Melodrama and Narrative Fiction: Towards a Typology

Recent research on melodrama has stressed its versatility and ubiquity by approaching it as a mode of expression rather than a theatrical genre. A variety of contexts in which melodrama is at work have been explored, but only little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between melodrama and novels, short stories and novellas. This article proposes a typology of melodrama in narrative prose fiction, examining four different categories: Melodrama and Sentimentalism, Depiction of Melodramatic Performances in Narrative Prose Fiction, Theatrical Antics and Aesthetics in Narrative Prose Fiction and Meta-Melodrama. Its aim is to clarify the ways in which melodrama, ever since its early days on the stages of late eighteenth-century Europe, has interacted with fictional prose narratives, thereby shaping the literary imagination in the Anglophone world.

"Sounds Funny? – Humor Effects of Phonological and Prosodic Figures of Speech"

Whereas semantic, logical, and narrative features of verbal humor are well-researched, phonological and prosodic dimensions of verbal funniness are hardly explored. In a 2 × 2 design we varied rhyme and meter in humorous couplets. Rhyme and meter enhanced funniness ratings and supported faster processing. Rhyming couplets also elicited more intense and more positive affective responses, increased subjective comprehensibility and more accurate memory. The humor effect is attributed to special rhyme and meter features distinctive of humoristic poetry in several languages. Verses that employ these formal features make an artful use of typical poetic vices of amateurish poems written for birthday parties or other occasions. Their metrical patterning sounds “mechanical” rather than genuinely “poetic”; they also disregard rules for “good” rhymes. The processing of such verses is discussed in terms of a metacognitive integration of their poetically deviant features into an overall effect of processing ease. The study highlights the importance of nonsemantic rhetorical features in language processing.

Talking About Climate Change: The Ecological Crisis and Narrative Form

This article examines the issue of climate change in the context of ecocriticism. It analyzes some of the narrative forms employed in the mediation of climate change science, focusing on those used by mediators who are not themselves scientists in the transmission of scientific information to a nonspecialist readership or audience. It reviews four relevant works that combine the communication of scientific theories and facts with pedagogical and motivational impulses. These include David Guggenheimer’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, Fred Pearce’s book The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change and the climate change manuals The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook and How to Save the Climate.

The direct-democratic challenge to evidence-based policy making: Questioning the governmental PISA narrative in Swiss school policy

The democratic deficit of evidence-based policymaking and the little attention the approach pays to values and norms have repeatedly been criticized. This article argues that direct-democratic campaigns may provide an arena for citizens and stakeholders to debate the belief systems inherent to evidence. The study is based on a narrative analysis of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports, as well as of newspaper coverage and governmental information referring to PISA in Swiss direct-democratic campaigns on a variety of school policy issues. The findings show that PISA reports are discursive instruments rather than ‘objective evidence’. The reports promote a narrative of economic progress through educational evidence that is adopted without scrutiny by governmental coalitions in direct-democratic campaigns to justify school policy reforms. Yet, the dominant PISA narrative is contested in two counter-narratives, one endorsed by numerous citizens, the other by a group of experts. These counter-narratives question how PISA is used by an ‘expertocracy’ to prescribe reforms, as well as the performance ideology inherent to. Overall, these findings suggest that direct-democratic campaigns may make more transparent how evidence is produced and used according to existing belief systems. Evidence, on the other hand, may be a stimulus for democratic discourse by feeding the debate with potential policy problems and solution. Thus, direct-democratic debates may reconcile normative positions of citizens with the desire to base decisions on empirical evidence.

The Almost Person: Myth, Narrative and The Doctor

Paul Ricœur describes selfhood as the product of a communal narrative. Communal narratives structured as symbolic myths provide a narrative identity and an ethic of selfhood. The psychologist Jerome Bruner, for instance, places the source of such a narrative identity in the family, where ‘canonical stories’ are formed. ‘Home’ becomes a mode of discourse, a way of recognizing ourselves in the narratives given to us by others. This paper will draw on these concepts of narrative identity in order to investigate the problems to selfhood which face the character of The Doctor in the BBC series Doctor Who. I will identify The Doctor as a character who acts within a self-constructed narrative vacuum, reading the character by contrasting two types of personal myth-making, one ‘real’, as in a lived narrative, and one ‘counterfeit’; a conjured myth to replace and obscure the lived self. The paper will pay particular attention to the twenty-first century reincarnations of Doctor Who. I will argue that the writing of Russell T. Davis and later Steven Moffat in particular directly address this tension of myth and selfhood, as The Doctor struggles between his self-imposed role as a modern Prometheus and the insistent haunting and return of his own story. In these incarnations, his companions become mirrors to The Doctor, bringing with them their own narrative and ethical identities. In turn, it is through his companions that The Doctor is able to build his own lived narrative of sorts, which challenges his self-created ‘mythology’. In contrast to the weeping angels, whose horrific agency manifests only when not apprehended, the Doctor’s story continues to become more real the more he is ‘perceived’, both by the human race and by the viewer.

Hamlet's Mobility: The Reception of Shakespeare's Tragedy in US-American and Canadian Narrative Fiction

This essay presents a comprehensive study of how Hamlet figures in North American fiction. Gabriele Rippl takes her cue from Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of Shakespeare’s ‘theatrical mobility’ (Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility. Cambridge University Press, 2010). This initial mobility, based on the playwright’s own borrowings, appears to facilitate, or even instigate further migrations. Rippl proceeds to give an overview of adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the USA and Canada, thus providing an insight into the historical and cultural uses to which the play has been put by authors such as John Updike or Margaret Atwood. Phenomena such as the ‘republicanization’ of Shakespeare (James Fenimore Cooper), or his appropriation for a feminist counter-discourse in Canada circumscribe a space for the negotiation of cultural and political identities.

Printed Narrative: The Festival Books for Archduke Ernest of Austria from Brussels and Antwerp 1594

Workshop „The Narrative in Eastern and Western Art“, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto, 2-5 December 2013 Abstract by Ivo Raband, University of Berne Printed Narrative: The Festival Books for Ernest of Austria from Brussels and Antwerp 1594 During the early modern period the medium of the festival book became increasingly more important as an object of ‘political narration’ throughout Europe. Focusing on Netherlandish examples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, my talk will focus on the festival books printed for the Joyous Entries of Archduke Ernest of Austria (1553–1595). Ernest was appointed Governor General of the Netherlands by King Philipp II in 1593, being the first Habsburg Prince to reside in Brussels since 30 years. In Brussels and Antwerp, the Archduke was greeted with the traditional Blijde Imkomst, Joyous Entry, which dates back to the fourteenth century and was a necessity to actually become the sovereign of Brabant and Antwerp and to uphold the privileges of the cities. Decorated with ephemeral triumphal arches, stages, and tableaux vivants, both cities welcomed Ernest and, at the same time, demonstrated their civic self-assurance and negotiated their statuses. In honor of these events of civic power, the city magistrates commissioned festival books. These books combine a Latin text with a description of the events and the ephemeral structures, including circa 30 engravings and etchings. Being the only visual manifestation of the Joyous Entries, the books became important representational objects. The prints featured in festival books will be my point of departure for discussing the importance of narrative political prints and the concept of the early modern festival book as a ‘political object’. By comparing the prints from Ernest’s entries with others from the period between 1549 and 1635, I will show how the prints became as important as the event itself. Thus, I want to pose the question of whether it would have been possible to substitute a printed version of the event for the actual ceremony.

Working with A Secular Age. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Charles Taylor's Master Narrative

Charles Taylor’s monumental book A Secular Age has been extensively discussed, criticized, and worked on. This volume, by contrast, explores ways of working with Taylor’s book, especially its potentials and limits for individual research projects. Due to its wide reception, it has initiated a truly interdisciplinary object of study; with essays drawn from various research fields, this volume fosters substantial conversation across disciplines.