The Bureau and the Realism of Spy Fiction

This article addresses the issue of realism in relationship to contemporary serial fiction. Drawing on The Bureau (Canal+, 2015–2020), it argues that spy TV series are “realistic” not because they correspond to reality but because of their impact on reality. It begins by giving an overview of the many ways in which “realism,” in the ordinary sense of a resemblance with reality, served as the working framework for The Bureau’s team. It then identifies three distinct types of realisms in the series. The first is a “fictional realism,” namely the ability of The Bureau to conform to the aesthetic and narrative conventions of realistic fictions. The second type of realism, which I qualify as “ordinary,” refers to the possibilities offered by the show’s aesthetics and the enmeshment of The Bureau with viewers’ ordinary experience. The third type of “performative realism” refers to the series’ impact on shared representations and reality. By providing a common language about the secret activities of the state, The Bureau has gone from being a framed version of reality to being one of the defining frameworks through which state secrecy is experienced both individually and collectively, by insiders and the public at large.

A Study on the Postmodern Narrative Features in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is renowned as the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. Her third novel Song of Solomon was written in the context of postmodernism, which embodies a variety of postmodern narrative features. Postmodern works are frequently inclined to ambiguity, anarchism, collage, discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, metafiction, montage, parody, and pluralism. Such postmodern narrative features as parody, metafiction and indeterminacy have been manifested in Song of Solomon. In this novel, Toni Morrison employs the strategy of parody in order to subvert traditional narrative modes and overthrow the western biblical narrative as well as African mythic structure. Meta-narratives are also used in the text to dissolve the authority of the omniscient and omnipotent narrator. By questioning and criticizing the traditional narrative conventions, Morrison creates a fictional world with durative indeterminacy and unanswered problems. Through presenting parody, metafiction and indeterminacy, this paper attempts to analyze the postmodern narrative features in Song of Solomon and further explore Morrison’s writing on the African-American community and its future development.

The Diffusion of Identity: A Study of Three Contemporary Thai Short Stories through the Lens of Western Narrative Conventions

Literary works give expression to universal themes through settings, subjects, and techniques that are culturally tied. This article reviews generic conventions involving point of view, protagonist, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution that typify Western short stories in order to examine how varying patterns can illuminate cultural contrasts between Thailand and the West. Widely known stories by Katherine Mansfield and Amy Tan serve to exemplify the conventional Western pattern and its versatility and to provide a basis for discovering alternative patterns that characterize numerous contemporary Thai short stories. An analysis of stories by S.E.A. Write award winners Phaitoon Thanya, Anchan, and Ussiri Thammachot through the comparative lens of Western conventions reveals how divergent narrative techniques involving point of view and plot elucidate and corroborate divergent expressions regarding the nature of identity. Narrative patterns in these Thai short stories help produce diffusions of identity that reflect a collectivist ethos and an acceptance of uncertainty and impermanence, while adherence to the Western formula reinforces a core belief in the permanence and persistence of the individual ego over time.

Army of the Wronged: Autobiography, Political Prisoners, and Black Radicalism

Shelby presents an analysis of the warfare between Black radicals associated with the Black Panther Party and the US government during the era of the Black Power movement. Shelby observes that these would-be revolutionaries regarded US law as having no authority over them. The radicals also thought that their declaration of war was reciprocated, that state officials were self-consciously using the tactics and machinery of war to repress this internal uprising and insurgency, including killing, capturing, and incapacitating Black radicals. Shelby contends that there is truth in this characterization, and lessons to be learned from it. He explores the underlying questions of political morality through an examination and comparison of four autobiographies—by George Jackson, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur. Each spent significant time in prison, and each regarded themselves as political prisoners and, in some ways, as prisoners of war. Attention is given to the narrative conventions these authors rely on to achieve their aims, a tradition that can be traced to, but differs in important ways from, African American slave narratives.

Party animals

This article examines the Netflix series Russian Doll (2019) to consider the narrative and ideological positioning of its nonhuman characters. The series formulates a sort of game whose successful completion requires the protagonists to resist their solipsistic instincts and embrace intersubjectivity and interdependence. Appearances by Russian Doll’s nonhuman characters are fleeting; however, they serve an important function, both as symbols for the protagonists’ development as social beings, and as obstacles that the protagonists must overcome in over to fully actualise as such. In so doing, the series prioritises inter-personal relationships by reinforcing anthropocentric narrative conventions. With its resolution, however, the show promotes a form of compassion that is not contingent on the promise of reciprocity, thereby presenting a model that can be extended to conceptualising a more ethical human-nonhuman sociality.

«Strong Curtains» and «Dramatic Punches»: The Legacy of Playwriting in the Screenwriting Manuals of the Studio Era

The Hollywood Golden Age was a revolutionary moment in the history of cinema and is pivotal to understanding the historical passage of a peculiar new art form –screenwriting. This early film period, from the Tens to the Sixties, was determined by key interactions between the respective forms of cinema and stage. Together, these interactions form a wider screenwriting “discourse.” There are reoccurring disputes in film scholarship over the paternity of the conventions and techniques of screenwriting. One solution is that techniques of theatre playwriting persisted extensively in the production practices of classical Hollywood cinema. Whether or not its professionals were aware of this is at the heart of this dispute. It is possible to identify the contribution of screenwriting manuals from Hollywood’s Golden Age toward the standardization of screenwriting techniques. The article aims to examine in the screenwriting manuals of this period some statements by practitioners who document the normalization and codification of the narrative structures used in screenwriting over time –in particular, the three-act structure. The validity and origin of the three-act structure are constantly debated among screenwriters. While this formula was known to the early writers of the Silent Era due to its legacy throughout centuries of playwriting and literature, it reappeared in the Seventies in the guise of a new theory. This article attempts to fill in certain gaps in the history of the theorization of screenwriting practices by juxtaposing statements found in screenwriting manuals and the statements of scholars and educators of this field. Ultimately, narrative conventions belonging to the tradition of theatre, as well as technological exigencies were integral in shaping the cinema techniques in use today.

Narrative Structure and the Unnarrated in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

This paper analyzes the narrative structure of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad against the grain of traditional slave narrative conventions. The novel may be categorized as a neoslave narrative, telling the story of a slave girl, Cora, and her escape from a Georgia plantation using the “Underground Railroad” mentioned in the title. My working hypothesis takes cue from the explicit, literal rendering of the Underground Railroad in the text, which may be considered as symptomatic of Whitehead’s approach to the slave narrative convention, in that his novel discloses or makes visible aspects which, in slave narratives, were left unnarrated.

Movies within Movies and New Orleans Comes Back 2008–2019

In the 2000s and 2010s, screen jazz stories explored new forms to tell a new century’s jazz stories—longform television included. The surreal comedy Be Kind Rewind critiques jazz narrative conventions, with a movie within a movie: a new trend in jazz pictures. Born to Be Blue depicts a Chet Baker biopic within the biopic. A Miles Davis biopic is configured as a self-contained double feature, dividing his charming and evil personas. Nina Simone and Joe Albany biopics likewise focus on lulls in their careers. Queen Latifah plays Bessie Smith in a sexually frank biopic. Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is hysterical like a too-fast drum solo, and his La La Land echoes Scorsese’s New York, New York in various particulars. As the jazz film approached the music’s centenary on record, new stories keep harking back to early ones—even the earliest, drawing connections back to The Jazz Singer.

Instead of a Novel

This article focuses on the life and literary strategies of Sophia Yablonska (1907–1971), a self-identified Ukrainian camerawoman, photographer, and writer. While working for a French documentary production company, traveling around the world, and living in Morocco and China, Yablonska published three books of travelogues supported by hundreds of photos (The Charm of Morocco, 1932; From the Country of Rice and Opium, 1936; and Distant Horizons, 1939) that combine autobiographical and anthropological approaches and transgress poetic and narrative conventions. In her travelogues, Yablonska examines the contradictions between traditional and modern culture and expresses them in verbal and visual forms. Abandoning the genre of the novel for that of the travelogue, Sophia Yablonska transgressed literary and life norms in terms of genre, gender, anthropology, autobiography, perception, media, culture, and discourse. Her writings not only reveal other countries, but also show the formation of a modern personality in the process of writing.

Theoretical Discourse as an Object of Metaparody in Russian Post-Modern Prose

This article deals with the roles that metaparody plays in modern prose. Methodologically, it follows Yuri Shatin’ semiotic approach to parody. In his works, parody is regarded as a special function of aesthetic language that comically reimagines a work’s pretexts while also expanding its referential semiotic structure by pointing out its intertextual sources. Contemporary fiction expands the semantic field of the plot by having narrators or characters reflect on philological terms and concepts. Furthermore, in postmodern fiction, representation of popular theoretical interpretations often achieves the effect of metaparody, the parody of scholar metalanguage. This paper studies metaparody in A. Bitov and A. Zholkovsky’s “philological prose”. It also deals with parodic reception of well-known theories (such as V. Propp’s fairy-tale functions; Structuralist approach to language; PostStructuralist concepts of discourse and narrative) in post-modern novels by M. Uspensky, A. Lyovkin, and V. Pelevin. Investigating references to theoretical discourse in various story episodes and structure units makes it possible to define the principles of “intrigue of interpretation” found in contemporary novels. This intrigue, featuring readers as characters (including professional readers such as scholars, librarians, critics, or publishers), becomes especially valuable in post-modern situation of “lacking reality.” Texts of this variety showcase the methods of interpreting and describing them as parts of the plot, while the “superior” theorizing instance becomes interwoven into the event-line. As such, both theoretical models and basic narrative conventions appear in parodical light, including even the crucial postmodern conflict between literary solipsism and the “open structure.”