Divine Analgesia

Author(s):  
L. Stephanie Cobb

Chapter Three surveys narrative techniques for rejecting pain as a locus of meaning in martyrdom. A number of texts explicitly deny the experience of pain altogether by employing the language of analgesia or anesthesia in their descriptions of the martyrs’ experiences of torture; other texts employ typical terms for pain but negate them; some narratives differentiate the experiences of the martyrs’ bodies from those of their spirits. Often texts attribute Christian impassibility to the presence and support of the divine. Finally, many texts thwart the audience’s visual imagination by preparing listeners to envision a grotesque murder, but then unexpectedly describing, instead, a beautiful body unharmed by torture. In these stories, torture does not harm Christians but, rather, it heals them.

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-237
Author(s):  
Dana E. Katz (book author) ◽  
Christopher F. Black (review author)

Author(s):  
Christopher Rosenmeier

Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Despite being an integral part of the Chinese literary scene, their bestselling fiction has, however, been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This book is the first extensive study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other Western language and it re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. Their romantic novels and short stories were often set abroad and featured a wide range of stereotypes, from pirates, spies and patriotic soldiers to ghosts, spirits and exotic women who confounded the mostly cosmopolitan male protagonists. Christopher Rosenmeier’s detailed analysis of these popular novels and short stories shows that such romances broke new ground by incorporating and adapting narrative techniques and themes from the Shanghai modernist writers of the 1930s, notably Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying. The study thereby contests the view that modernism had little lasting impact on Chinese fiction, and it demonstrates that the popular literature of the 1940s was more innovative than usually imagined, with authors, such as those studied here, successfully crossing the boundaries between the popular and the elite, as well as between romanticism and modernism, in their bestselling works.


Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Edial Rusli

AbstrakImaji visual fotografi merupakan media rekam visual yang objektif dan representatifkebenarannya dalam merekam suatu realitas. Revolusi teknologi menyebabkan perubahandari teknologi fotografi analog sebagai salah satu media yang menyatakan kebenaran ataubukti dan sebagai media yang representatif kebenarannya ke teknologi digital yang dapatmemungkinkan untuk merekayasa gambar digital melalui perangkat lunak. Teknologi digitaltelah menjadikan kebenaran dalam sebuah foto tidak lagi absolut. Akhirnya fotografi sebagaialat perekam imaji yang representatif kebenarannya semakin diragukan. Karena semakin sulituntuk membedakan foto asli atau palsu, bahkan sebuah foto asli bisa saja dikatakan sebagaihasil manipulasi. Penciptaan imajinasi visual fotografi ini dihasilkan dari suatu olah daya pikirmanusia. Dalam proses tersebut dibutuhkan suatu kreativitas dari penggabungan imaji-imajisebelumnya atau sekarang ini untuk diimajinasikan. Pemaknaan akan bergeser dari imaji visualfotografi menjadi imaji visual fotografi yang baru. Proses artistik imajinasi visual ini diciptakandengan didasarkan pada artistik yang berdasarkan imajinasi, artistik berdasarkan imajinasi danartistik didasarkan pada kombinasi antara kenyataan dan imajinasi. Penciptaan Imajinasi visualfotografi merupakan daya untuk mengonstruksi ataau menggabungkan kembali dari berbagaiimaji-imaji atau foto- secara imajinatif dan kreatif dengan persepsi yang menyertainya untukmenjadi imaji baru yang utuh, logis, dan mungkin terjadi dengan menggunakan teknik danefek fotografi. Proses mengonstruksi membutuhkan suatu kemampuan berimajinasi untukmenggabungkan dan menyatukannya untuk menjadi satu kesatuan (unity) yang utuh dalam satupermukaan gambar/imaji secara ekspresif dan imajinatif melalui proses estetis yang kreatifberdasarkan ciri personal penciptanya. Dengan demikian, hasil dari proses konstruksi tersebutsudah tidak tampak lagi imaji sebelumnya dan pemaknaannya sudah bergeser menjadi karyaimaji dengan pemaknaan baru.AbstractImage to Photography Visual Imagination. Visual image of photography is a visual recordingmedia which is objective and representative in revealing the truth when recording a reality. Thetechnology revolution led to the change in photography, from analog photographic technologyas one of the media for promoting truth or evidence and as media representing truth to thedigital technology which allow people to manipulate digital images through software. Digitaltechnology has made the truth in a photograph is no longer absolute. In the end, photographyas an images recording tool representing truth is doubted. It is getting harder and moredifficult to distinguish the original or fake photo, even an original photo can be said as aresult of manipulation.The creation of visual imagination photography is produced by thepower of human thought. The process requires a creativity of merging the previous or recentimages to imagine. The meanings will be shifted from visual image photography into a newvisual image photography. Visual imagination of the artistic process is created on the basisof artistic imagination, artistic imagination and artistic are based on a combination of realityand imagination.The creation of visual photography imagination is a power to construct orrecombine from multiple images or pictures imaginatively and creatively with the perceptionto be a whole new image, logical, and may occur with the use of techniques and photographiceffects. The process of constructing requires an ability of imagining to combine and unitethem into a single unit as a unity which is intact on s single surface of the picture/image,expressively and imaginatively through an aesthetic creative process based on the personalcharacteristics of the creator. By doing so, the construction process will no longer visible onthe former image and the meaning will shift into an image with a new meaning.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 478
Author(s):  
Ana Ashraf

Sacred Games (2018–2019), based on Vikram Chandra’s novel of the same title, is India’s first Netflix crime thriller series. This series shows how the lives of a Sikh policeman, Sartaj Singh, and a powerful gangster, Ganesh Eknath Gaitonde, weave together in a mission to save Mumbai from a nuclear attack. The series immediately received critical acclaim and viewers’ appreciation, but the way the series represents the (mis)use of metanarratives of religious and political ideologies, as they come to influence Gaitonde’s life, needs further perusal. For this purpose, this article investigates how Gaitonde’s life, and its abrupt end, are shaped and challenged by the larger ideological and religious metanarratives of his milieu. At the same time, this article examines Gaitonde’s ability to gain control over his own narrative despite the overwhelming presence of these metanarratives. More specifically, Gaitonde’s transgressive will and his desire to tell his story are brought under scrutiny. Along with the analysis of Gaitonde’s character, this article also examines how the use of various cinematic and narrative techniques heightens self-reflexivity and metafictionality in Sacred Games and emphasizes the role of mini-narratives as unique, singular, and contingent, in contrast to the generic, universal, and permanent tones of metanarratives.


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