The Rise of Uber and the [Re]construction of the North American Dream

The road – while on the surface often perceived as merely a means of allowing individuals to move from one location to another, has during recent decades become deeply intertwined with both individual and mass narratives related to the pursuit of freedom. The freedom narrative began when the United States highway system, developed during the early 1960s and thematically charged by the Beat Generation’s road-trip literature, became imbued with new meaning and new freedom-facilitating potential. The road, an architectural feat once thought of largely as a means of providing mass mobilization, came to be understood as both the road to freedom, and the road as freedom. However, today we find ourselves experiencing a new road narrative, one that still speaks to freedom but that differs vastly from the road narratives of the 1960s. Today, as individuals experience the road through sharing-economy services such as Uber, a narrative shift has occurred whereby freedom on the road is no longer experienced individualistically and/or destructively but, instead, communally and constructively.

The Rise of Uber and the [Re]construction of the North American Dream

The road – while on the surface often perceived as merely a means of allowing individuals to move from one location to another, has during recent decades become deeply intertwined with both individual and mass narratives related to the pursuit of freedom. The freedom narrative began when the United States highway system, developed during the early 1960s and thematically charged by the Beat Generation’s road-trip literature, became imbued with new meaning and new freedom-facilitating potential. The road, an architectural feat once thought of largely as a means of providing mass mobilization, came to be understood as both the road to freedom, and the road as freedom. However, today we find ourselves experiencing a new road narrative, one that still speaks to freedom but that differs vastly from the road narratives of the 1960s. Today, as individuals experience the road through sharing-economy services such as Uber, a narrative shift has occurred whereby freedom on the road is no longer experienced individualistically and/or destructively but, instead, communally and constructively.

Yevgeny Bazarov and “Don Juan”: towards the issue of images, motives, and narrative syntax

The paper examines the character of Yevgeny Bazarov and the plot structure of Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons versus a Western European legend of Don Juan — mostly in the version proposed by Molière in his 17th-century comedy. Bazarov’s phrase, “Two and two make four. Nothing else matters,” becomes a starting point for discussion, being compared to the response that Molière’s Don Juan gives in a dispute with his valet Sganarelle. The author analyzes the status of “two and two make four” concept in Russian literature of the 19th century and evaluates the chances that Turgenev borrowed the phrase from Molière’s play and the name of protagonist’s beloved (Anna) from the whole body of Don Juan narratives, whether directly or unintentionally. The study puts forwards a strategy for interpreting the novel plot as an unfolding of key events ascending to the legend of Don Juan. It includes addressing archetypal similarity of Arkady and Sganarelle (as well as Sancho Panza), along with functionality of the road narrative, riot motif, and conceptual congruence between the deaths of Don Juan and Bazarov, both dying as a result of somewhat infernal, cadaver-mediated interference. The paper makes an assumption that the preceding literary tradition served for Turgenev as a tool for processing a contemporary content, dealing with the emergence of а nihilist as a new social type.

Roads

This chapter focuses Jack Kerouac and Joan Didion, arguing that the postwar American road narrative produces a sophisticated account of the nonhuman social actor through its treatment of the automobile, an entity that is both a material thing and a social site. In Kerouac's On the Road, a semiautobiographical account of his road trips in the late 1940s, the car plays no less potent a role in facilitating male bonding and in constituting the social world of the novel. To capture the distinctiveness of that world, the chapter contrasts it with the representation of two other automotive subcultures—the hot-rodders and the Merry Pranksters—in seminal works by Tom Wolfe that appeared in the wake of On the Road. Then, the chapter turns to the writing of Joan Didion, arguing that Play It as It Lays functions as a self-conscious response both to Kerouac's novel and to the mythology of road-tripping that it fostered.

Further on down the digital road: Narrative design and reading pleasure in five New Media Writing Prize narratives

In 2006 and 2010, I published papers in Convergence, which analysed readers’ responses to several interactive narratives: From this research, I formed a set of ‘assessment’ criteria for such narratives, intended to be of use to writers, academics and teachers, looking for ways to understand how readers might react to the very new and changing forms of digital storytelling, which continue to surprise, delight and puzzle readers. Despite huge technical advances, and although some recent examples are doing well commercially, digital interactive narrative remains largely unknown to the general reading public (who nonetheless love their novels, films and games). This article reviews a very specific set of interactive narratives – those which have been shortlisted for the international New Media Writing Prize – against the criteria I established in the 2010 paper. These are cutting edge, exemplar works, which one might suppose demonstrate the best of everything that new-media storytelling can offer. I revisit my criteria in the light of technical and creative developments over the past 5 years, using the responses of volunteer readers to aid my own evaluation of the pieces under discussion. Overall, I argue that many of the issues I previously found to be a barrier to readers have been overcome, but that there are still problems for readers, which writers/developers need to consider.

Learning relationships: Church of England curates and training incumbents applying the SIFT approach to the Road to Emmaus

This study invited curates and training incumbents attending a 3-day residential programme to function as a hermeneutical community engaging conversation between the Lucan post-resurrection narrative concerning the Road to Emmaus and the learning relationship in which they were engaged. Building on the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics the participants were invited to work in type-alike groups, structured first on the basis of the perceiving process (sensing and intuition) and second on the basis of the judging process (thinking and feeling). This approach facilitated rich and varied insights into the Emmaus Road narrative and into the theme of learning relationships.