The independence of adaptations: the metanarrativity and metafictionality of Ian McEwan´s Atonement adapted for the cinema

Conceiving of cinematographic adaptations as being independent of their source material has come to be the standard approach for most specialists in this area. The stress on fidelity has made way for many other approaches, such as those focused on intertextuality, on the dilemma of form v. content, or on questions of genre and gender. The objective of this article is to present an overview of the principal theories which have been developed in the area as from 2000 in order to support this notion of independence, which will be exemplified by an exposition of the strategies used to adapt the metafictional and metanarrative elements in Atonement (2001) for the cinema.

Il banchetto e le sue rappresentazioni. Le radici di un dibattito contemporaneo

La ricerca si propone di sondare in maniera completa e approfondita la rappresentazione del banchetto nel testo letterario e, in senso più ampio, nel testo inteso come sistema di segni (siano essi parole, gesti, espressioni facciali, modi di esprimersi, mezzi di comunicazione in genere). Il banchetto è una ‘messa in scena’ che assume nel testo letterario e nei linguaggi espressivi dell’arte contemporanea diverse funzioni a livello tematico e stilistico. Nel lavoro si analizza ognuna di queste funzioni: la funzione denotativa, connotativa, strutturale, metaforica, metanarrativa e stilistica e comunicativa. La linea di analisi tracciata si conclude con un particolare focus sulla rappresentazione del banchetto nel testo letterario e nei media come strumento di comunicazione all’interno di un altro mezzo di comunicazione. Con questa premessa la candidata termina con il capitolo conclusivo dedicando spazio all’immagine del pasto postmoderno. Il banchetto, in quanto rito simbolico, media contenuti legati all’universo culturale, rivela connessioni con la realtà storico-sociale, con l’assetto profondo dell’identità individuale e collettiva, costituendo un polo di aggregazione di diverse dimensioni di umanità. Nonostante l’estrema duttilità alla quale si presta l’immaginario del banchetto sul piano artistico e concettuale, nella quotidianità il momento conviviale continua per l’uomo postmoderno a evocare sentimenti e valori tradizionali ai quali ispirarsi.

Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating in Post-9/11 American War Literature

A rhetorical approach to the fiction of war offers an appropriate vehicle by which one may encounter and interrogate such literature and the cultural metanarratives that exist therein. My project is a critical analysis—one that relies heavily upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method and his concepts of scapegoating, the comic corrective, and hierarchical psychosis—of three war novels published in 2012 (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, FOBBIT by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain). This analysis assumes a rhetorical screen in order to subvert and redirect the grand narratives the United States perpetuates in art form whenever it goes to war. Kenneth Burke’s concept of ad bellum purificandum (the purification of war) sought to bridge the gap between war experience and the discourse that it creates in both art and criticism. My work extends that project. I examine the symbolic incongruity of convenient symbols that migrate from war to war (“Geronimo” was used as code for Osama bin Laden’s death during the S.E.A.L team raid; “Indian Country” stands for any dangerous land in Iraq; hajji is this generation’s epithet for the enemy other). Such an examination can weaken our cultural “symbol mongering,” to borrow a phrase from Walker Percy. These three books, examined according to Burke’s methodology, exhibit a wide range of approaches to the soldier’s tale. Notably, however, whether they refigure the grand narratives of modern culture or recast the common redemptive war narrative into more complex representations, this examination shows how one can grasp, contend, and transcend the metanarrative of the typical, redemptive war story.

Evolutionary theory of history

Several attempts have been made recently to apply Darwinian evolutionary theory to the study of culture change and social history. The essential elements in such a theory are that variations occur in population, and that a process of selective retention operates during their replication and transmission. Location of such variable units in the semantic structure of cognition provides the individual psychological basis for an evolutionary theory of history. Selection operates on both the level of cognition and on its phenotypic expression in action in relation to individual preferred sources of psychological satisfaction. Social power comprises the principal selective forces within the unintended consequences of action and through the struggle of individuals and groups in pursuit of opposing interests. The implication for historiography are methodological in that evolutionary theory of history sharpens the focus of explanatory situational analysis, and interpretive in that it provides a paradigmatic metanarrative for the understanding of historical change.

The narrative construction va + infinitive in contemporary French:a linguistic phoenix risen from its medieval ashes?

In Old and Middle French (12th-16th centuries), va ["goes"] + inf was used in narrations in the past. A similar usage seems to have reappeared and be spreading today. However, the old construction combined with past Tenses whereas the new one is found only with forms anchored in present and future. We argue that the conTemporary construction derives not from the old one, but from a metanarrative construction. On the basis of its future in Terpretation, va + inf aids the organization of the narration, announcing subsequent events through a hypernymic process. The periphrasis thus approaches a narrative value by projecting the time of events onto that of narration. With the disappearance of all deictic markers, the go-periphrases are no longer hypernyms: they appear on the same temporal line of events as the neighboring situations and are understood as fully completed. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.

The utility of an Integrated Qualitative /Quantitative Data Analytic Strategy (IQ -DAS) to evaluate the impact of youth development interventions to positive qualitative change in the life course

This study reports one of the first controlled studies to examine the impact of a school based positive youth development program (Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 2000) on promoting qualitative change in life course experiences as a positive intervention outcome. The study built on a recently proposed relational developmental methodological metanarrative (Overton, 1998) and advances in use of qualitative research methods (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). The study investigated the use the Life Course Interview (Clausen, 1998) and an integrated qualitative and quantitative data analytic strategy (IQ-DAS) to provide empirical documentation of the impact the Changing Lives Program on qualitative change in positive identity in a multicultural population of troubled youth in an alternative public high school. The psychosocial life course intervention approach used in this study draws its developmental framework from both psychosocial developmental theory (Erikson, 1968) and life course theory (Elder, 1998) and its intervention strategies from the transformative pedagogy of Freire's (1983/1970). ^ Using the 22 participants in the Intervention Condition and the 10 participants in the Control Condition, RMANOVAs found significantly more positive qualitative change in personal identity for program participants relative to the non-intervention control condition. In addition, the 2X2X2X3 mixed design RMANOVA in which Time (pre, post) was the repeated factor and Condition (Intervention versus Control), Gender, and Ethnicity the between group factors, also found significant interactions for the Time by Gender and Time by Ethnicity. ^ Moreover, the directionality of the basic pattern of change was positive for participants of both genders and all three ethnic groups. The pattern of the moderation effects also indicated a marked tendency for participants in the intervention group to characterize their sense of self as more secure and less negative at the end of the their first semester in the intervention, that was stable across both genders and all three ethnicities. The basic differential pattern of an increase in the intervention condition of a positive characterization of sense of self relative to both pre test and relative to the directionality of the movement of the non-intervention controls, was stable across both genders and all three ethnic groups. ^

The utility of an integrated qualitative/quantitative data analytic strategy (IQ-DAS) to evaluate the impact of youth development interventions on positive qualitative change in the life course

This study reports one of the first controlled studies to examine the impact of a school based positive youth development program (Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 2000) on promoting qualitative change in life course experiences as a positive intervention outcome. The study built on a recently proposed relational developmental methodological metanarrative (Overton, 1998) and advances in use of qualitative research methods (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). The study investigated the use the Life Course Interview (Clausen, 1998) and an integrated qualitative and quantitative data analytic strategy (IQDAS) to provide empirical documentation of the impact the Changing Lives Program on qualitative change in positive identity in a multicultural population of troubled youth in an alternative public high school. The psychosocial life course intervention approach used in this study draws its developmental framework from both psychosocial developmental theory (Erikson, 1968) and life course theory (Elder, 1998) and its intervention strategies from the transformative pedagogy of Freire's (1983/1970). Using the 22 participants in the Intervention Condition and the 10 participants in the Control Condition, RMANOVAs found significantly more positive qualitative change in personal identity for program participants relative to the non-intervention control condition. In addition, the 2X2X2X3 mixed design RMANOVA in which Time (pre, post) was the repeated factor and Condition (Intervention versus Control), Gender, and Ethnicity the between group factors, also found significant interactions for the Time by Gender and Time by Ethnicity. Moreover, the directionality of the basic pattern of change was positive for participants of both genders and all three ethnic groups. The pattern of the moderation effects also indicated a marked tendency for participants in the intervention group to characterize their sense of self as more secure and less negative at the end of the their first semester in the intervention, that was stable across both genders and all three ethnicities. The basic differential pattern of an increase in the intervention condition of a positive characterization of sense of self relative to both pre test and relative to the directionality of the movement of the non-intervention controls, was stable across both genders and all three ethnic groups.

The Policy Dystopia Model:an interpretive analysis of tobacco industry political activity

BACKGROUND: Tobacco industry interference has been identified as the greatest obstacle to the implementation of evidence-based measures to reduce tobacco use. Understanding and addressing industry interference in public health policy-making is therefore crucial. Existing conceptualisations of corporate political activity (CPA) are embedded in a business perspective and do not attend to CPA's social and public health costs; most have not drawn on the unique resource represented by internal tobacco industry documents. Building on this literature, including systematic reviews, we develop a critically informed conceptual model of tobacco industry political activity. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We thematically analysed published papers included in two systematic reviews examining tobacco industry influence on taxation and marketing of tobacco; we included 45 of 46 papers in the former category and 20 of 48 papers in the latter (n = 65). We used a grounded theory approach to build taxonomies of "discursive" (argument-based) and "instrumental" (action-based) industry strategies and from these devised the Policy Dystopia Model, which shows that the industry, working through different constituencies, constructs a metanarrative to argue that proposed policies will lead to a dysfunctional future of policy failure and widely dispersed adverse social and economic consequences. Simultaneously, it uses diverse, interlocking insider and outsider instrumental strategies to disseminate this narrative and enhance its persuasiveness in order to secure its preferred policy outcomes. Limitations are that many papers were historical (some dating back to the 1970s) and focused on high-income regions. CONCLUSIONS: The model provides an evidence-based, accessible way of understanding diverse corporate political strategies. It should enable public health actors and officials to preempt these strategies and develop realistic assessments of the industry's claims.

The emotional knots of academicity: a collective biography of academic subjectivities and spaces

The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded ‘knowledge economy optimism’. Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive constitution of academic subjectivity through the figuration of ‘emotional knots’ as we explore three stories of the constitution of academic subjectivities in institutional spaces. These stories were composed in a collective biography workshop, where participants constructed accounts of the physical, social, material and imaginative dimensions of subjectivities in the ‘academic-city’ of higher education spaces. Identifying moments of ‘perturbation’ in these stories, this paper considers the micro-contexts of ‘becoming academic’: how bodies, affects and relations become knotted in precise times and places. The figuration of ‘knots’ provides an analytical strategy for unravelling how subjects affectively invest in the promises of spaces saturated with knowledge economy discourses, and moments of impasse where these promises ring hollow. We examine the affective bargains made in order to flourish in the corporate university and identify spaces of possibility where optimistic projections of alternative futures might be formed. These stories and their analysis complicate the metanarrative of ‘knowledge economy optimism’ that is currently driving higher education reform in Australia.

Post: 9/11: hidden pedagogy: the positional forces of pedagogy in Victoria, Australia

This qualitative study charts the lived narratives of twelve participants, six teachers and six students from urban and rural Victoria, Australia. The study examines in detail the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’. 9/11 has become accepted shorthand for September 11th 2001, in which terrorist attacks took place in the United States of America. The attacks heralded a ‘post- 9/11 world, [in which] threats are defined more by the fault lines within societies than by the territorial boundaries between them’ (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 2011, p. 361). The study is embedded in the values that have come to the fore in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ideological shifts that have occurred globally. These values and ideologies are reflected via issues of culture and consumption. In education this is particularly visible through pedagogy. The research employs a multimethodological (Esteban-Guitart, 2012) form of inquiry through the use of bricolage (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) which is comprised at the intersectional points of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2008b), public pedagogy (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010b) and cultural studies (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1992). This study adopts a critical ontological perspective, and is grounded in qualitative research approaches (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). The methods of photo elicitation, artefact analysis, video observation and semi-structured interviews are used to critically examine the ways in which teacher and student identities are shaped by the pedagogies of contemporary schooling, and how they form common sense understandings of the world and themselves, charting possibilities between accepted common sense beliefs and 21st century neoliberal capitalism. The research is presented through a prototypical form of literary journalism and intertextuality which examines the interrelationship between teaching and social worlds exposing the hidden influence of enculturation and addressing the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’