Narrative Structure and the Unnarrated in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

This paper analyzes the narrative structure of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad against the grain of traditional slave narrative conventions. The novel may be categorized as a neoslave narrative, telling the story of a slave girl, Cora, and her escape from a Georgia plantation using the “Underground Railroad” mentioned in the title. My working hypothesis takes cue from the explicit, literal rendering of the Underground Railroad in the text, which may be considered as symptomatic of Whitehead’s approach to the slave narrative convention, in that his novel discloses or makes visible aspects which, in slave narratives, were left unnarrated.

Cognitive Factors as a Key to Plain-Sense Biblical Interpretation: Resolving Cruxes in Gen 18:1–15 and 32:23–33

Both the accounts of Abraham’s three visitors (Gen 18:1-15) and of Jacob’s nighttime intruder (32:23- 33) are famous interpretive cruxes. This article shows why the plain sense is that both Abraham and Jacob recognize right away that the newly introduced figures represent their deity. It does this by: (1) accounting for the place of messengers in the mental life of ancient Israel; (2) recovering an under-appreciated yet cognitively based narrative convention regarding messengers; (3) setting the starting point of each narrative with care; (4) attending to the semantics and pragmatics of the main noun in both accounts; and (5) emulating the online processing of language that an audience’s mind automatically employs, which is incremental and prediction-driven. In the emulation exercise, the audience’s mental parser arrives at a “recipient recognition” (RR) construal quickly-already before the end of 18:2, and by the end of 32:25. Furthermore, handling 32:25 in this manner resolves a third crux at the same time (32:2-3). An RR construal is cognitively favored because it yields a coherent and informative text, unlike the “obscured origin” (OO) construal that theologians presently favor. Meanwhile, the emulation validates a previously proposed hypothesis that the noun אִישׁ ’îš functions as the generic label for designating an “agent”-that is, someone who is representing the interests of another party. All told, this article employs a variety of cognitive factors as keys to plain-sense interpretation. Finally, it touches upon the theological implications of the RR construal of the two passages under study.

Poetics of mnemonic strategy : the art of adaptation and the spirituality of being & things in Tunde Kelani’s Saworoide and The Narrow Path

This essay utilises two different but related concepts: “poetics and politics of literary memory” by Lars Eckstein and “adaptation” by Linda Hutcheon, to examine Yoruba narrative convention, characterisation and the “spirituality of Being and object(s)” in two films, Saworoide (1999) and The Narrow Path (2006), by the Nigerian filmmaker, Tunde Kelani, who has distinguished himself as one of the leading contemporary Nigerian and African cinema icons and storytellers. The essay argues that as one of the most significant voices in Nollywood, the history of film and cinema in Nigeria and beyond, Kelani has not only turned the adaptation of materials from page to screen into an art and a veritable source of history, he has also shown ways in which the process functions as the recollection of the fading glorious past of his race. In order to achieve its aim, the essay is divided into two parts: the first part examines the cultural and political considerations of memory and the aesthetics of adaptation in relation to Kelani’s body of works, and the second part discusses the two films by drawing from arguments that are developed in the first part.

Using narrative to construct accountability in cases of death after police contact

This paper examines the use of narrative verdicts in the coronial system in England and Wales to record findings in cases of death after police contact. It uses a dataset of 68 verdicts into such cases in the period 2004–2015. The paper considers how regulation is constructed in a way that makes complex cases comprehensible through narrative. The construction of these narratives is affected by legal structures, institutional structures, but also the structures imposed by narrative convention. The paper argues that the relationships between these structures affect what type of narrative is constructed in the aftermath of a death after police contact. It further suggests that devices within narratives enable the construction of a comprehensible narrative verdict in such cases.

Of Artists and Models. Italian Silent Cinema between Narrative Convention and Artistic Practice

The paper presents the author’s research on the representation of painters and sculptors, their models and their art works in Italian silent cinema of the 1910s and early 1920s. This research deals with both the combination of optical (painterly) vs. haptical (sculptural) cinema. It also problematizes art versus the real, as well as art conceived from cinema’s own perspective, that is within the conventions of European and American cinema. In addition to research in these filmic conventions the author compares how the theme manifests itself within different genres, such as comedy, crime and adventure films, diva films and strong men films. Examples are : Il trionfo della forza (The Triumph of Strength, 1913), La signora Fricot è gelosa (Madam Fricot is Jelous, 1913), Il fuoco (The Fire, Giovanni Pastrone, 1915), Il fauno (The Faun, Febo Mari, 1917), Il processo Clemenceau (The Clemenceau Affair, Alfredo De Antoni, 1917) and L’atleta fantasma (The Ghost Athlete, Raimondo Scotti, 1919). I will relate this pioneering study to recent studies on the representation of art and artists in Hollywood cinema, such as Katharina Sykora’s As You Desire me. Das Bildnis im Film (2003), Susan Felleman’s Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006) and Steven Jacobs’s Framing Pictures. Film and the Visual Arts (2011), and older studies by Thomas Elsaesser, Angela Dalle Vacche, Felleman and the author.

CONTRADICTORY EVIDENCE AND THE EXEMPLARY SCHOLAR: THE LIVES OF SAHNUN B. SAʿ ID (D. 854)

When writing biographies of historical figures, narrative convention requires that concision and clarity be wrested from sources that are multiple and often confusing. In this article, I argue that multiple accounts of a person's life may be more than an accident arising from the way that information was compiled. Rather, such multiplicity renders exemplary figures adaptable to a wide variety of circumstances, making them even more useful as a focus of devotion and emulation. Examining multiple accounts of early Maliki scholar Sahnun b. Saʿ id (d. 854), including those of his travels in search of knowledge and of his suffering under the miḥna (trial) in Kairouan, I find that close attention to apparently contradictory evidence may not get us any closer to understanding the man himself, but it does offer us much information about the ways in which he was considered an exemplary individual.