1,720,959 research outputs found
Building The Ark: Text World Theory and the evolution of dystopian epistolary
Get PDFTold through a series of interrelated documents (including emails, text messages, newspaper clippings and blog posts), Annabel Smith’s interactive digital novel The Ark epitomises the contemporary hybridity of the dystopian genre. Designed to be fully immersive, the story can be engaged with across media, enabling readers to ‘dive deeper into the world of the novel’ and challenge how they experience dystopian texts. Taking a Text-World-Theory perspective, I examine the implications of this challenge, investigating the impact of transmedial storytelling on world-building and exploring the creative evolution of dystopian epistolary more broadly. In analysing both the ebook element of The Ark and certain facets of its companion pieces (which take the form of a dynamic website and a smartphone app), I investigate the creation of the novel’s text-worlds, considering the process of multimodal meaning construction, examining the conceptual intricacies of the epistolary form and exploring the influence of paratextual matter on world-building and construal. In doing so, I offer new insights into the conceptualisation of ‘empty text-worlds’, extend Gibbons’ discussions of transmedial world-creation and argue for a more nuanced understanding of dystopian epistolary as framed within Text World Theory
Reading the Dystopian Short Story
Get PDFThis thesis presents the first cognitive-poetic account of the dystopian short story and investigates the experience of dystopian reading. In doing so, it takes a mixed-methods approach that draws upon various types of experimental and naturalistic reader response data in support of my own rigorous stylistic analysis. The study focuses upon four contemporary short stories published within the last ten years: George Saunders’ ([2012] 2014g) ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’; Paolo Bacigalupi’s ([2008] 2010a) ‘Pump Six’; Genevieve Valentine’s ([2009] 2012) ‘Is this your day to join the Revolution?’; and Adam Marek’s ([2009] 2012b) ‘Dead Fish’. These texts were selected for their focus upon socially relevant thematic concerns, their cultural resonance and their inherent didacticism – attributes which I argue determine the dystopian reading experience.
In moving beyond the periodic demarcations imposed on dystopian narrative by traditional literary criticism, this study argues for a reader-led discussion of genre that takes into account reader subjectivity and personal conceptualisations of prototypicality. My research therefore offers a new contribution to the area of dystopian literary criticism, as well as advancing research in cognitive poetics and empirical stylistics more broadly. Framed within Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999), my thesis builds upon existing research and advances text-world-theoretical discussions of world-building, characterisation and reading experience. In particular, I argue for a more nuanced discussion of paratextual text-worlds and propose a systematic account of social cognition that can be applied in Text-World-Theory terms.
As an original piece of stylistic analysis, this thesis challenges traditional conceptions of genre and aims to extend existing discussions of the emotional experience of literary reading. As a result, several contributions are also made to the field of empirical stylistics, as I test multiple reader response methods and combine key findings from each case study to present a multifaceted account of dystopian reading
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Experiencing dystopia through Umwelt: Modelling the nonhuman animal in Hollow Kingdom
Get PDFThe experience of nonhuman animals is typically neglected in dystopian fiction, particularly as concerns the experiences of domestic pets. The presence of such creatures in dystopia is often notable only by their absence, with animal life (or the lack thereof) being a characteristic, albeit peripheral, marker of social or environmental loss. In recent years, however, authors have been increasingly drawn to the role of animals in the end times, presenting dystopian worlds from the perspective of animal characters. Exploring the projection of nonhuman consciousness in contemporary dystopia, I look to investigate this phenomenon, focusing on the modelling of animal minds in Hollow Kingdom. Drawing upon the work of Caracciolo and Herman, I analyse the presentation of animal narration, exploring how we attribute consciousness to nonhuman characters and how, in turn, the conceptualisation of Hollow Kingdom is given texture as a result of the animal voices, perceptions and attitudes it presents
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
The language of dystopia
No full textTakes an innovative approach to categorising the dystopian genreProvides the first comprehensive stylistic analysis of 21st century dystopian literatureIncludes a discussion of dystopia across evolving and emerging platforms such as video games, digital fictio
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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