Permadeath : a review of literature

This paper explores existing literature concerning permadeath - the permanent in-game death of a playable character. Research concerning the depiction of death in video games is extensive, however research on the underlying concept of death within the magic circle of a game is scarce. Furthermore, although controversial, permadeath more closely connects with the original death concept than general in-game death as it adopts finality, a key characteristic of death. This is significant when we consider successful video games which have delved into deeper philosophical ideas and the realm of art, a deeper exploration of death, and dying, is within the capabilities of the maturing game industry, and may pave the way for unique in-game (death) experiences. To gain a better understanding of the nature of permadeath this paper draws together existing literature, highlights the difficulty of defining permadeath and death's meaning beyond penalty, identifies two approaches to permadeath, and suggests a holistic, interdisciplinary approach in future research.

Magical realism and irony's 'edge': rereading magical realism and Kim Scott's Benang

Magical realism has been the subject of much earnest theorising, implicating the narrative mode in postcolonial projects of cultural regeneration not only in Latin America but around the world. The claim that its hybrid vision simultaneously transgresses and supplements Western ratiocinative epistemologies has seen the mode become over-determined and dismissed as a postcolonial cliche. Rarely noted, however, is the ironic nature of the literary mode. Yet the trademark representation of the magical in a realist narrative is marked by a conspicuous incongruity, which is not only necessary to magical realism's aesthetic effect but which also provides a strong incentive for ironic readings. This paper will reread magical realism through Kim Scott's Benang in order to recognise the ironic incongruity at play in magical realism and to revitalise the mode's 'edge'.

Nasdijj's fake magical realist memoir: re-visioning magical realism's relationship with fakery

Examining what might be described as Nasdijj’s "fake magical realist memoir" The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, this paper is interested in how Nasdijj's text might be useful in contesting our understanding of the postcolonial literature of magical realism. Drawing attention to Nasdijj’s utilization of the “primitivist” conventions of magical realism, this paper will illustrate how fakery might be seen as essential not only to Nasdijj's text but also to magical realism. In fact, this paper argues that magical realist novels might be productively read as hoaxes, mobilizing what Graham Huggan describes as the "postcolonial exotic" in order to engage in a subversive act of “culture jamming”. The objective of the analysis is not to condemn magical realism along with Nasdijj’s opportunistic memoir, but rather to rescue magical realism from ideas about authenticity, celebrating its ironies and its challenges to colonial discourses of identity and history.

Literature, museums, and national identity; or, why are there so many writers' house museums in Britain?

Writers’ houses constitute the largest and oldest segment of historic house museums dedicated to famous persons in the United Kingdom. Litterateurs tend to ascribe ‘lit houses’ to the ineffable magic of readers’ connections to writers. By contrast, my analysis deploys the analytic of cultural politics to suggest that writers’ house museums can more fully be understood as assertions of national identity. The elision of language with national distinction is subliminal in everyday life, but can be brought to prominence by historicising the nations of the British Isles, and the practice of writing in English.

The network of intertextual relations in Naipaul's half a life and magic seeds

Esta dissertação mapeia a rede de relações intertextuais em Half a Life (2001) e sua continuação Magic Seeds (2004), os romances mais recentes do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 2001, V. S. Naipaul, como contribuição para o estudo da obra do autor. A noção de intertextualidade permeia os estudos literários, e o termo tem sido largamente empregado desde que foi cunhado por Julia Kristeva nos anos sessenta. Desde então as mais variadas, e muitas vezes divergentes, teorias sobre intertextualidade compartilham a idéia de que um texto só adquire significado pleno na interação com outros textos. A abordagem metodológica proposta é baseada na teoria da transtextualidade de Gérard Genette. Esta escolha implica o estudo de intertextos, paratextos, metatextos, arquitextos e hipertextos que constituem a interface entre os dois romances e outros escritos. O nome do protagonista "William Somerset Chandran" constitui o fio que guia o estudo das várias relações transtextuais nos dois romances. A partir do prenome do protagonista – William – este estudo situa os romances no contexto da tradição do Bildungsroman, e argumenta que estes estabelecem uma paródia arquitextual do gênero na medida em que subvertem seu cerne, ou seja, a formação do caráter do protagonista. O nome do meio do protagonista – Somerset – remete à ficcionalização do escritor Somerset Maugham na narrativa, ao mesmo tempo em que esta desmistifica a ótica ocidental sobre o hinduísmo popularizada por Maugham em The Razor's Edge. O sobrenome do protagonista – Chandran – leva ao estudo do conjunto de referências à origem indiana de Naipaul e o papel desta na produção do autor. Este nome se reporta ao romance de Narayan The Bachelor of Arts, cujo protagonista também é nomeado Chandran. Narayan é um escritor de destaque na literatura anglo-indiana e referência recorrente na obra de Naipaul. Os temas de migração e choque cultural apresentados nos dois romances têm sido presença constante na obra de Naipaul. Esta pesquisa mapeia a relação de continuidade entre os dois romances em questão e o conjunto da obra de Naipaul, salientando o papel da ambientação geográfica da narrativa, marcada pela jornada do protagonista através de três continentes. A teoria da transtextualidade é uma ferramenta operacional para a pesquisa, a qual examina a densidade das referências geográficas, históricas e literárias em Half a Life e Magic Seeds, visando aportar elementos para o estudo da produção literária de Naipaul, na medida em que estes romances recentes condensam e revisitam a visão de mundo deste autor.

The Magic Toyshop: A narrativa imagética como processo de recriação

Because it belongs to a cultural practice, the adaptation of a novel into a feature film will always exist within a context and, for being subject to changes, corresponding modifications in the political sphere and even variations in the meaning of the story may occur. This seems to be precisely the result of the transformation of Angela Carter's second novel, The Magic Toyshop, into the homonymous film, directed by David Whealtey in 1987. Removed from the context of the book's production and publication, a crucial period of questioning about the importance of women in society and culture, the plot created by the English author in the sixties, rewritten two decades later, with the author herself as the script writer, seems to have acquired another meaning during this time. Although the film maintains the same plot of the novel, the political engagement visibly present in the narrative, namely Carter's critical stance about the model of patriarchal society, seems to lose its strength, highlighting now its fantastic character. Briefly discussing issues such as loyalty and betrayal of one gender to another, we seek in this paper to observe the film, based on the re-writers perspective, in other words, the prospects of both writer and director, as a process of rebuilding the story. In this dialogue, the script was also used as an intertext for a better understanding of this process.

Confinamento e vastidão: a representação feminina e a subversão em The magic toyshop

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

A identidade feminina em The Magic Toyshop: estudos de gênero no texto e na tela

Besides producing a vast literary work, Angela Carter (1940-1992) participated of the screenplay’s production for two movies based on her books, The Company of Wolves and The Magic Toyshop. Either through the influence that cinema had in her life or through the very own style of her writing, the relation of the British author with the seventh art is visible. Considering the importance of significations in literary works, this paper proposes a comparative study between Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967) and the film of the same title, based on Carter’s novel, directed by David Wheatley and produced by Granada Television, in 1987. Based on Tania Carvalhal’s conception about intertextuality and film theories, the focus of this paper is the gender study, since its ideology is subscribed, represented and reproduced in every cultural practice, including literature and cinema. The characters construction in both cases, especially the female characters, is filled with symbols which are going to bring the film closer to the literary work and contribute to express the critics suggested in the work’s leading: the complaint to the patriarchal system. However, given the different nature of each work, it is necessary to stress that this present comparison doesn’t intend to establish a total identification between novel and film, but to set a dialogue between both, observing the approximation and distance of these two instances.

Transatlantic Echoes. Alexander von Humboldt in World Literature

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a world traveler, bestselling writer, and versatile researcher, a European salon sensation, and global celebrity. Yet the enormous literary echo he generated has remained largely unexplored. Humboldt inspired generations of authors, from Goethe and Byron to Enzensberger and García Márquez, to reflect on cultural difference, colonial ideology, and the relation between aesthetics and science. This collection of one-hundred texts features tales of adventure, travel reports, novellas, memoirs, letters, poetry, drama, screenplays, and even comics—many for the first time in English. The selection covers the foundational myths and magical realism of Latin America, the intellectual independence of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman in the United States, discourses in Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, East, and West Germany, as well as recent films and fiction. This documented source book addresses scholars in cultural and postcolonial studies as well as readers in history and comparative literature.

El efecto Duchamp

En una literatura en la que ha desaparecido el valor y los fantasmas perdieron consistencia, el lenguaje es un ready made de clichés. Algunas novelas actuales, sin embargo, han merecido el epíteto de verdaderas" (Jarkowski 2008) o "auténticas" (Lemus 2004). La magia ha regresado, y los narradores, aunque sus relatos sean inconclusos, indiferentes e incluso frívolos, interpelan al lector como los grandes realistas (Lukács 1971) porque el efecto de los textos es indicial. Señalan -con brutalidad o con delicia- el desfasaje entre lo que se dice y lo que se hace o lo que se deja de hacer. Nombran así, con palabras comunes y sin ninguna distancia, deseos singulares: los suyos y los nuestros (Aira 1988: 59)

El efecto Duchamp

En una literatura en la que ha desaparecido el valor y los fantasmas perdieron consistencia, el lenguaje es un ready made de clichés. Algunas novelas actuales, sin embargo, han merecido el epíteto de verdaderas" (Jarkowski 2008) o "auténticas" (Lemus 2004). La magia ha regresado, y los narradores, aunque sus relatos sean inconclusos, indiferentes e incluso frívolos, interpelan al lector como los grandes realistas (Lukács 1971) porque el efecto de los textos es indicial. Señalan -con brutalidad o con delicia- el desfasaje entre lo que se dice y lo que se hace o lo que se deja de hacer. Nombran así, con palabras comunes y sin ninguna distancia, deseos singulares: los suyos y los nuestros (Aira 1988: 59)

El efecto Duchamp

En una literatura en la que ha desaparecido el valor y los fantasmas perdieron consistencia, el lenguaje es un ready made de clichés. Algunas novelas actuales, sin embargo, han merecido el epíteto de verdaderas" (Jarkowski 2008) o "auténticas" (Lemus 2004). La magia ha regresado, y los narradores, aunque sus relatos sean inconclusos, indiferentes e incluso frívolos, interpelan al lector como los grandes realistas (Lukács 1971) porque el efecto de los textos es indicial. Señalan -con brutalidad o con delicia- el desfasaje entre lo que se dice y lo que se hace o lo que se deja de hacer. Nombran así, con palabras comunes y sin ninguna distancia, deseos singulares: los suyos y los nuestros (Aira 1988: 59)

A general catalogue of valuable and rare old books, in the ancient and modern languages, and various classes of literature; which are now on sale at the prices affixed to each,

Error in paging: 289 numbered 298.

Heralds of revolt; studies in modern literature and dogma,

"Of the essays contained in this volume the first four have been taken from the Dublin Review, the remaining seven were published in the Quarterly Review."--Pref.