narrative strategies
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Author(s):  
Argha Kumar Banerjee

Abstract In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the old, widowed charwoman is plagued by ‘unbearable’ thoughts of her deceased grandson Lennie: ‘Why did he have to suffer so?’ Lennie’s unfortunate death in the story is not a solitary instance of tragic portrayal of working-class childhood in Mansfield’s short fiction. In several of her tales she empathetically explores the marginalized existence of such children, occasionally juxtaposing their deplorable existence with their elite counterparts’. From social exclusion, child labour, parental rejection, infant and child mortality on the one hand to physical and verbal abuse, bullying in the school and appalling living conditions on the other; Mansfield's exploration of the working-class childhood in her short fiction is not only psychologically complex but sociologically significant. Focusing on the relevant short stories in her oeuvre, this brief analysis intends to closely examine such depictions of marginalized childhood experiences, particularly in light of the oppressive societal conditions that validate their repressive alienation and sufferings. Tracing various biographical circumstances that may have fostered Mansfield’s deep empathy with the children’s’ predicament, this analysis also draws attention to her subtle oblique narrative strategies that effectively represent the plight of working-class children in a convincing and an ingeniously nuanced manner.


Author(s):  
Justyna Weronika Kasza

AbstractThis chapter explores the shared characteristics, both in terms of thematic concerns and narrative structures and strategies, of autofiction and the distinct Japanese form of the I-novel, shishōsetsu. Focusing on the works of three contemporary Japanese writers, Kanai Mieko, Sagisawa Megumu, and Mizumura Minae, it examines the narrative strategies applied by female authors to redefine the self. The chapter focuses on the traits shared by shishōsetsu and autofiction: the ambiguity of first-person narratives such as the semantics of “I” within the text; the interdependence of author, narrator, and protagonist; the practices of fictionalizing the self; and the question of authorship. Exploring shishōsetsu as an autofictional form also expands the scope of existing theoretical discussions on the autofictional, which rarely take Japanese literature into consideration.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 173-198
Author(s):  
Ágnes Erőss ◽  
Katalin Kovály ◽  
Patrik Tátrai

Multiethnic borderlands, like Transcarpathia in Western Ukraine, are characterized by ethnic-linguistic-confessional complexity where ethnic boundary-making and ethnic categorization are constructed and rooted in politics. The present study aims to analyze how the mechanisms of ethnic categorization and boundary-making play out on a local level. Based on data analysis and fieldwork conducted in Hudya/Gődényháza in Transcarpathia, a village with ethnically, linguistically, and denominationally diverse population, we describe how “ethnicity” is getting blurred and reconstructed in the narrative strategies of residents. We examine the characteristics of the various classification systems (external classification, self-reporting) and their relation to each other. It is found that the ethnic, linguistic, and denominational affiliations in the village (and its wider region) are often divergent, which is reflected in the significant discrepancy between the data gathered in various ethnic classification systems. We argue that denomination is the prime factor of both self-identification and external classification, obscuring the boundaries between religious and standard ethnic terms. We further point to the formation of new boundaries between autochthonous and allochthonous populations. Although this cleavage emerged a few decades ago and has been transgressed by dozens of marriages among autochthonous and newcomers, it can easily get ethnicized, thus it adds an extra layer to the existing distinctions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Browarczyk

Life writings had time and again been used as source material for historical research both in the West and the various literary cultures of South Asia. Considering the absence and a deliberate, socially conditioned erasure of Dalit history from the mainstream narratives of Indian historiography, some scholars have introduced the notion of viewing Dalit life writings as exercises in history writing. This article explores several Dalit autobiographies as instances of engagement with the process of constructing history of Dalit communities in India. Starting from this premise, it undertakes a preliminary analysis of various narrative strategies employed in Hindi autobiographies by Dalit authors in the hope of revealing the nature of their engagements with India’s past and present. The study presented in this paper is based on four relevant examples of prose in Hindi—by Kausalya Baisantri, Sushila Takbhaure, Omprakash Valmiki, and Sheoraj Singh Bechain.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Roberta Novielli

International cinema of every era has told of the relationship between men, women and food. In many cases it is presented as a common thread capable of binding every life impulse: sex, spirituality, greed, even death. In the cases of Italy and Japan, there are two directors in particular for whom the theme recurs with greater incisiveness: Marco Ferreri and Itami Jūzo, and especially in their works La Grande Abbuffata and Tanpopo. Both movies also represent a critique of the consumer society and the general decay of civil entourage. The characters thus contribute to representing a sort of mythology of the human being, each distinct in a grotesque, surreal and in many cases parodic way while they use food to translate their impulses. This essay aims to highlight the similarities between the main narrative strategies used by the two directors.


Author(s):  
Михаил Бойцов

The author attempts to find out under what circumstances Vasilii Tatishchev could have come to his assertion that Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa had sent an architect to Andrei Bogoliubskii, prince of Vladimir. Despite the wide popularity of this Tatishchev's argument among today's historians of architecture, it has never become the subject of a special study. Meanwhile, this case allows a deep look into the specific research methods of a historian in the first half of the eighteenth century, as well as into his narrative strategies and value orientations.


Author(s):  
Giacomo Ranzani

The article scrutinises Cae­sar’s De bello Gallico narrative through offering an exhaustive analysis of one of the most relevant narrative strategies the Cae­sarian storytelling relies on: the artful representation of Cae­sar’s intervention in battle. The paper firstly illustrates how the accounts of Cae­sar’s activities during the combat are always depicted, across the seven books, as the turning point of a difficult situation for the Romans. Moreover, the article clarifies that these scenes share not only the exceptional results achieved by the commander, but also significant similarities on the diegetic, stylistic and rhetorical level. On this basis, the article argues that such analogies are part of a narrative strategy operating whenever the text describes Cae­sar’s action in a combat. A stylistic and rhetorical investigation on four exemplary cases is undertaken (Gall. 2.15-28, 3.14-15, 6.8 and 7.87); these passages are representative of the De bello Gallico general trend in depicting the author’s efforts during a struggle. The enquiry reveals that the Latin text always presents a comparable sequence of events preceding and following the account of Cae­sar’s accomplishments in battle and that similar lexicon and rhetorical figures are employed to support Cae­sar’s self-presentation as infallible commander.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 68-90
Author(s):  
Vladislav V. Kirichenko

Modern narratological researches are quite well developed and has long gone beyond the purely philological field. One of the applications of narratology is the study of computer games, the most relevant new medium. This paper is devoted to the issue of unusual narrative strategies used in games on the example of Final Fantasy XIII-2. The analysis is conducted via the possible-worlds method, which is currently in demand in modern humanities, but it is less known in Russia. The aim of the research is to determine the function of possible worlds existing in Final Fantasy XIII-2 for a better understanding of the game design. In the course of the work, the author examines the internal structure of the game world with the help of the theory of possible worlds, analyzes the narrative strategy, and makes a game scheme of possible worlds with accessibility links which let to see the deep internal structure of the narrative game world. In conclusion, it is clear that Final Fantasy XIII-2 contains a non-trivial narrative structure with multiple branches that is smoothed out by the gameplay and cinematic experience of the player, although such a composition of possible worlds represents a complex scheme of the game's macrocosm which demands a close attention to the narrative. The article is intended for various humanitarian specialists interested in the study of computer games.


Author(s):  
M. Zaoborna

Based on literary studies, the article highlights the text of Ivan Franko's novel "Lel’ and Polel’" from the perspective of motif as a linguistic text category. In this respect, the motive is defined as linked with the personality of the author (narrator) impulse to create the text, related to the psychological aspect of text-creation and actualized by means of certain lingual signals. Understanding the motive as a text-creating category is expressed against the background of the stages of text generation that structure the trajectory of research considerations: situation → actualization of meanings → motive → intention → text concept → semantic organization of text. At the same time, given the presumption of modern French studies on the implicit autobiography of the writer's novels, the conceptual core of the study turns out to be the thesis of the personal senses of the author (narrator) as the basis for the motive. Thus, the effective summarizing positions of the analysis are centered around the linguistic signals associated with the individual consciousness of the sense-creating activity of the writer. In this respect, the intertextual field of the novel is determined to be relevant for grasping the sense, the basis for deriving the motive for creating the text "Lel’ and Pole’l". Intertextual connections, on the one hand, emphasize and maintain the effect of polarity in the text of the novel, and on the other hand, actualize the state of mental dichotomy that the writer experienced throughout his life. On this basis, an implicit presuppositional assessment of life in general and of the man in particular as dual phenomena has been derived, which correlates with the sense-being problem of Franko's life. As a result, the proposed theoretical construct of the logic of understanding the motivation of the text in relation to the novel "Lel’ and Polel’" has been concretized with the conclusive position: the spiritual and mental world of the writer → ambivalent evaluative sense as a basis for the formation of motive → motive, realized in the image of twin brothers → the intensity of explanatory psychology → textual concept as a logos of human destiny. Therefore, the dichotomous structure of the textual world of the novel "Lel’ and Polel’" is realized as a consequence of emanating the nature of the author's motive for the meaningful organization of the text. At the same time, the specificity of the figurative embodiment of the motive, which is consistent with the figurative-conceptual paradigm of text units formed on the basis of changing narrative strategies of the author, connected by means of associative cohesion, determines the centripetal nature of the text of this literary work.


2021 ◽  
pp. 367-392
Author(s):  
Walerij Igoriewicz Tiupa

The paper presents the concept of fundamentally new direction in the field of narratological studies – historical narratology. The author suggests turning to the research experience accumulated in Russian historical poetics by A. Veselovsky, P. Ricoeur’s and W. Schmid works. Narratology is seen as a theory of forming, storing and transmitting the event experience of the presence of the human self in the world. In particular, the work deals with diegetic picture of the world, with the historical dynamics of the most important types of narrative intrigue, and with the ethos of narrative. The most important characteristics of narrative are integrated into the concept of narrative strategy of a particular discourse. The emergence, spread and coexistence of narrative strategies in the diachronic dimension of the culture of storytelling as a form of human communication is at the core of research interest in historical narratology.


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