between embryos of theatricality in the short stories and their transposition in the stage adaptations. For instance, the stage version of The Mousetrap experiments a Modernist treatment of space and time that is not to be found in the original short story.

Shutters Open: The Gesture of Photography

The most interesting thing about Saatchi's 2001 publication Am A is not necessarily the content. Any number of the included artists (Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol, and others) could be singled out and discussed at length in multitude of ways. The title itself is what sparks intrigue, but the included essay does little to elaborate on it, claiming that the included artists were part of a breakdown in art's hierarchies of painting and sculpture. (1) While perhaps true, the essay leaves out something that title like Am A insinuates--something far more potent about the act of photography. Am comes from the title of play published in 1951 by John Van Druten. Adapted from short story by Christopher Isherwood called Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the play became feature film in 1955, going on to inspire the well-known musical Cabaret. No version of the story ever received much critical acclaim, but in the first passage of the play, Van Druten gets right to the point. The main character (a writer) struggles to begin his novel, and sits down to write: I am camera, with its shutter open, quite passive. Someday all of this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. (2) Isherwood's original version is slightly different: I am camera, with its shutter open, quite passive--recording, not thinking. (3) Both passages are compelling--Van Druten's is more closely tied to the process of still photography, while Isherwood refers to time-based media. In both cases, the photographic process is paralleled with human observation, and intertwined with the desire to remember. The strength of the passage fades away as the narrative takes over, but the idea has made itself clear: the camera and the gesture of photography are tied to notion of capturing and preserving images, which suggests the notion of preserving memories themselves. This is, of course, rather obvious. Plenty of excavation has occurred along these lines. The notion of memory relating to the act of photography is nothing new; in fact, it can be plainly evident in popular culture. The correlation between the camera and the brain is so widely accepted and understood it becomes cheeky punchline that helps explain the reality of getting older: I have photographic memory, just ran out of film. But it is also something many wrestle with seriously, and sometimes literally--like Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilaal, who in 2010 had camera surgically installed in the back of his head for project called The 3rd I, project that was to last year but was cut short due to physiological complications. Perhaps the idea is bit too literal in Bilaal's case, but it nevertheless serves as an example. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A more philosophical perspective is introduced with the help of the progressive rock band Yes. Their 1980 song Into the Lens was rearrangement of song called I Am A Camera by the Buggies, band whose leading members later became part of Yes. And yes--the song was inspired by Christopher Isherwood's original short story. Yes's version goes like this: I am camera, taken, taken so easily, to pass into glass reality. Transformer, transferring energy. (4) Though this version is certainly more ambiguous, it shows how Isherwood's line has been adapted yet again for conceptual interpretation. Scott Bartlett, an experimental film and video artist in the 1960s, said something rather eloquent: Some memories leave such an indelible mark on the mind that you're sure they will last beyond the brains that housed them. (5) More than binding the brain and camera as mechanically similar, Bartlett talks about the preservation of memory in more intensely metaphysical way. Van Druten's suggestion of preserving what is observed, or Bartlett's idea that memories might outlast physical existence, seem to go beyond the obvious parallels and start more dense conversation. …

Leverets

Abstract By submitting an original short story and an essay exploring its genesis, antecedents and composition, this article explores the creative process in the context of the demands being made upon creative writers to position their writing as research within the UK higher education academy. Whilst pointing to the rigidity of current research models it also indicates the intense subjectivities at play in the reading and realization of fictional forms, discussing both process and affect in doing so.

Gastric-to-intestinal transdifferentiation and cancer

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an original short story authored by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the main character ages in reverse, beginning life as a mature adult (i.e., well-differentiated state) and then progressing inexorably toward a childlike existence (i.e., progenitor state). A molecular counterpart to this process, which frequently occurs during oncogenesis, is transdifferentiation, in which cells transition from a well-differentiated state to a progenitor state, which is then followed by the reemergence of a different cell lineage (i.e., metaplasia). Intestinal-type gastric cancer epitomizes this process during its progression from normal mucosa, to chronic gastritis and atrophy, to intestinal metaplasia, and finally to dysplasia and adenocarcinoma. The annual incidence of gastric cancer is estimated to be 0.1% for patients with atrophy but increases 2.5 fold for patients with intestinal metaplasia, underscoring the premalignant potential of this lesion (1). In PNAS, Fujii et al. provide fresh insights into the molecular underpinnings that regulate the development of intestinal metaplasia within the stomach (2).

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

An original short story for Physics today

O mesmo e o outro: uma leitura ‘dupla’ do conto “92”, de Dalton Trevisan

Based on the principle that Dalton Trevisan recreates a new short story that is concomitantly the same and the other, the present paper analyzes the short stories “92” and "Última corrida de touros em Curitiba". The objective is to demonstrate the way in which this concomitance is built. At the same time, some considerations about the reader's participation in the two short stories' aesthetic effects are made. Analyzing the corpus, results show that the concomitance is due to the author's job of eliminating and leaving textual marks, intentionally or not, which allow the reader to give the text new readings and also to rescue meanings from the original short story

The Game Thing: Ludology and other Theory Games

The current state of computer games studies is critically examined in this paper by means of an analysis of the recently released computer game, The Thing. Game studies is an emerging area of humanities scholarship, an emergence that exhibits characteristically ambivalent processes of defining its own object and staking out its own field of expertise from other areas of academic competence. A principal dynamic of these processes concerns the opposition between ‘ludological’ and narratological theorisations of the computer game. This opposition is examined for both its limitations and its productive potential by means of consideration of The Thing game and its relation to John Carpenter's cinematic iteration of the original short story from which it is adapted. This consideration leads away from the question of the specificity of the computer game object to some concluding speculations about the relation of contemporary computer games to the broader computer culture within which games are taking on an increasingly significant profile.

The Brave New World of the Cyber Speech and Hearing Clinic

The Brave New World of the Cyber Speech and Hearing Clinic