Shaping and Sharing Imagination

Changes in business and social environments have led society towards a complex landscape in which the relationship between mainstream media and participatory culture is completely changed, with a consequential blurring of boundaries between public and virtual space. As audience media habits are changing, a digital vision of reality is rising and engagement practices are evolving. As a consequence, there is the need for a new design methodology based on different skills working together. It is then necessary to adopt a disruptive approach to overcome the contemporary complexity, assuming storytelling activities, narrative practice and relationships among people as driving forces for innovation. The cases of Imagine Milan (2009-2012) and Plug Social TV (2013-ongoing), in which we tested listening and expressive tools, and communication strategies in order to activate a dialogue among communities. On the one hand, there is the aim of experiencing audiovisual languages through different narrative formats. On the other hand, we explored the use of stories in a collaborative process, spreading the narrative worlds across different channels. The aim of this paper is to describe our design approach, merging together tools and skills from different areas: communication design strategies as participative methods are linked to codesign actions; branding strategies, coming from the advertising field, as tools for identity development; audiovisual language considered as a cultural interface for listening to reality; transmedia practice as a cultural paradigm able to involve the audience into meaning-making processes; ultimately, social media advocacy is used to build relationships between virtual and real communities.

Possible Worlds in Translation: Coleman Barks’s Rendition of a Story from Rumi’s Masnavi

This article applies the theory of possible worlds to the field of translation studies by examining the narrative worlds of original and translated texts. Specifically, Marie-Laure Ryan’s characterization of possible worlds provides an account of the internal structure of the textual universe and the progression of the plot. Based on this account, one of the stories from Rumi’s Masnavi is compared to Coleman Barks’s English translation. The possible worlds of the characters and the unfolding of the plots in both texts are examined to assess the degree of compatibility between the textual universes of the original and the translated texts and how significant this might be. It also examines how readers reconstruct the narrative worlds projected by the two texts. The analysis reveals some inconsistencies in the way the textual universes of the original and translated texts are furnished and in the way readers reconstruct the narrative worlds of the two texts. The inability of translation to fully render the main character results in some loss in terms of the pungency and pithiness of the original text. It is also shown that the source text presents a richer domain of the virtual in comparison, suggesting a higher degree of tellability in the textual universe of the Masnavi’s narrative.

Narrative Language and Possible Worlds in Postmodern Fiction. A Borderline Study of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time

"Narrative Language and Possible Worlds in Postmodern Fiction. A Borderline Study of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time. The present paper is a study of more traditional hermeneutics combined with a tinge of possible world modality, with the purpose of creating a thorough picture of narrative worlds and balancing it against the possible world system, with practical applications onto postmodern fiction, in Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time. The article focuses on exposing narrative language, worlds and characters, viewing them through Seymour Chatman’s perspective and slightly counterbalancing this approach with the possible world semantics system (as envisioned by Kripke, Lewis, Nolan, Putnam) for a diverse understanding of the inner structure and functioning of narrative text and fictional worlds. Keywords: possible worlds, possible-world semantics, narrative worlds, fictional worlds, narrative language, fiction, postmodern fiction, fictional characters "

Dream weaving and sonic metalepsis in Jan Troell’s Land of Dreams

Jan Troell’s Sagolandet (Land of Dreams) (1988) presents itself as a documentary about 1980s Swedish society, but is also a film about filmmaking, the imagination, memory and autobiography. The film has multiple narrative levels: interviews, home movie footage, autobiographical anecdotes and imaginative sequences. Commentary and guiding themes are drawn from the theories of psychoanalyst Rollo May. These strata and themes have associated musical motifs and/or sound effects, which, as the film progresses, serve as an ontological bridge between the different strata. Land of Dreams is structured as both a multistrand and multiform narrative with the intercutting of multiple stories with multiple protagonists (multistrand) mixed with dream worlds and internal-subjective perspectives of Troell (multiform). The different narrative strata invite metalepsis, a type of narrative ‘transgression’ that occurs across the boundaries of distinct narrative worlds. In Land of Dreams, voice, music and sound effects act as metaleptic agents, transgressing different strata through four interrelated techniques: (1) metaleptic ‘i-voices’; (2) musical structures made up of ironic and disjunctive musical textures; (3) musical motifs transgressing narrative and ontological boundaries and (4) musical metaleptic warps. Musical metalepsis in Land of Dreams functions in a way that is emblematic of how political decisions and public policy infiltrate the private sphere, human consciousness and even dreams of the future.

Buddhism and Biography

The Buddhist religion has a long and rich tradition of biographical literature. This literature has functioned to unify distinct and often contradictory elements of Buddhist ritual, practice, and doctrine, adjusting these elements to specific historical situations. Scholarship on the function of literary characters in making narrative worlds coherent supports this argument: when readers engage characters, they draw together textual and non-textual data to construct beings that are similar to themselves. This connection of a specific situation with a larger whole, a connection that is at the same time an organization, can be observed in how Buddhist biographies are built. Biographies of Shakyamuni, for example, contain many traces of changes motivated by local conditions. The body of Shakyamuni is used to authorize these changes: the local is situated at the heart of Buddhism. Biographies of Chinese Buddhist saints attest to the same process, as can be seen in the shifting representation of Indian saints in China or the literary transformations of the Patriarchs of the Chan school. While these changing representations reflect changes in historical Buddhist communities, they can also produce attitudes and regulate behaviors. The debate on the portrayal and effects of women and animals in Indian Buddhist texts provides an illustration of this, as does scholarship on how saintly ideals regulate behavior. The case of Buddhist autobiography, a genre at times so closely connected to biography that it is nearly indistinguishable from it, provides a final example of how identity is structured in Buddhist biography.

Logical Consequence Operators and Etatism

In the paper, there is presented the theory of logical consequence operators indexed with taboo functions. It describes the mechanisms of logical inference in the environment of forbidden sentences. This kind of processes take place in ideological discourses within which their participants create various narrative worlds (mental worlds). A peculiar feature of ideological discourses is their association with taboo structures of deduction which penalize speech acts. The development of discourse involves, among others, transforming its deduction structure towards the proliferation of consequence operators and modifying penalty functions. The presented theory enables to define various processes of these transformations in the precise way. It may be used in analyses of conflicts between competing elm experts acting within a discourse.

Aesthetic Responses to the Characters, Plots, Worlds, and Style of Stories

This chapter reviews empirical research on aesthetic responses to stories, organizing our review around characters, plots, worlds or setting, and stylistic choices. We begin by outlining various responses to characters and how they influence us. Next, we discuss emotional, cognitive, and physiological reactions to plot events. We also touch on the confusing appeal of stories that elicit negative emotions, suggesting that they inspire insight. Next, we focus on the worlds in which stories take place, outlining how engagement in story worlds affects enjoyment and story-related beliefs. We also review our tendencies to revisit narrative worlds, and how different worlds map onto different genres. Finally, we discuss how characters, plots, and settings can be portrayed in different ways, based on stylistic choices. We explain how adopting a unique style of presenting stories captures attention and invites reflection and engagement. Lastly, we discuss future challenges and goals facing this field.