The Narrator: NLG for digital storytelling

We present the Narrator, an NLG component used for the generation of narratives in a digital storytelling system. We describe how the Narrator works and show some examples of generated stories

Translation and response between Maurice Blanchot and Lydia Davis

When an author translates a text by another writer, this translation is one form of a response to that text. Other responses may appear in their own writings that are more inflected with their authorial persona. Lydia Davis translated six books by Maurice Blanchot, including fiction and theoretical writings. Blanchot’s concept of the récit privileges non-conventional forms of narrative and it can be considered to have influenced Davis, a view shared in critical writing about Davis. However, responses to his fiction can also be found in Davis’s work. This article reads Lydia Davis’s story “Story” as a response to Maurice Blanchot’s récit, La Folie du jour, translated by Davis as “The Madness of the Day”. Both texts develop a narrative that questions the possibility of arriving at a single story: Blanchot’s narrator cannot tell the story of how he came to have glass ground into his eyes, while Davis’s narrator must try to understand a contradictory story told to her by her lover. However, Davis responds to Blanchot by reversing the perspective in the story: where Blanchot’s narrator must and cannot create a story that explains his situation in a judicial/medical context, Davis’s narrator is struggling to understand her lover’s story which does not explain the situation that they find themselves in. Davis’s narrator is therefore motivated by an emotional need to find an acceptable story that is absent from Blanchot’s narrator. This difference in motivation is central to the difference between Davis’s and Blanchot’s approach, and complicates any reading of his influence on her because she responds to his text in her own

Stuck : a memoir of entanglement and disentanglement

Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only.This memoir focuses on a past friendship the narrator develops with Will, whom she meets through Marissa, their mutual friend. Will and Marissa date, but the relationship becomes toxic and abusive, while the narrator often plays the role of mediator and middle-man. Marissa finally manages to extricate herself from the relationship, but Will and the narrator continue to spend time together and become close. The narrator feels a friendly duty to remain close to Will, but the friendship also affords her a certain amount of intimacy, which she lacks in her current romantic relationship; however, the narrator's relationship with Will eventually sours, as he begins to assert more power and control over her. Part of the narrator's struggle is realizing that her friendship has become abusive, and that Will's growing desire for control and power, needing to know where she is and who she is with and demanding all of her time and attention is actually a form of abuse. Another part of her struggle is realizing how she got into her predicament. This memoir is grounded in a tradition of storytelling, memoir and relationship narratives, and is intended to join in the literary conversation about unhealthy relationships and shed some light on reader's understandings of abuse.Department of EnglishThesis (M.A.

Henry Y. H. Zhao. The uneasy narrator : Chinese fiction from the traditional to the modern

This article reviews the book The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern , written by Henry Y.H. Zhao

Death on the Freeway: Imaginative resistance as narrator accommodation

We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent (Lewis, Stalnaker, Kamp) and 'cautious' updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange (Eckardt)

I Would Prefer Not to Help You

Bartleby, the Scrivener recounts a story of a scrivener who would prefer not to do anything, whether that be parts of his job, changing his location, or eating his dinner. The narrator’s reaction to Bartleby’s lazy desires seem to be admirable, but his selfish motivation and false compassion are evident. The way the narrator views and treats Bartleby is consistent with the standards of philanthropy of the wealthy during the mid-nineteenth century. The narrator truly believes he has helped Bartleby to the best of his ability, yet fails to connect with Bartleby outside of offering him money and future assistance if required. This may be blamed on the narrator’s lack of relationship with God. People below the narrator’s socioeconomic status were viewed solely on how they could benefit him and his business and were expected to conform to the narrator’s standards. Bartleby the Scrivener, though a melancholy story leading to Bartleby’s death, can be used to see an accurate picture of philanthropy in the 1850s

An Uninformed Pilgrim

Joseph C. Pattison’s article, “The Celestial City, or Dream Tale,” examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” and portrays the narrator as a Christian hero standing against the modernist persuasions of his time – a protagonist who enters the story with firm orthodox convictions and exits his dream journey with unaltered principles or character. However, Hawthorne’s narrator frequently adopts new modernist arguments and wavers in his pre-formed convictions. He toys with Christian faith but promptly discards any accusations of guilt that such beliefs suggest. While he repeatedly compromises his principles and doubts the ramifications of Christian faith, his dynamic nature is nowhere stronger than in the final scene of the story when he realizes the consequences of modernist thought. Here, he finally expresses true regret and displays his tendency to change – a tendency which Pattison’s article takes so little account of. Though Pattison sees this story as Hawthorne’s attempt to illustrate unwavering Christian principles, the narrative rather serves as a cautionary note to uneducated individuals, and a warning against shaky convictions and unfounded faith

Narrating(−)Life – In Lieu of an Introduction

‘Narrating life’ – this phrase warrants some investigation. Who is the ‘agency’ or the ‘subject’ in this phrase, ‘narrating’ or ‘life’? Who, or what, is narrating life? Which would mean that life was an object (or being subjected to narration), as if life was ‘in need of’ narrating in order to become what it ‘is’. Or, instead, might life be the narrator or the narrating instance: life that expresses itself through narration? In both cases, life ‘as such’ would be something ‘outside’ narration (while being in need of it) but, as such, it would remain invisible (at least for the (human?) observer). However insistent the questioning, life would not be able to yield its secrets ‘outside’ or ‘without’ narration. But life would always be ventriloquized by some (human?) narrator – unless, by some magical process of inscription, life was to do the narrating and writing ‘itself’ (which would presuppose a ‘self’, or at least some ‘sense of self’, selfreflexivity and thus consciousness, or at least iterability, in the Derridean sense – life itself)

The Narrator as Detective

This essay examines the role of the narrator as detective in the construction of a non-fiction narrative based on an unsolved murder. The majority of so called “true-crime” books are written as long pieces of journalism with little investigation of character and a tendency to summarize and sensationalize events. However, there is scope for a different kind of narrative where the narrator, working alongside the reader, functions as a “real” detective to reconstruct from the words and documents of others a “true account” of the crime and to reveal its deeper implications. Drawing on the writer’s own experience in investigating the murder of a prominent police whistleblower in Sydney, Australia, this essay examines the technical and practical difficulties facing a writer when investigating an unsolved murder. Keywords: narrative non-fiction, true crime, narrator as detective, unsolved murders, police corruption, noir, practice-based researc

The biblical foundation of James Baldwin\u27s Sonny\u27s Blues

This article focuses on the critical analysis of two main biblical texts that form the foundation of Baldwin’s Sonny\u27s Bules : the Cain and Abel story from the Book of Genesis and the parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke’s gospel