Metalepses and Shoelaces: Advanced Narrative Resources in Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine

Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988) bends narrative boundaries to the extreme. This article analyses the novel’s postmodern metatextuality, its confrontation of high culture and mass culture, its exploration of recursive thought processes, its inclusion of constantly shifting time references, and the function of its autodiegetic narrator. Special attention is given to the use of the footnote as a narrative device as it allows Baker to develop Gérard Genette’s concept of narrative metalepsis. Because of the unique way these advanced narrative resources are interwoven, the novel deserves wider academic attention as a milestone in contemporary literature in English

Backwards is the way forward: feedback in the cortical hierarchy predicts the expected future

Clark offers a powerful description of the brain as a prediction machine, which offers progress on two distinct levels. First, on an abstract conceptual level, it provides a unifying framework for perception, action, and cognition (including subdivisions such as attention, expectation, and imagination). Second, hierarchical prediction offers progress on a concrete descriptive level for testing and constraining conceptual elements and mechanisms of predictive coding models (estimation of predictions, prediction errors, and internal models)

Review of Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. (Distributed by the Law Book Company Ltd.). 325pp. ISBN 0415075114. (pbk), $45.00.

If Point of View in the Cinema introduced its author as one of the leading film analysts by its attention to the details of the process of cinematic presentation, Narrative Comprehension and Film establishes Edward Branigan as a creative theorist beyond the boundaries of film. The book's voice is that of a craftsman speaking from his workshop. No deconstructive symplok and certainly no rhetorical terrorism. Instead, we find a certain modesty of style, which is deceptive considering that Branigan offers a great deal of substance and a range of attractive speculative insights. The author's mastery of technical intricacies within the broader frame of general narrative makes Narrative Comprehension and Film an outstanding teaching book for film studies as well as other disciplines in the humanities. What makes it especially appealing is its careful elaboration of an inferential account of how we make sense of narrative. For this and other reasons, it is well worth paying closer attention than is perhaps usual for a review article to how the book's argument unfolds and in particular to how it manages to relate the double argument about narrative in film and human perception as interpretive construals

Bilingual episodic memory: an introduction

Our current models of bilingual memory are essentially accounts of semantic memory whose goal is to explain bilingual lexical access to underlying imagistic and conceptual referents. While this research has included episodic memory, it has focused largely on recall for words, phrases, and sentences in the service of understanding the structure of semantic memory. Building on the four papers in this special issue, this article focuses on larger units of episodic memory(from quotidian events with simple narrative form to complex autobiographical memories) in service of developing a model of bilingual episodic memory. This requires integrating theory and research on how culture-specific narrative traditions inform encoding and retrieval with theory and research on the relation between(monolingual) semantic and episodic memory(Schank, 1982; Schank & Abelson, 1995; Tulving, 2002). Then, taking a cue from memory-based text processing studies in psycholinguistics(McKoon & Ratcliff, 1998), we suggest that as language forms surface in the progressive retrieval of features of an event, they trigger further forms within the same language serving to guide a within-language/ within-culture retrieval

Flocking together : collective animal minds in contemporary fiction

The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a full-fledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance-like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows), and animals that embrace a collective "we" to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). When individuality drops out of the picture of human-animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi-geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance

Exploding iconography: The Mindbomb Project

The Mindbomb project was started by a group of young artists, journalists and writers, rich in creative resources. Together they created the social poster. It became a means to hack into the dominant discourse of mainstream politics, the mass media and the advertising industry. This paper will attempt to give an answer to the question: how to localize this critique in a non-differentiated global consumer culture? The argument in this paper centers around the idea that the Mindbomb project started as a challenge to the consumer culture. However, it later developed into a broader critique of contemporary Romanian society. A set of theoretical filters in the literature on aesthetic movements and culture jamming were used to map out the Mindbomb project. The present discussion of a single case may be a relevant addition to existing theoretical debates

The manner of mystery: free indirect discourse and epiphany in the stories of Flannery O\u27Connor

This project addresses the narrative voice(s) in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, particularly in relation to her conception of art. O’Connor critics often polarize the cultural and religious worth of her stories. As a Catholic, O’Connor was convinced that the “the ultimate reality is the Incarnation” (HB 92). As an artist, O’Connor believed that fiction should begin with a writer’s attention to the natural world as she comprehends it through the senses. It is no wonder, then, that her fiction lends itself well to critics interested in both her theology and her presentation of issues of race, class, and gender. My project describes how O’Connor’s use of free indirect discourse, a narrative mode that blends third and first person narrative elements, positions her theology within her culture especially in the short story form. While many O’Connor critics address issues of narrative voice, few have explored O’Connor’s use of free indirect discourse, a characteristic feature of her stories. Through free indirect discourse, O’Connor presents third person stories through a single character’s perspective, a perspective that proves insufficient by the story’s epiphanic end. That character’s perspective, rooted in O’Connor’s observations of a racially charged Southern climate in the mid-twentieth century, speaks to his cultural situation. Because O’Connor positions the perspectives of her characters within a larger framework that questions their validity, she draws on her character’s cultural situations to reveal human limitation and disconnectedness, both important elements of her theology. My project shifts its focus to race to emphasize the extent to which O’Connor is drawing on her culture. Ultimately, O’Connor’s stories, when analyzed through their use of free indirect discourse, answer how manners reveal mystery, how culture informs theology, and finally, how we might investigate O’Connor’s stories, mindful of both their religious and cultural impact

Writing the Self-at-War: World War I Popular Writings as \u201cTechnologies of the Self\u201d

Based on the analysis of more than 150 diaries and memoirs, this article highlights the rhetorical strategies used to define the self and shape the idea of war that characterized a specific peasant community, the Italian-speaking soldiers from the Trentino region that fought for Austria-Hungary in World War I. Through this case study the essay discusses how the Foucauldian notion of “technology of the self” can be applied to the study of war testimonies and to the historiographical debate on the nature of World War I “war culture”. By looking at the texts not in their message but in their form and in their function for the authors the study proposes a methodology to interpret sources that have been often deemed too repetitive and hermetic to be part of a systematic historical analysis.