Third-person Narrator Research Articles

Natural History and Narrative Sympathy: The Children’s Animal Stories of Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842)

Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842), a late eighteenth-century writer of children’s animal stories, deserves recognition for his sustained attempt to offer an empathetic rendition of imagined animal experience in fiction. His early fiction, including the dog story Keeper’s Travels (1798) and several tales of bird life, contributed to the development of more sympathetic attitudes to non-human animals in the late eighteenth century. Two factors influenced the development of Kendall’s innovative treatment of animal characters. First, the natural history of Buffon and his English translators and followers, in particular William Smellie, informed Kendall’s detailed attention to animal behaviour and to questions of animal mind and sentience. Second, the contemporary development of narrative techniques designed, on the basis of the imaginative sympathy theorized by Adam Smith, to encourage readers to identify with protagonists’ feelings, prompted Kendall to extend such methods to the representation of animal characters. He helped shift animal representation away from fable and satire towards naturalism and empathy. His use of third-person narrative proved most fruitful in this regard, and anticipated later developments in the imaginative apprehension of non-human experience.

Infantile Women in Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock and Where Shall We Go This Summer?

This essay explores the implications of representing adult women as infantile and childish in Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975). Do these women infantilize themselves or are they infantilized by men, omniscient third-person narration and/or the author, and what are the slippages between these overlapping, if contradictory interpellations? Despite the narratives of overt hysteria and the impossibility of finding desired, radical subjects of feminism in her early work, I argue that Desai provides an invaluable historical snap-shot of the challenges faced by middle-class women entrapped in specific ways within an idealized imagining of family and nation.

Inclusive Design, Audio Description and Diversity of Theatre Experiences

ABSTRACTThe conventional approach to audio description (AD) uses third-person narrative, factual delivery style, post-planning and third-party delivery, making it incompatible with inclusive design principles and equitable access to sensory stimuli.This paper discusses Clay & Paper Theatre's alternative AD approach, involving actors, scriptwriters, musicians and directors. With no previous exposure to inclusive design, the creative team developed the design process: script modification, characters and music integration, and sensory tour presentation. Innovative methodology taught actors and directors to think about accessibility from the start of their creative processes.Actors found the inclusive design process useful in developing a better understanding of character roles. Audience members enjoyed the play through the role of music and its link to the narrative and characterization. Clay & Paper Theatre's alternative AD approach exemplifies social innovation in inclusive theatre design for blind and low vision (B/LV) audiences, with an emphasis on process and service outcomes.

DIVIDED LOYALTIES, CHANGING LANDSCAPES: WILLIAM MCILVANNEY'S LAIDLAW NOVELS

This article looks at the three William McIlvanney novels featuring detective Jack Laidlaw – Laidlaw (1977), The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983), and Strange Loyalties (1991). It examines the shift from third-person narration in the first two books to first-person in the third and sees it as part of a changing perspective not only on the character of Laidlaw, who, it is argued, retreats into a personalized mythologization of his community and his country, but also on the Scottish landscape. Laidlaw's return to Ayrshire in Strange Loyalties leads to a flowering of organic but essentially static metaphors of soil and national identity. These metaphors, ultimately, are atavistic and exclusive of that which Laidlaw considers outwith his personal vision of Scottishness.

Surfacing by Nora Raleigh Baskin (review)

Reviewed by: Surfacing by Nora Raleigh Baskin Deborah Stevenson Baskin, Nora Raleigh. Surfacing. Candlewick, 2013. [208p]. Trade ed. 978-0-7636-4908-1 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-6361-2 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9–12. Two things define Maggie’s life: the drowning of her older sister, Leah, when Maggie was a little girl, and people’s mysterious urge to tell their deepest secrets to her. Now she’s a teenager, dealing with her water unease by becoming a champion swimmer, isolated by people’s quickly regretted intimacies, and aiming all her longing toward an older boy, Matthew. She’s so focused on Matthew that her relationship with kind and affectionate Nathan is mostly just a means to gaining the sexual experience she’s sure will finally allow her to win the approval that she craves from Matthew. Baskin limns her protagonist with quick, clear strokes; the third-person narration limits itself largely to Maggie’s own knowledge, so Maggie’s unawareness of her dysfunction is a plausible characteristic that leaves readers to extrapolate her feelings from her behavior. The eternal struggle of her relationship with Leah, whom Maggie experienced first as a bossy older sister and then as the silent, absent center of the family, is compellingly explored, and the interwoven flashbacks focalized through Leah add dimension. Unfortunately, they also enhance the choppiness of the episodic narrative, and the chronological skipping around [End Page 283] makes it hard to get a fix on the emotional trajectory; as a result, the revelation of family secrets surrounding Leah’s death seems less conclusive than spontaneous. The relationships remain memorable, though, and it’s an affecting portrait of the extent of the aftershocks from a family tragedy. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

FORM AND REFORM: THE “MISCELLANY NOVEL”

Around 1847, an author describinghimself as “A Discharged officer with twenty years’ experience” published a book entitledThe Mysteries of the Madhouse. It commences as a novel: the third-person narrative tells a thrilling tale complete with a harmless heir, conniving step-mother, and gormless step-brother. But after the heir of Howarth House is committed to a madhouse by his step-mother, the genre of the text changes abruptly. With no transition, the language of the novel is suddenly interrupted by extended, first-person, ostensibly factual accounts of what conditions are like inside madhouses.

Night Letter (review)

Reviewed by: Night Letter Karen Coats Sayres, Meghan Nuttall. Night Letter. Nortia, 2012. [304p]. ISBN 978-0-9848359-0-4 $18.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7–10. Anahita is thrilled to be on her way to her betrothed’s city of Marv in Persia in the early 1900s. When she is kidnapped along the way, she doesn’t panic, because she’s confident that between her own tribe and her fiancé’s, she will soon be rescued. Meanwhile, she watches for ways she can help her friends track her. There are setbacks for both the kidnappers and her would-be rescuers, and Anahita eventually ends up in the harem of a despotic emir. Caught between negotiations and necessity, Anahita must plot to save herself, while her father, fiancé, grandmother, and [End Page 216] friends face troubles of their own in the emir’s fortress. While the prose is sometimes stiff, it’s also often touched with metaphorical grace; the events are clear, and the periodic shifts in narrative perspective, from Anahita’s first-person account to the third-person narration of events taking place on her behalf, keep readers engaged in this action-laden adventure in a seldom-explored historical setting. A list of characters and places prefaces the novel, and a glossary and discussion guide follow; in a wide-ranging author’s note that treats the history, language, art, and poetry of the region, Sayres describes the bride kidnapping going on during the time of the story and then provides an update on current practices of enslavement and trafficking. Although this extensive apparatus suggests that the book is clearly meant for curricular use, readers will also find plenty of enjoyment in the classic story of a strong-willed heroine fighting for her own freedom and happiness in a land of serene dervishes, untrustworthy khans, ruthless emirs, and interesting customs. Karen Coats Reviewer Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

Trickle-Down Citizenship:Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King Marshall Boswell (bio) The Pale King is conspicuous in David Foster Wallace's oeuvre in being the only one of his three novels not set in the future. Whereas he set The Broom of the System in a cartoonish 1990s America almost indistinguishable from the mid-eighties world of the novel's creation, and Infinite Jest in a post-millennial America imagined from the vantage point of the actual early nineties, both novels take place in a fully replete alternative reality that seems to have branched off from the reader's world and pursued its own quirky, though plausible, path. This playfully proleptic strategy frees Wallace to exaggerate and alter the details and contours of our workaday world for the purposes of comic and thematic emphasis. As a result, both novels achieve an almost ahistorical and, at times, even spectral quality that, whether intended by Wallace or not, sometimes obscures the historical contingency of their signature themes. Conversely, The Pale King takes place in a carefully reconstructed historical past, with May 1985 through June 1986 carved out as of primary interest, as this marks the thirteen months during which one David Wallace allegedly worked for the Internal Revenue Service as a lowly G-9 in the Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois. In very deliberate ways, Wallace portrays the IRS as this novel's alternative reality. In a paragraph-long section early in the novel, the third-person narrator describes the IRS as a "parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause" (Pale King 86). This dramatic shift in approach feeds directly into what I wish to submit is one of The Pale King's more striking agendas. More so than any of his other major works, The Pale King wrestles directly with matters of real world [End Page 464] politics and—here we have one of the novel's key words—civics, while the philosophical and ethical issues it engages are grounded firmly in a series of concrete historical particulars that Wallace rightly identifies as key to understanding what Salon journalist Steve Kornacki, in an internet postmortem posted on the colossally stupid "debt ceiling debate" of summer 2011, identified as "the hopeless politics" of our current political era. The Pale King zeroes in specifically and relentlessly on the Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and the subsequent ascendancy in American political discourse of so-called "supply side economics" as a pivotal and damning moment in postwar American civics history, and it builds its elaborate inquiry into taxes, bureaucratic heroism, and civic responsibility atop this decisive event that, in the words of Dewitt Glendenning, might very well "bring us down as a country" and signal the "end of the democratic experiment" (Pale King 132). These concerns all converge with dramatic force in IRS agent Chris Fogle's lengthy account of his surprise conversion from 1970s "wastoid" to devoted IRS "wiggler." Fogle's monologue operates as a quasi-religious narrative grounded in the work of American pragmatist William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, as well as a focused dramatization of the novel's more diffuse analysis of post-Reagan conceptions of taxes and civic responsibility. One would not necessarily know any of this from a cursory reading of the voluminous press that greeted the novel's spring 2011 publication. Most of the book's initial reviewers described the book primarily as an IRS novel about boredom. Some of this blindness to one of the book's central concerns may be inadvertently credited to Michael Pietsch, who undertook the Herculean task of compiling the published book from Wallace's copious drafts and notes. Nowhere in his introduction does he touch upon the novel's political concerns. Rather, he argues that "David set out to write a novel about some of the hardest subjects in the world—sadness and boredom—and to make that exploration nothing less than dramatic, funny, and deeply moving" (ix-x). To be sure, this description of Wallace's primary purpose limns seamlessly with the unfortunate popular conception of Wallace as a...

The Treachery of Beautiful Things (review)

Reviewed by: The Treachery of Beautiful Things Kate Quealy-Gainer Long, Ruth Frances . The Treachery of Beautiful Things. Dial, 2012. 363p. ISBN 978-0-8037-3580-4 $16.99 Ad Gr. 7-10. Despite having spent the last seven years insisting that her older brother was stolen by trees, seventeen-year-old Jenny is finally ready to put the past behind her and returns to the woodsy site of Tom's disappearance to say a final goodbye. Instead, however, Jenny hears what she thinks is Tom's flute, follows the sound, and finds herself being attacked by a small group of well-armed faeries. Rescued by Jack, a guardian of the border between the faerie realm and the mortal world, Jenny demands to be taken to her brother. Jack acquiesces, but like everything in the faerie world, he has his own motivation and he's willing to put Jenny's life on the line if it means he gets what he wants. The third-person narration is primarily focalized through the steadfastly loyal and mostly boring Jenny, but the emphasis sometimes [End Page 96] shifts to the much more interesting Jack, giving readers a broader sense of a faerie world steeped in secrets, magic, and lore. Long builds the foundation of her setting on traditional English and Celtic tales, but she also draws on elements from Nordic and German stories to create a distinct sense of place. The malice that underlies the world's beauty plays out the title to the fullest and adds a substantial bit of true gruesomeness to what is already a suspenseful story. With such a fascinating and complex build-up, the tidy ending is therefore disappointing, especially in that it takes both Jenny and Jack out of the faerie world completely. Still, readers of the genre will no doubt enjoy getting lost here and will find themselves hoping for a sequel that ensures a return trip. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Stone Girl (review)

Reviewed by: The Stone Girl Karen Coats Sheinmel, Alyssa B. The Stone Girl. Knopf, 2012. [224p]. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-97080-1 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-87080-4 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-307-97462-4 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7-10. Although Sethie gets straight As at her competitive girls' school in New York, she finds more satisfaction in smoking pot, having sex with Shaw, and keeping thin. When she meets one of Shaw's friends, Jane, the girls immediately bond, and Jane teaches Sethie to purge after eating, not realizing that Sethie has a bigger problem than the occasional pizza and chips binge. As Sethie's relationship with Shaw wanes, she steps up her efforts to lose weight, but when he comes clean about how he feels (or actually doesn't feel) about her, controlling her eating is all Sethie has left. The third-person narration is so densely focalized through Sethie's distorted view of things that it begins to feel claustrophobic; short, choppy sentences predominate, most of them starting with Sethie's name followed by a present tense verb, a style that becomes repetitive. Additionally, the lack of honest self-awareness and reflection renders Sethie's motivations a bit fuzzy: for a smart girl who craves control, she's quick to indulge in drugs, lies, and unprotected sex, and there is no textual revelation of why she prefers to take refuge in delusions. Her decision to get help is a rather quick turnaround; seems all she needed was a good talking-to from a sensible friend and a finally concerned mother to snap out of it. While unlike other treatments of anorexia and bulimia, this nevertheless touches on what is likely a more ordinary experience of girls who tell themselves lies until the truth becomes too insistent. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Fictional archaeologies of text and homeric reception in Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey

‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ‘Time present and time past/are both perhaps present in time future,/and time future contained in time past. […] Time past and time future/what might have been and what has been/point to one end, which is always present.’ T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’ ‘There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits … At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meaning, but … as the dialogue moves forward, they will return to memory and live in renewed form. […] Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth.’ Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Principle One of Homer’s epithets for Odysseus, polytropos (literally ‘of many turnings’), can be applied to Zachary Mason’s debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, an audacious compendium of forty-six (first edition, 2007) or forty-four (second edition, 2010) stories, which won its author the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was hailed by Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times as ‘an ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive’ (Kakutani 2010). To date, this is the latest entry of a novel into the equally ‘polytropic’ Nachleben of the Odyssey, which includes such disparate works as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? The stories of The Lost Books range in size between one and fifteen pages and offer ‘a fragmented, smoky, shimmering version of the Odyssey’ (Goldhill 2010). That the whole they comprise is a novel and not a miscellany, as the plural ‘Books’ of the title might suggest, is mostly to do with its disclosure of perspectives on various Homeric characters, especially Odysseus.1 The stories are first- and third-person narratives and form a kind of anti-Odyssey, an alternative version of the epic that explores its elisions and exploits its imaginative leaps. As Mason avers, his aim is ‘less to advance a plot than to take one image or theme and, paring away all that is inessential, present it with the greatest possible concision and clarity’ (2007: xiii). In some respects, this is an odd piece of fiction that flaunts its oddity: not only have two ‘Books’ vanished from the second edition — another ‘loss’ and a playful allusion to the title’s ‘Lost Books’ — but also the novel in both editions has a strikingly academic flair: the first edition contains a long mock-scholarly introduction, an appendix, and several footnotes, and the second edition features a one-page introduction, no appendix, and fewer footnotes. In both editions, Mason assumes the roles of author and reader, creator and commentator of his work.

The Unnaturalists (review)

Reviewed by: The Unnaturalists Kate Quealy-Gainer Trent, Tiffany . The Unnaturalists. Simon, 2012. [320p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-2206-3 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-2208-7 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10. Sixteen-year-old Vespa Nyx's scholarly plans are abruptly put on hold when she discovers that she has magical powers—an offense that, in New London where the Church of Science and Technology reigns supreme, would earn her execution. Meanwhile, Syrus, a young boy living in the wilds surrounding the city, is charged with the task of procuring a witch for the forest's ruling Elemental (a nature spirit) after a band of city guards invades and slaughters a group of Tinkers, an ancient race that protects the magical creatures of the woods. Events bring the two together as Vespa realizes that her father is planning to use her magic to power a science experiment that may be New London's doom and Syrus discovers that his people are meeting fates far worse than death inside the city walls. A steampunk-themed city meets a bevy of fanciful creatures in this intriguing mashup that unabashedly positions technology against nature. The alternation between Vespa's voice and the third-person narration that focuses on Syrus brings the contrast between their [End Page 50] worldviews into sharp relief. Vespa is a charming heroine, at once prickly and vulnerable, competent enough to get out of tricky situations yet still willing to swoon over a handsome rebel. Syrus is slightly less developed, but his compassion for the creatures he is sworn to protect will ring true with animal lovers. Younger fans of The Girl in the Steel Corset (BCCB 9/11) will find plenty to like here. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy : Critical Approaches ed. by Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally (review)

Reviewed by: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches ed. by Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally Susan Neal Mayberry Eds. Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 160 pp. $52.99. Of Toni Morrison’s last six novels, A Mercy (2008) provides the lone title prefaced with an article that specifies the presence or, in this case, absence of definiteness of the noun. A motif echoing throughout her œuvre, the presence of absence is also, in this case, reflected by Morrison’s clearly and frequently stated intention to explore a time before American slavery became identified with race. In their 2011 collection of essays, Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally set out to present “a reader’s guide to A Mercy, a storehouse of various approaches” that will not only provide Morrison scholars and students with “an assortment of avenues” into the text’s treatment of race, broadly interpreted, difference and absence, but of other social determiners such as gender, religion, geography, and class (1). And they do. In tribute to them, I attempt in this review not only to provide an overview and assessment of those critical approaches, but to engage with them as the editors intend. The book begins with an exploration of geographic, ecological, and domestic space as defined by James Braxton Peterson and Anissa Janine Wardi. While this reader finds Peterson’s essay to rely a tad too heavily on critical jargon, I do appreciate the cutting edge of a piece that, rightly, critiques Morrison’s among contemporary ecocritical texts: “It is in/through relationships between hypothetical and (regular/normal) focalization that certain eco-critical and narratological understandings emerge in close readings of Morrison’s A Mercy” (10). I also owe to this opening chapter the location of several pieces needing critical alignment in the literary puzzle that is the novel. First, Peterson concurs with Wardi and reviewer La Vinia Delois Jennings, who designate its setting as colonial Maryland and Virginia. Jennings writes elsewhere: “A third-person narrator from a limited perspective provides the back stories for Florens, Jacob and the other characters who live or work on Jacob’s burgeoning Virginia estate.” Doubting in my usual Hamletesque fashion my own decision that Vaark’s farm would lie in what we now call upstate New York, I appeal to two other [End Page 463] respected Morrison scholars, wailing, “Well, what about the moose?” I envy the definiteness of an immediate reply from one: I can’t vouch for moose’s habitats during that period. But Morrison (not that she matters) and the descriptions in [the] narrative indicate that Vaark settles in Virginia. Morrison is keen to show that the laws established in [Virginia and Maryland] were intended to “racialize” blacks. Historically, I don’t think New York supports the kind of narrative we have in Mercy. I may have misread the text—but I believe if you download reviews and articles on Mercy, you may discover that MOST readers agree on Maryland and Virginia. I don’t have time to confirm the setting (in the middle of a deadline), so please check with other readers…. Based upon the narrative details, I believe [Vaark] travels from Maryland and settles in Virginia. When I concede that the old New World map named pretty much everything north of Maryland “Virginia” but plead that the other narrative detail I was considering is that Willard “had trouble getting used to the rougher, colder region he was moved into” after his “harder but more satisfying days in Virginia” (A Mercy 174-75), this same irrepressible colleague answers my call in no uncertain terms: “I think this uncle bequeathed [Vaark] land in this god-awful proprietary colony of VA.” Semi-deflated but still stubborn, I forward my questions to a fellow New Yorker who can’t resist the challenge despite being “off to Guatemala with 15 honors stu in seven days, with 23 × 7 hrs. worth of things to do between now and then”: [S]o I’ll keep this short, but I agree with you about the northern location of the Vaark farm. In fact, I have no clue how...

‘A Member of the Race’: Dr Modiri Molema's Intellectual Engagement with the Popular History of South Africa, 1912–1921

This paper offers a prelude to the reconsideration of the writing life and contribution of an African intellectual and nationalist who, studiously and courageously, subjected the concepts of race, culture and nationalism to critical evaluation. Molema's engagement with popular politics began after his return from years of studying medicine at Glasgow University. However, from 1912 to 1921, he engaged with the history of South Africa intellectually, only later producing essays and speeches for more popular audiences. His study of black South Africans, The Bantu Past and Present (1920) challenged racist interpretations of the past, while also taking subtle aim at racism in Scotland during and after World War I. The text is multi-layered, moving from first- to third-person narration, which suggests that the author's own identity was subtly entangled with this project. In the Preface, the young writer defines his writing identity, revealing that the book's purpose is historical, ethnographical and, implicitly, nationalist. This paper examines the Preface's crucial role in defining the author's writing identity as nationalist and intellectual. Molema used his standpoint knowledge as ‘a member of the race’ whose story he ‘unfold[ed] to the world’ to begin the task of carefully reclaiming black history from the margins of South African cultural life.

The Political Is the Personal

The Political Is the Personal Steven Wingate (bio) The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos, Simon & Schuster, http://www.simonandschuster.com, 368 368 pp., $25.00 Click for larger view View full resolution Detail from Cover When the subject of Greece enters American minds today, it’s usually in reference to that nation’s current financial instability: the largest debt default in the history of humankind, which has imperiled the entire European economy and given jitters to the rest of the world. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when many in Western culture were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, Greece faced a more dangerous political instability during a seven-year military takeover—one of the most recent dictatorships the West has seen. The Green Shore, a finely wrought first novel by Natalie Bakopoulos, unfolds in this environment—one that resembles, in its stark contrast between the left and the right, a dystopian vision of America’s future that may come to life before our eyes as both sides take increasingly oppositional stances. That “the personal is the political” has been a truism for over a generation, but Bakopoulos’s work suggests that the obverse is equally true. In an environment dominated by political division and fear, the goings-on of those in power ripple down into personal relationships within families and between lovers. The question, “Whose side are you on?” can dent and diminish even the strongest bonds. So too in this novel’s world can the question, “How will you fight the battle?” A generation before The Green Shore is set, Greece had fought a civil war (1946–1949) between left and right. Those who took sides in that war, now past their prime as political agitators, approach resistance to the junta differently than their young counterparts and may not see eye-to-eye tactically as much as they do in principle. This political environment will be familiar to American audiences because of our familiarity with two leftist demographic groups that have similar goals but don’t quite overlap: the baby boomers who gave us free love and peace protests at the cusp of the 1970s, and the Occupy movement of today. Now is a good time for this book to come out, and I hope that readers will encounter it in a trans-generational political context. At the center of The Green Shore stands one Athens family and its satellites. Eleni, a widow and a doctor, has three children: early twenty-something Sophie, brash and outspokenly against the junta; son Taki, a blustery late teenager about to escape the coming trouble by leaving for college in America; and the post-adolescent Anna, who candidly observes the world she is not quite old enough to participate in. Their uncle Mihalis is a noted poet who has done time—and endured torture—for being on the wrong side in the civil war; both of his nieces look to him as a mentor at different points of the novel, which spans six years and ends before the dictatorship’s eventual fall in 1974. Orbiting this world are Dimitri, Eleni’s right-of-center lover and fellow doctor; Irini, married unhappily to the hot/cold Mihalis; the poet’s friend Vangelis, a cab driver and fellow survivor of torture; and two cousins outside the family named Nick and Loukas, both of whom fall in love with Sophie. Bakopoulos manages this web with a somewhat formal and distant third-person narrator, supplemented by selective glimpses into her characters’ minds; it’s a big story, and she keeps it comparatively lean by carefully picking her spots to show the world through their eyes. This lends itself to small, subtle, and telling observations throughout: the aging Mihalis feeling his bicep to test his might after the coup and telling himself that he is still young, still strong; Anna observing that Mihalis and Sophie “dived headfirst into trouble and laughed when they emerged”; Taki’s face wearing “an expression of distaste, as if the family were something sour or bitter that he had to hold in his mouth indefinitely before swallowing.” She also makes use of sweeping panorama at times—the best of...

Role of Transportation in the Persuasion Process: Cognitive and Affective Responses to Antidrug Narratives

This study examined transportation effects of first- and third-person narratives as well as the role of transportation in the persuasion process. In particular, the authors evaluated the role of transportation in affecting cognitive and affective responses. Last, they addressed the relation between (a) cognitive and affective responses and (b) antidrug expectancies. Participants were 500 undergraduate students at a large northern university in the United Kingdom who were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions: first- or third-person narratives on cocaine use. The results demonstrated that there was no difference between first- and third-person narratives in terms of transportation. However, overall, greater transportation was associated with more favorable cognitive responses, and more favorable cognitive response was associated with stronger anticocaine expectancies. In terms of affective responses, results indicated the mediating role of sadness and contentment in the association between transportation and anticocaine expectancies. In particular, increased transportation was associated with greater sadness and lower contentment. Lower sadness and contentment were associated with stronger anticocaine expectancies. Important theoretical and empirical implications are discussed.

La confession de Charleroi by Aliocha Vandamme

VANDAMME, ALIOCHA. La confession de Charleroi. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. ISBN 978-20812 -4835-9. Pp. 350. 19 a. History professor Aliocha Vandamme’s first work of fiction delves into the alternately serious and humorous state of humanity and the unpredictable universe that we inhabit. At the center of this world in decline is Charleroi, a city ravaged by wars, mining, and industry, punctuated by mine dumps and World War I cemeteries with white crosses. Yet the novel’s geographical anchor is the picturesque Charles II square with its fountain and a church that Boris, the novel’s central protagonist, enters to confront the Abbé Thierry Degueldre on his philosophical ideals. The resulting dialogues between the two men diverge from religious questions, mimicking the plot’s spatial development away from the church into other parts of Charleroi, where Boris ventures with trepidation. Like Beatrice Portinari of Dante’s trilogy, Ornella, a young woman of unusual powers inexplicably drawn to the protagonist, guides Boris on these journeys in which present events and surrealist moments overlap with Boris’s memories. In these third-person narratives, Boris remains a detached observer, who stops time to momentarily lose himself in the mundane trials and tribulations of those he encounters in order to avoid confronting his inner fears. The confession of the novel’s title is that of the city as a collective entity, whose inhabitants are revealed to be living with the guilt of secrets and regrettable past acts. Paul Dupré, who locks his wife in the house and prostitutes her to anyone to whom he lends the key, does so out of vengeance and frustration. Brasserie owner Norbert Bucquoy, a former Katangan gendarme during post-independence Congo, relives the violence he helped perpetrate while pining for his beloved Térésa. Ludovic Taillepied, a militant anarchist who served time for a seemingly violent crime, unsuccessfully tries to lose himself in the scale model of Charleroi that he populates with tragic characters inspired by the faits divers of the city’s newspapers. Bachir, Boris’s Palestinian friend now living in Charleroi, must recognize that he was unknowingly responsible for his son’s voluntary death in a suicide bombing. Degueldre and Boris also have painful truths to confront and revelations to share. Boris’s journey and the people he encounters humanize the otherwise apathetic view of existence proposed by Vandamme’s reinterpretation of the Big Bang theory: “l’univers est une histoire belge, et Charleroi en est le centre, une Grande Éclate farceuse” (327). In this world of disorder, Boris deems two Belgians to be the geniuses of the twentieth century: Georges Lemaître, who first proposed the Big Bang theory, and the more widely recognized accident-prone Gaston Lagaffe, of the comic strip Spirou. La confession de Charleroi also combines scientific theory with sarcasm to illustrate the universe’s propensity toward disorder and confusion. Grandiose pronouncements on mankind’s fate alternate with bizarre interludes , such as the irreverent environmentally sound aerial cemetery where the body of Boris’s recently deceased mother is placed atop trees for consumption by uncooperative vultures. Yet such absurdity has human significance: Dans ce corps déchiré par les rapaces, [on peut voir] une allégorie de notre Belgique toujours en sursis d’écartèlement, mais aussi une allégorie de notre pauvre Charleroi déchiquetée par les appétits capitalistes qui l’ont dépouillée de sa substance et la rejettent maintenant comme une écorce vide. (269) Reviews 1215 Vandamme’s novel effectively weaves the fantastic with the realistic, the tragic with the humorous, to convincingly portray how, in a universe that may have no meaning, man’s will to live emerges from dialogue and interaction. Inventive anecdotes, thought-provoking conversations, wistful songs, and bawdy short stories populate the novel and demonstrate that the written word continues to play an integral part in the affirmation of life, particularly in the contemporary world. The universe will always produce stupidity, failure and insignificance, but it is also full of beauty, love and art, even in Charleroi. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Nathalie G. Cornelius Linguistics edited by Stacey Katz Bourns BURGUY, GEORGES FRÉDÉRIC. Grammaire de la langue d’o...

Recursive Mindscapes: Noematic Confusion in the Kunstgespräch of Georg Büchner's Lenz

I argue that the famous Kunstgespräch in Georg Büchner's Lenz is less a talk about art than a scene in which Lenz's speech is increasingly confused with the mind of a woman by a window as depicted in the second painting of the Dutch School. By dint of free indirect discourse presented in monologue form, Lenz's mind in effect becomes indistinguishable from that of the woman in the painting—as well as from the narrative voice of the novella's third-person narrator. Specifically, I base this intrusion or perhaps appropriation of the narrator's narrative voice on the near identical depiction of the scene of Lenz's sermon earlier in the text. Against other critics’ diagnoses of paradoxes and enigmas in Lenz's speech, I offer a reading of the Kunstgespräch that identifies “noematic confusions” within the ambivalent phenomenological parameters of these first- and third-person narrative perspectives of the passage to be at the core of the Kunstgespräch's enigmas.

Gender Assignment and Word-final Pronunciation in French: Two Semantic Systems by Margaret À. Beckett

Céleste’s heart because he is not a fighter. He has not invested in his négritude, or overcome his unemployment. Instead, he has resigned himself to seeing his job loss as an indication of the rise in power accorded to “les Maghrébins” (184). Both Elliott’s and Elio’s self-centeredness compel Céleste to disappear. Too late, they each realize their behavioral errors, and resolve to win her back. Despite the novel’s initial status as a complicated love story told in the firstperson by Cassandra, Céleste’s best friend, Bamako Climax becomes a murder mystery and novel of suspense in its second half. Third-person narration predominates in the investigation of the plane crash claiming the life of Elio’s sister. Moreover, the omniscient narrator is better suited for telling the story of Elio’s and Elliott’s convergence in Bamako as they pursue Céleste through her journalistic activities aimed at uncovering a continent-wide conspiracy for providing Islamic terrorist organizations with young African recruits. The third-person account provides more credibility in the disclosure of the negotiations and hardships that each man faces in inquiring where in Africa Céleste has been sighted, which is information beyond Cassandra’s purview. Nevertheless, Cassandra reappears twice in the last seventy pages of Bamako climax in order to resume her first-person narration. This causes the reader to rethink her contribution to the novel. Although Cassandra could not know every tip presented in the suspenseful chapters, her tying up the threads of the story makes sense, as she finally admits to being a better person herself because of Céleste. In the penultimate chapter, Cassandra even speculates about what Céleste’s place would have been in “la mythologie grecque” (396). From this point forward, one identifies Cassandra as the oracle for the entire novel, although her abrasive personality has kept the reader at a distance. Through her, one glimpses a rewritten mythology in which women hold men in their power. Tchoungui’s hierarchy reaffirms itself in the novel’s final chapter as epilogue, which predicts the nature of racial relations in the future. University of Texas, El Paso Jane E. Evans Linguistics edited by Stacey Katz Bourns BECKETT, MARGARET À. Gender Assignment and Word-final Pronunciation in French: Two Semantic Systems. Munich: Lincom, 2010. ISBN 907-8-38958-696-79. Pp. 836. 89 a. If grammatical gender in French were rule-based and thus predictable, applications of such a model would be of great interest to linguists and teachers, not to mention to French students. Through an analysis of terms denoting birds, fish, other members of the animal realm, plants and human beings, Beckett provides compelling evidence that words’ meanings constrain both grammatical gender and word-final phones. The resulting lists of features associated with masculine versus feminine gender and consonant- versus vowel-final words resembles the noun classification systems of non-European noun class languages. Beckett’s thorough analysis indicates that nouns that do not connote gender directly, for example, un coq versus une poule, have semantic properties related to feminine or masculine grammatical genders. The trait “open,” for instance, is Reviews 603 argued to be associated with feminine gender. Une baie, for example, opens to surrounding waters, whereas un lac, which is landlocked, is “closed” and masculine . Other attributes are analyzed as being associated with words ending in a pronounced vowel (“rough skin,” like cornichon) versus a pronounced consonant (“smooth skin,” like banane). Of course, most words have multiple traits of this kind. Therefore, these attributes are said to be ranked in terms of saliency. For example , although une autruche is “flightless,” which is related to masculine gender, it is more importantly the largest of all birds and thus “unique,” a feminine property. Variable rankings of such attributes account for words that take both genders, words that have historically changed genders, and cases in which grammatical gender does not match with semantic gender (for example, une victime for a masculine victim). In this analysis, these properties frequently take on the form of oppositions between semantic features asserted to extend to other lexical fields and, possibly, to the organization of nominal classifications in other...

Liturgy and the First Person in Narratives of the Second Temple Period

Among the genres that make regular use of the first person in the Second Temple period, the testament and the apocalypse have received widespread attention. I isolate and analyze a different first-person narrative genre, the liturgical autobiography. In the liturgical autobiography, the speaker narrates an experience that he has undergone as a way of offering and attempting to elicit in his audience praise of God. I highlight the commonalities between the two best attested instances of the genre, the book of Tobit and Daniel 4, from their shifts in person to their use of Deuteronomy 32. Finally, I reflect on connections between the liturgical autobiography and novel elements in post-classical third-person narrative, especially the book of Ruth.