As a scholar, Tolkien spent a great deal of time working from manuscripts. Likewise, as a storyteller, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien creates a narrative persona who bases his story on his compilation and translation of ancient manuscripts. This persona operates within his story’s narrative frame as an analogue for Tolkien’s own work with manuscripts. Readers have long sought for Tolkien’s sources. The mythologies of medieval Northern Europe have been especially beneficial in helping us understand the influences on Tolkien. No study, however, currently exists that pursues the “manuscript sources” used by Tolkien’s narrative persona. But a reading that attempts to pursue these sources may also prove beneficial. Just as Tolkien inserts himself, in the form of his narrative persona, into the framework of Middle-earth, so also is the reader invited to read The Lord of the Rings from within this same framework. Tolkien wanted to his story to be read from inside Middle-earth as an artifact of history. This study will propose that—by simulating the kinds of phenomena around which a modern compiler of medieval manuscripts and stories has to work: fragmented manuscripts, lacunae, dittography, palimpsests, and variable texts—Tolkien has successfully distressed his story in such a way that it has gained the atmosphere of an ageing legend. The argument of this thesis is that Tolkien’s imitation of classical and medieval manuscript realities is even ambitious enough to suggest that Tolkien’s narrative persona has culled his story from the manuscripts of at least three major literary traditions, each of which is distinct in its interests, concerns, iconographies, historiographies, and themes. In addition to revealing where and how Tolkien has distressed his narrative, this study will also seek to identify what portions of the narrative belong to which of the three major traditions and tease out the implications of the interactions between them. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2015. / English / DLitt / Unrestricted

Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine is a novel depicting a world of authentic Native American experiences for readers to immerse themselves in. Erdrich creates this immersive setting with an unconventional sense of pace, realistic handling of characters, and clever choices of narration. The question of how this unique type of writing creates effective storytelling can be answered by analyzing its effects through the use of narratology. This essay outlines narratological features and effects in Love Medicine through the use of structuralist concepts. By utilizing terms out of Genette’s structuralist framework such as time, events and narration, defining the methods applicable to this novel, the scattered pieces of Erdrich’s narrative come together to describe its underlying structure with greater clarity.

The goal of this thesis is to answer the question of how does Subnautica (Unknown Worlds Entertainment, 2018) incorporate base building mechanics into its narrative progression? This research was conducted using a close reading methodology for the purpose of closely examining the key points of interest. The two authors conducted individual playthroughs of the game where they looked at the base building mechanics and narrative in Subnautica (Unknown Worlds Entertainment, 2018) using a lens constructed from theories of cognitive narratology, emergent narrative, and narrative gameplay mechanics. This lens used assemblage theory prominently as well to bridge the gaps between the previously mentioned theories. The results of the research describe in detail the inner workings of Subnautica’s (Unknown Worlds Entertainment, 2018) approach to base building mechanics and how it affects the different forms of narrative in the game. This research is beneficial for researchers and game developers that seek a deeper understanding of the impact that the integration of base building mechanics and narrative progression has on survival games.

Video game researchers have recently begun to explore qualitative techniques to understand video games and their audiences. Yet many questions remain concerning the significance of gaming media and how video game research should be conducted. This research addresses the changing focus of video game researchers from the "producers," or sender of the video game, to the "audience" or receiver. This is accomplished in the following ways: by exploring meanings created by individuals while "role-playing" in an electronic world as an on-screen video game avatar; by using the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET), to gather a deeper understanding of how players are interpreting the video game creators intended message, and focusing on the relationships formed between a player and their onscreen character. Using the ZMET method the author conducts ten in-depth interviews looking at the interviewees' relation with the Super Mario Bros avatar to gain an understanding of player-avatar relationships. Interviews are then discussed to describe how these individuals understand the video game message and avatar relationship.

The focus of this research is on the involvement of narrative learning within technical communication and the benefits that such an involvement can bring to the field. I analyze literature from within technical communication to determine how narrative is perceived, as well as the traditions in technical communication that made the field resistant to the use of narrative in the past. These findings are considered with respect to the history and definition of narrative, as well as to how narrative can improve learning outcomes when compared to expository learning approaches commonly used in technical documentation. While narrative is not a new concept to technical communication, this thesis offers new insights through a multidisciplinary approach that considers the work of philosophers and narratologists that are relatively unknown to the field. Philosophers Daniel Dennett and Jerome Bruner, as well as narratologists Gerard Genette, David Rudrum, and David Darby, show that narrative forms the basis for the construction of reality and that all human learning is based on the stories that we construct to give meaning to the world. Research studies conducted on the efficacy of narrative based learning are discussed in detail and an analysis of the areas where narrative use would most benefit technical communication is provided. Recommendations are made for the future use of narrative in technical documentation and for further research on the implementation and cost of narrative solutions.

Technical and professional communicators have in recent research been challenged to make significant contributions to the field of knowledge management, and to learn or create the new technologies allowing them to do so. The purpose of this dissertation is to make such a combined theoretical and applied contribution from the context of the emerging discipline of Texts and Technology. This dissertation explores the field of knowledge management (KM), particularly its relationship to the related study of artificial intelligence (AI), and then recommends a KM software application based on the principles of narratology and narrative information exchange. The focus of knowledge is shifted from the reductive approach of data and information to a holistic approach of meaning and the way people make sense of complex events as experiences expressed in stories. Such an analysis requires a discussion of the evolution of intelligent systems and narrative theory as well as an examination of existing computerized and non-computerized storytelling systems. After a thorough discussion of these issues, an original software program that is used to collect, analyze, and distribute thematic stories within any hierarchical organization is modeled, exemplified, and explained in detail.

In order to protect the safety of our citizens and to ensure a civil society, we ask our law enforcement, judiciary and intelligence agencies, under the rule of law, to seek probative information which can be acted upon for the common good. This information may be used in court to prosecute criminals or it can be used to conduct offensive or defensive operations to protect our national security. As the citizens of the world store more and more information in digital form, and as they live an ever-greater portion of their lives online, law enforcement, the judiciary and the Intelligence Community will continue to struggle with finding, extracting and understanding the data stored on computers. But this trend affords greater opportunity for law enforcement. This dissertation describes how several disparate approaches: knowledge management, content analysis, narratology, and natural language processing, can be combined in an interdisciplinary way to positively impact the growing difficulty of developing useful, actionable intelligence from the ever-increasing corpus of digital evidence. After exploring how these techniques might apply to the digital forensic process, I will suggest two new theoretical constructs, the Hermeneutic Theory of Digital Forensics and the Narrative Theory of Digital Forensics, linking existing theories of forensic science, knowledge management, content analysis, narratology, and natural language processing together in order to identify and extract narratives from digital evidence. An experimental approach will be described and prototyped. The results of these experiments demonstrate the potential of natural language processing techniques to digital forensics.

This project is a narratological study of the border between fiction and reality, and the traversing thereof. I postulate that the permeability of this border is the consequence of textual acts: Cataloged Fabulations, Second-tier Fictionals, and Rhizomatic Fabrications. These are akin to speech acts in that fictional entities gain nonfictional status by means of an implicit contract at the heart of the textual act. Having laid out the narratological foundation of the textual acts' power, I argue that the narratological bears on the ontological through performative speech acts, as portrayed in J. L. Austin's tripartite model. I use two lenses in my analysis: the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries. The Borgesian trifecta is encyclopedia, mirror, and labyrinth, referents that are synonymous with the three textual acts noted above. In terms of the biblical lens, my analysis focuses on a metaphor family in Jewish mysticism. This family includes the World as Book, The Torah as Blueprint, God as Author, and Letters as Building Blocks. The resulting conceptual system is narratological in nature. Consequently it is useful to draw on this system so as to elucidate the field of narratology. The binoculars offer a parallax view, which provides a unique perspective on narratology: the combination of modernist/postmodernist fantasy and the urtext of the Western literary canon.

The intricate and complex writing style of Machado de Assis’ novel Dom Casmurro create a unique and powerfully engaging reader experience. While much has been discussed with regard to narratology and reader-response theory in Dom Casmurro, Machado’s writing recalls many principles found in the cross-disciplinary field of experience design. Through an analysis of the novel using flow and co-creation theories, we see that Machado designs an extraordinary reader experience through narrational scaffolding and co-creative invitations. These elements engage readers in challenging and immersive ways, ultimately encouraging readers to develop their reading capacity throughout their contact with the novel. In Dom Casmurro, Machado’s experiential writing enables readers to work together with the author to create two significant products: both the novel itself and—perhaps most important—the co-creative experience the novel facilitates.

R/Nosleep is a digital publishing platform for horror literature. A unique quirk that defines this platform is the common understanding between its authors and readers that any story published to the platform is to be treated as a recollection of actual events. In other words, the fiction is to be treated as plausible non-fiction, both by those who write the texts and those who comment on them. This collaborative performance is enforced by a series of rules that authors and readers need to abide by. In this thesis I examine what exactly it is that authors and readers on r/Nosleep engage in when they treat the fiction as plausible. To do this I have conducted two analyses. First I have done analysises of three different stories posted to R/Nosleep, where I examine paratextual and narratological elements in each text to find if they either make a claim for authenticity or fictionality. And second I have analyzed the top comments for each of these stories to determine what sort of readings the users of r/Nosleep engage in and whether or not these readings play along with the rules established by the platform and its performance. From my analysises of the literature as well as the reader response I come to the conclusion that the seemingly strict rules enforced by R/Nosleep still leave a lot of wiggle room for authors and readers alike to engage in a rich variety of creative expressions both when it comes to writing and interacting with works of fiction.