ABSTRACT Since the first publication of Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, illustrated editions have directed audiences to identify particular scenes, situations, and adventures as key to understanding the Swiss pastor’s narrative for children: illustrations—from the nineteenth century to the present day—have defined the ways in which to read and make sense of the text intermedially. This article will focus on a visual narrative consisting of six woodcuts that was commissioned for the first Chinese translation of the work, which was published in installments in the Shanghai-based magazine, The Tapestry Portrait Novel (绣像小说) in 1903. This translation was based not only on a rewriting of Wyss’s work, a rendering in monosyllabic words by Mary Godolphin, but the locally produced woodcuts also shaped the Chinese readers’ understanding of the text, at times not following details of the original and departing from earlier (western) illustration practice. The article will offer a detailed study of these woodcuts, their storytelling, and the visual interpretation they advance, at the same time focusing on how the illustrations adapted the narrative to the iconic-representational conventions of the target audience.
{"title":"Mediating a Western Classic in China: Woodcuts, Iconic Narrative, and the 1903 Chinese Translation of J. D. Wyss’s <i>The Swiss Family Robinson</i>","authors":"Sandro Jung","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0495","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Since the first publication of Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, illustrated editions have directed audiences to identify particular scenes, situations, and adventures as key to understanding the Swiss pastor’s narrative for children: illustrations—from the nineteenth century to the present day—have defined the ways in which to read and make sense of the text intermedially. This article will focus on a visual narrative consisting of six woodcuts that was commissioned for the first Chinese translation of the work, which was published in installments in the Shanghai-based magazine, The Tapestry Portrait Novel (绣像小说) in 1903. This translation was based not only on a rewriting of Wyss’s work, a rendering in monosyllabic words by Mary Godolphin, but the locally produced woodcuts also shaped the Chinese readers’ understanding of the text, at times not following details of the original and departing from earlier (western) illustration practice. The article will offer a detailed study of these woodcuts, their storytelling, and the visual interpretation they advance, at the same time focusing on how the illustrations adapted the narrative to the iconic-representational conventions of the target audience.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"38 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Stephen King is one of the most popular novelists of our time, and probably the one with the highest number of fiction-induced nightmares on his conscience. His horror stories resonate with people across the globe, but why? What is it about King’s fiction that has catapulted him to the top of the best-seller charts? What, exactly, makes his particular brand of nightmare fuel so incredibly volatile? James Arthur Anderson, a professor of writing and literature at Johnson and Wales University, sets out to answer those questions in his new book. How, he asks, “do we account for Stephen King’s unparalleled popular success as a writer of horror fiction?” The answer, according to Anderson, “may not lie in the traditional realms of the literature departments of the academy, but in the fields of evolutionary psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience” (xv).Anderson’s claim is bold one, and one eminently worth pursuing. It would be highly surprising if the sciences of mind and language had nothing to say about the ability of King’s literary art to resonate with people. And while academic scrutiny of King has grown rapidly over the past several decades, there is almost no research on King’s fiction from an evolutionary perspective, even as evolutionary literary theory has been flourishing during that same period (but see Clasen, “Hauntings of Human Nature”). Anderson’s aim with his book is both ambitious and praiseworthy, but I am not convinced that he fully succeeds. His engagement with evolutionary science—evolutionary literary study in particular—is inadequate, and so his book comes off as a slightly awkward love letter to King, illuminated with scientific doodles in the margins, rather than a probingly consilient theoretical and critical synthesis.I do not mean that to sound as disparagingly condescending as it probably does; after all, I wrote my own awkward love letter to King in the form of a critical essay only a few years ago (a book chapter entitled “Why the World Is a Better Place with Stephen King in It”). I certainly understand the compulsion to mobilize science to prove to the world—in particular, perhaps, a snobbish critical establishment that historically has been dismissive of King—why his fiction has value and how it is so much more than the literary equivalent of a forgettable summer blockbuster. But Anderson’s main claim, which seems to be that King’s popularity is an effect of his ability to “tap into [human] universals” (xx), remains underwhelming. I think the claim is basically true, but it is trivially true. Anderson does develop that claim through the book, but not much. It remains too general and vague. It is almost like saying that houses are popular because they provide shelter for people. In the book’s conclusion, Anderson says that King “appeals to human universals, or basic human nature, if you will. His stories are actually about something and contain the conflict and suspense that people crave. His characters are real human b
斯蒂芬·金是我们这个时代最受欢迎的小说家之一，也可能是他良心上做过最多由小说引起的噩梦的人。他的恐怖故事引起了全球人民的共鸣，但为什么呢?是什么让金的小说登上了畅销书排行榜的榜首?到底是什么让他的噩梦燃料如此不稳定?约翰逊和威尔士大学(Johnson and Wales University)写作与文学教授詹姆斯·阿瑟·安德森(James Arthur Anderson)在他的新书中着手回答这些问题。他问道，“我们该如何解释斯蒂芬·金作为恐怖小说作家所取得的无与伦比的成功?”根据安德森的说法，答案“可能不在于文学系的传统领域，而在于进化心理学、语言学和神经科学等领域”。安德森的主张很大胆，而且非常值得追求。如果心理科学和语言科学对金的文学艺术与人们产生共鸣的能力无能为力，那将是非常令人惊讶的。虽然在过去的几十年里，对金的学术审视迅速增长，但几乎没有人从进化的角度对金的小说进行研究，即使进化文学理论在同一时期蓬勃发展(参见克拉森的《人性的幽灵》)。安德森写这本书的目的雄心勃勃，值得称赞，但我不相信他完全成功了。他对进化科学——尤其是进化文学研究——的投入不够，所以他的书就像一封给金的有点尴尬的情书，在页边空白处用科学的涂鸦来装饰，而不是一个探索性的理论和批判的综合。我的意思并不是说这听起来像轻蔑的居高临下;毕竟，就在几年前，我以一篇评论文章的形式给金写了一封尴尬的情书(一本书的一章题为“为什么有斯蒂芬·金的世界更美好”)。我当然理解调动科学向世界证明的冲动，尤其是向历史上一直对金不屑一顾的势利的评论界证明，为什么他的小说有价值，为什么他的小说比文学上那些容易被遗忘的夏季大片要重要得多。但安德森的主要观点，似乎是金的受欢迎程度是他“挖掘(人类)共性”能力的结果(xx)，仍然令人印象深刻。我认为这种说法基本上是正确的，但它是微不足道的。安德森在书中确实提出了这个观点，但不多。它仍然过于笼统和模糊。这几乎就像是说房子受欢迎是因为它们为人们提供了住所。在书的结语中，安德森说金“吸引了人类的共性，或者说是基本的人性。他的故事实际上是有意义的，包含了人们渴望的冲突和悬念。他笔下的人物都是真实的人……他的故事通俗易懂……最后，它们都是令人愉快的，并且讲述了一些关于人类状况的重要而真实的东西”(218)。嗯,是的。谁会不同意呢?也许，只有激进的建构主义者不相信“人类共性”或“基本人性”，但安德森的书无论如何都没有足够的力量来动摇他们。这种说法太宽泛了，以至于可以用来描述任何成功的小说家，这就剥夺了它的解释力，我认为问题在于安德森的理论工具太粗糙了。这本书分为四个部分。第一部分试图借助进化论复兴坎贝尔和荣格的故事原型思想;第二部分探讨了人类的共性及其在金的小说中的作用;第三部分探讨安德森所说的“情感情感”以及金描绘和唤起情感的能力;第四部分旨在解决更高层次的概念，如美术和故事讲述。这篇文章的结构听起来可能有点令人困惑，那是因为它确实有点令人困惑——蜿蜒曲折，在一些地方有联想，而不是由一个强有力的论点紧紧引导。安德森的理论工具包，他称之为“达尔文主义解释学”，旨在“利用和融合经常冲突的后现代主义理论，这种理论赋予语言和风格特权，以及文学达尔文主义，它融合了进化论，人类学，心理学，语言学，叙事学，甚至神经语言学的理论”(xviii)。然而，在实践中，安德森很少触及后现代主义的工具(这也是为什么你甚至试图“融合”“冲突”的理论?)。事实上，他似乎对他的工具包中的一些工具感到有点尴尬，他自嘲地将其称为“女巫的酿造”(215)。 在书的最后一章中，安德森对金最近的短篇小说《饼干罐》(2016)进行了全面解读，试图展示金的文学才华。然而，进化论在这一尝试中几乎没有发挥任何作用，这或许很能说明问题。这是一个错失的机会，是几个机会中的一个，也可能是理论综合没有时间成熟和巩固的一个症状——一个过于粗糙的工具包。作为另一个例子，安德森观察到，虽然金的书“当然可以在海滩上或飞机上阅读，但它们不止于此。”他最震撼的场景不只是读过就被遗忘。即使书被放到书架上，它们也会陪伴你很久”(219)。是的，但是为什么呢?我们没有得到一个答案，即使进化心理学可以有效地提供这样一个答案，例如，参考适应性记忆和我们物种中享有记忆优势的各种场景。虽然安德森的书是对一些更疯狂的、受理论影响的金批评的一种令人耳目一新的纠正，但它不太可能对金的学术研究或进化文学研究产生重大影响。但也许这并不是安德森真正的野心——也许他真正的野心要温和得多。在书的最后，他说，他希望他的书能“帮助你，忠实的读者(金对他的粉丝的深情称呼)，更多地理解和欣赏金的小说”(216)。实现这一抱负的主要障碍可能是这本书高昂的价格(这不能怪安德森)，以及它不幸地倾向于理论和分析的肤浅。但是从一个国王学者到另一个国王学者——地狱，从一个痴迷的《恒常读本》到另一个:我和你在一起!金是最好的，我们确实需要更多的书和文章来证明这一点。虽然我同意进化心理学有可能成为这种情况下的关键因素，但我们仍然需要一本书的篇幅来研究这种潜力。
{"title":"Excavating Stephen King: A Darwinist Hermeneutic Study of the Fiction","authors":"Mathias Clasen","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0519","url":null,"abstract":"Stephen King is one of the most popular novelists of our time, and probably the one with the highest number of fiction-induced nightmares on his conscience. His horror stories resonate with people across the globe, but why? What is it about King’s fiction that has catapulted him to the top of the best-seller charts? What, exactly, makes his particular brand of nightmare fuel so incredibly volatile? James Arthur Anderson, a professor of writing and literature at Johnson and Wales University, sets out to answer those questions in his new book. How, he asks, “do we account for Stephen King’s unparalleled popular success as a writer of horror fiction?” The answer, according to Anderson, “may not lie in the traditional realms of the literature departments of the academy, but in the fields of evolutionary psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience” (xv).Anderson’s claim is bold one, and one eminently worth pursuing. It would be highly surprising if the sciences of mind and language had nothing to say about the ability of King’s literary art to resonate with people. And while academic scrutiny of King has grown rapidly over the past several decades, there is almost no research on King’s fiction from an evolutionary perspective, even as evolutionary literary theory has been flourishing during that same period (but see Clasen, “Hauntings of Human Nature”). Anderson’s aim with his book is both ambitious and praiseworthy, but I am not convinced that he fully succeeds. His engagement with evolutionary science—evolutionary literary study in particular—is inadequate, and so his book comes off as a slightly awkward love letter to King, illuminated with scientific doodles in the margins, rather than a probingly consilient theoretical and critical synthesis.I do not mean that to sound as disparagingly condescending as it probably does; after all, I wrote my own awkward love letter to King in the form of a critical essay only a few years ago (a book chapter entitled “Why the World Is a Better Place with Stephen King in It”). I certainly understand the compulsion to mobilize science to prove to the world—in particular, perhaps, a snobbish critical establishment that historically has been dismissive of King—why his fiction has value and how it is so much more than the literary equivalent of a forgettable summer blockbuster. But Anderson’s main claim, which seems to be that King’s popularity is an effect of his ability to “tap into [human] universals” (xx), remains underwhelming. I think the claim is basically true, but it is trivially true. Anderson does develop that claim through the book, but not much. It remains too general and vague. It is almost like saying that houses are popular because they provide shelter for people. In the book’s conclusion, Anderson says that King “appeals to human universals, or basic human nature, if you will. His stories are actually about something and contain the conflict and suspense that people crave. His characters are real human b","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"35 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
If one wants to know who Ford Madox Ford was and what he did, this is the book to read. It is excellent on Ford’s personal life as well as on the writers and artists he knew and promoted and on those who knew and promoted him. It not only gives us the chronology and history of Ford’s movements from place to place but also his mental and emotional life as it reveals itself in his books and letters and in those of his family, friends, and acquaintances. Max Saunders gave us Ford’s life in his two-volume biography Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life in 1996 and he has here distilled those twelve hundred pages masterfully in the two hundred pages of this volume in the Critical Lives series. In the time between these two books, many literary documents and personal letters have come to light, and some of what they tell us about Ford is in this book.Two novels and three women figure prominently in Ford’s life. The two novels are The Good Soldier (2015) and Parade’s End (1927). The three women are Violet Hunt, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala, though there are important glances at others like Elsie Martindale, Ford’s wife, who refused to divorce him, Jean Rhys, who fractured his relationship with Bowen, and Elizabeth Cheatham, who proved a significant distraction in the United States.Saunders shows that Ford’s first success came after publishing ten books that didn’t achieve much notice. The one that changed things was The Soul of London (1904). It put both Ford and London prominently on the literary scene. Ford followed it with The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land (1906) and The Spirit of the People (1907). These books gave Ford needed recognition, as did the novels in his trilogy on Henry VIII, The Fifth Queen (1906), which was a notable success. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, Ford founded The English Review, a periodical that gave a voice to modern writers and published the work of yet unknown writers like Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis, to name just a few. Appropriately, as Ford said, its “definite design” was “giving imaginative literature a chance in England.” The English Review did not live a long life, but its goal never died in Ford’s life.Ezra Pound became a lifelong friend of Ford’s, even visiting him in Provence late in Ford’s life. That friendship began with Ford’s dramatic evaluation of Pound’s fledgling poetry. He fondly recalled reading his early poems to Ford in Giessen, Germany, only to find Ford falling out of his chair onto the floor and rolling around in laughter at what he called Pound’s Swinburne verse. Pound learned his lesson quickly enough to give us in good time his most memorable poem: In a Station of the Metro: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd, / Petals on a wet, black bough.” This moment leads Saunders to a lucid and thorough discussion of Ford’s insistence on Impressionism and the use of everyday speech in poetry. Ford’s own poetry before, during, and after the Great War is generously sam
{"title":"Ford Madox Ford","authors":"Joseph Wiesenfarth","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0534","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0534","url":null,"abstract":"If one wants to know who Ford Madox Ford was and what he did, this is the book to read. It is excellent on Ford’s personal life as well as on the writers and artists he knew and promoted and on those who knew and promoted him. It not only gives us the chronology and history of Ford’s movements from place to place but also his mental and emotional life as it reveals itself in his books and letters and in those of his family, friends, and acquaintances. Max Saunders gave us Ford’s life in his two-volume biography Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life in 1996 and he has here distilled those twelve hundred pages masterfully in the two hundred pages of this volume in the Critical Lives series. In the time between these two books, many literary documents and personal letters have come to light, and some of what they tell us about Ford is in this book.Two novels and three women figure prominently in Ford’s life. The two novels are The Good Soldier (2015) and Parade’s End (1927). The three women are Violet Hunt, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala, though there are important glances at others like Elsie Martindale, Ford’s wife, who refused to divorce him, Jean Rhys, who fractured his relationship with Bowen, and Elizabeth Cheatham, who proved a significant distraction in the United States.Saunders shows that Ford’s first success came after publishing ten books that didn’t achieve much notice. The one that changed things was The Soul of London (1904). It put both Ford and London prominently on the literary scene. Ford followed it with The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land (1906) and The Spirit of the People (1907). These books gave Ford needed recognition, as did the novels in his trilogy on Henry VIII, The Fifth Queen (1906), which was a notable success. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, Ford founded The English Review, a periodical that gave a voice to modern writers and published the work of yet unknown writers like Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis, to name just a few. Appropriately, as Ford said, its “definite design” was “giving imaginative literature a chance in England.” The English Review did not live a long life, but its goal never died in Ford’s life.Ezra Pound became a lifelong friend of Ford’s, even visiting him in Provence late in Ford’s life. That friendship began with Ford’s dramatic evaluation of Pound’s fledgling poetry. He fondly recalled reading his early poems to Ford in Giessen, Germany, only to find Ford falling out of his chair onto the floor and rolling around in laughter at what he called Pound’s Swinburne verse. Pound learned his lesson quickly enough to give us in good time his most memorable poem: In a Station of the Metro: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd, / Petals on a wet, black bough.” This moment leads Saunders to a lucid and thorough discussion of Ford’s insistence on Impressionism and the use of everyday speech in poetry. Ford’s own poetry before, during, and after the Great War is generously sam","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"37 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anna Neill’s Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction is bound to have different effects depending on who opens it. If the reader is an average literary scholar with an interest in science, the book will produce the warm fuzziness of familiar ideas unfolding familiarly. If the reader is an average historian of science, some puzzlement may occur about the presumed central role of literature, but the book’s pattern will be unsurprising. If the reader is a biologist or an evolutionary social scientist, the experience may resemble Neill’s citation of Samuel Butler’s hypothetical “grain of corn in the hen’s stomach,” which “finds itself in an environment so unfamiliar to the world its forefathers have taught it to navigate, that it ceases to remember it is grain” (97). If the reader is a literary scholar who believes in the epistemological validity of science, there might be neither surprise nor fuzziness. The present reader responded with mild fatigue when Butler, sentient grains and all, was placed next to Darwin and described as a “genius” (95).Neill’s book fits safely within literary study’s current program for interpreting evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century literature. I have characterized that program at length elsewhere, identifying its core tenets and tracing its roots to the early 1980s (Jonsson, “Old Tune” and Early Evolutionary Imagination 74–87). I argued that Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (first published in 1983) established parameters that largely remain in place for present scholars: a tendency to treat evolutionary theory as semi-fictional, a tendency to suggest that evolutionary theory owes more to literary inspiration than to scientific methodology, and a tendency to view any epistemological validity in evolutionary theory as a confirmation of literary theories popularized around the 1980s—deconstructive indeterminacy of meaning; the cultural construction of (human) nature; and the consequent vilification of hierarchies, definitions, and noncultural explanations. In line with the idea that meaning is indeterminate, Beer employed techniques of argumentation that simultaneously advance and withdraw claims (evolution both is and is not fictional), avoiding accusations of anti-scientific rhetoric (Jonsson, Early Evolutionary Imagination 74–87). The resulting program opens up a world of possibilities for reading and rereading novels with different degrees of emphasis on indeterminacy and hierarchies. It also prevents interdisciplinary understanding, feeds academic territorialism, encourages ideological distortion, and leads scholars in circles of repetition toward sheer stagnation. In my view, this program has stymied the study of a deeply fascinating subject for forty years.Neill indicates that no change is in sight. If anything, the slimness of her book and the meekness of its argument suggest some petering out of the program. Fantastic Victorian Fiction spends its conclusion—traditionally a place for extending and rhetor
{"title":"Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction","authors":"Emelie Jonsson","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0525","url":null,"abstract":"Anna Neill’s Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction is bound to have different effects depending on who opens it. If the reader is an average literary scholar with an interest in science, the book will produce the warm fuzziness of familiar ideas unfolding familiarly. If the reader is an average historian of science, some puzzlement may occur about the presumed central role of literature, but the book’s pattern will be unsurprising. If the reader is a biologist or an evolutionary social scientist, the experience may resemble Neill’s citation of Samuel Butler’s hypothetical “grain of corn in the hen’s stomach,” which “finds itself in an environment so unfamiliar to the world its forefathers have taught it to navigate, that it ceases to remember it is grain” (97). If the reader is a literary scholar who believes in the epistemological validity of science, there might be neither surprise nor fuzziness. The present reader responded with mild fatigue when Butler, sentient grains and all, was placed next to Darwin and described as a “genius” (95).Neill’s book fits safely within literary study’s current program for interpreting evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century literature. I have characterized that program at length elsewhere, identifying its core tenets and tracing its roots to the early 1980s (Jonsson, “Old Tune” and Early Evolutionary Imagination 74–87). I argued that Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (first published in 1983) established parameters that largely remain in place for present scholars: a tendency to treat evolutionary theory as semi-fictional, a tendency to suggest that evolutionary theory owes more to literary inspiration than to scientific methodology, and a tendency to view any epistemological validity in evolutionary theory as a confirmation of literary theories popularized around the 1980s—deconstructive indeterminacy of meaning; the cultural construction of (human) nature; and the consequent vilification of hierarchies, definitions, and noncultural explanations. In line with the idea that meaning is indeterminate, Beer employed techniques of argumentation that simultaneously advance and withdraw claims (evolution both is and is not fictional), avoiding accusations of anti-scientific rhetoric (Jonsson, Early Evolutionary Imagination 74–87). The resulting program opens up a world of possibilities for reading and rereading novels with different degrees of emphasis on indeterminacy and hierarchies. It also prevents interdisciplinary understanding, feeds academic territorialism, encourages ideological distortion, and leads scholars in circles of repetition toward sheer stagnation. In my view, this program has stymied the study of a deeply fascinating subject for forty years.Neill indicates that no change is in sight. If anything, the slimness of her book and the meekness of its argument suggest some petering out of the program. Fantastic Victorian Fiction spends its conclusion—traditionally a place for extending and rhetor","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"24 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135763396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT The appeal of the Jackass television series and film franchise, centered around stunts wherein the performers deliberately hurt and humiliate themselves, has been considered a unique and peculiar mystery by cultural critics, one that can only be solved by looking at its particular historical and sociocultural context. In contrast, this article argues that Jackass constitutes a resurgence of a widespread form of comedy whose roots stretch far back into human history: ritual clowning. Comparing the stunts and gags of Jackass with those of ritual clowns in traditional societies around the world, both are shown to be characterized by four universal comic themes: pain, sex, the foreign, and the sacred. In contrast to previous critical readings that have attributed each of these themes in Jackass to its particular historical and sociocultural context, this article argues that they are all ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into.
{"title":"<i>Jackass</i>, Ritual Clowning, and the Comic Themes of Universal Occurrence","authors":"Marc Hye-Knudsen","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0466","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The appeal of the Jackass television series and film franchise, centered around stunts wherein the performers deliberately hurt and humiliate themselves, has been considered a unique and peculiar mystery by cultural critics, one that can only be solved by looking at its particular historical and sociocultural context. In contrast, this article argues that Jackass constitutes a resurgence of a widespread form of comedy whose roots stretch far back into human history: ritual clowning. Comparing the stunts and gags of Jackass with those of ritual clowns in traditional societies around the world, both are shown to be characterized by four universal comic themes: pain, sex, the foreign, and the sacred. In contrast to previous critical readings that have attributed each of these themes in Jackass to its particular historical and sociocultural context, this article argues that they are all ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"24 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135763397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As one of the forerunners of econarratology, Marco Caracciolo has been devoting himself to enriching the patterns and methods of this contextual approach to narratology. Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures, the final volume of his NARMESH trilogy, explores both formal and experiential dimensions of narrative through an ecological and ecocritical perspective and demonstrates “how reading narrative (or engaging with narrative in other media) may train audiences in the acceptance or embrace of ecological uncertainty as a fundamental dimension of the experience of the present” (ix).The book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a coda. Taking a cue from contemporary narrative theories, Caracciolo in the introduction brings out the idea of narrative’s “negotiation” of uncertainty in an era of ecological crisis. In his opinion, narrative can help us come to grips with an unknowable future, especially when the “ontological security” of our lives is fundamentally threatened (4). By offering formal tools, literary narrative can cultivate readers’ affective and ethical acceptance of uncertainty. Therefore, in the chapters thereafter, he aims to discover the types of stories that might be most effective in adapting readers to the instability of the future, and the aspects of those stories that should be focused on to cultivate readers’ embrace of uncertainty.In Chapter 1, “Uncertainty in the Future Tense,” Caracciolo begins with temporality, a fundamental dimension of narrative, to explore narrative’s engagement with uncertainty. Before detailed textual analysis, he urges us to grasp four distinct but interrelated aspects of temporality in the new era of climate change: futurity; individual as well as collective temporal experience; the narratological significance of telling a future-oriented story and future-tense narration and parallel storyworlds as narrative strategies in contemporary fiction but significantly different from those in postmodernist literature. Taking Jesse Kellerman’s Controller (2018) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts (2019) as case studies, Caracciolo identifies future-tense narration and parallel storyworld-building as experimental narrative forms attempting to represent the affective and imaginative complexity of the climate crisis and having the potential to foster readers’ embrace of uncertainty.Chapter 2, “Pathways to Unstable Worlds,” re-examines another fundamental parameter of narrative, spatiality. Caracciolo’s discussion begins with “storyworlds,” a concept introduced by David Herman to narratology and the basis for Erin James’s econarratology. He then proposes that the destabilization of (story)worlds can be represented in four aspects: oscillation, erasure, fragmentation, and floating. However, Caracciolo reiterates that these are not completely developed narrative types but adaptable formal devices existing in different genres and contexts, such as postmodernist works. Thou
在库切的《糟糕的一年日记》(2008)中，他展示了两位作家发展元虚构和元比喻的策略来挑战人类与非人类之间的本体论分类，从而培养读者对生态危机造成的不稳定性的接受。第五章“Deus Ex Algorithmo”检视了当代叙事面对生态危机带来的犹豫和不稳定的尝试。Caracciolo通过重新诠释“deus ex machina”的经典比喻，创造了“deus ex algorithmic”一词，指的是人工智能部署算法策略来解决核扩散和全球变暖等问题。通过分别识别案例研究中的生物物理力量，即米切尔的《鬼魂》(2001)中的量子不确定性和理查德·鲍尔斯的《上层故事》(2018)中复杂系统的自组织逻辑，他进一步总结说，两位作家对当今危机的解决方案在于每本小说的结局——人类的集体未来在很大程度上取决于非人类计算智能机构的干预。第6章，“互动叙事的生态”，通过对数字叙事的分析，从字面意义上研究了算法。Caracciolo认为，叙事和游戏玩法的相遇为呈现我们生态困境的不确定性提供了独特的可能性(157)。电子游戏的互动性也为捕捉具有复杂性和多线性特征的生态危机提供了一种突出的形式。通过研究《Heaven’s Vault》(Inkle 2019)和《Kentucky Route Zero》(Cardboard Computer 2020)这两款以故事为重点的游戏，他不仅发现了游戏媒介所达到的叙事复杂性和更高的神秘感，还发现了在一个不稳定和神秘的世界中做出决策的道德规范，这是人类无法理解的。正是玩家深度参与选择逻辑的体验将这些游戏与他在前几章中所研究的带有不确定性的小说性游戏区分开来。在结尾处，卡拉乔洛通过研究对珍妮·奥菲尔的《天气》(2020)的一些在线评论，讨论了气候不确定性与冠状病毒病爆发之间的情感共鸣。他强调了叙事在培养读者的反应和为心理和社会弹性创造条件方面的作用，并呼吁教育机构调解和扩大这种形成效应。总的来说，卡拉乔洛的专著有三个显著的优势。首先，他的抱负是开创一种阅读模式，以应对当今生态的不确定性。与Erin James呼吁通过一系列新的叙事形式来更好地理解现状以缓解环境危机不同，Caracciolo强调叙事作为正式工具的作用，以培养读者对不确定性的拥抱，他认为这是面对生态危机的基本技能。我们不仅需要探索叙事与人类世之间的相互关系，还需要学习如何与我们无法控制的气候变化共存。Caracciolo的阅读模式为我们在危机和不确定的背景下提供了另一种生活方式，可能会产生缓解焦虑和压力的效果。其次，卡拉乔洛遵循了叙事学的交叉性和中间性的发展趋势。一方面，他的叙事方法具有很强的交叉性，他不仅在文学研究中架起了叙事学、生态批评和影响研究之间的桥梁，而且跨越了气候科学、计算机科学、算法和游戏研究的界限，将它们整合到他的案例研究中。另一方面，他的作品选择跨越体裁、母题、种族和媒介，不仅显示了他广泛的阅读和研究范围，以及他的语境叙事方法的中介性，也证明了他的阅读模式的兼容性和适用性。第三，他以一种系统的、用户友好的方式组织了他的章节和文本分析。前三章讨论的是讲故事的基本参数，即时间、空间和角色;从第4章到第6章，重点转移到更具体但更正式的未来不确定性:元小说、不安的结局和电子游戏的互动叙事。在文本分析方面，他在案例研究中注入了丰富的背景材料，这有助于读者理解他的中心主题和主张。此外，这些分析都以通俗易懂的方式呈现，这使得读者更容易跟随他的思路，并将其应用于自己的批评实践。
{"title":"Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures","authors":"Xu Xiao","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0538","url":null,"abstract":"As one of the forerunners of econarratology, Marco Caracciolo has been devoting himself to enriching the patterns and methods of this contextual approach to narratology. Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures, the final volume of his NARMESH trilogy, explores both formal and experiential dimensions of narrative through an ecological and ecocritical perspective and demonstrates “how reading narrative (or engaging with narrative in other media) may train audiences in the acceptance or embrace of ecological uncertainty as a fundamental dimension of the experience of the present” (ix).The book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a coda. Taking a cue from contemporary narrative theories, Caracciolo in the introduction brings out the idea of narrative’s “negotiation” of uncertainty in an era of ecological crisis. In his opinion, narrative can help us come to grips with an unknowable future, especially when the “ontological security” of our lives is fundamentally threatened (4). By offering formal tools, literary narrative can cultivate readers’ affective and ethical acceptance of uncertainty. Therefore, in the chapters thereafter, he aims to discover the types of stories that might be most effective in adapting readers to the instability of the future, and the aspects of those stories that should be focused on to cultivate readers’ embrace of uncertainty.In Chapter 1, “Uncertainty in the Future Tense,” Caracciolo begins with temporality, a fundamental dimension of narrative, to explore narrative’s engagement with uncertainty. Before detailed textual analysis, he urges us to grasp four distinct but interrelated aspects of temporality in the new era of climate change: futurity; individual as well as collective temporal experience; the narratological significance of telling a future-oriented story and future-tense narration and parallel storyworlds as narrative strategies in contemporary fiction but significantly different from those in postmodernist literature. Taking Jesse Kellerman’s Controller (2018) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts (2019) as case studies, Caracciolo identifies future-tense narration and parallel storyworld-building as experimental narrative forms attempting to represent the affective and imaginative complexity of the climate crisis and having the potential to foster readers’ embrace of uncertainty.Chapter 2, “Pathways to Unstable Worlds,” re-examines another fundamental parameter of narrative, spatiality. Caracciolo’s discussion begins with “storyworlds,” a concept introduced by David Herman to narratology and the basis for Erin James’s econarratology. He then proposes that the destabilization of (story)worlds can be represented in four aspects: oscillation, erasure, fragmentation, and floating. However, Caracciolo reiterates that these are not completely developed narrative types but adaptable formal devices existing in different genres and contexts, such as postmodernist works. Thou","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"36 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT Both stylistics and narratology pay much attention to point of view. This article discusses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and tries to clear up the various kinds of confusion involved. It argues that the different concerns of stylistics and narratology result in two partial pictures that are very much complementary to each other. Both partiality and complementarity call for a redefinition of point of view to facilitate a more comprehensive investigation.
{"title":"Stylistics, Narratology, and Point of View: Partiality, Complementarity, and a New Definition","authors":"Dan Shen","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0415","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Both stylistics and narratology pay much attention to point of view. This article discusses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and tries to clear up the various kinds of confusion involved. It argues that the different concerns of stylistics and narratology result in two partial pictures that are very much complementary to each other. Both partiality and complementarity call for a redefinition of point of view to facilitate a more comprehensive investigation.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT This article discusses the genre of literary journalism/reportage against a background of earlier assumptions on fictionality. At a local level in nonfiction, fictionality can be expressed through invented stories and scenarios that create a contrast to the global, nonfictive context. However, fictionality can also be expressed through stylistic devices that traditionally have been associated with narrative fiction. A local contrast may appear, but only if the genre in itself is not narrative. If the focus is on the nonfictional and narrative genre of literary journalism/reportage, there will be no contrast. Here, the rhetoric will work just like in narrative fiction and should be considered to be part of the features of narrativity. Furthermore, the concept imagination should be perceived in close relation to Monika Fludernik’s understanding of narrative as experience. The conclusion is a call to partly rethink existing connections between fictionality, narrativity, and imagination in order to better understand the narrative nature of reportage.
{"title":"The Case of Literary Journalism: Rethinking Fictionality, Narrativity, and Imagination","authors":"Cecilia Aare","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0440","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses the genre of literary journalism/reportage against a background of earlier assumptions on fictionality. At a local level in nonfiction, fictionality can be expressed through invented stories and scenarios that create a contrast to the global, nonfictive context. However, fictionality can also be expressed through stylistic devices that traditionally have been associated with narrative fiction. A local contrast may appear, but only if the genre in itself is not narrative. If the focus is on the nonfictional and narrative genre of literary journalism/reportage, there will be no contrast. Here, the rhetoric will work just like in narrative fiction and should be considered to be part of the features of narrativity. Furthermore, the concept imagination should be perceived in close relation to Monika Fludernik’s understanding of narrative as experience. The conclusion is a call to partly rethink existing connections between fictionality, narrativity, and imagination in order to better understand the narrative nature of reportage.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"36 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) annotates one of Aubrey Thomas de Vere’s (1814–1902) sonnets as “Worthy of Milton.” By delving into a complex web of intertextuality, this article analyzes de Vere’s sonnet in the light of his literary criticism and from the perspective of Landor’s manuscript neglected note, interpreted via the useful link of William Wordsworth.
{"title":"Aubrey de Vere’s Political Passions in His Sonnet on Milton Annotated by Landor","authors":"Tianhu Hao, William Baker","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0459","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) annotates one of Aubrey Thomas de Vere’s (1814–1902) sonnets as “Worthy of Milton.” By delving into a complex web of intertextuality, this article analyzes de Vere’s sonnet in the light of his literary criticism and from the perspective of Landor’s manuscript neglected note, interpreted via the useful link of William Wordsworth.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"36 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of embodied memory in literary fiction and aims to illustrate some of the many angles from which it can be examined. After reviewing three different approaches to understanding embodied personal memory, it argues in line with contemporary perspectives on embodiment and 4E cognition (Caracciolo and Kukkonen) that a combined approach of cognitive and more traditional perspectives on the concept has significant benefits for analyzing embodied memories in literary texts. A case study of Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) is presented to illustrate these claims in practice. The analysis shows that a medial or symbolic approach to embodied memory cannot contain the novel’s complex bodies on its own and that a cognitive perspective adds an analytic layer which is essential to forming an understanding of its personal as well as collective mechanics of remembrance.
{"title":"A Graveyard Smash: Analyzing Embodied Memories in <i>Lincoln in the Bardo</i>","authors":"Cara Vorbeck","doi":"10.5325/style.57.3.0350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.3.0350","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of embodied memory in literary fiction and aims to illustrate some of the many angles from which it can be examined. After reviewing three different approaches to understanding embodied personal memory, it argues in line with contemporary perspectives on embodiment and 4E cognition (Caracciolo and Kukkonen) that a combined approach of cognitive and more traditional perspectives on the concept has significant benefits for analyzing embodied memories in literary texts. A case study of Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) is presented to illustrate these claims in practice. The analysis shows that a medial or symbolic approach to embodied memory cannot contain the novel’s complex bodies on its own and that a cognitive perspective adds an analytic layer which is essential to forming an understanding of its personal as well as collective mechanics of remembrance.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135053031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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