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Narratology can profit from closer critical attention to premodern texts. This essay opens an extended narratological analysis of the Middle English Book of Margery Kempe (mid fifteenth-century). Modifying narrative theory (Genette, Bal) to suit a medieval narratology, I use discourse analysis to explore the language, focalization, and temporality of the narrating discourse. The text, with a dramatized storyteller but not an explicit narrator, deploys multiple focalizations to construct not a strict autobiography but a detailed third-person narrative of the life of a lay, extravagantly pious, and visionary woman. I describe five focalizations: two internal (Everyday and Visionary Experiencers) and three external (Summarizer, Commentator, Scribal-Textualist). The lively narration weaves together homodiegetic and heterodiegetic perspectives and constructs multifocalized accounts of the protagonist's everyday struggles and interactions with lay people and clergy and her interior experiences and visions of Jesus suffering in the Passion and "fresch" on the streets. Narratological analysis foregrounds the textual power of the protagonist's life story with intersecting and transplacing temporalities of Apostolic past, near past, and present reading time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of performance in jazz novels - novels that not only deal with jazz on the level of content, but use it as a structural model in their narrative construction. It considers several aspects of the performance situation in jazz music and their evocation in the novels, beginning with the relationship between the performer and composer, which is reflected in the novels by the tension between dramatized narrators and implied authors. Elements borrowed from oral storytelling are used to link text and music, bridged by orality as an intermediate stage. Several oral devices are imitated in these texts, from aspects of language and deictic references to the speech context, to topics and styles reminiscent of gossip, to a strong focus on the figure of the narrator as an individualized voice. After a discussion of first-person narration and the tenses used to convey immediacy, the paper concludes with an analysis of the 'solos' by some of those narrators and the way they attempt to 'improvise on the break'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a century now, the desire for a political interpretation of literary form has persistently resurfaced in many seemingly unrelated corners of literary theory and critical practice: in the early work of Georg Lukács and in the literary sociology of Lucien Goldmann and Franco Moretti, in poststructuralist readings of modernist fiction, in Foucauldian interpretations of the realist novel, in feminist narratology of Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, and, most recently, in the attempts by scholars such as Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh to subvert the distinction between the patterns of literary and social organization. And yet, despite the long list of scholars who sought to explore the relationship between form and ideology, attempts to develop a political formalism have been plagued by far-reaching methodological issues, including excessive reliance on homological reasoning, problematic mechanisms of assigning ideological significance to specific techniques, unresolved relationship between formal and thematic analysis, and implausible claims of literary formalism's political relevance. In this essay, I introduce the categories of soft formalism , hard formalism , and expansionist formalism in order to analyse both the sources of literary criticism's attraction to the project of political formalism and the methodological difficulties that make such a project a near impossibility: What do we truly mean when we speak of the politics of form? What do we promise when we imagine a political formalism? What theoretical and rhetorical moves do we perform in an attempt to fulfil that promise? And what do we deliver in the end? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case for approaching works of nineteenth-century realist fiction as proto-ethnographic documents that contain unique evidence for reconstructing extinct discourse practices. We focus on two previously undescribed phenomena: improvised rhyming in sparring dialogue, and the use of ideophones in oral storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) and Catherine Breillat's Barbe Bleue (2009) are film adaptations of the tale Bluebeard, both of which have a seemingly bright closure -- "and they all lived happily ever after". "They", as the female, are in the becoming process since "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" (de Beauvoir 1956: 273), which changes the nature of the film denouement. By looking at the female protagonists Ada McGrath in The Piano and Marie-Catherine in Barbe Bleue, this research aims to deal with how female "decisions" in attempting to accomplish themselves in the face of a crisis affect the understanding of the film's ending. First, female characterisation and plot development are investigated with the construction of women's feelings and perceptions at a given moment, influencing the subsequent outcomes. Second, the significance of narrative techniques is expounded with audience's affective interaction with characters. The conclusion reached is that in both films, repressed female temperament allows women to make judgements and choices that predetermine the tragic core of the happy ending. The significance of this study is to draw attention to the plight of women in the undercurrent, to make it possible for the silent cries behind the beautiful fantasies to be heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Slavic & East European Journal is the property of American Association of Teachers of Slavic & East European Languages 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.)

Copyright of Brazilian Journalism Research is the property of Sur le journalisme, About journalism, Sobre jornalismo 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.)

The humanities in general, and literature in particular - Martha Nussbaum argues - deserve a leading role within the educational system, because they contribute in a fundamental way to the functioning of a democratic society. More concretely, they would help to cultivate empathetic citizens, concerned with the experiences, suffering and vulnerability of people whose lives seem radically different from their own. In the present article, the correlation between literary education, empathy, and justice established by Martha Nussbaum will be tested by reference to an extreme case, i.e. the affective relations between human beings and artificial creatures as represented in Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. The limits and dangers of empathy, on the one hand, and the ambivalent character of aesthetic experience, on the other, will be emphasized. In these two novels - the author argues - the arbitrary distinction between human and non-human, as well as the differential justice that follows the lines of this cleavage, is consolidated precisely by the deep sympathy/empathy/compassion felt for members of the same group of belonging, be it social class, gender, race, or species. Furthermore, if aesthetic education functions for the protagonists of the two novels both as an illusory compensation and a means of subjectivation, the effect that the narratives may have on the readers is far from clear and unequivocal: even though empathy for otherness is partially able to undermine our closure of identity, it remains powerless as a motivation for acting ethically, if this implies the loss of benefits for our group of belonging (ethnic, national or human). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of Baudelaire's poem 'La Beauté' have generally agreed that it has a key role to play in our understanding of his aesthetic theories, but have differed wildly in how this role is interpreted. The present study brings together arguments that see the speaker of the poem, Beauty, as a statue, along with those that understand the poem as being fundamentally ironic. Situating 'La Beauté' in the context of Baudelaire's art criticism allows us to understand it as part of his engagement in debates within the visual arts. This gives us a new reading of Beauty's claims as voicing the positions of neo-classical idealism, and specifically those of nineteenth-century academic theorists influenced by the eighteenth-century German inventor of art history, Winckelmann. Recognizing the importance of Winckelmann in approaching this poem sheds light on the rejection of movement and emotion that is pronounced by Beauty, and which contradict Baudelaire's theoretical positions expressed elsewhere. The sonnet is thus incorporating the language of a speaker who is distinct from the lyric 'je' and cannot be reduced to a mask for him or a part of his divided self. This language and the position it expresses are framed within the sonnet, whose implicit irony leads to what Bakhtin calls double voicing. This approach offers a new reading of 'La Beauté' in formal terms as an example of Bakhtinian dialogism within lyric poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 2 of the book "Walking Shadows " is presented. It focuses on the short story "Rip Van Winkle by author Washington Irving. The treatment of myth and romance are used through a narrative technique that establishes existence of myth. The unity of framework and literary mechanism, the role of narrators, and the folk lore genre of the story are given textual analysis by the author. The heroic representation of the protagonist with specific historical reference is highlighted.

Copyright of Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofia is the property of Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofia 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.)

It has been an accepted notion that ‘inter-textuality’ is the basis of all communication. Games, inasmuch as they use semiotic systems, are no exception. At the same time the special rhetorical use of specific references and allusions to other texts, particularly in literature, is also an established fact. It is however, quite surprising to find rhetorical inter-textuality in computer games, even in single player action of the shooting type, because of the demands such games make on the player’s time and attention. Following a theoretical grounding in theories of allusion (Ben-Porat, 1976, 1978) and game theory (Aarseth, 1997, 1999, 2005a,b, 2006, 2012), the article presents six distinct types of rhetorical allusions, discussing them in relation to the narrativity level of the game to which they belong, to the source text position vis-à-vis the game, and to published evidence concerning the identification of such literary canonic traces and reflections on their contribution to the game. The results are hardly surprising, but still interesting. Game-produced narratives are not literary, certainly not literary inter-textual texts. Consequently, although there are numerous inter-textual relations between computer games and canonic, as well as popular literary texts, very few of them can be actualized as rhetorical allusions, and even less will. They are not treated as such by those who use them, though their authors may think and act otherwise. Neither triggers nor a high concentration of narrative elements effects actualizations. Significantly, gamers’ behavior is not different from that of average readers and the nature of the triggers is typical of contemporary culture: they consist of minimal cultural units, former attributes of canonic works that have become detached from and independent of their sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trakya University Journal of Social Science is the property of Trakya University, Institute of Social Sciences 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.)

The article focuses on the narratorial preconceptions on the role and behaviour of Mark Ambient in "The Author of Beltraffio," by Henry James. It examines James' perception on the alleged henpeckery of Ambient and his preconceptions that Ambient is arrogant, antisocial, and aesthecist. The author also discusses on the sustained hesitation of James between what he perceives and what he wishes he had perceived about Ambient.

The article traces the influence of Victorian debates about aesthetic education in Thomas Hardy's 1890 short story entitled "Barbara of the House of Grebe." Hardy's story, loosely based on an anecdote about the grandson of the eighteenth-century aesthetic theorist Anthony Ashley Cooper concerns the uses of art for the education of character.

This study investigates the similarities between Li Ruzhen's nineteenth-century novel Jinghua yuan and Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century masterpiece Honglou meng in terms of their artistic experimentation, by its focus on Li's appropriation of Cao's rhetorical strategies. It places the two novels in the context of vernacular literature in the mid- and late Qing period and attributes the disappearance of the "pseudo-oral" narrator in both novels to the dramatization of the narration and the establishment of a supernatural realm as the sphere of the author. The rhetorical strategies employed in Honglou meng, and subsequently evoked in Jinghua yuan, are not, as this study intends to show, the sporadic engagements of the supernatural seen in earlier novels. Instead, they are sophisticated mechanisms at work in both the model and its imitation. In comparing the similarities of rhetoric in these two novels, this essay emphasizes Li Ruzhen's artistic creativity by highlighting his critical responses to Honglou meng and his ingenuity in re-using Cao Xueqin's techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about the literary style of writing of the author Henry Fielding. Fielding has an interesting literary style. Fielding speaks in a manner which is playful and in a high and archaic literary style, incorporating the rhythms of iambic verse, learned allusions, conventional formulae, and antiquated pronouns and verbal forms. Stylistic features, he proposes, reflect epistemic choices they convey, along with a statement's specific content, the underlying matter of how a writer thinks, how he comes to know, how he imposes order on the ephemeral pandemonium of experience.

With reference to Australian radio, this paper reviews a premise of recent European television news research: that in the increased climate of competition engendered by deregulation over the last decade, news has moved away from the objectivism embodied in the inverted pyramid, and narratives have come to dominate news reports. This 'storytelling' mode has been identified with 'dumbing down' or 'tabloidization' of news. The paper offers a definition of narrative modes in broadcast news, then analyses radio bulletins on public stations in Sydney, to support the argument that narrative modes are appropriate to the radio medium but raise questions for the news genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the integration of medieval histories and modern realism in the fictional writing. Evidence of fiction-inside-history phenomenon during the Middle Ages; Views on history as form of epistemological claim; Opinion of novelist Charles Fornara on historical mimesis; Influence of literary genre on the twist of linguistic turn.

A literary criticism of the book "My Mortal Enemy, by Willa Cather is presented. Topics discussed include the essay "The Novel Démeublé" and the writing techniques developed by Cather in books "A Lost Lady" and "The Professor's House," the increase in books' compression and economy, and the critics who offered their views on the book such as James Woodress and John Randall.

This article addresses the silencing procedures of children's bodies and voices in Chilean children's literature between 1920 and 1970. This analysis draws on concepts that come from narratology and feminist insights. The strongly established trend of the absence and displacement of child characters' bodies and voices during this period provides evidence for the aetonormativity stance that defines the emergence and first decades of the narrative genre for children in Chile. This work offers a diachronic approach seeking to contribute to the scarce knowledge of the origins and development of children's literature produced in Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]