Orientador: Ana Sílvia Lopes Davi Médola / Resumo: Os novos paradigmas relativos à informação e ao entretenimento no vasto campo delimitado pelas tecnologias digitais conjugam, entre outros aspectos, a criação de novas lógicas de comunicação e socialização, assim como o mercado que os envolve. Tais inovações, pontuadas pelas características da sociedade contemporânea a serem abordadas adiante, geram, portanto, reconfigurações no status quo da lógica organizacional de produção, distribuição e consumo de produtos midiáticos ficcionais, tratados no estudo como narrativas digitais. A partir de um levantamento exploratório das formas de narrativas digitais, ou seja, atos de narrar em plataforma digitais existentes em produtos de ficção contemporâneos produzidos pelas grandes redes de televisão e produtoras de audiovisual (vídeo, cinema, publicidade) como também pequenas produtoras e trabalhos "caseiros" e experimentais, procura-se evidenciar como recurso do reconhecimento das suas características torna-se importante para a compreensão das narrativas digitais no atual estágio dos processos de convergência midiática em que são enfatizados vários aspectos até então não contemplados de forma ampla, como principalmente a interatividade / Abstract: Not available / Mestre

M.A. / In this study the application of different temporal forms in Afrikaans narratives is discussed. Afrikaans narratives make use of the present tense, the preterite (a combination of the imperfect and the perfect tense) and a combination of the two above mentioned tenses to narrate events. Fleischman debates that in some languages the present tense that is used in narratives to narrate dramatic events can be divided into two different groups, namely the historical present tense and the dramatic or narrative present tense. In this study an attempt was made to make a distinction between these two tenses with regard to the semantic value of the verb. A variety of texts that mainly consist of present tense verbs were analyzed and the verbs were divided into two groups: dramatic verbs and static verbs. If a narrative consisted of higher percentage of dramatic verbs it was thought that the narrative was being narrated in the dramatic or the narrative present tense. When a narrative consisted of a higher percentage static verbs it was thought that the narrative was being narrated in the historical present tense. This distinction is however not absolute, but the two varieties are rather seen as being on a continuum. Afrikaans narratives do not only utilize the historical present tense to narrate, but also the preterite. By using the preterite in narratives the reader is further removed from the narrator‘s deictic centre than if the narrator is using the historical present tense. A combination of the preterite and the present tense is also quite often used in Afrikaans narratives. The alternative use of the two tenses consists of a diverse range of functions. For example when events are placed on the foreground the use of the present tense is often required amidst a story being told in the preterite. Lastly the Afrikaans adverbial particles toe, nou and dan and their various temporal functions in Afrikaans narratives were discussed

M.A. / Language, specifically the narrative use of language, is not only a medium through which people express and understand themselves. Language is the vehicle wherein and whereby personal identity is constituted. Thus, identity is not seen as fixed, but as a product-in-process of narrative discourse.The interrelationship between narrative and personal identity can be observed in a person`s almost inborn urge to mentally reconstruct his lifestory. Narratives supply personal identity with continuity and cohesion. Ricoeur`s description of the instance of “mimesis” – narratives are “mimesis” in the sense of being the representation of an action – is used to explain the construction of two selfnarratives (Griet Swart in Griet skryf `n sprokie and Stoffel Mathysen in Die lang pad van Stoffel Mathysen). Ricoeur`s two “functions” of narrative, i.e. to expose and to transform, are considered. Griet Swart`s narrative identity is constituted by her being situated in a tradition (mimesis 1 ) – that of being writer of fairy-tales as well as reader of literature. Drawing on conventions and prior knowledge, a plot is created (mimesis 2), in which Griet narrates her lifestory. The narration, the perspective on a patriarchal society as well as the continuous redefining of narrative identity by means of the writing process, are examined. The act of writing becomes metaphor for personal freedom. In Die lang pad van Stoffel Mathysen the use of the epic hero figure, travel prose, Western literature, hunting prose and the outobiography are examined in order to understand Mathysen`s narrative construction of personal identity. Both Griet and Mathysen reconfigure personal identity by means of narrative. It is this process of constant change in self-understanding that Ricoeur calls “narrative identity”.

Most people share a strong intuition that there is much to be learned from great literature and other forms of narrative art. This intuition is, however, philosophically contentious. Plato was the first to argue against the possibility of learning anything from narrative art, but he founded a tradition that persists to the present day. I will engage in this debate in order to examine the role narratives might be able to play in acquiring virtue on Aristotle's ethical account, as it is presented in Nicomachean Ethics. I will claim that narratives have so long seemed a problematic source of learning because philosophers have traditionally approached the issue in the wrong way. They have typically tried to show how we might acquire propositional knowledge through our engagement with art, but this approach has failed because of insoluble problems involved in satisfying the justification criterion. Fictions may be rescued from their problematic status by realising that what we truly get from them is, instead, a type of knowledge-how. I will argue that Aristotelian virtue is itself a kind of knowledge-how and so the type of learning that takes place in engaging with narratives has a role to play in its acquisition and exercise. Virtue depends on types of reasoning that are themselves kinds of knowledge-how and which are employed and improved in engaging with narrative art. These types of reasoning will be described as conceptual, emotional and imaginative understanding. I will show how each is important in relation to virtue and how each is a kind of knowledge-how that may be improved through exposure to narrative art.

Though the notion of absent-centred structure enjoys a current fashionableness in a number of contemporary theoretical discussions, the variety of interpretations, some of them implicitly contradictory, and most of them excessively abstract, prevents "absent-centredness" from being the useful critical category it might be. By surveying the history of the term in my Introduction, and by describing the textual realizations of absent-centredness in a number of modern novels, my thesis attempts to define the term as a special strategy of narrative structure. That strategy is identifiable by such formal devices as indirect narration, anti-climax, cancellation, and negation; and by structuring images of spatial and temporal distortion, especially the anarchist explosion and the urban labyrinth. The introductory discussion of works which might or might not be considered absent-centred fiction demarcates the category more clearly, though my choice of novels for more detailed discussion is exemplary rather than exhaustive. My discussion begins with Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (Chapter II) because, in its use of anarchism, the Dickensian labyrinthine city, and anti-climax, that novel represents, albeit uncertainly, the late-Victorian beginnings of absent-centred structure which James's literary descendents shape more consistently. Hence, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (Chapter III) is governed, paradoxically, by a prominent absence, the unseen and indirectly narrated bomb explosion which operates as a narrative mataphor, for the temporal and spatial distortions of the text are both the logical result of the bomb's blast and a means of circumscribing the absent centre. Andrei Bely's Petersburg (Chapter IV) illustrates best the High-Modernist use of the absent centre, though it relies on the same devices of anarchist plot and foiled explosion which Conrad exploits. And while Bely's Symbolism has a particular Russian coloration, it co-opts, like Conrad's, the same fragmentary features of the bomb-threatened city as images for narrative structure. And whereas Conrad shows us that absent-centredness is an apt description of the moral vacancy which he sees as characteristic of the early twentieth-century West, Bely shows us that it is also an apt description of his mystical and metaphysical view of the early twentieth-century East. Like Petersburg,whose narrative is fragmented more literally than The Secret Agent's, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (Chapter V) exploits the chronological and spatial disruptions which result from explosion. Fragmentation in this work is mimetic of Yossarian's consciousness which, shattered by the realization of Snowden's "exploded" secret, prefers to, but cannot, forget the horror of his comrade's death. As in other works of absent-centred fiction, the hero's hyperbolic fear of his own death is transformed into the fear of apocalyptic nullity. The military establishment which prevents Yossarian's escape from that fear occasions an exploration of the blackly humorous and absurdist nature of a world with no sane centre of control. Most, if not all, of these themes, images, and strategies are gathered together encyclopedically in the most ambitious of these absent-centred works, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Here, the anarchist bomb, metaphor for absence, finds its sophisticated contemporary counterpart in the rocket which, in a rainbow arc from "point to no point," transports apocalyptic absence. Under the shadow of that trajectory moves Slothrop, a failed quester whose grail eludes him and who wanders directionless in the labyrinthine and centreless post-war "Zone" until he disappears from both landscape and text. More reflexive than earlier absent-centred works, Gravity's Rainbow makes us aware that Slothrop's experience in the Zone is also the reader's, for like Slothrop, he searches for a centre in the "zone" of a fiction too complexly structured and too exploded to reveal its unifying source, which can only be, paradoxically, the absent centre itself. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The development of the English novel during the eighteenth century is illustrated in this thesis by the concept of the author's "mask of reality," or the rhetorical stance adopted by the novelist for the telling of his story. The novelist creates and populates a fictional world, or Kosmos, and the success of his work depends on his power to invest this illusory world with an air of reality. Through the medium of the printed word, he convinces the reader of the truth of his vision. My examination of the modes of narration in the major novels of the period clarifies their authors' use of the mask of reality. Defoe's novels seem to exclude the author from the life of the novel, allowing him to appear only on the title-page and in the editor's prefaces. Defoe uses his heroes and heroines as narrators to conceal his own presence as the creator of their world of perceptual experience. Nevertheless, the themes, images, syntactic patterns, and diction, which recur throughout the Defoe canon, enable the reader to discern, behind the mask, the existence of the author who controls and evaluates the fictional Kosmos. In Richardson's novels this authorial presence becomes more explicit in the critical prefaces and postscripts surrounding the fictional letters. Moreover, Richardson's correspondents themselves exemplify the process of fiction as they record and evaluate their fictional experiences through the medium of writing, while their letters, becoming a part of the action of the novel, bridge the gap between the fictional world of the Kosmos and the actuality of the printed text - the two realities of life and art. In Fielding's and Sterne's novels the role of the narrator becomes still more explicit with the result that the reader's attention is diverted from the contemplation of the imaginary life of the Kosmcis to the consideration of the work as a piece of fiction. The novelist's rhetoric involves the reader in the process of fiction by making him conscious of the novel as a created artifice rather than as the simple verbal representation of the world of imaginary or real experience. This pattern of development which shows the eighteenth-century English novel becoming increasingly self-conscious is examined in this thesis in relation to Cervantes' Don Quixote, which achieved renown during this period. Cervantes' influence is shown both in the minor and major works of English fiction. Charlotte Lennox, Smollett, and Richard Graves use the quixotic theme mainly to pit the presumed reality of their contemporary world against the literary fantasies of their protagonists. Fielding, however, emulates the perspectivism of his Spanish predecessor in the creation of his narrator-historian as his mask of reality, achieving a more complex, ironic view of the fictional Kosmos. Sterne, too, borrows many elements from Cervantes. His narrative mask of Tristram demonstrates the interaction between language and experience, as the novel displays its form in the dialogue between novelist and reader. The self-consciousness of Tristram Shandy as a work of narrative art results in a relativistic, ambiguous attitude to remembered experience, and shows many of the qualities that make Don Quixote an example of the art of mannerism. In Tristram Shandy Sterne emphasizes the narrative techniques by which Tristram re-creates the world of the Shandy family. Sterne's Shandean mask of reality fuses the self-conscious display of the art of the novelist with the fictional life of Shandy Hall. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Studies show that the use of narratives enhances the lecture method of teaching. The model and manual developed in this study focus on the needs of lecturers who require creative guidance in all aspects of creating and using didactic narratives. This study suggests that the subject content of a lecture has a deep structure that can be used to generate the surface structure of a didactic narrative. The model and manual are informed by theories and models from a variety of disciplines that have been adapted for analyzing subject content, transforming subject content structure into a parallel narrative structure, and integrating the narrative into lecture.

The thesis examines the O.J. Simpson murder trial and analyzes the racial narratives that affected its outcome and the way it is perceived by the American public. By examining four books about the trial written by lawyers who served on the case, the analysis focuses on how race functions within each of the reconstructed narratives, as well as within the framework of the U.S. criminal justice system. The author argues that racial narratives affect how and why people can see the same event differently, a prime example of which is the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Representations of Mark Fuhrman, his role in the O.J. Simpson trial, and how these are affected by racial narratives are also discussed. The author concludes that the O.J. Simpson murder trial presented an opportunity in which issues concerning race, race relations, and ideologies about race could be openly discussed.

This project contains a literature review, a discussion, and an original feature length screenplay. The review of literature examines the various structuralist-inspired theories of narratology and the three-act structure method of screenplay construction.

Thesis (MA (African Languages))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / This study explores the theoretical work in articulating the motivations and conditions for account-giving in Isizulu. In this situation, accounts are similar to narratives and can be retained at the level of private reflections or written as diary entries or for others to read and refer to from time to time. The importance of the intelligibility of accounts is established with reference to Schank and Abelson (1977) who contend that people construct accounts based on their knowledge structure approach, causal reasoning and text comprehension. Thus, for an account to be honored, it has to be goal-oriented and coherent. In this study, the social-interactive aspects of account-giving are investigated and it is discovered that severe reproach forms involving personality attacks and derogatory aspects, elicit defensive reactions that result in negative interpersonal and emotional consequences. Narrative accounts based on McIntyre (1981) form the basis of moral and social events and as such, stories have two elements from which they are explored. They are explored firstly in the way in which they are told and secondly, on the way they are lived in the social context. These stories follow a historically or culturally based format and to this effect, Gergen (1994) suggested narrative criteria that constitute a historically contingent narrative form. Narrative forms are linguistic tools that have important social functions to satisfactorily fulfill such as stability narrative, progressive narrative and regressive narrative. According to Gergen (1994), self-narratives are social processes in which individuals are realized on the personal perspective or experience, and as such their emotions are viewed as constitutive features of relationship. The self-narratives used and analyzed in this study portray the contemporary culture-based elements or segments of a well-formed narrative.