METAFICTION AND DROSTE EFFECT IN THE NOVEL “IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER” BY ITALO CALVINO

f on a winter's night a traveler is considered one of the greatest novels by Italian writer Italo Calvino. Published in 1979, this literary work, which belongs to the postmodernist narrative style in the form of a frame story, tells about a reader trying to read a book with the same title from beginning to end. Much of the story’s content was written in the second-person’s narration, implying that “you” (the Reader) are the protagonist of the novel. Embedded inside are ten short stories (the loose ends of different novels) read by the main character, which causes the book to constantly switch between settings, narrators, and styles. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is truly a perfect illustration for the literary style characterized by metafiction and postmodernism. The novel is a conscious textual play with various techniques employed such as authorial role limitation, reader involvement in the plot line, open structure, non-linearity, fragmentation, multiplicity, and intertextuality. By effectively using these devices, Calvino deconstructs the traditional novel form and creates a new structure which shows a parallel between the processes of writing and reading a text. Calvino acts as the supreme game-master taking control of both the characters and the real players, who have been pushed into this game-like novel. This article focuses on analyzing the charactericstics of metafiction, the Droste effect and deconstruction in Calvino’s novel If on a winter's night a traveler, thereby helping to grasp his playful language and his narrative techniques as well as to discover his metafictional discourse.

Kristuskarakteristik og eksempelfortælling

During its history of interpretation and reception, the temptation story in Matthew 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13 has been interpreted with emphasis on either its Christological or its paraenetical dimension. The article investigates how contemporary Danish children’s bibles retell the story with accent on the paraenetic elements. The children’s bibles reframe the story according to the genre of the morality tale. With literary devices such as focalization, metalepsis, shared interest and reader involvement strategies, the children’s bibles portray Jesus as a positive moral example for readers to emulate. This implies a view of the intended reader as a competent child who is capable of understanding and identifying with the text and overcome the devil’s temptations.

Second-person narration as a joint action

This article represents an attempt to free narratological typologies from the constraints of first- and third-person dualities. It argues that a new collaborative and multiagent model of second-person narratives is needed, and draws on the concept of enactment to help explain the specificity of second-person narration. The growing popularity of second-person narration in contemporary print literature is linked to the rapid development of multimedial storytelling strategies and new technological environments. The new status of second-person narration in print literature is connected with the increasing cultural need for participation in interactive and socially shared experiences or activities (real or virtual). Understanding second-person narration as such a joint action can thus help to understand its growing popularity, not only in terms of the stylistic alternative it affords to both first- and third-person narration, but also in conjunction with the rising cultural value of social cooperation or co-acting in the media-saturated reality. My hypothesis is that second-person narrative stimulates a specific mode of reader involvement, rooted in participation rather than immersion.

Constructing Dialogues, (Re)Constructing the Past: ‘Remembered’ Conversations in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes

This article explores the uses and functions of dialogue in Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. Taking conversational dialogue and fictional dialogue as points of comparison, the article argues that dialogue in autobiographical writing is essentially constructed, albeit not in the same way as fictional dialogue is. Dialogue as a means of dramatisation raises questions regarding factuality and fictionality. In McCourt’s memoir, dialogue is shown to serve numerous functions: characterisation and stereotyping; selfpositioning and indirect stance-marking; the creation of verisimilitude, humour and reader involvement.

Discursive control and persuasion in early modern news discourse

As an early form of news discourse, witchcraft pamphlets were one of the primary sites in which and through which ideologies about witchcraft and witches were articulated and disseminated in Early Modern England. Recognizing the pivotal position of language in constructing and perpetuating ideologies, this paper adopts a discourse analytic perspective (Van Dijk 2001, 2008; Halmari and Virtanen 2005) and uses insights from the study of stance and evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Hyland 2005, 2008) to examine the ways in which the prefatory materials of those pamphlets construct and (re)produce ideologies about witchcraft through linguistic and rhetorical choices, and the ways in which such a process may affect the audience’s perceptions, notions, and beliefs about witchcraft and witches. The findings reveal that the pamphleteers seek to manipulate linguistic choices and, in doing so, naturalize the ideologies about witchcraft which promote an image of Otherness that is inimical to the community. Persuasive strategies used include the negative depiction of the accused individuals as threats to society to prioritize the urgency of persecuting witches in the community; the pamphleteers’ construction of a positive self-image to establish itself as a source that can be trusted; and reader involvement to invite the reader to engage in the argumentation. Such strategies work in concert to reinforce the beliefs about witchcraft of those believers, and/or to persuade those who might still be in doubt.

A Contrastive Study on Metadiscourse Elements Used in Humanities vs. Non Humanities across Persian and English

The present study studied contrastively the use of metadiscourse in two disciplines (applied linguistics vs. computer engineering) across two languages (Persian and English). The selected corpus was analyzed through the model suggested by Hyland and Tse (2004). The results revealed the metadiscursive resources are used differently both within and between the two languages. As for the two courses, applied linguistics representing humanities relied heavily on interactive elements rather than interactional ones, compared with computer engineering representing non humanities. The analysis attests that humanities focus on the textuality at the expense of reader involvement. As indicated by the result, the idea of disciplinary prominence of metadiscourse across different languages needs to be cautiously taken into account.