Narrative Studies

This is the Introduction to volume 9 (2009) of Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics that I co-edited with Laurent Milesi and Biwu Shang. The articles included in this issue can be accessed at http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/site_engleza/No_1_2019.html. The issue includes: Arleen Ionescu: Postclassical Narratology: Twenty Years Later GENERAL PERSPECTIVES Brian Richardson: Recent Work in Unnatural Narrative Studies Biwu Shang: Postclassical Narratology in China: Receptions and Variations John Pier: Is There a French Postclassical Narratology? THEMATIC DEPARTURES Samuel Caleb Wee: Songs of ‘Experientiality’: Reconsidering the Relationship between Poeticity and Narrativity in Postclassical Narratology Charlotte Lindemann: Dialogue and the Limits of Narrative Discourse: Gérard Genette, Gertrude Stein Florian Zitzelsberger: On the Queer Rhetoric of Metalepsis Xiaomeng Wan: Body as Resource of Narrative Communication: An Intersection of Corporeal Narratology with Rhetorical Narratology READINGS Vladimir Biti: Almost the Same but not Quite: Kafka and His Assignees Yili Tang: Character Narration and Fictionality in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot REVIEWS Yuzhen Lin: A Comparative Perspective on Unnaturalness: A Review of Biwu Shang’s Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives Fang Cai: A Discipline with Local Characteristics and a Global Perspective: Zhong Guo Xu Shi Xue [Chinese Narratology]

Resumo

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre A Dança dos Paroxismos (1929), de Jorge Brum do Canto (1910-1994), motivada por diversas pistas de interpretação lançadas nos intertítulos iniciais, designadamente a apresentação da obra como um “ensaio visual” e como um “filme português”, e a dedicatória ao cineasta Marcel L’Herbier. Perspetivando o filme em função de alguns pressupostos do cinema da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa, na qual se inscreve L’Herbier, identifica-se e caracteriza-se um programa estético que, no filme de Brum do Canto, se materializa numa questão que, sendo primariamente diegética, transporta também implicações teóricas determinantes: todo o filme corresponde à alucinação de um moribundo. Através de uma análise aproximada de A Dança dos Paroxismos, investiga-se, por fim, de que modo este filme — um dos primeiros casos de “cinema onírico” — pode constituir um complexo “ensaio visual” sobre o cinema da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa.

This article examines the rationales for language revitalization and their materialization on a local scale. The starting premise is that, due to specific social, cultural, as well as spatial circumstances, there exists a wide variety of rationalizations for why saving endangered languages is important. The complexity of the matter is discussed with regard to Meänkieli, a minority language spoken in northern Sweden, which has a long and unique history of marginalization. The article bases on group discussions conducted with Meänkieli speaking cultural activists in northern Sweden during the fall of 2015 and the spring of 2016. The present examination of the group discussions reveals how the rationales of saving the language are inherently interrelated with questions concerning identity formation, educational principles and the sovereignty of minority groups. The analysis also reveals how, due to the complex nature of local history, there is no consensus on whether the recent progress in language revitalization is unanimously a positive change or not.

Inscrevendo no seu título a expressão estudos narrativos, este dicionário não busca apenas contemplar uma área científica com recorte nítido. Aquela expressão sugere também que esta não quer ser tão-só uma obra de teoria, no sentido mais forte e consequente do termo; ela encerra também (e muitas vezes explicita-as) propostas de trabalho, ou seja, de estudo da narrativa – ou das narrativas.  Vai neste plural muito daquilo que hoje está adquirido pelos estudos narrativos: num mundo que conhecemos, representamos e organizamos sub specie narrationis, é pertinente que muitos relatos e não apenas os literários sejam objeto de análise; neles – em contexto televisivo ou na Internet, nas páginas de um conto ou numa notícia de jornal –, está muito do que somos, como pessoas e como coletividade.

This article examines competing narratives over belonging and authority at Japan's and China's margins by excavating the discursive practices employed by relevant state and substate actors in framing, contesting and (dis)assembling totalizing claims over Ryukyu/Okinawa and Taiwan since the late nineteenth century. Informed by the critical international relations literature on practices of statecraft and Foucauldian conceptions of power as productive and discursive, we suggest that the aforementioned 'margins' are sites central to the constitution, production and maintenance of Chinese and Japanese state identities, which have been repeatedly performed through violent material and discursive practices concealing these two states' lack of ontological foundation. We look at how the state-centric narratives employed by the Chinese and Japanese authorities have worked to limit, curtail and suppress their locally generated counter-narratives in such cases as the Taiwan Expedition (1874), the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands dispute and boundary-making between Okinawa and Taiwan. However, these cases also show that efforts to contain resistance to the state's inscription of boundaries separating an 'inside/self/domestic' from an 'outside/other/foreign' cannot fully succeed, not only because where there is power there is resistance but also because the state would wither away should its identity formation be successful in the terms in which it is articulated.

Girls (HBO, 2012-17) é uma série de dramédia estadunidense que desde seu lançamento suscitou muitos debates de diferentes vieses. Ao longo de suas temporadas é perceptível uma mudança de um viés predominantemente cômico para um aumento de carga dramática na narrativa. A proposta desse trabalho é analisar como essa dinâmica de tensionamentos entre euforia versus disforia, que enxergamos como intrínseca à dramédia, causa impactos diretos na tipificação cômica (BERGSON, 1983; JAUSS, 2005) da protagonista e em sua Jornada do Herói (CAMPBELL, 1949; VOGLER, 2006), o que vemos que reflete também em sua estrutura narrativa quanto a uma lógica mais episódica ou serializada (MITTEL, 2006; NERI, 2015). Assim, nos propomos a analisar como o imbricamento entre drama e comédia impacta diversos elementos textuais do nosso objeto de pesquisa.

Standard genealogies of knowledge posit the circulation of modernity in one direction, from the West to “the rest.” This history reveals the waves of influence flowing the opposite way, from nonstate people to the state. The essay introduces a new method for the history of knowledge that traces the travel of narratives, packets of media containing messages. Masks long viewed as objects of collection are seen here anew as subjects of recollection, mnemonic devices that archive the global propagation of knowledge. One set of masks is reunited with the narratives they encode: stories employed as a survival strategy by the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, a network of peoples who utilized the anthropologist Franz Boas as a host body to enter and alter the world that came to colonize them. The efforts of the Indigenous intellectual George Hunt to disseminate the masks—and, with the masks, his family message of transformation—directly shaped the concept of culture. Using the masks as teaching tools, Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw thinkers civilized Boas into a new modernity, shifting him from categorization to communication, from signs to messages, and from a Self/Other perception to a global consciousness of Host–Guest relations. The masks recollect a profound yet long suppressed Indigenous influence on modern thought.

The studi analyses the unrecognized teaching of the narratives in Luke 16 concerning the response to the vision of Paul. The method used is narrative interpretation. As the results, Luke 16 teaches about both the role of the Holy Spirit to bring the chosen leaders to cross their boundaries as well as to teach them to practice Shared-Leadership in Missio Dei process. Abstrak Tulisan ini meneliti ajaran yang tersembunyi dalam narasi mengenai respon terhadap penglihatan Paulus dalam Kisah Rasul 16. Pendekatannya adalah kajian narasi. Sebagai hasilnya, Lukas 16 mengajarkan pertama, kedaulatan Roh Kudus yang mendorong pemimpin-pemimpin yang dipilihnya melintasi batas-batas pandangan mereka dan kedua, mengenai peran-Nya mengajarkan agar kepemimpinan bersama perlu diterapkan di dalam proses melaksanakan Misi Allah.

uncorrected pre-print/view proof.
please cite the published essay: https://www.popularinquiry.com/s/Popular-inquiry_Vol8_2021_4_Sorokin_up1.pdf
--
Arguably, our (post)modern age engenders suspicion and (explanatory) uncertainty, prompting epistemic instability, eroding veracity conditions and causing rational skepticism and distrust. This throws into sharp relief the leading pathologizing or stigmatizing scholarly evaluation of the practice of conspiracy theorizing. Especially insofar as the proliferation and stratification of competing (and power-differentiated) stories and knowledge representations are concerned. In challenging the validity of such conventional wisdom, this multidisciplinary essay broadly follows the critical "particularist" philosophical perspective. I will highlight the doubly collaborative activity underscoring digital conspiracism: The Latin etymology of "to conspire" ("to breathe together") and the storytelling dimension of "to plot" ("plotting a story"). Two notions will be introduced: contra-plotting and plotters of suspicion. Both elaborate on the ubiquitous role of narrative, for plotting necessitates an indefinitely expanding "middle" communally self-reproduced through "continual interpretation" --precluding the final acceptability of any resolution (sections 1-2). The third section offers an illustrative qualitative analysis of 'natural' discursive data. The sample of forum posts on the MS Estonia's catastrophic shipwreck is taken from the bilingual (Estonian-English) conspiracy forum Para-Web and broader (motif and theme-oriented) plotting tendencies are identified. The essay concludes with some summarizing thoughts and suggestions for further research (section 4).

This paper addresses variation in lexical semantics by oral-poetic register and genre, including semantic variation in formulaic language.  It reviews uses of the Old Norse term þurs (commonly translated 'ogre') in verse contexts, including runic inscriptions.  It argues that the semantics of this term varied in relation to the genre in which it was used, including uses with reference to mythological giants (jötnar) in mythological narratives, agents of illness in charms, and as a vague synonym for 'monster' in death-songs more like the prose narratives in which these appear.  It proposes that variation by genre includes genres embedded in narrative as speech acts, approaching these as 'registral irruptions' in mertical narrative.

It shows that, especially in the fornyrðislag meter, use of this term was highly formulaic and considers the question of whether it may have indexed excessive or inappropriate sexuality.

Configuração dos processos de ficcionalidade. Cabe à
personagem a primazia da armação desses mundos que ela habita,
transitando em tempo e espaço e sofrendo ou exercendo as ações
narradas. Assim, como produção ou como produto a relação entre
cada personagem com o universo narrativo determina o conjunto de
tipos de modelo de mundo que competem para configuração do
mundo possível ficcional que se sobreleva como cenário. A
constituição de mundos possíveis narrativos envolve um conjunto de
estratégias presentes nos modelos de construção de mundos,
designando modos e sentidos próprios na forma com que o
ficcionista engendra sua produção ficcional...

Disponível em

http://www.dialogarts.uerj.br/admin/arquivos_tfc_literatura/Figura%C3%A7%C3%A3o_de_personagens_s04.pdf

A coordinated multidisciplinary collection focusing on methods that engages folklore studies, medieval studies, ethnography, linguistic anthropology, oral poetry, semiotics, iconography, design, medieval literature, mythology, textual studies...

Covenant, circumcision, and sacrifice in the Abraham tradition are analyzed, especially as articulated in the triangle relationship between God, Abraham, and Isaac. Two texts are particularly in focus, Gen 17 and Gen 22:1-19, concerning the initiation of Abraham as a covenantal servant, the covenant as a course of events developing a reciprocal structure of exchange, and the connection between initiation, circumcision, and sacrifice. The stories of P and JE about the miraculous birth of Isaac are almost the same but differ on a certain point. Where P recounts the circumcision of Isaac, JE tells the story about the sacrifice of Isaac, and we suggest the sacrificial narrative functions as the founding myth for the circumcision rite. Finally, we introduce the Jewish Akedah tradition and its connection with the narrative interpretation of Jesus’ death in the New Testament and demonstrates how the relationship between sacrifice and baptism in the Jesus story in a displaced manner repeats the relationship between sacrifice and circumcision in the Abraham story.

"Philosophy of trauma" is not a widely used concept, and the topic is rarely discussed, despite the strong philosophical undercurrent of literary trauma theory and its genealogical link to poststructuralism. This is probably due to the fact that trauma is more commonly seen as a psychological or cultural rather than a philosophical concept. It could be argued, however, that precisely for this reason there is a need to explore the philosophical assumptions underlying trauma theory. These assumptions often remain unarticulated-they can be tacit and implicit-but they nevertheless structure different traditions of theorizing trauma. In this chapter, I approach philosophies of trauma precisely from the perspective of the philosophical assumptions undergirding different ways of engaging with trauma. These assumptions can take various forms depending, first, on how explicitly articulated they are and, second, on whether they emerge in the context of theoretical discourse or fiction. Drawing on these distinctions, I will sketch out four types of philosophies of trauma. In addition to this semantic categorization, I propose a substantial one, suggesting that the three main philosophical paradigms of trauma that underlie contemporary trauma theory can be called empiricism, poststructuralism and hermeneutics. I will then analyse in more detail the philosophical underpinnings of dominant literary trauma theory particularly concerning the concepts of experience and narrative understanding. The final part of the chapter elucidates these points through a discussion of Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life (2015).

L’histoire de la narratologie est paradoxale. Sa naissance découle de la prise de conscience précoce que l’horizon des travaux portant sur la narrativité déborde
du cadre de la théorie littéraire. Pourtant, cette discipline émergente a longtemps été réticente à s’émanciper de son périmètre d’origine. Il en a découlé qu’un certain nombre de concepts se sont figés dans des définitions qui les rendent difficilement applicables à des formes non verbales. A une époque où les grands récits de notre culture se déclinent sur une vaste gamme de supports médiatiques, souvent coordonnés, au sein desquels les narrations bédéiques, filmiques, télévisuelles ou vidéoludiques occupent une place de plus en plus centrale, il est devenu urgent de développer une théorie du récit capable d’embrasser cette diversité. Mais cet élargissement ne doit pas se faire au mépris d’une conscience aiguë des contraintes que chaque support, par sa matérialité, mais aussi par sa tradition historique, impose au message narratif. Si l’on regarde au-delà du phénomène de l’adaptabilité des histoires, il devient alors essentiel de refonder des concepts transversaux suffisamment souples pour s’adapter à n’importe quel média, tout en réfléchissant à la manière spécifique dont chacun d’entre eux s’incarne médiatiquement.

Resumo: o presente texto descreve e analisa o universo narrativo Star Wars e discute seu papel tanto dentro do gênero de ficção científica audiovisual quanto para o campo dos Estudos Narrativos. Palavras-chave: Comunicação midiática1; Estudos narrativos2; Ficção científica audiovisual3; Abstract: This paper describes and analyzes the universe of Star Wars and discusses its role both within the audiovisual science fiction genre and the field of Narrative Studies.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Darstellung der Eroberung Amerikas in aktuellen deutschen und mexikanischen Geschichtsschulbüchern im Hinblick auf die Konstruktion und Verhandlung von (Inter-)Kulturalität sowie die daraus resultierenden gegenwartsbezogenen Implikationen. Im ersten Teil wird dazu in Auseinandersetzung mit relevanten Beiträgen der Geschichtstheorie, der Schulbuchforschung und der post- und dekolonialen Studien ein diskursanalytisches Modell entwickelt, mit dem sich die narrative und performative Ebene von geschichtsbezogenem Schulbuchwissen untersuchen lassen. Im zweiten Teil des Beitrags werden der deutsche und mexikanische Schulbuchkorpus (Zeitraum 2009 bis 2014) anhand dieser Heuristik vergleichend untersucht. Dabei lassen sich mit dem Narrativ europäischer Dominanz (Deutschland) bzw. dem Narrativ der Hybridisierung (Mexiko) zwei genuin unterschiedliche Vergegenwärtigungsweisen der Conquista herauskristallisieren, mit denen zudem unterschiedliche didaktische Anforderungen und Subjektpositionierungen einhergehen. Trotz aller Differenzen treffen sich die hegemonialen Darstellungen beider Korpora jedoch in der epistemischen Ausblendung oder Verbannung der indigenen Bevölkerungen bzw. ihrer Geschichten.

This essay explores how classical Buddhist literature, across a variety of traditional genres, portrays the wondrous smile of the Buddha. Despite its literary register, the Buddha’s smile is first and foremost a nonverbal gesture, and if we are to understand its significance, then we must employ a theoretical approach that treats it as such. Multimodality provides such an approach. While an emergent body of psychological research has argued that the smile is a universal human gesture connected to a rather limited set of emotional states like happiness, the recognition that smiles can be voluntary acts highlights the importance of situational context. Since the Buddha’s smile comes from an historical and cultural context quite foreign to the body of evidence that has informed modern physiological science, we must read carefully for incongruency and allow difference to guide our thinking. The essay argues that, while the figurative trope of the Buddha’s smile remains enigmatic and rich in possible meanings due to its inherently nonverbal character, it nonetheless gestures toward his status as a figure of sovereign power and superhuman knowledge. Although this interpretation has largely eluded modern commentators, it finds support in classical Buddhist understandings and points to the power and flexibility of language itself, particularly gesture, body language, and figurative behavior. For evidence, the article also includes, as an appendix, an English translation of a short story from the Hundred Buddhist Tales (Avadānaśataka) featuring the luminous and powerful smile of the Buddha.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo a análise de redações de alunos de uma escola pública do sistema estadual de ensino na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, localizada no subúrbio, a fim de compreender, através de seus relatos escritos, suas expectativas em relação a serem bem-sucedidos. O ato de leitura é visto como um fenômeno social em que o fluxo de informação opera no diálogo que o leitor realiza com o texto escrito. A pesquisa se alinha ao paradigma de investigação interpretativista. A análise enfocou trechos de redações nos quais os alunos construíram a educação como um sonho a ser conquistado. A educação aparece em seus discursos como um elemento a ser possuído e que faz parte das expectativas em relação ao que é ser bem sucedido. Os resultados apontam para a percepção de que, ao construírem diversas formas de acesso à educação como um sonho, os alunos; a) evidenciam uma das principais formas de divisão de classes de sua sociedade, aquela que separa aqueles que têm e os que não têm acesso à educação; b) eles ratificam discursivamente a percepção de que a educação é um bem de valor como, por exemplo, uma casa ou um carro, mas; c) eles, muitas vezes, não sabem como conquistar nem o que fazer com este bem.

Film noir merupakan anomali tersendiri dalam sejarah Hollywood. Dengan segala variasinya tentang misteri pembunuhan dan perselingkuhan rumah tangga, film noir menjadi hiburan populer masyarakat Amerika dari tahun 1942 sampai 1958. Periode tersebut merupakan pertama kalinya dalam sinema Hollywood karakter perempuan digambarkan memiliki kebebasan atas tanggung jawab domestik. Dalam perspektif yang lebih makro, film noir tidak menjadikan rumah dan keluarga sebagai solusi konflik cerita, yang sebelumnya merupakan tradisi bercerita mayoritas film-film keluaran Hollywood.

Secara historis, kemunculan film noir terjadi bersamaan dengan perubahan lanskap sosial-politik Amerika Serikat pasca Perang Dunia II. Negara adidaya tersebut mengalami transformasi peran gender yang drastis, di mana laki-laki kembali ke lapangan kerja usai mengabdi untuk negara di medan perang, dan perempuan kembali ke kehidupan domestik setelah menikmati kebebasan merintis karier di luar rumah. Pada saat yang bersamaan, pemerintah mengkampanyekan pentingnya kehidupan komunal, dengan harapan keluarga dapat menjadi unit pemantap ideologi negara dalam level akar rumpun.

Ada kontras yang mencolok dalam pendirian terhadap keluarga dalam film noir dan lanskap-sosial politik yang melingkupinya. Kontras tersebut yang diharapkan dapat dijembatani melalui penelitian ini.

Early childhood settings have become contested spaces, or sites of struggle, between economic and sociocultural interests disputing their purpose. Recent years have shown increased pressure on children in early education settings to demonstrate predetermined learning outcomes, which (a) limits the scope of what is possible in the classroom, (b) narrows the range of what learning is considered valid, and (c) privileges the experience and values of the dominant culture, thereby determining who and what matters in early childhood settings. Thus, in the current education climate where conventional knowledges are routinely privileged, unconventional knowledges and small stories from children’s lives are frequently disregarded or otherwise pushed to the margins of daily classroom life.
The purpose of this post qualitative study was to position children’s storytelling as a disruptive force to western, positivist, and humanist knowledges in early childhood education and research. In this study, I am thinking with theory using critical posthumanist/new materialist theories as a research approach to consider children’s storytelling in an early childhood setting. Adopting the role of observant participator, I worked alongside ten 2.5-5-year-old (co)-participants using observations, photography, and classroom discussions to investigate the relational and emergent dimensions of children’s storytelling. I used pedagogical narration as an approach to data analysis, drawing lines between interconnected episodes and pointing to the more-than-human relational encounters that were present in children’s everyday storytelling practices. In
ii
this study, I found storytelling to be a generative process, produced within a complex assemblage of human and non-human actors. The second finding that emerged is that an expanded concept of narrativity is required to fully attune and attend to the multiplicitous storytelling occurring within early childhood settings. Lastly, in this study, children’s stories were shown to have to the potential to act as thought experiments for envisioning possible worlds. This study broke from conventional education research by considering not what worlds are being reflected in children’s storytelling, but rather what worlds are being produced. This is an important distinction at this particular moment in history, when we must consider what knowledges are legitimized and what are outcast by our systems of education, and what worlds are produced and reproduced in the process.

Join us on 28 February at h. 17:30 CET (16:30 UTC/11:30am EST) for the online presentation of "Spatial Plots. Virtuality and the Embodied Mind in Baricco, Camilleri and Calvino".

The book will be presented by the author Marzia Beltrami, in dialogue with Marco Caracciolo (Gent University) and Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo), followed by a Q&A session.

All welcome, no booking needed. Just follow the Zoom link on the poster!

The present theoretical paper explores the narrative storytelling dimension of conspiracy theorizing. After a careful review of recent scholarly literature on conspiracy theories (section 1), it is argued that two mutually reinforcing aspects of the notion might have remained to some extent undertheorized: (1) whether "conspiracy theory," following conspiracy proper, also retains the collaborative quality of the latter (the Latin etymology of "to breathe together"); (2) consequently, whether such "theorizing" can be claimed as being the 'second-order' explicitly narrative manifestation of the plotting in conspiracy proper (to plot as in plotting a story). Toward these aims, and in consulting conspiracy theory research and narrative studies, tentative terminology is proposed and some empirical observations are undertaken based on the Estonian-English conspiracy forum Para-Web (section 2).

Key-words: conspiracy theory, (alt-)narrative, sense-making, (contra-)plotting, co-elaboration.

Excerpt in lieu of an abstract: In narratology, it is usually maintained that verbal utterances, films, and picture sequences can fulfill the aforementioned and similar criteria, but a single picture cannot. In this article, I would like to question this point of view. More specifically, my analysis focuses on the difficulty associated with conveying a story through single monochronic pictures that only depict one moment in time, as opposed to polychronic pictures that explicitly represent several moments. If I were able to prove that it is possible to convey a story with a single monochronic picture, then it should follow by implication that polychronic pictures can also convey stories. The most common reason for thinking that this is not the case is because of the perceived temporal limitations of pictures in terms of presentation and conveying story content (Speidel 2013). I would like to challenge this notion, by suggesting that there are [end p. 2] single pictures that correspond to the major criteria used to determine whether something is a narrative, including the criteria Herman introduced. Recent experiments (Speidel 2018) show that this is in accordance with the nonexpert conviction that some single pictures that explicitly show only one moment do convey stories. I have argued that a narratology that wants to operate descriptively rather than normatively should revise definitions of narrative that exclude such pictures from the realm of narratives. Here, however, I would like to take a different approach by accepting, for the sake of the argument, definitions that are considered to make pictorial narrative problematic, and arguing that specific examples can comply with them. My argument will mainly be based on one well-known painting; it appears that no one has interpreted it as an autonomous narrative thus far, either in narratology or in art history. I conclude with a few words on why scholars have not offered said interpretation in the past. I will further argue that pictures can have a complication and resolution. Certain narratologists, such as Françoise Revaz (1997), even take complication resolution structure to be synonymous with the quality of having an intrigue (180) and also consider it necessary for distinguishing a narrative from other “action texts” such as recipes or chronicles (178). This article follows their use of the term intrigue as referring to a plot with a complication resolution structure. I try to show that a single picture, and not only films, verbal utterances, or comics, can also achieve this typical narrative complexity. Access to original publication here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/storyworlds.10.issue-1-2

The syllabus for this coming semester, published in a sense among my students and colleagues at USC, or to whoever interested in searching for it. As much as a Blog is published. Of course this is not an abstract of the syllabus, but an instance of performing a professor's identity, which ponders on every little question someone posted.

It is a brief, heuristic, and textually paradigmatic study of the inter-artistic and multidisciplinary categories of perception, perspective, and depth. It concerns the modern Hellenic/Greek postwar literary environment. Particularly, this study examines a specific era's poetry and the last one's additional painting and philosophical implications/modalities regarding the abovementioned categories. [The issue of the interrelated perception, perspective, depth, and illusion, at least, is further explored in a series of unpublished manuscripts but on a much different axon compared to this published paper.]

This article takes Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on art's inventive function as a point of departure to analyse two graphic narratives that undermine ideas about truthfulness: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Riad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future. It is argued that these allegedly autobiographical memoirs undermine genre conventions to create an implied readership who co-witnesses Satrapi's and Sattouf's experiences of oppression, racism, and war during their respective childhoods. It is shown how Satrapi and Sattouf undermine the autobiographical pact through graphic narrative's 'figures of thought', a term introduced to capture the formal, thematic, and narrative possibilities of comics and graphic literature to make readers come into contact with unforeseen visions-and to possibly think anew. Specific attention is paid to the narrative voice, which in Satrapi's and Sattouf's works often goes beyond the personal perspective to account for collective experiences, as well as to the use of colour and line work that add critical layers to the stories told. In line with Deleuze and Guattari's arguments, the poetic, which is the productive function of art, is shown to go beyond questions of truthfulness and falseness, allowing for new ways of thinking and for the creation of new worlds.

In my paper, I compare the typical female figures of different genres of folklore texts. The folkloric data is selected from the cultures of three fairly different geographical areas, the Southwest European Catalonia, the East European Caucasus and the Inner Asian Mongolia. The common principles behind the making of a mythological hero provide the grounds for my comparison, as well as the partly common contextual origins of the folkloric narratives and of the characters themselves.
My first example is offered by a group of Catalan folk songs known as: El caçador i la cervola. These folk songs were collected by Manuel Milà i Fontanals (1818-1884) during his tour of the Baixa Cerdanya (in Spanish: Baja Cerdaña) near Andorra, before 1882 (Milá y Fontanals 1882).
The second example is Lady Satanaya, “the wise,” who plays the central role in the Nart Saga. The Caucasian Nart Sagas exist in many variants, including Abkhaz, Adyghe, Chechen, Circassian, Karachay-Balkar, Ossetian, Ubykh and numerous others. In my argument, however, I do not consider them separately, as their differences hold no particular importance for my discussion.
The third work addressed here, The Secret History of the Mongols (Mongoliin nuuts tovchoo), can only be considered as a folkloric artifact in part, since there is no general consensus on its genre. Perhaps that of epic chronicle would be the most appropriate definition for its genre. The time of its creation is also disputed, some say 1228 AD, others 1240 or 1323, but the exact date is not relevant here.