Dying of the Stranger's Disease: Yellow Fever, Narrative Space, and the Art of Exclusion in Absalom, Absalom!

Peter Bowker and Laurie Borg's three-part television drama Occupation (2009) chronicles the experiences of three British soldiers involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By means of an historically situated textual analysis, this article assesses how far the drama succeeds in presenting a progressive critique of the British military involvement in Iraq. It is argued that although Occupation devotes some narrative space to subaltern perspectives on Britain's military involvement in Iraq, the production – in contrast to some other British television dramas about the Iraq war – tends to privilege pro-war perspectives, elide Iraqi experiences of suffering, and, through the discursive strategy of ‘de-agentification’, obfuscate the extent of Western responsibility for the damage the war inflicted on Iraq and its population. Appearing six years after the beginning of a war whose prosecution provoked widespread public dissent, Occupation's political silences perhaps illustrate the BBC's difficulty in creating contestatory drama in what some have argued to be the conservative moment of post-Hutton public service broadcasting.

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Embodied displacements in young German children’s storytelling

Research on Children and Social Interaction ◽

10.1558/rcsi.37311 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (1-2) ◽

pp. 168-195 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Vivien Heller

Keyword(s):

Picture Book ◽

Book Reading ◽

Lexical Resources ◽

Narrative Space ◽

Multimodal Analysis ◽

Different Types ◽

German Speaking ◽

Picture Book Reading ◽

The Given

This paper is concerned with embodied processes of joint imagination in young children’s narrative interactions. Based on Karl Bühler’s notion of ‘deixis in the imagination’, it examines in detail how a 19-month-old German-speaking child, engaged in picture book reading with his mother, brings about different subtypes of deixis in the imagination by either ‘displacing’ what is absent into the given order of perception (e.g. by using the hand as a token for an object) or displacing his origo to an imagined space (e.g. by kinaesthetically aligning his body with an imagined body and animating his movements). Drawing on multimodal analysis and the concept of layering in interaction, the study analyses the ways in which the picture book as well as deictic, depictive, vocal and lexical resources are coordinated to evoke a narrative space, co-enact the storybook character’s experiences and produce reciprocal affect displays. Findings demonstrate that different types of displacement are in play quite early in childhood; displacements in the dimension of space and person are produced through layerings of spaces, voices and bodies.

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