Shaping Words, Narrating Shapes

2005

Massey University, 2020

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2008

What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives and the texts we read? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theater, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now thoroughly revised, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes two new chapters. With its lucid exposition of concepts and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Journal of Early Childhood Research

IBM Journal of Research and Development

In the last decades, narratives, as symbolic tools for keeping, fixing and sharing ideas and experiences, have undergone deep transformations. The diversity of narrative supports, the technological tools being employed, and even the deep changes affecting the late modern societies have caused transformations in the classical and linear narrative paradigm. Not only in cinema, but also in TV, videogames and other media, we are witnessing an intensive use of increasingly complex narratives, based on hypermediatic, rhizomatic, modular, branching and fragmented narratives, and its constant presence in the public and private space, including the pervasiveness of transmedia and interactive proposals. In this special edition of the CITAR Journal, we aim to study the audiovisual narrative - specially experimental and nonclassical narratives - in close dialogue with creations of contemporary cinema, TV, cinematic art, videogames, animation, audiovisual advertising, interactive installations, location games and other expressive uses of the moving image.

History and Theory, 2024

In ´The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Per- spective of Meaning´, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with con- temporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philoso- phers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog’s book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog’s denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” also show that much. Keywords: philosophies of history, historical method, causal explanation and understand- ing, history and social science, irrelevance of time

The study analyses four unpublished terracotta figurines from Ebla. From the morphological point of view and because of the presence of a dagger, the figurines are related to the administration of war at Ebla, based on archaeological and textual data and references.