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This book explores the complex interrelationship between fact and
fiction in narratives of the twenty-first century. Current cultural
theory observes a cultural shift away from postmodernism to new
forms of expression. Rather than a radical break from the
postmodern, however, postmodernist techniques are repurposed to
express a new sincerity, a purposeful self-reflexivity, a
contemporary sense of togetherness and an associated commitment to
reality. In what the editors consider to be one manifestation of
this general tendency, this book explores the ways in which
contemporary texts across different media play with the boundary
between fact and fiction. This includes the examination of novels,
autobiography, autofiction, film, television, mockumentary, digital
fiction, advertising campaigns and media hoaxes. The chapters
engage with theories of what comes after postmodernism and analyse
the narratological, stylistic and/or semiotic devices on which such
texts rely. The chapters in this book were originally published as
a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.
This book explores the complex interrelationship between fact and
fiction in narratives of the twenty-first century. Current cultural
theory observes a cultural shift away from postmodernism to new
forms of expression. Rather than a radical break from the
postmodern, however, postmodernist techniques are repurposed to
express a new sincerity, a purposeful self-reflexivity, a
contemporary sense of togetherness and an associated commitment to
reality. In what the editors consider to be one manifestation of
this general tendency, this book explores the ways in which
contemporary texts across different media play with the boundary
between fact and fiction. This includes the examination of novels,
autobiography, autofiction, film, television, mockumentary, digital
fiction, advertising campaigns and media hoaxes. The chapters
engage with theories of what comes after postmodernism and analyse
the narratological, stylistic and/or semiotic devices on which such
texts rely. The chapters in this book were originally published as
a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.
Climate change and the apocalypse are frequently associated in the
popular imagination of the twenty-first century. This collection of
essays brings together climatologists, theologians, historians,
literary scholars, and philosophers to address and critically
assess this association. The contributing authors are concerned,
among other things, with the relation between cultural and
scientific discourses on climate change; the role of apocalyptic
images and narratives in representing environmental issues; and the
tension between reality and fiction in apocalyptic representations
of catastrophes. By focusing on how figures in fictional texts
interact with their environment and deal with the consequences of
climate change, this volume foregrounds the broader social and
cultural function of apocalyptic narratives of climate change. By
evoking a sense of collective human destiny in the face of the
ultimate catastrophe, apocalyptic narratives have both cautionary
and inspirational functions. Determining the extent to which such
narratives square with scientific knowledge of climate change is
one of the main aims of this book.
This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation
of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative
strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or
stable connection between narrative techniques and world views.
Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed
through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the
contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative
techniques are employed and under what conditions.
This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation
of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative
strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or
stable connection between narrative techniques and world views.
Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed
through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the
contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative
techniques are employed and under what conditions.
The term "hazardous wastes" covers a wide range of disused products
and production wastes generated not only in industrial sectors, but
also in all areas of everyday life. Hazardous wastes are to a large
extent shipped by sea to third countries for recycling or disposal.
While the procedural requirements for such movements are laid out
in the 1989 Basel Convention, explicit rules of responsibility and
liability for resulting damages are neither provided by the Basel
Convention nor by other international conventions. The Liability
Protocol to the Basel Convention of 1999 has not yet entered into
force. This book examines the existing rules of responsibility and
liability applying to States and private persons and outlines the
conditions under which liability may be incurred. Subsequently, the
advantages and shortcomings of the 1999 Liability Protocol are
analyzed. Although this Protocol faces substantial political
headwind, from a legal perspective it includes principally useful
and reasonable approaches and should therefore be ratified.
This collection of essays looks at two important manifestations of
postclassical narratology, namely transmedial narratology on the
one hand, and unnatural narratology on the other. The articles deal
with films, graphic novels, computer games, web series, the
performing arts, journalism, reality games, music, musicals, and
the representation of impossibilities. The essays demonstrate how
new media and genres as well as unnatural narratives challenge
classical forms of narration in ways that call for the development
of analytical tools and modelling systems that move beyond
classical structuralist narratology. The articles thus contribute
to the further development of both transmedial and unnatural
narrative theory, two of the most important manifestations of
postclassical narratology.
In recent years, the study of unnatural narratives has become an
exciting new but still disparate research program in narrative
theory. For the first time, this collection of essays presents and
discusses the new analytical tools that have so far been developed
on the basis of unnatural novels, short stories, and plays and
extends these findings through analyses of testimonies, comics,
graphic novels, films, and oral narratives. Many narratives do not
only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it but confront us
with strange narrative worlds which rely on principles that have
very little to do with the actual world around us. The essays in
this collection develop new narratological tools and modeling
systems which are designed to capture the strangeness and
extravagance of such anti-realist narratives. Taken together, the
essays offer a systematic investigation of anti-mimetic techniques
and strategies that relate to different narrative parameters,
different media, and different periods within literary history.
This book investigates the ways in which Charles Dickens's mature
fiction, prison novels of the twentieth century, and prison films
narrate the prison. To begin with, this study illustrates how
fictional narratives occasionally depart from the realities of
prison life, and interprets these narrations of the prison against
the foil of historical analyses of the experience of imprisonment
in Britain and America. Second, this book addresses the
significance of prison metaphors in novels and films, and uses them
as starting points for new interpretations of the narratives of its
corpus. Finally, this study investigates the ideological
underpinnings of prison narratives by addressing the question of
whether they generate cultural understandings of the legitimacy or
illegitimacy of the prison. While Dickens's mature fiction
primarily represents the prison experience in terms of the unjust
suffering of many sympathetic inmates, prison narratives of the
twentieth century tend to focus on one newcomer who is sent to
prison because he committed a trivial crime and then suffers under
a brutal system. And while the fate of this unique character is
represented as being terrible and unjust, the attitude towards the
mass of ordinary prisoners is complicit with the common view that
'real' criminals have to be imprisoned. Such prison narratives
invite us to sympathize with the quasi-innocent prisoner-hero but
do not allow us to empathize with the 'deviant' rest of the prison
population and thus implicitly sanction the existence of prisons.
These delimitations are linked to wider cultural demarcations: the
newcomer is typically a member of the white, male, and heterosexual
middle class, and has to go through a process of symbolic
'feminization' in prison that threatens his masculinity (violent
and sadistic guards, 'homosexual' rapes and time in the 'hole'
normally play an important role). The ill-treatment of this
prisoner-hero is then usually countered by means of his escape so
that the manliness of our hero and, by extension, the phallic power
of the white middle class are restored. Such narratives do not
address the actual situation in British and American prisons.
Rather, they primarily present us with stories about the unjust
victimization of 'innocent' members of the white and heterosexual
middle class, and they additionally code coloured and homosexual
inmates as 'real' criminals who belong where they are. Furthermore,
Dickens's mature fiction focuses on 'negative' metaphors of
imprisonment that describe the prison as a tomb, a cage, or in
terms of hell. By means of these metaphors, which highlight the
inmates' agony, Dickens condemns the prison system as such.
Twentieth-century narratives, on the other hand, only critique
discipline-based institutions but argue in favour of rehabilitative
penal styles. More specifically, they describe the former by using
'negative' metaphors and the latter through positive ones that
invite us to see the prison as a womb, a matrix of spiritual
rebirth, a catalyst of intense friendship or as an 'academy'.
Prison narratives of the twentieth century suggest that society
primarily needs such reformative prisons for coloured and
homosexual inmates.
A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and
dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible
in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the
storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of
narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today's
world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout
the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the
heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel,
the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the
science-fiction novel, among others. Unnatural Narrative looks at
the startling and persistent presence of the impossible or "the
unnatural" throughout British and American literary history.
Layering the lenses of cognitive narratology, frame theory, and
possible-worlds theory, Unnatural Narrative offers a rigorous and
engaging new characterization of the unnatural and what it yields
for individual readers as well as literary culture. Jan Alber
demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in
literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena
become conventional in readers' minds, altogether expanding our
sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of
narrative engagement.
In this volume, an international group of contributors presents
new perspectives on narrative. Using David Herman's 1999 definition
of "postclassical narratology" from Narratologies: New Perspectives
on Narrative Analysis (OSUP) as their launching point, these eleven
essayists explore the various ways in which new approaches overlap
and interrelate to form new ways of understanding narrative texts.
Postclassical narratology has reached a new phase of consolidation
but also continued diversification. This collection therefore
discriminates between what one could call a critical but
frame-abiding and a more radical frame-transcending or
frame-shattering handling of the structuralist paradigm.
Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses discusses a
large variety of different aspects of narrative, such as extensions
of classical narratology, new generic applications (autobiography,
oral narratives, poetry, painting, and film), the history of
narratology, the issue of fictionality, the role of cognition, and
questions of authorship and authority, as well as thematic matters
related to ethics, gender, and queering. Additionally, it uses a
wide spectrum of critical approaches, including feminism,
psychoanalysis, media studies, the rhetorical theory of narrative,
unnatural narratology, and cognitive studies. In this manner the
essays manage to produce new insights into many key issues in
narratology.
The contributors also demonstrate that narratologists nowadays
see the object of their research as more variegated than was the
case twenty years ago: they resort to a number of different methods
in combination when approaching a problem, and they tend to ground
their analyses in a rich contextual framework.
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