Narrative

LOST exemplifies a contemporary American prime-time series that exhibits both serial and episodic traits and, thanks to technological developments, has proliferated across many different platforms allowing for a deepening of its hyperdiegetic world. This paper will examine how Lost’s non-linear narrative structure, using flashbacks and flash forwards, serves to provide a linear development of story and character while also creating an implicit promise of narrative resolution and final closure. However, as I will argue using a close study of Lost’s fifth season finale, recent developments have extended and problematised the non-linear framework that has structured the show’s development from the beginning. Instead of the promise of a story that can, despite a complex non-linear narrative, be reconstituted in linear terms, the increasing complexity of Lost’s narrative has opened up the possibility of a radical act of de-narration that threatens to erase an entire five seasons’ worth of story.

Personal testimony by survivors of genocide or persecution has long constituted the gold standard for learning about human-inflicted tragedy. The physical presence of a survivor captivates audiences and lends immediacy to catastrophes that seem both unfathomable but also eminently repeatable. The Holocaust looms large as an example. The most aggressive efforts at preserving live testimony have centered on assembling archives of video testimonies. This transformation of live testimony into a different medium generates two key questions:
1. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience (via editing, selective viewing, etc.)?
2. How can mediated survivor testimonies serve as tools for preventing and counteracting prejudice?

As survivors of genocides pass away, their firsthand testimonies increasingly will be accessible primarily through video archives. The preservation of memory through video archives also exacts a price. Once a survivor’s testimony enters the archive, it risks becoming ossified as a static monument. The video preserves the definitive record not only of that survivor’s life, but it also endures as an instantiation of archetypal narrative templates that channel perceptions into familiar storylines. As these narrative patterns become embedded as expectations, they risk obscuring or marginalizing the complex panoply of ways the survivors dealt with their situations.

This project takes Holocaust survivor testimonies as its point of departure in assessing the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of video testimonies. Discussions focus on three types of mediated testimony: early non-fiction televised chronicles of Holocaust survivors (particularly the first appearance of a survivor, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life); archival video testimonies; and “unsettled testimony” consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. The final category includes testimonies of Holocaust survivors independently recorded by the author. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and increasing productive engagement with the global immigration crises that many politicians continue to foment into nativism and xenophobia.

Critical examination of each medium of testimony leads to recommendations regarding how to provide more thorough, nuanced understanding of refugees and immigrants in the present. Testimony from immigrants could put into practice several key lessons gleaned from Holocaust survivor testimony. At the micronarrative level, individual testimonies can provide counterexamples to categorical generalizations about immigrants. Attention at this level focuses on providing detailed context and background to demonstrate how immigrants do not necessarily align with how they are categorized by media and politicians. At the mesonarrative level, the diversity of narratives can activate themes and characterizations absent or suppressed in collective portrayals of immigrants. Metanarrative testimony reframes immigrants by offering new narratives that can reframe the role of immigrants in society, suggesting storylines that treat immigrants as contributors rather than invaders.

By following the sectional structure of this volume, these afterthoughts explore a multitude of venues for approaching aesthetics as a means to study the dynamics of religious narratives and their reception. They not only elaborate on the theoretical and methodological potential of the aesthetics of religion for the study of narrative cultures in diverse religious contexts, but also explore the main insights of this volume’s contributions by applying it to a case study. The afterthoughts follow the sectional structure of this volume and engage in methodological and theoretical reflections on issues central to the aesthetics of religion. To demonstrate how the theoretical and methodological approach as proposed in this volume could be put into practice and work within the context of a single case study, these afterthoughts illustrate how the aesthetics approach can be used to elucidate less obvious forms of narrative cultures and the different aesthetic means of their transmission within different religious and cultural contexts. By presenting a case study in which different narrative cultures are intertwined through lines of socially and culturally interconnected storyworlds, the most significant insights of these afterthoughts outline the potential framework for future analysis that emerges through the assemblage of the individual contributions. With the aim to highlight unrecognized connections and expand on the aesthetic junctures of sensation and imagination, a nuanced consideration of all dimensions and aspects promises to exemplify the theoretical and methodological relevance of the aesthetic frame and narrative focus as integral to the makeup of this volume and the study of religion as a whole.

This essay proposes a historically material theory of resonance in experience and literature. Working against contemporary techno-deterministic assessments of sound, I argue for a historical, rather than individual, modality of listening – a collective acoustical unconscious. Understood in its technical expression, Faulkner’s literary acoustics helps us to draw out some of Benjamin’s more elliptical points regarding an acoustical unconscious, a notion that Benjamin never directly articulated, but can be found scattered across the writings. Both Faulkner and Benjamin teach us that the acoustical unconscious far exceeds the boundaries of the individual life. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner crafted a narrative space that is a sensitive recording apparatus, more sensitive than any mechanical device. But as history moves through narrative space and its radiophonic air, there are consequences for racial consciousness. In Faulkner’s narrative space, blackness and whiteness become, above all, sound-effects,  or what I call a “fact of resonance” rather than of essence or substance.

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focusing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

Not long ago, narrative was all the rage... today, not as much. The fashionable preoccupation with (yet another) category to deliver religious imagination from the grips of organizing principles - artificial and reductionistic tropes - enjoyed its brief day in the sun. As with most fads, narrative theology still influences many but not in the label - more in the details and low-powered vocabulary. Why? Because we're frightened by those grand, reductionistic themes... embarrassed by our hubris and too cool to be tricked once again. Good luck with that....

"Narrative Theology" is a piece published as part of Walter Elwell's 2001 revised edition of The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Baker).

Our time is characterized by a crisis of representational
practice, fuelled by unprecedented technological and economic changes on a global level. Narrative, therefore, takes a wide variety of forms. This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of film and literature from around the world, and analyses the masters of each art form. Through short stories and plays, we will study different ways a story can be told and the many exciting ways embedded "narratives" (or discourses) can be framed. Similarly, through films and film adaptations of great literary masterpieces, we will study how visual elements challenge the reader's imagination.


Specifically, we examine the relationship between meaning
and narrative structure. The course considers the tensions
between claims for originality and poetic license, between
producers and audiences, between fiction and reality, narrative and history, memory and representation. We will study representative theorists of narratology, such as J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and Hayden White. Cutting-edge scholarship on film and the new media will also be introduced, such as Seymour Chatman, Rey Chow, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation. In addition to becoming familiar with major issues in film studies and East-West comparative studies, students will acquire a working knowledge of narrative theory.

What we know today as literature began as oral tales told in small hunter-gatherer bands. Several lines of evidence indicate that storytelling has long been an integral part of human experience. Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged around 200,000 years ago, at which point language was firmly in place. The recent finding that 85% of nighttime conversation among San foragers is dedicated to the recounting of stories and myths attests to the prominence of this activity in modern and—by implication--ancestral hunter-gatherer life. Unfortunately, behavior doesn’t fossilize, so we don’t have access to the stories told by our ancestors. However, thanks to texts collected by early anthropologists and extant oral traditions kept alive by dedicated tribal elders, we have a good sense of what storytelling was like in recent foraging groups. Due to contact with industrialized state societies and access to Western goods, recent forager life differs somewhat from that of our ancestors; however, their story traditions date to a time when they lived in small, nomadic or semi-nomadic bands and made their living by hunting and gathering. Thus, these traditions are the product of an existence that was very similar to that of early humans—a life without agriculture, social stratification, economic specialization, motorized transport, telecommunication, or modern medicine. For this reason, research on modern foraging peoples is seen as a valuable tool for reconstructing the hominid past. Similarly, the oral traditions of ethnographically documented foragers provide a model of storytelling in ancient environments....

Storytelling pervades almost every aspect of the law. Many narrativistic legal elements, however, have in fact been little more than historically transitory. Given the precarious status of narrative at law, I argue we should focus instead on one of the most historically consistent acts of legal storytelling: the judicial opinion. Here I examine in particular the invocation of precedent in legal opinions, what I call “judicial emplotment,” as an almost archetypal act of formalized storytelling. As I go on to argue, the courts justify legal outcomes by invoking precedent, thereby placing decisions within a specific and heavily formalized legal-narrative structure.

Moschus' 'Europa' has long been recognised to be a highly visual and pictorial poem. It is also dominated by an erotic theme: the sexual awakening of the maiden Europa and her love affair with Zeus. This article will focus on a connection between erotic theme and highly visual narrative that has received attention in relation to Greek texts from the Roman Empire, but none in relation to Moschus. The sophisticated and self-conscious use of vision and ekphrasis in erotic narrative which has been traced in authors such as Achilles Tatius (in particular by Goldhill) is anticipated, I shall argue, in Moschus' Hellenistic poem.

Resumen El artículo intenta realizar una aproximación de tipo narratológica a la serie de televisión Mad Men (AMC, 2007-2015) del creador y guionista Matthew Weiner. Se estudia el relato en tanto estructura poniendo énfasis en los mecanismos narrativos. En primer lugar se aborda el inicio del relato – íncipit-poniendo énfasis en los códigos que ya desde ahí orientan la recepción de la serie para luego contrastarlos con los elementos que dan cierre al relato. Posteriormente, se trabaja la construcción espacial a partir del concepto cronotopos, condensación del binomio espacio-tiempo, según la perspectiva de Mijaíl Bajtín. Desde ahí se analizarán tres cronotopos principales: la ciudad como gran escenario, las casas y, por último, las diferentes oficinas de la agencia Sterling Cooper, a juicio de quién escribe estas líneas, el cronotopos predominante. Finalmente se trabaja la cuestión temporal, en este caso desde tres aristas diferentes: como decurso, como discurso y como experiencia vital Palabras clave: Mad Men, serie de televisión, estructura narrativa, espacios, tiempo Abstract The article proposes a narrative approach to Mad Men (AMC, 2007-2015), the television series by the creator and screenwriter Matthew Weiner. The story is analyzed structurally, emphasizing its narrative mechanisms. Firstly, the beginning of the narrative –incipit-is tackled by highlighting the codes that are already orienting the reception of the series, in order to contrast them with the elements that draw an end to the story. Afterwards, the spatial construction is examined upon the concept of cronotopos, according to Mikhail Bakhtin's perspective. From there onwards, three main cronotopos will be analyzed: the city as a great stage, the homes and lastly, the different offices of the agency Sterling Cooper, which is the predominant cronotopos in the opinion of the one writing these lines. Finally, the topic of temporary matters is handled, in this case, in accordance to three different points of view: as course of time, as discourse and as vital experience.

The paper examines the dominancy of narrative in Hasidic religious life through the discourse of narrative ethics and its implications for theology, specifically feminist theology, and for religion in general.
I claim that the centrality of storytelling in Hasidism reflects and constructs an essential attitude toward religious life. This attitude directs one to narrative and contextual thinking, which focuses on the specific person, circumstances, emotions, as opposed to law, norm, and abstract determination. This centrality of storytelling is connected to a deep Hasidic awareness of the restriction of normative religious life, a finite facet of the infinite paths to God

El Sociólogo norteamericano Richard Sennett (2009) explica que la artesanía es la habilidad de hacer las cosas bien y está activada por un impulso humano duradero y básico: el deseo de realizar adecuadamente una tarea. Desde esta mirada, el término es más abarcativo que el estrictamente referido al trabajo manual especializado, se aplica a muchas profesiones y a oficios y suele retribuir al individuo con el orgullo por la labor realizada. Todo buen artesano, continúa Sennett, mantiene un diálogo entre sus prácticas concretas y sus pensamientos, que evolucionan juntos hasta convertirse en hábito. De esta manera, el concepto del artesano va más allá y representa en cada uno de nosotros el deseo de hacer algo bien, concretamente y sin ninguna otra finalidad.
En este trabajo se explorarán distintos conceptos como: artesanía, motivación, habilidad, despertar, pericia, vocación y or- gullo por el trabajo propio. Se trazará así un camino que permita visualizar las prácticasdocentes de los profesores universitarios en un marco particular, el de la artesanía.

Drawing on a body of literature that considers narrative meaning emerging in intraspecies entanglements, in this paper I read Gwen John's letters revolving around her relationship with the many cats she lived with throughout her life. I am particularly interested in throwing light at moments when a woman's body makes strong connections with the animal's body blurring the boundaries between humans and nonhumans through a cosmological ethics of care. In doing so, I follow trails of Deleuze's and Guattari's idea of becoming-animal, as it is fleshed out through a narrative analysis of a modernist woman artist's letters.

• This essay explores the literature/digital nexus from a narratological perspective and asks: how does the digital enter the traditional printed novel? The concept of the paratext – with the new categories of material peritexts and digital epitexts – serves as a theoretical frame to be discussed along with Paul Dawson's proposal for a discursive narratology and James Phelan's rhetorical approach to narrative in the attempt to fruitfully combine the two for a contextualized and cultural-aware narrative analysis.

Transitional justice is a major concept in promoting peace and reconciliation between conflicting parties. It is usually associated with formal judicial processes such as criminal justice, rule-of law reform and paying reparations. This chapter focuses on another transitional justice method, a more informal one: memory work. There is a growing realization of the major impact on the way in which the history of a conflict is viewed by the members of parties involved on their psychological and behavioral reactions. Addressing that history properly can promote their well being, conflict resolution and reconciliation between the parties. There are many ways of addressing the relevant history, for example, through truth and reconciliation committees, the rewriting of history textbooks, and commemoration projects. This chapter focuses on another way: the role of the autobiographical memory, that of the people who experienced the conflict directly, as it is manifested in their memoirs, newspaper articles and interviews with scholars. To this end the chapter uses a case study approach, regarding the causes for the main historical event of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the 1948 Palestinian exodus. It explores for the first time the way in which Israeli-Jewish 1948 war veterans presented these causes between 1949 and 2004. The question posed was: did their autobiographical memory present a Zionist narrative (willing flight of the Palestinians) or a critical/post-Zionist narrative (willing flight combined with expulsion)? This exploration is based on an analysis of all published war veterans' memoirs and newspaper articles, as well as interviews with scholars, in the 56 year research period. During this study, interviews were also conducted with 1948 war veterans. Following the description of the empirical findings regarding the Israeli-Jewish autobiographical memory of the exodus, these findings are used to theoretically conceptualize various phenomena. For example, what determines the way in which direct-experience people describe their experiences during a conflict, how these people influence directly and indirectly the collective memory of their society of a given conflict, and the way in which they influence the dynamics of

La critica letteraria è una materia in cui “parole e cose” sono strettamente intrecciate le une alle altre, e in cui tra i componenti materiali dei testi e le categorie che li classificano esiste un intricato rapporto di individuazione reciproca: non c’è termine, nel lessico della teoria letteraria, che non sia nato da un dato testuale, un caso particolare che ne ha influenzato natura e confini con le proprie caratteristiche specifiche, e allo stesso tempo non si dà dato testuale che possa essere identificato come tale in mancanza di una categoria che gli preesiste, di uno spazio teorico che lo fa esistere in quanto oggetto e ne garantisce la riconoscibilità. Partendo da questo doppio presupposto, questo libro si offre come strumento di partenza per lo studio della narrativa, occasione per riepilogare i concetti fondamentali della critica riportandoli – per quanto possibile – ai loro contesti di origine, così da coniugare nozione ed evoluzione, significato e storia.

The rough text, in English language, of the student seminar delivered at the Banja Luka Political Science Department - April 2013.
The seminar explains the key parameters of the US foreign policy in terms of a 'ritual identity' that's based on three narratives or narrative-frames
(the frames figure as frequently recurring, behavior-shaping cultural matrices):
1.  Power as a Divine Grace.
2.  Puritan narrative - a hero of  a 'promised/free land'
3.  'Pioneer' - a hero in a land of continually expanding and moving boundaries (Manifest Destiny)
The seminar illustrates such an analysis of US foreign political vocabulary with many examples from American self-descriptions (official talks, memoirs, diplomatic notes, presidential speeches....), and enumerates some key consequences of the thus explained identity in its foreign political projection.

This thesis focuses on a particular stylistic period of Frederic Chopin. The 1840s show an important evolution of Chopin’s musical language and correspond to an aesthetic turning point, characterized by a difficult historical and biographical context. All along our research, we will try to build a transversal definition of Chopin’s last style by highlighting the recurrent characteristics of this period. In this purpose, a corpus of twenty-two works will be analyzed through several levels (traditional and formal, semiotic, narrative and thymic), to grasp all the issues of the last period of the polish composer.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à une période stylistique particulière du compositeur Frédéric Chopin. Les années 1840 manifestent une évolution importante dans son langage musical et correspondent à un tournant esthétique marqué par un contexte historique et biographique difficile. Tout au long de ce travail, nous allons tenter d’ériger une définition transversale du « dernier style » de Chopin, en recherchant les éléments caractéristiques récurrents de cette période. Dans ce but, un corpus de vingt-deux oeuvres musicales sera analysé selon plusieurs niveaux (traditionnel et formel, sémiotique, narratif et thymique) afin de saisir tous les enjeux de la dernière période du compositeur polonais.

What makes a good movie? How can one analyse a film accordingly without primarily interpreting it? Dramaturgy can enrich film understanding, for those who make films, as well as for those who want to understand better why they are made how. Film Dramaturgy supports the creative process of filmmaking, especially the work of the authors, directors and producers. Students and professionals who are involved in the creation of a film also benefit from this knowledge. The understanding of dramaturgy supports film analysis and film criticism too. In some regions of the world, dramaturgy is well established; in other parts, it is less familiar.
This book provides a basic introduction to modern film dramaturgy. It emerges from academic research drawn from professional practice. It addresses students, scholars, colleagues, filmmakers and all professionals involved in making films, videos, audio-visual time-based media productions

This article compares the concepts of “text-within-a-text” and “mise en
abyme”. Until now, there have been no attempts to analyze and differentiate them in Russian literary studies. This paper tries to identify these phenomena by considering the context of their emergence and conceptualization, by studying the semantic and functional criteria for differentiating them in narratives of 19th – 20th century, as well as by regarding the prospects of further integration of these two concepts.

Key words: mise en abyme; text-within-a-text; narrative; semiotic analysis.

Аннотация. В статье сопоставляются такие понятия, как «текст-в-тексте» и «редупликация» (mise en abyme). До сих пор в отечественном литературоведении не предпринимались попытки их анализа и разграничения. Данная работа приближается к идентификации этих феноменов: рассматривается контекст возникновения и концептуализации самих терминов, изучаются критерии их семантического и функционального разграничения в прозе XIX и XX в., а также учитываются перспективы их дальнейшего взаимодействия.

Ключевые слова: редупликация; mise en abyme; текст-в-тексте; нарратив; семиотический анализ.

The article discusses the production of live television formats, as they have developed in Europe during the past decade. The analytical examples are taken from entertainment as well as factual television, and from public service as well as commercial contexts. In the article, it is argued that there has been an approximation between the textual features and generic and narrative structures of entertainment and factual live television, and a model is presented that is supposed to account for these narrative patterns.

This paper is about a methodology which wants to represent in an innovative way the musical work’s narrativity and expression according to the moments of tension and detente created by the relations between the different topics. These unities are characteristic figures coming from the historical and social musical legacy and refer to genres and musical styles (march, dances, hymn, etc.). In line with the publications of Robert Hatten, Eero Tarasti, Márta Grabócz and many others, our narrative analyses try to understand the stylistic evolution and the different strategies of Chopin’s compositions. The evolution and concatenation of the topics reveal different identities and itineraries called “narrative structures”. Three models emerge from our analyses: the “complex” structure, the “simple” structure and the and “non-contrasted” structure which characterized all the 21 pieces of our corpus, composed after 1841 and linked to the last style.

The article discusses the production of live television formats, as they have developedin Europe the last decade. The analytical examples are taken from entertainment aswell as factual television, and from public service as well as commercial contexts. Inthe article is argued that there have been an approximation between the textualfeatures and generic and narrative structures of entertainment and factual livetelevision, and a model is presented, that is suppose to account for these narrativepatterns.

Today I finished the Fantasy – and the sky is beautiful, there’s a sadness in my heart – but that’s alright. If it were otherwise, perhaps my existence would be worth nothing to anyone.
(Letter to J. Fontana, 20th October 1841)

Musical narratology is an important item to highlight and understand the narrative strategies of musical works by the study of the concatenation of the expressive unities it contains. In the 19th century, the narrative strategy is often built as a “path which leads the listener from dysphoric elements till the transcendental level (euphoric) through several steps […]. This itinerary often corresponds to the coming-of-age novel or imaginary or initiatory journey […]” (Grabocz, 2009, p. 33). This is also possible in music by the choice of the protagonists, their relationships and their evolution into the musical piece.
In our thesis, which focuses on Chopin’s last style, we study 21 works of the 1840’s to reach a definition of this late stylistic period. Among our corpus, the Fantasy op. 49 in F minor is particularly interesting. In fact, this piece was rather badly received by the contemporary critics, considering “a lack of unity and cohesion” according to Lenz while Schumann found it “full of genius traits, although the whole hasn’t felt to have being bound by a formal harmonious framework”.
However, we consider that this work is a very good illustration of a real mastery of the formal construction and the narrative strategy proposed by Chopin and revealed by the narrative analysis. Composed in the beginnings of the 40’s, two themes serve as a basis of all the progression: the first is dramatic and more and more powerful all along its repetitions which put us deeper into the dramaturgy. The second is more transitional, in an improvised style and presents two kinds of appearance, totally opposite, which carries the auditor into two different atmospheres. The interactions between these two protagonists will build the “plot” of the piece, anchored in this romantic aesthetic, as we will try to show it in our presentation.
This kind of narrative strategy will also be compared with other works of our corpus which present the same kind of strategy but also totally contrary, like the Ballade op. 52 in f minor whose analysis in our forthcoming paper "La Ballade op. 52: une « épopée dramatique ». Entre analyse formelle, narrative et thymique" noticed a totally inverse narrative strategy.

The last style of Chopin is a new notion in musicology in France. In spite of the fact that the authors  admit its existence, very less researches concern this subject, particularly in France. All along our researches, the analysis of the works of our corpus  shows us different narratives structures.
The narrative framework, proved by some theoretician of literature , is the thread of the main conventional narrative  and can also govern the musical discourse: initial situation (tranquillity, exposition), inciting incident, quest and adventures, crisis, resolution, and final situation. In the romantic period, the artists change these traditional paths to express their new aesthetics ideas and cause a bursting of the classical structures, which will more freely model the narrative framework.
In this paper, we want to present several examples of different narrative structures in Chopin’s last style. In fact, the themes, motives and thymic states of the works enable to model different evolutions of the dramaturgy. The results of these researches reveal different “narrative structures” used by Chopin in the works of the last style.

During the Holocaust and the subsequent process of what has become known as liberation, women constantly confronted convergent oppressive forces. Under the Nazi regime and its cohorts as well as during the liberation process, Jews faced torture and genocide. Jewish women constantly lived with an additional layer of oppression: threatened or actual sexual violence. Positioned at the vortex of intersecting oppressions, how can the identities of these women transcend their stature as victims? How do women creatively reposition themselves vis-à-vis the perpetrators and the traumatic events so they can maintain or reclaim their agency and dignity?
Centering on narrative analysis of first-person testimony gleaned from memoirs and from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA), this investigation covers four narratively sustained modes of comportment toward sexual violence. First, mutual aid demonstrates an ethic of care. Second,  degrading or minimizing the perpetrator or the sexual act retains the narrator’s dignity. The final two angles offer complementary ways to avoid or repel assault: distracting an assailant by directing him toward more attractive targets, and rendering oneself repellant.
Departing from the prevailing approach of treating Holocaust survivor testimonies primarily as responses to trauma, this project reveals how the narrators actively craft their identities through the storytelling process. This creative molding of identity through narrative, a process called autopoeisis, recasts survivors of these and other traumas as dynamically (re)negotiating their understanding of self and their relationship to lived experiences. Trauma stories thereby further tikkun olam—repair of a fractured world.

Suspendus aux lèvres d’un conteur, incapables d’interrompre la lecture d’un roman, captivés par un film haletant, nous faisons tous l’expérience quotidienne de ce plaisir apparemment paradoxal que nous tirons de notre insatisfaction provisoire face à un récit inachevé. Bien qu’une mode esthétique et théorique ait tenté de nous convaincre que ce plaisir était honteux, on peut néanmoins avoir l’intuition que le cœur vivant de la narrativité réside précisément dans ce nœud coulant, toujours plus serré à mesure que nous progressons dans l’histoire, qui nous attache à l’intrigue et creuse la temporalité par l’attente impatiente d’un dénouement. Si le récit a quelque chose à voir avec la manière dont nous éprouvons le temps, cette expérience n’apparaît jamais avec autant d’éclat que dans le suspense, la curiosité ou la surprise qui font la force des intrigues fictionnelles. La compréhension des fonctions narratives engage donc non seulement l’analyse littéraire, linguistique et sémiotique, mais aussi l’analyse cognitive et la psychologie des émotions.

This book is the edited proceedings from the conference 'The Art of Stesichorus' held at St John's College, Oxford, on June 29–30 2012. Contributors include: Ewen Bowie (Oxford), Chris Carey (London), Patrick Finglass (Nottingham), Richard Hunter (Cambridge), Adrian Kelly (Oxford), Ian Rutherford (Reading), Gerson Schade (Berlin), Laura Swift (Open University), Martin West (Oxford).

Pelling, C., Classics for All 2015/08/11

Bringing together interdisciplinary leaders in methodology and arts-based research (ABR), this comprehensive handbook explores the synergies between artistic and research practices and addresses issues in designing, implementing, evaluating, and publishing ABR studies. Coverage includes the full range of ABR genres, including those based in literature (such as narrative and poetic inquiry); performance (music, dance, playbuilding); visual arts (drawing and painting, collage, installation art, comics); and audiovisual and multimethod approaches. Each genre is described in detail and brought to life with robust research examples. Team approaches, ethics, and public scholarship are discussed, as are innovative ways that ABR is used within creative arts therapies, psychology, education, sociology, health sciences, business, and other disciplines.

ROZBOR FILMU / FILM ANALYSIS [English summary]

Radomír D. Kokeš (Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2015)

The book focuses on possibilities of analyzing a film as a system. Its aim is to deal with the process of asking questions in such a way that their answers will contribute to convincing solutions of exactly formulated tasks related to the structure of a film work. It is not a broadly conceived exposé of numerous kinds of analyses of numerous types of films; it rather follows the method of in-depth study of a limited scope of issues. As such, it consists of four sections. Each of these sections offers different questions and answers, presents different findings to the reader and follows different methods of work with the explication. All sections logically follow from the others, and thus analysed topics reappear in various contexts, as well as complement and develop each other. An invariable background of the explications in the book is formed, first, by aesthetic norms of the classic Hollywood film, second, by traditions of the Czech cinema and third, by Kristin Thompson’s and David Bordwell’s neoformalist poetics.

(1) The first section is titled TO OBSERVE and it presents the basic tools for an analysis of a work of art. It sees the work as a system, where it distinguishes between basic components of narrative, style and the fictional world. It explains each of these components separately on specific examples. It gives special attention to the films: A Close Shave (GB, 1995) and Once upon a Time in the West (USA/Italy, 1968). The subject matter of the explication is a film work.

(2) In the second section, TO PLAN, the book approaches to discussion and writing about film as a way of issues-solving. It explains the importance of finding, posing, and answering question about the structure of a film. It gives examples of the films Titanic (USA, 1997) and Bloody Sunday (GB/Ireland, 2002). For a better understanding of the topic it deals with, it offers a conception of two types of theses: centripetal and centrifugal. The subject matter of the explication is the analysis as such.

(3) The third section TO WRITE AND READ / TO READ AND WRITE is the most guiding one, as it focuses on practical aspects of analytical writing, theoretical coherence and the field of recommended publication, which can help to enhance this sensibility. The subject matter of the explication is a written analytical text.

(4) The final section APPENDIX: THREE ANALYTICAL FORMATS AND A READER makes it easier to understand on a higher level the various ways of structuring analysis and its functions. It presents three formats of such texts: an analytical essay, an analytical study, and poetological study. Adaptability to analysed issues follows primarily from six case-studies of the films Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (Czechoslovakia, 1966), Arsenic and Old Lace (USA, 1944), Speed Racer (USA, 2008), Memento (USA, 2000), Smugglers of Death (Czechoslovakia, 1959) and A Tooth for a Tooth (Austria-Hungary, 1913). Each of these more or less comprehensive studies deals with a different issue, asks different questions and (intentionally) addresses readers with different levels of experience. The subject matter of the explication is a unity of approach on the one hand and a variety of issues-solving on the other hand.
The book aims to show the widest range of the explanatory possibilities of its approach, which it labels a poetics of fiction. When working with its case-studies, it repeatedly proceeds in the chapters from formally playful films (like A Close Shave, Titanic, Speed Racer or Memento) to structurally complex works (like Once Upon a Time in the West, Bloody Sunday or Smugglers of Death). This enables it to cover a wide range of challenges, which one can encounter in the process of an analysis of (not only audio-visual) works. And finally, the last chapter introduces the theme of a historiographic dimension of the book. It presents original research of the beginnings of Czech cinema.

The field of an analysis of a film authorship is rather suppressed in the explications, although it remains crucial and as such it is primarily dealt with in the second section of the book, which can thus be also seen from this perspective as an original contribution to authorial poetics and questions of a realistic effect in the work of the director Paul Greengrass.

Given the reasons stated above, Film Analysis wants to be (a) a comprehensible guide to the analytical process of a wide readership (especially students of programmes in history and theory of the arts, cinephiles and beginning critics), (b) a collection of original analyses, which explain a variety of issues related to structures of film from the perspective of the poetics of fiction, and (c) a source of helpful tools for not only film analysis, but also the analytical process as such (for example, kinds of theses or analytical formats).