scholarly journals At Play on the Borders of the Diegetic: Story Boundaries and Narrative Interpretation

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 591-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Computer Game ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Common Element ◽  
Game Playing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Scene Construction ◽  
Narrative Interpretation

Working with young readers, aged 10 to 14, as they responded to narrative texts in a variety of media (Mackey, 2002), I observed a recurring phenomenon: In a variety of ways they repeatedly stepped in and out of the fictional universe of their different stories. Some examples will perhaps give the flavor of this experience: Two 14-year-old girls playing Starship Titanic alternate between lively engagement in the narrative world of the story and stepping outside the fiction to console themselves, “Oh well, if we die, we can just start again.” A 10-year-old girl speaks of alternating between the novel and the computer game of My Teacher is an Alien, using the novel as a source of game-playing repertoire. Two 10-year-old boys look at the DVD of the film Contact, learning how the special effects of an explosion scene were composed, and commenting on how their new awareness of scene construction would affect how they view the film in the future. As I recorded and analyzed numerous examples of such behaviors, I was struck by a common element of interpretive activity on the boundaries of the fictional universe. Sensitized to the topic, I began to notice, and then to collect, examples of contemporary texts that foster various forms of such border crossing, in and out of the diegesis, the framework of events as narrated in the text. This article explores how an awareness of this aspect of contemporary texts may enhance our understanding of interpretive processes and expand what happens in literature classes.

Playing power: gendered discourses in a computer games magazine

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Thornborrow
Keyword(s):  
Computer Games ◽  
Computer Game ◽  
Stylistic Analysis ◽  
Game Playing ◽  
Gender Specific ◽  
Conflicting Discourses

The focus of this article is the language of computer game previews and guides in the magazine Sega Mean Machines. I examine the presence of conflicting discourses within these texts, and discuss the possible effects they may have on the construction of gender-specific identities for the reader. Through a stylistic analysis of these texts, I will argue that entering the computer game-playing world means essentially a shift for the female readers/players into male-centred discourses.

Pinocchio e l’evoluzione

Revue Romane ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-293
Author(s):  
Margareth Hagen
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Continuous Evolution ◽  
Narrative Interpretation ◽  
Theories Of Evolution ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Pedagogical Literature

The first chapters of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio were printed in 1881, the same year as the publication of the novel I Malavoglia, Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece of verismo. While every critical reader of Verga’s realism has pointed out his particular narrative interpretation of evolution, Collodi’s has novel very seldom been connected to the theories of evolution, even if Darwin’s ideas were highly present in the public debate in Florence during the last decades of the 19th century. The reasons for this silence are primarily to be found in the genre of Pinocchio, in the fact that it is children literature, and therefore primarily related to the narrative mechanisms of the fairy tales and pedagogical literature. Focusing on Pinocchio, the article discusses to which degree Darwinism can be traced in Collodi’s literature for children, and questions if the continuous metamorphoses of Pinocchio can be read also in connection with the naturalist conception of the literary characters as unstable, in continuous evolution, and not only as part of the mechanisms of fairy tales and mythological narratives.

scholarly journals The Foregrounding Function of Praesens Historicum in Russian Translated Adventure Narratives (20th Century)

Slovene ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia V. Urzha
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Functional Grammar ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
Common Basis ◽  
Narrative Forms

This research focuses on the functioning of praesens historicum forms which Russian translators use to substitute for English narrative forms referring to past events. The study applies the Theory of Grounding and Russian Communicative Functional Grammar to the comparative discourse analysis of English-language adventure stories and novels created in the 19th and 20th centuries and their Russian translations. The Theory of Grounding is still not widely used in Russian translation studies, nor have its concepts and fruitful ideas been related to the achievements of Russian Narratology and Functional Grammar. This article presents an attempt to find a common basis in these academic traditions as they relate to discourse analysis and to describe the role of praesens historicum forms in Russian translated adventure narratives. The corpus includes 22 original texts and 72 Russian translations, and the case study involves six Russian translations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, focusing on the translation made by Korney Chukovsky, who employed historic present more often than in other translations of the novel. It is shown that the translation strategy of substituting the original English-language past forms with Russian present forms is realized in foregrounded and focalized segments of the text, giving them additional saliency. This strategy relates the use of historic present to the functions of deictic words and words denoting visual or audial perception, locating the deictic center of the narrative in the spacetime of the events and allowing the reader to join the focalizing WHO (a narrator or a hero). Translations that regularly mark the foreground through the use of the historic present and accompanying lexical-grammatical means are often addressed to young readers.

A Country for Old Men: The South of Clyde Edgerton’s Early Novels

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Donahoo
Keyword(s):  
Language Arts ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The South ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Excessive Alcohol ◽  
Old Men ◽  
Larry Brown ◽  
Clyde Edgerton

This chapter discusses Clyde Edgerton's early novels, whose characters define themselves and the essential nature of contemporary life in the South. If we accept Erik Bledsoe's description of the Rough South as “a world of excess—excessive alcohol, excessive sex, excessive violence,” the works of Edgerton hardly seem to qualify. Indeed, Yvonne Mason, in Reading, Learning, Teaching Clyde Edgerton, declares his work “infinitely suitable” for “young readers in the English Language Arts classroom”—an appraisal difficult to imagine for the fiction of Harry Crews or Larry Brown. Edgerton's first three novels—Raney (1985), Walking Across Egypt (1987), and The Floatplane Notebooks (1988)—offer a way to understand his South, a world that increasingly belongs to and is defined by aging and death. This chapter considers Edgerton's other works, including the novel The Night Train (2011), the memoir Solo: My Adventure in the Air (2005), and the nonfiction Papadaddy's Book for New Fathers: Advice to Dads of All Ages (2013).

scholarly journals “Minat, Motif, Tujuan, dan Manfaat Membaca Novel Teenlit Bagi Remaja Jakarta: Studi Resepsi Sastra”

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Redyanto Noor
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Value System ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
Adolescent Readers ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
The Social

The reality of young readers'(Jakarta) receptions of the teenlit novel concerning the motives, purposes, and benefits of reading the teenlit novel explains the social-cultural function of teenlit novel. Teenlit novel as a means of entertainment is able to fulfill the social-cultural function, which is giving spiritually pleasure, to be able to accommodate the horizon-expectations of adolescent readers. Teenlit novel provides entertainment while teaching "something" to teenagers. Teenlit novel serves as a social media such as self-identification, actualization, and socialization. Teenlit novel directly or indirectly has function to develop personality: independent, confident, and more mature. However, in some ways there is a contradictory reality between the motives, goals, and benefits of reading teenlit novels among teenagers. The contradictory reality is the absence of a correlation between motives and goals with the benefit of reading teenlit novel. The motive of spare time is not correlated with the purpose of gaining knowledge. The purpose of acquiring knowledge is not correlated with the benefits of not feeling smarter. These facts indicate that there are important issues relating to information and values promoted by the novel teenlit and the value system prevailing in adolescent social life.

Physiological correlates of the flow experience during computer game playing

2015 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
László Harmat ◽  
Örjan de Manzano ◽  
Töres Theorell ◽  
Lennart Högman ◽  
Håkan Fischer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Computer Game ◽  
Flow Experience ◽  
Game Playing

Computer Game Playing—“Turn-On” to Mathematics

1981 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-39
Author(s):  
Alice-Ann Winner ◽  
Margo D. McClung
Keyword(s):  
Computer Game ◽  
Upper Elementary ◽  
Elementary Level ◽  
Game Playing ◽  
Turn On

At the upper elementary level, teachers of mathematics are faced with two problems. They must reteach skills that the children have been exposed to, but have not mastered. At the same time they should awaken children to the joys and excitement of mathematics.

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