Theatre and storytelling

2021 ◽  
pp. 171-218
Author(s):  
Steven Brown

The narrative arts deal with the presentation of stories via a variety of narrative processes and presentation media. Fictionality is a unique feature of the arts, one that distinguishes the narrative arts from the storytelling of everyday conversation. The plots of stories are grounded in the experientiality of the story’s protagonist in a storyworld, most especially his/her problem-solving dynamics. Literature describes these behaviours in the third person using narration, whereas theatre re-creates these actions in an embodied manner by having actors portray the characters in performance. While role playing is a central part of the presentation of the self in everyday social interactions, actors portray characters who they themselves are not, a re-creative process of impersonation and pretence that comprises the most art-specific feature of the narrative arts.

2014 ◽  
Vol 107 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-446
Author(s):  
Ayelet Even-Ezra

In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul writes: It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such a one I will boast; yet of myself I will not boast, except in my infirmities. (2 Cor 12:1–5 nkiv) This brief and enigmatic account is caught between multiple dialectics of power and infirmity, pride and humility, unveiling and secrecy. At this point in his letter Paul is turning to a new source of power in order to establish his authority against the crowd of boasting false apostles who populate the previous paragraphs. He wishes to divulge his intimate, occult knowledge of God, but at the same time keep his position as antihero that is prevalent throughout the epistle. These dialectics are enhanced by a sophisticated play of first and third person. The third person denotes the subject who experienced rapture fourteen years ago, while the first person denotes the narrator in the present. Only after several verses does the reader realize that these two are in fact the same person. This alienation allows Paul the intricate play of boasting, for “of such a one I will boast, yet of myself I will not boast.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Komenan Casimir

Todorov’s syntactic, verbal and semantic aspects of the literary text, onomastics and Mauron’s psychocriticism, underlie this paper whose goal is to show that Chinua Achebe’s “Chike’s School Days” is an autrebiography verbalizing Achebe’s early schooling. As two major thematic Ariadne’s threads, the religious, familial and onomastic connections between Chike and Achebe, as well as Achebe’s untimely love for Shakespeare’s language, have been used to compose an autrebiograhical short story, a shortened fiction about the self, which is narrated not in the first-person (“I”), but rather in the third-person (“He”). It is with such a detachment device that Achebe writes about Chike, a character who is nobody else but his double.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-270
Author(s):  
Tuija Virtanen

Abstract This paper explores linguistic egocentrism in English through the lens of virtual performatives, i.e. self-referential stand-alone predications in the third person singular present tense through which users perform virtual action or emotion. The focus is on microblogging for apparently recreational purposes, where visibility, rather than reciprocity, must be a primary concern. Findings show that the common or garden virtual performative consistently relying on an externalized self occasionally turns into a variant where the self is subsequently reassumed, and then again possibly re-externalized within the same construction. The syntactic and discursive systematicity manifest in these constructions forbids treating them as erroneous. The paper discusses the benefits of this way of externalizing and optionally reassuming self, through fluctuation between third-person and first-person references, and touches upon metapragmatic awareness and logophoricity. In creating digital culture, virtual performatives point to users’ pragmatic adaptation of their public, social self to environments manifesting a high degree of context collapse.


Author(s):  
Matthias Hofer

Abstract. This was a study on the perceived enjoyment of different movie genres. In an online experiment, 176 students were randomly divided into two groups (n = 88) and asked to estimate how much they, their closest friends, and young people in general enjoyed either serious or light-hearted movies. These self–other differences in perceived enjoyment of serious or light-hearted movies were also assessed as a function of differing individual motivations underlying entertainment media consumption. The results showed a clear third-person effect for light-hearted movies and a first-person effect for serious movies. The third-person effect for light-hearted movies was moderated by level of hedonic motivation, as participants with high hedonic motivations did not perceive their own and others’ enjoyment of light-hearted films differently. However, eudaimonic motivations did not moderate first-person perceptions in the case of serious films.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyang Yu

The human brain and the human language are precisely constructed together by evolution/genes, so that in the objective world, a human brain can tell a story to another brain in human language which describes an imagined multiplayer game; in this story, one player of the game represents the human brain itself. It’s possible that the human kind doesn’t really have a subjective world (doesn’t really have conscious experience). An individual has no control even over her choices. Her choices are controlled by the neural substrate. The neural substrate is controlled by the physical laws. So, her choices are controlled by the physical laws. So, she is powerless to do anything other than what she actually does. This is the view of fatalism. Specifically, this is the view of a totally global fatalism, where people have no control even over their choices, from the third-person perspective. And I just argued for fatalism by appeal to causal determinism. Psychologically, a third-person perspective and a new, dedicated personality state are required to bear the totally global fatalism, to avoid severe cognitive dissonance with our default first-person perspective and our original personality state.


Philologus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 164 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Klaas Bentein

AbstractMuch attention has been paid to ‘deictic shifts’ in Ancient Greek literary texts. In this article I show that similar phenomena can be found in documentary texts. Contracts in particular display unexpected shifts from the first to the third person or vice versa. Rather than constituting a narrative technique, I argue that such shifts should be related to the existence of two major types of stylization, called the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ style. In objectively styled contracts, subjective intrusions may occur as a result of the scribe temporarily assuming himself to be the deictic center, whereas in subjectively styled contracts objective intrusions may occur as a result of the contracting parties dictating to the scribe, and the scribe not modifying the personal references. There are also a couple of texts which display more extensive deictic alter­nations, which suggests that generic confusion between the two major types of stylization may have played a role.


1975 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-242
Author(s):  
Jay G. Williams

“Might it not be possible, just at this moment when the fortunes of the church seem to be at low ebb, that we may be entering a new age, an age in which the Holy Spirit will become far more central to the faith, an age when the third person of the Trinity will reveal to us more fully who she is?”


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