Too Strange for Reality, Too Real for Fairy Tales: Views from Cognitive and Unnatural Narratology on A.S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman”

In “A Stone Woman” (2003), A.S. Byatt centres the story of her protagonist’s fantastic metamorphosis around the continuities between the transformations involving the body and those affecting the mind. In this light, her narrative constitutes a fictional exploration of cognition as embodied and of language as a cognitive tool equally rooted in embodiment. While this focus straightforwardly calls for second-generation cognitive narratology as the most suitable theoretical framework, the article proposes to integrate the cognitive approach with insights from unnatural narratology. This combined perspective arguably allows to appreciate and examine Byatt’s ambivalent use of embodied cognition as both a shared condition that fosters the readers’ capability to relate to the narrated experience, but also as a strategy that interacts with traditional features of the fairy tale (e.g. the lack of psychological introspection) in ways that are defamiliarizing and yet not subversive of the genre

Evolution: Fangtastic Venoms Underpin Parasitic Mimicry

Venomous teeth are rare in fishes, which typically utilise spines for defence. A new study reveals the evolutionary origins of fangs and venom in the Nemophini blennies and shows that, in contrast to snakes and lizards, the fangs pre-date the venom

An investigation of performer embodiment and performative interaction on an augmented stage

This thesis concerns itself with an investigation of live performance on an augmented stage in front of an audience, where performers witness themselves as projection mapped virtual characters able to interact with projected virtual scenography. An interactive virtual character is projected onto the body of a performer, its movements congruent with the performer. Through visual feedback via a Head Mounted Display (HMD), the performer is virtually embodied in that they witness their virtualised body interacting with the virtual scenery and props of the augmented stage. The research is informed by a theoretical framework derived from theory on intermediality and performance, virtual embodiment and performative interaction. A literature review of theatrical productions and performances utilising projection identifies a research gap of providing the performer with a visual perspective of themselves in relationship to the projected scenography. The visual perspective delivered via the HMD enables the performer to perform towards the audience and away from the interactive projected backdrop. The resultant ‘turn away’ from facing an interactive screen and instead performing towards an audience is encapsulated in the concept of the ‘Embodied Performative Turn’. The practice-based research found that changing the visual perspective presented to the performer impacted differently on performative interaction and virtual embodiment. A second-person or audience perspective, ‘performer-as-observed’ prioritises the perception of the virtual body and enhances performative behaviour but challenges effective performative interaction with the virtual scenography. Conversely, a first-person perspective, ‘performer-as-observer’ prioritises a worldview and enhances performative interaction, but negatively impacts on performative behaviour with the loss of performer-as-observed. The research findings suggest that the presentation of differing perspectives to the performer can be used to selectively enhance performative interaction and performative behaviour on an augmented stage

Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction

Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-than-human modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of "mutant narratives". Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of "embodied estrangement". Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, "performative enactivism", that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-than-human aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.Reading Mutant Narratives keskittyy ekologista kriisiä käsitteleviin "mutanttikertomuksiin" ja niille tyypilliseen kokemuksellisuuteen. Mutanttikertomukset ovat tieteisfiktiivisiä kertomuksia, joissa ihmiskeskeiset ja posthumanistiset piirteet yhdistyvät ja antavat lukijalle mahdollisuuksia ekologiseen ymmärrykseen. Esimerkkeinä mutanttikertomuksista tutkimus nostaa esiin kolmen yhdysvaltalaisen tieteiskirjailijan, Greg Bearin, Paolo Bacigalupin ja Jeff VanderMeerin, teoksia. Nämä teokset asettavat ihmisen osaksi ekologisia, evolutiivisia ja teknologisia vuorovaikutussuhteita, joissa myös ihmisruumiit ja ruumiillinen kokemus muuttavat muotoaan. Väitöskirja tutkii siis, kuinka tieteisfiktiiviset kertomukset ympäristöllisestä ja kokemuksellisesta muutoksesta voivat kehittää ruumiillista kokemusta. Kertomuksentutkimukseen ja empiiriseen lukijatutkimukseen tukeutuen tutkimus lähtee oletuksesta, että sopivissa olosuhteissa kirjallisuuden lukeminen voi edesauttaa kokemuksellisia muutoksia. Tutkimus tarkastelee tieteisfiktion lukemista eletyn ruumiillisen kokemuksen tasolla. Lukukokemuksen analyysissa otetaan huomioon sekä lukijan ruumiillinen, subjektiivinen ja historiallinen tilanne että luettujen teosten kytkeytyminen romaanikerronnan ja tieteisfiktion lajityypin perinteisiin. Suuri osa nykykirjallisuudesta esittää ruumiillisen kokemuksen luonnollisena ja kätkee oman kerronnallisen vaikutusvaltansa, mutta mutanttikertomusten kerronnalliset keinot saattavat outouttaa lukijoiden ruumiillista kokemusta suhteessa sekä elettyyn ympäristöön että kirjallisuuteen itseensä. Tieteisfiktion tutkimuksen käsitteistöä uudistaen väitöskirja kutsuu tällaista lukemisen dynamiikkaa "ruumiilliseksi vieraannuttamiseksi". Lukukokemuksen analyysien avulla tutkimus esittää, kuinka kirjallisuuden lukeminen ohjaa osaltaan lukijoiden tunne- ja havaintotottumusten muotoutumista. Se tuo yhteen ruumiillis-kognitiivisia ja posthumanistisia lähestymistapoja kirjallisuudentutkimukseen ja muotoilee "performatiivis-enaktiivisen" lähilukemisen metodin, joka auttaa sanallistamaan lukukokemuksen ruumiillisia, ympäristöllisiä ja ei-inhimilliseen kurovia puolia. Ruumiillisen kokemuksellisuuden syventäminen tämän metodin avulla tuo ekologisen tieteisfiktion tiiviimmin osaksi globaalin ympäristömuutoksen kokemuksellista tilannetta

Tritagonist Theatre: investigating the potential for bystander agency through three interconnected solo performances

This study demonstrates contribution to the field of knowledge and practice of applied theatre. Over a ten-year period, Ava Hunt researched, co-wrote, performed and toured three solo productions: I’m No Hero (2009, 2010), The Kites Are Flying (2013) and Acting Alone (2014–2018). The productions experimented with form, integrating film, immersive participation, and verbatim/autobiographical storytelling techniques to explore the intractable Israeli–Palestinian conflict, asking: How is solo performance able to engage diverse communities in difficult questions about social justice, and support the development of critical thinking skills to empower bystanders and to make a difference to marginalised communities? Hunt, an artist, researcher and teacher, utilised a/r/tography, a practice-based research methodology (Springgay, Irwin, Leggo and Gouzouasis, 2008), to propel the development of the three productions and the published work. I’m No Hero (INH) interwove the heroic acts of two women: Irena Sendler (who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto under Nazi occupation) and Rachel Corrie (who was killed by Israeli Defence Forces while protecting Palestinian children). The Kites Are Flying (TKAF) was adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s book for children. Set in Palestine, TKAF explored the pedagogy of hope in oppressed and incarcerated communities. Acting Alone utilised verbatim and autobiographical accounts of field research conducted in Palestine, together with participatory elements, to transform the hierarchical relationship between spectator and performer. These works led to the published article ‘Acting Alone: exploring bystander engagement through performer/audience relationship’ (Hunt, 2019), which is submitted alongside the three performances as a coherent body of four published works. The article coined the term tritagonist audience to empower bystander audiences through offering a rehearsal of agency in relation to an intractable international conflict. This critical appraisal frames and traces the development of Tritagonist Theatre through the four submitted works and proposes a toolkit that can be used in further research, pedagogic practice and applied theatre. The toolkit could be developed further and/or extrapolated to other conflicts. Using the active tritagonist model, the toolkit is intended to contribute to spectator empowerment

A critical analysis of the representations of the posthuman in contemporary canadian SFF

Tesis por compendio de publicaciones[ES]Como hemos apuntado, partimos de la premisa de que las publicaciones recogidas en este trabajo revelan distintas aproximaciones al concepto de “lo posthumano” a partir de hipótesis y desarrollos genéricos dentro del campo de la ficción especulativa y ciencia ficción (SFF). Leídas en el orden en que se presentan, estas tres publicaciones conforman el objetivo principal de la tesis, que es el de elaborar una cartografía inicial de las distintas posturas, temas y fórmulas estéticas adoptadas por los autores de las fuentes primarias seleccionadas con respecto a la categoría de lo posthumano. Las publicaciones seleccionadas pretenden reflejar y establecer el papel clave de la SFF contemporánea en Canadá para reflexionar sobre el pasado, el presente y el futuro en el contexto de lo posthumano, así como sus distintas implicaciones en términos de raza, género y precariedad, que se distribuye de manera desigual en un contexto de crisis planetaria que engloba la crisis climática y las peores consecuencias del desarrollo tecnológico y socioeconómico. [EN]The primary sources analysed in the here compiled pieces reveal different approaches to the concept of ‘the posthuman’ from the generic hypotheses and developments within the field of speculative and science fiction studies. Read in the presented order, these three pieces fulfil the thesis’s overall aim of elaborating an initial cartography of the different positions, themes and aesthetic formulae adopted by the authors of the selected primary sources. In the process, I suggest that the selected articles establish the key role of contemporary speculative and science fiction in Canada for reflection on the past, present and future within the context of the posthuman and its various implications in terms of race, gender, and the differentially distributed precarity of global critical environments, including those regarding the climate crisis as well as socioeconomic and technological developments

Substitutive bodies and constructed actors: a practice-based investigation of animation as performance

The fundamental conceptualisation of what animation actually is has been changing in the face of material change to production and distribution methods since the introduction of digital technology. This re-conceptualisation has been contributed to by increasing artistic and academic interest in the field, such as the emergence of Animation Studies, a relatively new branch of academic enquiry that is establishing itself as a discipline. This research (documentation of live events and thesis) examines animation in the context of performance, rather than in terms of technology or material process. Its scope is neither to cover all possible types of animation nor to put forward a new ‘catch-all’ definition of animation, but rather to examine the site of performance in character animation and to propose animation as a form of performance. In elaborating this argument, each chapter is structured around the framing device of animation as a message that is encoded and produced, delivered and played back, then received and decoded. The PhD includes a portfolio of projects undertaken as part of the research process on which the text critically reflects. Due to their site-specific approach, these live events are documented through video and still images. The work represents an intertwining, interdisciplinary, post-animation praxis where theory and practice inform one another and test relationships between animation and performance to problematise a binary opposition between that which is live as opposed to that which is animated. It is contextualised by a review of historical practice and interviews with key contemporary practitioners whose work combines animation with an intermedial mixture of interaction design, fine art, dance and theatre