George Wilson
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159216
- eISBN:
- 9780191673566
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159216.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter gives a study on film narrative and narrative meaning. The study is divided in three categories: explicative interpretation, bigger than life, and meaning as significance. The first ...
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This chapter gives a study on film narrative and narrative meaning. The study is divided in three categories: explicative interpretation, bigger than life, and meaning as significance. The first category is concerned with how Bordwell constructed a broad challenge to what has been the dominance of interpretative work in the interpretation of film studies. The second category concerns how Wilson concentrated initially upon the enigmatic scene. He discussed how ‘meaning’ arises in a narrative setting. The last category is about the meaning as signification and the meaning as significance. There is a familiar sense in which the meaning of an event or action is fundamentally constructed in terms of its place within a relevant network or casuality. It is important to point out that the liabilities of linguistic models of narrative meaning and alternative conception are available.Less
This chapter gives a study on film narrative and narrative meaning. The study is divided in three categories: explicative interpretation, bigger than life, and meaning as significance. The first category is concerned with how Bordwell constructed a broad challenge to what has been the dominance of interpretative work in the interpretation of film studies. The second category concerns how Wilson concentrated initially upon the enigmatic scene. He discussed how ‘meaning’ arises in a narrative setting. The last category is about the meaning as signification and the meaning as significance. There is a familiar sense in which the meaning of an event or action is fundamentally constructed in terms of its place within a relevant network or casuality. It is important to point out that the liabilities of linguistic models of narrative meaning and alternative conception are available.
Alessandro Barchiesi
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691161815
- eISBN:
- 9781400852482
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691161815.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. This is the first English translation of one ...
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The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. This is the first English translation of one of the most important and influential modern studies in this tradition. As a revised and expanded edition it advances innovative approaches even as it recuperates significant earlier interpretations, from Servius to G. N. Knauer. Approaching Homeric allusions in the Aeneid as “narrative effects” rather than glimpses of the creative mind of the author at work, the book demonstrates how these allusions generate hesitations and questions, as well as insights and guidance, and how they participate in the creation of narrative meaning. The book also examines how layers of competing interpretations in Homer are relevant to the Aeneid, revealing again the richness of the Homeric tradition as a component of meaning in the Aeneid. Finally, the book goes beyond previous studies of the Aeneid by distinguishing between two forms of Homeric intertextuality: reusing a text as an individual model or as a generic matrix. For this edition, a new chapter has been added, and in a new afterword the author puts the book in the context of changes in the study of Latin literature and intertextuality. The book has valuable insights for the wider study of imitation, allusion, intertextuality, epic, and literary theory.Less
The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. This is the first English translation of one of the most important and influential modern studies in this tradition. As a revised and expanded edition it advances innovative approaches even as it recuperates significant earlier interpretations, from Servius to G. N. Knauer. Approaching Homeric allusions in the Aeneid as “narrative effects” rather than glimpses of the creative mind of the author at work, the book demonstrates how these allusions generate hesitations and questions, as well as insights and guidance, and how they participate in the creation of narrative meaning. The book also examines how layers of competing interpretations in Homer are relevant to the Aeneid, revealing again the richness of the Homeric tradition as a component of meaning in the Aeneid. Finally, the book goes beyond previous studies of the Aeneid by distinguishing between two forms of Homeric intertextuality: reusing a text as an individual model or as a generic matrix. For this edition, a new chapter has been added, and in a new afterword the author puts the book in the context of changes in the study of Latin literature and intertextuality. The book has valuable insights for the wider study of imitation, allusion, intertextuality, epic, and literary theory.
Carolyn Dewald
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520241275
- eISBN:
- 9780520930971
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520241275.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Archaeology: Classical
As a sustained analysis of the connections between narrative structure and meaning in the History of the Peloponnesian War, this study revolves around a curious aspect of Thucydides' work: the first ...
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As a sustained analysis of the connections between narrative structure and meaning in the History of the Peloponnesian War, this study revolves around a curious aspect of Thucydides' work: the first ten years of the war's history are formed on principles quite different from those shaping the years that follow. Although aspects of this change in style have been recognized in previous scholarship, this book analyzes how its various elements are structured, used, and related to each other. This study argues that these changes in style and organization reflect how Thucydides' own understanding of the war changed over time. Throughout, however, the History's narrative structure bears witness to Thucydides' dialogic efforts to depict the complexities of rational choice and behavior on the part of the war's combatants, as well as his own authorial interest in accuracy of representation. In the introduction and conclusion, the book explores some ways in which details of style and narrative structure are central to the larger theoretical issue of history's ability to meaningfully represent the past. It also surveys changes in historiography and considers how Thucydidean scholarship has reflected and responded to larger cultural trends.Less
As a sustained analysis of the connections between narrative structure and meaning in the History of the Peloponnesian War, this study revolves around a curious aspect of Thucydides' work: the first ten years of the war's history are formed on principles quite different from those shaping the years that follow. Although aspects of this change in style have been recognized in previous scholarship, this book analyzes how its various elements are structured, used, and related to each other. This study argues that these changes in style and organization reflect how Thucydides' own understanding of the war changed over time. Throughout, however, the History's narrative structure bears witness to Thucydides' dialogic efforts to depict the complexities of rational choice and behavior on the part of the war's combatants, as well as his own authorial interest in accuracy of representation. In the introduction and conclusion, the book explores some ways in which details of style and narrative structure are central to the larger theoretical issue of history's ability to meaningfully represent the past. It also surveys changes in historiography and considers how Thucydidean scholarship has reflected and responded to larger cultural trends.
Thomas Keymer
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199245925
- eISBN:
- 9780191715341
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245925.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
The coexistence with Sterne's noisy displays of learned-wit of his quiet but no less pervasive engagement with the novel genre takes several forms, and marks not only the novelistic-sentimental final ...
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The coexistence with Sterne's noisy displays of learned-wit of his quiet but no less pervasive engagement with the novel genre takes several forms, and marks not only the novelistic-sentimental final volumes of Tristram Shandy but also its satirical-Scriblerian opening. Tristram Shandy absorbs and resumes the most vexed topics of experimentation and debate in novels such as Clarissa and Tom Jones, notably the mimetic efficacy or otherwise of narrative language, the dynamics of communication between narrator and reader, and the openness of narrative meaning to plural construction. Sterne also adopts the episodic repertoire and formal reflexiveness of now largely forgotten experimental novels of the 1750s, ostentatiously trumping their prior deployment of both with elaborate displays of narrative involution and excess, especially through visual devices that dramatize representational impasse. He digests and reworks the most innovative feature these novels share, which is their tendency to push a literary self-consciousness inherited from Fielding into a more directly practical self-consciousness about the mechanisms and institutions of print culture: specifically, about the relationship between authorial production and its materialization as a printed object, and about the overdetermination of both by the forces of literary commodification, consumer fashion, and regulatory reviewing.Less
The coexistence with Sterne's noisy displays of learned-wit of his quiet but no less pervasive engagement with the novel genre takes several forms, and marks not only the novelistic-sentimental final volumes of Tristram Shandy but also its satirical-Scriblerian opening. Tristram Shandy absorbs and resumes the most vexed topics of experimentation and debate in novels such as Clarissa and Tom Jones, notably the mimetic efficacy or otherwise of narrative language, the dynamics of communication between narrator and reader, and the openness of narrative meaning to plural construction. Sterne also adopts the episodic repertoire and formal reflexiveness of now largely forgotten experimental novels of the 1750s, ostentatiously trumping their prior deployment of both with elaborate displays of narrative involution and excess, especially through visual devices that dramatize representational impasse. He digests and reworks the most innovative feature these novels share, which is their tendency to push a literary self-consciousness inherited from Fielding into a more directly practical self-consciousness about the mechanisms and institutions of print culture: specifically, about the relationship between authorial production and its materialization as a printed object, and about the overdetermination of both by the forces of literary commodification, consumer fashion, and regulatory reviewing.
Alison Taylor
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474415224
- eISBN:
- 9781474434829
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415224.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In contrast to the films examined in earlier chapters, which tend to culminate in events of violence, and end abruptly thereafter, chapter five turns to films which draw attention to the endurance of ...
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In contrast to the films examined in earlier chapters, which tend to culminate in events of violence, and end abruptly thereafter, chapter five turns to films which draw attention to the endurance of the everyday, and the persistence of violence within it. Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (1998) and Markus Schleinzer’s Michael (2011) offer insight into what a return to the everyday following violent disruption might look like. What is potentially most troubling about these films is their implication that violence and the everyday are perhaps not mutually exclusive. In varying ways, both films depict violence as something that might be absorbed into the very fabric of the ordinary. Drawing on theoretical conceptions of everyday time as both measured and perpetual, eventful and repetitious, this chapter argues that these films frustrate our desire for coherence by making explicit the fallacy of the narratives we construct to make the everyday meaningful. Chapter five posits that by undermining our attempts to understand on-screen violence with legible meaning, these films extend their potency by calling attention to the meaning we project on life outside the cinema; I Stand Alone and Michael challenge us to question just what is at stake in acknowledging the everyday as indeterminate.Less
In contrast to the films examined in earlier chapters, which tend to culminate in events of violence, and end abruptly thereafter, chapter five turns to films which draw attention to the endurance of the everyday, and the persistence of violence within it. Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (1998) and Markus Schleinzer’s Michael (2011) offer insight into what a return to the everyday following violent disruption might look like. What is potentially most troubling about these films is their implication that violence and the everyday are perhaps not mutually exclusive. In varying ways, both films depict violence as something that might be absorbed into the very fabric of the ordinary. Drawing on theoretical conceptions of everyday time as both measured and perpetual, eventful and repetitious, this chapter argues that these films frustrate our desire for coherence by making explicit the fallacy of the narratives we construct to make the everyday meaningful. Chapter five posits that by undermining our attempts to understand on-screen violence with legible meaning, these films extend their potency by calling attention to the meaning we project on life outside the cinema; I Stand Alone and Michael challenge us to question just what is at stake in acknowledging the everyday as indeterminate.
Alison Futrell (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474407847
- eISBN:
- 9781474430982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474407847.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, World History: BCE to 500CE
This chapter explores how the slaves of Batiatus' ludus rebuild their individual identities by redefining categories of value and connection, gender and family, as they are stripped of their past and ...
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This chapter explores how the slaves of Batiatus' ludus rebuild their individual identities by redefining categories of value and connection, gender and family, as they are stripped of their past and end up becoming a band of brothers with their own loyalties and narratives of meaning. As this chapter shows, a number of these narratives are embedded within Roman artifacts, such as the herms in Batiatus' villa or the rudis of Gannicus: for instance, the amphitheater of Capua functions as a visible expression of imperial prestige, deployed as a tool of local power that resonates all the way to the city of Rome.Less
This chapter explores how the slaves of Batiatus' ludus rebuild their individual identities by redefining categories of value and connection, gender and family, as they are stripped of their past and end up becoming a band of brothers with their own loyalties and narratives of meaning. As this chapter shows, a number of these narratives are embedded within Roman artifacts, such as the herms in Batiatus' villa or the rudis of Gannicus: for instance, the amphitheater of Capua functions as a visible expression of imperial prestige, deployed as a tool of local power that resonates all the way to the city of Rome.
