Story Space Research Articles

Traditions and innovations in constructing the anthroponymic space in stories by T.N. Tolstaya

Traditions and innovations in constructing the anthroponymic space in stories by T.N. Tolstaya

Walking Borders, Risk and Belonging

Walking borders, risk & belonging makes a case for using walking as a biographical interviewmethod (WIBM) in order to do critical public pedagogy—using conjunctural analysis—that engagesin unsettling and troubling the white, male privilege and basis of walking, and indeed the‘turn’ to walking rooted in Eurocentric practices. The authors build upon a long history of: i) usingwalking, participatory and arts-based methods (ethno-mimesis) to do social research on migrationwith migrants, and; ii) the importance of creating space for stories of asylum, migration andmarginalisation to be shared and heard through critical pedagogy, critical journalism, and walkingas an arts-based research method.

Interrupting conferences: sex workers and public protest

ABSTRACTThis viewpoint paper considers the relationships between conferences and activism by examining the events surrounding the World’s Oldest Oppression, a conference held in Melbourne, Australia in 2016. This conference attracted swift protest action from local sex workers, much of which was executed online. Drawing from the documentation of these events in blogs, opinion pieces, and social media, this paper develops two observations. First, it situates the World’s Oldest Oppression within a trend toward conferences that blur the lines between academic and activist, and considers its use of feminist pedagogies to make space for marginalised stories. Secondly, it posits a tension between the stories the conference sought to generate and share, and the unsolicited stories of sex workers. Characterising this tension as a clash of counterpublics, it discusses the implications of an activist-oriented conference being met with activism of another kind, arriving unauthorised and unannounced.

Multi-Agent Narrative Experience Management as Story Graph Pruning

In many intelligent interactive narratives, the player controls an avatar while an experience manager controls non-player characters (NPCs). The space of all stories can be viewed as a story graph, where nodes are states and edges are actions taken by the player, by NPCs, or by both jointly. In this paper, we cast experience management as a story graph pruning problem. We start with the full graph and prune intelligently until each NPC has at most one action in every state. Considering the entire graph allows us to foresee the long-term consequences of every pruning decision on the space of possible stories. By never pruning player actions, we ensure the experience manager can accommodate any choice. When used to control the story of an adventure game, players found our technique generally produced higher agency and more believable NPC behavior than a control.

Zeitraum und Raumzeit: Dimensionen zeitlicher und räumlicher Narration im Theater

Zeitraum und Raumzeit: Dimensionen zeitlicher und räumlicher Narration im Theater

The metrics and poetics of historical drama

AbstractThis article analyses four history plays, published between 1837 and 1869 in Sweden and Finland, and asks how the playwrights of the early nineteenth century represented the same premodern episode: the unsuccessful peasant uprising called the Club War (1596–1597). The focus is on the plays’ dramatis personae, and the article will make comparable suggestions of the themes and topics each protagonist brings to the stage. The article studies literary factors that contributed to the persistent afterlife and continuous cultural resonance of these dramatic events, and addresses the dynamics between historical fiction and scholarly history in the production of collectively meaningful pasts. As one of the results the paper demonstrates that a somewhat surprising historical hero surfaced when the 1590s were adapted in the context of a new nationalism. Methodologically the article combines computational distant reading and more traditional close reading to disclose the core characters of each play individually, and, taken together, of the early fictional ‘story space’ of the event. The article argues that even such small‐scale investigations can benefit from the systematic analytical tools offered by digital humanities that can reveal wholly new facets of the texts that more traditional literary history may overlook.

Espacio, acoso y agresor en historias de vida de mujeres

Espacio, acoso y agresor en historias de vida de mujeres

RESPONSE: LISTENING TO NEW VOICES: SILENCE, REPAIR, HYBRIDITY

ABSTRACTIn our response piece we are both listening to and exploring the new scholarship included in the special issue "Listening in Unusual Ways in Unusual Spaces: Ethics, Listening and Place." In doing so, we trace three themes within the issue, as well as offering observations from our own listening context. The themes we identify are the possible harm of "applying silence" to listeners, the restorative quality of story spaces, and the hybridity of sound spaces.

Representing and commoning the refugee crisis: The ‘assemblage’ of the Lesvos Migration Atlas

This article uses a critical lens to examine the various representations of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Lesvos, Greece through both the system of the hotspot regime and the performative acts of commoning, defined as the creation of the commons. It also proposes a process of commoning by the creation of an ‘assemblage’ of the Lesvos Migration Atlas. In this manner, the Atlas as an outcome of the research is itself a representation that embraces theory, narratives, practices, and acts; a visual and symbolic tool that provides space for photographic material, videos, artworks, (re)mappings, everyday stories, and reflective texts. At the same time, it is a collective process of capturing, writing and representing, open to new material and scripts – thus a product in a process of becoming. Overall, the online and interactive Lesvos Migration Atlas can well be approached as an ‘assemblage’ that respects the mobility and contingency of the various crises, representations and acts of commoning. In the Atlas, the refugee crisis, the hotspot regime and the common spaces that have been created are brought together through the emergence and critical confrontation of the multiple representations of Lesvos.

Гетеротопия лагерного Севера в «Колымских рассказах» В. Шаламова

In the article, the cycle of V. Shalamov Kolyma Stories is considered with the help of M. Foucault's theory on heterotopies. The concept of «heterotopia» («another place»), according to the French philosopher, defines specific spaces in which social norms and practices noticeably shift or transform, primarily characterizes GULAG space in Shalamov's stories. In the writer's texts, the entire Soviet penitentiary system of the 1920s-1950s is presented as a hierarchy of «other» places terminated by the labor camp, which is the culmination of the Soviet penitentiary system. All types of space outside the camp (including the «big earth» space) at the same time turn out to be correlated with the topos of the GULAG; their values are determined by place in the repressive hierarchy. A special function in the world of Kolyma Stories is played by the concept of «without convoy»; this is the one, in the writer's opinion, which outlines the ultimate limits of a Soviet person’s freedom, who can, at best, be on the border of the penitentiary system, but never outside its borders.

Narrative space in Ian McEwan’sSaturday: A narratological perspective

AbstractAlthough the work of Ian McEwan, one of the most important modern British writers, has been quite thoroughly researched, the narrative space was rarely the subject of narratological treatment. This article tackles a close reading of McEwan’s novelSaturdayfrom a narratological perspective testing the applicability of a series of spatial categories systematized by Marie-Laure Ryan in the already existing narratological tradition and in her own research in narrative space. At the macro level of the story, the circular structure of the novel and the concepts of space as a container and space as a network are being shown and so is the use of local names. In the foreground there is a discussion of the five fundamental levels of narrative space (spatial frames, setting, story space and spaces of intertextuality, storyworld, narrative universe), followed by the treatment of textualization at the micro level (perspectivism and aperspectivism, map, and tour, and the lived experience of space). The analysis of space representation inSaturdayeventually makes it possible to conclude that McEwan promotes the conception of space that became prominent within the spatial turn in postmodern humanities.

Autistic children, their parents, and the failures of intersubjectivity: A narrative approach

AimThis article examines the failure of the processes of access to intersubjectivity and to primary subjectivation in the treatment of young children presenting autism, and the consequences thereof for the development of parenthood. The psychotherapeutic nature of certain narrative and testimonial processes used during parent-child consultations appears as a critical element in the restarting of narrative identity and of the capacity for parental reverie. MethodsThe author first outlines a number of clinical and psychopathological features of the development of early mechanisms in young children. Clinical practice with childhood autism explores failures in the formation of pre-narrative envelopes and the failure to establish intersubjective psychical work, both of which are necessary for the emergence of the processes of primary subjectivation and for the formation of an intrapsychical world during the period of primitive psychical conflict. This clinical approach provides access to the early psychical mechanisms. Secondly, the author lists several elements with which to analyze the situation of parents confronted with their child's psychopathological disorder, which can in itself constitute a traumatic experience for parents. A therapist's diagnosis can cause a disruption of the parent's fantasies about his or her child, with the real of the diagnosis shutting down the imaginary work that is an integral part of parenthood, hence the traumatic nature of the announcement. Finally, the author examines ways of restarting “frozen” parental functions, through the use of therapeutic functions that allow for an elaboration of the trauma. ResultsThe underlying psychotherapeutic principle involves rehabilitating the early environment, an environment in which the encounter with the affective sphere initially failed to meet the child's needs for narcissistic cohesion. The therapist must support the maternal psyche's capacity for hosting, gathering an unsymbolized parental psychical experience in his or her own psyche in order to encourage its elaboration. DiscussionAll psychical growth depends upon an encounter with otherness, with intersubjectivity; and a failure in the interpersonal register can hinder the passage to the intrapsychical register. Childhood autism can be considered as a major failure of the processes leading to intersubjectivity, which, in turn, prevents the processes of subjectivation from taking hold. Confronted with the breakdown of the parent's projective identifications and of the conditions of making the child thinkable, the discussion focuses on restarting the processes of regressive identification that allow parents to maintain an active link with their own childish aspects. The author emphasizes the link between restoring the parents’ narrative function and restructuring the parent-child bond as a “story space”. ConclusionDysfunctional affect attunement – whether non-language-based (primary symbolization) or language-based (secondary symbolization) – and disruptions in the formation of pre-narrative envelopes affect the processes of access to subjectivity and to intersubjectivity. Childhood autism can be a traumatic experience that interrupts fantasy and the imaginary investments of parenthood. The imagined parent-child relationship can be damaged by the encounter with the real, which impacts both the capacity for maternal reverie and its associated narrative space. For parents whose narrative function has been “fractured”, the restarting of the processes of refiguration that allow for the passage from history to its narration has the power to restore the parental narrative space, transforming it into a site of reverie and play between parent and child. The testimonial function mobilized by the therapeutic process can thus enable a re-elaboration of the problems that affected the child and its early environment.

LANGUAGE FORMALISM ANALYSIS OF BIJAN NAJDI'S STORIES

Formalists examine literary work apart from the author's personality, morale and beliefs, and merely a linguistic issue. For them, a literary work is a mere form. The world of literature is completely different from the real world and one should not expect to acquire knowledge from a literary work. Bijan Najdi is a storyteller interested in obscuring the story space in his stories. Using a variety of linguistic possibilities of inside the mygans skillfully, he developed a kind of creative storytelling based on the principles of formalism that removed his stories from context of incident. The attempt to highlight the form of the story (deviating from norms, adding rules) and apply new narrative techniques, pay attention to the rhetorical aspect of speech, create a vague language and based on poetic tone and making spaces, has replaced it with strange themes; Thus, he has fulfilled the intended eliminating acquaintance of formalism. In this research, by a descriptive-analytical method aiming at studying the fictional language of Bijan Najdi based on formalism viewpoint, we have tried to examine eliminating acquaintance and manifestations and evidences, highlighting, meta-fiction, poetic language, logopathy,…, that is one of the most decisive factors of being mysterious and peculiar of Bijan Najdi's stories world. As a result, using modern language techniques and arrangements, Najdi prevented emergence of a dominant element and repetition of values leading to the novelty of the language and a new understanding of using literary language and the aesthetic preservation of his stories. In fact, he makes a new concept of applying language in the mind of the audience by deviating from the standard language based on the principles of formalism. Article visualizations:

THE EMERGENCE OF A STORY SPACE

For centuries, the Club War, a popular uprising on Finnish territory in the 1590s, constituted a minor side story in Swedish royal historiography. After the Napoleonic Wars, it was quickly appropriated as one of the most canonical historical events in the emerging Finnish national history. This article argues that, in order to understand the role of the Club War in early 19th-century Finnish historical culture, it is necessary to trace its interpretive tradition backwards in time, across established borders of national historiographies, in a thematic, transtemporal, and comparative framework. The paper will discuss eight pieces of Swedish and Finnish history writing from 1620 to 1860, focusing on the storylines, attributes attached to the protagonists, and historical agency allocated to different social groups against a backdrop of sources available within each context of writing, in order to pinpoint and analyse moments when the story space of the event altered. The article will demonstrate that textual traditions of regions that formerly belonged to multi-ethnic or conglomerate states provide particularly interesting material for transtemporal historiography. Through this case study, the article also argues that Swedish and Finnish historiography of the early 19th century should be studied as one, entangled, textual culture.

'If I can walkthatfar': space and embodiment in stories of illness and recovery.

Illness and recovery transform embodied experience, and transform the experience of space. Space, in turn, is a valuable resource in the telling of an illness narrative. Starting from a phenomenological perspective that takes the body to be the centre of experience, and hence of selfhood and storytelling, this article offers an argument for and an approach to analysing space as a narrative resource in stories about illness and recovery. Using a case study of one woman's stories about her amputation, it demonstrates how both narrated space and narrating space can be used as devices to structure the narrative and position its characters and interlocutors to construct the narrator's embodied experiences and identities. The article reveals intersections between embodied experience, space, and narrative identity construction, offering a new way of attending to illness narratives and a new way of engaging with narrative space.

Public Authority and Local Resistance: Abdur Rehman and the industrial workers of Lahore, 1969–1974

AbstractIn 1968 a popular movement emerged on the streets of Pakistan which toppled the regime of General Muhammad Ayub Khan and ushered in the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). After a decade of military rule this movement was heralded as a turning point in the country's political fortunes. However, the war in 1971, the failure of the PPP to live up to its radical slogans, and Pakistan's eventual return to military rule in 1977 were seen as clear indications of the failure of both the movement and the PPP. This article focuses on the area of Kot Lakhpat in Lahore and the emergence of a worker-led court under Abdur Rehman to argue that this narrative of the failure of the movement does not leave space for local success stories which, while temporary, had an important impact on the role that the working classes imagined for themselves within the state. The Kot Lakhpat movement was part of a longer history of labour politics, and its story challenges the centrality of the PPP and shows how local structures of authority can be formed in response to the greater space for radical action opened up by a wider national resistance movement.

Resettled Refugee Youths’ Stories of Migration, Schooling, and Future: Challenging Dominant Narratives About Refugees

In the United States and around the world, refugees are frequently portrayed as helpless victims, burdens of the host society, and potential criminals. Similarly, in schools even well-intentioned educators focus on what they lack, rather than the various stories, experiences, and perspectives they have to offer. To provide another perspective, we aim to find ways to empower resettled refugee youth and draw implications for education of former refugees and other marginalized students. Through interviews, we sought to understand the stories of ten former Burmese refugee adolescents with respect to their backgrounds, migration, and school experiences. Our analysis shows that they recognized their marginalized positionings in the United States that are attributable to their limited English proficiency, ethnicity and race, and former refugee status. They, however, authored narratives of themselves that contest such marginalizing narratives by providing diverse stories of refugees different from dominant ones and positioning themselves as valuable members of local communities and change agents for a more equitable society. These findings call for pedagogical approaches in which schools and communities provide space for stories that former refugee youths bring, value stories authored by them, and draw on their perspectives on inequity and social transformation.

The bipolarity of the concept “life/death” in the discursive space of early stories by Leonid Andreyev

The article considers the phenomen of bipolarity of the concept Life/Death and peculiarities of its verbalisation in the early works of Leonid Andreev. The main puprose of this paper is to acknowledge and describe the way and means of the concept explication of the Life/Death concept and estimate of its bipolar nature. The importance of the paper is defined by the growing interest in to realising the cognitive structure of a certain kind - bipolar fictional concept whose text-creating role in the opposite discourse has not been studied enough. For Leonid Andreev this bipolar fictional concept is Life/ Death. As N.K. Mikhailovsky said “the fear of death, the fear of life... are as such axe-carved parts” which have become dominant for the “Russian Allan Poe”. This paper evaluates how the internal Conflict of the writer is transformed into a major bipolar concept.

Study of the Effect of Imaginary Imagery (Imaginary Color, Imaginary Figure, Imaginary Space Building and Fantasy in Characterization) on the Characterization of Children

Provided introduction is related to imagination in children’s story books. Reviewing the books of this course, in addition to introducing the author’s styles, leads to more knowledge about the content of these books. The imaginary imagery as the main gem of these books is considered as one of the most important artistic criteria. Types of colors, shapes and characteristics are the most striking forms of imagination in this work. Applying live metaphors and exquisite combinations which appear on the vapor of imagery and the remarkable frequency of ecosystemism can be seen in these works. Children build the foundations of the future civilization; therefore, in order to understand and promote the culture of our country, the study of the effect of imagery in the works of Iranian illustrators associated with the stories of Iranian writers is considered as the research goal. Another goal of this study was to identify the elements that illustrators have been inclined to use to make more visual imagery over the past decade. The methodology of this research is historical and descriptive-analytical, and the collection of materials has been done through library and internet studies. The results of the review of books and images and examples from the age group “B and C” books by the Children’s and Adolescent Intellectual Development Center indicate that the use of fictional imagery in the illustrations of the last decade has been growing and more illustrators have taken fantastic elements in creating the story space. The most commonly used fictional imagery is imaginary space, and the smallest is imaginative characters.

From the Profane to the Sacred: Prison-Space Transformations in G.G. Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon” and O. Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

This study focuses on two prison poems: “The Prisoner of Chillon” by G.G. Byron and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by O. Wilde. It highlights the ordeal of the inmates with the emphasis on the change in their perception of the prison space. Based on M.-L. Ryan’s definition of story space, it is argued that the changing perception of space in the poems reflects the spiritual transformation the protagonists undergo. The experience of confinement leads, in the case of Byron’s protagonist, to the acceptance of prison life to the point of the dungeon becoming “a second home,” sacred to him as a site of his brothers’ burial. In Wilde’s poem incarceration has a transformative function, culminating in spiritual awakening and in the development of faith in Christ’s redemption. As a result of the change in both poems, prison becomes a space of prayer, turning thereby from the profane into the sacred.