What’s So Special about Video?

This chapter examines video’s epistemological trio of moving images, audio, and a timeline and their evidentiary affordances. Based on a single court case that blended video clips from a variety of perspectives, the project explores the evidentiary value of video and the way it’s used in testimonial narrative. Fisher’s narrative paradigm serves as the foundation for this chapter, which theorizes video as both an affordance and as a text with its own embedded narrative. In US courts, video cannot stand for itself but must accompany other testimony, and as testimonial affordance, video can explain or illustrate the order of action. Video is especially useful for refuting testimony that does not match what the video depicts. While its timeline affords a natural plot, the narrative that matters most is the discursive one crafted in court, offering what Fisher labeled coherence and fidelity—the moral or legal “point” of the story.

ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE AND FUNCTION OF NARRATOR IN JUN CHIU’S CROP CIRCLES

The purposes of this study are to find out the elements of narrative and the function of narrator in Jun Chiu’s silent comic Crop Circles. This research applied qualitative design. The data of this study were in the form of 20 pictures taken from the silent comic. The data were collected through stages: finding out and determining, classifying and separating the pictures conveying illustration of a narrative. The analysis of the data was done qualitatively by using the theory of phase analysis by Miles, Huberman and Saldana covering condensation, display and verification. The research results show that the elements of narrative found in Jun Chiu’s comic pictures Crop Circles narrative mood (transposed speech-indirect style); narrative instance (narrative voice: heterodiegetic narrator, time of narration: simultaneous narration; narrative perspective: external focalization), narrative levels (embedded narrative, metalepsis) and narrative time (order: analepsis, narrative speed: ellipsis, frequency of events: singulative narration). The narrator carried ideological function because the narrator illustrates the pictures to introduce public policy.

Always Already Monsters—BioShock’s (2007) ‘Splicers’ as Computational Others

The article explores the manufacturing of monsters in video games, using the case of the influential 2007 first-person shooter BioShock, and ‘splicers’—its most numerous, zombie-like enemies. I combine two methodological perspectives on the ‘manufacturing’ of splicers by analyzing [a] the title’s developer commentary and other official paratexts to trace the design of splicers, and [b] the game’s embedded narrative to reconstruct the diegetic backstory of splicers. I argue that video game enemies, including splicers, are ‘computational others’, who may appear human on the level of representation, but whose behavior is machinic, and driven by computational algorithms. To justify the paradoxical relationship between their human-like representation and machinic behavior, BioShock includes an elaborate narrative that explains how the citizens of the underwater city of Rapture were dehumanized and transformed into hostile splicers. The narrative of dehumanization, explored following Haslam’s dehumanization theory (2006), includes [a] transforming splicers into atomized creatures by depriving them of political power and social bonds, [b] creating fungible and interchangeable enemies through splicers’ masks and bodily disintegration, [c] justifying splicers’ blindness to context and their simplistic behavior by portraying them as mentally unstable addicts. The article concludes that all video game enemies are inherently monstrous, and that critique of video game representation should focus on how games fail to make monsters human, rather than how games render humans monstrous or dehumanized.

Disentangling the Tangle

Chapter 4 argues that Buddhaghosa interpreted the Abhidhamma as a series of methods of analysis, oceanic and immeasurable in scope and practice. Its lists and formulas are distilled from the contextually embedded narrative contexts of the suttas, to provide, in an abstract form, the analytical practices to examine experience. Such lists and methods are, in principle and in practice, unending. This argument is counter to interpretations of Abhidhamma and Buddhaghosa that suggest that they be read as offering a metaphysics of irreducible reals or essences, and the chapter refutes these positions. It shows how the many phenomena listed in the Abhidhamma matrices operate in a modal and modular fashion as practical methods to help one to “know and see” within the therapeutic aims of the Buddhist path.

Chimeria:Grayscale: An Interactive Narrative for Provoking Critical Reflection on Gender Discrimination

Roleplaying has a history of serving diverse aims, including art, entertainment, therapeutic purposes, and political action (Piper 1973; Gygax 1978; Boal 1993; Matthews et al. 2014). This paper presents an interactive narrative called Grayscale that uses roleplaying to provoke critical reflection through modeling workplace gender discrimination. Grayscale's interface resembles a streamlined email system, constituting what Henry Jenkins has termed an “embedded narrative” since the narration is distributed across elements in the space (e.g. emails, notes, draft messages).

The Narrator and the Narrative: A Literary Analysis of Aḥādīth al-Ṣifāt

Based on the work of Daniel Beaumont and Sebastian Günther on Hadith and narratology, this chapter analyses three proto-types of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt while focusing on the basic building-blocks of these texts, namely the ‘framing narrative’, the ‘embedded narrative’, and the narrator. The texts reviewed in this chapter are several versions of ‘the ḥadīth of the beatific vision’, ‘the ḥadīth of the sacrifice in favour of the believer’, and ‘the ḥadīth of the divine fingers’. The chapter combines literary analysis with a thorough reading in the biographical sources. This combined methodology uncovers the personal motivations of the narrators of the aḥādīth in question, while demonstrating the effect of these motivations on the shaping of the narrative. This chapter presents the typical features of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt and reveals hidden meanings in the texts while considering two styles of narration: mimesis and diegesis, or showing (performing) and telling (recounting). Among the narrators under review are Abu Burda (d. c. 721-3), son of the ṣaḥābī Abu Musa al-Ashʿari (d. c. 663), and ʿAlqama (d. between 681 and 692) and ʿAbida (d. between 691 and 693), the disciples of the ṣaḥābī ʿAbd Allah ibn Masʿud (d. 652-3).

Speech Acts and Embedded Narrative Structure in the Getty Hexameters

The Getty Hexameters are an enigmatic text that reveals a conception of the pragmatic force underlying mythic narratives. Although some scholars have concluded that the text is a composite of multiple spells, this paper argues for reading the text as a unified narrative marked by a hierarchy of authoritative speech acts that draw on the authority of three apotropaic divinities: Paean, Hecate, and Heracles. These layers of narrative acts follow a sequence of revelation, mythological analogy, and aitiology, all of which come together to demonstrate the efficacy of the text as an apotropaic charm.