Hanieh Zaltash; Farid Parvaneh; Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar
Abstract
IntroductionThe inauguration of electronic literature is highly entwined with the evolution of digital media, in a sense that it is called “digital born,” which refers to the works of art that are created on a computer and meant to be read on a computer. Multimodal web-fictions, also known ...
Read More
IntroductionThe inauguration of electronic literature is highly entwined with the evolution of digital media, in a sense that it is called “digital born,” which refers to the works of art that are created on a computer and meant to be read on a computer. Multimodal web-fictions, also known as the second generation of electronic literature, utilize several modes, including image, sound/music, video, and text. Multimodal web-fictions provide us with the flow of various modes on the screen. Moreover, there is no clue that indicate how we could navigate the digital project. Although reading digital fictions seems problematic, we could unearth instances of particular patterns among various modes/media which are randomly scattered in Illya Szilak’s Queerskins (2012) and Hazel Smith’s Motions (2014), through following Kathrine Hayles’ and Patrik Colm Hogan’ theories. Background of StudyIn Electronic Literature (2019), Scott Rettberg provides a thorough introduction to contemporary genres of digital writing. The book is divided into seven chapters which focus on various genres of electronic literature. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2018), edited by Joseph Tabbi, could be considered as the first authoritative reference handbook to the field of Electronic Literature. It consists of four parts This book collects various scholars’ theories, concerning the significant concepts within electronic literature. Daniel Punday, in “Narrativity,” investigates narrativity within electronic literature. He commences by elucidating the evolution of narrativity and how electronic works can create and use narrativity. In “Rebooting Cognition in Electronic Literature,” David Ciccoricco highlights the significance of cognition in electronic literature. Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (2005) by David Ciccoricco pivots on cognitive issues, including memory, perception, attention, and emotion. He explores aesthetic treatments of cognition in three kinds of narrative media: print novels, digital fiction, and story-driven video games. Methodology This research, on the one hand, aims to divulge the patterns that are hidden in random modes/ media of Queerskins (2012) and Motions (2014) through following Katherine Hayles theories, concerning apophenia. On the other hand, the present study utilizes Patrick Colm Hogan’s theories, regarding emotions and narrative goals, in order to delineate the narrative patterns in the aforementioned works. Redefining narrative as the pursuit of a goal, Hogan, according to Sanskrit theories, claims that every story is formed around at least one of the chief goals because these are the goals around which all human life is ordered. The Indic tradition depicts that the goals of life, also known as the purusārthas, are kāma, artha, moksa, and dharma. These goals trigger particular emotions. Therefore, in Illya Szilak’s Queerskins (2012), Sebastian’s romantic relationships and his self-blame emotions are respectively based on Kama and Moksa, and in Hazel Smith’s Motions (2014), characters’ quest to again social prosperity reveals that their lives are based on artha.ConclusionFollowing Katherine Hayles’ theories, concerning apophenia, it could be argued that narrative patterns could be traced in electronic literature. In other words, various modes/media, which randomly emerge in Illya Szilak’s Queerskins (2012) and Hazel Smith’s Motions (2014), could portray narrative patterns. Although the novels seem fragmented, reading them through Patrick Colm Hogan’s theories, regarding emotions and narrative goals indicates that the underlying pattern is a picture of working memory process when emotions are triggered by life or narrative goals. In Queerskins (2012), narratives are based on Kama and Moksa, and in Motions (2014), narratives are centered on artha. Therefore, the pursuit of the aforementioned goals in Queerskins and Motions creates narrative patterns which challenge randomness of the various modes.
Fatemeh Esmaeili; Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar
Abstract
Although a number of theorists, critics, and philosophers have acknowledged the recent ethical turn in the novel and literary criticism since the last two decades, the quiddity of illustrated morality remains vague and needs further research. Thus, the present article endeavors to evaluate the new moral ...
Read More
Although a number of theorists, critics, and philosophers have acknowledged the recent ethical turn in the novel and literary criticism since the last two decades, the quiddity of illustrated morality remains vague and needs further research. Thus, the present article endeavors to evaluate the new moral matrix in Heroes of the Frontier (2016) by Dave Eggers, indicating the end of postmodern era. Indeed, this novel demonstrates a world in which people face plights of postmodernism caused by egoism and consumerism. However, in the rest of the novel, a wondrous ethical turn occurs which has never been detected before and needs to be examined in detail. Since this is a situational, experimental, and posteriori morality, the researchers aim to study the aforementioned novel under the light of John Dewey’s pragmatic ethics based on “moral inquiry”, “experience”, “imagination”, “situation”, and “meliorism”. This research also demonstrates that moral imagination could solve the individual and social problems in postmodern society, which can lead to moral evolution, growth, self-correction, reconstruction and advent of hope.
Lida Matin Parsa
Abstract
A psycho-cultural study of 9/11 attack and its pertinent trauma, reflected in Ian McEwan’s Saturday illuminates the manipulated structures of cognition and cultural identity and the way the unreliable narrators in this narrative are causing cognitive dissonance through their socio-culturally-made ...
Read More
A psycho-cultural study of 9/11 attack and its pertinent trauma, reflected in Ian McEwan’s Saturday illuminates the manipulated structures of cognition and cultural identity and the way the unreliable narrators in this narrative are causing cognitive dissonance through their socio-culturally-made trauma resulted by the cognitive manipulation of the 9/11 event. The way the narrator and characters in the selected novel cope with the 9/11 attack displays the cleft Festinger refers to as the cognitive dissonance as a distasteful condition led by the awareness of inconsistencies between beliefs, attitudes, or actions. However, People inherently aspire to the consistency, so they are impelled to reduce the dissonance between what actually occurred and what has been manipulated. While through the narrations, the narrators symbolically act as history-tellers reflecting the 9/11 era, the reliability or unreliability of what they narrate should be socio-culturally investigated. Based on Festinger’s theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and Elaine Auyoung’s idea on ‘huge cognitive leaps’, the cognition of a person changes and adapts itself to sociocultural settings and events. So any narration is prone to subjectivity and subsequently not necessarily reliable. Consequently what happens through the cognitive manipulation is meaning construction that makes narrations of cultural traumas unreliable. Thus, McEwan’s aesthetic representation of the 9/11 trauma makes the reader encounter an unreliable version of a cultural trauma, connoting the fact that the borderline between fact and traumatic fabrications is hard to distinguish due to cognitive manipulations.
Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar
Volume 13, Issue 17 , October 2017, , Pages 245-268
Abstract
Ethics has undergone huge changes in postmodernism as many playwrights of the era have tried to capture the deep interconnection between language and subjectivity. The present essay is an attempt to unravel the new ethical dicta set forth on the American and British stage from the 1960s to 1980s. The ...
Read More
Ethics has undergone huge changes in postmodernism as many playwrights of the era have tried to capture the deep interconnection between language and subjectivity. The present essay is an attempt to unravel the new ethical dicta set forth on the American and British stage from the 1960s to 1980s. The critical framework for this study relies on Giorgio Agamben’s thought and philosophical oeuvre. Agamben’s ethical renovations happen at the close proximity of language, ontology, and politics. He firmly asserts that experiencing the matter and being of language can be considered as an ethical act that questions cultural clichés imposed by power. Postmodern theater has witnessed an unprecedented shift in the role of language; it has forced the audience to venture the theatrical experience in order to be at the margins of communication and speech. This process can be deemed as ethical from Agamben’s point of view as it entices the viewers to see beyond and through the capitalist and ideological workings. Through such a limit experience, theater can find its true stance as a site for communality. The ultimate purpose of this study is to put forward the mechanisms through which performance can become an ethical gesture by installing the awareness of the fact that liminality of language can in itself be a new form of subjectivity.