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Michel Houellebecq's Platform is a novel that intentionally provokes and disturbs through creative engagement with the detective novel. The novel highlights the versatility of detective fiction and how through subversion and the intentional breaking of the genre's rules and boundaries the author can construct a form of resistance. Thus, an investigation into the intention and effect of Houellebecq's use of the detective novel will help us see how this particular genre shapes his narration and themes. Traditionally, detective fiction is known for its coherence and narrative closure; however, it is apparent that Houellebecq's Platform undermines these conventions and instead focuses on ambiguity and disorientation and, in the end, offers no resolution. Through the employment and subversion of the detective tropes, the novel highlights controversial perspectives and beliefs and forces the reader to confront their own assumptions about genre, narration, and resistance. Keywords: Michel Houellebecq / detective fiction / genre / resistance, 'All witnesses are disappointing.' --HOUELLEBECQ., PLATFORM (17) INTRODUCTION Michel Houellebecq's writing has been compared to many literary genres and influences. Critics have identified and discussed Balzacian realism (Viard 2007) and [...]

Looking back over our lives, we often start pondering the impact the experiences we recall have had on our current situation. Autobiographical remembering thus entails the reflection of the subject [...]

ABSTRACT Across the River and Into the Trees consists of two swerves: away from the opening duck shoot in chapter 1, and into an art of expressed emotion. Had Hemingway [...]

ABSTRACT The acting style in Stanley Kubrick's films can be regarded as a symptom of the 'other minds problem'' and its ramifications for the cinema. Performances in Kubrick's work reveal [...]

AUSTEN READERS have agreed for a long time that seeing Sense and Sensibility as a didactic novel that prescribes to young women readers Elinor's 'sense' and warns against Marianne's 'sensibility' [...]

Walking around the halls of Versailles, and passing from her grand public bedroom into her small private apartments, surrounded by her fabrics and trinkets, I could imagine the girl ... [...]

Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the plank in your own? (Matt 7:3) (1) Those without sight may see and those with sight [...]

Previous qualitative research has illustrated a range of issues about the daily life of people living with low back pain (LBP). In this paper, we consider the struggle between hope and despair through consideration of six people's narratives about their experiences of chronic LBP. The six cases were selected from a larger qualitative study of 37 patients in the UK, sampled from a prospective cohort of people consulting their general practitioner. These six cases were selected for particular focus as they exemplify the fluctuating emotions of hope and despair. A number of linked themes emerged which influenced the extent to which people oscillate between hope and despair. the most salient of which were 'uncertainty', 'impact on self', 'social context of living with pain', and 'worry and fear of the future'. It is clear from the narrative accounts that it is not only just physical pain that the back pain sufferer must endure, but also that the psychosocial implications pose an added and often complicated challenge. Health care practitioners should consider these fluctuating emotions of hope and despair in order to facilitate more patient-centred strategies for treatment. Keywords: UK: Hope: Despair: Low back pain: Patient experiences

In Au piano (2003) Jean Echenoz considers the conventions of novelistic narration and the ways in which literary meaning may be constructed. In particular, he focuses upon the articulation of [...]

Popularity, for a writer of fiction, can be a double-edged sword: Surely writers want their work to be read and appreciated, and royalty checks are always welcome; but some forms [...]

An exploration of the translation of historian Cide Hamete Benengeli's manuscript from Arabic into Spanish offers insight into the obvious connection Miguel de Cervantes is making between the act of translating and the mutability of the world.

The narrator in Dante Rossetti's dramatic monologue 'Jenny' speculates on the possible fate of the Haymarket prostitute Jenny, poised topologically between repentance and suicide in the physical heart of London, and uses the term fiery serpent that might be an allusion to Numbers 21, a biblical typological application. The true artistic boldness of Jenny however lies in Rossetti's creative attempt to move readers through his use of biblical typology to repentant, redemptive action on behalf of women trapped as prostitutes.

The remarkable versatility of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus is attributed to its emphasis on the succession of events and its open reference to eighteenth century philosophical fictions. Undertaking an examination of various enlightenment predictions of human liberty and rights, it is argued that the novel's political import resides less in the problem of man becoming God than it does within the paradoxes of man becoming man.

Links between James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and the cultural logic of ragtime and the phonograph during the pre-World War I era are examined in order to reconsider critical conceptions of voice within the African-American tradition. The autobiography gathers together fictional narration, sociology and to draw the boundaries of literary fiction around, it risks invoking the archive fever whose racialized consequences are the subject of the text itself.

Television is a story machine. Every day, thousands of hours of narrative zip through the airwaves and cables and into our sets and minds. Television does more than just tell [...]

The appearance of the risen Jesus is interpreted to the community of the disciples on Easter evening in terms of a Johannine theology and spirituality and as integral to the Johannine resurrection narrative as a whole. The scene serves as a narrative exploration of Johannine ecclesiology, which means, the establishment of the New Covenant with the New Israel and the raising of the New Temple, the body of Jesus, in its midst.

The German fascination with complete critical editions is examined from three different angles. A narrative and extrinsic account Georg Buchner's yet unfinished Samtliche Werke und Schriften is presented to show how cultural sentiment and editorial logic shape and distort a major contemporary editorial project.

Throughout Frankenstein Shelley makes extensive use of several source narratives, all of which interact with and within her own tale. Andrew Green describes how Milton's Paradise Lost and Coleridge's 'The […]

Readers comprehend narrative texts by constructing a series of mental models of the situations described in the text. Observations suggest that readers might use event boundaries as a means for controlling the contents of memory.

At first glance, the work of John McGahern (1) looks like a Francis Ponge (2) inventory: 'Wheels', 'The Key', 'My Love, My Umbrella', 'Peaches', 'Gold Watch', 'Parachutes', 'Doorways' are titles [...]

What I'd like to do here is just offer, by way of appreciation, a few brief responses to some of what draws me into McGahern's work, elements that represent for [...]

Berlie Doherty's young adult novel Dear Nobody was first published in 1991 and won the Carnegie Medal in the following year. It has since been made into a radio play, [...]

The structuralist distinction between story and discourse, that is, between what is told and how it is told, is regarded as 'an indispensable premise of narratology' (Culler 171). Many narratologists [...]

The article proposes a theoretical perspective for analyzing the organization of narrative that combines Weick's (1979) model of organizing and Burke's (1968a, 1984b) ideas of dramatistic form and the guilt-purification-redemption cycle. The theoretical perspective is used to interpret a narrative from the world of music about the cultural practice of 'bamboozling'as a 'curative' act. The analysis describes how: (a) an equivocal construct is retrospectively enacted, (b) repetitive, conventional, progressive, and minor forms, particularly metaphor and crescendo, are selected in the processing of equivocality, (c) the movement toward linguistic 'perfection' of the metaphor of 'doctor' reflects requisite variety, mortification and scapegoating, and the 'demonic trinity,' (d) the representation of 'double-interacts' within the narrative form serves to produce both frustration and gratification while also processing equivocality, and (e) narrative 'discrediting' serves to reproduce the hierarchy and mystery that symbolically legitimates the cultural practice reproduced in the narrative. Five propositions are stated that use central ideas from Burke's dramatism and Weick's model of organizing.

CONSIDER THE PROBLEM OF INTEGRITY: we all aspire to be true to ourselves, to be today what we were yesterday, to fulfill our promises. One way of addressing the need [...]

This article discusses the literary, historical and psychoanalytical study of the autobiographical works of Jews who were child survivors of the Holocaust during the Second World War. The author focuses on the scholarly interest in the interaction between memory and history, and examines on the works of French Jews Sarah Kofman, Georges Perec, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, comparing their respective narrative styles.

This article examines the notion of seeing and being seen in the narrative pattern of Albert Camus's short story 'L'Hote', and its ability to dictate and direct encounters that occur within the text. The author suggests that the story reflects the human encounter with the Other and notions of subjectivity, through depictions of face to face encounters and depictions of the face and its expressions.

The best jurists and best authors share the consideration of contraints, since court proceedings are guided by the literal past and literature explores limits of the possible figurative. Legal arguments and storytelling both use narrative, a form that constantly balances established history and variations on imagination.

This article examines the use of hand imagery and symbolism in Sir Thomas Mallory's 'Le Morte D'Arthur', focusing on its use in the Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, and its representation of the masculine world of Arthurian legends. The author examines the negative connotations that the hand represents through its association with duplicity, dishonor and compulsiveness, suggesting that it emphasizes the efforts to construct masculinity and narrative authority.

Key-words: Greece, identity, nationalism, archives, history of archaeology, Introduction As a discipline concerned with the past, and especially the remote past, archaeology is in a unique position to contribute to the growing discussion on nationalism and the formation [...]

Anthropologists have increasingly been concerned with epistemological and ethical issues and how these issues have affected narrative strategies. These concepts are particularly relevant when studying African American 'obeah' concepts of other-worldly reality.

The art of the memoir is examined. Topics include possible reasons why memoirs are so popular at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, the need to artfully make sense out of lived events, and an examination of Sir Edmund Gosse's memoir, 'Father and Son.'

The article examines anti-colonial writings by prominent colonial men and women in New Zealand, spurred by the forced purchase of Maori lands by the British government in the 1850s. Discussion focuses on comparing men's narratives to women's narratives, analyzing ideological and gendered differences and discursive representations of social and geographic place.

Canone inverso (1) is a rather complex book that offers various readings, ranging from a simple variation on the old detective story, to a meditation on the relationship between technique [...]

Operational research frequently has to deal with situations where the perceptions and views of the various stakeholders involved may be quite different. One such situation is provided by the case of the evaluation of the work of voluntary sector groups, where concepts such as quality are frequently held to be the desired objectives whose achievement should be evaluated, yet where quite different perceptions of these concepts are held by the various parties to the evaluation. Through the use of a case study, this paper illustrates how approaches to narrative analysis like actant analysis and deconstruction can be used alongside other soft OR methods to enable negotiation of common understandings of important concepts like quality.

This research examined how transmission and transaction beliefs about reading affect comprehension, engagement, and holistic understanding of narrative text. Transaction beliefs, which emphasize reader-generated meaning, were related positively to the type and number of reader responses as well as to the sophistication of one's holistic interpretation. Transmission beliefs, which emphasize understanding the author's intended meaning, were unrelated to all outcome measures. Transmission and transaction beliefs were unrelated to each other. These findings support the view that transaction beliefs facilitate meaning construction of narrative text, whereas transmission beliefs do not.