Journal articles on the topic 'Traditional narratology'

Et gensyn mellem to slægtninge Narratology and text linguisticsIn this article I argue for the application of linguistic methods in the study of narratives and map out the difference between linguistic narratology with its focus on »how« narration is established and traditional narratology where the focus is centred on anthropomorphic subjects, i.e. the »who«. The main argument of the article is that by changing the focus from narrator to certain linguistic constructions, we open up an often overlooked level of meaning; a level of meaning which only emerges through so-called function words or in the compounding of the words. This is exemplified by readings of the short story »Der er ikke flere sennepsmarker i Danmark« (2002) by Helle Helle and Jan Sonnergaard’s »Blackout« (1997) among others.

Abstract The discipline of cognitive narratology applies insights of cognitive linguistics to narrative analysis. This study seeks to demonstrate the value of cognitive narratology by exploring the role of the reader and the extent of the reader’s knowledge in constructing characters. While traditional narrative criticism often limits itself to the world of the text, cognitive narratology recognizes that the reader’s knowledge from other texts and the real world also contributes to the construction of characters. This study will show that the extent of the reader’s literary and social knowledge of a text affects the construction of characters. As a case study, we will examine the calling of Peter in the canonical Gospels and show how four readers with varying degrees of knowledge will arrive at different constructions of Peter’s character.

The current study aims to analyze the narratology and to identify the genre of Disney’s Aladdin (2019). It also discusses the relationship between narratology and the genre in the movie. The theories used in this study are narratology theory by Vladimir Propp and genre analysis by Northrop Frye with the structuralist criticism perspective. The study used the descriptive qualitative method. The findings of this study provide pieces of evidence that Disney’s Aladdin movie can be analyzed using Propp’s narratology. There are 30 of 31 functions of dramatis personae and 7 of 7 dramatis personae found in the movie. Those findings are deducted by focusing on the plot and characters in the movie. According to those findings, the genre of the movie based on Frye’s theory of myths is the mythos of spring (comedy). This is because the movie moves from the mythos of winter to summer (irony to romance). This finding is supported by the existence of the elements of conflict, disorder and confusion, and the triumph of traditional quest theory. It also supported by the existence of the category of irony, romance, and comedy (theory of modes in the movie. Hence, the researcher deduces that the narratological analysis and the genre in this study are intercorrelated and support one another.

The paper examines transformation of narrative in digital epoch, which caused emergence of the form “storytelling”, that is, narrative used in Internet mostly with commercial purpose. Theory of narrative, which emerged as a method of narrative research in the XX century, the time of development of structuralism, is regarded from the point of view of its applicability to the texts of popular culture. Analysis of contemporary storytelling in its connection with traditional research in humanities is a new turn in studying digital culture in the context of humanities discourse. Internet narratives are examined as based on archetypal structures used in myths and legends and adopted to today’s realities. As a conclusion, suggestion is made about ambivalence of digital culture forms, including storytelling, which are linked to the past forms and categories but are used beyond the limits of cultural consumption.

The paper discusses the methodological potential of narratology that extends beyond the boundaries of traditional poetics taking the text of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s short story "Hey you, little barrell..." as a case study. G. Genette’s definitions of the basic categories of narratology, such as story, discourse, anachronies, narrator’s types and functions, narrative distance and focalization are discussed. First and foremost, categories and paradigms introduced by G. Genette increase the possibilities of literary analysis. For example, there is no concept of a subject of vision (a focalizer) in traditional poetics. The paradigm of narrative perspective (focalization) developed by G. Genette is very important for studies of the narratives, besides, the narrative technique of modernism without this category is incomprehensible at all. Traditional poetics does not pay enough attention to anachrony, considering it together with other "off-plot elements", although analepsis and prolepsis are neither discursive nor descriptive. G. Genette presents detailed classification of analepsises and prolepsises, that determines the functionality of the analysis in context. Secondly, the paper clarifies, that the method of G. Genette’s narratology is not limited to tracing narrative categories as elements – it is also about their constant interrelation, i.e. the narrative model of the stories. Vynnychenko’s short story is analyzed in terms of correlations between telling, showing and talking, as well as displays of character’s discourse and attributive discourse. The artistic viability of anachronies (analepses and prolepses) is examined in the compositional and semantic aspects. The paper focuses on some specific features of Vynnychenko’s narrative style, such as dominance of mimesis over diegesis, as well as narrative distance and the author’s self-elimination by means of focalization (both the internal and external one) that are typical for modernist writing.

This article presents the chronicle of the “Theory of Literary Plot / Narratology – 6” conference, held on May 14–16, 2019, by the Literary Studies Department of the Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS). About 60 reports, prepared by researchers working in educational and scientific institutions of Siberia (Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Kemerovo, Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, Rubtsovsk), as well as of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm and other cities, were delivered at the conference. Same as in previous years, this traditional conference was dedicated to the problems of creating a Dictionary of subjects and motifs of Russian literature (the work on compiling this multi-volume book is being carried out in the departments for the second decade). At the conference, the questions of literary plot theory and motif were discussed, the plot was taken as a concept of narratology, the history of specific plots was reconstructed, the review of plot and motif thesauruses of individual authors or works was made. The plot was considered in relation to the intertext in the motif – poetic path – poetic formula – name – word series of notions, taking into account the opposition of lyrical and epic, anarrative and narrative. In addition to theoretical reports, as well as studies reconstructing the transversal history of certain plots, works on the narratology and motif theory of the Siberian texts were also presented at the conference. The subject structure of opinion journalism (separately or in comparison with artistic subject structures) and multigenre works were also considered. A separate section was devoted to the ancient literature, and a rather large group (about a dozen) of researchers focused on the study of the lyrical plot, although the main interest was traditionally focused on the study of epos.

The study analyses Sohni Mahiwal, the renowned Punjabi folktale, by applying Greimas Actantial model for structural analysis. The purpose of this study is to explore the narrative structure and discover the character functions based on the model. Folktales are considered the simplest and oldest form of stories embedded in the local cultures. They broadly refer to orally transmitted, traditional narratives that carry cultural information. The findings show that all the major actantial categories proposed by Greimas such as subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, and opponent have been depicted in the selected folktale. The analysis revealed that many characters were found involved in several actant classes simultaneously. Structural analysis of the folktale uncovered two parallel acts/episodes. The parallelism in the contents of two acts of the tale serves a didactic function at the socio-cultural level besides entertaining the readers/ listeners proving the strength of true love. As far as the function is concerned, the tale successfully validates the culturally imparted message that the individuals who transgress the social norms are destined to perish.

Abstract The objective of this article is to analyze Lost from the perspective of transmedia storytelling and to propose a taxonomy of transmedia expansion/compression strategies. In the first section, the article presents the basic components of transmedia storytelling from a theoretical point of view that combines narratology and semiotics. After describing the most important components of Lost's transmedia fictional universe in the second section, the article presents a general description and taxonomy of expansion/compression narrative strategies based on traditional rhetorical categories. The article also analyzes “compressed texts” – like recapitulations – and their role inside the expansive strategies.

Abstract The purpose of this article is to initiate discussion into the role narratives could play in military studies. Narratology is an old and well-established research paradigm that first emerged as part of the linguistic turn. Yet its potential has not been depleted. It is the study of narratives or stories. There are plenty of topics not yet approached from this perspective especially in the field of military studies. The military academia needs to broaden its scope of research and allow for alternative orientations and theories to be used to address traditional dilemmas, create new research paradigms and enrich the variety of analysis. Critical security studies approach shared topics with military studies by embracing the aesthetic turn that differentiates between the representation and the represented. The argument in this article is that to produce comprehensive information on its research topics military studies would benefit from embracing them as people experience them and not focus on their ontology. The article does not offer a methodological toolbox to the reader but rather an introduction to some classics of narratology and offers a few insights how this type of approach could be used in military history, strategy, operational art or even leadership studies.

The contemporary Colombian films made by women La luciérnaga (Hermida, 2016) and Señoritas (Rodríguez, 2013) subvert patriarchal gender norms of classic Colombian film narratology through their representation of lesbianism, female sexual self-exploration, and orgasms. The cinematic techniques of these filmmakers construct a specific view of female pleasure, emphasizing the plurality and visibility in cinema of female sexuality and desire. An interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of specific sequences suggests that the aesthetics and visual strategies of these women filmmakers evince pioneering female characters and subjectivities that challenge the traditional gaze on female bodies. Their films offer liberating representations that deconstruct the dominant basis of heteronormativity that has historically characterized Colombian narrative cinema. La luciérnaga (Hermida, 2016) y Señoritas (Rodríguez, 2013), dos películas colombianas contemporáneas realizadas por mujeres, subvierten las normas patriarcales de la narratología clásica del cine colombiano a través de su representación del lesbianismo, la autoexploración sexual femenina y los orgasmos. Las técnicas cinematográficas empleadas construyen una visión específica del placer femenino, haciendo hincapié en la pluralidad y visibilidad de la sexualidad y el deseo femenino. Un análisis de secuencias específicas con enfoque interdisciplinario sugiere que la estética y las estrategias visuales de estas cineastas evidencian personajes femeninos pioneros y subjetividades que desafían la mirada tradicional sobre los cuerpos femeninos. Las películas muestran representaciones liberadoras que deconstruyen la base heteronormativa dominante que históricamente ha caracterizado al cine narrativo colombiano.

Abstract Working at the intersection of cognitive and critical race narratology, the essay examines the relationship between the embodied mind and the social construction of race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928/2011). The essay argues that Fauset’s African American passing novel rejects the notion of a solely ‘inward turn’, which is commonly associated with modernist literature, in favor of a more dynamic understanding of embodied cognition that acknowledges the shaping force of race and racialization. Using a seemingly traditional omniscient narrator, Fauset not only draws attention to the failure of U. S. American racial hierarchies, but she also lays bare how race impacts both individual consciousness and social cognition.1

The article analyzes the biographical case of cancer with problematized attitude to traditional medicine. The author examines the biographical choices of the informant and the problem of not following the medicalist treatment strategy. Optics using analytic methods and social theory, the author seeks to show that living biographer’s disease and agree with the diagnosis of a life inextricably linked with the social relations within which these terms aventureuse, namely in the framework of relations “doctor-patient”. The analysis of this social dyad using the methods of anthropology and narratology brings us closer to the understanding of disease as a phenomenon mediated by the cultural codes of society, the dominant model of which is the biomedical paradigm of studying the “diseased body”.

AbstractThis paper looks at instances of second person narration in the first journal published inAppearances of second person narration are chronologically tracked through the data and compared to biographical developments in Sylvia Plath's life; entries written in the first- and second person are compared to each other to determine linguistic differences using corpus methods; the results of the two analyses are then interpreted in the light of traditional functions attributed to second person narration in narratology, and in the light of research in narrative psychology. The paper aims to demonstrate that second person narration can project a sense of emotional depth and inner conflict as well as of emotional balance. However, the temporal orientation of a given text will influence which of these effects predominates.

This paper examines the setting construction in the ethnographic fiction of Orang-Orang Oetimu by Felix K. Nesi. Analytical descriptive methods, oral tradition, narratology, and setting theory were used to answer questions about: colonial and decolonial settings, socio-educational, ethnographic, and military violence setting. The results depict that the colonial and decolonial grounds left scars on the nation, which experienced previous neglect and alienation in their land. This long-experienced trauma affects massive social, education, and military violence behaviors. In addition, colonial and decolonial history also intersects with ethnographic, mainly traditional beliefs about local history and myths about “sifon,” which is a tradition of having sex after circumcision. Unpredictable and irreversible patterns of colonial, decolonial, and ethnographic settings are also shockingly strengthening the plot, proofing that the well-constructed set produces quality and innovative story, narrative, and narrating.

This article explores the novel Zelfportret of het galgemaal (The Man in the Mirror, 1955) by the Flemish author Herman Teirlinck, who planned it as a literary self-portrait. Its interpretation as an autobiography hinges on one’s understanding of the second-person point of view that makes up substantial parts of this novel. Multifocality of the “you” appears to be a key feature characterizing this little explored narrative mode in autobiography. Departing from structuralist narratology by Genette and Lejeune, I investigate reader-driven reading modes as elaborated by Fludernik, Bonheim, and Schmitt to explore how the deferred referentiality of the “you” blurs the traditional dichotomy between factual historical reality and the narrative world. The narrator involves the reader in interpreting the “you” to address both the narratee (Teirlinck) and the protagonist (Henri) at the same time.

The form of fallacy. A rereading of the falconry motif in Roberto Bolaño’s Nocturno de ChileThe aim of the article is a rereading of the falconry motif in Roberto Bolaño’s novel Nocturno de Chile, based on an analysis of the critical reception existing so far. The study combines the traditional methods of narratology with a close-reading-orientated approach on the textual, narrative and intertextual level. As a result, the formal aspect of the novel, based on the techniques of incongruity and indetermination, is seen as a narrative tool to discredit the fallacies of the narrator’s monologue. By positioning the allegoric and symbolic readings of the motif in the context of the narrative technique, it seems that the main focus of the novel is a deconstruction of the testimonial mode of enunciation and, as a consequence, a critical revaluation of the actual debate on the history and memory in Chile and Latin America.

The philosophical debate on the nature of narrative has been mainly concerned with literary narratives, whereas forms of non-literary and especially pictorial narrativity have been rather neglected. Within traditional art history, however, the narrative potential of the visual arts has usually been taken for granted, though rarely by attempting to elucidate any deeper cognitive, semiotic, and philosophical aspects involved. Now, generally speaking, narratives contribute to the human endeavour to reduce the unpredictability of worldly changes, and human existence in particular, attempting to establish order in our experiences of transitoriness and existential vulnerability. The paper discusses some possible criteria of narrativity with regard to their applicability to pictorial objects. It demonstrates thatpictorial works may express or imply high- -level narrative structures or, put in another way, wider world views or schemata, and that our comprehension of and need for these schemata can be explained by taking recent research within cognitive psychology, schema theory, and narratology into account.

Aim. The aim of the research is to show the applications of art reception in computer games. Moreover it is important to show the game as a visual object worth to analysis for art historian, because of complex structure and relations with traditional artistic media like architecture and painting. Many disciplines, like ludology, narratology and culture study research computer games, but we can see a large lack in the state of research in visual aspects of games, which should be supplemented. Methods. The subject of study are five games belonging to different game genres. The first, Assasin’s Creed II is set in a historical context, the next Witcher III and Dark Souls embedded in the realities of fantasy and finally, two games in an independent games category. The basic method is iconographic identification of the object and comparative difference and similarity between original source of inspiration and transposition of this in computer media. Therefore basic tools gained from history of art are used, which are necessary for visual analysis of a piece of art. Also important is notion of a commonplace forming a frame for images from different media. Results. Indicated examples show that classic art has a strong influence on numerous computer games. The citations and allusions from art brings an additional narration completing the story in the game. Objects of architecture or paintings also give symbolic meanings, influencing the interpretation of the whole game. Game developers oscillate between education in the history of art and the use of these references to create your own world. Conclusion. The examples presented in the article are only part of the rich area of art inspirations that can be found in many games. This should become a contribution to further research, not only taking into account the indicated types of references, but also the visuality of the games themselves The visual complexity of the games would require separate, more extensive research that would bring a lot into the perception of games and researching them

Abstract In the last ten or fourteen years there has been a debate among the so called ludologists and narratologists in Computer Games Studies as to what is the best methodological approach for the academic study of electronic games. The aim of this paper is to propose a way out of the dilemma, suggesting that both ludology and narratology can be helpful methodologically. However, there is need for a wider theoretical perspective, that of semiotics, in which both approaches can be operative. The semiotic perspective proposed allows research in the field to focus on the similarities between games and traditional narrative forms (since they share narrativity to a greater or lesser extent) as well as on their difference (they have different degrees of interaction); it will facilitate communication among theorists if we want to understand each other when talking about games and stories, and it will lead to a better understanding of the hybrid nature of the medium of game. In this sense the present paper aims to complement Gonzalo Frasca’s reconciliatory attempt made a few years back and expand on his proposal.

AbstractUnacknowledged by its practitioners, narratology has often been revisionary rather than descriptive when categorizing narratives. This is because definitions, expert judgment and personal intuition, traditionally the main tools for categorization, are vulnerable to media blindness and to being theory loaded. I argue that to avoid revisionary accounts of ordinary everyday practices such as narrative or gameplay of which non-experts have a firm understanding, expert categorizations have to be tested against folk intuitions as they become apparent in ordinary language. Pictorial narrative in single pictures is introduced as a specific case of categorization dispute and an experiment laid out in which non-experts assess if different pictures tell stories. As the chosen pictures correspond to different criteria of narrative to varying degrees, the experiment also serves as an implicit test of these criteria. Its results confirm monochrony compatibilism, the position that single monochronic pictures can autonomously convey stories. While the pictures rated high in narrativity correspond to traditional criteria of narrative, I argue that the way in which these criteria are usually interpreted by narratologists is problematic because they exclude these pictures from the realm of narratives. It is argued that the way marginal phenomena are categorized is essential for a sound understanding of even the most paradigmatic objects of a domain because categorizations influence definitions and definitions ultimately guide interpretations.

The bestowal of Nobel Prize 2016 in Literature for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition to Bob Dylan indicated that the understanding of literature in post-modern world has begun to permeate its traditional boundary of definition.The research will deploy textual analysis approach with the focus to narratology, with conclusion base on deductive analysis on the holistic data relation. The data collecting method initiates mostly with close reading. Subsequently, those data are divided, arrange and grouped to certain criteria that support the process of analysis.Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee (To the Valley Below”) uniquely identifies the conventional knowledge as something that is not ultimate, instead it identifies it as something that has the value of truth which may be rivaled by other kind of system of truth. The plural existence of system of knowledge is not only acknowledge as juxtaposed entities, but even furthermore deconstructed to be something that successfully find the true essence of truth does not found in conventional system of knowledge.

My subject is point of view in theAeneid. I want to make some theoretical points about that concept, and to discuss some examples. In writing this paper, however, I have come to realise that underneath there lies an attempt to come to terms with the work on Virgil of two of my elders, betters, and friends, Oliver Lyne and Gian Biagio Conte, to whom this piece is offered with affection. But I shall not try to conceal the Oedipal nature of these encounters. As will be seen, there is also an element ofprolepsis: I want to forestall a particular line of interpretation about theAeneidwhich I sense is about to make its appearance.In my title I use the term ‘focalisation’ rather than ‘point of view’. The term is Genette's, later taken up especially by Mieke Bal. I use it for three reasons. First, I believe the reason that led Genette to coin it was a valid one, and perhaps the single most important proposition in his narratology. Genette criticised traditional accounts of point of view for confusing two distinct questions: ‘who speaks?’, and ‘who sees?’. In relation to any textual feature, the answers to these questions may be different. For the first phenomenon, we have the term ‘voice’, and it is helpful to have a separate term for the second; that is, focalisation.

Produced throughout the 1980s using the company’s Adventure Game Interpreter engine, the digital adventure games created by American software publisher Sierra On-Line played an important and largely overlooked role in the development of animation as an integral part of the digital gaming experience. While the little historical and theoretical discussion of the company’s games of the era focuses on their genre, it ignores these games’ contribution to the relationship between the animated avatars and the gamers that control them – a relationship that, as argued in this article, in essence turns gamers into animators. If we consider Chris Pallant’s (2019) argument in ‘Video games and animation’ that animation is essential to the sense of immersion within a digital game, then the great freedom provided to the gamers in animating their avatars within Sierra On-Line’s adventure games paved the way to the same sense of immersion in digital. And, if we refer to Gonzalo Frasca’s (1999) divide of digital games to narrative-led or free-play (ludus versus paidea) in ‘Ludology meets narratology: Similitude and differences between (video) games and narrative’, then the company’s adventure games served as an important early example of balance between the two elements through the gamers’ ability to animate their avatars. Furthermore, Sierra On-Line’s adventure games have tapped into the traditional tension between the animator and the character it animated, as observed by Scott Bukatman in ‘The poetics of Slumberland: Animated spirits and the animated spirit (2012), when he challenged the traditional divide between animators, the characters they animate and the audience. All these contributions, as this articles aims to demonstrate, continue to influence the role of animation in digital games to this very day.

The review analyses the current state of research of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent. The starting point is the tradition of academic commentaries to the text, which allowed achievements in textual criticism during the 1960-1970s. Today we are obviously facing a new turn in both textual studies and commentaries to the novel. The main trends indicate that researchers aim at discovering the spiritual meaning of The Adolescent, its poetics, and sources. Nevertheless, contemporary surveys are characterized by a diversity of academic discourses, originated from psychology, history, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. In the field of literary studies, both Russian and foreign works show a rising interest in the poetics and the analysis of the role of the Christian tradition in the novel. Traditionally, the novel is studied within the prospective Dostoevsky’s Five great works. Monographs reveal the artistic success and unique character of The Adolescent and integrate it into the meta-text of Dostoevsky’s life and oeuvre, giving a variety of typological reasons. Academic research maintains a typological and comparative-historical approach to this novel, though its literary context has not significantly expanded. A substantial aspect of Dostoevsky’s studies is dedicated to the narratology of The Adolescent and its genre features; the traditional definition of the book as a Bildungsroman has now gained a new modified formula. The article pays close attention to the few existing monographs that concentrate on The Adolescent. The article not only provides a review that helps understand how the novel is studied today but outlines prospects of research. Dostoevsky’s novel is organized as a multilayer reality. Therefore, it requires a complex approach - biographical, historical, literary, and mythopoetic (broadly speaking) – in order to allow a full reception of the novel The Adolescent, especially in the mass culture.

The review analyses the current state of research of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent. The starting point is the tradition of academic commentaries to the text, which allowed achievements in textual criticism during the 1960-1970s. Today we are obviously facing a new turn in both textual studies and commentaries to the novel. The main trends indicate that researchers aim at discovering the spiritual meaning of The Adolescent, its poetics, and sources. Nevertheless, contemporary surveys are characterized by a diversity of academic discourses, originated from psychology, history, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. In the field of literary studies, both Russian and foreign works show a rising interest in the poetics and the analysis of the role of the Christian tradition in the novel. Traditionally, the novel is studied within the prospective Dostoevsky’s Five great works. Monographs reveal the artistic success and unique character of The Adolescent and integrate it into the meta-text of Dostoevsky’s life and oeuvre, giving a variety of typological reasons. Academic research maintains a typological and comparative-historical approach to this novel, though its literary context has not significantly expanded. A substantial aspect of Dostoevsky’s studies is dedicated to the narratology of The Adolescent and its genre features; the traditional definition of the book as a Bildungsroman has now gained a new modified formula. The article pays close attention to the few existing monographs that concentrate on The Adolescent. The article not only provides a review that helps understand how the novel is studied today but outlines prospects of research. Dostoevsky’s novel is organized as a multilayer reality. Therefore, it requires a complex approach - biographical, historical, literary, and mythopoetic (broadly speaking) – in order to allow a full reception of the novel The Adolescent, especially in the mass culture.

This article explores how the concept of formalism and the resulting method of formal analysis have been used and applied in the study of digital games. Three types of formalism in game studies are identified based on a review of their uses in the literature, particularly the discussion of essentialism and form that resulted from the narratology-ludology debate: 1) formalism focused on the <em>aesthetic form</em> of the game artifact, 2) formalism as<em> game essentialism</em>, and 3) formalism as a <em>level of abstraction</em>, related to formal language and ontology-like reasoning. These three are discussed in relation to the distinctions between form and matter, in the Aristotelian tradition, to highlight how the method of formal analysis of games appears to be dealing with matter rather than form, on a specific fundamental <em>level of abstraction</em>, and in turn how <em>formal analysis </em>becomes a misleading concept that leads to unnecessary confusion. Finally, the relationship between <em>game essentialism </em>and the more computer science-centric approach to <em>ontology </em>is studied, to account for the contemporary trend of identifying the unique properties of games and opposing them with properties of, e.g., traditional storytelling media like literature and film, explored through their <em>aesthetic form</em>.

AS VIEWED SOMEWHAT FROM ABOVE | First; the relationship between the two positions of natural and unnatural narratology is discussed. It is pointed out that even if they appear to live together in relative harmony and supplement each other in productive ways, they may have to disagree more fundamentally with each other if they are to formulate their respective conceptions of language. Subsequently, an exemplary reading of J.P. Jacobsen’s short story “Et skud i Taagen” is undertaken.First, the question of genre is discussed, since the story appears to be a ghost story that does not really want to be such a story in a traditional sense. Todorov’s idea that the fantastic in literature originates from rhetorical figures becomes the point of departure for a further reading of the story. It is demonstrated that the literalization of a now forgotten idiom, the becoming fictional reality of a simile, and metonymy, is what conjures up the ghost in the narrative. The unnatural or supernatural is thus a product of language in the strictest sense possible. Furthermore, another rhetorical or literary phenomenon, namely free indirect speech, is used with devious effects by Jacobsen, since it is evoked to produce a couple of perspectives or points of view that are simplyimpossible. The literary language of the story can thus not only conjure up the unnatural or supernatural, it can also blind the reader to the sheer impossibility of what is written on the page.

<p>The author chooses both Chinese and English short narratives as samples to analyze their narrative structures so as to testify one presupposition that Chinese people and western people are different in ways of thinking that can be reflected in the narrative structures of their writing. Twelve Chinese short narratives and ten English short narratives are listed from ancient to modern time in their chronological order. The author divides each sample into narrative units in the light of the theory of structuralist narratology and defines the relations between narrative units with different relation definitions according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). On this theoretical basis, the author illustrates all the diagrams of 22 samples with marked relation definitions, which are sorted out and rated so as to compare and contrast the logical relations in those Chinese and western narrative frameworks. The conclusion proves that the narrative frameworks of both English and Chinese short narratives are generally similar to each other in structure from ancient times except for a few differences in modern times. English short narratives tend to emphasize originality and individuality, as well as logical reasoning and linear order for westerners tend to be increasingly thinking for clarity and logical consistency since Socrates and Aristotle. Meanwhile, Chinese people tend to be thinking and writing in a spiral and complete circle echoing the traditional yin-and-yang principle and five-element principle until the “May 4th of 1918”, during which Chinese opened their mind to accept westerner’s science and democracy. </p>

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were created, probably in the second half of the 9th century BC, in the framework of the Greek epic tradition of oral formulaic poetry, which started in the Peloponnese in proto-Mycenaean times (c. 1600 BC). The epic verse, the dactylic hexameter, must have been taken over from the Minoan Cretans. Whereas most 19th century scholars were analysts, considering Homer's epics' conflations of older and more recent epic poems, most modern scholars are unitarians, recognizing the unity of both epics, thanks to modern insights in the nature of oral traditional poetry and to modern narratology. Although many modern scholars ascribe the Odyssey to a later poet than that of the Iliad, there are no convincing arguments against the Ancients' opinion that both epics are the work of one single poet called Homer. Both Iliad and Odyssey are characterized by the principle of ‘unity of action’, a principle not found in other ancient epic poetry. There are reasons to suppose that Homer learnt the art of epic versification in Smyrna, his native city, by listening to performances of Aeolic singers. Driven by Ionic self-consciousness he transposed the epic Aeolic Kunstsprache into Ionic, thus creating the so-called Homeric dialect. He could perform his monumental epics at great religious festivals and at the courts of princes. There is evidence that he gave performances in the island of Euboea, the only prosperous region of the contemporary Greek world, and that there his epics were eventually written down. Thus, Homer's epics are the end-point of the oral epic tradition and the starting point of written Greek and European literature.

Lyric poetry is a genre where discourse types such as description, argumentation, contemplation and narrative can occur together, though in varying combinations. During the last two decades, research has been devoted to the question of how to describe and to study such use of narrativity in lyric poetry. As Hühn (2007) puts it, ‘poetry can profitably be analysed on the basis of narratological categories’. However, this article argues that such a narratological analysis can never replace the traditional lyric analysis. The aim of this article is to combine the means of classical lyric analysis and narratological toolboxes with those of the new rhetorical narratology, in order to explore the impact of figurativity (i.e. micro-narrative stylistic characteristics on the ‘ discours level’ of the poem) on the ‘ histoire level’ (or the level of the enounced, Müller-Zettelmann, 2002) and on the reader of the poetic text in question. As an example, I will study English and German poetic epitaphs from the 17th century, because this early sub-genre of lyric poetry provides enough distance from a restrictive mainstream-romantic understanding of poetry and, at the same time, shows a high degree of figurativity with complex functions. In these texts, figurative elements such as synecdoche and metonymy create ‘discourse events’ at the level of enunciation (with the ‘lyrical I’ as the agent of a decisive change in consciousness or attitudes), but in some cases figurative elements even create (decisive changes that ‘the reader is meant to perform’, Hühn, 2007) that steer the reader’s mental construction of the poem’s ‘story world’, as a key aspect of the text’s narrativity.

AbstrakArtikel ini menganalisis genre sastra tradisional Minangkabau, Kaba Bonsu Pinang Sibaribuik (KBPS), dengan menggunakan pendekatan naratologi morfologi Valdimir Propp. Dengan menggunakan metode kualitatif dan teori fungsi pelaku morfologi cerita rakyat dari Propp, penelitan ini membuktikan bahwa fungsi pelaku dalam kaba ini sangat relevan dengan teori Propp. Terdapat sebanyak 29 fungsi dalam kaba KBPS dari 31 yang dikemukakan Propp, dengan tiga pergerakan cerita atau tiga pengulangan pola fungsi tindakan pelaku, dengan tujuh persebaran fungsi pelaku yang sesuai/lengkap dengan Propp (lingkungan aksi: penjarah; pemberi (donor); pembantu/penolong; seorang putri (yang dicari) dan ayahnya; perantara/utusan; pahlawan/wira; dan pahlawan palsu. Narasi kaba ini membuktian relevasi dan equivalensi struktur kesejagadannya dengan pola-pola cerita peri Rusia yang diteliti Propp. Fungsi-fungsi tindakan dikemukakan Propp itu pada kaba KBPS bukan semata sebuah hasil rekayasa dan kejeniusan tukang cerita, hal itu juga keajaiban universalitasnya dalam penciptaan struktur naratif tradisional yang unik.Kata-kata kunci: Bonsu Pinang Sibaribuik, fungsi, morfologi cerita rakyat, struktur naratif, universal, Vladimir Propp AbstractThis article analyses a traditional Minangkabau epic narrative entitled Kaba Bonsu Pinang Sibaribuik (KBPS) by using Vladimir Propp’s morphology of folktale. By using qualitative method and the theory of the function of action in Propp’s theory, this research proves that the function of action of the narrative is very relevant to the Propp’s pattern. From the analysis it was found that there are 29 functions (act of actions) in the narrative compared with 31 functions stated by Propp, with three movements of the story or three repetition of the functions of action with seven extent of function of acts that are fit to Propp invented (the circle of action: villain; donor; helper; a princess and her father; dispatcher; hero; and false hero). This narrative has proved its pattern has a universal structure as the pattern of fairy tales studied by Propp. The function of action proposed by Propp as revealed in the narrative of BPS is not a mere story telling intelligence, it is also as wonderful of the universality pattern in the making of unique traditional narrative structure.Keywords: Bonsu Pinang Sibaribuik; function, morphology of folktale, narrative structure; universal, Vladimir Propp.

Venäläisen ohjaajan Kirill Serebrennikovin elokuva Kesä (Leto, Venäjä 2018) on tositapahtumiin perustuva, mutta silti voimakkaan fiktiivinen kuvaus Neuvostoliiton underground-rockin noususta valtavirtaan 1980-luvun alkupuolella, päähenkilöinä kaksi neuvostorockin tosielämän suurnimeä Majk Naumenko (1955–1991) ja Viktor Tsoi (1962–1990). Elokuvassa kuullaan luonnollisesti paljon musiikkia: venäläisiä ja länsimaisia 1980-luvun alun rock-hittejä sekä alkuperäisinä että uusina tulkintoina, mutta myös elokuvaa varten sävellettyä originaalimusiikkia. Kesä voitti parhaan soundtrackin palkinnon Cannesissa 2018, mutta sai Venäjällä ristiriitaisen vastaanoton.Artikkelissa keskitytään tarkastelemaan Kesän musiikinkäyttöä formalistisen lähiluvun ja rakenneanalyysin keinoin. Tarkastelun keskiössä on erityisesti elokuvamusiikin narratologia ja Claudia Gorbmanin (1987), Rick Altmanin (1987) ja Guido Heldtin (2013) määritelmät diegeettisyydestä, ei-diegeettisyydestä, supradiegeettisyydestä sekä ekstrafiktiivisyydestä. Tutkimuskysymyksenä on se, miten Kesä-elokuva käyttää neuvostoajan rockia elokuvamusiikkina ja miten tämä musiikinkäyttö ankkuroituu neuvostoelokuvien rock-musiikkikonventioihin.Kesän musiikkistrategiassa muodostuu selkeä vastakkainasettelu kotimaisen ja ulkomaisen, elävän ja nauhoitetun, sekä alkuperäisen ja uudelleentulkitun musiikin välille. Eri musiikkityylien ja kerronnan tasojen välille muodostuu elokuvassa tietynlainen säännönmukaisuus ja tehtävänjako. Se miltä kerronnan tasolta musiikin katsotaan milloinkin tulevan vaikuttaa vahvasti siihen, miten realistisena minkäkin kohtauksen voi lukea, ja tämä puolestaan sitoo elokuvan eri genreperinteisiin: realistisempi, diegeettinen musiikkiesitys ankkuroi elokuvan elämäkertaelokuvien genreen, kun taas täysin epärealistiset, supradiegeettiset musiikkiesitykset viittaavat enemmän musikaaliperinteeseen. Music and Levels of Narration in Kirill Serebrennikov’s film LetoRussian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Leto is a film about the rise of the underground rock scene into the mainstream in early 1980s Soviet Union. The film is based on a true story and the lives of two rock legends Majk Naumenko (1955–1991) and Viktor Tsoi (1962–1990), even though it also contains plenty of highly fictitious elements. The music track features Russian and Western rock songs of the era both as original performances as well as cover versions, additionally there are also excerpts of original score. Leto won the best soundtrack award in Cannes in 2018, but it received mixed reviews in Russia.This article analyses the use of music in Leto through formalist close reading and structural analysis. The analysis relies heavily on film music narratology and in particular on Claudia Gorbman’s (1987), Rick Altman’s (1987), and Guido Heldt’s (2013) definitions of diegeticity, non-diegeticity, supradiegeticity, and extrafictivity. The research question concerns how is Soviet era rock used as film music in Leto, and how does this use relate to the rock music conventions in Soviet cinema.In the musical strategy of Leto, there arises a juxtaposition between domestic and foreign music, as well as live and recorded, and original and re-interpreted music. Furthermore, there is a structure and logic in the way the different types of music relate to the levels of narration throughout the film. The narrative level that the music is anchored to has an effect on the interpretation of individual scenes and events as realistic or unrealistic. This also anchors the film in different film genres or traditions: a more realistic, diegetic music performance is connected with traditional biopic dramas, whereas the unrealistic, supradiegetic musical performances are more closely connected with the tradition of Hollywood musicals.

This research aims to find out how gender and narrative correlate to each other. Traditionally speaking, gender is only related to one of the intrinsic aspects, the character, which is usually inside the plot. Although in this short story the narrator is character-bound narrator, the narrator is not in the fabula or plot. The implication is that it can be assumed that gender plays its role. The narrator in this short story obviously gets involved in the contestation of masculinity of the characters. The method of narratology is employed to dig out all of the masculine contestation, among the main characters (Ajo Sidi and Sang Kakek/the Oldman) and the narrator. The result shows that the masculinity of Ajo Sidi belongs to the hegemonic masculinity and the masculinity of the Oldman belongs to the non-hegemonic masculinity. The contestation of masculinity represents the binary opposition between active and passive masculinity. In this respect, the masculinity of the Oldman, which is passive, can be binarized as the feminine rather than masculine one.

The purpose of the research is to define “family narrative” term; to analyze its structure as well as typological features in “Bukova Zemlya” [Beech Land]. Panorama-novel covering 225 years” by M. Matios published in 2019.Methods have been designed in compliance with the key principles of narratology (particularly, works by Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Yury Lotman, Vladimir Propp, Wolf Schmid, etc), the inter-relation of narration types as well as the implemented forms of memory’s reproduction.Results. The author of the research has suggested a definition of “family narrative” term as a form of transformation of cultural, historical and communicative memory. The author has identified and analyzed its structure, key functions, typological and individual features using “Bukova Zemlya” novel by M. Matios. The text of the novel is built as a linear narrative of four families during 225 years in XVIII-XX centuries at the territory of Bukovyna (currently, in the South-West of Ukraine). According to G. Genette’s typology, the impartiality of the story is achieved via conducting a narration on behalf of a heterodiegetic narrator in an extradiegetic situation. Combination of a family and a historical narratives is typologically manifested through detailed descriptions of ancestry trees; family stories; ethnography-styled descriptions of customs and every-day living of Hutsuls [an ethnic group living in Caprathian mountains of Ukraine or nearby]. The author also mentions well-known historical figures, uses testimonies of the individuals who lived in those times found in archive sources on the First World War, protests, rallies and riots in 1918; describes the events of the Second World War, anti-Soviet Resistance in Bukovyna and finishes the novel with the events of the War in Donbas in 2014. Following the classification approach by G. Genette, M. Matios applies an internal focalization of a plural type. In particular, the views of the various characters are presented from the perspective of a heterodiegenetic narrator. For example, one of the novel’s chapters describes a cross-cutting theme of war simultaneously both as viewed by a peasant, Dariy Berehovchuk, and by an ambassador, Nikolay Vasylko. The family narrative includes specific typology features as “sine qua non” components of the plot: birth, marriage, re-location (home/village/city/home country), hardships (diseases, famines, the Holocaust, wars), death. The author’s specific elements of her view upon the family narrative include the themes of Land, the God and belief, Language, Ethnicity (including the topic of multiple ethnic groups living in Bukovyna). The novel also has such popular elements for a family narrative as images of twins (or twin strangers) and some borrowed traditional features of folk epic tales: cases of “magical recognition” and “magical prophecy” for a future of a kin.Conclusions. The family narrative of M. Matios’ novel includes both typology and individual features. It is built in compliance with the structure of the internal focalization of plural type. The narration is presented as conducted by a heterodiegentic narrator in a extradiegenetic situation. Hence, an impartiality of a narration and a subjectivity of a discourse in present time provides for realization of “I”-presence of a reader and avoiding idealization and mythologization of a family narrative, which are quite traditional for it.Key words: narration, heterodiegenetic narrator, historical narrative, cultural memory, communicative memory. Мета – визначити поняття «родинний наратив», проаналізувати його структуру та типологічні ознаки у творі М. Матіос «Букова земля. Роман-панорама завдовжки у 225 років» (2019).Методи дослідження формуються відповідно до основних положень наратології (праці Р. Барта, Ж. Женетта, Ю. Лотмана, В. Проппа, В. Шміда та ін.), взаємозв’язку типу нарації і втілених форм репродукції пам’яті.Результати. У процесі дослідження було запропоновано дефініцію поняття «родинний наратив» як форми трансформації культурної, історичної та комунікативної пам’яті. Визначено та проаналізовано його структуру, основні функції, типологічні та індивідуальні ознаки на прикладі роману М. Матіос «Букова земля». Зазначено, що текст побудований у формі лінійного наративу історії чотирьох родів протягом 225 років на території Буковини XVIII–XXI століть. Об’єктивність викладу досяга-ється, за типологією Ж. Женетта, завдяки нарації від імені гетеродієгетичного наратора в екстрадієгетичній ситуації. Типо-логічною ознакою є поєднання родинного та історичного наративів, що демонструється через детальний опис родоводів, сімейних історій, етнографічного опису побуту та звичаїв гуцулів, згадок про відомих осіб, використання свідчень сучасників з архівних джерел подій Першої світової війни, протестів, мітингів і заворушень 1918 р., подій Другої світової війни, істо-рії антирадянського опору на Буковині та завершення оповіді роману подіями війни на Донбасі у 2014 р. За класифікацією Ж. Женетта, в романі використано внутрішню фокалізацію множинного типу, а саме подаються погляди різних персонажів із точки зору гетеродієгетичного наратора. Наприклад, наскрізна тема війни в одному з епізодів роману одночасно описується з погляду селянина Дарія Береговчука і посла Николая Василька. Типологічними ознаками родинного наративу є і неодмінні складники сюжету: народження, одруження, зміна місця (дому/села/міста/батьківщини), випробування (хвороби, голод, голо-кост, війна), смерть. Виразними елементами авторського погляду на родинний наратив стали теми землі, Бога і віри, мови, національності (зокрема, і тема багатонаціональної буковинської землі). У романі присутні і такі поширені елементи родин-ного наративу, як образи близнюків (або двійників), а також запозичені усталені ознаки сюжетів народного епосу – епізоди чарівного упізнання і магічного передбачення майбутнього роду.Висновки. Родинний наратив роману М. Матіос містить типологічні та індивідуальні ознаки, формується відповідно до структури внутрішньої фокалізації множинного типу. Нарація подається у викладі гетеродієгетичного наратора в екстрадієге-тичній ситуації. Таким чином, об’єктивність оповіді та суб’єктивність дискурсу теперішнього часу дає змогу втілитися ефекту «я»-присутності читача та уникнути традиційної для родинного наративу ідеалізації та міфологізації.Ключові слова: нарація, гетеродієгетичний наратор, історичний наратив, культурна пам’ять, історична пам’ять, комуні-кативна пам’ять.

AbstractThe role of the narrator in fiction has recently received renewed interest from scholars in philosophical aesthetics and narratology. Many of the contributions criticise how the term is used – both outside of narrative literature as well as within the field of fictional narrative literature. The central part of the attacks has been the ubiquity of fictional narrators, see e. g. Kania (2005), and pan-narrator theories have been dismissed, e. g. by Köppe and Stühring (2011). Yet, the fictional narrator has been a decisive tool within literary narratology for many years, in particular during the heyday of classical literary narratology. For scholars like Genette (1988) and Cohn (1999), the category of the fictional narrator was at the centre of theoretical debates about the demarcation of fiction and non-fiction. Arguably, theorising about the fictional narrator necessitates theorising about fiction in general. From this, it follows that any account on which the fictional narrator is built ideally would be a theory of fiction compatible with all types of fictional narrative media – not just narrative fiction like novels and short stories.In this vein, this paper applies a transmedial approach to the question of fictional narrators in different media based on the transmedial theory of fiction in terms of make-believe by Kendall Walton (1990). Although the article shares roughly the same theoretical point of departure as Köppe and Stühring, that is, an analytical-philosophical theory of fiction as make-believe, it offers a diametrically different solution. Building on the distinction between direct and indirect fictional truths as developed by Kendall Walton in his seminal theory of fiction as make-believe (1990), this paper proposes the fictional presence of a narrator in all fictional narratives. Importantly, ›presence‹ in terms of being part of a work of fiction needs to be understood as exactly that: fictional presence, meaning that the question of what counts as a fictional truth is of great importance. Here, the distinction between direct and indirect fictional truths is crucial since not every fictional narrative – not even every literary fictional narrative – makes it directly fictionally true that it is narrated. To exemplify: not every novel begins with words like »Call me Ishmael«, i. e., stating direct fictional truths about its narrator. Indirect, implied fictional truths can also be part of the generation of the fictional truth of a fictional narrator. Therefore, the paper argues that every fictional narrative makes it (at least indirectly) fictionally true that it is narrated.More specifically, the argument is made that any theory of fictional narrative that accepts fictional narrators in some cases (as e. g. suggested by proponents of the so-called optional narrator theory, such as Currie [2010]), has to accept fictional narrators in all cases of fictional narratives. The only other option is to remove the category of fictional narrators altogether. Since the category of the fictional narrator has proved to be extremely useful in the history of narratology, such removal would be unfortunate, however. Instead, a solution is suggested that emphasizes the active role of recipients in the generation of fictional truths, and in particular in the generation of implied fictional truths.Once the narratological category of the fictional narrator is understood in terms of fictional truth, the methodological consequences can be fully grasped: without the generation of fictional truths in a game of make-believe, there are no fictional narratives – and no fictional narrators. The fictionality of narratives depends entirely on the fact that they are used as props in a game of make-believe. If they are not used in this manner, they are nothing but black dots on paper, the oxidation of silver through light, or any other technical description of artefacts containing representations. Fictional narrators are always based on fictional truths, they are the result of a game of make-believe, and hence the only evidence for a fictional narrator is always merely fictional. If it is impossible to imagine that the fictional work is narrated, then the work is not a narrative.In the first part of the paper, common arguments for and against the fictional narrator are discussed, such as the analytical, realist, transmedial, and the so-called evidence argument; in addition, unreliable narration in fictional film will be an important part in the defence of the ubiquitous fictional narrator in fictional narrative. If the category of unreliable narration relies on the interplay of both author, narration, and reader, the question of unreliable narration within narrative fiction that is not traditionally verbal, such as fiction films, becomes highly problematic. Based on Walton’s theory of make-believe, part two of the paper presents a number of reasons why at least implied fictional narrators are necessary for the definition of fictional narrative in different media and discusses the methodological consequences of this theoretical choice.

The review traces papers of the International conference V. Nabokov and Transatlantic Relations in American and European culture hosted at Saint Petersburg State University on May14–16, 2021. Scholars in various fields of humanities traced the routes of intercontinental cultural contacts of the XX-th century to construct a global context to understand Vladimir Nabokov as a paradigmatic transatlantic figure. The main direction which was discussed in papers of D. Ioffe, T. Venediktova, G. Kruzhkov, O. Panova, A. Astvatsaturov, O. Antsyferova, I. Golovacheva, A. Shvets, O. Sokolova, traditionally turned out to be American and British. The Russian cultural context viewed through the transatlantic prism was outlined by E. Penskaya, V. Feshchenko, A. Rodionova, A. Masalov, Y. Probstein, C. Bernstein and by Marjorie Perloff. The issues of transatlantic transfer in Romanesque literatures were presented in the papers of L. Muravieva, A. Petrova, V. Popova and I. Khohlova. The speakers discussed Franco-American autofiction, the images of Americans in the works of G. Apollinaire and the history of Soviet-Latin American and Portuguese-American poetic contacts, German and Scandinavian contexts viewed the in light of transatlantic problems. Discussion of Vladimir Nabokov works summed up a kind of outcome of the conference that brought together linguists (A. Kretov, Zh. Gracheva), historians of literature and culture (D. Tokarev, A. Bolshev, N. Shcherbak, A. Stepanova, N.A. Karpov ), scholars of poetics and narratology (F. Dvinyatin, V. Schmid, E. Kazartsev, D.Yu. Dovzhenko, N.I. Emelyanova).

The ballad as a narrative genre of the chamber-vocal music. Logical reason for research. The relevance of the topic of the present research is due to the fact that in music the interaction of purely musical and extra-musical phenomena continues to remain in the focus of increased attention of the researchers who represent both musicology and other areas of humanitarian knowledge. This interaction has a synergistic effect, which lies in the fact that the combination of the simultaneous influence of words and music, integrated into a single whole, leads to a significantly greater effect of these factors together, rather than separately. Such emergence is clearly manifested during all types of musician’s activities – composing, performing, listening, but has not yet been sufficiently developed in musical science. And the need for a connection between musical science and practice directs our attention to such types of synergistic interaction in music, and one of the most basic is the interaction of music itself (of purely musical, sound patterns) and the verbal text (of the sphere of extramusical – specific images, characters, events, etc.). One of the concepts associated with the verbal text, which has its own specific qualities, is the “narrative”, and the study of the narrativeness as a special property (or a complex of properties) of a vocal musical composition with a narrative text, its potential, performance specifics and characteristics of perception by the listener seems relevant both in theoretical and practical directions. Innovation. The article is devoted to a chamber-vocal ballad, one of the genre indicators of which is the narrativeness. The narrativeness is understood as a special quality of a musical composition, in particular, a vocal one, which relies on narration (both verbal and achieved by means of musical expression). The narrative narration is connected, on the one hand, with eventfulness, plot; on the other hand, it is characterized by an emotional and ethical assessment of the reflected events. In the vocal music, the conductor of the narrative is the word, however, only those genres of the vocal music can be defined as narrative, where the verbal text itself has narrative qualities. The vocal ballad is such among the genres of the vocal music, and its literary origin and narrativeness as the main genetic trait determined the corresponding narrative specificity. The narrativeness as a genre factor in the ballad is the result of the synthesis of a narrative verbal text and the corresponding eventfulness of a vocal composition (an extra-musical component) and the specifics of their musical embodiment (a musical component). As one of its tasks the concert practice of a vocal ballad performer has the realization of the narrativeness as a quality of the performing-composing interpretation, which represents the understanding and presentation of the artistic potential of a musical composition. The narrativeness can manifest itself at different levels of the musical text of the ballad, usually enhancing the emotional and ethical assessment of the events. Objectives. The purpose of the present research is to reveal the specifics of the narrativeness of the chamber-vocal genre of the ballad. Methods. The main methods of the presented research are genre and systemic. The genre method is associated with the need to characterize the chamber-vocal genre of the ballad in connection with the chosen perspective of studying the meaning and action of the narrative in it. The systemic method makes it possible to identify and systematize the peculiarities of the interaction of the extra-musical narrative and the means of musical expression in a specific genre, namely, the chamber-vocal ballad. Results and Discussion. The movement into the inter-disciplinary field remains a promising growth point in modern research in the sphere of humanities, where different areas of knowledge actively interact and share their experience. This also applies to musicology. Active assimilation of knowledge from other sciences helps to see from a new perspective many problems, the study of which by traditional methods has practically exhausted its potential. One of the concepts that can help in the study of the patterns of interaction between words and music in musical art is the “narrative” as a special quality of the verbal text. The narrative involved in the field of musical science receives additional scientific “saturation”, scientific meanings and research perspectives. The development of an integrative scientific approach for two disciplines such as linguistics and musicology goes beyond their case studies and focuses on connecting the laws of “musical structures” to the analysis of the verbal text: for example, such concepts as tension and decline, open and closed form, the lyrical, harmonic content, etc. The need to comprehend the dynamic nature of the narrative text leads to an expansion of the horizon of research related to the concepts of the birth of the text and the perception of the text, and the theory of musical forms is the closest to the narratology in this regard. Indeed, the organization of verbal and musical communication obeys the general laws of dynamism and temporality: the basis of both linguistic and musical structures is the procedural nature of the development of information. The convergence of musicality and narrativeness has led to the development of such a concept as a “musical intrigue” in the works of the French narratologists R. Barony, F. Revaz and others. In musical science, there is a concept that, in our opinion, is associated with a “musical intrigue”, but is more capacious and better explaining the narrative in music of both, a purely musical and extramusical nature – this is musical “eventfulness” (N. Gerasimova-Persidskaya, A. Ivko, and A. Durnev), which is understood broadly and multi-dimensionally, both in connection with the events “introduced” to music with the word, and with purely musical “events” – harmonic, rhythmic, intonational, timbre-acoustic, etc. Such musical eventfulness, unfolded in the narration with a sequential presentation of the events from the “third” person and an emotional assessment of the happening things – both in the verbal and musical text, is most clearly represented in the chamber-vocal genre of the ballad. Owing to the literary origin of the genre and its original narrative nature, it has retained its narrative nature in music (this applies to both the vocal and instrumental ballads). Most often, the musical text in the vocal ballad is subordinated to the verbal one, it is an illustration of the events that are taking place and at the same time enhances their emotional assessment. Conclusions. The narrativeness in the vocal music is primarily related to its extra-musical source. The narrativeness as a special quality of a narrative eventful text is characterized by an emotional attitude and a corresponding assessment, which is dictated from the outside (by the “storyteller”) to the person at whom the narrative is directed – in the sphere of musical practice this is the listener. Since the text (the word) is used in the vocal music, here we should talk about the narrative with all the specifics of its action. Very various texts are used in the vocal music, and not all of them are narrative, therefore, the narrativeness as a genre quality in its pure form can be traced in the genre of the vocal ballad due to its literary origin and narrative character. That is why the most indicative vocal genre in the aspect of the narrativeness is such a genre of the chamber-vocal music as the ballad. The nature of the narrativeness: in the vocal ballad it determines the verbal text, and the means of musical expression, as a rule, embody both the events reflected in the text and their emotional assessment. The prospects for the study of the narrativeness in musical art are associated not only with the characteristics of the interaction of musical and extra-musical principles in the vocal music (both in the chamber music and in the large genres), but also with the study of manifestations of the narrativeness in instrumental music, especially in such compositions that are not associated with extra-musical manifestations even in minimal form (program headers and the like). In addition, since the narrativeness is associated with a “storyteller”-intermediary between the source of information and its recipient, it can be argued that the narrativeness in musical art is also associated with the performing art as one of its tasks, literally or figuratively.

This paper explores introduction to special education textbooks in order to illuminate how they portray the social and political work of special educators, especially in relation to disabled students and adults. This study analyzed five leading special education textbooks used in university teacher education programs using traditional methods of discourse analysis, including line-by-line coding and language-in-use with valuation. The analysis and coding tracked story plot components and characters associated with five phases evident in the narrative structure of a hero's journey: (1) the call to adventure, (2) supernatural aid, (3) threshold guardians, (4) trials and tribulations, and (5) the return. Discussions of the findings illustrate the problematic ways in which the textbooks create a heroic narrative of past and current elements tied to the field of special education.

This article focuses on self-narratives and identity construction in the context of social networking sites (SNSs). It does so by discussing the findings of a research that had at its core a practice-based module titled “Facebook and Autobiography”, which was designed and taught at a major Hong Kong University. Through a cyber autoethnographic approach, which aligns to the methodological orientation of the second wave in narratology studies, the research explores how the infrastructure of Facebook affects the processes of self-narration in comparison with traditional written dairies. Contrary to previous studies, the interviews with students-participants and the analysis of their Facebook’s profiles suggest that the retrieval on Facebook of even small self-narratives is impaired by the fact that the platform has abandoned its life-diary orientation in favour of a news-based business model where the posthuman connotation of profiles prevails.

Հոդվածում ներկայացրել ենք գյումրեցի արձակագիր, գրականագետ, բանասիրական գիտությունների դոկտոր, պրոֆեսոր Հայկազ Հակոբջանյանի կյանքը, նրա գրական ժառանգության համառոտ բնութագիրը: Ավանդական և ժամանակակից գրականության տեսության հայեցակետերից ուսումնասիրել ենք նրա գեղարվեստական արձակի բնորոշ առանձնահատկությունները: Նարատոլոգիայի օրինաչափությունների կիրառմամբ համառոտ կերպով բացահայտել ենք գրողի վաղ շրջանի վիպակների («Ամանոսի լեռների առասպելը», «Պադվալի Վաղոն», «Խանասոր»), ինչպես նաև Վ. Տերյանի, Դ. Վարուժանի, Սիամանթոյի, Ռ. Սևակի մասին կենսագրական վեպերի մեջ հեղինակի և պատմողի (նարատոր) փոխառնչությունների առանձնահատկությունները: / In the article we have presented the life and brief description of the literary heritage of the Gyumri prose writer, literary critic, Doctor of Philological Sciences Haykaz Hakobjanyan. We examined the characteristics of his fiction from the point of view of the traditional and modern literature theory. Using the principles of the narratology, we briefly revealed the early novels of the writer (―The Myth of the Amanos Mounts‖, ―Padvali Vaghon‖, ―Khanasor‖), as well as the features correlations of the author and narrator in biographical novels about V. Teryan, D. Varuzhan, Siamanto, R. Sevak.

The paper is an overdue review on the volume Árnyképrajzoló – körülírások [Draughtsman of Shadow – Circumlocutions – 2008]. Having construed the relations between the title story and its subtitle, the paper comes to the conclusion that one possible interpretation of the term „circumlocutions” refers to the linguistic strategy that is characteristic of nearly all writings of the volume. Szilárd Borbély was widely acknowledged as one of the most important poets at the time of the publishing of the book. However, as a prose writer, he was in an experimental stage. These writings represent this experimental playground. The essay Egy bűntény mellékszálai [The Secondary Threads of a Crime], as well as its counterpart the volume Halotti pompa [The Splendours of Death], which was a milestone in contemporary Hungarian literature, can be regarded as a masterpiece without exaggeration. The key of the literary success is the fact that the narrator treats the tragic fate of his parents, who were victims of a brutal robbery, as a text. Szilárd Borbély applies a tool of his own profession, narratology to this story. He deconstructs – in the Derrida-esque sense - the traditional ways of narration.

AbstractThis lecture delivered at Victoria College, University of Toronto, concentrates on defining the status to be accorded to any universals. Underlining his desire that semiotics avoid epistemological dissensions and focus instead on establishing its effectiveness, Greimas recalls that he has adopted an “agnostic” constructivist stance and thus declined to affirm whether universals exist in the world or only in the mind. Following Hjelmslev’s middle way, he has identified a set of undefinable terms, then employed them to define each other in a coherent deductive axiomatic. Empirically, he distinguishes different kinds of universals. Absolutely necessary such terms include the interdependent concepts of description and relation. He further distinguishes between paradigmatic and syntagmatic universals. The former notably include the elementary category of the collective semantic universe, nature-culture, and that of the individual semantic universe, life-death. For his fundamental syntactic universal, Greimas declined to adopt the traditional propositional form comprising subject, copula, and predicate, and has opted instead for an alternative featuring a verbal kernel to which are articulated actants defined through grammatical cases. Semiotics identifies these and other hypothetical universals as metalinguistic terms which describe language and other systems of representation, and which define the conditions of their production and comprehension. In contrast to narratology, semiotics thus situates narrative universals within a comprehensive theory of meaning, with a goal to develop the bases of the human sciences in a manner parallel to the foundations of the life sciences.

Being a polysemantic phenomenon, the literature is in a systematic process of constructive transformations of previous experience, based on the transit of centuries-old traditions, on the functioning of TTP (theory of traditional plots). The purpose of our work is to analyze the general problems of reception, transformation and new generation of test sequels by the writers by juxtaposition of Gogol’s and Bulgakov’s novels. These methodologies provided a new perspective on the reception and functionality of classic designs. The use of the receptive platform, the theory of TТР, the theory of intertextuality, narratology, etc., have provided the basis for new, unexplored, scientific findings. The well-known traditional motives, plots, characters occupy their niche in the theory of transitivity, without losing relevance due to the endless dialogue «author – recipient». This cultural transit has its regularities, which are engraved in the receptive segment of the science of literature, beginning with the problem of understanding the text, which goes back to deciphering the exegesis. Bulgakov, as a classic writer, formed in a time of crisis and shaky space, not only had to inherit the tradition, but also zealously protect it from the unmotivated literary blasphemy of radically new times. It is in his creative attitude to classical material and his alterations that he is a striking representative of the «caste of the guardians of tradition». His latest novel, incorporating a tremendous literary legacy – from legends to classical material – undoubtedly gives us the right to identify this main Bulgakov text as a meta-romance. The functionality of classical plots and their reminiscences at the reception of the writer appeal to the question of intertextuality. In the context of TCT theory, we examined M. Gogol’s influence on M. Bulgakov’s work. The update of the Gogol text, made possible by numerous microstructural components. In addition, we drew attention to the theatrical interpretations of M. Gogol, which veiled the issue of actualization of classical material. In the feuilleton «Chichikov Adventures», the writer contaminated M. Gogol’s most colorful characters using the past ridiculed the realities of the day.

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AbstractIn the 1970s and 1980s, literary theorists, particularly in the German-speaking world, showed increasing interest in appropriating the distinctive methodologies of both the positivist social sciences and the natural sciences. Alongside empirical (e. g. Groeben 1982) and analytical approaches to literature (e. g. Fink/Schmidt 1984), the structuralist school shaped by Lotman’s narrative theory attempted a scientific turn in literary theory (cf. Köppe/Winko 2010), aiming for an exact science, or at least one more exact than the traditional ›art of interpretation‹ admitted by Staiger (1955). We trace the structuralist approach, or more precisely, the central aspect of structuralist narratology, the theory of boundary-crossing, first in Lotman (1979), and then criticise Renner’s remodelling based on formal logic (1983), and finally remodel boundary-crossing theory by means of modal logic. By doing this, we hope to demonstrate the potential of a methodologically self-aware, terminologically precise text analysis that is therefore capable of intersubjectivity.At the beginning of the 1970s, the Estonian literary scholar and cultural semiotician Jurij M. Lotman took as his starting point the strong human affinity for the replication of abstract systems (The most influential formulation of Lotman’s boundary-crossing theory – at least in the German speaking world – was that of Karl N. Renner in the early 1980s. Renner understood events to be disruptions of order, and disruptions of order in turn as logical contradictions. In addition to the formal logic representation of disruptions of order, Lotman and Renner differ in that Renner presupposes that the ›eventful situation‹ arisesThe consequences of the principle of non-contradiction do not occur to Renner. While Renner is, in fact, dissatisfied with his model, for him the problem lies in a different circumstance: his ordering statements lack the characteristics of postulates. It can be deduced from his writings that he wishes his ordering statements to be understood as normative statements. However, non-modal sentences, and these are precisely what Renner uses, do not describe, even in the case of subjunctions/implications, what should be, but merely whatThis problem, addressed but not explored by Renner, can be solved with the help of normative reasoning/deontic modal logic. Instead of an operator of necessity, here an operator of obligation is used. Using this operator, we can produce contradiction-free statements about how something should be, which can be placed in relation to selective statements about how things are. Our aim, however, is not exclusively or primarily to criticise Renner, but rather to develop the particular benefits which these consideration of formal logic bring to cross-boundary theory – namely the connection between the quality of the ordering statements, and the durative and non-durative aspect of events.We demonstrate this using Pierre Boulles’ 1963 novel

AbstractThis article explores the role of punctuation and typography in readers' engagement with literary narrative, and with fictional characters in particular. I argue that unconventional typography and punctuation marks can be used to convey the phenomenological ``feel'' of characters' (and narrators') experiences, thereby becoming a vehicle for consciousness representation in narrative. Aiming to contribute to the discussion on readers' responses to characters within cognitive narratology, I hypothesize that such responses can be guided by non-verbal cues as well as by the verbal strategies traditionally examined by narrative theorists. I explore two different dimensions of the nexus between punctuation, typography, and consciousness representation: firstly, because of their ``separating'' function graphic markers can render the temporal structuring of consciousness itself; secondly, unconventional graphic cues can exploit the ``evaluative'' function of punctuation and typography in order to convey altered states of consciousness such as dream experience, extreme emotions, and cognitive disorientation.

AbstractOver the past two decades cognitive literary studies (CLS) has emerged as a new subfield of literary studies. Despite the success of cognitive theories in some areas of research such as in narratology, however, the impact of CLS on the academic discipline of literary and cultural studies as a whole has not been as profound as predicted. Major schools of research, e.g. postcolonial studies or gender studies, remain virtually untouched, and the vast majority of literary scholars are still sceptical or indifferent towards this area of research. Reasons for this scepticism include, for example, epistemological and methodological uncertainties concerning the interdisciplinary intersection of science and literature. But scholars have also begun to address another lacuna in contemporary research that may prove to be of equal or even more profound consequence: the lack of a solid and widely accepted conceptual and analytical bridge between cognitive approaches and the wide field of cultural studies. It is a well-known fact that the study of culture in its many theoretical guises has taken a lead role in philology departments around the globe. Though not every scholar welcomes this development, it would certainly be unwise to ignore the general impact of cultural studies on philology. For this reason, my paper argues that CLS not only needs to engage in a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between literary scholars and cognitive scientists but it also needs to incorporate cultural studies into this dialogue. In other words, an important challenge lies in making cognitive approaches relevant for cultural analysis.This paper engages with current attempts to face this challenge. It provides a survey of approaches that aim to build a conceptual bridge between culture and cognition and thus take a step towards extending cognitive approaches into the field of cultural studies. For this purpose, I adopt the distinction between so-called ›first‹ and ›second generation‹ approaches in order to group this research heuristically into two academic camps: (1) approaches that emphatically foreground so-called second generation cognitive science as their prime source of inspiration, i.e. approaches that engage with enactive, embedded, extended, and embodied aspects of cognition; and (2) studies which do not explicitly situate themselves within this paradigm and rather seek innovation by turning to more ›classical‹, foundational ›first generation‹ concepts of mental representation, information- and text processing. By discussing examples from both lines of research, including work by Kukkonen/Caracciolo (2014), Strasen (2013), Sommer (2013), and Hartner/Schneider (2015), my survey attempts to provide an impression of the wealth of creative thinking currently at work in CLS. In this context, the paper discusses some of the major challenges cognitive approaches are facing today; it traces a selection of current developments in the field, including work on the concept of ›cultural models‹, the notion of the ›intercultural mind‹, and the attempt to programmatically ground conceptualizations of cognition in our bodily interactions with culture and the environment.All in all, I argue that despite the efforts towards a systematic cognitive investigation of culture sketched in this survey, the project of cognitive cultural studies in general is still in its infancy. Its work is conducted by a comparatively small group of enthusiasts and constitutes a highly-specialized academic niche within a multitude of postclassical approaches to literature. Whether it will be possible to interest the much larger body of ›traditional‹ literary and cultural scholars in cognitive approaches, in my opinion, will to no small degree hinge on the field’s ability to move beyond abstract theoretical reflection. While there is obviously nothing intrinsically wrong with specialized fields of research beyond the mainstream, I believe that cognitive approaches have the potential to reach a wider audience. However, this may depend on the ability of CLS to develop concepts and methods capable of analysing concrete cultural phenomena in their social and historical context.

Sometimes ... we don’t want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake (Nigella Lawson, How to be a Domestic Goddess vii). IntroductionFor today’s female readers, the idea of trailing “nutmeggy fumes” of home-baked pie through their kitchens could be as much a source of gender-stereotyping outrage as one of desire or longing. Regardless of personal response, there seems little doubt that the image Lawson’s words create prevails even in the 21st century: an apron-clad, kitchen-bound woman, cooking for others as an expression of love and communication. This is particularly true of contemporary cookbooks written by and aimed at women. Two examples are Sophie Dahl’s Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights (2010) and Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess (2000). This paper explores how Dahl and Lawson use three narrative strategies—sequence, description and voice—to frame their recipes; it also analyses how these narrative strategies encourage readers to embrace traditional constructs of domestic femininity, albeit in a contemporary and celebratory light. The authors’ use of these strategies also makes their cookbooks more than simply instruction manuals—instead, they become engaging and pleasurable texts that use memoir, humour and nostalgia to convey their recipes and create distinct authorial personas and cultural ideas about food and femininity. While primary purpose of cookbooks is to instruct, what makes them distinctive—and, arguably, so popular—is their mix of pleasure and utility. The stories they tell, both cultural and personal, are what make us continue to buy and read them, despite bookshelves that may already bend beneath the weight of three hundred different versions of chicken risotto and chocolate cake; as Anne Bower notes, many women read cookbooks for escapism and enjoyment. This concept of escapism and enjoyment is closely tied to the role of narrative. Cognitive narratology, a more recent strand of narrative theory, emphasises what readers bring to a text, and how narrative allows readers to frame and understand texts and the world around them. Therefore, cookbooks that situate their recipes among personal anecdotes and familiar cultural ideals or myths—such as the woman in the kitchen—appeal to our experiences and emotions. Cookbooks thus become engaging and resonant on personal and sociocultural levels: Gvion argues that cookbooks are “social texts” (54), which seems appropriate when considering the meanings we ascribe to food—it remains a fundamental part of our culture and identity (Lupton). Certain cookbooks—those that emphasise the social and emotional aspects of what we consume—can be regarded as a reflection of how we attach meanings to foods in particular contexts (Mintz). The books discussed in this paper combine the societal and personal aspects of this process: their authors blend familiar cultural tropes with their own engaging autobiographical anecdotes using sequence, description and voice. Narrative theory has traditionally been applied to fiction, and cookbooks obviously lack fictional elements such as plot and character. However, cognitivist narratology, which directs its focus to humans’ cognitive understanding and perception of various actions and events (Fludernik, Histories), makes it applicable to a range of texts. Cookbooks’ use of sequence, description, and voice create “storyworlds” for readers, which “can be viewed as [a] global mental representation enabling interpreters to draw inferences about items and occurrences either explicitly or implicitly included in a narrative” (Herman 9). Cookbook authors use memories, anecdotes and imagery to conjure scenes to which readers can aspire or relate, perhaps prompting responses similar to those experienced when reading fiction.Prince characterises narrative as a “representation of events in a time sequence” (82). The sequence of information and anecdotes in a cookbook—its introduction, chapter structure and recipe structure—positions readers to read and interpret the text in a particular way; it is both part of how the texts authors construct a sense of self and of how they encourage readers to construct their own meanings in response. Dahl, for example, arranges her recipes according to season, since she places great importance on seasonal eating. Description is the cornerstone of any successful cookbook, since it becomes impossible to successfully replicate a dish if you cannot make sense of the instructions. However, in a narrative sense, description operates as part of a narrator’s “rhetorical strategy” (Bal 36); it helps construct their narrative persona and enables them to reinforce the associations between food, culture and identity in evocative language. Voice is the final piece of the narrative puzzle. These cookbooks are all “narrated” by their authors, who offer selected anecdotes and stories to support their authorial intentions and position readers to interpret their texts in a particular way. Feminist narratologist Susan Lanser regards voice as the “intersection of social identity and textual form” (14), a definition that recognises the broader social and cultural significance of cookbooks. Since they tend to be narrated “directly” from author to readers, authorial voice serves not only to engage readers, but also to establish authors’ culinary authority. The two cookbooks analysed here are written by—and, arguably, primarily aimed at—women, and this paper contends that their authors use narrative to reclaim a powerful sense of feminine ownership. While they are just two of many contemporary cookbooks that arguably strive to achieve similar ends (Tessa Kiros’s 2010 Apples for Jam, and Monica Trapaga’s 2010 She’s Leaving Home, are two recent Australian examples), Dahl’s and Lawson’s texts are apt case studies: both are commercially successful and their authors occupy a significant space in the public imagination, particularly where women’s identity is concerned. Dahl is a former plus-size model who lost weight “rather publicly” (Dahl xi) and whose book charts the evolution of her complex relationship with food; Lawson’s books and cooking programs have seen her variously characterised as “prefeminist housewife … antifeminist Stepford wife … the saviour of downshifting middle-class career women and as both the negative and positive product of postfeminism” (Hollows 180). Dahl and Lawson narrate the knowledge and skill of their recipes in a context of experiences and memories related to their lives as mothers and/or partners and food professionals, which underscores the weight of their kitchen authority as women while still maintaining that rather mythic connection between the feminine and domestic. Sequence The introductory pages and internal structure of each book reflects both its author’s intentions, and the persona they construct within the text that speaks directly to readers. It also foregrounds the link between women and food. The link between this domesticity and feminine identity is explicit in both texts. Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights is a food memoir as well as a cookbook, and Dahl’s use of narrative sequence makes this clear: in her introduction, she reveals that “the second word I ever spoke was ‘crunch,’ muddled baby-speak for fudge” (viii). Interspersed between the book’s four sections (Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer) are essays that chart Dahl’s evolving relationship with food and cooking, framed particularly in terms of her female identity: they detail her progression from a plump-cheeked teenager unhappy about carrying a few extra pounds to a woman at ease with her body and appetite who cannot “get away from the siren call of the kitchen” (15). Dahl often introduces her recipes with reference to their personal significance, particularly in relation to cooking as an act of love or communication—“Musician’s Breakfast,” for example, is so named because it is a favourite of her boyfriend, jazz musician Jamie Cullum (152). Lawson’s book is ostensibly more practical—her chapters are arranged according to types of dish, such cakes or biscuits. She also explicitly summons the familiar vision of the woman at home in the kitchen. Although she draws on the clichéd image of the domestic goddess, her preface seems aimed at making female readers feel at ease. For example, she writes that she does not want her audience to think of baking as a “land you do not inhabit” or to “confine you to kitchen quarters” (vii); rather, her aim is to make them “feel” (vii) like a domestic goddess rather than be one, an act that might be interpreted as an attempt to put a more contemporary spin on a dated archetype.Nonetheless, throughout Lawson’s book, the prose that introduces her recipes draws on those associations between baking and homely comfort: cake-baking “implies effort and domestic prowess,” (2) but is easy in practice, and baking loaf cakes makes one feel “humble and worthy and brimming with good things” (5). Again, Lawson’s own experience—particularly as a busy mother and career woman—shapes the introductory words for each recipe and establishes a sense of her authorial persona in relation to broader social constructs of food and the feminine. Description Vivid, evocative descriptions of food and food-related memories and experiences are an integral part of what makes these texts narratively engaging, and how they continue to enforce and idealise that connection between the feminine and the domestic. Both authors frequently describe food in terms that create concepts of cosy domesticity: Lawson describes baking as a metaphor for “familial warmth” (vii), and for Dahl, roast chicken “is Sunday ... there’s something about that smell wafting through the house” (53). A distinct sense of nostalgia is at play here; as Linda Hutcheon observes, one can “look and reject” or “look and linger longingly” (online), and this apparent yearning to return to simpler times summons a “mythical past of comfort and stability” (Duruz 57), seemingly embodied in images of wholesome foods cooked for us by mothers or wives. This idea of food as emotionally nourishing is frequently related in terms of the author’s duties as domestic providers and as women who occasionally—and by choice—inhabit traditional female roles. However, Lawson and Dahl reveal the tensions between past and present: while they embrace the pleasures of old-fashioned domesticity, they do not—and cannot—wholly recreate it. Instead, they must balance it with other priorities, making space for a more liberated and contemporary female home cook who can choose to occupy a place at the stove. Of course, the title of Lawson’s book—and the wording of its preface, quoted at the start of this paper—refers explicitly to the old-fashioned idea of the domestic goddess. But Lawson aims to update or demystify the concept for today’s busy women: she expresses the view that many have become “alienated” from the domestic sphere, but that “it can actually make us feel better to claim back some of that space, make it comforting rather than frightening” (vii). While she summons very traditional images—for example, “a pie is just what we all know should be emanating from the kitchen of a domestic goddess” (81)—she also puts a new spin on them, perhaps in an attempt to make them seem less patronising or intimidating while still enforcing how satisfying it can be to feel like a domestic goddess without slaving in the kitchen. She frequently emphasises the simplicity of her recipes and describes food in terms of the pleasure it brings the cook as well as those for whom she is cooking: while baking bread brings “crucial satisfaction, that warm feeling of homespun achievement,” she also notes that “my way of baking bread is designed to fit more easily into the sort of lives we lead” (291). As Hollows notes, the “Nigella cooking philosophy” is that “cooking should be pleasurable and should start from the desire to eat” (182), a concept far removed from the traditional construct of women as “providers of food for others” who have difficulty “experiencing food as pleasurable themselves, particularly in a domestic context” (184). Dahl also emphasises pleasure, ease and practicality, and describes food in terms of its nostalgic and emotional associations, particularly in relation to her female relatives. As a child, Dahl attended boarding school, and on the last night of her holidays—before she returned to terrible school food, with its “gristly stew, grey Scotch eggs and collapsed beetroot” (7)—her mother would cook her a special dinner, and she remembers feasting on “roast chicken wrapped in bacon with tarragon creeping wistfully over its breast, potatoes golden and gloriously crispy on the outside and flaking softly from within” (7). Although Dahl’s mother taught her the importance of “cooking for your man,” this very old-fashioned idea is presented in a tongue-in-cheek way, with the caveat, “woe betide any man who doesn’t appreciate it” (73). Again, the act of cooking is described as something that brings intense domestic satisfaction, and represents a conscious choice to relive the past in a contemporary, and perhaps slightly ironic (albeit still enjoyable), context: making tawny granola “makes one feel very fifties housewife, because as it bakes the house is bathed in a warm cinnamon-y glow” (25). Such descriptions of food and cooking are both evocative and romantic, even while they emphasise convenience and practicality. This perhaps reflects the realities of modern life for busy modern women juggling work and family commitments; it emphasises that tension between the ideal of the past and the reality of the present. While Lawson and Dahl still idealise the correlation between women, food and the domestic, drawing on familiar and perhaps comforting associations, they nonetheless manage to make their cookbooks both narratively engaging and culturally revealing: as Susan Leonardi points out, recipes are an exchange between reader and writer, and they require “a recommendation, a context ... a reason to be” (340). Descriptions of memories, emotions and sensations in relation to cooking and women’s identity help to create a particular narrative “storyworld” (Herman 9) or familiar context; the authors here describe experiences that are likely to resonate with female readers to enforce that connection between women and their kitchens. Since they draw so heavily on their authors’ lives, these cookbooks are almost forms of life narrative; by drawing on their own recollections to appeal to readers and share recipes, their narrators are “performing several rhetorical acts, justifying their own perceptions, conveying cultural information” (Smith and Watson 10). This is a fundamental aspect of narrative voice: who “speaks” in the text (Genette 185). Voice Both authors use their identity as women and home cooks to enforce the feminine/domestic connection and relate to their audience. They each create a distinct narrating voice or authorial persona that speaks directly to readers and aims to win their trust and sympathy. Lawson positions herself as a busy mother and wife; Dahl focuses on her evolving relationship with food, particularly in the context of her former career as a plus-size model and her subsequent weight loss. Both women share cooking anecdotes, and often, significantly, their kitchen failures—Dahl’s recipe for asparagus soup reveals that one of her attempts at trialling the recipe resulted in soup spurting from her blender, “covering me, the walls and floor in a thick slick of green” (168). Both women write as passionate home cooks: what seems most important is a love of food and what it represents, the joy of cooking as much as the culinary skill it may require. Lanser writes that “the authority of a given voice or text is produced from a conjunction of social and rhetorical properties” (6), and both Dahl’s and Lawson’s authority comes from their domestic experience and their roles as women who cook for themselves and for the pleasure it brings them as much as for their families. Although they advocate this sense of enjoyment over duty, there remains in each text a distinctly romantic idea of what it means to cook; specifically, to be a female home cook. This is most explicit in how Dahl and Lawson narrate their texts, particularly in terms of the confidences they share. Both confess their shortcomings in relaxed and informal tones: Lawson writes about an occasion when she found herself in “dire straits” when trying to make marzipan (6), and confesses to being a “negligent mother” because all she does with her children is cook with them (209); Dahl says that she “would plant tarragon in my garden in London, but the neighbour’s cat is partial to peeing on every herb I have” (58). Both imbue their actual recipes, as well as the prose that surrounds them, with a very personal tone, offering tips and advice drawn from their own experience: Dahl advises readers to “go by instinct and taste, adding or taking away as you want” (52) and Lawson suggests leaving “a decent amount of uncooked cake batter in the bowl for scraping-out purposes” (183). Conclusion Pasupathi’s work on constructing identity in storytelling, and how recounting stories becomes a way of establishing a sense of self, is particularly relevant here; a similar concept is evident in cookbooks. Lawson and Dahl choose familiar life stories and situations that readers, (particularly female), might recognise and engage with. As Fludernik observes, narrators are integral to narrative texts, since they help to establish narrative meaning and interest (An Introduction to Narratology). The narrating voices of Dahl’s and Lawson’s cookbooks foreground their identity as women and home cooks to highlight experiences and issues relevant to women. All three of the narrative strategies discussed in this paper contribute to this. Both texts do, to a degree, enforce cultural stereotypes—most obviously, the idea of a woman’s kitchen as a kind of natural habitat—but they also emphasise the pleasures of cooking. Despite the clichéd imagery and heavy nostalgia, Dahl’s and Lawson’s appropriation of the domestic goddess image exposes and reconfigures the contradictions between the idealised past and more liberated present; offering female readers and cooks “beguiling possibilities … for re-enactment” (Duruz 57). Lawson and Dahl’s use of narrative strategies not only makes their texts more engaging to read, but reflects the social and cultural relevance of cookbooks, and how they can embody and reshape our engrained values and ideas. In their own way, they seek to affirm the female domestic experience and position it as something celebratory rather than oppressive. Perhaps no one puts it so aptly as Lawson: “I know the idea of being in the kitchen faffing around with bottles and jars and hot pans might seem confining to many, but honestly, I have found it liberating. The sense of connectedness you get, with your kitchen, your home, your food, is the very opposite of constraint” (334). This seems an apt reflection of cookbooks’ narrative power and ability to explore fundamental social and cultural ideas; they engage us, inspire us and entertain us. References Bal, Mieke. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Bower, Anne. “Romanced by Cookbooks.” Gastronomica 4.2 (2004): 35–42. Dahl, Sophie. Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights. London: HarperCollins, 2009. Duruz, Jean. “Haunted Kitchens: Cooking and Remembering.” Gastronomica 4.1 (2004): 57–68. Fludernik, Monica. An Introduction to Narratology. New York: Routledge, 2009. Fludernik, Monica. “Histories of Narrative (II): From Structuralism to the Present.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Hoboken: Blackwell, 2005. Blackwell Reference Online. 4 Apr. 2013. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell UP, 1980. Gvion, Liora. “What’s Cooking in America? Cookbooks Narrate Ethnicity: 1850–1990.” Food, Culture, and Society 7.1 (2004): 53–76. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Hollows, Joanne. “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess: Postfeminism and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 179–202. Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” U of Toronto English Library, 1998. 21 Oct. 2010. ‹http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html›. Lanser, Susan. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. New York: Cornell UP, 1992. Lawson, Nigella. How to be a Domestic Goddess. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Leonardi, Susan. “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster á la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie.” Modern Language Association 104.3 (1989): 340–47. Lupton, Deborah. “Food and Emotion.” The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Berg, 2005. 317–24. Mintz, Sidney. “Sweetness and Meaning.” The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Berg, 2005. 110–22. Pasupathi, Monisha. “Silk from Sow’s Ears: Collaborative Construction of Everyday Selves in Everyday Stories.” Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative. Ed. Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich. Vol. 4. Washington, DC: APA, 2006. 129–50. Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative. Berlin: Mouton, 1982. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.

J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is appalled to learn that his lover is a victim of incest in Robert Towne and Roman Polanski’s definitive, yet subversive film Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). Similarly, Ethan Mars (Pascale Langdale), the hero of the electronic game Heavy Rain (David Cage, 2010), is equally devastated to find his child has been abducted. One a cinema classic of the detective genre, the other a sophisticated electronic game: both ground-breaking, both compelling, but delivered in contrasting media. So, what do Chinatown and Heavy Rain have in common from the writer’s point of view? Can the writer of games learn from the legacy of film storytelling yet find alternative rules for new media? This article attempts to answer these questions making reference to the two works above to illuminate the gap between games writing and traditional screenwriting scholarship.Western commercial cinema has evolved to place story centrally and Chinatown is an example of a story’s potential as film art and entertainment concurrently. Media convention derives from the lessons of previous relatable art forms such as pictorial art, literature and architecture in the case of film; board games and centuries of physical gaming in the case of games design. Therefore, the invention of new media such as online and electronic gaming relies, in part, on the rules of film. However, game play has reassessed screenwriting and its applicability to this new media rendering many of these rules redundant. If Marshall McLuhan’s adage “the medium is the message” is correct, then despite the reliance of one medium on the traditions of its predecessor, gaming is simply not cinema. This article considers writing for games as axiomatically unconventional and calls for radical reinventions of storytelling within the new media.In order to investigate games writing, I will first revisit some of the rules of cinematic construction as inherited from an original Aristotelian source (Cleary). These rules require: a single focussed protagonist driving the plot; a consistent story form with narrative drive or story engine; the writer to avoid the repeated dramatic beat and; a reassessment of thematic concerns for the new technology. We should also investigate game-centric terminology such as “immersion” and “agency” to see how electronic gaming as an essentially postmodern phenomenon reciprocates, yet contrasts to, its cinematic predecessor (Murray, Hamlet 98/126). Must the maker of games subscribe to the filmmaker’s toolbox when the field is so very different? In order to answer this question, I will consider some concepts unique to games technology, firstly, the enduring debate known as ludology versus narratology. Gaming rhetoric since the late 1990s has questioned the efficacy of the traditional film narrative when adapted to game play. Players are still divided between the narratologists’ view, which holds that story within games is inevitable and the ludologists’ opinion, which suggests that traditional narrative has no place within the spatially orientated freedom of game play. Originally espousing the benefits of ludology, Janet H Murray argues that the essential formalism of gaming separates it from narrative, which Aarseth describes as representing “'colonialist' intrusions” on game play (46). Mimetic aspects inherited from narrative principles should remain incidental rather than forming an overarching hegemony within the game (Murray, "Last Word"). In this way, the ludologists suggest that game development has been undermined by the persistence of the narrative debate and Murray describes game studies as a “multi-dimensional, open-ended puzzle” worth solving on its own terms (indeed, cinema of attractions compelled viewers for thirty years before narrative cinema became dominant in the early twentieth century.Gaming history has proved this argument overblown and Murray herself questions the validity of this spurious debate within game play. She now includes the disclaimer that, ironically, most ludologists are trained in narratology and thus debate a “phantom of their own creation” (Murray, "Last Word"). This implies a contemporary opposition to ludology’s original meaning and impacts upon screenwriting principles in game making. Two further key concepts, which divide the medium of game entirely from the art of cinema are “immersion” and “agency” (Murray, Hamlet 98/126). Murray likens immersion to the physical sensation of being “submerged in water” pointing out that players enjoy the psychologically immersive phenomenon of delving into an undiscovered reality (Murray, Hamlet 98). Although distinct from the passive experience of cinema viewing, this immersion is like the experience of leaving the ordinary world and diving into the special world as Christopher Vogler’s screenwriting theory suggests. The cinema audience is encouraged to immerse themselves in the new world of Gittes’s Chinatown from the comfort of their familiar one. Similarly, the light-hearted world of the summer home contrasts Heavy Rain’s decent into urban, neo-noir corruption. Contrary to its cinematic cousin, the immediacy and subjectivity of the new media experience is more tangible and controllable, which renders immersion in games more significant and brings us to the next gaming concept, agency.To describe agency, Murray uses the complex metaphor of participatory dance, with its predetermined structures, “social formulas” and limited opportunities to change the overall “plot” of the dance: “The slender story is designed to unfold in the same way no matter what individual audience members may do to join the fun” (Hamlet 126-27). In electronic gaming, time-honoured gaming traditions from chess and board games serve as worthy predecessors. In this way, sophisticated permutations of outcome based on the player’s choice create agency, which is “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray, Hamlet 126). Bearing this in mind, when narrative enters game play, a world of possibility opens up (Murray, Hamlet).So where do the old rules of cinema apply within gaming and where is the maker of games able to find alternatives based on their understanding of agency and immersion? McLuhan’s unconventional scholarship leads the way, by pointing out the alternativity of the newer media. I consider that the rules of cinematic construction are also often disregarded by the casual viewer/player, but of utmost importance to the professional screenwriter.Amongst these rules is the screenwriting convention of having a single protagonist. This is a being fuelled with desire and a clear, visually rendered, actively negotiated goal. This principle persists in cinema according to Aristotle’s precepts (Cleary). The protagonist is a single entity making decisions and taking actions, even if that entity is a collection of individuals acting as one (Dethridge). The exploits of this main character (facing an opposing force of antagonism) determine the path of the story and for that reason a clear, single-minded narrative line is echoed in a single story form (McKee). For example, the baffling depth of meaning in Chinatown still emanates from protagonist J.J. Gittes’s central determination: to solve the crime suggested by the Los Angeles water shortage. The audience’s ability to identify and empathise with Gittes is paramount when he discovers the awful perversion his love interest, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), has been subjected to. However, the world of Chinatown remains intriguing as a string of corruption is revealed though a detective plot fuelled by our hero’s steadfast need to know the truth. In this way, a single protagonist’s desire line creates a solid story form. Conversely, in computer games (and despite the insistence of Draconian screenwriting lecturers who insist on replicating cinematic rules) the effect of a multiple protagonist plot still allows for the essential immersion in an imaginative world. In Heavy Rain, for example, the search for clues through the eyes of several related characters including a hapless father, a hangdog, ageing detective and a hyper-athletic single mother still allows for immersion. The player/interactor’s actions still create agency even as they change avatars from scene to scene. The player also negotiates for mastery of their character’s actions in order to investigate their situation, facts and world. However, each time the player switches their character allegiance, they revert to square one of their potential identification with that character. Indeed, in Heavy Rain, the player keenly aware of the chilling effect generated by the father losing his child in a busy shopping mall, but then another avatar steps forward, then another and the player must learn about new and unfamiliar characters on a scene-by-scene basis. The accumulative identification with a hero like Chinatown’s Gittes, begins with an admiration for his streetwise charm, then strengthens through his unfolding disillusionment and is cemented with Polanski’s brilliant invention: the death of Evelyn Mulwray replete with its politico-sexual implications (Polanski). However, does this mean cinematic identification is superior to game play’s immersion and agency? McLuhan might argue it is not and that the question is meaningless given that the “message” of games is axiomatically different. Traditional screenwriting scholarship therefore falters in the new medium. Further, Heavy Rain’s multi-protagonist miasma conforms to a new breed of structure: the mosaic plot, which according to Murray mirrors the internet’s click and drag mentality. In this sense, a kaleidoscopic world opens in pockets of revelation before the player. This satisfies the interactor in a postmodernist sense: an essential equality of incoming information in random, nonlinear connections. Indeed electronic games of this nature are a triumph of postmodernism and of ludology’s influence on the narratologist’s perspective. Although a story form including clues and detection still drives the narrative, the mosaic realisation of character and situation (which in a film’s plot might seem meandering and nonsensical) is given life by the agency and immersion provided by gaming (Truby).Back in traditional screenwriting principles, there is still the need for a consistent and singular story form providing a constant narrative drive (McKee). As mentioned, this arises from the protagonist’s need. For example a revenge plot relies on the hero’s need for vengeance; a revelation plot like Chinatown hinges on detection. However, first time screenwriting students’ tendency to visualise a story based unconsciously on films they have previously seen (as a bricolage of character moments arranged loosely around a collection of received ideas) tends to undermine the potential effectiveness of their story form. This lack of singularity in filmic writing indicates a misunderstanding of story logic. This propensity in young screenwriters derives from a belief that if the rendered filmic experience means something to them, it will necessarily mean something to an audience. Not so: an abandoned story drive or replaced central character diminishes the audience’s enjoyment and even destroys suspension of disbelief. Consequently, the story becomes bland and confusing. On investigation, it appears the young screenwriter does not realise that they are playing out an idea in their head, which is essentially a bricolage in the postmodern sense. Although this might lead to some titillating visual displays it fails to engage the audience as the result of their participation in an emotional continuum (Hayward). In contradistinction to film, games thrive on such irregularities in story, assuming radically different effects. For example, in cinema, the emotional response of a mass audience is a major draw card: if the filmic story is an accumulation of cause and effect responses, which steadily drive the stakes up until resolution, then it is the emotional “cathexis” as by-product of conflict that the audience resonates with (Freud 75; Chekhov). Does this transfer to games? Do notions such as feeling and empathy actually figure in game play at all? Or is this simply an activity rewarding the interactor with agency in lieu of deeper, emotive experiences? This final question could be perceived as anti-gaming sentiment given that games such as Heavy Rain suggest just such an emotional by-product. Indeed, the mechanics of gaming have the ability to push the stakes even higher than their cinematic counterparts, creating more complex emotionality in the player. In this way, the intentional psychological malaise of Heavy Rain solicits even greater emotion from players due to their inherent act of will. Where cinema renders the audience emotional by virtue of its passivity, no such claim is possible in the game. For example, where in Chinatown, Gittes tortures his lover by repeatedly slapping her, in Heavy Rain the character must actively perform torture on themself in order to solve the mystery. Further, the potential for engagement is extended given there are fourteen possible endings to Heavy Rain. In this way, although the film viewer’s emotional response is tempered by guessing the singular outcome, the multiple endings of this electronic game prevent such prescience (films can have multiple endings, but game mechanics lend the new media more readily to this function, therefore, game books with dice-rolling options are a stronger precedent then cinema).Also effective for the construction of cinema is Aristotle’s warning that the repetition of story and expositional information without rising stakes or any qualification of meaning creates a sense of “dramatic stall” for the audience (Aristotle). This is known as a repeated dramatic story beat and it is the stumbling block of many first time screenwriters. The screenplay should be an inventive effort to overcome escalating obstacles and an accumulative cause and effect chain on the part of the protagonist (Truby). The modern screenwriter for film needs to recognise any repeated beat in their early drafting and delete or alter the repetitive material. What then are the implications of repeated dramatic beats for the game writer? The game form known as “first person shooter” (FPS) depends on the appearance of an eternally regenerating (indeed re-spawning) enemy. In an apocalyptic zombie shooter game, for example, many hordes of zombies die unequivocally without threatening the interactor’s intrigue. Presumably, the antagonists are not intended to pose intellectual opposition for the gamer. Rather, the putrefying zombies present themselves for the gamer’s pugilistic satisfaction, again and again. For the game, therefore, the repeated beat is a distinct advantage. They may come harder and faster, but they are still zombies to be dispatched and the stakes have not necessarily risen. Who cares if this is a succession of repeated beats? It is just good clean fun, right? This is where the ludologists hold sway: to impose principles such as non-repeated beats and rising stakes on the emergence of a world based on pure game play offers no consequence for the FPS game. Nevertheless, the problem is exacerbated in “role play games” (RPG) of which Heavy Rain is an example. Admittedly, the gamer derives effective horror as our hero negotiates his way amongst a sea of disassociated shoppers searching for his lost child. The very fact of gamer agency should abnegate the problem, but does not, it merely heightens the sense of existential hopelessness: turning face after face not finding the child he is searching for is a devastating experience exacerbated by active agency (as opposed to the accepting passivity of cinema spectatorship). The rising panic in the game and the repetition of the faces of impassive shoppers also supports the player’s ongoing disorientation. The iconic appearance of the gruff clown handing out balloons further heightens the panic the gamer/protagonist experiences here. These are examples of repeated beats, yet effective due to player agency. The shoppers only persist until the gamer masters the situation and is able to locate the missing child. Thus, it is the capacity of the gamer to circumvent such repetition, which actually propels the game forward. If the gamer is adept, they will overcome the situation easily; if they are inexperienced, the repetition will continue. So, why apply traditional narrative constrictions on game play within a narrative game?Another crucial aspect of story is theme, which in the young writer reflects a postmodernist fetishisation of plot over story. In fact, theme is one of the first concepts to be ignored when a film student puts pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) when designing their game. In this way, the themes students choose to ignore resurface despite their lack of conscious application of them. They write plot, and plot in abundance (imperative for the modern writer (Truby)), which the mosaic structure of games accommodates for seamlessly. However, plot is causative and postmodern interpretations do not necessarily require the work of art to “say” anything beyond the “message” trapped in the clichés of their chosen genre (McLuhan). In concentrating on plot, therefore, the young writer says what they are unaware they are saying. At its most innocuous level this creates cliché. At its worst, it erases history and celebrates an attitude of unexamined ignorance toward the written material (Hayward). In extreme cases, student writers of both media support fascism, celebrate female masochism, justify rape (with or without awareness), or create nihilistic and derivative art, which sensationalises violence to a degree not possible within film technology. This is ironic given that postmodernism is defined, in part, by a canny reaction to modernist generation of meaning and cynicism toward the technology of violence. In all this postmodernism, that illusive chestnut known as “originality” (a questionable imperative still haunting the conventional screenplay despite the postmodernist declamation that there is no such thing) should also be considered. Although the game writer can learn from the lessons of the screenwriter, the problems of game structure and expression are unique to the new medium and therefore alternative to film. Adhering to traditional understandings of screenwriting in games is counterproductive to the development of the form and demands new assessment. If gaming students are liberated from narratologist impositions of cinematic story structures, will this result in better or more thoughtful games? Further to the ludologists’ original protestation against the ““colonialist” intrusions” of narrative on game play, film writing must recede where appropriate (Aarseth). Then again, if a ludologist approach to game creation renders the student writer free of filmic dogma, why do they impose the same stories repetitively? What gain comes from ignoring the Aristotelian traditions of storytelling–especially as derived from screen culture? I suggest that storytelling, to echo McLuhan’s statement, must necessarily change with the new medium: the differences are illuminating. The younger, nonlinear form embodies the player as protagonist and therefore should not need to impose the single protagonist regime from film. Story engine has been replaced by player agency and game mechanics, which also allows for inventive usage of the repeated beat. Indeed, postmodern and ludological concerns embedded within mosaic plots almost entirely replace the need for any consistency of story form while still subverting the expectations of modernism? Genre rules are partly reinvented by the form and therefore genre conventions in gaming are still in their infancy. Indeed, the very amorality of nihilistic game designers opens a space for burgeoning post-postmodernist concerns regarding ethics and faith within art. In any case, the game designer may choose the lessons of film writing’s modernist legacy if story is to be effective within the new medium. However, as meaning derives from traditional form, it might be wiser to allow the new medium its own reinvention of writing rules. Given Heavy Rain’s considerable contribution to detective genre in game play by virtue of its applying story within new media, I anticipate further developments that might build on Chinatown’s legacy in the future of gaming, but on the game play’s own terms.ReferencesAarseth, Espen. Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. Aristotle. Poetics. Australia: Penguin Classics, 1997.Chekhov, Michael. Lessons for the Professional Actor. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1985.Chinatown. Roman Polanski. Paramount Golden Classics, 2011.Cleary, Stephen. “'What Would Aristotle Do?' Ancient Wisdom for Modern Screenwriters.” Stephen Cleary Lecture Series, 1 May 2011. Melbourne, Vic.: Victorian College of the Arts.Dethridge, Lisa. Writing Your Screenplay. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2003.Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. 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