scholarly journals Story understanding of a nonexplanatory film affects viewers' premotor activity and empathy for fictional characters

2016 ◽  
Vol Volume 5 ◽  
pp. 37-44
Author(s):  
Yukiko Ogawa ◽  
Sotaro Shimada
Keyword(s):  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Story Understanding

An American Dream

Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
R. J. Hansen
Keyword(s):  
American Dream ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Hard Core ◽  
Fictional Characters

Malfunctioning of new technology causes mass confusion at the ballot box on the Election Day: people vote for fictional characters, actors who play them, and dead presidents; hard-core Republicans find themselves voting for Democratic candidates and proud liberals give their votes to representatives of the GOP.

Between Madras and Chennai: Narratives of belonging in a post colonial city

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942199245
Author(s):  
Kavithaa Rajamony ◽  
Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Change ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
New Name ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
The City

Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new reality of Chennai, to what extent they see the city producing a standardized experience, and how the fictional characters corroborate or contest institutional change. In the process, the texts are brought to converse with the postcolonial desire for cultural autonomy, its mediation by a nativist agenda, as well as the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in such a desire. The texts betray the inadequacies of the new name as a stable container of cultural meanings and propose an idea of the city that is internally incoherent and multi-experiential.

scholarly journals Plot Structure Decomposition in Narrative Multimedia by Analyzing Personalities of Fictional Characters

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1645
Author(s):  
O-Joun Lee ◽  
Eun-Soon You ◽  
Jin-Taek Kim
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Story Line ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
Personality Changes ◽  
Structure Decomposition ◽  
Plot Structure

This study aims to decompose plot structures of stories in narrative multimedia (i.e., creative works that contain stories and are distributed through multimedia). Since a story is interwoven with main plots and subplots (i.e., primary and ancillary story lines), decomposing a story into multiple story lines enables us to analyze how events in the story are allocated and logically connected. For the decomposition, the existing studies employed character networks (i.e., social networks of characters that appeared in a story) and assumed that characters’ social relationships are consistent in a story line. However, these studies overlooked that social relationships significantly change around major events. To solve this problem, we attempt to use the changes for distinguishing story lines rather than suffer from the changes. We concentrate on the changes in characters’ social relationships being the result of changes in their personalities. Moreover, these changes gradually proceed within a story line. Therefore, we first propose features for measuring changes in personalities of characters: (i) Degrees of characters in character networks, (ii) lengths of dialogues spoken by characters, and (iii) ratios of out-degrees for in-degrees of characters in character networks. We supposed these features reflect importance, inner/outer conflicts, and activeness of characters, respectively. Since characters’ personalities gradually change in a story line, we can suppose that the features also show gradual story developments in a story line. Therefore, we conduct regression for each feature to discover dominant tendencies of the features. By filtering scenes that do not follow the tendencies, we extract a story line that exhibits the most dominant personality changes. We can decompose stories into multiple story lines by iterating the regression and filtering. Besides, personalities of characters change more significantly in major story lines. Based on this assumption, we also propose methods for discriminating main plots. Finally, we evaluated the accuracy of the proposed methods by applying them to the movies, which is one of the most popular narrative multimedia.

scholarly journals Representing the victorious past: Chinese revolutionary TV drama between propaganda and marketization

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110227
Author(s):  
Yingzi Wang ◽  
Thoralf Klein
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Market Reforms ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Production Environment ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Revolutionary History ◽  
Over Time

This paper examines the changes and continuities in TV representations of Chinese Communist Party’s revolutionary history and interprets them within the broader context of China’s political, economic and cultural transformations since the 1990s. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three state-sponsored TV dramas produced between the late 1990s and mid-2010s, it traces how the state-sanctioned revolutionary narratives have changed over time in response to the Party’s propaganda imperatives on the one hand, and to the market-oriented production environment on the other. The paper argues that while recent TV productions in the new century have made increasing concessions to audience taste by adopting visually stimulating depictions and introducing fictional characters as points of identification for the audience, the revolutionary narratives were still aligned with the Party’s propaganda agenda at different times. This shows the ongoing competition between ideological and commercial interests in Chinese TV production during the era of market reforms.

scholarly journals Adult attachment and engagement with fictional characters

2021 ◽  
pp. 026540752110185
Author(s):  
Marina Rain ◽  
Raymond A. Mar
Keyword(s):  
Adult Attachment ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Conservative Approach ◽  
Attachment Orientation ◽  
Character Identification ◽  
Parasocial Interactions ◽  
Attachment Dimensions

Adult attachment influences how people engage with stories, in terms of how immersed or transported they become into these narratives and the tendency to form close bonds with characters. This likely stems from the ability of stories and story characters to provide interpersonal intimacy without the threat of rejection. In Study 1, we expand on this work to examine how attachment relates to two previously uninvestigated aspects of character engagement: character identification and parasocial interactions. Taking a statistically conservative approach, controlling for broader traits, we demonstrate that the attachment dimensions of anxiety and avoidance differentially predict these forms of character engagement. A high-powered, pre-registered, Study 2 follows up on these results by examining the types of characters that are most appealing, based on one’s attachment orientation. Together, these studies demonstrate that attachment plays an essential role in both how we engage with characters and the types of characters to whom we are attracted.

Inference of Personality Projected onto Fictional Characters Having an Author's First Name

2001 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 705-706 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Barry
Keyword(s):  
Social Communication ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Personality Characteristics ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Pride And Prejudice

Jane Austen projected some of her personality characteristics onto her fictional namesakes Jane Bennet in the novel Pride and Prejudice and Jane Fairfax in the novel Emma. Wishful fantasy seems satisfied by two attributes of both Janes. They are very beautiful, and they marry rich men they love. A feeling of inferiority was expressed by two attributes of both Janes, depicted as deficient in social communication and subordinate to the heroine of the novel.

The Language of Fiction

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
New Research ◽  
Fictional Names ◽  
Philosophy Of Fiction ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Literary Techniques ◽  
Fictional Story ◽  
Fictional Truth

The Language of Fiction brings together new research on fiction from philosophy and linguistics. Fiction is a topic that has long been studied in philosophy. Yet recently there has been a surge of work on fictional discourse in the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. There has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. The Language of Fiction contains fourteen essays by leading scholars in both fields, as well as a substantial Introduction by the editors. The collection is organized in three parts, each with their own introduction. Part I, “Truth, reference, and imagination”, offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, “Storytelling”, deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, “Perspective shift”, zooms in on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, viz. the way we get access to the fictional characters’ inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see.

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