Set Of Stories Research Articles

Which moral exemplars inspire prosociality?

ABSTRACT Some stories of moral exemplars motivate us to emulate their admirable attitudes and behaviors, but why do some exemplars motivate us more than others? We systematically studied how motivation to emulate is influenced by the similarity between a reader and an exemplar in social or cultural background (Relatability) and how personally costly or demanding the exemplar’s actions are (Attainability). Study 1 found that university students reported more inspiration and related feelings after reading true stories about the good deeds of a recent fellow alum, compared to a famous moral exemplar from decades past. Study 2A developed a battery of short moral exemplar stories that more systematically varied Relatability and Attainability, along with a set of non-moral exemplar stories for comparison. Studies 2B and 2C examined the path from the story type to relatively low stakes altruism (donating to charity and intentions to volunteer) through perceived attainability and relatability, as well as elevation and pleasantness. Together, our studies suggest that it is primarily the relatability of the moral exemplars, not the attainability of their actions, that inspires more prosocial motivation, at least regarding acts that help others at a relatively low cost to oneself.

In Praise of Refusing the Questions

In Praise of Refusing the Questions

Editor’s Pick: Kwon Yeo-sun

Editor’s Pick:Kwon Yeo-sun Michelle Johnson Click for larger view View full resolution Kwon Yeo-sun Lemon Trans. Janet Hong Other Press Enduring Words from Two NSK Prize Laureates “Remember, friends, that our task, as persons who know that children are real people, is to make common cause with those who are the losers. We must not, for their sake, surrender to despair or cynicism. Instead, staring into the very face of over-weening power, of sinful greed and criminal indifference, let us join hands to become the unlikely, dancing heroes of the long defeat.”—Katherine Paterson, 2007 NSK Prize Laureate, “Fighting the Long Defeat,” WLT 82, no. 2 (May 2008) Click for larger view View full resolution KATHERINE PATERSON, 2007 NSK LAUREATE, WITH KATHY NEUSTADT, SUSAN NEUSTADT SCHWARTZ, AND NANCY BARCELO Click for larger view View full resolution 2019 NSK LAUREATE MARGARITA ENGLE PHOTO © SHEVAUN WILLIAMS “You are a bridge to the future. You are the only possible peacemakers, the only environmental superheroes, the only rescuers of nature, and the only hope for a just society based on honesty, equality, and kindness. . . . We don’t know what is possible in the future, but we do know that we need poetry, the language of hope.”—Margarita Engle, 2019 NSK Prize Laureate, “Two Cultures, Two Wings,” WLT 94, no. 1 (Winter 2021) LEMON BEGINS LIKE many crime dramas: someone’s been murdered and the police are interrogating a suspect. Well, the victim’s younger sister is imagining that interrogation—“By imagine, I don’t mean invent”—and already on page 1 we know this isn’t a typical police procedural. An exceptionally beautiful eighteen-year-old girl has been murdered in 2002, the year Korea hosted the FIFA World Cup. (I mention her beauty because it’s a preoccupation of our narrators.) “On July 1 in the afternoon, Hae-on’s body was discovered in a flowerbed in a park not far from the school. She’d been found with blunt force trauma to the head. The school was turned upside down, engulfed in shock that couldn’t compare to the hype of the World Cup.” Each of the eight chapters is from one of three perspectives of varying reliability—at least if the reader is seeking facts. Three women drop clues while revealing more about how the crime has affected others, particularly the victim’s younger sister, their mother, and the two men who were once, when in school, suspects. With no eyewitness, a solid alibi, and a lack of evidence to solve the High School Beauty Murder, the case goes cold. With no trial, no court ever issues a judgment. And without that judicial declaration of truth, those close to the victim are left to investigate the case on their own and deal with their grief in disturbing, imaginative ways. Eventually, we wonder which crime we’re solving. Without giving anything away, this makes the novel intricately chilling and hard to put down. A spare novel of 147 pages, I was first drawn to it by its bright yellow cover designed by Kathleen Digrado. Though Kwon Yeo-sun received the Sangsang Literary Award in 1996 for her debut novel, Niche of Green, this is her first novel available in English, thanks to the elegant work of translator Janet Hong. The Korean original appeared in 2019. The book held my interest thanks to both the plotting and the authoritative, original means of expression. Here’s an example: “My mother hit my sister. Not frequently, and not as a consequence of wrongdoing, but in a sudden outburst, like a sneeze.” The novel does, as billed, evoke Parasite: economic inequality plays a recurring role. It is also, as we expect, a story set in motion by a crime. Ultimately, though, it is less a whodunnit than a What Did She (younger sister Dae-on) Do and How Did She (the author) Do it. [End Page 35] Michelle Johnson Managing & Culture Editor Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Using Conceptual Models in Agile Software Development: A Possible Solution to Requirements Engineering Challenges in Agile Projects

Studies on requirements engineering with Agile methods for software development have shown difficulties in managing the quality of the requirements and communicating with users. Some of these studies have proposed conceptual modeling as a solution to these problems. However, the effort that is required to create conceptual models conflicts with Agile values. In this paper, we propose an approach for using conceptual models in projects while adhering to Agile principles. This approach focuses on projects in which requirements are expressed as user stories that are the main artifacts of the requirements used for software development with Agile methods. First, the paper presents a literature review in which we have systematically searched for the challenges to requirements engineering with Agile methods. Next, we report on a survey study in which we interviewed 16 experts in the Agile methodology to confirm the identified challenges and find new ones that are not covered in the literature. Based on a thematic analysis of the challenges, we argue that most of them map to the two main purposes of using conceptual models in software development: improving communication and understanding requirements. To effectively use conceptual models in projects that use the Agile methodology, several conditions must be met, which we make explicit in the paper. The paper ends by illustrating how these conditions can be met demonstrating the models that can be automatically generated from a given set of user stories. This demonstration was subsequently used to obtain feedback from the experts on the perceived benefits of conceptual models in addressing the challenges of requirements engineering.

A Role for Design in Global Health: Making the Concept of Vulnerability Actionable

The social determinants of health approach focuses on factors—apart from biomedical care—that have linked poor health outcomes to questions of socio-economic inequality and social injustice. Social determinants of health are complex and can be difficult to measure; thus, more work needs to be done to support the actionable application of the social determinants of health into global health programming. One possible application is the Pathways vulnerability approach. The Pathways approach consists of a vulnerability framework, population-representative household segmentation solutions, and a set of qualitative stories and insights that bring the framework and the segmentation to life. The goal of this approach is to enable health system actors to stratify their users according to the social, environmental, and cultural vulnerabilities associated with poor health outcomes across a range of reproductive, maternal, newborn child health, nutrition, and women’s health and well-being outcomes. In this viewpoint article, we reflect on the role that we played using design methods to bring a more woman-centered approach to understanding how women are made vulnerable by the social and cultural systems in which they are embedded and the differentiated effect this has on specific health outcomes.

Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels by Rebecca Suter

Reviewed by: Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels by Rebecca Suter Matthew C. Strecher Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels. By Rebecca Suter. University of Hawai'i Press, 2020. 158 pages. ISBN: 9780824882372 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). When Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954) broke into the literary world in 1982 with his maiden work, A Pale View of Hills, it was perhaps only to be expected that this very British author should have been associated by some critics with Japan, the land of his birth. This misconception was not alleviated by the fact that both his first novel and his second, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), are set in Japan, albeit one that exists solely in his imagination. It was perhaps also inevitable that he would be compared to other non-Anglo-Saxon British writers such as Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and Shiva Naipaul, and that he should be pushed at times into the tricky position of "postcolonial" writer (notwithstanding the fact that Japan was never a part of the British colonial empire). Over time, attempts were made to read Ishiguro and his work as a kind of quasi-Japanese literature, as "ethnic" English (meaning, presumably, not "White English"), and as "international," which is probably shorthand for "We have no real idea where this person belongs." Ishiguro presents a conundrum to those who are determined to place him and his fiction into a neatly labeled box. Their efforts are not helped by the fact that Ishiguro himself, on an intellectual level, seems to prefer confounding the labelers, perhaps resenting these efforts to pigeonhole his identity. Does being ethnically Japanese make one culturally Japanese? Does it entitle (or indeed, require) one to become a spokesperson for Japan? These questions clearly troubled Ishiguro in his youth when, like many young persons of color living in a predominantly White society, he appears to have found it preferable to blend in and simply "be English." To be sure, having spent his entire life from the age of five in England, whatever his citizenship (he remained a Japanese citizen until 1983), he had surely earned the right to think of himself as an Englishman if he so chose. But the matter was not quite so simple, even for Ishiguro, whose culturally and linguistically Japanese home life, even in Surrey, sowed images in his mind of a birthplace he could barely remember, much less describe in prose. At best he was able to construct a version of Japan in his mind, not for the purpose of introducing Japan to his readers (what would have been the point of such an introduction?), [End Page 182] but to provide a setting for stories that deal with broader, indeed universal, aspects of the human condition. Perhaps this is why, after setting his first two novels in an imaginary version of Japan, he placed his third, Remains of the Day (1989), in the most quintessentially English setting imaginable: a grand and lordly English mansion, owned by a quintessentially charming and conservative English lord (Lord Darlington), looked after by a quintessentially English butler who believes in all the good old values of good old England. These are the three novels that form the focus of Rebecca Suter's fascinating monograph, Two-World Literature, whose title, one finds, refers to a number of related things. On the superficial level, it is an alternative to the idea of "one-world" literature (or for that matter, one-world thinking), celebrated by some as a triumph of "world" literature, decried by others as yet another invitation for White, Western (and, no doubt, predominantly male) parochialism to become the standard by which all literatures of the world will be measured1 As "one-world literature" appears to be at an impasse, Suter opts for "two-world literature" as a means of understanding Ishiguro and his work. But what exactly does "two-world" mean here? Suter explains it as a way of approaching the external world, perception, memory, description, representation, values, and culture through a multifaceted lens of reference, or as she states it, "the capacity, and the will, to hold different perspectives and to understand reality through...

Significance of Short Story Cycle in Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories: An Analytical Study Using Complexity Theory

Rachel Joyce’s short story collection A Snow Garden and Other Stories (2015) is composed of seven stories which occur during a fortnight of the holiday, Christmas season. The collection uses narrative techniques which make it a unique set of stories. The stories have an urban setting and examine the intricacies of human relationships. The sense of interconnection highlighted by Joyce in the stories elevates it to a short story cycle. A short story cycle consists of individual stories which can stand on their own as complete narratives while also maintaining fictional links running through all the stories. The paper is an attempt to establish A Snow Garden and Other Stories as a short story cycle. It also argues that by narrating the interconnected nature of human lives Joyce’s work is exploring life as a complex system. As a scientific philosophy complexity theory explores the behavior of complex systems including human societies. Complex systems are self-organizing, dynamic, evolving networks that operate without any centralized control; similar to human societies. This paper will apply the principles of complex systems to reveal patterns of human behavior represented in Joyce’s work. .

Роман Джо Аберкромби «Красная страна» как фэнтези-вестерн: особенности жанровой природы

The article analyzes the novel Red Country (2012) written by the outstanding modern British fantasy author Joe Abercrombie. All his works can be characterized as postmodern play with genre conventions and genre mixing. Red Country unites the characteristics of the fantasy and the Western – genres that seem to be incompatible. The aim of the article is to look into how the elements of each of the genres are connected in the novel and how they are transformed in this process. The article gives a short overview of the characteristic features of both fantasy and Western based on works by Russian and foreign researchers. The text of Red Country is analyzed at the levels of plot, conflict, characters, setting, values, and ideology. For this novel, inside the already existing world of his books, Abercrombie creates a new territory organized in accordance with the story setting principles of the Western genre. The writer uses a lot of plot devices characteristic of the Western and some elements of a typical Western character, although depriving him of his traditional mysteriousness by employing a character known from his previous novels. However, most of Red Country’s characters do not conform to the stereotypes about Westerns, and the ideas and values conveyed in the novel undermine those of the Western genre. Responsibility, cooperation, freedom, reprehension of violence come in place of order, lawfulness, masculinity, and self-sufficiency. Such values are much more typical for the fantasy in general and for Abercrombie’s works specifically. The number of Western clichés in the novel itself indicates their unusual interpretation by the author. At the plot level, these shifts create a game with the reader, who is provoked to predict the outcome of events basing on his knowledge of the Western genre. Such expectations are often not met, which creates a strong effect of surprise and arouses more interest in the plot.

“Dr Zhivago” in the Amazon rainforest

The author of the article makes an attempt to verify the veracity of the story set out by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in his poem "Dora Franco". It is about a copy of Doctor Zhivago, which the poet discovered in a small library in the town of Leticia in the Amazon part of Colombia in 1968. The book bore an inscription of the soviet writer Sergei Smirnov. This fact is remarkable not only because Doctor Zhivago was still banned in the USSR, but also because in 1958 it was Smirnov who chaired the meeting of writers which expelled Pasternak from the Writers' Union. Archival searches, analysis of contemporaries' testimony, as well as interaction with a colleague from the Amazonas department made it possible to discover that Sergei Smirnov had indeed visited Leticia several months before Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Together with the translator he attended the same places, performed in the same House of Culture and interacted with the same people (e.g. the famous animal trapper Mike Tsalickis). During this trip to Colombia in 1967 Smirnov often had to answer uncomfortable questions about Pasternak. Nine years after the Pasternak affair, it is clear from newspaper articles that not a trace of aggression remains in the words of the chairman of the "trial", while ego-documents by their contemporaries suggest that Sergei Smirnov regretted the role he had assumed in 1958 for the rest of his life. The research also established that there may have been only one library in Leticia before the 1980s — the House of Culture, which both Smirnov and Yevtushenko mention in their travel reports. Both indirectly confirm that there were no Russian books in it. We couldn't find out whether Doctor Zhivago was the only exception, i.e. was already on the bookshelf, or whether it was brought by Smirnov and the translator N. Bulgakova. However, we were able to confirm that it was a Spanish translation of the book. Since the very book itself has never been found, we cannot unequivocally assert that the inscription of the penitent Smirnov in Pasternak's book is not a figment of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's fiction; however, our research allows us to think that this story did take place.

The ‘Corkscrew’ Journey of an Adaptation: Cultural Mobility in Hammett, Kurosawa, Leone, and Hill

Abstract Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) has long been recognized as a quasi-adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), even if it relates much more closely to Hammett’s short story ‘Corkscrew’ (1925). Yojimbo was remade as the Italian Western Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone. The material finally ‘came home’ when Walter Hill adapted it as Last Man Standing (1996) that returns to the 1920s American desert town setting of the original story. This contribution seeks to examine the inflections of the individual incarnations that the material has undergone on its journey through various cultural contexts. The main argument is that the story of the outsider infiltrating a corrupt town and ‘cleansing’ it by playing off two gangs against each other has lent itself to commentary on transnational cultural exchange and mobility. ‘Corkscrew’ expresses anxiety over the integrity of cultural boundaries, Red Harvest expresses the inherent corruption of a ‘hermetic’ culture, Yojimbo uses the story to highlight the uneasy relation between tradition and Westernization in Japan while simultaneously drawing attention to Kurosawa’s status as ‘Western’ director and embraces a guarded cultural mobility, Fistful of Dollars empties the signs, icons, and narratives that make up the expressions of culture of any essentialist meanings and so stages cultural mobility as the shifting play of signifiers, endlessly transgressing acquired meanings and cultural boundaries, and Last Man Standing, finally, in reclaiming the Americanness of the story simultaneously forgoes any cultural specificity by reducing it to an excessive pastiche of prior elements.

An Aging Nursing Workforce: Thematic Analysis from the Nurstory Project

Background: Nursing in the United States of America is an aging workforce. This study sought to better understand the lived experience of aging nurses. Because nurses work in systems where other forms of interpersonal power dynamics may influence internalized and external stereotype an approach based on intersectional theory was applied. Methods: A qualitative thematic narrative analysis of an existing data set of first-person digital stories in the Nurstory project, authored by a group of nurses, was the data source. An emergent coding method was applied. The collection of five digital stories were analyzed. Results: All stories were first person accounts of experiences that represented their internalized reflections and elements of ageism in how their age interacted with their work environment. Dominant themes included: 1) Role constriction 2) Strength 3) Tired and (re)Tired 4) Age perceived and 5)Loneliness. Conclusions: These aging nursing stories add to the contextual layers of the aging healthcare workplace and aging nursing workforce. These individual experiences offer a nuanced understanding of the internalized responses to aging and ageism. These stories highlight socially constructed and socially reinforced attitudes that are complicated by the personal and occupational expectations of nurse’s work, their role and embedded hierarchies in healthcare. Stories such as these are important individual and collective indicators of lived experiences that offer a deeper understanding into the intersections of social identity and aging, that when listened to, can offer insight and a way forward in addressing the stereotype, discrimination and social inequities of ageism.

Pauline Hopkins’ Literary Egyptology

Abstract Author Pauline Hopkins produced work in a variety of genres: short stories, novels, a musical, a primer of facts. Like other African Americans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she engaged with the history of the Nile Valley before the discipline of Egyptology was firmly established in the sphere of higher education in the US. Her serialized novel Of One Blood, published in 1902 and 1903, draws on a variety of sources, such as the English historian George Rawlinson, to tell a fictionalized story set in the contemporary present of the Upper Nile and to address issues related to the ancient past of that region. Her main character, Reuel, embodies links across time—ancient and contemporary—and space—the United States and the Nile River Valley. Through him, she shows the power and relevance of ancient history to contemporary life.

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Paya Soup

Abstract This short story set in Mumbai imagines the enduring legacies of pandemic sickness and immunity. Everyday labors, pleasures, demands, and relations must be navigated across the fault lines of health, illness, and state surveillance.

Stories at War: Images of Algerian Women From Colonial Accounts to the Life Story of Fadhma Amrouche

This article aims to discuss and analyse a wide array of stories produced in nineteenth century French Algeria and told by different actors about native Algerian women. While some of these stories were written as true-to-life war testimonies about Algerian women told from multifarious angles and perspectives, others were produced in the form of phantasmagorical image-stories about native women as told by Orientalist artists and colonialist photographers. Moving away from these colonial male narratives, the article discusses in juxtaposition the story of the women of Algeria as told by French feminist Hubertine Auclert in her book Les Femmes arabes en Algérie, and a counter story to hers written by Fadhma Aït Mansour Amrouche, as the story of her life, Histoire de ma vie. Bringing these two contrasting sets of stories into discussion and scrutiny will enable us to evaluate the extent to which native women were central to the French conquest and to the French feminists’ agenda of ‘saving them’ from their barbaric people and ways of life. The article aims to discuss the intricacies of such missions and assess the extent to which native Algerian women were saved by their colonisers.

Review Essay—Jhumpa Lahiri: Between Longing and Belonging

Review Essay—Jhumpa Lahiri: Between Longing and Belonging

Ancient Architecture Animation Design Method of 3D Technology and Its Application

Ancient architecture animation design method of 3D technology and its application is discussed in this paper. In the film and television animation production, 3D technology in the computer set a virtual real world, film and television animation creator based on the needs of the story using 3D technology in the virtual world to set the appropriate characters and the scenes, and then follow the structure of the story set The direction of the movement of each model. . In the design process, we not only need to consider main scenic spot, activity area, rest area, every main road, but also need to consider the relation between plane and elevation, through the means such as landscape, the use of view, outstanding subject. In the animation, most of the scenes are both roles and scenes exist, the scene is not only designed to then coordinate with the character design, but also as much as possible to assist and coordinate the activities of the character and emotional performance. The proposed methodology in the paper will help us to improve the traditional design pattern.

Reinterpretation of the Legend of Lake Toba into the Batak Opera Janji Putri Ikan

The creation of the Janji Putri Ikan Batak Opera is an effort to design the Art of Batak Opera which is based on the Batak folklore of the legend of Lake Toba. The design effort is the result of the re-interpretation of the legend of Lake Toba folklore through the transfer approach. The results of the transfer of the vehicle were initially manifested in a new drama play entitled Janji Putri Ikan. The drama play of the Janji Putri Ikan was designed by retaining the plot as found in the folklore of the legend of Lake Toba but changing it from a folklore format to a drama play format with a formulation or play style adapted for the purposes of designing the Batak Opera. The designer of the play is done by making changes to the structural aspects of folklore which are interpreted deconstructively in the meaning of the structure. The placement of the opposite meaning of the structure ultimately has an impact on significant changes in the characterization aspect, the dramatic aspect and also the story setting aspect as contained in the structure of the legend of Lake Toba folklore. Thus, the design of the Janji Putri Ikan Batak Opera is more than just an adaptation work but is a complete application of the concept of transfer from the regional literary genre (folklore) to the creation of the Batak Opera. This means that the final embodiment of this creation is the Batak Opera performance with the play Janji Putri Ikan. This work is supported by 15 players consisting of actors, dancers, and musicians, which will be performed at the local or national level. The product of this research is a work of theater art, as an appreciation material for students and the community. This work is made in Brechtian form in a realist concept.

Of Epicene Particles and Other Misleading Tricks

“Carta perdida en un cajón” [Letter lost in a drawer] is a paradigmatic example of simultaneous ambiguities at work in Silvina Ocampo’s fiction (1903–1993). In this short story published in 1959, pronouns and shifters, as well as endings that mark gender cooperate to erase certainties and make the reader actively seek clues to understand the exchange the short story sets up. By scrutinizing its manuscript, I examine Ocampo’s writing and revision strategies and elaborate on some of her creative processes in her search for ambiguity. Through five key compositional moves I have identified in her manuscripts, my essay focuses on how Ocampo revises and ramps up the writerly effect of gender ambiguity that allowed the construction of queer identities in her fiction. I argue that the insertion of epicene particles and insults — which are less common in Spanish than gendered ones — , added at later stages of revision, demonstrate the intentional pursuit of a reading marked by confusion around the depiction of a non-normative desire. Genetic criticism allows us to reveal the painstaking process by which queer desire nudges its way into expression.

Ghosts, murder and mutation: The portrayal of pandemics in children’s and YA fiction

The coronavirus pandemic has stimulated a number of texts, which are aimed at helping children to cope with situations alien to them. For example, the picture book Staying Home by Sally Nichols and Vivienne Schwarz (2020) deals with the conditions of lockdown and family isolation, whilst Piperpotamus by Annis Watts endeavours to explain COVID-19. This pandemic is not the only such event in history. The Black Death swept across Europe (1347–51) followed by the Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20). Both of these have stimulated historical fiction for older children and Young Adults and have done so by employing differing literary approaches. For instance, Cat Winters’ In the Shadow of Blackbirds (2013) incorporates a ghost story set against the contexts of séances and spirit photographers as the bereaved hope to gain comfort, whilst Charles Todd’s An Unmarked Grave (2012) is a murder mystery. Dystopian science fiction has also been employed to examine the equivalent circumstances of such pandemics. The plague in Gone (2008–14) by Michael Grant follows a nuclear disaster, which has produced a world where only those under fifteen have survived beneath a dome created by a young autistic child at the point of the explosion. Unforeseen forces have erupted resulting in mutation where individuals have supernatural powers taking them into a posthuman state. Their world is later blighted by plague and the children have to deal with remaking their lives and their society without the help of adults. This article will consider the various ways that such texts have approached these world-changing disasters and the common themes, which emerge to give our current generation of children ways of thinking about their present and their future.