Networked Collective Symbolic Capital Revisited

This study attempts to illustrate identity performance via the display of symbolic capital by Taiwanese gay men through photo-sharing experiences on Instagram. For Taiwanese gay men, photo-sharing experiences on Instagram have become a significant venue where they can interact with selected publics through performing various personae. This study has classified roles with various forms of cultural capital as well as clarifying how distinction is meticulously maneuvered among collapsed contexts. Through ethnographic interviews with 17 gay male college students from Taiwan and textual analysis of their correspondence though texting on Instagram, this study first contextualizes how the interactional processes engaged in on Instagram help constitute a collective identity pertaining to Taiwanese gay men on Instagram. The photo-sharing experiences are examined as an identity-making process involving the display of various symbolic capital, illuminating the calculated performance of taste and the collective past oppressed by the heteronormative society. The conclusion offers an alternative sociological intervention that goes beyond the notion of digital narcissism to help understand how the cultural capital on the presumption of photo-sharing experiences is invested.

Exhuming the Narrator in 'The Buried Giant': Genre and Intertextual Inference in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

<p>This thesis takes the critical response generated by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his most recent novel, as an invitation to re-examine the overall literary ‘experiment’ of his body of work. Ishiguro’s novels, regardless of their genre, message, or cultural moment, create experiences in which the reader engages with each narrator as if they were a human being. His attention to stylistic and formal detail foregrounds our awareness of his art in each text, and much scholarship focuses on overarching discussions of memory, identity, and history; however, this all relies upon the empathy that the texts generate between the character-narrator and the reader. The commitment to mimesis over the synthetic or thematic dimensions of the text, to draw on the theoretical model of character presented by James Phelan, often remains covert throughout each novel, but character mimesis nevertheless acts as both an accessible entry point to the novels, and a consistent touchstone throughout and across the texts. Upon the publication of The Buried Giant, Ishiguro was met with criticism and dissatisfaction from numerous reviewers and scholars, despite general public appreciation of the novel. At the heart of this dissatisfaction lies a sense that Ishiguro’s foray into fantasy lacks the affective power of his iconic artlessness. Specifically, The Buried Giant appears to lack a central, consistent, human voice to hold together the synthetic and thematic work that the text performs. This thesis presents an argument that finds within The Buried Giant the presence of a first-person voice that, rather than diverging from each of Ishiguro’s previous narrators, takes his experimentation with the first-person voice to a new extreme. This reading allows me to locate The Buried Giant more squarely back in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, by identifying a covert but vital thread that exists beneath the shifts in genre, thematic and synthetic choices, and context of the novel. I explore the establishment of character mimesis across Ishiguro’s body of work, how this feeds into both the dissatisfaction with The Buried Giant and my reconciliation of the novel to his earlier works, and finally how The Buried Giant and its shift to both a covert narrative voice and the genre of fantasy provides an opportunity to re-examine Ishiguro’s use of non-mimetic structures and generic conventions in his first six novels around the central, mimetic narrator. As suggested, this approach draws significantly on the theory of character presented by James Phelan, which allows for comprehensive consideration of diverse textual functions that occur both throughout a given text and across several texts of widely varying genres and perspectives. I touch on notions of unreliability, memory and subjective history, trauma, and identity performance, each of which are central to many pieces of scholarship on Ishiguro’s novels; however, the aim of this project is to swiftly push beyond readings that prioritise synthetic and thematic dimensions of the novels to reach the heart of how the voices who capture their own stories completely entrance Ishiguro’s readership.</p>

Exhuming the Narrator in 'The Buried Giant': Genre and Intertextual Inference in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

<p>This thesis takes the critical response generated by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his most recent novel, as an invitation to re-examine the overall literary ‘experiment’ of his body of work. Ishiguro’s novels, regardless of their genre, message, or cultural moment, create experiences in which the reader engages with each narrator as if they were a human being. His attention to stylistic and formal detail foregrounds our awareness of his art in each text, and much scholarship focuses on overarching discussions of memory, identity, and history; however, this all relies upon the empathy that the texts generate between the character-narrator and the reader. The commitment to mimesis over the synthetic or thematic dimensions of the text, to draw on the theoretical model of character presented by James Phelan, often remains covert throughout each novel, but character mimesis nevertheless acts as both an accessible entry point to the novels, and a consistent touchstone throughout and across the texts. Upon the publication of The Buried Giant, Ishiguro was met with criticism and dissatisfaction from numerous reviewers and scholars, despite general public appreciation of the novel. At the heart of this dissatisfaction lies a sense that Ishiguro’s foray into fantasy lacks the affective power of his iconic artlessness. Specifically, The Buried Giant appears to lack a central, consistent, human voice to hold together the synthetic and thematic work that the text performs. This thesis presents an argument that finds within The Buried Giant the presence of a first-person voice that, rather than diverging from each of Ishiguro’s previous narrators, takes his experimentation with the first-person voice to a new extreme. This reading allows me to locate The Buried Giant more squarely back in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, by identifying a covert but vital thread that exists beneath the shifts in genre, thematic and synthetic choices, and context of the novel. I explore the establishment of character mimesis across Ishiguro’s body of work, how this feeds into both the dissatisfaction with The Buried Giant and my reconciliation of the novel to his earlier works, and finally how The Buried Giant and its shift to both a covert narrative voice and the genre of fantasy provides an opportunity to re-examine Ishiguro’s use of non-mimetic structures and generic conventions in his first six novels around the central, mimetic narrator. As suggested, this approach draws significantly on the theory of character presented by James Phelan, which allows for comprehensive consideration of diverse textual functions that occur both throughout a given text and across several texts of widely varying genres and perspectives. I touch on notions of unreliability, memory and subjective history, trauma, and identity performance, each of which are central to many pieces of scholarship on Ishiguro’s novels; however, the aim of this project is to swiftly push beyond readings that prioritise synthetic and thematic dimensions of the novels to reach the heart of how the voices who capture their own stories completely entrance Ishiguro’s readership.</p>

Self-Conscious Storytelling and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early Ishiguro

<p><b>This thesis engages with Kazuo Ishiguro’s three novels, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled, as united by a common theme: the crisis of masculinity. These texts, written in succession from 1986 to 1995, are Ishiguro’s first uses of male character narrators. This thesis takes this fact as consequential for the meaning of the works, as well as for the idea of their interconnection.</b></p> <p>I link the obscured tragedies often identified in Ishiguro’s narrators to the conflicting obligations they feel between their sense of themselves as men and their suppressed emotional lives. This imbalance between the private and public life is presented as a key conflict in Ishiguro’s work, one accessed through identifying crises of masculinity. A crisis for Ishiguro is triggered by the realisation of the impossibility of balancing these two lives. Discussing how professional identity is tied to masculine identity, I analyse the way unreliability emerges from the overprioritising of work. I suggest that in this way identity performance is key to unreliable narration and that these narratives operate as a reorganisation of the narrators’ biographies along the logic of crisis.</p> <p>However, rather than suggesting that Ishiguro’s true interest is on masculine crises, this thesis makes the case that by looking at this series of novels as different explorations of crisis, something new is revealed about the more documented interests of Ishiguro’s experiment—memory, unreliability, history, and storytelling. Through this claim I seek to demonstrate how an overlooked aspect of Ishiguro’s early work offers a fresh approach to his overall project. I combine established narratological analysis of the novels with this alternative perspective on the early works to analyse the way the author expands the bounds of readerly awareness, as well as the capabilities of narrators. In doing so I draw a causal chain between masculine crises, self-conscious narration, and violations of realism.</p> <p>Each chapter explores the related ways Ishiguro carries his interest in crises of masculinity forward. The first, on An Artist of the Floating World, analyses the novel’s sense of being self-consciously organised from within, expanding on the connection between a crisis of masculinity and authorial dispositions. The following chapter on The Remains of the Day takes up narratological theories on the implied author, the narratee, mimesis, and unreliability to examine the extent to which narrators can be aware of their unreliable narration’s effects. The final chapter reads The Unconsoled as Ishiguro’s “masterwork” on the crisis of masculinity. The chapter explores the ways the text acts as a heightening of the prior crisis novels to get a better grasp of this unusual work.</p>

Self-Conscious Storytelling and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early Ishiguro

<p><b>This thesis engages with Kazuo Ishiguro’s three novels, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled, as united by a common theme: the crisis of masculinity. These texts, written in succession from 1986 to 1995, are Ishiguro’s first uses of male character narrators. This thesis takes this fact as consequential for the meaning of the works, as well as for the idea of their interconnection.</b></p> <p>I link the obscured tragedies often identified in Ishiguro’s narrators to the conflicting obligations they feel between their sense of themselves as men and their suppressed emotional lives. This imbalance between the private and public life is presented as a key conflict in Ishiguro’s work, one accessed through identifying crises of masculinity. A crisis for Ishiguro is triggered by the realisation of the impossibility of balancing these two lives. Discussing how professional identity is tied to masculine identity, I analyse the way unreliability emerges from the overprioritising of work. I suggest that in this way identity performance is key to unreliable narration and that these narratives operate as a reorganisation of the narrators’ biographies along the logic of crisis.</p> <p>However, rather than suggesting that Ishiguro’s true interest is on masculine crises, this thesis makes the case that by looking at this series of novels as different explorations of crisis, something new is revealed about the more documented interests of Ishiguro’s experiment—memory, unreliability, history, and storytelling. Through this claim I seek to demonstrate how an overlooked aspect of Ishiguro’s early work offers a fresh approach to his overall project. I combine established narratological analysis of the novels with this alternative perspective on the early works to analyse the way the author expands the bounds of readerly awareness, as well as the capabilities of narrators. In doing so I draw a causal chain between masculine crises, self-conscious narration, and violations of realism.</p> <p>Each chapter explores the related ways Ishiguro carries his interest in crises of masculinity forward. The first, on An Artist of the Floating World, analyses the novel’s sense of being self-consciously organised from within, expanding on the connection between a crisis of masculinity and authorial dispositions. The following chapter on The Remains of the Day takes up narratological theories on the implied author, the narratee, mimesis, and unreliability to examine the extent to which narrators can be aware of their unreliable narration’s effects. The final chapter reads The Unconsoled as Ishiguro’s “masterwork” on the crisis of masculinity. The chapter explores the ways the text acts as a heightening of the prior crisis novels to get a better grasp of this unusual work.</p>

Situatedness and Performativity

Translating and interpreting are unpredictable social practices framed by historical, ethical, and political constraints. Using the concepts of situatedness and performativity as anchors, the authors examine translation practices from the perspectives of identity performance, cultural mediation, historical reframing, and professional training. As such, the chapters focus on enacted events and conditioned practices by exploring production processes and the social, historical, and cultural conditions of the field. These outlooks shift our attention to social and institutionalized acts of translating and interpreting, considering also the materiality of bodies, artefacts, and technologies involved in these scenes.

HYPE SOURCE: G Fuel’s Contemporary Gamer Persona and its Navigation of Prestige and Diversity

G Fuel, an energy drink marketed towards gamers, performs a ‘contemporary’ gamer persona to interact with its audience, drawing upon an array of gaming influencers to appeal to fans of these figures. Specifically, this contemporary gamer persona builds upon the ‘geeky’ male gamer identity that has been constructed by marketers and adopted by players, utilising elements of esport such as skilfulness and focus. However, this persona also reimagines the gamer identity in alternative ways, such as gaming as an athletic activity – one that requires much mental and physical energy—and as an activity that connects players to others, and is exciting and glamourous, evocative of the lifestyles of gaming influencers. Thus, the contemporary gamer persona signals that there has been a shift in the popular discourses surrounding the ‘gamer’ identity in specific gaming micro-publics. The energy drink company G-Fuel is aware of this shift and strengthens this persona by forming partnerships with gamer microcelebrities and influencers. In this article, we find that in G Fuel’s construction and maintenance of the contemporary gamer persona, they seek to appeal to the wider gaming audience, but must constantly negotiate a balance between popular but controversial influencers and a commitment to diversity learner personas playful identity performance game-based learning game-making live action roleplay

A chronotopic approach to identity performance in musical numbers: a choreo-musical case study of ‘Rewrite the Stars’ and ‘This Is Me’

Musical numbers, as viral modes of entertainment, influential forms of visual culture and catalysts of popular discourse are dense with multivariate aesthetic performers, and are interlaced to punctuate the melodramatic narrative texture in advancement of the plot and characterization in musical films. Performing identity through dancing bodies has been the subject of several film, music, culture, performance and communication research endeavours yet has rarely been explored from multimodal discourse analysis perspectives. To examine the ‘resilient identities’ underlying performances, the article adopts an eclectic approach informed by the Bakhtinian chronotope with regard to two numbers drawn from a recent American musical film in order to pinpoint: (a) the full repertoire of multimodal resources of narrative agency and identity performance; (b) the emotional experiences evoked by the musical numbers; and (c) the social practices that constitute, maintain and resist social realities and identities. The unconventional approach to the analysis of the musical numbers is what makes the current research project stand out among interdisciplinary studies of musical discourse.