370 research outputs found
The Character as subjective interface
This paper re-frames virtual interactive characters as " subjective interfaces " with the purpose of highlighting original affordances for interactive story-telling through conversation. This notion is theoretically unpacked in the perspectives of narratology, interaction design and game design. Existing and imagined scenarios are presented in which subjective interfaces are elevated as core interaction mechanics. Finally, technical challenges posed by this approach are reviewed alongside relevant existing research leads.Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Cultur
âsome kind of thing it aint us but yet its in usâ: David Mitchell, Russell Hoban, and metafiction after the millennium
This article appraises the debt that David Mitchellâs Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After clearly mapping a history of Hobanâs philosophical perspectives and Mitchellâs inter-textual genre-impersonation practice, the article assesses the degree to which Mitchellâs metatextual methods indicate a nostalgia for by-gone radical aesthetics rather than reaching for new modes of its own. The article not only proposes several new backdrops against which Mitchellâs novel can be read but also conducts the first in-depth appraisal of Mitchellâs formal linguistic replication of Riddley Walker
Attributing minds to vampires in Richard Mathesonâs I Am Legend
For Palmer (2004, 2010), and other proponents of a cognitive narratology, research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences provides insights into readersâ experiences of fictional minds. In this article, I explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Mathesonâs (1954) science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. I draw upon empirical research into âmind attributionâ in social psychology, and apply Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), and its notion of âconstrualâ, as a framework for the application of such findings to narrative. In my analysis, I suggest that readersâ attribution of mental-states to the vampires in Mathesonâs novel is strategically limited through a number of choices in their linguistic construal. Drawing on online reader responses to the novel, I argue that readersâ understanding of these other minds plays an important role in their empathetic experience and their ethical judgement of the novelâs main character and focaliser, Robert Neville. Finally, I suggest that the limited mind attribution for the vampires invited through their construal contributes to the presentation of a âmind styleâ (Fowler, 1977) for this character
The influence of fictional narrative experience on work outcomes:a conceptual analysis and research model
Fictional narrative experience is assumed to have a profound impact on human behavior, but the possible
outcomes and the processes through which fictional narrative experience influence behaviors have rarely
been studied. This paper introduces a model of the consequences of fictional narrative experience through
transportation and transformation processes. We discuss a framework for understanding the effects of
fictional narrative experience, distinguishing affective and behavioral effects, and temporality of effects
(short-term or persistent). Exemplary outcomes of fictional narrative experience are presented, including
recovery, creativity and interpersonal behavior. Finally, we propose that the effects of fictional narrative
experience are dependent upon a personâs frame of reference, as well the extent to which a reader can
identify with the main characters, the perceived usefulness of a narrative, and degree of verisimilitude in
the narrative
Midlands Cadences: Narrative Voices in the Work of Alan Sillitoe
This paper will examine excerpts from a range of Alan Sillitoeâs prose fiction, most notably Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and short stories from the collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1958), via a comparative exploration of the textsâ representations of Midlands English demotic. Both texts enact Bakhtinâs notion of novelistic dialogism and find much expressive capital in the tension between discourses: between the oral and the written. Indeed, it could be argued that much of Sillitoeâs work functions as a direct challenge to dominant notions of the literary. The narrative discourse attempts to trace a link between the quotidian experience of the Midlands English working classes represented and the demotic language which they speak. His technique also explores the link between language and sensibility; i.e. verbal articulacy need not be a limit to expression of a characterâs distinctive identity. In contrast to the more radical techniques of novelists like James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, all instances of phonetically-rendered demotic remain imprisoned by what Joyce called âperverted commasâ â as direct speech. However, the diegetic narrative discourse itself is redolent of registers rooted in 1950s English working class life. The texts also contain different methods of representing their protagonistsâ consciousness through their own idiolect. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this is evidenced by the use of the second person âyouâ. It functions simultaneously as a representation of Seatonâs consciousness in the oral register which he might choose to articulate it, and as a dialogic âsideways glanceâ at the reader and assumed shared experience. The second is more redolent of internal monologue, using the first-person form (as seen in the homodiegetic narration of the second novel); crucially, though, it remains in Standard English, if explicitly orientated towards oral register.
Sillitoeâs is a novelistic discourse which refuses to normalise itself to accord with the conventions of classic realism, and as such prefigures the ambitions of many contemporary writers who incline their narrative voices towards the oral â asserting the right of a characterâs dialect/idiolect to be the principal register of the narrative. The paper will demonstrate this thesis through the ideas of Bakhtin, and through an analytical taxonomy derived from literary stylistics. It aims to propose a model which can be used to analyse and explore any fiction which has been labelled as âworking classâ, and asserts that such an approach leads to a more principled characterisation of working class fiction (based on its use of language) than current literary-critical discussions based simply on cultural/social context and biography
The Fragmented Digital Gaze: The Effects of Multimodal Composition on Narrative Perspective
As society as a whole moves more and more into the multiplicative frames of the digital world, it is important to understand how using these interfaces affects how we think and how we communicate. In this article, the focus is on a creative genre of human communication: narrative. Emerging technologies have historically had various impacts on narrative fiction, from the emergence of mimetic narratives in novel form, to the cameraâs influence on techniques such as flashback, and character gaze and perspective. These technologies can be seen to engage in an authorial partnership with the composer, âcollaborating to create new media,â new narrative forms and practices. The specific affordances of digital media introduce multimodality, polylinearity, and reader/player interaction to fiction; the practice of composing such multimodal works affects narrative perspective, leading to fragmented and layered narration, metalepsis, and âunnatural narrators.â This article presents research based in the practice of creating a multimodal project, FĂŠrwhile (the digital component of this article), examining the progression of narrative perspective from mimetic to unnatural, analyzing the various narrative perspectives. While Richardson argues that the postmodern narrative perspective (utilizing contradictory, permeable, and dis-framed narrators) leads to âpostmodern unreliability,â this examination of the FĂŠrwhile multimodal narrative will argue that a cohesive voice and its communicated metaphor can be created from the layering of disparate narrative perspectives. The effects described herein have implications for digital engagement and communication on a wider scale, as we attempt to understand how our rapidly evolving technology is also effecting change in our cognition, composition, and understanding of events communicated in digital spaces
Perspectivization and modes of quoting in Hungarian
This paper examines modes of quoting with special regard to the organization of perspective. Due to the pragmatic interest of the study, our focus is on the functioning of two context-dependent vantage points, the subject of consciousness and the referential centre. Our key question about the former is to whom speaking as a sign of active consciousness is attributed and how this is linguistically marked. As regards the latter, the central issue is from where and how the spatio-temporal and interpersonal relations of the quoted discourse are represented.Further problems to be discussed include the questions of how and to what extent quoting is associated with pragmatic or metapragmatic awareness, and how various quoting modes may differ along this dimension.Although the paper is mostly concerned with a âuniversal pragmaticâ characterization of the functioning of perspective in quotations, it also highlights some language-particular features of Hungarian quoting strategies and touches on their evolution in the history of the language
Writing from the archive: Henry Garnetâs powder-plot letters and archival communication
Through a reading of the archived letters of Henry Garnet (1555â1606), Superior of the Jesuit order in England and suspected Gunpowder plotter, this article investigates the nature of the archive in relation to narrative theory. Figuring the archive as one of the number of narrating voices accrued by the individual record, I argue that models of communication such as those put forward by Roman Jakobson, Wayne C. Booth and Seymour Chatman afford useful insights into the ways in which power is inscribed and reinscribed in the record through successive acts of reading and rewriting
For public (and recontextualized) sociology: The promises and perils of public engagement in an age of mediated communication
This article argues for the analysis of public engagement as an essentially mediated activity. Although recent studies note that academic knowledge is increasingly available for consumption by nonacademic audiences, they tell us little about how it gets recontextualized while passing through the hands of media professionals on its way toward such audiences. In Burawoyâs (2005) influential call for the rebirth of public sociology, as in the debates his work provoked, the media is treated solely as a means for the transportation of knowledge. But as this article demonstrates, the media does not simply transport knowledge; it also, and at the same time, translates that knowledge in various, rhetorically
consequential ways. Focusing on the mediated trajectory of an attempt by a group of academics to connect with audiences beyond academia, their initial contribution is compared to its subsequent translation(s) across various British newspapers. A discursive analysis reveals the techniques via which a classic form of public sociology came to be recontextualized such that, remarkably, these authors were left appearing to voice nothing but their own petty prejudices. The article concludes by noting
that where public engagement involves mediation, public sociology should pay more attention to the recontextualizing affordances of media discourse
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