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"Frustration Fiction."
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Grump Groan Growl
Rhythmic text exposes a bad mood on the prowl, and advises the reader not to hide, but to let those feelings be.
Book
Towards a Typology of Narrative Frustration
Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction.
Journal Article
Lulu the lion cub learns to roar
\"Lulu the lion cub hasn't learned how to roar yet -- this makes her feel really frustrated and angry. With the help of Mindy the chimp, Ernie the elephant, George the giraffe and her other friends, Lulu learns how to deal with her anger and she finally finds that roar... just when danger threatens them all!\"--Back cover.
Book
Gothic Spaces in Pinter's The Room and The Birthday Party
One obvious preoccupation both Theatre of the Absurd and Gothic Studies share is their responsiveness to the inner workings of the human mind; another is that both exhibit tendencies of repressed emotions and individual experiences by capturing social dysfunctions. These psychoanalytical underpinnings are the defining traits of both gothic fiction and absurdist literature. Using qualitative research methods and close textual analysis, this article unfolds the painful social layers of Harold Pinter's plays. The repressed fears, deep-seated anxieties, and behavioral imbalances resulting from a claustrophobic atmosphere, often a room or a damp chamber, texture their world. To do this, a close textual reading approach is adopted. The theoretical grid for the article is Freud's theory of Uncanny and his concept of Unhomely. Also, the plays have been approached through Vidler's (1992) idea of Architectural Uncanny. Although the amount of scholarship available is fertile, no exhaustive study of Pinter's plays has been conducted from this perspective. The study is unique in that Pinter's works have not been previously analyzed through the critical lens of gothic theories. The article's main argument is that the motifs, tropes, and trappings that are scattered throughout the body of Pinter's dramatic works evoke a strong image of a dark Gothic world characterized by excessive anxiety and frustration. The article explores the effect of the uncanny produced through such psychological and social derangement and, from the gothic perspective, examines how Pinter's dramaturgy conjures up the terrifying psyches of the characters. The gothic analysis shows how the characters in an absurdist play take defensive positions and strategies against the social world. The article further interlinks gothic terror psyches and fears to highlight the ensuing sense of displacement characters feel in the light of the theory of uncanny and homely. This article analyzes three early plays of Pinter: The Room, The Birthday Party, and The Caretaker. Gothicity in Pinter's plays emerges as a strong impulse, a driving force through which Pinter puts across the social invasion, oppression, injustice, and individual freedom.
Journal Article
Volleyball victory
Andrea is looking forward to another winning volleyball season with her school team, but the new coach is putting them through a lot of basic drills, and Andrea is frustrated because she is not playing the position she is used to, and she does not understand why.
Book
“Was it marriage?”: Queer Relationships and Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Realism
When E. M. Forster protested, in the face of matrimony’s intractable grasp on life and literature alike, that novels were expected to end with “the old, old answer, marriage,” he voiced a widely-held frustration with the possibilities for representations of queer life in fiction and fact.2 This article explores how a vein of queer modernist writing, exemplified by David Garnett’s 1922 novella of animal transformation, Lady into Fox, dislodges conventional marriage as the central organizer of social and literary form by undermining the foundation of the marriage plot—narrative realism. Garnett’s novella subverts the hegemonic norms of the marriage plot, critiquing structures of heteronormative monogamy while offering an affirmative version of queer resistance in which moments of subversion surpass critique and instead imagine a new vision of the social order. [...]Lady into Fox reveals that this history of progressive political expression is entangled with the legacies of modernist innovations and the often-elided role of fantasy in modernist writing. Exploring the fantastic, speculative vein of queer modernism that Garnett’s no-vella represents allows us to answer José Esteban Muñoz’s call to resist the “recent . . . erosion of the gay and lesbian political imagination” that makes queer politics into nothing more than “mere inclusion in a corrupt and bankrupt social order” signified by the master symbol of marriage.3 Fantasy’s potential as an anti-realist genre is precisely what transforms critique into new possibilities for queer people, rather than rerouting their desires into normative social structures or failure. 7 Pines interprets novels from Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881) to D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) as reinforcing the “old order” that defines success in life and romantic love through the figure of a happy marriage (The Marriage Paradox, 113).
Journal Article
Skating showdown
Thirteen-year-old Janelle loves figure skating, but when she enters a competition she is frustrated because she is not as good at the jumps as another girl at the rink and she starts to wonder if she should just quit--until her coach comes up with an idea.
Book
'Angry Young Women' Disrupting the Canon in Late Soviet Latvian Literature: Andra Neiburga's Early Prose Fiction
In the late phase of 'developed socialism', shortly before Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms of perestroika or reconstruction in the Soviet Union in 1985 had reached Latvian cultural establishment, a young generation of poets, writers, playwrights, journalists, musicians, cinema and theatre artists throughout the socialist bloc countries and the Soviet Union initiated new trends in culture. In Soviet Latvia, the new trends in prose fiction produced by young writers were labelled the 'new wave'. Among them - emerged a group of women writers called 'angry young women' who challenged the established canon of socialist realism by addressing new themes including the negative sides of Soviet reality and everyday life, silenced pages of Latvian history under the Soviet regime, issues of sexuality, etc., as well as introducing new poetic features in the prose narrative. The representatives of the 'new wave' produced short prose fiction works that were published in the monthly journal Avots and thus were circulated among broad readership, arousing quick reaction. Andra Neiburga (1957-2019) is one of the 'angry young women' who entered the scene of Latvian literature in 1985 with the publication of short stories in Avots and other press periodicals; her first collection of stories Izbāzti putni un putni būros (Stuffed Birds and Birds in Cages) was published in 1988. The present paper regards the narrative peculiarities of A. Neiburga's early short stories in a gender perspective that reflects the specific ambiguous characteristics of the late Soviet epoch as a time anticipating change in discourse and expression. Along with other young generation writers of the late Soviet period, A. Neiburga distanced herself from the canon of socialist realism and executed what Alice Jardine termed gyn sis by introducing a new voice that expressed indignation, frustration, uncertainty and inscribed a radically different vision of reality that saw the subversive potential of accepted structures and forms of expression.
Journal Article
Adopting Agile software development: the project manager experience
Purpose
Early research into Agile approaches explored particular practices or quantified improvements in code production. Less well researched is how Agile teams are managed. The project manager (PM) role is traditionally one of “command and control” but Agile methods require a more facilitative approach. How this changing role plays out in practice is not yet clearly understood. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how adopting Agile techniques shape the working practices of PMs and critically reflect on some of the tensions that arise.
Design/methodology/approach
An ethnographic approach was used to surface a richer understanding of the issues and tensions faced by PMs as Agile methods are introduced. Ethnographic fiction conveys the story to a wider audience.
Findings
Agile approaches shift responsibility and spread expert knowledge seeming to undermine the traditional PM function. However, the findings here show various scenarios that allow PMs to wrest control and become more of a “gate-keeper”. Ethnographic fiction communicates a sense of the PMs frustration with the conflict between the need to control and the desire for teams to take more responsibility.
Originality/value
Stories provide insight and communicate the experiential feel behind issues faced by PMs adopting Agile to surface useful knowledge. The objective is not how to measure knowledge, but how to recognize it. These reflections are valuable to fellow researchers as well as practitioners and contribute to the growing literature on Agile project management.
Journal Article
Spectacular Case of Wintry Dreams: A Debordian Reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams”
A constant failure and frustration of relationships can be traced in most of Fitzgerald’s works of fiction. The most prominent instance seems to be the case of Gatsby and his elusive and obscure object of desire Daisy, yet Fitzgerald’s short stories can be considered as no exception. “Winter Dreams” is one of the short stories in which the prospect of an imminent downfall of relationship always haunts the protagonist. This essay attempts to shed light on the roots of this meltdown through Guy Debord’s theories. As a founding member of Situationist International (SI), Debord believed that the modern world’s defining characteristic is spectacle which mediates the relationships among the members of society. The lack of directness and immediacy which is caused by the Society of the Spectacle (La Société du Spectacle) seems to be the originator of the unremitting failure between the characters in the case of “Winter Dreams” and therein lies the rub.Keywords: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du Spectacle), Sign-value, Exchange-value
Journal Article