Search

Copyright of Wielogłos is the property of Jagiellonian University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Returning to Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) in light of its scholarly reception and Brand's subsequent works, this article focuses on narration as a form of post-colonial redress with particular attention to Brand's use of second-person narration as a device of counter-estrangement. Taking a cue from Brian Richardson's description of the second person as an "unnatural" register of narration, it explores Brand's use of the second person as a voice of commingled alterity that has strong ethical implications for readers. With Brand's analysis of "what sits in narrative" in An Autobiography of an Autobiography of Reading (2020) as a hermeneutic, the article demonstrates how, by blurring the gap between narratee and reader, Brand puts the reader "in the room with history". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video games which base their narration on avatar-based representation of the player shift the narrative towards the interactive receiver, a "surrogate self" within the game's tale. The immersive activism of the sovereign influence of the player on the course of the game is nonetheless significantly limited in case of procedural games, as the interactivity may prove to be an imposed or anticipated inter-passivity of the receiver. The chaos-inducing and destabilizing effect of the pandemic on social life shown in the example of the rhetorical, both utopian and persuasive game Animal Crossing proved to be the anticipated virtual ersatz of real social order. The players' anxious dissociations and dislocations were assuaged by the rhetorical disposition of the game, which does not require deep investment. It is an ambient game in the sense that the player allows his in-game islander avatar to "lead them by hand". The player does actively belong to the allotopic community, but nevertheless their alternative post-identity becomes a form of psychological escapism which allows them to relinquish factual decision making. Meanwhile, to explore the new possibilities of the island community, the game poses a condition: one has to accept its dominant economic aspect. Animal Crossing's narrative subordinates the active interaction in-game to obedience to rhetorical procedures which, through second-person narration, impose quasi-capitalistic rules of order to the simulation of island fun. The player is thus not sovereign in their actions, but rather they follow instructions aimed at them. The market regulations of late capitalism form the ideological background of these instructions. The eutopic narrative thus conceals the paradox of the neoliberal "object of free will" which is only possible at the cost of repression and real constraints on autonomy and choice, even in the alternate form of in-game post-identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to present the phenomenon of using the second-person narrative in tabletop role-playing games. Despite its ambiguous status in literary projects, the dyadic narrative is the basic component of the phenomenon of pen-and-paper RPGs. In the introduction, the author briefly introduces the specificity of text-based narrative games and the history of their creation. Then the most popular systems, such as Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade, were characterized, as well as examples of games created in Poland. To illustrate the phenomenon, official manuals, and recordings of sessions of the most popular Polish artists published on YouTube were used. When discussing examples of second-person narration, the author draws attention to its occurrence in guides and in the statements of the player functioning as the Game Master. The Game Master is a specific narrator of heroes' adventures, who in his action smoothly moves between different types of narratives (first, second and third person): he describes the scenery and actions of NPCs and creatures, constructs statements of characters not guided by other participants of the session, but also comments on the actions and commands of player-created heroes. It is precisely in this last type of activity that the dyadic narrative is extremely important. In the statements of the Game Master, it manifests itself primarily as a commentary on the actions of the characters, the continuation of the plot after the actions and statements of the players, and when consulting the heroes' further actions, but also serves technical communication related primarily to the mechanics of throwing polyhedral dice. The use of a second-person narrative in RPGs primarily contributes to increasing the immersion, the involvement, and the sense of interactivity between players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the 1970s, if not before, second-person narration has been used as an alternative storytelling format in auto/biography to expand the narrative possibilities of engaging with one's own or someone else's life. The second-person pronoun can support the author's project of self-exploration while also offering a means for self-distancing. When someone else's story is addressed to that person, this raises questions concerning the epistemics of the narrated events as well as the teller's storytelling rights and authority. This article explores the use of you-narration in an auto/biographical text by Anne Harich about her dead husband, Marxist philosopher Wolfgang Harich. The second-person narrative form is shown to serve various functions, ranging from creating an imaginary dialogue with the dead to expressing the author's personal feelings about and perspectives on the life she lived with her husband. The analysis shows how Anne Harich, in imagining a conversation with her husband, vents her own pent-up frustration and points to her ambivalent attitude towards her marriage. The you-narrative parts fictionalize the otherwise non-fictional account and show that one needs to distinguish between the aspects of address at the level of the communication between narrator and narratee and reference in the story world of the you-narration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a correlation between second-person narration and the more-than-human perspectivity in animal narratives. The analysis focuses on representations of "you" narration in Andrzej Zaniewski's novel Rat, published for the first time in 1995. "Rat-centric" fiction, as Marco Caracciolo describes it, talks about various experiences of the title animal. Although the dominant diegetic form in the novel is the first-person narrative, the appearing parts of the text told from a second-person point of view turn out to be a significant element of a non-anthropocentric perspective. Considering the influence of form on the posthuman message, the paper is based on research in the field of animal studies and contemporary narratology, including, among others, Irene Kacandes's "literary performative", David Herman's "double deixis" or Dominique Lestel's "thinking with fur". In this article, I propose to distinguish three functions of the second-person narrative in Rat: immersive, empathetic and identity roles. The immersive function participates in adapting a sensorimotor repertoire to the intersubjective perception of the non-human world. The second of them, the empathetic function, by bonding the human narratee with the animal character, opens a possibility of embodied co-experience and verification of anthropocentric norms. The third, identity function, participates in (de)constructing the rat selfhood. Findings of the proposed perspective of second-person zoonarration sheds new light on its formal opportunities for creating posthuman agency, thinking, and storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay builds upon David Herman's idea of double deixis to explore the 'choose-yourown-adventure' (CYOA) form as a popular subtype of you-narration that foregrounds reader involvement, co-creation, and agency. The central conceit from such instances of hypertext fiction to self-help writing seems to be that you -- the reader/consumer -- have a choice. However, in my reading of Alejandro Zambra's Multiple Choice (2014) and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House (2019), the false equivalence between choice and non-choice becomes particularly palpable when considering the affect of the second-person mode. While the former exemplifies what Irene Kacandes has called 'proto-' or 'paper hypertext' (2001: 200), the latter is also a memoir. I look at the underexamined intersection of hypertext fiction and autobiographical writing in the history of second-person narratives to restore the significance of negative affect to critical discussion. The agency to choose in you-narratives not only involves the anticipation of guilt, fault and/or shame, but autodiegetic instances of you-narration like Machado's memoir formalise Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenological description of shame and Denise Riley's concept of malignant inner speech, or malediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Winiecka focuses on the phenomenon of interactive fiction produced using the Twine software. She refers to the state of the art in digital fiction study, discussing the possibilities new technology provides to the literary narration. She draws attention to the transformations of literary communication resulting from the use of interactive text’s visual and kinetic potential. Winiecka considers especially the latter feature, related to the setting in motion of the fixed and hitherto unchanging layer of literary works. Thus, she focuses on the new possibilities of dynamic narration and its aesthetic, semantic, social, and cultural consequences. Referring to examples of works created with Twine, Winiecka indicates the need for further research on literary works created in the digital environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interactional model of second-person narration description. The text refers to the interdisciplinary research on the second-person perspective, which resulted in the “turn to you” in the cognitive sciences, philosophy, and sociology. Rembowska-Płuciennik discusses this current of reflection against the background of the hitherto narratological approaches to the second-person narration. RembowskaPłuciennik introduces a conceptual matrix based on the enactive cognition theory, in which interaction with other subjects is seen as an inalienable component of human cognition. The article presents a narrative directed toward “you” as an interaction between the initiator and the interactorm, namely the referent of the pronoun “you” and the “I” responding with its story to the actions of others. The participatory potential of this form of storytelling is considered to be the most important feature of its semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I would like to discuss whether recent interest in human interactions may facilitate the long-standing debates on second-person narratives, and help to go beyond an official list of controversies or questions about this ambiguous literary form. Here, I introduce the method of reconceptualizing second-person narrative inspired by social cognitive research, including some empirical findings from social neuroscience. It may be a step towards an enactive theory of second-person narrative. This approach includes an explanation of subjectivity inscribed in that narrative form ("an interacting dyad"); redefinition of second-person narratives in terms of interaction, cooperation, and social event; and remodeling of the ethics and pragmatics of this form as narrative reenactment. Such a conceptualization may explain the current role of the second person in social and interactive media that has given rise to the empowered and directly engaged "you" user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teena Maguire and her child, Bethie, are brutally attacked and beaten by a mob of violent young men in a park at night. While the mother is gang raped and nearly killed, the daughter is both the witness and the victim of physical and psychological violence. Through its innovative second-person narration, Joyce Carol Oates’s novella Rape: A Love Story (2004) contributes to her sustained interest in family relationships, violence, crime and justice. However, rather than focusing on the victim of the rape, Oates writes a coming-of-age story that explores the daughter’s trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder and fight for survival, a struggle that coincides with the girl’s critical passage from childhood to adulthood. During the months after the assault, Bethie’s innocence is also repeatedly violated by the aggressors’ intrusion into her life and the hostility of the community in the town of Niagara Falls and its social institutions, such as police, school, media, healthcare and the judicial system. Unable to cling to girlhood or to find maternal protection, her forced witnessing of her mother’s gang rape compels Bethie to mature too early while experiencing her first love for a man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suspension between life and death is not the only one that heroes of Gerorges Perec and Anne Godard, accompanied by a reader, have to undergo. The grammatical second person applied in order to represent the characters implies actually a particular plurality of voices which creates in a paradoxical way these two silent heroes. Moreover, devoid of anchor point unlike other grammatical persons, it makes them constantly suspended in time and space. Therethrough, A Man Asleep and L'Inconsolable cannot be treated just like rewritings of common myths: they represent a new quality in the history of literature, very dynamic and rich in interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article represents an attempt to free narratological typologies from the constraints of first- and third-person dualities. It argues that a new collaborative and multiagent model of second-person narratives is needed, and draws on the concept of enactment to help explain the specificity of second-person narration. The growing popularity of second-person narration in contemporary print literature is linked to the rapid development of multimedial storytelling strategies and new technological environments. The new status of second-person narration in print literature is connected with the increasing cultural need for participation in interactive and socially shared experiences or activities (real or virtual). Understanding second-person narration as such a joint action can thus help to understand its growing popularity, not only in terms of the stylistic alternative it affords to both first- and third-person narration, but also in conjunction with the rising cultural value of social cooperation or co-acting in the media-saturated reality. My hypothesis is that second-person narrative stimulates a specific mode of reader involvement, rooted in participation rather than immersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the narratological and rhetorical features of Ilse Aichinger’s story of a botched abortion, “Spiegelgeschichte,” in order to highlight the challenges associated with putting female, bodily trauma into language. By focusing its analysis on the text’s second-person narration and imperative statements it makes an argument about the degree to which the protagonist is liberated from the oppressive conditions that lead to her death. Through her act of reflective storytelling the protagonist divides herself into narrated and narrating selves in order to experience herself as both subject and object and to fight back against her entrapment in a temporal chain of cause and effect. Reaching the limits of this reflective language, however, she must eventually turn to defiant silence in order to (re)establish herself as a unified subject and escape the injurious language that surrounds her. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on second-person narration invariably mentions involvement as a special effect of you-narration on readers. This is arguably achieved because you-narration employs direct address and thus ‘communicates’ with real readers. I argue that one needs to take into consideration the second-person pronoun’s occurrence in, and its interplay with, a given discourse context. Using grammatical and narratological description, and drawing on a contemporary fictional example, this paper proposes that a distinction be made between affective-emotional involvement and aesthetic-reflexive involvement. It is hypothesized that it is the collocation of you with lexical items such as emotive verbs and with narrative techniques creating an interior perspective that creates a sense of experientiality and thus triggers emotional responses. Likewise, readers’ feeling of being addressed is shown to be attributable to the ‘interpersonal semiotic’ in various grammatical constructions, rather than to the usage of the second-person pronoun alone. The address function seems to be tied to the postmodern playfulness of you and readers’ aesthetic-reflexive involvement in this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominance of male characters in children’s literature has been well-established. Despite some improvements, children’s literature remains gender-stereotyped, with an assumption that boys prefer to read about male protagonists. Most literature analyzing gender bias has been grounded in psychology and gender research, but creative writing research has been less frequently used as an investigative tool. Here we use a creative writing methodology to develop a second-person choose-your-own-adventure story, exploring constructions of gender and character. We then extend this research using a traditional survey, comparing readers’ choices of ‘caring’, ‘cold’ or ‘curious’ actions with their own gender and the perceived gender of the protagonist. Our preliminary findings suggest that although both sexes were equally likely to describe the protagonist as either male or female, readers who considered the protagonist to be female were more likely to choose ‘caring’ rather than ‘non-caring’ actions. The traditional use of gender-specified texts may artificially promote dichotomous gender choice in readers. Further research using second-person interactive narratives may offer less proscribed constructions of gender than traditional methods. Creative writing research offers exciting possibilities for new approaches to gender studies in children’s literature, however, our preliminary study has also identified important limitations which will benefit future study design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]