Puppets

This is a Puppet Show:

Nice, right? See the wizard and the lady? See the hands controlling the puppets, and the French guy? Of course you do. Puppet shows require multiple roles. First of all you have the puppets, who are the characters and the only part of the show that people are supposed to see. Then you have the puppeteers, who are controlling the puppets and giving each one a voice, unbeknownst to spectators (because they are children, and not-so-sharp). Among them is a narrator of some sort who tells us the whole story, potentially revealing things to the audience (or not). Then, of course, there is an author (the aptly-named Mr. Not-appearing-in-this-blog-post), who is on vacation somewhere because he wrote this puppet show yeeears ago. When they're all in order, it's time to get some popcorn, grab a root-beer, and sit right in front of that bar-napkin drawing of mine for a kick-ass show.

If you think about it, any old narrative fits into the same kind of basic structure: You have characters, an author who writes about them, and a narrator who bridges the gap between the two. After some struggles with diagrams, here is an example that makes a bit more sense to me: Our same puppet show, where the pink boxes represent what Barbara Dancygier calls the "Story-Viewpoint" space, and the red box represents the "Main Narrative" space. My diagram is a little different than Dancygier's, because I have that silly Frenchman on the side. We will come back to him.

What ends up happening is that the narrative action (in the Main Narrative space, stay with me) plays out, creating different narrative spaces for the audience. Those narrative spaces are constructed by observers, based on the action and narration: They are like the scenes in your  head that you make-up as you read, and then associate with different characters and actions. 

So, again, in that red box we have 1.) Characters, 2.) their actions, and therefore 3.) Narrative spaces.

The Story-Viewpoint space (pink, remember?) is where we have our Narrator, the puppeteer, through whose viewpoint we learn what's happening. The narrator chooses what to highlight on stage, what the characters on stage will say and do, and what commentary to make about it. He therefore shapes how we will interpret each character and the narrative as a whole.

But the whole puppet-stage (everything in blue) was constructed by an author, i.e. the writer of the puppet show script who is probably rolling in dough from this clear success of a performance (not the French guy, wait for him, he's coming up next).

So, between the Main Narrative/stage/red box and the Story-Viewpoint/backstage/pink box, there is a lot of connection, i.e. those puppet strings. The characters, though perhaps based on real people with free-will, are totally non-agentive puppets. The viewpoint is thus established by the narrator/puppeteers who are calling all the shots, and are the lens (viewpoint) through which we view all the action. Get it?

But this is a little too simple --- we know that sometimes there is a narrator-character-puppet who appears on-stage, and tells us what has happened/is going to happen/whatever they want us to know which can change our interpretation of the story as a whole. In that case, the string from the hand to the narrator is a live-wire, connecting the narrator to that Main Narrative space (pink box to red box, yes) because he is also a character in the story.

What about that French guy, eh? Well, he can have different roles --- like, sometimes the narrator is totally outside the action, not connected to the narrative at all, but can still give us some background or reveal some secrets. This narrator can even be the author himself (is Mr. Not-appearing-in-this-blog-post French?), or a least the personaof the author, who controls viewpoint as well, but not interact with the characters. But in the end, the author is totally at his time-share, because the show was written in the past, and the performance is just a re-telling of the story the author intended. He is not there. We know you didn't write this, Frenchie. Don't play games.

The possibilities get much more complicated depending on the type of viewpoint that the author is trying to create,which involves time and language as well as shifting viewpoints and all types of crazy narration techniques, but here's one simple example for you. Hopefully this will become clearer, but for now, just watch out for that guy with the mustache --- he's tricky.

-Sarah

And a Narrative is...

When enrolling in classes for this semester, I had decided that I would focus on linguistics as much as possible, taking only the required literature courses. Not that I don't like literature, but... Well, I just don't like it as much, okay? When I looked at the course offerings, I saw a course on Narratology, which, to be honest, I didn't recognize as a linguistics course until talking to my advisors. So here I am, in what looks like is going to be an AWESOME class, and the first question we are tackling is, "What is Narrative?"

William Labov and Joshua Waletzki published what I understand to be the "Grand-Daddy" of Narrative analyses in 1966, in which they compiled a collection of recordings from narrators of different ages, classes, and backgrounds in order to analyze and define the basic parts and structure of a narrative. They open the paper with the notion that oral versions of personal experiences contain the fundamental structures of narrative --- NOT the perfected tales spun by expert storytellers after years of practice, but the everyday "So, this happened..." kind of thing. The idea of the whole paper is that by studying narratives as told by different speakers, we will uncover the real, basic elements of narrative.

The first difficulty is found in narratives across the board: When does a narrative start or end in oral tellings? The context on either end of a story might be a transition from one narrative to another, so where does one end and another begin? Or is it all just one big narrative? Right off the bat, they start separating clauses, defining whether they are crucial in the narrative process. These are "Narrative Clauses." The narrative places each of these narrative clauses in a temporal context, so that the listener can follow a sequence of events which occurred.

This paper says that a narrative must have temporal sequence, i.e. it must present actions in temporal, chronological order. They must be recapitulated in the same order as they were experienced (with a few exceptions). Sometimes it is unclear whether an action happened before, after, or during another action, so the article uses some mathety-math-type graphs and numbers to decide what's possible with the order of clauses. This confuses me, but the explanations give you the idea that the math is really just there for visual learners who like a challenge --- the written explanation was enough for me... I think.

After all the fancy equations involving the types and locations of clauses, the definition of a narrative is deemed "Any sequence of clauses which contains at least one temporal juncture is a narrative." There must be at least one a-then-b inference between clauses, like

"I walked to the bakery, I saw that they were closed, and I cried."

There are three clauses here, but no matter how you spin it, here is a cause and effect. I got there, and THEN I cried. Maybe because of the walk, maybe because I am addicted to cinnamon rolls and now I can't have any, or maybe because of something totally unrelated, but temporally things are clear: I didn't cry before I got there, I cried after. That's the a-then-b relationship.

But wait, there's more! Next we address orientation sections, which are the set of free clauses before the first narrative clause, which are optional but often part of the narrative structure. This section orients the listener in respect to person, place, time, and behavioral situation. So...

"I was hungry and tired. I knew it was late, but I wanted cinnamon rolls. I walked to the bakery, I saw that they were closed, and I cried."

The first two sentences are pure set-up, and are not temporally significant. All at the same time, I was hungry, tired, knew what time it was, and craved baked goods. THEN the action started. There's your orientation.

The part you might be missing here is the complication, or the series of events that may be termed the complicating action(s). It is hard to tell when a narrative 's complication and result have been given in full, making it hard to decide where the end of a narrative really is. But in my example sentence, you can see that the complication is that the bakery is closed, and the result is my crying in the street without any pastries. But is that the end? Maybe, maybe not.

Narratives can be of vicarious experience OR personal experience --- a personal experience narrative often has an evaluation, whereas a vicarious one can be just a set of events and their results. It is suggested in this paper that these types of vicarious narratives are not a narrative; they lack significance given by an evaluative clause. Furthermore, narratives tend to highlight the unusual or mysterious, portray the speaker in a positive light, and generally reveal the narrator's attitude toward theevents. This can be done semantically, formally, and culturally. It is often a comment at the end of the narrative, which can therefore signify resolution as well as evaluation. So, finally...

"I was hungry and tired. I knew it was late, but I wanted cinnamon rolls. I walked to the bakery, I saw that they were closed, and I cried. That was the worst day ever."

Ta-Da!

Fast-forwarding thirty years, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capp's 1996 article Narrating the Self circles back to these fundamental arguments about narrative, while fleshing out the idea to include more than just written or spoken word: A narrative often involves another medium, such as gesture, dance, song, facial expression, etc. This broadens the field of what can be considered a narrative, and leads me to what may be a pretty cool idea: Analyzing blogs as narratives, specifically food blogs in Russian.

While a food blog is usually a collection of recipes, just like a cookbook, the ability to comment and discuss with readers makes it a sort of collaborative narrative, and the story behind making a dish makes it a narrative instead of just a list of instructions.

So here's to wiping my tears and making my own cinnamon rolls :) More on this to come!

Love,
Sarah

Feminist Beyonce Literary Theory

(E)
Literary ladies, literary ladies (x4) – Now put your books UP!

(E)
Open a book, damn girl look --- All the men be oppressin’ me!
But not anymore, I took it to the floor,  it’s a feminist epiphany.
Androgyny is ideal, that’s how Woolf feels, but why can’t we be special?
'Cuz in the end, sexist men, they be tryin to deme-ean me-ee.

(A)
If you writin’ then you better think feminism
If you writin’ then you better think feminism
I’mma do it just because I am a she-woman
If you writin’ then you better think feminism o-o-o

(E)
Austen knows that she's got prose, but the language leads her to a snag
Men have a claim on lit’rature’s domain, and for ladies that’s a real big drag
We have got a voice, too, and I’ll tell you, that it’s our very own language!
So when a girl writes it’s gonna be tight, lady novelists have got a right to brag!

(A)
If you writin’ then you better think feminism
If you writin’ then you better think feminism
I’mma do it just because I am a she-woman
If you writin’ then you better think feminism

(E)
o-o-o, o-o-o (x4)

(E)
First there’s guys, I see it in their eyes, they be puttin' the oppression on us.
But now my friend, we gonna start a trend, help the ladies build the canon on up!
Writing In the 70's? it was heavenly! Gettin' every lady’s words out,
We write with our hips, not with our dicks, and you bet we gonna ha-ave so-ome fu-un!

(A)
If you writin’ then you better think feminism
If you writin’ then you better think feminism
I’mma do it just because I am a she-woman
If you writin’ then you better think feminism

(E)
o-o-o!

Benjamin and Adorno: The "Frankfurt's Cool"

Lacan I get back to you?

Having read Lacan's "Mirror Stage as Formative of the I function," as well as Fry's chapter on Lacan, I have a lot of questions. I will attempt to answer them based on my recognition of the terms that confused me.

Q: What is Gestalt?
A: a type of pickled fish, related to Gefilte, often pronounced in a thick New-York accent and found in Kosher delis. Ex: "Oy vey, the Gestalt is mighty fine this afternoon!"

Q: What is the function of the mirror stage?
A: to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality, assuming that that organism is an actor and his reality is that of a reflective surface upon which he acts.

Q: What is the Ideal I?
A: about two months and ten pounds ago.

Q: What is Imagos?
A: a type of frozen, breakfast pastry that can be prepared in a toaster ---  well known for the marketing slogan "Gimme my Imagos, Amigos!"

Q: What is "The Gaze"?
A: a medical bandage which has itself undergone a recent surgery to remove the pesky letter "u"

Q: Why do we keep talking about the penis?
A: This is actually "hashtag" (#) type of catchphrase, used in a time when people were obsessed with their pens and their perfect figures. Whether your pen is expensive, big, classy, or multi-colored, you can use the term #penis to mean "pen is..." implying that you have some sort of #swag that other #pens #lack.

Q: What is Geist?
A: See Gestalt.

Q: What is the relationship between big "S" and little "s" in "S/s"?
A: Well, you see, when a big "S" and a little "s" love and desire each other very much...

Q: What is a "Sheaf"?
A: Neither miserly nor spiteful #penis

Q: What is language?
A: a rebus --- the first bus was too small to contain all the "S/s"s.

Correction: Language is awesome.

Your Mother

Wow, what a weird, whirlwind weekend. First I sat down to read Freud's article on the Uncanny. He explains at length, through pages of dictionary definitions, that the German word for Uncanny ("Unheimlich") is supposedly synonymous, in some ways, with its opposite ("Heimlich")... which really just makes me think of the Heimlich maneuver. But the point of the article was to point out that the uncanny in literature really comes from that which was previously known (either from the history of mankind or from infancy) and has since been repressed. For example: It's not weird at all when, as children, we play with dolls and pretend that they are alive. Who else are you going to have tea-parties with, if not Barbie, Baby Newborn, and Mr. Bear? But as adults, after we understand fully that stuffed animals and human-like toys are NOT animate, the idea or inclination of their animacy becomes uncanny, and it freaks us out.

Talking tow-trucks, telepathy, and trippy-ness take totally tame territory from time to time: Anything impossible in our own reality might be possible, even expected, in an alternate reality. This is why, depending no the context of the plot, the uncanny and its opposite can be one in the same. In fairy-tales, we assume that certain things are going to happen that we would not expect from a novel that portrays what we interpret as "real life." For instance: If a tree reprimands Dorothy for picking its apples as she walks down down the yellow-brick road, it may be surprising, but not uncanny because of the fantastical context. On the other hand, if a tree says a polite hello to John Doe as he walks through Central Park, that's effed up, and our rational minds are forced to explain the action: Do we believe that trees can talk? That John has a special ability to communicate with trees? That he is insane? We don't know, and the possibility of irrational explanations makes this uncanny.

Finally, Fry focuses on further Freudian Forays into Fiction. We look at the novel as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. But if the beginning gives you a problem, and the end gives you a solution (or resolution), then why do we need the middle? We all like a page-turner, which usually results from lots of problems and suspense and worry. Why do we like that? Freud says that we all seek our own pleasure, and that “the aim of all life is death” --- that’s why we dig close calls and narrow escapes in fiction, and why trauma patients always come back to their traumatic experiences, at least from what I understand --- Because we want to become masters of death, and therefore relish the rehearsal of artfully avoiding it until the right time comes. I don’t know if I understand that whole idea, but I think I can get behind it…

Maybe mankind is masochistic, making the middle more morbid? That’s what I’m getting from Freud and Brooks in this chapter. This is what moves the plot of the story: the desire to Master death, which follows Freud’s pleasure principle: The delay of death, our conquering of death-defying or just plain scary situations, supposedly brings us pleasure. This is why we have plot, and why novels tend to be of a certain length and only give so much suspense: enough, but not too much. Am I getting this?

...Creepy concepts combined with the craziness of collective consciousness are quite curious to consider. It's uncanny!

Oh, the Digital Humanity!

Why, yes, I am a command-prompting computer wizard. Why, just look at my DATA! See all that Data over there? Yes. Mine. I did that. With... CODE MAGIC.

...or something.

Although this screenshot (in my opinion) makes me look like a computer wizard, the question it answers is fairly simple. I set out to find a program that could tell me which words within the text of Gogol's Dead Souls occurred most frequently in each chapter. This is called "Topic Modelling," looking at word-frequency to build a set of topic words for different sections of text (in this case, chapters of a book). The program I found was called "Mallet," which seemed the most likely to get the job done.


The biggest problem that I encountered (which I encountered with various DH programs and tools that I tried out, mainly Voyant and Tagxedo) was in working with Russian text. Cyrillic characters can be a problem, of course, but the structure of Russian words makes them harder to map (even if the program can process Cyrillic). Because the Russian grammatical system works by changing the endings of words, most programs won't recognize two words as identical if they are used in different grammatical constructions. The word девушка, for instance, means "girl," but can be written as девушка, девушку, девушкой, девушке, or девушки depending on the grammatical context. although these are all the same word, a program that analyzes words as entire units won't see it that way, and my data becomes useless.

So, is there a solution? For those of you who speak Russian and read Cyrillic, you will notice in the top left-hand side of my screen shot is some unintelligible text --- this is a modified version of Gogol's Dead Souls, from which I attempted to remove all of the grammatical endings. Although this seemed like a good idea, it did not solve the problem of stop-words. Of course, the list of stop-words in all of the programs I worked with were English, which did me no good when working with a Russian text. After scrubbing the text clean of endings and finding lists of Russian stop-words to add to my program (the series of folders in the upper right-hand corner) via the command prompt (lower right-hand corner), I came up with a messy pile of word-pieces that hardly represented the data that I was looking for.

But was time wasted? Definitely not. The squeaky-clean version of my Russian text came in handy for making word-clouds, just to see which words showed up most often within the entire novel. Interesting to see, and potentially useful, but not exactly what I was going for --- I wanted chapter-by-chapter division. After getting the hang of the Mallet program and some basic command-prompting, I just entered a full English translation of the text to be Topic-mapped, and the results are the lists of English words that take up most of my screen-shot. I had expected to see some food-related words up there, and was happy to see that "sturgeon," "dish," and "egg" made the cut, but I wasn't blown away by the results as a whole. It was cool to try topic-mapping, and I think this could definitely be useful once I get a better idea of what this program is capable of.

In the meantime, I'll stick to what I know. With regard to the Russian text, and finding instances of food-vocabulary, I took 2 minutes and came up with the gallery of images below. I literally just hit Ctrl+f to find where in the Russian text I could find different food-related words like bread, fish, sturgeon, sugar, pastry... AND (is it just my computer that is this awesome, or is it google chrome, or what?) when I search that way, a little side-bar shows up that highlights where exactly in the text each example is found, and i can see the distribution in little yellow highlights. This is just an example of how DH-applicable extras have already been integrated into systems that we use all the time. Sad to say, but I think this was more interesting/useful/relevant than the hours I spent learning how to code and topic-map... but I will not be discouraged.

Conclusion: "Screwing around" with a DH tool is all good and well, if you just want to learn the capabilities of that tool and see how it MIGHT be applicable to your research. All of the tools I tried were fun, interesting, and could have potential use in my project, or future projects. If you already know what you're looking for, however, finding the right DH tool can be a problem... but it doesn't have to be as complicated as you think!

#DH4lyfe