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Xerxes: motivation and explanation (Books VII–IX)

Emily Baragwanath

in Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus

This chapter examines the interaction of ascriptions of motivation with wider patterns of explanation for Xerxes' failure, illustrating how, for example, specific attributions of motive—particularly ... More

This chapter examines the interaction of ascriptions of motivation with wider patterns of explanation for Xerxes' failure, illustrating how, for example, specific attributions of motive—particularly the alternative possibilities—may encapsulate and draw attention to wider explanations. They may strengthen the impression that different explanations arise from different perspectives (particularly Greek versus Persian), thus illuminating the role of focalization in fashioning motives. The charge of megalophrosunê at Histories 7.24 is reevaluated, with Xerxes' notorious digging of the Athos Canal viewed as a matter as much of display as of hybris. The twin comparisons of Xerxes with his predecessors Darius and Cambyses highlight how Xerxes' behaviour is often at least as much the result of the circumstances in which he finds himself as of his character.Less

Focus and Wh Constructions

Enoch Oladé Aboh

in The Morphosyntax of Complement-Head Sequences: Clause Structure and Word Order Patterns in Kwa

This chapter investigates two other instantiations of the C-system: focalization and wh-questions. Firstly it examines constructions in Gungbe and shows that this language involves a focus process ... More

This chapter investigates two other instantiations of the C-system: focalization and wh-questions. Firstly it examines constructions in Gungbe and shows that this language involves a focus process that necessarily triggers leftward movement of the focused category (i.e., a maximal projection or a head) to a specific focus position. It then argues that focus phrases and wh-phrases are licensed in the focus position, [spec FocP], and a last section concludes the chapter.Less

Formal Models in Narrative Analysis

David Herman

Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur (eds)

in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative

This chapter considers formal models of narrative and the nature of the theory of narrative. After discussing the diachronic and synchronic approaches to investigating the role of formal models in ... More

This chapter considers formal models of narrative and the nature of the theory of narrative. After discussing the diachronic and synchronic approaches to investigating the role of formal models in narrative analysis, the chapter looks at those ideas about models and modeling as a kind of bridge between humanistic and technoscientific discourse. It then evaluates descriptive and functional classifications of models, along with a range of perspectives on mathematical models and modeling. It also presents a case study in metanarratology, with a particular focus on modeling practices that have been brought to bear on focalization. It also analyzes some instances of the confluence of the formal study of narrative and mathematics, including the use of permutation groups, as well as the synergy between mathematically based theories of structural linguistics and early work on story grammars.Less

Tales of Contingency, Contingencies of Telling: Toward an Algorithm of Narrative Subjectivity

Jan Christoph Meister

Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur (eds)

in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative

This chapter examines whether mathematics can help us model aesthetic contingency, and hence create narrative subjectivity. It begins by considering narrative subjectivity as a hard-wired feature of ... More

This chapter examines whether mathematics can help us model aesthetic contingency, and hence create narrative subjectivity. It begins by considering narrative subjectivity as a hard-wired feature of narrative representation and how this feature reflects the post-Enlightenment view of human existence that replaced the old belief in Providence with a new explanatory model, that of existential contingency. The discussion proceeds by exploring the aesthetic and philosophical consequences of this explanatory model for narrative, first by looking at Leo Perutz's stories that illustrate the problem of contingency from various angles, and then by discussing the so-called story generator algorithm (SGA) that aims to fabricate contingency. The chapter also explains how perspective and focalization, two ways in which theorists have tried to understand narrative subjectivity, can be formalized in the context of the SGA. Finally, it offers suggestions for how mathematical tools may help in the computational modeling of narrative subjectivity.Less

Character‐focused Narration

Gregory Currie

in Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories

Stories are narrated from a point of view, but, occasionally the narrator, of whatever kind, modulates the style of narration to take account of the point of view of some other character. This ... More

Stories are narrated from a point of view, but, occasionally the narrator, of whatever kind, modulates the style of narration to take account of the point of view of some other character. This chapter examines the methods that lie behind this character‐focused narration. It is argued that this phenomenon has been misunderstood, notably by Genette, whose account has led down the blind alley of focalization. Character‐focused narration is best explained by invoking the mechanisms used to explain framing: expression and imitation. It is shown how a variety of stylistic and grammatical devices, including free indirect discourse, aid character‐focused narration and serve, on occasions, to encourage empathic contact with charactersLess

Perspective: Otto the Great

Alastair Matthews

in The Kaiserchronik: A Medieval Narrative

This chapter examines narrative perspective in the episode about Otto the Great in the Kaiserchronik. It argues against concentrating on focalization at the expense of other aspects of perspective, ... More

This chapter examines narrative perspective in the episode about Otto the Great in the Kaiserchronik. It argues against concentrating on focalization at the expense of other aspects of perspective, as much recent research has done, and presents Boris Uspensky's planes of perspective as an alternative analytical framework. The chapter shows, with reference to temporal, phraseological, and psychological perspective, that Otto is capable of reflecting on his actions rather than simply embodying the fixed ideological role of a model of good Christian rulership. The associated nuances of perspective are highlighted by means of comparisons with hagiographical and historiographical texts in Latin and the vernacular, including the Frutolf/Ekkehard chronicle.Less

SPEECH, SILENCE, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN GÍSLA SAGA

Heather O'Donoghue

in Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative

This chapter analyses the use of verses as dialogue in the prosimetrum of Gísla saga. It shows how crediting a saga character with a verse may be a literary device to make manifest that character's ... More

This chapter analyses the use of verses as dialogue in the prosimetrum of Gísla saga. It shows how crediting a saga character with a verse may be a literary device to make manifest that character's inner life, something not accessible through the usual external focalization of saga narrative, through soliloquy, and how the attribution of verse dialogue can mark out a character as a dominant, controlling voice in the narrative.Less

Introduction

Kylee-Anne Hingston

in Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

Prompted by Victorians’ frequent conflation of body and text, the introduction argues that Victorian fiction’s narrative form, specifically plot structure and focalization, contributed to the ... More

Prompted by Victorians’ frequent conflation of body and text, the introduction argues that Victorian fiction’s narrative form, specifically plot structure and focalization, contributed to the development of disability as a concept; in particular, as fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. The chapter addresses focalization’s evocation of the perceiving body, linking focalization to theories of staring and the specular in disability studies, and it provides a history of scholarship on Victorian illness and disability, thus placing the book’s argument in the fields of narratology, disability studies, and Victorian studies.Less

Grotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris

Kylee-Anne Hingston

in Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

This chapter argues that Victor Hugo’s historical Gothic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)—especially in its popular English translation, Hunchback of Notre Dame (1833)—set a precedent in Victorian ... More

This chapter argues that Victor Hugo’s historical Gothic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)—especially in its popular English translation, Hunchback of Notre Dame (1833)—set a precedent in Victorian fiction for investigating the disabled body through narrative form and focalization. The chapter shows how Hugo uses external focalization from a perspective outside the narrative action to portray the disabled body as grotesque and thus inherently deviant but uses strategic internal focalization through characters inside the narrative to destabilize the boundaries between normalcy and abnormality. In particular, focalizing externally on Quasimodo, Hugo separates reader empathy from him and dehumanizes his body; but focalizing through Quasimodo forces readers to share his embodiment, removing the distinction between self and other. Moreover, the chapter contends that the novel’s structural hybridity, which combines disparate genres, enables the dialogic conflict of these two opposing voices and so provides a structural prototype whereby Victorian novels approached disability.Less

Social Bodies: Dickens and the Disabled Narrator in Bleak House

Kylee-Anne Hingston

in Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

Dickens makes disability central to his social condition novel Bleak House (1851–53) by revealing exactly midway through its serial publication that Esther Summerson, one of its two narrators, has ... More

Dickens makes disability central to his social condition novel Bleak House (1851–53) by revealing exactly midway through its serial publication that Esther Summerson, one of its two narrators, has disfiguring facial scars. This chapter argues that splitting narration between Esther and a disembodied third-person voice throws into relief the dissimilarities between external and internal focalization and their articulation of disability. Notably, while Bleak House’s externally focalized third-person narration usually marginalizes disability and illness by making them symbolize social corruption through humour and sentimentality, when focalizing through disabled narrators and characters, the novel repositions disability and disease as ordinary aspects of the body’s normal instability and uses humour to criticize sentimental metaphorization of disability. Both attitudes towards disability simultaneously exist in the novel through its hybrid form that lacks full narrative closure.Less

Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

Kylee-Anne Hingston

in Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and ... More

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and focalization of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), this chapter argues that bodies in sensation fiction function both as spectacle, exhibitions of physical instability, and as specimens, case studies on the source of identity. In Aurora Floyd, focalization through an authoritative external perspective provides ‘correct’ interpretations of bodies which have previously been misinterpreted by physiognomy, phrenology, and lineage. In particular, the narrator uses external focalization on disabled villains to manifest how identity appears in bodies and to place eugenic value on those with healthy bodies. By contrast, The Moonstone, lacking authoritative external focalization due to its multiple first-person narrators, uses plot to reveal misinterpretations of disabled bodies, in particular that of Rosanna Spearman. In addition, internally focalized interactions between normate narrators and disabled characters in the novel often cause the narrators to recognize the instability of their own identities and bodies, and thus of normalcy. However, the novel’s overall narrative structure works to control deviance through linearity, which imposes normalcy as a stable, final result.Less

Fairy-Tale Bodies: Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince

Kylee-Anne Hingston

in Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

As a literary fairy tale, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874) employs a fantasy setting and magical circumstances to depict the ... More

As a literary fairy tale, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874) employs a fantasy setting and magical circumstances to depict the moral, psychological, and physical development of its hero, Prince Dolor. The hybrid story combines fairy tale, Bildungsroman, and parable, defies conventional narrative closure, and produces incongruous understandings of disability. The story’s narrative trajectory moves towards closure, first reinforcing Dolor’s physical deviance and the eradicating it through magical prosthetic gifts; as such, the outer structure creates a story of disability as abnormal, restricting, and in need of compensation if not cure. However, by making readers aware first of the narrator’s physical limitations and of their own roles as spectators, and then by focalizing through the disabled hero while he is a spectator, The Little Lame Prince undermines its earlier use of Dolor as a sentimental spectacle. Moreover, moments in which readers focalize with Dolor through his magical prostheses reveal the limitations of all bodies and speculate on the beauty and infinite variety of physical difference. These colliding views of disability in The Little Lame Prince exhibit the complex, shifting role of the body in Victorian thought.Less

Discussions: Affect, Sociopolitics and the Ensemble Narrative

Wyatt Moss-Wellington

in Narrative Humanism: Kindness and Complexity in Fiction and Film

The second chapter of Part III moves to theorise some of the concerns raised in suburban ensemble cinema, looking at their class and spatial politics, use of sentimentality alongside oft-cruel ... More

The second chapter of Part III moves to theorise some of the concerns raised in suburban ensemble cinema, looking at their class and spatial politics, use of sentimentality alongside oft-cruel humour, and their responses to concomitant developments in American politics across the 2000s.Less

Dual Focalization, Retrospective Fictional Autobiography, and the Ethics of Lolita

James Phelan

in Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology and the Brain

As we explore Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, we see that Humbert Humbert's character provides a description of how he had imagined the murals on the walls of the Enchanted Hunters Hotel after ... More

As we explore Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, we see that Humbert Humbert's character provides a description of how he had imagined the murals on the walls of the Enchanted Hunters Hotel after articulating how he felt about his experience regarding his first sexual intercourse with Dolores Haze. It is important to note that the narration he presents in the succeeding chapter is different from the statements he made in the preceding chapter. In this chapter, the author attempts to provide an explanation regarding the narrative logic that underlies the contradiction within the autobiographical narration that Humbert's character displays. Also, the author attempts to look into how this contradiction reflects the ethical dimensions involved with Nabokov as the book's author and with Humbert as a fictional character. In doing so, the author makes use of the following interrelated elements: self-consciousness, focalization, and unreliability.Less

Putting up Pyramids, Characterizing Kings*

Katherine Clarke

in Fame and Infamy: Essays on Characterization in Greek and Roman Biography and Historiography

This chapter explores the interaction between man and nature in Herodotus through the figure of Cheops, the pyramid builder. It argues that, although grand engineering projects are often used in ... More

This chapter explores the interaction between man and nature in Herodotus through the figure of Cheops, the pyramid builder. It argues that, although grand engineering projects are often used in Herodotus to contribute to a negative characterization of players within the narrative, the focalization of such episodes introduces considerably greater complexity. Rather than simply concluding that building pyramids constitutes a despotic abuse of nature, as has been traditionally assumed of Cheops, this chapter notes that negative comments about Cheops and his pyramid-building activities are all focalized through the Egyptians. Herodotus, in propria persona, highlights instead the miraculous technical achievement of this project, and reverses the damnatio memoriae imposed by the Egyptians on this king. It is possible, therefore, by not only setting this episode alongside other instances of man’s control over nature, but also paying attention to issues of focalization, to challenge the view that Herodotus condemns this king.Less

The clause and VP

Erich R. Round

in Kayardild Morphology and Syntax

Chapter 5 sets forth a formal analysis of inflectional features associated with full clauses and verb phrases (VPs). It examines sejunct and nonsejunct complementization and posits two ... More

Chapter 5 sets forth a formal analysis of inflectional features associated with full clauses and verb phrases (VPs). It examines sejunct and nonsejunct complementization and posits two complementization features, one of which blocks the realization of the other, and both of which attach to S-category nodes. Crucial evidence comes from topicalized and focalized DPs. Types of embedded S and VP and their permissible DP constituents are examined, with two new adverbial embedded VP types identified. Conditions on multiple verb heads are discussed, and arguments presented for the existence of two distinct verbal complement DP positions. An analysis of tense inflection motivates an articulated clause structure with features attaching, and DPs adjoining, at various heights. Arguments are furnished in defence of a syntactic analysis and against a diacritic analysis of the inflectional facts.Less

An Ethics of Wartime Protest: Voicing Servant Characters in To the Lighthouse and The Years

Eleanor McNees

in Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Vol. 2 Aesthetics and Theory

Reacting to the Armistice of November 11, 1918 in her diary, Virginia Woolf reported seeing a “fat slovenly woman” on the train from Richmond to London and commented that “she & her like possessed ... More

Reacting to the Armistice of November 11, 1918 in her diary, Virginia Woolf reported seeing a “fat slovenly woman” on the train from Richmond to London and commented that “she & her like possessed London, & alone celebrated peace in their sordid way...” (D 1:216). Of Peace Day, July 19, 1919, designated as the official celebration of the peace, she later remarked how the “poor deluded servants” had taken the bus to see the decorations left over from the celebratory parade. She stated, “I was right: it is a servants [sic.] peace” (D 1:294). In spite, however, of these patronizing and slightly derogatory comments about servants’ crowd mentality, Woolf initially chose to present both the Great War and the Armistice through individual servants’ eyes in the Time Passes interval in To the Lighthouse and in the 1914 and 1918 chapters of The Years. The lurching Mrs. McNab in To the Lighthouse and the hobbling Crosby in The Years are not among the sordid celebrators Woolf criticizes in her diary. Instead, their painful efforts to persevere regardless of war or peace reflect Woolf’s criticism of a jingoistic and patriarchal patriotism that panders to the lower classes. Adapting Gérard Genette’s and Mieke Bal’s narrative structures of focalization, this essay considers Woolf’s ethical struggle as a novelist to articulate private and voiceless alternative perspectives through the servant characters. McNees traces Woolf’s successive revisions of both novels from holograph to published edition in which she substantially reduces the servants’ roles to render them less effectual as alternative reflectors of war and peace. Against critical analyses that consider Woolf’s revisions as mainly aesthetic, the essay argues for an ethics of revision in which Woolf critiques her own methods of manipulating the servants’ views of war and peace to produce an authentic alternative to the paternalistic public version. Examining the revision process of both Time Passes and the first “expurgated chunk” of The Years, McNees suggests that Woolf’s efforts at focalization through Mrs. McNab and Crosby ultimately fail because, as Woolf herself states in “The Niece of an Earl” (1928),, “...it is impossible, it would seem, for working men to write in their own language about their own lives” (E 5:132). Nevertheless, Woolf’s attempt to cross this divide to register a perspective otherwise silenced and obscured deserves the qualified praise she rendered Meredith.Less

Effects of Narrative Filters

Michael Nitsche

in Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds

Both visualization and soundscapes point to the generation of a complex narrative perspective toward a narrated event created by the presentation. The narrative perspective emerges from the available ... More

Both visualization and soundscapes point to the generation of a complex narrative perspective toward a narrated event created by the presentation. The narrative perspective emerges from the available interactive options, but also from the way the space is told to the player. The mediated plane works like a narrative filter between the rule-based plane and the play space. This chapter argues that the narrative perspective opens up layers of guidance through focalization in games. For 3D games, these are not optional add-ons but ever-present effects in 3D game spaces.Less