Experimental Narrative Structure and the Advent of New Humanism in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

This paper attempts to study the experimental narrative structure to explore postmodern new humanism in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The study focuses on three inextricable narrative elements: the characters, narrative descriptions, and the novel's spatial setting. It will demonstrate how McCarthy's uses postmodern narrative experimentation to accentuate the necessity of halting the danger lurking behind the sustainable safety of the natural environment. Therefore, the study first examines the nameless characters of the novels as an exemplification of people who are devoid of their identity and sense of belonging due to natural catastrophes. Second, it identifies the narrative descriptions of the devastated environment ensuing gigantic disasters that obliterate the vast majority of the human civilisation. Third, it looks into the conditions of the remaining survivors as the embodiment of the remains of the human civilisation, and these survivors will be explored as the literary paradigm of new humanism living in a post-apocalyptic society leading a new primitive life from scratch. In this sense, the study gaps lie in exploring such new humanism as an archetype of postmodern civilisation surviving the destructive events and their related ethical dilemmas. As such, the study applies a qualitative methodology by following a textual analysis of the novel's characters, narrative descriptions, and spatial setting. Here, narratology will be applied as the theoretical background for interpreting these elements with regard to the post-apocalypse and its new humanistic insights. Thus, the study's main results are the exploration of the novel's apocalyptic events as narrative paradigms of new humanism and McCarthy's use of postmodern experimental narrative structure.

Introduction

Epic and evolution have a complex relationship. For some thinkers they have nothing in common—belonging to separate spheres. For some sociobiologists, on the other hand, they have everything to do with each other. The Evolutions of Modernist Epic describes how the two were coordinated in a number of modernist national narratives. It argues that global modernism is better understood through this encounter than through more conventional economic, political, or ecological readings. The introduction lays out the theoretical grounds for this reading. It tells how epic came to contest social Darwinist narrations of national progress at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains the ways in which experimental narrative participated in the so-called eclipse of Darwinism. And it makes the case for epic’s continued vitality in late modernity, describing its creative nationalisms, as well as its uses of queer forms of sexuality.

THE PROBLEM OF POINT OF VIEW IN TEXT WITH AN «UNRELIABLE» NARRATOR (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF V. NABOKOV'S STORY «THE EYE»)

The subject of the article: The article raises several urgent problems of narratology - the question of the «unreliable» narrator in the text, his point of view on the events underlying the history. This paper examines the internal and external point of view in a work with an «unreliable» narrator. A work with an «unreliable» narrator organizes a special point of view on the event hypothesis is put forward. The material is the narrator of V. Nabokov`s story «The Eye». In this text, the narrator's point of view on events, himself in these events and the characters reveals a split into external and internal. The narrator's play with the point of view forms a special type of «unreliable» narrator, which allows the author not only to create an experimental narrative, but also to raise the philosophical problems of memory, self-identification, and consciousness.

Unless the Water is Safer than the Land

The film based on the selection of stories about the experience of journeys, shared by its participants (minor age unaccompanied refugees) during the 3 months of fieldwork in 2013 in Cologne, Germany. What they have gone through and been faced with on the way to, or after arrival in the host countries. The intention of the project was to reach out to the broader local audience. Therefore by applying experimental narrative forms, the film tends to express and project these experiences sensorially.

Language and the Subject

The chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of the modernist subject. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are read as the serial restaging of an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other. These unwarranted interruptions contribute to an exploration of a particularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion afforded the Cartesian cogito. The insistence on the oral tradition is thus read not as an attempt to resurrect speech within an essentially silent medium but as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him. Those same experimental narrative techniques that are often associated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philosophical inquiry are attributed here to the author’s effort to chart the ontological coordinates of character and narration.

Cultural and Natural Roots of Puerto Rican Mestizaje in Rosario Ferré’s The House on the Lagoon

The paper explores the conversational orchestration of family anecdotes as a dominant experimental narrative strategy underlying Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré’s historical novel, The House on the Lagoon. The study reads Ferré’s narrative through Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of the dialogic nature of language to highlight the interplay between environmental and cultural images of hybridity. The close reading of this representative piece of US Caribbean literature elucidates how Ferré utilizes the dialogic form to contest the Puerto Rican cultural and national politics that tend to suppress and silence the nonwhite (black and indigenous) components of Puerto Rican identity.

Effecten van narrativiteit in educatieve teksten : Wat zeggen onderzoeksresultaten (nog niet)?

This study aims to gain more insight into narrativity in the educational domain. Based on earlier research, we define three prototypical narrative elements (i.e., the presence of particularized events, an experiencing character, and a landscape of consciousness), and present an analytic model that illustrates how varying combinations of these elements occur in Dutch educational materials for Social Studies and Science. Using this model, we then analyze experimental texts from previous studies on the effects of narrativity on text comprehension and recall. We demonstrate that experimental narrative texts nearly always exhibit all prototypical narrative elements, while their expository counterparts also contain some narrative elements and thus are not purely expository. In addition, we show that no consistent patterns can be found in the results of the selected experimental studies, and that the data at hand therefore do not allow for strong conclusions about the effects of narrativity in educational texts. Finally, we discuss the limitations of previous as well as the present research and the implications for future research.