Heroine’s journey to love: Spatial rhetoric in romantic subplots in BioWare’s fantasy RPGs

This article explores the potential of digital games to encode references encompassing specific cultural ideas of romantic love within their spatial structures, thus helping guide the player’s interpretation of romance as they interact with and move through those spaces. It undertakes an analysis of romantic subplots in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing games, specifically those which reappropriate the courtly love trope, and discusses elements of that remediation which rely heavily on spatial metaphors and structures, including the shared experience of heroic journey, the role of questing for the development of romance, and spatial positioning of lovers on the game map. Through its analysis, the article explores how digital games can employ spatial rhetoric while approaching topics of love, and how they are equipped to represent the materiality and spatiality of love and love narratives.

Spatial Expressions of Ascetic Tendencies in the Qurʾan

In this article, I propose viewing the early Qurʾanic movement as an expression of strong ascetic tendencies. More specifically, I suggest seeing aspects of Qurʾanic rhetorics as offering a specifically spatial expression to broader ascetic tendencies that characterized late antiquity as a whole, and which may be labeled “axial,” insofar as they can be traced back to the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., i.e., to the period coined by Karl Jaspers and others as “the Axial Age.” In the Qurʾan, rhetoric about striving for religious perfection takes on a spatial and horizontal expression, since the soteriological aspirations are formulated, to a certain extent, as a spatial ambition of “going out in the way of God.” As I suggest here, spatial imagery constitutes a prevalent theme throughout the Qurʾan and, based on an analysis of a number of examples, I argue that this spatial rhetoric indicates ascetic tendencies within the early Qurʾanic movement. The Qurʾan’s articulation of the tension between the believers and the surrounding world, including the tension between the muhājirūn (emigrants) and “those who stay behind,” is a prevalent theme throughout the text. This suggests that ascetic piety should be enacted spatially. In the last section of the article, I discuss the apparent change in semantics of two Qurʾanic terms that suggests the later Islamic exegetical tradition appears to favor an interpretation of these terms that allows for a more settled mentality and “stationary piety.”

The exhibition design in the face of complexity: For a semio-pragmatic approach of enunciation

The exposition always allows us to ‘see’ and ‘know’ as much as it explains through the installation how to ‘interact’ and ‘make signify’ its combinatory. It invites the visitor to venture into a process-based experience of constant scavenge into the depths of the meaning to finally lead him, throughout the meeting, to discover its semantic code. The exhibition is, therefore, perceived as a spatial-media engineering work; a spatial rhetoric where the communication's efficiency is reliant on the attractive and expressive performance of the processes and mediums, by which, it condenses its statements, forges its phrases and includes its visitor-reader. Speech setting, course setting, editing games, articulation, situations, signification and interaction, evocation and provocation, etc., will thus be perceived as instruments and materials of a particular language as well as tools of spatial-media strategies. Keywords: Exhibition, complexity, design process, spatio-media, enunciation.

Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Rhetoric

By the end of the 1930s space (Raum) had become a common catchword in the writings of Carl Schmitt. This chapter argues that space was not merely a theme during this phase of his career, but was linked to a rhetorical strategy and mode of argumentation. Focusing on Land and Sea (1942) and “Nomos” of the Earth (1950), the first two sections show how Schmitt developed two contrasting modes of argumentation inextricably intertwined with his theory of space and the poetics of his writing. In the final section Agamben’s comments on Schmitt’s “topology” and the collaborative work A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari serve as case studies for recent reconfigurations of Schmitt’s spatial thought. The analysis of their appropriations of Schmitt points to major differences between his original perspective on space and these contemporary theories. Schmitt’s spatial theory is deeply rooted in the epistemology of the early twentieth century.

Exploring Bodily and Spatial Rhetoric in the De Opificio Dei of Lactantius

In the construction of spatiality, “partitioning” (as Foucault would have it), or the formation of the “enclosure,” allows not only for the production of an object of knowledge, but prompted by the regulative procedures of a social order, also invests spaces with an almost inherent valorisation. The relations of power active in the production of demarcated space, not only allows for the disciplined production of knowledge within the boundaries of the enclosure, but it also enacts the principle of hierarchy, rendering some parts of more value than others, evoking reasons for boundaries, evaluating types of movement and mobility, thereby reproducing social order. How a version of an interior body was embedded within a rhetoric of spatiality in antiquity is the objective of this essay. The point of departure is not a pre-discursive interior body upon which a rhetoric of spatiality has been inscribed, but an already rhetorically constructed object of knowledge in interaction with a rhetoric of spatiality. Besides exploring the interaction of bodily and spatial rhetoric with reference to specific prominent issues in the Dei Opificio Dei of Lactantius, the question whether a version of Roman masculinity tropologically functions as proposal for the construction of social order is also posed.