Textual Medium Research Articles

Narration across time and media: Narrative framing in radio adaptations of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine

Radio drama presents unique challenges for narrative construction, particularly with regard to the incorporation of a narrator. The illusion of immediacy in radio drama often makes it difficult to identify a narrator, disrupting the traditional narrative structure found in novels. This article explores two American radio adaptations of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, with a particular focus on the use of narrative techniques that move beyond the possibilities of the original novel’s textual medium. This comparison emphasizes the unique narrative structures present in the radio adaptations and deepens our understanding of the distinct affordances as well as limitations of the audio medium in realizing Wells’s visionary tale. The analysis considers the concepts of narrator, focalizer and mediator and their application in radio drama. By exploring the distinctive characteristics of auditory signification and multimodal strategies utilized in audio drama, a deeper comprehension of narrative theory can be achieved.

Revisiting literary magazines through typographic aesthetics: The case of Planodion (1986–2012)

This article is concerned with the twofold identity of the literary magazine: as a material object, endowed with specific visual and tactile characteristics, and as a textual medium, active in the intellectual sphere. Moving beyond the traditional dichotomy between form and content and following a phenomenological approach, I examine the literary magazine as a multi-layered structure whose visual features (illustration, binding, vignettes and margins) work along its seemingly invisible aspects (form and content of text). I focus on Planodion magazine (1986–2012) and employing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I attempt to conceive the literary magazine as a living body, an expressive space capable of accommodating divergent experiences and meanings. Inquiring into the typographic aesthetics of the literary magazine, I also probe the boundaries separating discourse and image, and query their supposed autonomy.

“We Are the Homeowners”: Sacred Textuality and the Social Structure of Jewish Religious Nationalism in Israel and the West Bank

This article offers an anthropological look at sacred textuality by exploring the social and theological structure of Jewish religious nationalism in Israel and the West Bank. It argues that the study of sacred texts serves as a medium through which Jewish religious Zionists articulate what it means to return to an ancestral homeland. It demonstrates how the study of these sacred texts is implicated in the cultivation of two different structural modes through which religious Zionists relate to ideas of homecoming. On one side, homecoming rests in a revolutionary force of intellectual insight; on the other, it is expressed through the mystical and mysterious force of prophecy. In a broader sense, this article critiques the reticence of anthropologists to engage seriously with the broader theological ideas that are expressed through a textual medium that can be so much a part of the everyday experiences of individuals living in text-based societies.

“Like a Sacrifice Ascending from the Flames”: Hadar Goldin’s Mesilat Yesharim in Israeli Religious Nationalist Thought

Abstract: This article tracks how Mesilat Yesharim , an eighteenth-century devotional work of pietistic asceticism, has been transformed by Jewish religious Zionists in Israel and the West Bank into an experience of military and civic duty. It specifically focuses on a contemporary popular commentary on the text authored by Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, a religious Zionist casualty of Israel’s 2014 conflict with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. It argues that the study and interpretation of the Mesilat Yesharim by religious Zionists in Israel ultimately functions as a sacred textual medium through which these communities are able to better navigate between the competing obligations that characterize their social, political, and theological positions within Israeli society. When seen through this lens, Mesilat Yesharim serves as a sacred literary vehicle through which young men and women, facing years of national service, work through some of the conflicting loyalties of their own moral worlds.

The creation process of a synthetic textual medium

Abstract The paper presents the contemporary phenomenon of synthetic textual media that write poetry. It describes the several stages of preparation, conceptualization and building of a neural network that generates poetry. The neural network introduced in this article, called Liza Gennart, is the author of the book Výsledky vzniku (‘Outcomes of Origin’, 2020) and of several other projects, among them an interactive multimedia installation. The author of this article uses a practice-led research method to write about her own collaborative project that was conducted in collaboration with the programmer Ľubomír Panák.

Hyperbole in Early Modern Missionary Travel Accounts of China

Abstract For much of the early modern period, Europeans identified China as a land of opulence and abundance. This image was later dismissed as an unfaithful representation, wilfully created by missionaries who overstated the positive qualities of China, and understated its negative attributes. This chapter explores the beginnings of overstatement and exaggeration in the earliest Iberian missionary accounts of China. As travel publications flooded the sixteenth-century print market, new literary conventions emerged, privileging eyewitness observations over hearsay. Negotiating the porous categories of fact and fiction, missionaries sought to convince audiences of their reliability while creating impressive accounts. This chapter demonstrates that hyperbole, more than mere exaggeration, was creatively and strategically used by the missionaries not to deceive, but to highlight to their audiences the promise and potential of China. By insisting that the reality of China exceeded the limits of the textual medium, the missionaries liberally created an image of an abundant land. As their texts gained popularity and underwent translations, redactions and reprints, the reception and repetitions of these hyperboles could not always be shaped and controlled as the missionaries had intended. The missionaries’ hyperbolic China was further amplified and veered precariously between the boundaries of information and disinformation.

Review Essay: Am I Blue?: Black Music & White Male Self-Construction

Review Essay: <i>Am I Blue?: Black Music &amp; White Male Self-Construction</i>

History and Types of Script in Ancient Indian Civilization

Scripts and language were essential tools for expressing one's thoughts and feelings in ancient civilization, and they will be useful in acquiring a better understanding of that civilization. When we talk about scripts, we're talking about a certain way of writing or the textual medium of human communication that is utilized to communicate information. In the history of the world, script has been used to create some of the most important pieces of writing ever written, including some of the most important works of literature ever written. The most important, as well as the most fundamental, aspects of the human condition and of life have been portrayed via the medium of script. An optimum environment for language development is created by the combination of script and language, as well as a solid vocabulary and grammar. They provide a link between people of diverse cultural backgrounds. Despite the presence of various scripts in ancient India, there is a need for extensive investigation into several concerns and questions concerning their intra and inter-relationships. A combination of research methods including formative, observation, open-ended and qualitative methods have been used with a predominance of historical methods. As the main vehicle of communication, the history of script in ancient India has ignited many minds and there have been many works in this regard which merits a review.

A Narrative Stylistic Analysis of Associated Press (AP) News

Although there have been various stylistic studies of news, the use of narrative stylistic approach in analysing news has not been common. The aim of this research is to analyse the stylistic domains and narrative components in the Associated Press (AP) news. It was carried out descriptive-qualitatively. Ten news were studied by using stylistic units of analysis based on model of narrative structure in Simpson (2004) and Jahn’s classification of narrative components (2005). After completing the analysis, it was found that news is one category of narrative and it contains the use of six stylistic domains and nine narrative components. The six stylistic domains are textual medium, sociolinguistic code, action and event, point of view, textual medium and intertextuality. In addition, there are also occurences of the nine narrative components: narration, focalization, narrative situation, action, story analysis, tellability, tense, time and narrative mode.

Literature and digital media: notes on theory and aesthetics

In this keynote lecture, Roberto Simanowski combines close reading of single works with a media-ontological reading of digital art and digital literature. The folowing works are analysed in detail: Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback’s Text Rain (1999); Bit.Fall (2006) by Julius Popp; Still Standing by Jason Lewis (2005); and Caleb Larsen's The Complete Works of W.S. (2007). The analyses suggest that, while remaining essentially a textual medium, the computer increasingly visualizes communication, thus restoring the pictorial nature of early forms of writing.

The Gospel of John as Model for Literate Authors and their Texts in Epistula Apostolorum and Apocryphon of James (NHC I,2)

The Gospel of John (GJohn) bears a striking resemblance to two later Jesus books, Epistula Apostolorum (EpAp) and Apocryphon of James (ApocrJas) (NHC I,2), in making authority claims that appeal to the socio-cultural significance of the textual medium. In all three, these claims are twofold: (1) internally ascribing authorship to representative figures of the early Jesus tradition portrayed as literate; (2) explicitly emphasizing the written medium of these authors’ compositions. GJohn can provide an instructive model for understanding these features in EpAp and ApocrJas, as both are demonstrably familiar with GJohn. EpAp and ApocrJas consequently can be examined alongside GJohn’s editorial expansion in ch. 21 as examples of early readers and users of GJohn exhibiting comparable claims regarding literate authors and their texts – applied to the Beloved Disciple (GJohn), the ‘Eleven’ apostles (EpAp) and James (ApocrJas).

Adapting Novel into Film & Copyright

The history of cinema is replete with adaptations of novels into film. Indeed, it seems that almost every movie made these days is based on a book. Beyond mere commercial opportunism, there is at least something about the film medium that lends itself to borrowing from literary sources. The significance of this topic for copyright scholars is that the cinematographic or “movie” right vests with the author of a book (what I will call the “adaptation right”). Where that right has been at issue, courts have struggled with developing a methodology for determining infringement. The enormously complex topic of assessing whether there has been a substantial taking from a textual medium for adaptation into a visual medium has been oversimplified both by legal “tests” for infringement and the manner which they are applied. The purpose of this short paper is to explore the topic from extra-legal disciplinary perspectives in an effort to highlight some of the shortcomings of the law in this area but also to embark on new ways of thinking about the adaptation right. This paper draws on a field known as “adaptation studies” which itself borrows liberally from literary criticism, film studies, art philosophy, and media studies. From debates within and across these fields, certain theories emerge which help to better understand the possibility of cinematic adaptation from literary sources (if indeed it is possible at all). We will begin with the counter intuitive idea that there is no essence to any given work that is available to be adapted to another medium (constructivism). A second school of thought argues that the differences between literature and cinema – the written word and the visual image – are too great for there to be anything approaching equivalency between the two media (adaptation skepticism). Next we consider the argument that what is adapted from book into film is a narrative structure that, in some respects but not others, is amenable to transfer to the film medium (structuralism). We will conclude with a brief look at the argument that reading and visualizing are inverse cognitive processes that might suggest the differences between the two media are overstated (cognitive equivalency). After a brief exploration of the law of the adaptation right, each of these four perspectives will be addressed. I ultimately side with the structuralist position and conclude that the legal test for infringement has much to gain from this analytical framework.

Digital tools for delivery of dementia education for health-care providers: a systematic review

ABSTRACTContinuing education on dementia for health-care providers has been shown to have positive effects on diagnostic confidence, knowledge, and care management. Technological approaches to educational delivery have been found to have comparable effects in terms of quality and efficacy. The purpose of the systematic review was to compose and present an evidence base for technology-delivered dementia education for health-care providers. The review used PRISMA guidelines and Cochrane methods focusing on studies with a pre- and post-intervention evaluation. Technology-based delivery of dementia education was broadly defined as any technology-based medium delivered in real time or asynchronously. Ten studies were identified and analyzed using content analysis. The review revealed positive outcomes post-intervention, for dementia knowledge, readiness to change, receptiveness to training, communication skills, and self-efficacy. Studies were rated as medium to high quality on a scale for measurement of published data in research, and there was generally an unknown risk of bias due to a lack of a control group in most studies (N = 7). The findings revealed benefits of digitally-based, asynchronous continuing education for health-care providers, which allow schedule flexibility and the ability to deliver remotely. Findings also revealed benefits of presentations using a variety of interactive educational materials via videos, voice recordings, textual medium and online discussion groups. Suggestions for intervention improvements include tailoring training for the specific needs and knowledge levels of health-care practitioners and using validated scales to measure outcomes.

The Present Pasts: Image and Text in the Fiction of W.G. Sebald

In her Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag suggests that contemporary culture draws on photography to a historically unprecedented degree. This ubiquity of images, she claims, especially images of violence, imposes itself even on those who seek to express the specifc post-Holocaust nature of reality through textual medium. Her major example is the German writer, W.G. Sebald. In his novels, text is accompanied by images whose role, in Sontag’s reading, is reduced to that of an illustration. In my article, I suggest that the position of the photographic image in Sebald’s novels cannot be approached from the perspective proposed by Sontag. Rather, it invites reading in terms of the spectral presence of images whose intrusion into textual reality is as haunting as it is unavoidable. Referring to recent theories of photography, I discuss how in Sebald’s novels the relationship between text and image can be explained as that of parallel structures whose linearity is always already interrupted (haunted) by past events. I refer to recent theoretical perspectives on photography in order to account for the interactions between different media in Sebald’s works and for their visual/textual engagement with the interplay of temporalities that characterizes the working of memory.

Empiricism, antiquarian fieldwork and the (in)visibilization of the past in the early eighteenth century

The work of many early eighteenth-century antiquaries roots the discovery of authentic facts about the past in the empirical study of antiquities in situ and in immediate sensory experience of the material world. This article explores visual and verbal representations of antiquarian fieldwork in antiquarian works and travelogues by William Stukeley, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Gordon, and others. It shows that these authors developed novel and often self-reflexive modes of visual and verbal representation in order to ask how the empirical approach renders the past visible and material. In doing so, they ushered in important changes in chorographic writing. However, for Stukeley in particular, recording artefacts and the process of empirical observation also became a way of reflecting on the limitations of empiricism in elucidating the past: the arrangement of text and illustration in his later work reveals that Stukeley used the friction between the visual and the textual medium in order to consider how the material form which the past now assumed was, paradoxically, also shaped by the impress of that which remains invisible to the empirically trained eye.

The Mimetic Paraphrase

The mimetic aspects of speech, the spoken word, and dialogical exchange that distinguish the miracle narratives of the first half of Erasmus’s Paraphrase on John constitute a unique implementation of Erasmus’s reader-oriented Philosophia Christi. They efficiently apply the poetics of speech that characterize the theology of Christ’s inverbation in John 1:1 to the genre of the paraphrase for the sake of imitatio. The Erasmian paraphrase reveals itself as the ideal textual medium to exploit the transformative capacities of the incarnate Word and its poetics of speech and verbal transmission in order to perform the gradual acquisition of faith in the individual reader’s mind and, by extension, in the sphere of thought and action of the imagined listeners in the paraphrase’s homiletic community. Moreover, these examples illustrate the remarkably literary notion of mimesis in Erasmus’s paraphrastic text.

John Donne and the Textuality of the Two Souls

This article traces John Donne’s intellectual struggle to reconcile a paradox of two conflicting souls: the classical organic soul composed of three mortal faculties rooted in the body’s function and the immortal Christian soul that serves as the basis of salvation. In Donne’s writings, the tension between the organic and Christian souls leads him to a new model of Christian subjectivity figuring the soul as a textual medium subject to tracing, writing, and ultimately printing. In his poetry and later prose, he clears a space for a new mode of Christian agency by rewriting how the two souls define the subject in the malleable rhetoric of literary language and by asserting that the contents of the soul were not fixed but could be rewritten by the devotional subject. Ultimately, by the end of his life, Donne articulates a rhetoric of the two souls in terms of a printerly textuality that transforms the psychological dilemma into the basis of a novel vision of spiritual plasticity, which gives to the Christian subject the power to edit the soul’s substance precisely as a text’s type can be reset or as its language can be rewritten. Donne’s adoption of the printing press as a useful figure to make sense of the two-souls dilemma is unexpected, given the common assumption that he distrusted the print medium and preferred to circulate his works in manuscript. By contrast, I demonstrate that Donne expresses the view that Christian salvation is a mode of printerly textuality—a second printing of our souls.

T.S. Eliot and the textualities of the discarded

This article attends to the propositional presence of redundant or exhausted things within literary writing; it seeks the immanent pulp in fictions considered canonical. If one assumes that writing is shaped by the material capacities of the things participating in the process of writing, then the idea of waste in literature resides in the relationship between its content and the textual medium. In this respect, one of the more compelling effects of waste as it is transcribed into textual forms is the opportunity it affords to reflect upon the activity of writing, making moments that seem ‘simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction'. In this metafictional capacity, a potential exists for the contemplation of various methods of drafting things, whether decaying, dissolving or going to waste, and the innumerable things that appear before us, either on the page or screen. Clearly, this is a perspective on content, form and process that can be applied to many different kinds of writers and many different kinds of writing. Here, I concentrate on the published and unpublished work of T. S. Eliot to illuminate works in which waste has often been noted for its presence but rarely understood beyond its surface effect.

Cookbook: A New Scholarly View

Cookbook: A New Scholarly View

Words from the Culinary Crypt: Reading the Cookbook as a Haunted/Haunting Text

Words from the Culinary Crypt: Reading the Cookbook as a Haunted/Haunting Text