Cognitive Linguistic Models for Analyzing Characterization in a Parable: Luke 10:25–37 The Compassionate Samaritan

This study employs an array of cognitive linguistic (cl) models to reveal some of the details in how contemporary readers understand and interpret characters in a New Testament parable, the one often tagged “The Good Samaritan.” It also uses cognitive narrative analysis to explore how Luke constructs and develops the dialog partners in the pericope and the characters in the parable. The larger goal is to use cl to reveal some of the ways in which meanings are evoked, constructed, constrained and opened up. The parable is embedded in a larger narrative and immediate co-text, its characters selected from the stock of Lukan personae. The study explains how narrative spaces are built up; how characters serve as anchors and links to the larger narrative; and how viewpoint shifts proliferate as the story unfolds. The Lukan narrator makes Jesus’ viewpoint clear: “Do this, and you will live!” Readers are implicitly invited to identify with the compassionate character of the parable and emulate him. But the opening question and closing dialog shape the parable’s point, expanding its trajectory beyond mere moral rule revision or definitions of “neighbor” or even of “good” character. This parable allows readers to imagine with Luke a way of life lived in the light of the new epoch Jesus is announcing and inaugurating.

Semiotic modeling of the text-driven conceptual paradigm in language education

The conceptual paradigm of Thomas Sebeok’s modeling systems theory builds a theoretical foundation that modeling and knowing converge and coexist in the process of life evolution, and affords multiple narrative spaces for foreign language education, allowing us to address living and learning concurrently in the process of meaning modeling. The present paper argues that the concept of modeling has elevated us above the long-standing emphasis on the most valuable knowledge with the same (target) language standards and the same discourse power, and has captured the interest of language educators to establish a semiotic connection between knowledge content and knowledge representation through a representation model, the English textbook, which is generally considered as an important carrier of language knowledge. The study of the concept of English textbooks promotes sustainable regeneration of semiotic information on multi-level spatial interpretability so that learning can be regarded as exploration and growth of experience. Based on what these analyses reveal, the paper concludes by confirming that the textbook can effectively construct a diverse cultural signification order, considering the learner’s greater flexibility and social responsibility and providing the curriculum with a modeling nature for meaning negotiation among all parties involved.

Orientierung durch Katastrophen

Catastrophes that threaten life and health have characterized the history of humankind from the very beginning, as has the search for meaning. The descriptions of end-time catastrophes in apocalyptic literature are also concerned with their meaning for the present. In the New Testament, the book of Revelation belongs to this kind of literature. It does not provide a roadmap for the end of the world; the horror images of a subversive narrative aim at understanding the current reality. Using the example of the so-called »damage cycles« (Rev 6:1-17; 8:2-11:19; 15:1-16:21), it will be argued that these texts aim at a theological interpretation that consoles and admonishes its readers by creating narrative spaces for the transience of the seemingly unchangeable Roman rule.

The Shakespeare Brand in Contemporary “Fair Verona”

The idea that Shakespeare belongs to the world is certainly not new. From the beginning of his afterlife as a dramatist two issues have been consistently put forward by his contemporaries: 1) his art’s universality—for Ben Jonson, Shakespeare was the one “To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe”—and 2) his ability in appropriating foreign exotic environments which have notoriously characterised most of his plays. The value of such claims, which seem to be so present to us, helped to identify Shakespeare as an ‘universal’ icon whose work transcends time and space, gradually fostering, in and outside Britain, the so-called ‘Bardification of culture’, a phenomenon which persists, even more powerfully, nowadays. This study examines the different ways through which Verona has contributed in popularizing and elaborating the myth of Romeo and Juliet into a variety of formats suitable for the tourism market. By taking into account the so-called ‘Shakespace’ phenomenon, it focuses on what I have labelled as the ‘R&J-influenced spaces’ which account for a number of civic, cultural, and narrative spaces generated by and constructed upon the myth of the Veronese lovers.

Material windows and working stations. The discourse networks behind skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker

The article probes the intermedial structure of the skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The author indicates that intermedia research in game studies is often diachronically limited, focusing on material and semiotic interactions between “old” and “new” media. He proposes to open the field onto historically aware discoursive analysis and bases his method on Friedrich Kittler’s notion of “discourse networks”. This allows him to inspect the game in relation to technologically-founded networks that embody or bring into life specific modes of though and experience. During his analysis, he discovers that the interface design is involved with navigation devices in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance periods, Alberti’s windows as objects through with narrative spaces become visible, isometric modes of objective thinking, industrial and cybernetic notions of control, and the Xerox invention of the computer as a working environment.

Between the physical and the virtual: The present tense of virtual space

This article explores a way of thinking about virtual environments and how they might be used to create new spaces, not as an alternate reality, but as an integrated part of reality – regardless of this reality being physical and/or digital. Virtual environments can be seen as an extension of reality – the physical and the virtual sitting side by side with one, more often than not, bleeding into the other. The virtual is not separable from the physical and vice versa. This position will be formed by directly referring to traditions that stem from processes and ideas around materiality, poetics and philosophy rather than centring on technical or hardware specifics. At the centre of this exploration is an ongoing investigation into the role of memory and imagination in narrative spaces in immersive virtual environments, stemming from the author’s background in interactive Installation art and designing for virtual environments. The article’s subtitle refers to Robert Morris’s 1978 article, ‘The present tense of space’, which informs the article’s overall position.

Dangerous Liaisons: Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and the Previous Theatrical Adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s Novel

Quo vadis?, directed by Enrico Guazzoni in 1913, is still one of the most faithful film adaptations of the novel by Sienkiewicz. When the silent feature came to cinemas around the world, the story was already familiar to the majority of the audience, due to the popular success of the book and a proliferation of many derivative works, especially theatrical. In various ways, these adaptations developed audiences’ previous knowledge of the plot and the characters. Some of them were set in an openly illustrative relationship; others focused on a single narrative thread of the novel. The most complex examples, especially the 1909 opera by Jean Nouguès, offered a skilled concentration of the plot in a few scenes that were complex both in terms of narrative and staging. The director Guazzoni was quite familiar with the ‘horizons of expectation’ that adaptations of such a popular novel created, but he decided to use them differently. In his film, faithfulness to the original text became the most important trait of a new, ambitious staging strategy: the protection of the plot’s complexity and its spatial fragmentation. Performing a comparative analysis of the narrative spaces in Guazzoni’s film and in a few theatrical adaptations, this chapter delves into two different examples of interaction between the original novel, the adaptation, and viewer expectations: the centripetal model, in which the most important quality is the ability to synthesize, and the centrifugal one, based precisely on fidelity to the original text and to historical accuracy.