Metalepsis

(Résumé sur @nalyses:) Avec Aliss (2000), Patrick Senécal rend hommage au roman de Lewis Carroll, Alice au pays des merveilles (1865). Chez Senécal, le roman pour la jeunesse se transforme en un roman pour adultes, variante « X »; il explore les limites du réel et du possible par le biais des aventures d’une adolescente de Beauport dans un Montréal parallèle. L’analyse structuraliste de Landais montre comment Senécal emploie la métalepse narrative pour effectuer le passage d’un personnage diététique à un univers métadiégétique et engendrer le sentiment d’inquiétante étrangeté à la source du fantastique.

In his novel Aliss (2000), Patrick Senécal pays homage to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its fictional universe. In the Quebec author’s hands, the children’s tale is transformed into a work for adults. Senécal explores the limits of the real and the possible through the adventures of an adolescent from suburban Brossard who finds herself in a parallel-world Montreal. A narratological analysis demonstrates how Senécal employs Genette’s ontological metalepsis to move a diegetic character into a metadiegetic universe and to evoke the sense of the uncanny which lies at the source of the fantastic.

En el presente trabajo se  exploran las voces narrativas de tres generaciones de mujeres, abuela, madre e hija que llevan el mismo nombre Mariana, en la novela Misiá Señora (1982) de Albalucía Ángel. Nuestra propuesta inscribe a la obra en el género del Bildungsroman femenino, que transcurre durante el siglo XX en Colombia. De modo que, la apuesta que desde muestra visión hace la autora hace al crear una cuarta narradora-testigo, gravitando alrededor de las voces narrativas de la abuela, madre e hija, produce a la vez una metalepsis e involucra a las posibles destinatarias en el proceso de concienciación. Hay entonces un énfasis en la idea de la genealogía femenina que constituiría el espacio metafórico para pensar y tejer la gran obra de una subjetividad, porque no sólo se trata de un drama generacional, sino de un drama que relaciona las experiencias de las mujeres y lectoras en general, a través de la mediación narrativa y de la sororidad. Por lo tanto, se revisan las implicaciones que trae este tributo a la genealogía, hecha desde una cuarta voz narrativa, que se constituye como otra generación en la obra, una generación esperanzadora, la del cronotopo del futuro con una conciencia femenina liberada. Se logra vislumbrar así un sujeto femenino que no se reduce ante las estructuras sociales que excluyen, sino que sigue en constante proceso de revisión y se hermana con otras mujeres, incluso las contemporáneas, a través de la escritura, a fin de tomar conciencia.

Los materiales que se presentan aquí parten de la convicción de que los métodos de análisis se desprenden de las teorías, y por eso mismo los modelos de análisis pueden ser estudiados en su dimensión teórica. Teoría y análisis son las dos caras de una misma moneda.

This paper focuses on metafictional narrative strategies characteristic of contemporary English-language fiction. The research reveals the variety and stylistic peculiarities of these strategies, as well as specifies the definition of metafiction with regard to its liminal status and self-reflexivity. Narrative metalepsis, specific framing and plot arrangements, metafictional commentary, and other techniques have been analyzed resorting to numerous examples.

While the theatrical device of "breaking the fourth wall" has come to be seen as a characteristic technique of modernist theater, it is not often associated with the plays of Samuel Beckett — perhaps the quintessential modernist playwright. While Beckett employs the device in some of his early plays — most markedly in the lesser-known Eleutheria — he eventually moves away from anything resembling the "alienation effect" (as theorized by Bertolt Brecht), in which the fourth-wall break asserts the supremacy of objective reality over that of the dramatic fiction. In rejecting Brecht's methodology, Beckett does not, however, return to a naturalist theatrical model. In the "failed realism" of his most successful plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Beckett's nuanced treatment of the fourth wall helps to present the stage as a space of complete ontological indeterminacy, reflecting the unstable metaphysics of lived experience.

Among all Borges’ brilliant ideas, the most famous is perhaps the one around which the short story The Garden of Forking Paths is constructed; in this short story is described the structure of an imaginary novel in which there is no selection between alternative possibilities and every possible thing is actualized in a different universe line: in some cases, these lines can rejoin after splitting and then break up again. However, even if the “forking paths” seem to be inextricably linked to Borges’ short story, in this case we can say that the Argentinian writer, rather than inventing something new, has contributed in great measure to fix in the popular imagination what appears to be an ancient topos. The main goal of this essay is to analyze how this topos is adopted and developed in its own expressive potential by a consistent number of postmodernist writers.

The essay argues that Der Runenberg can be read as a romantic allegory of linguistic mystery and wonder between man and nature. In closely reading J. G. Herder’s philosophy of the origin of language, it claims Herder’s philosophy cannot philosophically justify the natural origin of linguistic expression in man without presupposing the philosophically incomprehensible concept of what the romantics called the “language of nature.” By way of understanding the essence of linguistic expression proper rather in the praxis of reflexive language, the novella adequately articulates the language of nature as a figure of mystery in poetic language that reflects on its own representation thereof. Accordingly, the essay first attempts to establish that the uncertain, mysterious divide between man and nature in their respective capacity for linguistic expression is a legitimate theme in both Herder’s writings and Tieck’s novella. It then attempts to demonstrate how the novella reflects on its representation of the same: on the story-level, the logic of the story confuses the language of man and the language of nature, precluding any stable definition of these figures; on the textual-level, various poetic techniques undermine the text’s own use of language, generating a sense of linguistic incomprehensibility.

The paper aims to revitalise Gérard Genette’s literary term of ‘metalepsis’ within a cinematic context,  emphasising the expression’s creative potentials for both analytical and creative approaches. Through its ‘mainstream complexity,’ Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception provides a novel and, at best, progressive contribution to contemporary Hollywood cinema, exemplified in its playful take on the diversified possibilities that the metaleptic logic allows. Nolan hereby (and similarly to Memento and The Prestige) follows his auteur affinity of converting, moreover, converging narrative and cognitive values into and within a fictional story. By introducing a fantastic, but at least conceivably possible futuristic world of permeable dreams in Inception, Nolan ‘diegetises’ the narrative feature of the embedded structures’ metaleptic transgressions, and inversely, by thoughtfully considering its viewer’s abilities of comprehension, ‘narrativises’ human cognitive skills into storytelling forms.

Usually, the interpreters of Mark’s gospel understand the allusions and citations to psalm22 in his passion narrative as proof of prophetic fulfillment. This reveals a theo- logical conclusion rather than a literary one. Instead, this article poses, using a literary approach, that Mark uses psalm 22 for three purposes: firstly, he wants to scripturize the historical details of Jesus’ crucifixion account. Secondly, he uses psalm 22 to enhance the literary motifs of abandonment, despair, contempt, and defeat present in his narrative. He invites his readers to understand the details of Jesus crucifixion in light of the suffer- ings of the psalmist wherein the motifs aforementioned are represented vividly. Thirdly, as a completion of his picture of Jesus as divine, psalm 22 enables Mark to present Jesus as human. Jesus’ despair, divine and human abandonment, and defeat are proper of human experience. By describing Jesus this way, a divine-human Christology emerges.

This chapter aims to analyze world-making practices in transmedia narratives and how viewers are engaged in these practices through the discussion of two narrative strategies, namely trompe-l'oeil and meta-lepsis, as they are used in the TV show Supernatural (The WB/The CW 2005-present) and in the works produced by its fan base. My paper will be structured into three parts: first, I will provide a definition of the above mentioned strategies, including their main effects; second, I will discuss how the relationships between the use of these strategies, the participatory or networked culture of fandom and world-making practices can be interpreted and analyzed; and finally, I will focus on the case of the TV series Supernatural.

"Serious games for learning, used in the professional world, link both game and work practices. This issue concerns designers as well as training managers and human resources managers, all interested in transferring and evaluating professional skills. But serious games, simulating interpersonal relationships through notions of fiction, immersion, realism or referentiality, are also reactivating some problems encountered by documentary films.

Thesis defended: This thesis suggests that the theory and practice of documentary cinema can serve the educational intent of the designer of serious game to facilitate the acquisition of new skills by the user.

Objectives: On the cognitive level, the purpose is to explore the learning related to confrontation of viewpoints (socio- cognitive conflict) through serious game on a single-player mode. The associated communicative purpose is to explain the construction of an interlocutor, a fictitious or a real one, who is able to oppose his point of view to the user. In order to meet these objectives, the sociocultural and historical processes of documentary filmmaking will advise different discursive and relational forms of the serious game.

Method: 4 configurations of the same serious game EHPADSG were tested in a quasi-experimental plan over a period of 5 months, with 250 users from 10 medical institutions. Our investigation is based on self-administered questionnaires and on an activity tracking system. To the statistical treatment arisen from the investigation, 5 focus groups, 3 individual interviews and observational reports are added.

Main results: First, a series of theoretical transpositions supports the analogy between serious games and documentary filmmaking. On the empirical side, our investigation confirms this analogy by pointing out that the use of serious games in a professional context is favorable to engage a documentarizing reading. Second, the comparison between the 4 configurations of the game EHPAGSG demonstrates the significant influence of two narrative figures (mise en abyme and metalepsis) on the increase of "documentarity" and viewpoints confrontation. Finally, our research leads to a "narrato-cognitive grammar" allowing designers to move from a documented to a documentary writing: the targeted competency is no longer confined to fiction but extended by reflexivity to the real enunciators."

Studio sui modi dell'influenza ovidiana sulle Metamorfosi di Apuleio. Al di là delle non numerosissime allusioni e riprese testuali, una lezione importante che Apuleio sembra aver imparato da Ovidio è l’uso di sottili metalessi per stimolare il coinvolgimento del lettore, che è continuamente esortato a vedere, capire, immaginare, stupirsi, (non) credere: tutte azioni che facilitano l’ingresso del lettore nell’universo narrativo e, direbbe Coleridge, la sua “temporanea sospensione dell’incredulità”.

Metalepsis is a rhetorical and narratological term (Genette 1980, Wolf 2005, Kukkonen 2011) referring to aesthetic techniques used across media to "jump across" or break ontological boundaries between fictional and actual worlds, as well as between various layers of diegesis. Metalepses can involve a full physical transgression, i.e. a way of transporting characters, narrators or the audience into and out of diegetic levels or ontological spheres/worlds, or indeed just a quick ‘glance’ across, for instance by briefly addressing a reader, viewer, or player. Typical examples of metalepsis include author-narrators talking to readers, characters stepping through film screens into superordinate or subordinate narrative worlds; vidders creating films as a platform where they (or rather representations of themselves) meet their favourite popular media characters; avatars impersonating players in game worlds; and players talking about their avatars in the first person. The specific effects of metalepsis vary across media; they depend both on authorial intention and individual interpretation, but generally speaking, they are either illusionist or ani-illusionist in nature: they either create/augment feelings of immersion or disrupt the willing suspension of disbelief.
In this talk I offer a survey of metaleptic techniques and their effects across media and showcase how specific media affordances help to to "stage" illusion in two respects: by exposing and subverting mimetic illusion, and by enacting it as an interactive performance. I will begin by mapping some important theoretical concepts, such as rhetorical vs. ontological, ascending vs. descending metalepsis, participatory, interactional and hetero-metalepsis. This will be followed by a tentative typology of illusionist and anti-illusionist metaleptic narratives from narrative fiction (e.g. Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds), comics, film (e.g. Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo), fan culture, digital fiction (e.g. Lance Olsen and Tim Guthrie's 10:01), videogames (e.g. Tale of Tales' The Path; Bioware's Dragon Age: The Origins), virtual worlds (Second Life) and the discourses and artistic practices surrounding them.

This chapter casts a critical eye on various classifications of reflexivity that have been proposed by film and media scholars over a number of decades. These center on the reflexive content of films, their self-referential communicative structures and functions, and intended effects of reflexiveness on spectators. In this context I differentiate (self-)reflexivity and related terms/concepts—metafiction; metacinema, mise en abyme, allusion and intertextuality, self-conscious style and narration—from a twenty-first century standpoint, and outline an alternative classification of reflexive forms in celluloid and digital cinema. The latter are distinct from specific reflexive devices (e.g., the film within the film, direct address, display of the cinematographic “apparatus”) and general modes (e.g., political, formal, ludic). As illustrated through concrete examples, the five transmedial forms posited—environmental; trans-art and intermedial; generic; creator-centered; performance-based—typically occur in complex combinations. Their identification, and the new conception of cinematic reflexivity this typology represents, aids in the analysis and interpretation of reflexive and metacinematic films and styles.

In this article I propose to examine the different ways in which Varda’s films accomplish a kind of metaleptic leap between levels of “fiction” and “reality,” of hypermediacy and immediacy, and to present this as an alternative to the techniques involving metalepsis used by the most famous representative of the generation of French New Wave filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard. I have found that, most of the times, for Varda cinema is defined as an “artifice” between two layers of the “real:” the reality of herself, the personal world of the author-narrator and the reality captured by cinéma vérité style cinematography. Intermediality in these films serves as a “figuration” that on the one hand performs these metaleptic leaps from immediacy to stylized representation/hypermediacy, and on the other hand “figurates” the impossibility of such a leap. Among the films referred to in the analysis are L’opéra-mouffe (an effective collage of photographic flânerie and concept-art), Ulysse (a narrative-dramatic ekphrasis of a photograph), 7p., cuis., s. de b., ... à saisir (inspired by an exhibition entitled The Living and The Artificial), Histoire d’une vieille dame (a sort of cinematic objettrouvé recovered from the shooting of Sans toit ni loi), Daguerréotypes (a controversial documentary), Happiness (a fiction film that shocked its contemporary audience with its unusual approach to adultery), The Beaches of Agnes (an autobiographical essay film), etc.

En este trabajo se propone un modelo del texto literario que incluye las categorías genéricas esenciales, a las que hemos denominado 'mundo del autor' y 'mundo de los personajes'. Dicho modelo permitirá establecer una clasificación de los géneros literarios capaz de integrar todas las manifestaciones literarias existentes o imaginables, y pretende ser de utilidad para mostrar que existen géneros literarios ficcionales y géneros literarios no ficcionales. Contrariamente a lo que sostienen algunas tendencias teórico literarias en la actualidad, las cuales consideran que la ficción es un elemento indispensable de todas las formas literarias, y que sin ficción no puede haber literatura, se intenta probar que existen tipos de literatura no ficcional, y que incluso un mismo género, como la lírica, puede adoptar formas ficcionales o no ficcionales. Por ello, la clasificación de los géneros se complementa con una teoría sobre la ficcionalidad, de cara a unificar las teorías sobre los géneros y la ficción. En este sentido, se propone una distinción entre el hecho de fingir, relacionado con el desarrollo del mundo del autor, y el de crear ficciones, atinente al despliegue del mundo de los personajes, capaz de explicar las distintas posibilidades de creación literaria, las cuales incluyen los casos de “fingimiento literario”. Por último, se trata de explicar los casos que presentan una ruptura de la lógica ficcional (o 'metalepsis'), los cuales se producen cuando entran en contacto elementos que, desde un punto de vista lógico, deberían ser independientes (por ejemplo, cuando el autor entra en contacto de forma imposible con sus personajes ficcionales, o cuando los personajes de ficción se dirigen a los lectores), para lo cual se desarrolla una 'teoría de los mundos imposibles' que complementa la' teoría de los mundos posibles'. A este respecto, el modelo del texto literario propuesto resulta de utilidad para distinguir y definir los distintos tipos de ruptura de la lógica ficcional en las diversas manifestaciones literarias y artísticas.

Desde la ambigua postura cervantina hacia la verosimilitud, el "Quijote" está invadido de vacíos, imposibilidades, paradojas y metalepsis que desempeñan una función profundamente creativa en la novela. En este ensayo se explora cómo Cervantes, valiéndose de tradiciones de pensamiento paradójico, presenta vacíos ontológicos y epistemológicos como una plenitud de ser y saber. Así descubre y desarrolla el equívoco ''modus operandi" de la ficción.
From its ambiguous stance towards verisimilitude, the "Quixote" is full of voids, impossibilities, paradoxes and metalepses that play a profoundly creative role in the novel. This essay explores how Cervantes, drawing upon traditions of paradoxical thinking, presents ontological and epistemological voids -- a plenitude of being and knowing. He thus exposes and develops the equivocal workings of fiction.

Este estudo objetiva examinar a metalepse enquanto recurso de complexificação narrativa presente na minissérie brasileira Capitu (REDE GLOBO, 2008). Adaptada do romance Dom Casmurro (1899), de Machado de Assis, a obra televisual transpõe, de maneira singular, o artifício da “transgressão entre mundos narrativos” (WOLF, 2009) da configuração literária para a audiovisual. Nosso propósito é, portanto, destacar a metalepse em sua potencialidade de espessamento narrativo, relacionando-a ao fenômeno da narrativa complexa autorreferencial e contribuindo, assim, para uma possível narratologia da televisão.

The Rigveda is one of the most influential religious texts in the history of the world, but is it world literature? This chapter examines what is really at stake when we translate the Rigveda, and how much we miss when we force the text to conform to our aesthetic world rather than its own. This chapter examines how the poets of the Rigveda conceive of literature, of the world, and of the relationship between the two, in an attempt to better understand what the creators of the Rigveda would consider a graceful translation.

{Rachelle Claire Strub, University of Basel} In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles uses metalepsis and metafiction as common devices of postmodern literature to create surprise and shock in the readers. These strategies connect his text to the genre of neo-sensation fiction. The aim of this paper is to outline how these instances of metalepsis and metafiction in both the novel and the film are connected to (neo)-sensation fiction.

The paper focuses on tendencies that qualify for the
label of reflexive and hypermediated cinema, but which, nevertheless,
also have the purpose of achieving the sensation of immediacy. Three
different types of such hypermediated cinematic experiences of the real
are analysed: Agnès Varda's film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000),
presented as a sort of "encyclopaedia of the real," then Godard's essay
film cycle, Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998), presented as primarily a
hand-made cinema derived from photomontage and the calligrammatic
fusion of image and text. The third type is exemplified by José Luis
Guerin's twin films En la ciudad de Sylvia and Unas fotos en la ciudad
de Sylvia (2007), in which we can see an example of how the most
transparent techniques can also end up as remediations. All these
examples seen as re-mediating to an excess the indexicality of modernist
cinema and challenging cinema's lack of auratic quality through the
director's marked personal implication and traces of his "handling" of
media. The paper also proposes the possibility of a "remediational
metalepsis" in which cinema exposes the paradoxes of the everyday
experience of metaleptic leaps between real and mediated and thus calls attention to metalepsis as integral part of reality itself.

Theoretically influenced by Bakhtin’s (1986) concept of dialogism – according to which any discourse is both permeated by and directed towards other discourses (i.e., backward and forward orientation) –, this thesis seeks to investigate the interweaving of voices surrounding Julian Barnes’s Booker-prize winning The Sense of an Ending (2011). In keeping with the double orientation of discourse, chapter I explores Barnes’s novel and Chapter II focuses on readers’ responses to it. Two questions drive the research: (i) What is the nature of dialogism in the novel versus in readers’ responses to the novel? (ii) What is the effect of dialogism in the novel versus in readers’ responses to the novel?

Chapter I entitled “A Text-driven, Reader-oriented Study of Dialogism” (pp. 11-47) is divided into two parts. First, it qualitatively considers the entanglement between Barnes’s novel and past discourses through a literary study of intertextuality. Then, it analyses the entanglement between Barnes’s novel and the target ‘implied reader’ through a stylistic study of the homodiegetic narrator’s – overt and covert – addresses to the reader. The study distinguishes two types of intertextual references: cultural and literary. Using insights from Ancient Philosophy and stylistic tools, the analysis reveals that cultural intertextuality works toward spatio-temporal anchoring. References to literary texts and figures – here, the 20th-century English poets Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin – work toward characterisation. Thus, intertextual patterns fix the meaning of the novel. The second part of chapter I uses a mixed-method methodology, integrating narratological, cognitive stylistic and corpus linguistic tools to investigate the ways in which the ‘para-diegetic’ and ‘diegetic’ narrators both attract readers in the story-world and entice them into empathising with the homodiegetic narrator. Research findings reveal that several stylistic features manipulate real-world readers into inhabiting the fictional world (i.e., to perform ‘ontological metalepsis’): you-narrations embedding the progressive aspect, foregrounded negation, and the prevalence of mental processes. Thus, chapter I finds that supposedly dialogic devices (i.e., cultural and literary intertextuality combined with addresses to the reader) have for effect to decrease the dialogic scope of the novel. The novel’s to-and-fro movement between past and future discourses enables the author to manipulate readers’ interpretations.

Chapter II entitled “A SFL-based Analysis of Online Book Reviews” (pp. 50-89) qualitatively analyse three customers’ reviews of The Sense of an Ending posted on Amazon.co.uk. These reviews – here used as reader-response data – respectively feature a ‘high’, ‘medium’, and ‘low’ star rating. In the same vein as chapter I, this study maps out the ways in which online readers engage with past discourses (i.e., The Sense of an Ending) and future discourses (i.e., readers reading the reviews on Amazon). At an analytical level, the research uses the Engagement sub-system within attitudinal APPRAISAL (Martin and White, 2005; Martin and Rose, 2007). The Engagement framework – which is directly influenced by Bakhtin’s dialogism – deals with the inclusion and exclusion of other voices and sources of attitudes in a text. It comprises three main linguistic resources: projections, modality, and concessions. Research findings suggest that there is a correlation between the dialogic scope of the reviews and their perceived legitimacy in the online community. Combined with the use of low epistemic modality, projections increase the dialogic scope of the review by encouraging interactions among ‘peer-to-peer’ Amazon readers. In contrast, combined with the use of high epistemic modality and/or polarity and intertextual references, projections decrease the dialogic scope of the review by discouraging potentially dissenting interpretations. In the former case, the reviewer appears as a source of opinion among others. In the latter case, the reviewer is construed as a literary expert and as a source of knowledge in the online community. Thus, chapter II also finds that supposedly dialogic devices (i.e., projections) can have for effect to decrease the dialogic scope of the review.

To conclude, the intertextual references present in The Sense of an Ending target a very specific audience: Western, educated, and familiar with Britain’s literary heritage. This intertextual pattern hinders the readerly creation of plural interpretations. Moreover, addresses to the reader pretend to subvert the monoglossic tendency of the narrator’s discourse while in fact subtly reinforcing it. Readers’ reviews reveal that the reviewers’ different use of projections and modality construe different dialogic scopes: narrow and wide. Reviews with a narrow dialogic scope are linguistically closer to professional book reviews, which leads the reviewer to be construed as an ‘expert’. Reviews with a wide dialogic scope are linguistically closer to dialogic social media communication, which leads the reviewer to be construed as a ‘peer’.

Les frontières entre fait et fiction, réalité et imaginaire, ont la répu-tation d'être désormais brouillées. Pourquoi les défendre ? Parce qu'elles sont une nécessité cognitive, conceptuelle et politique ; parce que leur disparition élimine le plaisir de passer d'un monde à l'autre. Françoise Lavocat propose ici de repenser les frontières de la fiction dans la littérature, le cinéma, le théâtre et les jeux vidéo. La première ambition de son livre réside dans le bilan très complet qu'il dresse des controverses anciennes et récentes sur le statut de la fiction dans les domaines de la théorie littéraire, du droit, de la psychanalyse et des sciences cognitives. À la faveur des ces éclairages multiples, l'ouvrage prend notamment en compte le phénomène du storytelling, l'histoire des rapports entre Histoire et poésie, la question du blasphème. Le parti pris de distinction qu'il adopte, tout en défendant l'idée d'une hybridité essentielle de la fiction, en constitue le second intérêt et la stimulante nouveauté. Les conditions de possibilité d'une culture de la fiction sont interrogées, ainsi que ses limites. Le point de vue défendu renouvelle entièrement les termes du débat : l'auteur s'emploie en effet à définir la fiction comme un monde possible possédant son ontologie propre, en concentrant l'intérêt sur la relation aux personnages, la question des paradoxes et de la métalepse, cette figure qui confirme la fron-tière entre les mondes en donnant l'illusion de la franchir.

Worldbuilding in video games is typically  associated with the creation of immersive virtual environments. In the independent puzzle adventure OneShot (Little Cat Feet 2016), however, worldbuilding becomes the game’s central theme in a highly self-referential manner. OneShot presents a multilay-ered universe in which not only characters and players but the game’s very code seem to move freely between  ontological  levels. Drawing attention to the aesthetics and mechanics of worldbuilding and deconstructing the architecture of its own game world, OneShot invites reflection on the relation between fiction and computation; the virtual and the actual.

The debate regarding the identity of the κύριoς at the conclusion of the parable of the Prudent Steward (Lk 16.8a) has not been satisfactorily resolved. Gérard Genette's study of narrative level, which helpfully illuminates the relationship between parables and their embedding narratives, provides a fresh perspective. Luke frequently employs a narrative trope that Genette calls metalepsis: the transgression of the boundary between narrative levels. An understanding of the puzzling denouement of the parable, as well as the morals appended to it (vv. 9-13), emerges from an appreciation of Luke's employment of metalepsis, which effects a collision between the cultural mores of stewardship that are operative within the parable and the very different understanding of faithful stewardship promoted on Luke's primary narrative level. The surprising intrusion into this parable of a κύ ριoς who approves of debt relief compels the parable's audience to reconsider their own loyalties and vindicates the debt relief scheme of a prudent steward.

Abstract: This essay surveys and assesses the roles of asses in _Don Quijote de la Mancha_. I argue that their ultimate significance derives from the picaresque tradition, specifically Apuleius’s _The Golden Ass_ and the anonymous _Lazarillo de Tormes_. Cervantes deploys picaresque asses as symbolic markers of: 1) his own aesthetic prowess, 2) his criticism of racial and ethnic intolerance, 3) his vision of compensated labor and economic exchange as the proper means of avoiding social conflict among Old Christians, conversos, and Moriscos. As opposed to the light and casual school of interpretation represented by critics like Auerbach, Spitzer, and Russell, I approach Cervantes’s great novel as a very serious satire against the ethnocentric, orthodox, and appropriative tendencies of early modern Spain.


Resumen: En este ensayo examino la función de los asnos en _Don Quijote de la Mancha_. Sostengo que su significado se deriva de la tradición de la novela picaresca, específicamente _El asno de oro_ de Apuleyo y _El Lazarillo de Tormes_ de autor anónimo. Cervantes despliega asnos picarescos como marcadores simbólicos de: 1) su propia destreza estética, 2) su crítica de la intolerancia étnica y racial, 3) su visión del trabajo compensado y el intercambio económico como los medios adecuados para evitar el conflicto social entre cristianos viejos, conversos y moriscos. A diferencia de la escuela de interpretación ligera representada por críticos como Auerbach, Spitzer y Russell, yo leo la gran novela de Cervantes como una grave sátira contra las tendencias racistas, ortodoxas y despojativas de la España de la temprana edad moderna.

Keywords: Don Quijote, Dulcinea, Cervantes, Apuleius, Mendoza, The Golden Ass, Lazarillo de Tormes, ass, mule, donkey, picaresque novel, history of the novel, comparative literature, satire, metalepsis, miscegenation, racism, orthodoxy, commerce, economics, Auerbach, mimesis, Inquisition, Moriscos, conversos, Old Christians, Neoplatonism, School of Salamanca, Juan de Mariana, Bartolomé de las Casas, El Greco, Velázquez.

Palabras clave: Don Quijote, Dulcinea, Cervantes, Apuleyo, Mendoza, Asno de oro, Lazarillo de Tormes, asno, burro, mula, novela picaresca, historia de la novela, literatura comparada, sátira, metalepsis, mestizaje, racismo, ortodoxia, comercio, economía, Auerbach, mímesis, Inquisición, moriscos, conversos, cristianos viejos, neoplatonismo, Escuela de Salamanca, Juan de Mariana, Bartolomé de las Casas, El Greco, Velásquez.

The long-term creative collaboration between Kira Muratova and Renata Litvinova began with the film “Uvlechen’ya” (“Pastimes”, 1994), in which Litvinova took part both as an actress and a screenwriter. Since then, Litvinova has become one of the most striking personifications of Muratova’s ornamental film style, which brings about a specific regime of visibility by foregrounding the eccentric corporeality of non-professional actors, or gesturality as a category of bodily and speech performance. This article focuses on the primary scene of gestural genealogy linking the two directors: thus, the pathologist’s gesture from nurse Lilya’s monologue, written and recited by Litvinova in her inner eccentric manner in Muratova’s film, unfolds in a full-length film narration of “Rita’s Last Fairy Tale” (2012), with a phantasmagorical plot and spectacular visuals characteristic of Litvinova’s directorial style. The article addresses, on the one hand, this gesture, expressing concisely the manifold and bidirectional relation between Muratova’s and Litvinova’s films, and, on the other, discusses possible ways of theoretical conceptions of gesture in text and cinema. Gesture is conceived of as a borderline figure of speech and/or of body, aimed at an absent object, whereby the grasping function of the hand makes gestures to a figure of metalepsis which, translated into the language of cinema, emphasises the haptic character of the image. The missing object around which gesticulation arises leads to a discussion of the problematic status of gesture as a sign as well as to the disturbed process of signification during its interpretation. Since gesture only indicates and signals but does not signify, one can speak of the semiotic function of monstration. A gesture appears as a monster in the literal sense of the word, that is, the one who shows itself and, in so doing, warns. Thus, using gestures, to some extent requires adopting the position of a monster – to designate by putting oneself on the show, by making oneself the object of spectacle. Both films and the figure of Litvinova therein are viewed through the prism of monstrosity of gesture and language – it is through the disjunction between showing and speaking that gesture becomes exposed as a pure medium.