Search

This study investigates the syntactic complexity of various text-types in the Czech language by analysing the mean dependency distance (MDD), a measure that quantifies the average distance between syntactic heads and their dependents within a sentence, and average sentence length (ASL). Using data from the SYN2020 corpus, a large and balanced collection of contemporary written Czech, we calculate the MDD and ASL for different text-types. Our findings reveal distinct patterns in the MDD and ASL values across genres, suggesting that syntactic complexity varies among different types of texts. We observe a clear distinction between fiction and non-fiction genres, with fiction exhibiting lower MDD and ASL values, indicating a more compact syntactic structure. Non-fiction genres, particularly scientific literature, display higher MDD and ASL values, reflecting more complex syntactic constructions. Journalistic texts, such as newspapers and magazines, fall between fiction and non-fiction in terms of MDD and ASL values. These results demonstrate the potential of MDD and ASL as quantitative measures for characterizing and differentiating text-types based on their syntactic complexity. Furthermore, our analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the syntactic variations across diverse genres in the Czech language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonfiction has long been left out of the discourse on literacy and little is known about the affective experiences that children seek when they choose to engage with facts via reading and otherwise. We have conducted an interview study in which children of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in Czechia (N = 20, age 9–11) reflected on the world of facts as a springboard for affective engagement. Bespoke creative props were developed for the study. First, children made collages of their real-world interests and then reflected on the different activities (e.g. reading, viewing, talking, playing) through which they nurture these interests. Second, children engaged in the design of an imaginary nonfiction book on a topic of their choosing, a process that involved laying out a double page, leafing through sample books, and sorting picture cards representing different book design features. We present the interview toolkit and its holistic rationale and offer two contrasting case studies of children whose engagement was characterised respectively by a 'learning' and 'wonder' focus. Their differences showcase the interview toolkit's flexibility for further research and practice and expose the underexplored complexity and diversity of children's nonfiction experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Melissa Harrison, nature writer, podcaster, and author of the novels "Clay," "At Hawthorn Time," and "All Among the Barley," is presented. She discussed whether she find fiction and nonfiction to be very different things to write, insight on her novel "All Among the Barley," and information on her novel "At Hawthorn Time."

North Koreans have relied on the shadow economy since the collapse of socialism in the 1990s, but little is known about the degree to which informal markets have influenced the country's everyday politics. Based on a large-scale survey of defectors, as well as interviews with almost 100 defectors, including some who had been high-ranking officials prior to leaving North Korea, this article finds that the shadow economy has elicited many changes. First, informal marketisation has affected social practices in the workplace, such as reduced job attendance, decreased participation in mandatory organisational meetings, and a strengthened public perception that official job allocations are unfair. Second, the shadow economy has spread unfavourable views of the official welfare system, leading people to prefer life in the market to their past reliance on the command economy. Third, the shadow economy has led to rampant corruption, strengthening popular perceptions that officials are corrupt and law enforcement is unfair. Finally, the shadow economy has negatively affected public views of the North Korean regime, decreasing loyalty to the leadership and reducing public trust in political institutions. Despite these social transformations, people remain sceptical about the idea of regime change due to tight social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queerfeminist strategies in the reconstruction of memories, such as performative uses of fantasy in (auto)biographical (non)fiction texts, can bring out what has been repressed by androcentric narratives of History. Through memory dispositives, which trigger frictions between past and present, fiction and reality, creators manage to confront trauma. This is illustrated by close reading two works dealing with (post)memories of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship: Carmen Martín Gaite's novel El cuarto de atrás (1978) and Maite García Ribot's documentary film Cartas a María (2015). While Martín Gaite navigates through her own fictionalized memories, García Ribot reconstructs her grandfather's exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although philosophers have long claimed that reading fiction has the potential to improve imaginative capacities, empirical evidence on this topic is limited. We report an experiment that aims to conceptually replicate and extend previous work by Djikic and colleagues by testing whether reading literary fiction reduces the need for closure, and by testing for the first time whether it enhances openness to experience, cognitive complexity, imaginability, and divergent thinking. We also examined whether a potential fiction-based impact depends on previous exposure to print fiction or nonfiction. In a between-subjects design, N = 111 higher education students were randomly assigned to read either two literary fiction short stories or two nonfictional essays. Outcome variables were assessed after the reading assignments using a battery of questionnaire-based and behavioral indicators. The two groups of readers did not differ on any outcome measure, and results were not influenced by lifetime exposure to written fiction or nonfiction. Taken together, the current findings do not support the assumption that reading literary fiction increases imaginative capacities or related outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about changes in England's initial teacher education (ITE), particularly the government's emphasis on the Core Content Framework (CCF) as a mandatory element for all teacher education. Topic include the discussion revolves around the style and substance of the implementation, addressing concerns about government control, the privileging of school-based experience, and potential limitations in addressing wider socio-economic issues.

This article discusses Het Groote Mekka-Feest (The Great Mecca Festival), a non-fiction film produced by a Dutch-Indo filmmaker G.E.A. Krugers about Indonesian pilgrims making the hajj journey in 1928. In addressing this unique primary source, the article scrutinises how the film complements and corroborates accounts of the hajj from the early twentieth century and elaborates on how it provides the viewer with an experiential sense of travel as encountered by the pilgrims. Acknowledging the access of digital source material now offered by many archives, this rich visual document is both discussed within the existing literature, and set apart from it, in an attempt to exhume it from early non-fiction film archives of colonial Indonesia relegated to the slow lane of historical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Passed down from the previous generation, alpine land in the Swiss Bernese Oberland is owned by three families with different ideas about what taking care of old structures and land looks like. Cattle come up from the valley in the summer. When the ancient barn is leaning and in need of repair, they discover the work of a badger, a powerful digger. Conflict arises. In due time, the barn project turns into a unifying force, lifting family shadows. This is a work of nonfiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an uncomfortable moment in the podcast, The Ballad of Billy Balls, that prompted me to think about a podcasting course I teach, and my approach to the emotional aspects of some of my students' own non-fiction stories. This article reflects on the course's first iteration from the perspective of Boler's pedagogies of discomfort and emotion. What became clear is that providing opportunities for students to engage with emotion and discomfort aids the development of their personal growth; yet, my approach to ethics in this course was preventing students from engaging with emotional aspects of their stories. After establishing the value of discomfort and emotion, this article presents teaching activities for the second iteration of the course. These activities are developed from my reflection and, following practitioners of speculative practice, they are designed to encourage students' exploration of emotion and discomfort and my own pedagogical experimentation in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Sinophone Utopias: Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream" is a nonfiction book edited by Andrea Riemenschnitter, Jessica Imbach, and Justyna Jaguscik. The book examines diverse literary and artistic representations of utopianism in Chinese and Sinophone cultures, particularly those that challenge the official futurology promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. The contributors analyze a wide range of cultural productions, including novels, science fiction, online fiction, films, multimedia artworks, and stage plays. The book is organized into four sections that explore themes such as technology, traditional Chinese culture, fictional realms, and specters of the past. Despite some minor flaws, the book is considered a comprehensive and timely contribution to the field of Chinese and Sinophone utopia studies. [Extracted from the article]

"Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction" by Mingwei Song is a nonfiction book that explores the development of Chinese science fiction's new wave over the past three decades. The author argues that this new wave of science fiction provides alternative truths overlooked by mainstream Chinese realism literature. The book delves into the concept of the "poetics of the invisible" and examines the method and aesthetic of Chinese science fiction. It also discusses the global impact of Chinese science fiction and the emergence of women and non-binary writers in the genre. Scholars and graduate students interested in global science fiction cultures and theory will find this book valuable. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores how documentary cinema in war contexts can challenge gender representations. To do so, we adopt a feminist and postcolonial approach to analyze the work of Catalan non-fiction filmmaker Alba Sotorra in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Catalonia. In her films, Sotorra positions herself close to a series of subjects absorbed by wars and armed conflicts that (re)define their identities while acting beyond gender stereotypes. In particular, the paper analyzes the modes of production and representational strategies of two of Sotorra's latest feature films, Game Over and Commander Arian, documentaries with which the filmmaker aims at overcoming the visual exploitation of alterity. After an introduction to Sotorra, and a brief revision of the theory of postcolonial feminist cinema, our argument unfolds in four parts. Firstly, we reflect on cinematic representations of women and men at war; secondly, we introduce our methodology, based on in-depth interviews with the director to support our film analysis; thirdly, we contrast our hypotheses by means of close-readings of the films; lastly, we reflect on how the filmmaker aligns herself with intersectional feminism by using empathy and solidarity towards her subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the beginning of the new millennium. Globalization is picking up the pace, and Marxist media theorists warn about affective and 'immaterial' modes of extraction, as well as the rise of the attention economy. It is within this web of post-Fordist anxieties and chameleonic, flexible mechanisms of control that Thomas Elsaesser first charts the rise of the mind-game phenomenon, in his 2009 article 'The Mind-Game Film'. Elsaesser and his successors perceptively trace the mind-game film back to a range of global conditions and technological innovations which marked the passage from the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, from interactive VCR and DVD technology to confrontations with post-colonial Others. However, little-to-no mind-game scholarship thus far has centered the rise of Web 2.0 and the concurrent privatization of the Internet; furthermore, with the obvious exception of the Matrix trilogy, the mind-bending hacker films of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. WarGames, Sneakers, The Net) have been largely overlooked as mind-game and mind-game-adjacent films. Accordingly, this paper examines whether and how the hacker film might be folded into the broader field of mind-game scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines Rod Serling's career as he transitioned from writing live anthology teleplays to his famous series, The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), in service of investigating the changing definitions of authorship as the television industry changed. It does so in order to show that the techniques many critics agree Serling used to subvert corporate sponsors may have been rooted in pragmatic compromise engendered by the need to remain working within the shifting world of TV. These techniques include using science fiction and fantasy on television and becoming a writer-producer and the face of The Twilight Zone. Serling's transition to science fiction and fantasy, this article argues, could also be seen as a retreat from early TV's dominant mode of storytelling: social realism. His becoming the face of The Twilight Zone may have been a way to assuage producers' fears in supporting another anthology series without a consistent cast. This leads to the conflation of Serling the writer with Serling the salesman. Ultimately, these compromises result in the blurring of the line between commercial and series, as well as between writer and salesman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the work of the critic V.F. Perkins in the light of the concept of description, and vice versa. It argues that a range of distinct senses of description come together in Perkins's work, and uses that work to assist in the construction of some proposals about the function and value of description in films and film criticism. Perkins had, it is argued, a particular interest in films that explore what might be referred to as 'failures of redescription', including Max Ophüls's Letter from an Unknown Woman and Elia Kazan's America, America. His writings on these films are explored with a view to demonstrating the ways in which the descriptive practices Perkins used in his writing can bring out rich and fascinating connections between criticism as an ethical practice with affinities to moral philosophy (via a concern with appropriate act descriptions) and the descriptions that are traced by films themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009) through Lauren Berlant's conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, which Berlant develops in their reflections on the cinema of precarity. This framework, I contend, has the potential to open up new avenues of inquiry within the study of Arnold's work, usually discussed in relation to either British (social) realist cinema or the phenomenological representations of female experience. Situating Fish Tank within the broader framework of the cinema of precarity helps articulate a position from which to problematise the overemphasis on movement in critical writings on the film – which, as I will discuss, is also predominant in both affect theory and film phenomenology. I argue that with its simultaneous focus on movement and impasse, realised through framing and composition of the shot, camera movement, and repetition of visual tropes that convey confinement, Fish Tank is able to capture and aesthetically re-enact the impact of neoliberalism, while simultaneously paying attention to class and gendered styles of bodily adjustment to crisis ordinariness. I conclude that Berlant's critical apparatus illuminates the formal and affective complexity of Fish Tank in new ways, and creates space to address larger questions of affect, aesthetics, and the profilmic body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes the motif of 'child spectators' within the self-reflexive tradition of modern European cinema since the 1940s and within discourses on the affinity of childhood and cinema, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Through a close reading of The spirit of the beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) and Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991) that deals with the impact of the cinema experience on a child's life, I analyze how this motif stages spectatorship, cinephilia, and filmmaking. First, I show how these films reflect on the impact of film experience and the process of film education as based on the existential being described by phenomenology. Second, I argue that this motif implies specific aesthetic strategies that are often linked to childhood and cinema. The child spectator calls for the understanding of childhood as a film aesthetical category and invites us to engage in a distinctive form of spectatorship. If the children in these films represent and address the phenomenological dimension of film experience, they also invite us, third, to reconsider aspects rarely addressed by phenomenology, especially the integration of imagination and materiality in film experience, and the interdependence of film experience and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oculocentric perspectives are often dominant in descriptions of the city essay film. Whether flâneurial, observational, lyrical or visionary, the gaze is often placed at the centre of the filmic perception of the city, which is itself conceived of as a sight, image, or palimpsest. In this article, I reflect on the centrality of noise to modernity, and of capitalism to urban sound. In doing so, I pursue a dual goal: to foreground a sound-based understanding of the city through the essay film; and to ask how sound can help us understand the city essay film as a critique at once of the metropolis' entanglement with capitalism and of the cinema's historical contribution to the creation of the city as spectacle. A workable definition of the city essay film as an object of theory is attained via an engagement with urban and sound studies, and the discussion of sound design and sound discourse in Many Undulating Things (2019), a geopolitical essay by Bo Wang and Pan Lu about Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Werner Herzog avers that cinema reveals a truth beyond mere fact, a truth he calls 'ecstatic truth'. The film that offers the clearest view of this conception, the mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004), remains understudied and obscure. In Incident, Herzog plays a fictionalized version of himself who is making a documentary about the Loch Ness monster. This fictional version of Herzog shares the real Herzog's filmmaking philosophy, a philosophy Incident lays bare for study: namely, Incident reveals how the pursuit of ecstatic truth takes us to the limits of human understanding. While Incident helps us explore the concept of ecstatic truth, I argue it also helps us understand much of Herzog's oeuvre, including 2005's Grizzly Man. In this paper, therefore, I analyze ecstatic truth as presented in Incident and apply that understanding to Grizzly Man and its controversial tape scene. Examining said scene through the lens of the ecstatic truth will, I argue, not only garner us fuller insight into Herzog's films, but will also shed light on the effects of Herzog's controversial choice to not play the tape of Timothy Treadwell's death in Grizzly Man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nostalgia is everywhere in media today—be it films, television, or advertisements. But what does it mean to say that media is nostalgic? Beyond presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts can also express nostalgia stylistically. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This article presents an original theory of the aesthetics of nostalgia, arguing that 'pastness' becomes fantastical when nostalgic media use an artificial style: often a hazy and hyper-coloured image. Through a case study of Guy Maddin's Careful (1992), this article demonstrates how nostalgia may function audiovisually in the context of cinematic melodrama theory. These nostalgic aesthetics serve as both an articulation of mediated memory and a reflection of lived nostalgia, which is a longing for the inaccessible, the impossible, the lost—in other words, fantasy itself. Using phenomenologies of nostalgia by Edward Casey, James Hart, and Steven Galt Crowell, this article defines nostalgia philosophically, as the contradictory position between emotional yearning and a self-reflexive distance from the past. Such a radically critical nostalgia locates nostalgics not in a regressive and idealized relic of the past, but in the present moment, in which we may long for the loss of a past so inaccessible that it never was. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fiction film remains the privileged focus of text-oriented film studies despite the growing interest in other film forms. Fiction as a concept also organizes the field's key taxonomy – fiction v. nonfiction – yet little work has been devoted to the notion of fiction itself. The work that does exist is either textualist or spectator centred. The article argues that this leads to significant issues. First, categorization of numerous films diverges significantly from the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction divide. Second, such categorization may lead to both misunderstanding of audience experience and ethical problems alike. Third, theoretical commitments revolving around indexicality although partially applicable to documentary cannot shed light on fiction contrary to numerous attempts to do so. Fourth, one of discipline's key assumptions – fiction films change real-life beliefs – demands a theory of the relationship between fiction and belief that is currently absent in film studies. Closer scrutiny of the notion of fiction, the article argues, is necessary to dispel these issues. Specifically, the article advocates for 1) non-textualist accounts of fiction and 2) a theory of the relationship of fiction to imagination and belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western gaze instituted by the cinematographic apparatus constructs racialized subjects and supports processes of dispossession. My present transmedial artistic research project engages with the biopolitics of representation in archival film material, from a decolonial perspective. By drawing from academic and non-academic sources on relations between colonialism, capitalism, and technologies of control, this paper studies manifestations of surveillance in non-fiction film, to analyze the sub-genre of medical propaganda in former European colonies. Moreover, it proposes to scrutinize the long-term impact colonial cinema and its structures of representation had and still have on processes of subjectification, haunting present-day gender and race-determined profiling by mainstream film, CCTV, and drones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]