Traditional Narrative Forms Research Articles

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the Absurd Theatre

The research consists of three sections and conclusion. Section one deals with the idea of absurdity in the modern world has attracted many writers to thereby portray the bitter reality of a society being dominated by the discourse of modernism Section two focuses on Samuel Beckett's life and his works. In addition, Beckett places his characters in a dreamlike setting in his two-act tragicomedy Waiting for Godot (1948). The play has been criticized by a number of people; in 1953, Jacques Audiberin called it "a perfect work which deserves a triumph". Studies in Section Three Anticipating Godot as an Absurd Drama: The paper concludes with a list of references and a conclusion.. This study examines the meaning-seeking process, existentialist themes, and the human condition in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot within the context of absurd theater. The play's repetitive dialogue and austere setting make it an ideal illustration of the absurdist belief that life is meaningless. The research looks at how the characters, Vladimir and Estragon, interact to show how their waiting for the illusive Godot symbolizes the pointlessness of life and the fight against hopelessness. The ridiculous routines and mutual dependence of the characters highlight the alienation and loneliness that come with living in the contemporary world. By situating Waiting for Godot in the context of Absurd Theatre, this research emphasizes Beckett's innovative use of language and structure, which challenges traditional narrative forms and invites audiences to confront the complexities of existence. Ultimately, the study reveals how Beckett's work serves as a poignant commentary on the human experience, encapsulating the essence of Absurdism through its exploration of time, identity, and hope.

Joseph Skipsey: Bir Madenci Şairin Şiirlerinde Doğanın Kullanımı

Victorian poetry developed under the influence of profound socio-political transformations and accompanied by diverse literary voices and perspectives includes the poems of many as yet little-known labouring poets from various occupational groups, along with those of the leading figures of the period. One of those poets was the Northumberland collier Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903), who spent most of his life in the coal mines he entered at the age of seven. In his poems, the echoes of the socio-economic realities and cultural codes of his locale are clearly observed. Even if his living in the country might evoke at first glance that Skipsey is quite close to nature, his relations with it surprisingly exist in a narrowed framework and remain within the confines of traditional narrative forms, such as ballad and song. This study aims to reveal the essence of a collier poet’s relationship with nature in his poems within the socio-political conditions of Victorian England. The main argument of the study is that Skipsey does not use nature as a glorified unity of beings, but as a means of balance and a source of material he refers to in narrating emotions, human relations and the realities of miners’ life.

On Narrative Ethics of Xiao Jianghong’s Novels

Narrative ethics is the ethical feelings conveyed in the narration of novels, which provides a new perspective for the study of novels to transcend the traditional moral criticism and narrative form analysis and to interweave narrative and ethics. Xiao Jianghong’s novels narrate stories with ethical significance, and discuss the ethical issues of countryside and city, tradition and modernity, “change” and “ invariance” and exude a unique “divine” temperament. With the help of ethical writing in the narration of the novel, XiaoJianghong sensitively touches on the life predicament of the characters on the edge of urban and rural areas in Guizhou, and this writing has injected vitality into the creation of local Chinese novels.

Narrative strategies in the stories by Vladimir Nabokov in the 1920s

The author argues that the features of the narrative structure in the stories by Vladimir Nabokov have repeatedly become the subject of researchers’ attention, both literary critics and linguists. Scholars have highlighted some features specific to the modernist narrative in the analyzes of particular Nabokov works and in the scholarly articles devoted to Nabokov in general. One of the most prominent feature is the uncertainty of the “deictic modus of the text” (Mikhail Dymarsky). However, in the early Nabokov works, when his individual style was just being formed, one can find examples of a consistently sustained traditional narrative. The material for this study was Nabokovʼs stories of the 1920s: this period accounts for almost half of the short stories he created; in addition, the instability of the authorʼs preferences when choosing narrative strategies attracts researcher’s attention. The fundamental differences between these strategies, their incompatibility, and their orientation toward solving mutually exclusive problems become more noticeable when comparing early Nabokov prose and the works by Anton Chekhov, a writer whose creative method evolved within the framework of the traditional narrative. So, along with all sorts of ways to violate the usual conditions of communication with the reader, Nabokov also uses the types of narration explored by Alexandre Chudakov on Chekhovʼs material. In other words, in the early stories, Nabokov actively masters the experience of his recent predecessors and looks for ways to overcome traditional narrative forms; in this sense, the arsenal of his artistic devices is more diverse than that of his predecessors. The results of the study allow to formulate a question about the plot conditionality of certain narrative devices in Nabokovʼs stories and, more broadly, in his prose.

The Precarious Balance of Refugees: Rupture and Connectivity in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Helon Habila’s

Contemporary novels about refugees often question the appropriateness of traditional narrative forms to relate stories of forced migration which involve a fragmentation of the self and of one’s sense of reality. Writers opt instead for forms which are as disjointed as the experience of refugees themselves. This paper explores the precarious balance between a poetics of rupture and an aesthetics of connectivity in two novels about refugees: Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid and Travelers (2019) by Helon Habila. It first examines the strategies developed by both authors to destabilize form in order to reflect the refugees’ shattering ordeals during and after their forced displacements. The multiplicity of stories as well as the shifts in focalization and narrative modes testify to the impossibility of inscribing refugees’ experiences within a single coherent and homogeneous pattern. However, Hamid and Habila also draw from the potentialities of the novelistic genre to devise formal ways of connecting apparently disparate story lines and thereby suggest possibilities for cross-cultural solidarity between refugees who share a common condition of vulnerability.

Peregrynacja Maćkowa (Matzes Reise) (1612) und Finkenritter (um 1560). Traditionen der Erzählform und das Spiel mit den Konventionen: Einiges zu Julian Krzyżanowskis Überlegungen

Summary In the article, relating to my earlier works, I discuss Julian Krzyżanowski’s reflections on the relationship between the joking text of Peregrynacja Maćkowa (1612) and Finkenritter (ca. 1560). Although there is no direct relationship between both texts, I show that they share a common traditional narrative form, and that they both belong to the humorous and joking literature.In this context, one can assume an indirect relationship between the texts, probably based on the oral or written knowledge of a number of motives, both in the case of the author of Finkenritter and the writer of Peregrynacja Maćkowa.The motives in question are highly characteristic of the Cocagne (Schlaraffenland) themes. These Cocagne themes constantly acquire a local and therefore different characteristic or quality.

Space, Time and Catwalks: Fashion Shows as a Multilayered Communication Channel

Fashion shows - the key moment in the fashion communication system - have become a privileged setting for experimenting with new communication languages that implement multifaceted and multi-channel strategies, poised between innovation and tradition. Fashion shows always could read and interpret the spirit of the times in different eras, transforming and shaping themselves into different formats each time while always remaining true to themselves. The article investigates the different contemporary forms of the catwalks, whether real or virtual, implemented due to the digital acceleration witnessed during the Covid-19 social distancing period. In this context, the fashion shows define new communication forms and strategies that are no longer limited to the “here and now” but expand space, thanks to the possibility of remote participation and time, by amplifying the whole concept: the catwalk-event become amplified with the inclusion of a pre, a during and a post. The time expands thanks to communication strategies that increasingly stage the phases that precede the fashion show (the creative process, the backstage, the work in progress), but also the subsequent phases, those of storytelling and narration, formerly the prerogative of a few privileged journalists, now shared storytelling, in which designers directly tell and explain their point of view, both through traditional narrative forms (such as interviews) and through forms of interaction typical of digital (such as gaming, sharing and Instagram live).

Alternative Histories: Renegotiating Colonial Modernity and the Novel Form in Radwa Ἀshour’s A Part of Europe (Qit’a min Urubba, 2003)”

تتThe aim of this paper is to show how Radwa Ashour’s A Part of Europe is an attempt at re-inscribing the ambivalence and conflict that characterized the history of colonial modernity in Egypt and the novel form that came in its tandem in the second half of the nineteenth century, the period that has come to be known as the Arab Nahda. The novel countervails the official history, offering a version that links Khedive Ismael’s project of European modernity to the colonial enterprise that leads in the end to the British occupation of Egypt, the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel as the only piece of Europe in the Arab world, and to a series of defeats that culminate in the American invasion of Iraq that looms over the end of the novel. The novel takes the form of a fictional autobiography of the narrator who introduces himself under the sobriquet of “Al-Nazer” (“The Seer” or “The Onlooker”). He figures as the common man-cum-historian, providing an alternative history from below, or from the margin, in which the public and the private intertwine and crisscross in a narrative patchwork/pastiche that dismantles the polarity between traditional narrative forms and the imported form of the European novel.

Communication Breakdown

The turn to narrative in biomedicine has been one of the most important alternatives to traditional approaches to bioethics. Rather than using ethical theories and principles to guide behavior, narrative ethics uses the moral imagination to cultivate and expand one’s capacities for empathy. This paper argues that by themselves narratives do not, and cannot, fully capture the range of the illness experience. But more than that, the emphasis on narrative often obscures how dominant forms of narrative discourse often operate to marginalize those whose narratives fall outside the parameters of traditional narrative forms or whose stories are occluded by structural violence and oppression. Rather, by focusing on forms of embodiment that are irreducible to narrative discursivity, this paper highlights forms of selfhood that exist outside of the narrative self.

Between Revision and Return: Emile Habiby’s Pessoptimistic Response to Postcolonial Theory

This essay explores how literary postcoloniality, postmodern aesthetics and local narrative traditions are historicized in modern Arabic literature, in particular in the novel of Palestinian writer Emile Habiby (1922–1996), الوقائع الغريبة في اختفاء سعيد ابي النحس المتشائل : قصة (The Mysterious Facts of the Disappearance of Saeed abi Nahs al-Mutashail: A Story) (1974). As an implicit critique both of postcolonial reading categories and postmodern writing, the novel recycles classical Arabic prose (most notably the maqama and the One Thousand and One Nights), French literature (Voltaire’s Candide) and Arabic poetry to offer a different historiographical approach to the postcolonial moment in which colonial and anticolonial cultures coexist. I argue Habiby’s recycling of classical prose opens up possibilities for rewriting the history of the Arabic novel and responds to postcolonial criticism’s problematic privileging of discourse over form. In mocking the expectation of realistic representation, the novel suspends the tension between retaining history and liberating the contemporary Arabic text from the past, specifically by foregrounding traditional narrative forms within the long form of the novel. As such, it invites us to reassess the resurgence of classical narrative forms in the period known as النهضة (al-nahda) or Arab Renaissance (1798–1939) as an integral moment of negotiation between the تراث (turath) or heritage and the modern (imported) novel form. In revisiting this significant historical moment, the novel historicizes both accounts of literary modernity and postcolonial representation and demands a revisionary literary history that could remind postcolonial theory of the need for an open and engaged commitment to singular “postcolonial” conditions.

Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in French. By Natalie Edwards.

This study of first-person narratives of voluntary childlessness in this century is the first book-length analysis of texts in French that challenge entrenched cultural assumptions about motherhood, on the one hand, and about women who choose not to mother, on the other. In the first part of her book, Natalie Edwards explores feminist, sociological, and psychoanalytic theories on voluntary childlessness, before moving on in the second part to undertake detailed and fascinating analyses of specific texts by Linda Lê, Jane Sautière, Lucie Joubert, and Madeleine Chapsal, all loosely defined as ‘life-writing’ and all seeking (in markedly different ways) to ‘take ownership of their childless identity and to create a textual space to explore this through literature’ (pp. 15–16). It is significant that Lê is from Vietnam, Sautière from Iran, and Joubert from Quebec: key to this study is a recognition of cultural differences in terms of attitudes to mothering and non-mothering — the context in France is importantly acknowledged here to be very different from that in the Anglo-American places from which the most prevalent theorizations of voluntary childlessness are derived. The study had originally planned to cover French women’s narratives of non-mothering from a range of ethnicities, races, socio-economic backgrounds, and sexual orientations; the relative lack of available narratives of voluntary childlessness underscores precisely the difficulty of articulating the desire not to have children amongst French women (and the discrimination that women who are not mothers face — as shown in the texts studied here), even in this century. Lê’s epistolary confession, Sautière’s experimental autofiction, and Joubert’s interrogative ‘autocritography’, as Edwards puts it, are analysed as constituting alternative textual experiments through which voluntary childlessness can be voiced and claimed; the less formally innovative La Femme sans, by Chapsal (2001), is included for its doubly silenced perspective, narrated by a woman past retirement age (in her seventies) who does not regret her choice not to have children. The choice to explore both form and content in these texts is effective, highlighting the limits of traditional narrative forms — as well as language — to formulate identity as a woman who chooses childlessness. It might be helpful to interrogate further still the notion of a ‘childless identity’ (p. 16), which presumably runs similar risks to an identity rooted only in maternity; if, as Edwards observes, the texts that she analyses ‘ask that society refrain from defining women according to their reproductive role’ (p. 191) then part of this shift would mean shifting away from tropes of identity and more, as indeed this study powerfully does, towards (textual) experimentation and to the voicing of hitherto silenced perspectives. This book — which is written beautifully, with exemplary clarity — offers a fascinating exploration of voluntary childlessness in contemporary French texts, as well as articulating a paradigm shift in the relation between maternity (refused or otherwise) and identity.

Crossroads Poetics

Crossroads Poetics

Conglomerate memory and cosmopolitanism

Under what conditions do countries and cultures considered radically different find a basis for allegiance and kinship? What part does memory play in this process? This article responds to these questions in two ways: 1) Through Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, I propose that when an other appears in empathetic discourses that both honor difference and cite shared human experiences, seemingly irreconcilable people can develop a sense of mutual responsibility and 2) Conglomerate memory, memories that fuse together others through common pains, contributes to such an appearance. To illustrate this point, I turn to Congolese voices as they are articulated in online American discourses; although currently, authors of online texts typically rely on traditional narrative forms that position Central Africa as incommensurate to Western civilizations, the Internet's worldwide accessibility and intertextual capacities render it a place primed for developing international collectives by connecting memories while maintaining difference.

Sinemada Hatırlamanın Politikası: Gece ve Sis

The Politics of Remembering in Cinema: Night and FogTracing the problems of representing the Holocoust or alike traumas, in other words, endeavoring to translate the traumas into the cinema language enables us to discuss the ethical-political dimension of reminding the past on the cinema screen. Alain Resnais’ movie Night and Fog (1955) positions in the intersection of trauma studies and film studies. The movie has been in the center of discussions on representation because of its narrative, using the real images of genocide directly while merging black and white archive images of Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps and contemporary colored images. The form of the movie is composed by the moments of collapse of the narrative, silences, gaps and encounters in which the traditional narrative form fails to represent. However, it is not adequate to explain Night and Fog’s significance in the cinema history only by its formal choices. The ethical position which this formal choices locate us as audiences is the main reason of this movie’s privileged status in regard to the representability of trauma in cinema. The relation of the movie with the past through its form creates an ethical realm by calling the audience to take responsibility for what he/she sees on the screen. Therefore, Night and Fog bears its status as the reference point of “representational ethics” in the history of cinema

In Saecula Saeculorum: On How Stories End

Abstract Narratologists often profess a distaste for stories that end unambiguously. The emphatic ending is thought simplistic, politically retrograde, and more common in traditional and commercial narrative forms (the folk tale, the realist novel, the feature film) and accordingly less common in modernist and experimental fiction. None of these claims survives scrutiny. A rereading of Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) should reveal the many shortcuts a narratologist has to take to celebrate open endings as liberating and should also disclose some of the ideological purposes to which this celebration has been put.

Roll a Hard Six: Losing Your Noodle in Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing

Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing is a convoluted representation of the mentallyunstable mind existing as a series of six characters that are at once separate and conjoined: the horrors and traumatic events of the narrative past dismantle the unified subject into a series of schizophrenic sub-personalities, parts of the destabilized Author’s psyche, existing as separate fragments that eventually collide. Further, the imaginary room emerges as the Fifth Person, promising, but failing, to be a central stabilizer of the other fractured selves. Finally, the design of the text echoes the patterns of the traumatized mind, illustrating the inability of a narrative to construct a stable, unified subject and demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional narrative forms. The text, with its obliterations, cropped phrases, and pictorial manifestations, becomes the Sixth Person. However, in the end, the text shows that the past cannot be erased, explained, or reversed; neither can the experimental nature of the novel reach beyond the traumatized, schizoid subject to represent the horrors of the past that caused the Author’s psychotic breach. Federman has rolled a hard six that will repeatedly fragment and unite, just as the traumatic past continues to repeat itself as one that defies representation.

Intermediality between Games and Fiction: The “Ludology vs. Narratology” Debate in Computer Game Studies: A Response to Gonzalo Frasca

Abstract In the last ten or fourteen years there has been a debate among the so called ludologists and narratologists in Computer Games Studies as to what is the best methodological approach for the academic study of electronic games. The aim of this paper is to propose a way out of the dilemma, suggesting that both ludology and narratology can be helpful methodologically. However, there is need for a wider theoretical perspective, that of semiotics, in which both approaches can be operative. The semiotic perspective proposed allows research in the field to focus on the similarities between games and traditional narrative forms (since they share narrativity to a greater or lesser extent) as well as on their difference (they have different degrees of interaction); it will facilitate communication among theorists if we want to understand each other when talking about games and stories, and it will lead to a better understanding of the hybrid nature of the medium of game. In this sense the present paper aims to complement Gonzalo Frasca’s reconciliatory attempt made a few years back and expand on his proposal.

The Rapture at the World’s End: Non-optional Choice and Libertarian Idealism in New Media

Central to the experience of new media is the idea of interactivity, even though this dovetails problematically with both arguments for grassroots agency and neo-liberal economic philosophies alike. This paper examines the 2007 computer game Bioshock in relation to its thematic employment of the ideals of market libertarianism as depicted in the novels of Ayn Rand and its strategic use and withholding of agency at critical moments in the gameplay. It argues that Bioshock not only uses the techniques of traditional narrative forms to address the culturally significant issue of the impossible alliance between traditionalism and libertarianism under a conservative banner but also uses the interactive medium to generate a genuinely new aesthetic experience in which the logic of free choice in the narrative, ideology, and medium are simultaneously brought into juxtaposition. This moment marks a landmark development in digital narrative and opens new possibilities for the art form.

Mary Robinson’s ‘The Haunted Beach’ and the Grammar of Gothic

Through an in-depth analysis of Robinson’s poem ‘The Haunted Beach’, this article seeks to identify some of the textual strategies which contribute to eliciting notions of terror and sublimity in the pages of Gothic fiction. The initial premise is that the patterns of Gothic narrative are a modification of those found in folktales, and that the tools of folk narrative research are therefore relevant to the study of Gothic texts. Applying to Robinson’s poem Vladimir Propp’s model for the study of fairytales clarifies several incidents, roles and motifs in the text, while deviations from the fairytale model are shown to be equally significant. Thus, for instance, the poem’s Miltonic strain can be accounted for in terms of a telling modification of the standard version of the hero’s journey; or again, the ‘destinal’ meaning Robinson’s text conveys is shown to be a direct consequence of its manipulation of traditional narrative form. The analysis yields a set of ‘rules’ that arguably enter into the composition of all Gothic narrative and shape what may be called a ‘grammar’ of Gothic. A rationale for these rules is found in the concept of liminality, which allows us to unify an otherwise heterogeneous set of conventions.

Resilience, Agency and Resistance in the Storytelling Practice of Aunty Hilda Wilson (1911-2007), Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Elder

Resilience, Agency and Resistance in the Storytelling Practice of Aunty Hilda Wilson (1911-2007), Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Elder