Digital Gaming and Tolkien, 1976-2015

‘Tolkien’ the cultural phenomenon is far bigger than J. R. R. Tolkien the author, or even J. R. R. Tolkien the author-and-oeuvre. When Christopher Tolkien asserted in 2012 that his father’s legacy has been rendered monstrous he blamed its fate on the gross depredations of commercialization generally and the Warner Bros’ franchise in particular. Explorations of – and encomiums on – the afterlives of Tolkien’s novels generally focus on the impact of Peter Jackson’s films. The forces which have shaped contemporary ‘Tolkien’ are not only commercial however; fans also ‘do things’ with Tolkien’s writings. The drive to make money has played a significant part in shaping Tolkien’s legacy, but audience engagements and technological change have also been highly significant as this article demonstrates through an exploration of digital games (computer and console) which adapt Tolkien’s writings from the 1970s to the present. The article considers both licensed and unlicensed games, and both fan and franchise practices and creations

You are here: reading and representation in Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru

Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru is a strikingly provocative postmodernist text. Instead of examining how Thru deconstructs fiction through the literary and linguistic theory that it includes, this essay looks at how theory—specifically Roman Jakobson's diagram of communication—is altered within the context of fiction. The analysis considers the mechanisms through which criticism differentiates itself from reading and how Thru manages to expose such distinctions. I foreground the text's disrupted graphic surface in order to suggest that this may be the basis for the pragmatic reader to gain the advantage over the critic in achieving a productive view of this complex text

Gender and the senses of agency

This paper details the ways that gender structures our senses of agency on an enactive framework. While it is common to discuss how gender influences higher, narrative levels of cognition, as with the formulation of goals and in considerations about our identities, it is less clear how gender structures our more immediate, embodied processes, such as the minimal sense of agency. While enactivists often acknowledge that gender and other aspects of our socio-cultural situatedness shape our cognitive processes, there is little work on how this shaping takes place. In order to provide such an account, I will first look at the minimal and narrative senses of agency (Gallagher 2012), a distinction that draws from work on minimal and narrative selves (Zahavi 2010). Next I will explain the influence of the narrative sense of agency on the minimal sense of agency through work on intention-formation (Pacherie 2007). After a discussion of the role of gender in the narrative sense of agency, I’ll expand on work by Haslanger (2012) and Young (1980) to offer three ways in which gender influences the minimal sense of agency, showing the effect that gender has on how we perceive our possibilities for interaction in a phenomenologically immediate, pre-reflective manner

"Treating the literary literally" : the reflexive structure of Flann O'Brien's At swim-two-birds

Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds is a complex reflexive novel that explores the creation of fiction. O’Brien’s layered narrative includes several author/characters, each with his own literary theory. This discussion traces O’Brien’s reflexive structure’s development and demonstrates its repercussions on the characters within the novel, and the novel as a whole. Beginning by placing O’Brien’s novel within a critical framework, this study examines each of the four narrative levels and the uses of reflexivity in each. O’Brien builds and dismantles several structures within his narrative levels, and this thesis shows that the basic reflexive structure of At Swim-Two-Birds is the only remaining structure at the novel’s end

The function of direct speech in Bacchylides' poetry: the case of ode 5 and ode 18

This paper is aimed at analysing Bacchylides’ narrative choices and the role played by and the effects of direct speech in two poems of his, namely ode 5 and ode 18. The use of direct speech in these odes allows the poet to achieve narrative effects that would be unthinkable by resorting only to an extradiegetic narrator and to pure narrative. The investigation of narrative structures can therefore help to understand in depth the aims of Bacchylides’ poetry and how he achieves them. The occasion and the aims of the two odes considered are different. Ode 5 is a victory ode: the insertion of the mythical narrative, with its pessimistic and subdued tone, is aimed at offsetting the excitement caused by a sports victory, which is a typical process of epinician poetry. Conversely, ode 18 is designed to celebrate a civic community, a glorification of Athens by celebrating its mythical founder and its youth filled with warlike ardour. In odes 5 and 18 a tragic effect is achieved, first and foremost, thanks to the poet’s masterly use of several narrative levels and in particular the narrative mode of mimesis adopted by resorting to direct speech. This mode highlights the gap of knowledge between characters on the one hand and the narrator and the audience on the other, thereby creating an effect of dramatic irony that reminds us of the best achievements of Attic tragedy

Polyphonic narrative discourse of the blog

UK: У статті розглядаються основні лінгвістичні ознаки наративу. Аналізується поліфонічно наративний дискурс англомовного блогу, та виділяються його наративні рівні. Наскрізною ланкою побудови наративного дискурсу визначається «точка зору». EN: The article focuses on the main linguistic features of narrative. Polyphonic narrative discourse of English blog is analyzed and its narrative levels are highlighted. The construction of cross-cutting element of the narrative discourse is determined by the "point of view.

Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature by Robert Zacharias

Review of Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature by Robert Zacharias

The narrative technique of Plumb : an essay presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

Prior to the publication of Plumb in 1978, Maurice Gee had published four novels and some short stories which had been collected and published under the title A Glorious Morning, Comrade (Auckland University/Oxford, 1976). The novels show Gee experimenting with various techniques. In My Father's Den (Faber, 1972) has two significant narrative levels. Paul Prior is involved in the police inquiry into the death of Celia Inverarity. The emotional shock of these events leads him on a search of his past, to discover that the forces which shaped his personality are also responsible for the destruction of Celia. In Games of Choice (Faber, 1976) Gee uses a more straightforward narrative form. Kingsley Pratt, the novel's central character, is driven to brief reminiscences, but the novel is entirely dominated by the action of 1970, as the Pratt marriage breaks up. We are told enough about Kingsley's childhood to give us an idea of his background, but the action of the past never achieves the status of a significant narrative in its own right. When he came to write a novel based upon the life of his grandfather, James Chapple, Gee developed a highly complex narrative form and a very distinctive narrative style. In terms of narrative technique, Plumb is different from anything Gee had tried before, although it makes use of two narratives separated by time, as did In My Father's Den. The narrative structure and style of Plumb are suited to its narrator, a man of education, who is capable of great insight and of great blindness. In the course of this study I will examine the structure and style of Plumb, as well as the nature of Plumb himself, as character, narrator and artist

Between Two Literary Traditions - The Writings of Flann O’Brien

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk