Search Results (70)

Hauntology has been used as theoretical scaffolding for analysing numerous diverse forms of expression within literary, film, and cultural studies. Its obvious connection to central ontological features—such as temporality itself, memory, trauma, repression, addiction, the embeddedness of lost futures in the past, and historiology more generally—has given it a status as a distinctly versatile and useful analytic tool. In terms of genre, it has primordial connections to two immensely popular and perennially vital categories of fiction that have a relatively long history as genres, that is, gothic/horror and crime fiction. Both genres are obsessed with the past and frequently also with the actual or potential return of the past in the form of spectral presences. In addition, the temporal hauntological core exists in other types of literature in which haunting does not initially seem to have an immediate focus or a central structuring function. This essay centres on a collection of such novels, namely Septology I–VII by Nobel Prize laureate Jon Fosse (2023). The analysis zooms in on the idiosyncratic phenomenology of Fosse’s writing. His carefully crafted prose allows the narratological forms themselves to incorporate hauntology as a dominant constituent of the structure of cognition, experience—and ultimately the constitution of the lifeworld itself—and how these take shape as the artistic medium that gradually shines forth as an overall hauntological manifestation. The literary analysis centres on micro and macro aspects of repetition in Fosse’s thoroughly worked out narratological and phenomenological configurations. Full article

This article examines the evolution of literary genres within the contemporary media ecosystem shaped by convergence culture and participatory practices. Traditionally understood as classificatory and normative frameworks, genres are increasingly challenged by transmedia storytelling, digital platforms, and collaborative forms of cultural production. Contemporary narratives often expand across multiple media environments, where each platform contributes differently to the construction of meaning and audience engagement. In this context, genres become fluid and dynamic structures negotiated among authors, industries, and audiences. The essay combines theoretical reflection with the analysis of transmedia narratives, online literary platforms, and fanfiction communities to investigate how digital participation reshapes literary forms and modes of reception. Particular attention is devoted to the intermedial and collective dimensions of contemporary storytelling and to their implications for genre theory. Rather than simply arguing that genres have become increasingly fluid, the article proposes that convergence culture transforms the analytical function of genre itself. Through three complementary case studies, it argues that genre should be understood less as a stable classificatory taxonomy than as an interpretative and discursive framework continuously negotiated across media, platforms, industries, and participatory audiences. Full article

This comparative study examines the interplay between moral rhetoric and material deprivation in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. Focusing on scenes in which authority figures articulate ideals of charity, order, or progress while children endure immediate neglect, the article argues that the irony resides not in individual dishonesty but in the structural failures of the institutions they represent. Through close reading of Dickens’s workhouse boardroom and McCourt’s leaking classroom, the analysis demonstrates how the child’s perspective exposes the chasm between abstract care and tangible neglect. Drawing on theories of spatial irony, ethics of care, and child narratology, the study suggests that literary representations of this contradiction offer a critical lens for understanding how poverty is managed through language rather than material intervention. By tracing this pattern from Victorian fiction to late-twentieth-century memoir, the article proposes that the leaking roof functions as an enduring symbol of social hypocrisy, wherein the discourse of compassion coexists with the architecture of decay. Full article

This article examines the narrative representation of high-technology clinical spaces and their challenging effects on the personhood of patient-protagonists in two Swiss hospital narratives: Walter Matthias Diggelmann’s Schatten (1979), a fictionalized autopathography on lung cancer, and Ulrike Ulrich’s Hinter den Augen (2013), which narrates an MRI examination. Combining classical narratology with the narratology of space, the paper delineates a shift from the twentieth- to the twenty-first-century text that moves from a critical representation of technologized hospital space as an antagonistic environment to a nuanced embrace of medical technology that intricately intertwines the machine and the self. As the analyses show, this shift from opposition to embrace of technology is accompanied and engendered by distinct structural characteristics: While both texts work with artistic forms of representing inner states, such as internal monologue and unreliable narration, their respective ‘poetics of the high-tech hospital’ diverge significantly, from a fundamentally dichotomous semantic setup (Diggelmann) to an integrative narrative based on formal mimesis (Ulrich). Focusing on how literary prose uniquely renders the experience of increasingly technologized hospital landscapes, the article contributes to literary scholarship at the intersection of the medical humanities, the cultural history of the hospital, and science and technology studies. Full article

This article examines how the memory of the 1947 Partition persists in contemporary Hindi fiction through a close reading of two short stories by Jyoti Chawla. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and engaging with trauma theory, narratology, and gender studies, the essay argues that Partition in these texts operates not as a completed historical event but as an ongoing condition that shapes subjectivity across generations. The analysis shows how memory is transmitted through objects, bodies, and narrative form, producing distinct gendered patterns of inheritance. By comparing material and spatial memory in “Cābī, ghar aur aṁdherā” with embodied and relational memory in “Lājo”, the article demonstrates how Chawla’s fiction reconfigures Partition as a persistent and unresolved structure within the contemporary present. This article contributes to current debates on postmemory and Partition literature by showing how gender and narrative form reshape the transmission of historical trauma across generations. The reactivation of violence in contemporary contexts—whether through communal unrest or gendered aggression—reveals the structural persistence of historical trauma. Full article

Recent scholarship in both Buddhist and Christian contexts has increasingly explored connections among utopia, the Pure Land, and the Kingdom of God, reinterpreting them as dynamic, this-worldly processes. Yet the role of narrative form in articulating such processual understandings remains underexplored. This study examines how the Gaṇḍavyūha (Ru fajie pin 入法界品) constructs the bodhisattva path through narrative structure, with particular focus on the episode of the Night Goddess Vāsantī. Using a narratological framework, the analysis integrates Seymour Chatman’s distinction between Story and Discourse with four analytical categories—Words, Dialogue, Actions, and Narration—adapted from Robert Alter’s work on biblical narrative. Close reading demonstrates that doctrinal meaning emerges through patterned interactions among perception, speech, action, and retrospective narration. Within this configuration, saṃsāra is presented as a closed and hazardous realm, while encounters with spiritual friends function as transformative interventions that redirect the practitioner’s trajectory. The avadāna structure further situates present attainment within an extended causal continuum, highlighting the reproducibility of the path. The study argues that the Gaṇḍavyūha presents a narrative model of practice in which utopia is not a fixed destination but an ongoing process enacted through a sequence of encounters. From a comparative perspective, this model offers a conceptual basis for Buddhist–Christian dialogue by highlighting relational and processual dimensions of transformation as they emerge in discussions of utopia, the Pure Land, and the Kingdom of God, without presupposing doctrinal equivalence. Full article

This article examines how contemporary domestic noir fiction and its online reception relate to the pathologization of women’s testimony. Combining feminist narratology, critical phenomenology, and Ian Hacking’s concept of “making up people,” we analyze Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train and A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window alongside Goodreads reviews of both novels. We argue that these texts mobilize women’s psychological distress—addiction, agoraphobia, depression, trauma, and gaslighting—as sources of narrative suspense while simultaneously casting doubt on women’s credibility as witnesses to their own experiences. Drawing on a thematically coded corpus of Goodreads reviews, we identify a spectrum of reader responses, ranging from diagnostic and moralizing readings that reproduce testimonial injustice to empathic and feminist readings that challenge pathologizing assumptions. By bringing textual analysis and reader-response research into dialogue, the article demonstrates that the credibility of female narrators is not determined by narrative form alone but is negotiated through broader cultural assumptions about women’s reliability and authority. Domestic noir thus emerges as a key site where women’s suffering becomes a contested object of interpretation in contemporary reading culture. Full article

We develop a categorical and operadic semantics for the diagrammatic proof system underlying the Greimas semiotic square. Building on a prior proof-theoretic formulation, we extract a typed signature of diagrammatic inference rules and construct the corresponding free coloured operad ${\mathcal{O}}_{\Sigma }$, whose elements correspond to proof trees. This establishes a precise correspondence between diagrammatic derivations and operadic terms, making explicit the compositional structure implicit in the original system. We then interpret these terms as wiring diagrams in a symmetric monoidal setting, yielding a graphical semantics in which intermediate semantic configurations are represented as flows through a network of operations. Within this framework, the construction of the semiotic square is realised as a single composite operation $\Omega$, obtained by operadic substitution of generators corresponding to negation, implication, and meta-term formation. Finally, we consider semantic interpretations of this structure as algebras of ${\mathcal{O}}_{\Sigma }$, yielding a category $\mathrm{Alg}\left({\mathcal{O}}_{\Sigma }\right)$, whose morphisms capture structure-preserving translations between interpretations. This provides a formal account of the extensibility of the square across domains such as seme-level analysis, modality, and narratology, and recasts it as a compositional semantic schema rather than a static relational diagram. Full article

The writing scene in East Africa has witnessed a rise in the emergence of contemporary literature. One example is Dust, a 2014 novel by the Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, who, in 2003, was awarded the Caine prize for African writing. The novel Dust has been reviewed from various angles. Dust introduces two female characters, Akai and Ajany, who are both connected to a key character in the novel: Odidi Oganda. How do the characters Akai and Ajany exemplify forms of hybrid identity shaped by colonial and diasporic contexts? This essay is about these two female characters who provide adequate material with which to explore hybrid identities during the colonial period and in the diaspora. Both experience trauma, which impacts their associations in their local communities and in the diaspora. Akai is tremendously affected by colonialism. She is a contract laborer impregnated by a British colonial settler who later attempts to kill her. Ajany moves in with an abusive man, whom she stabs to death in self-defense right before fleeing Brazil as a fugitive. This essay uses a Postcolonial Feminist lens to explore how these two characters propagate cultural resilience, challenge nationalist narratives, and demonstrate resistance. It employs the method of Narratological Text Analysis in order to present Akai and Ajany in their particular contexts. For analysis, the essay adopts a dialectical type of literary theorising. Full article

Addressing the prevalent issue of “physical preservation but spiritual silence” in the revitalisation of China’s national industrial heritage, this study proposes and empirically validates a “dual-track narrative” design framework that systematically translates cultural values into spatial experiences. The framework integrates a “figure–history” narrative, which crystallises historical lineage and symbolic spirit through spatial sequences, commemorative landmarks, and authentic remains, with a “scene–activity” narrative, which transforms former production spaces into dynamic, culturally vibrant stages through ecological restoration displays, industrial landscape transformation, and flexible activity implantation. Using Nantong Guangsheng Oil Mill as a single-case study, the research employs qualitative methods including archival analysis, field observation, and semi-structured interviews to examine how the dual-track framework operates in practice. The findings reveal that the “figure–history” narrative manifests in a walkable “time corridor” along the north–south axis, where architectural remnants from different eras are organised to materialise Zhang Jian’s industrial salvation ethos and the collective memory of generations of workers. Meanwhile, the “scene–activity” narrative activates underutilised spaces—such as the repurposing of acid treatment ponds into constructed wetlands and paved grounds into public stages—enabling ongoing cultural production, community interaction, and ecological healing. The study demonstrates that the dual-track framework bridges the historical and contemporary dimensions often treated separately in heritage practice, establishing a systematic “translation mechanism” from cultural decoding to design intervention. Theoretically, it contributes to industrial heritage research by integrating narratology, memory studies, heritage interpretation, and situationism into a coherent design methodology. Practically, it offers decision-makers evaluation criteria beyond the preservation-versus-development binary, provides designers with a mode of creative transformation grounded in material authenticity, and suggests to operators a content-driven, event-based model for sustaining heritage spaces. By spatialising and eventising narratives, the dual-track approach enables industrial heritage to function as a catalyst for cultural identity, social vitality, and economic sustainability, offering a transferable paradigm for the adaptive reuse of industrial heritage in contemporary urban contexts. Full article

Desire, a transformative force, is one of contemporary serial narratives’ most intricate and multifaceted dimensions. Far from being reducible to a mere representation of sexual attraction, desire in television seriality operates as a prism through which to explore issues of intimacy, identity, and power. This paper seeks to analyze how desire is staged and problematised within a set of emblematic series that have significantly shaped contemporary cultural imagination. Grey’s Anatomy explores the entanglement of desire with professional life, emotional fragility, and collective trauma, constructing narratives where eros intersects with affective labour and the negotiation of identity within high-pressure contexts. Sex and the City proposes a very different model, placing female desire at the centre as a space of autonomy, experimentation, and confrontation with the normative frameworks of late capitalist society. By contrast, The Handmaid’s Tale reimagines desire within a dystopian theocracy, assigning it an overtly political function: here, erotic impulses and affective attachments become acts of resistance against systemic repression and biopolitical control. More recently, Sex Education embodies a cultural shift, presenting desire through a plural and inclusive lens that embraces diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and relational practices. These case studies, when viewed collectively, reveal how television series rework cultural codes of sexuality and intimacy, producing new imaginaries of the body, pleasure, and identity. In this perspective, serial narratives emerge as key cultural laboratories, reproducing and challenging dominant ideologies of desire while offering audiences opportunities for recognition, critique, and affective engagement beyond the screen. Full article

This article offers the first systematic analytical methodology to understand distant play as a multidimensional, ludoliterary, critical, and philosophical practice of engaging with so-called idle or semi-idle games. It uses Anselm Pyta’s The Longing, a so far underexplored semi-idle, slow game that challenges traditional gameplay paradigms through its metareferential, bookish, philosophical, and contemplative structure, as a case study. Our central argument is that The Longing deploys antimimetic temporal mechanics, interpassive forms of bookish play, and ideas of existentialist resistance to explore themes of time, agency, and existential longing, thereby offering a reflective space for dealing with neo-liberal, post-pandemic, polycrisis-stricken angst. To come to terms with the multidisciplinary complexities of the game, our paper adopts a triadic analytical methodology interweaving insights from postclassical, medium-specific narratology, platform-comparative literary analysis, and existentialist philosophy. This combined approach transcends existing ludoliterary frameworks and accounts for divergent forms of play. Our first focus is the game’s multiscalar temporal layering and the strategies it requires from players to “ludify” antimimetic frictions between those layers. This is followed by an examination of how the game constructs a bookish player by interweaving ludexical processes of reading, unreading, dis-reading, and writing (in) books and other printed documents. Finally, we turn to the game’s complex interpassive relationships between player, player-character, and game world, highlighting in particular the role of walking, collecting, building, and searching as acts of catharsis and rebellion, and examining failure as a valid ludic alternative to survival and happiness. Ultimately, our analysis renders distant play as a form of parasocial resistance, which in The Longing manifests as an affective and philosophically fine-grained combination of more-than-human relationality, care, and relief vis-a-vis the nothingness of lost hope. The game thus offers a new form of e-literary engagement, placing books and their “unnatural,” transmediated affordances front and center while questioning the capitalist undercurrents of contemporary literary media and critiquing a culture of acceleration. Full article

Narrative perspective and focalization mode constitute fundamental elements shaping readers’ cognitive and neural responses during novel comprehension. Despite their theoretical importance in narratology, empirical evidence for their distinct processing mechanisms remains limited. This study employed a multi-method approach combining self-paced reading (N = 103) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS; N = 37) to investigate how narrative perspective (first-person vs. third-person) and focalization mode (internal vs. external) influence reading processes, with emotional valence as a potential moderator. Behavioral results revealed significantly prolonged reading times for third-person narratives compared to first-person narratives, particularly in negatively valenced texts. This effect was most pronounced among individuals with higher social cognitive abilities (low Autism Spectrum Quotient scores). Neuroimaging findings demonstrated distinct neural signatures: first-person narration elicited enhanced activation in the left superior parietal lobule compared to third-person narration, suggesting heightened attentional engagement. Internal focalization triggered greater activation in the left frontopolar cortex relative to external focalization, with negatively valenced texts showing similar enhanced activation patterns in this region. These converging lines of evidence support theoretical distinctions between narrative perspectives and demonstrate that first-person narration possesses higher cognitive salience during processing, while internal focalization more effectively engages readers’ metacognitive and empathetic neural systems. The findings provide empirical validation for longstanding narratological debates and illuminate the neurocognitive architecture underlying literary comprehension. Full article

This article critically examines the growing interest in what most contemporary scholars consider still a new and underdeveloped mode of environmental storytelling in video games. Different models of games that provide strong narrative techniques within highly detailed, environmentally sophisticated land/soundscapes have been released over the last decade by well-known studios like Fullbright Productions, Giant Sparrow and Campo Santo. This new perspective will draw several critical questions formed from prior research in several foundational articles, the area of game studies and several journals directed at the question of how game spaces function as narrative devices. For example, an early 2016 article by John Barber for the Cogent Arts and Humanities, “Digital storytelling: New opportunities for humanities scholarship and pedagogy” was one of the first essays to explore how Fullbright’s well-known game Gone Home utilizes spatial design, object placement, and ambient details to convey stories without explicit narration. Gone Home, according to Barber and many others, continues to emphasize environmental storytelling as a form of semiotic communication—one where the “text” is the game world itself, inviting players to read and interpret more complex layers of literary meaning. Contemporary scholars have built on these more foundational studies to consider how AI and procedural generation further complicate narrative agency and structure in digital spaces, enabling the current study to consider what could be considered a distinctly post-AI theoretical perspective based upon these primary determinants: (a) how game environments may dynamically adapt narratives in response to player interaction and algorithmic input, and (b) the evolving notion of narrative agency in digital spaces where human and machine contributions intertwine in AI systems. The two chief aims of this proposal are thus to reconsider traditional environmental storytelling within new innovative, post-GenAI narrative frameworks and, looking at contemporary insights from leading examples in the field, deepen current academic understandings of narrative spaces in games from new narratological perspectives. Studies in this area seem uniquely valuable, given the rapid development of GenAI tools in creative content production and what appears to be a new epoch in narrative engagement in all interactive media. Full article

This study leverages emotional arc modeling along with close reading to examine the Chinese Ye Xian, Perrault’s Cendrillon, and two Grimm versions. While computational modeling suggests that Cinderella tales share similar “recognition scaffolds,” their emotional architectures reflect distinct moral universes. Story peaks and valleys vary according to individual narrative resolutions to a universal problem of virtue unrecognized. Ye Xian descends to maximum negative sentiment when sacred bonds rupture, aligning with Buddhist-Daoist ethics in which divine-human reciprocity supersedes other bonds. Perrault’s arc offers surprising asymmetry: linguistic violence (Culcendron) defines every valley, while material transformation marks every peak. The 1812 Grimm tale oscillates between degradation and elevation with peaks and valleys suggestive of a syncretism between folk magic and Protestant theology. The 1857 version flattens into a rough semblance of Perrault’s emotional architecture, but peaks and valleys reflect Protestant, rather than aristocratic, values. These many shapes of Cinderella suggest fairy tales may serve as a flexible emotional technology. Themes of good and evil are key features of these emotional architectures, but how they are expressed vary from tale to tale. Full article