“It was not Death” : The Poetic Career of the Chronotope

As Bakhtin noted, chronotopes arise from the density and fusion of temporal and spatial indicators. In prose narrative, the density of temporal and spatial indicators arises as a natural consequence of setting scenes and explaining action, and those indicators are fused by the centripetal forces of plot, character and so on that encourage us to read the various elements of the text as aspects of a coherent story and world. In non-narrative poetry, however, there is no story to drive the setting of scene or generation of character; there may not even be scene or character. As a result, temporal and spatial indicators can be quite sparse, and there may be little centripetal force to encourage their fusion. In a textual environment bereft of character, plot, scene, in which even the centripetal forces of syntax are frayed by linebreaks and other poetic devices, how can chronotopes form and function? [...] In the centripetal environment afforded by most prose narratives, the stable chronotopes and the relationships among them define consciousness, world and values. In the centrifugal environment of non-narrative poetry, chronotopes flicker and flow in a series of hints, glimpses, dissolves, defining consciousness, world and values via evanescence rather than stability. However, as I hope to show below, the evanescence of chronotopes in non-narrative poetry can be as central to the vitality and meaning of those texts as the stability of chronotopes is to the vitality and meaning of prose narratives

Literary Modernity between Arabic and Persian Prose: Jurji Zaydan's Riwayat in Persian Translation

Our understanding of nineteenth-century literary practice is often mediated by the national literature model of study that continues to govern discussions of modern literature. Put differently, contemporary evaluations of literary texts of the nineteenth century are often arrived at by using the national literature models that remain ascendant. This results in particular from the interplay of two concepts, 'nationalism' and 'novelism', and the role that these ideological agendas play in establishing the frameworks for literary study that predominate in today's academy. Novelism is defined by Clifford Siskin as 'the habitual subordination of writing to the novel' —it is the prevalent tendency to approach prose writing in general using a framework of value derived from criticism of the novel.1 Rather than evaluating texts of the period in question by using criteria that can be validly ascribed to the sites of their production, we often tend to employ instead criteria derived from the novel as a currently-ascendant form of writing. Together with the tendency to read literature as defined exclusively by the trajectories offered in national-literature frameworks, this dual agenda has come to represent the most widespread tendency in literary historical scholarship, that of the nationalist-novelist paradigm, which presumes national literatures to be its subject matter, and which evaluates (non-European) prose writing largely through the critical tools developed for assessing the European novel

The modernist short story in Italy: the case of the 'Edizioni di Solaria'

This article investigates the role played by the modernist periodical Solaria (1926–34) as the Italian short story was being modernized. By offering a descriptive survey of the rarely studied corpus of fifteen short narrative volumes printed by the ‘Edizioni di Solaria’, the periodical’s minor publishing house, it sheds new light on the development of the short genre in this particular context. The two key questions addressed are, on the one hand, the validity of a recent hypothesis proposing Italo Svevo as a model for the ‘Solarian’ short story, and, on the other, the relationship between the codified novella/raccontoand other forms of short narrative prose derived from early twentieth-century avant-garde experimentation

Less is more : completing narratives in miniature fiction

This essay examines how readers interpret and interact with miniature fiction by completing the narratives in these extremely short stories. This is not to suggest that more traditional short stories have always provided complete narratives, but what we have found with miniature fiction is that the reader is more often required to complete the narrative in order for the story to make sense. At the same time, this inferencing process makes readers respond to these stories as they would to texts belonging to other genres. Specifically, we will consider the following pieces of writing: an untitled 6-word story by Graham Swift, ‘The Kids Are Alright’ (148 words) by David Gaffney, ‘Water’ (186 words) by Fred Leebron, and ‘Sparkles’ (175 words) by Louise Yeiser. We have chosen these texts because in our opinion each provides a striking illustration of what ‘short shorts’ require of the reader in order for them to make sense. It could be argued that each text demands more of its readers than the previous; hence the order of our discussion is incremental in terms of the complexity of the texts in question. Common to all four texts are the following: • Inferences made to comprehend the narrative • Inferences employed from known social narratives • Inferences of the types used in reading texts from other genres. Within this general examination of inferences, factors specific to each text will also be analysed

The automatic generation of narratives

We present the Narrator, a Natural Language Generation component used in a digital storytelling system. The system takes as input a formal representation of a story plot, in the form of a causal network relating the actions of the characters to their motives and their consequences. Based on this input, the Narrator generates a narrative in Dutch, by carrying out tasks such as constructing a Document Plan, performing aggregation and ellipsis and the generation of appropriate referring expressions. We describe how these tasks are performed and illustrate the process with examples, showing how this results in the generation of coherent and well-formed narrative texts