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"narrative theory"
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Empathy and the Novel
This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.
eBook
Writing the Reader. Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel
The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.
eBook
The Translator as a Colonial Agent: Reframing the South in the English Translation of Season of Migration to the North
This paper sets out to examine the translation of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North in light of Narrative theory. In his work, Salih is writing back to the empire as a form of resistance against British Colonialism. The translation seems to tone this resistance down by constructing a narrative that underlines the superiority of the North over the South. The paper attempts to offer a fresh perspective as it explores how the South is reframed in the target text to be represented to the target audience. It also attempts to answer the question of how the East/South is narrated and whether it has been (dis)empowered in the novel’s translation. Given the importance of the text, It is essential to investigate how the novel has been introduced in the West using a strong and adaptable framework capable of capturing the complexities of the interactions among various powers involved. Narrative theory offers such a framework and is particularly suitable for the current study.
Journal Article
How ChatGPT’s Semantic Parrotting (Compared to Gemini’s) Impacts Text Summarization with Literary Text
In this paper we explore ChatGPT’s ability to produce a summary, a precis, and/or an essay on the basis of excerpts from a novel—The Solid Mandala—by Nobel Prize Australian writer Patrick White. We use a number of prompts to test a number of functions related to narrative analysis from the point of view of the “sujet”, the “fable”, and the style. In the paper, we illustrate extensively a number of recurrent semantic mistakes that can badly harm the understanding of the contents of the novel. We made a list of 12 different types of semantic mistakes or parrotting we found GPT made, which can be regarded as typical for stochastic-based generation. We then tested Gemini for the same 12 mistakes and found a marked improvement in all critical key issues. The conclusion for ChatGPT is mostly negative. We formulate an underlying hypothesis for its worse performance, the influence of vocabulary size, which in Gemini is seven times higher than in GPT.
Journal Article
Narrative Technologies: A Philosophical Investigation of the Narrative Capacities of Technologies by Using Ricoeur's Narrative Theory
Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur's narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies themselves co-constitute narratives and our understanding of these narratives by configuring characters and events in a meaningful temporal whole. We propose a hermeneutic framework that enables us to categorise and interpret technologies according to two hermeneutic distinctions. Firstly, we consider the extent to which technologies close in on the paradigm of the written text by assessing their capacity to actively configure characters and events into a meaningful whole; thereby introducing a linguistic aspect in the theory of technological mediation. Secondly, we consider the extent to which technologies have the capacity to abstract from the public narrative time of actual characters and events by constructing quasi-characters and quasi-events, thereby introducing the social in our conception of technological mediation. This leads us to the outlines of a theory of narrative technologies that revolves around four hermeneutic categories. In order to show the merits of this theory, we discuss the categories by analysing paradigmatic examples of narrative technologies: the bridge, the hydroelectric power plant, video games, and electronic money.
Journal Article
Interactive Narrative in a Mobile Health Behavioral Intervention (Tumaini): Theoretical Grounding and Structure of a Smartphone Game to Prevent HIV Among Young Africans
The increasing availability of smartphones, including in low-income countries, offers an unprecedented opportunity to reach individuals with innovative health promotion interventions. Electronic games delivered via smartphone offer promising avenues for sexual health promotion and HIV prevention, especially for young people. By giving players real agency in a virtual and safe environment, well-designed games can provide a level of experiential learning unparalleled by many other behavioral interventions. The design of effective games for health relies on multidisciplinary insight and expertise. However, relatively few studies discuss the theoretical understanding underlying their intervention. Making explicit the theoretical grounding of a game-based intervention allows articulation of assumptions and strategies, anticipation of outcomes, and evaluation of impacts (including intermediate effects), thereby increasing understanding of pathways to change, with a view to contributing to the development of more effective games. It also helps strengthen the credibility and improve the accountability of games for health. We present the multidisciplinary theoretical framework-integrating intervention design, mediators, and behavioral outcomes-and the structure of an HIV prevention game for young African adolescents that has shown promise in a randomized pilot study in Western Kenya. The central component of Tumaini (hope for the future in Kiswahili) is an interactive role-playing narrative in which the player makes choices for characters that determine how their paths unfold. In addition, a series of mini-games reinforce skills, and the \"My Story\" component links the game world to the player's own life and goals, and a reward system motivates continued play. With its \"choose-your-own-adventure\" format, Tumaini is intended to be replayed so that players can experience the consequences resulting from different choices made in the role-playing narrative. Grounded in theories of narrative and applied communication and in social behavioral theories, especially Social Cognitive Theory, Tumaini is designed to help young adolescents acquire the information, skills, and motivation they need to avoid and reduce sexual risks. We close by situating Tumaini within discussion of the theory and practice of using interactive narrative in health promotion, with a view to furthering theoretical elaboration.
Journal Article