Can Reading Animate Justice?

In this study, I make audible a conversation in Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) on the meaning and application of justice. Without assuming that Alf Layla constituted an organized whole, the study identifies, in the frame narrative and the first two chains of stories—all three understood to belong to the earliest bundle—a debate on the coincidence of successful interpretation and just rulership. By the end of these tales, i.e., by the twenty-seventh night, a complete tale is told. In these stories, I propose, Alf Layla adopts an attitude that privileges multiplicity over singular interpretation, in a fashion that affirms thecontingency of ethical questions. The popularity of Alf Layla and the afterlives it enjoyed up to our present times—in the Arab world and the West—need not eclipse or substitute the Arabo-Islamic character the work came to exhibit, and the ethical questions it set out to address. In what has been read as fate, arbitrary logic, enchantment, magic, irrational thinking, and nocturnal dreamlike narratives, I suggest we can equally speak of a concern for justice. The study looks at Alf Layla’s affinity with advice literature, but stresses the need to read it as a work of (semipopular) literature that pays witness to societal debates on justice. Alf Layla, I suggest, belongs to Islamic culture in that the act of reading has been construed within hermeneutics that are largely informed by the ethical implication knowledge sharing entails. In how the stories find resolution to the crisis of the king, Alf Layla understands justice as an artificial and communal enterprise. The stories, more urgently, seem to suggest reading gears us towards a concern for the greater good. Keywords: The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights, 1001 Nights, Alf Layla wa-Layla), Adab, Justice, Rulership, Readership, Advice Literature, Interpretation, Multiplicity, Legitimacy

DIALOGIC ADIGA: THE NEOLIBERAL GOSPEL AND ITS CONTEXTS IN THE WHITE TIGER

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, both accommodates and provokes a variety of voices and discourses, evoking and dealing with India’s past, present, and future, thus highlighting its author’s dialogic vision. Although postcolonial and posthumanist approaches are worth exploring at length in this very challenging text, the current starts from the novel’s initial “conversation” with a controversial non-fiction book, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and the theory of the ten flatteners that reshape globalization, with Bangalore as the then (2006) neoliberal hub of the world. Using the patterns of the frame narrative of the Arabian Nights and of the European epistolary novel, the text under investigation dramatizes and transfigures the dark side of neoliberalism by means of the imaginary conversation between a murderer turned successful entrepreneur and the leader of the world’s most prominent rising economic tiger.

Reading

Focused on canto I of Inferno and the frame narrative of the Vita Nova, this essay examines the medieval cultural traditions and techniques involved in careful reading. These derive from two bodies of traditional education, ancient Greco-Roman and early Judeo-Christian. These were enhanced by reforms from the twelfth century, many disseminated from the abbey of St Victor by Augustinians and other monastic orders, and later by friars including St Bonaventure. Reading, remembering, and imagining are interdependent activities in the practices of contemplative thinking. Such reading has three characteristics. It is forcefully engaged and intense, not detached and objective. It is frequent, in the sense of being often re-visited, for creative meditation begins with something familiar and expands on it. And it is profoundly social. Medieval meditational reading is a set of continuing conversations, not intended to close off interpretation but to stimulate fruitful reflection and contemplation.

Cinema Panopticum: Wax, Work, Waxworks

“Cinema Panopticum” explores the central conceit of Waxworks—wax figures that come to life and threaten their creator—in the context of popular wax displays in the Weimar Republic. Commonly credited as a cult classic horror film, Waxworks is better understood in the period’s terminology as an “Episodenfilm,” a popular form of early narrative cinema that presented distinct episodes within a unifying frame narrative. Like other early German anthology films, Waxworks participates in the Weimar critique of historicism, foregoing the particularities of historical periods in favour of universal drives and philosophical themes. In this case, the framing narrative updates the classical Pygmalion myth for film-obsessed German modernity. The film is a testament to early cinema’s so-called “encyclopaedic ambition” and a cautionary tale about the potential fetishisation of the filmic image during the transitional period when cinema was establishing itself in opposition to older forms of representation such as wax figure displays.

Narrative Persuasion: Moderating effects of character identification on relationship between message format and intention to screen for cervical cancer among women in agricultural sector in Kiambu County, Kenya.

There is evidence that use of narrative messages is effective in the context of health behavior change. There is however no explanation as to what aspect of narrative leads to high level of persuasion. We evaluated the moderating effects of character identification on the three elements of narrative message (narrative message frame, narrative rationality and narrator’s perspective) in regard to the uptake of cervical cancer screening among women in the agricultural sector in Kiambu county, Kenya. A randomised experimental design was used. Narrative Message frame (gain frame vs. loss frame), narrative perspective (first vs third person), and narrative rationality, were manipulated. The messages were presented via a brief narrative video on cervical cancer and cervical screening. A uniform pretest questionnaire on cervical cancer and cervical cancer screening (T1) was completed by respondents before watching a narrative video. After watching a narrative video on cervical cancer screening, participants responded to the post test questionnaire (T2). Data from 378 (100 per cent) respondents for the pretest and 344 (91 per cent) for posttest was analysed and included in the study findings for the baseline and posttest respectively. Multiple hierarchical regression analysis was used. The study found that the majority of respondents were aged above 41 years of age at 32 per cent majority 249 (65.9 per cent) of the respondents were married, and majority 210 (55 per cent) of the respondents had 1 to 3 children followed by 4 to 5 at 91 (24 per cent). After running multiple hierarchical regression analysis, the study found that identification with story character moderated for all the independent variables. The study concluded that while using narrative messages to promote health behaviour, use of story characters which the target audience can identify with, may help in increasing adoption of advocated health behaviour.

Listening to the Alice Books

Despite the ‘acoustic turn’ providing ‘a corrective to the visualist bias of much scholarship on modern and postmodern culture’, the Alice books and their author have been almost exclusively seen rather than heard by critics to date. Prompted by a collaboration with composer Paul Rissmann which resulted in a concert suite performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2015, in this article I undertake the first detailed exploration of the sonic dimension of these texts. This merits attention not only because of its very emphatic foregrounding within the frame narrative of Wonderland, but also because of authorial interests and preoccupations, and the quickly established and still enduring musical afterlife of the books. Although triggered in Wonderland by the pastoral and by the sounds of the natural world, a process of translation or transformation renders a very different sonic landscape within the narrative proper. The bucolic frames an often raucous modern core, with Carroll embedding not only catchy anodyne melodies but also the sounds of the everyday and of contemporary industry, transport, and material culture. Attending to the rich and varied soundscape of Carroll’s best-known works sheds new light on their widely examined images but also restores a key dimension of the texts, essential to their Victorian reception. The detailed exploration of the full range of sonic phenomena within the works, from music to noise, and spanning both sound and silence, opens up new relationships between Carroll and his Victorian contemporaries, as well as further reinforcing his status as a proto-modernist.

The Storyteller Returns: Hotel du Lac (1984)

The epilogue reads Hotel du Lac through the figure of the storyteller, which it links to the genius woman writer, and argues that Brookner’s Booker Prize winner proleptically anticipates her aestheticist emphasis on beauty, form and technique. Utilising Walter Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller, and iconic figures of Staël, Colette, Woolf and Proust, the storyteller is produced through narratives of exile and return and focuses on the craft of the writer and artist persona including misreading, reversal, orality, frame narrative, epistolary form, paraprosdokian and anagnorisis. Colette’s The Pure and the Impure helps contextualise Edith’s scopophilic fascination with the mother/daughter pairing of Iris and Jennifer Pusey, which symptomise as a homoerotic narrative excess in the unsent letters to her lover. Edith’s queer preoccupations further illuminate the satirical treatement of gender, love, marriage and the heterosexual romance narrative in Hotel du Lac and more broadly in Brookner’s oeuvre. Like most Brooknerines, Edith rejects conventional romance for the romance of art and women’s writing. In conclusion, this chapter reviews the cross-historical intertextual performance of creative male gender through the contemporary female subject which sanctions a host of queer possibilities between female characters and plotlines. It celebrates Brookner as consummate aesthete, artist and storyteller.

La novel·la històrica en mans de Josep Lozano: Crim de Germania i El Mut de la Campana

Resum: Parlar de la novel·la històrica en la producció de Josep Lozano s’associa indubtablement a la prestigiosa obra Crim de Germania que l’autor riberenc mostrava al públic l’any 1980. Més de vint anys després reprenia aquest format per a crear El Mut de la Campana (2003) i, de nou, demostrava la seua mestria dins d’aquest gènere. L’objectiu i la configuració interna en ambdues és diferent però el que va empentar l’autor en la dècada dels 80 a usar aquesta vessant creativa tan de moda aleshores persisteix: tornar a un temps passat i contar-lo en una època actual a través del filtre de la ficció i així mostrar quina societat ha sigut i és la societat valenciana. Una societat, aquesta, que sobreïx en tot moment de les dues obres per a demostrar com funciona col·lectivament, així com què la determina des d’un punt de vista idiosincràtic. Paraules clau: novel·la històrica, marc, anàlisi narrativa, etnopoètica, folklore. Abstract: Any analysis about Josep Lozano’s historical novels is undoubtedly associated to his prestigious work Crim de Germania, which the Ribera born author released in 1980. Some 20 years later he created another historical novel, El Mut de la Campana (2003), once again showing his mastery of the genre. The purpose and structure of both works are different, but what motivated the author to use such a creative format in the 80’s persists today: travel back in time, and tell the story as if it were the modern day through a fictional filter and, in doing so, showing what Valencian society was like. A society, this one, which is prevalent throughout both works, shows how it works collectively as well as how it is defined by its idiosyncrasies.Keywords: historical literature, frame, narrative analysis, ethnopoetics, folklore.

Epilogue

In the frame narrative of Michael Powell’s 1937 film The Edge of the World, we see a tourist yacht approaching the island of Hirta in the Outer Hebrides.1 At least, this is the diegetic island of the film: the boat is actually approaching the island of Foula in the Shetlands. Powell did not receive permission to film on Hirta, also known as St Kilda, whose tiny population had asked to be removed to the Scottish mainland in 1930. ...