PhD Exhibition Catalogue (original) (raw)
Related papers
Literary Art and the Narrative of the Self
The Aesthetic of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower, 2020
This an extract from my book 'The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming - How Art Forms Empower'. (Routledge 2020) It might seem that any attempt to define storytelling will be undone by the sheer variety of its formats across different cultures. However, in order for one person to communicate with another (and to do so across language divides) there must be distinct but shared features of experience that are conceptually required in order for communication to take place. In what follows, I will define the scope of storytelling by reference to such features
Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts: Art, the Literary, and Life Experience
Style invites submissions that address questions of style, stylistics, and poetics-as we have traditionally. These submissions may include research and theory in discourse analysis, literary and nonliterary genres, narrative, figuration, metrics, and rhetorical analysis. In addition, Style also now welcomes contributions employing recent developments in several psychologies-cognition, bioevolutionary psychology, family systems, and human development-as those may relate to the study of literature and the humanities. Furthermore, the editors will be pleased to consider submissions on pedagogy generally as such relate to the teaching of literature and the humanities. Contributions may draw from such fields as literary criticism, critical theory, linguistics, philosophy of language, rhetoric, narrative, and composition studies as well as the varieties of psychologies and pedagogies.
This paper focuses attention on how I combined unique qualitative methodologies in a recent study, which examined the construction of self-identity through photographs and narrative text as primary data, in order to develop a visual autoethnography. Critical visual methodology, grounded in Barthesian visual semiotics, was combined with traditional and non-traditional ethnographic methods to interrogate these data in order to construct the autoethnography. These data came from a gallery showing of my photographic exhibition: Wunderkammer: Specimen views of my postmodern life. The resultant analyses of narrative text and photographs revealed an underlying sub-text of significant racial encounters as well as several social and institutional ideological issues that contributed to my findings. Implications from this particular methodological design indicate usefulness not only in photography, but also in allied disciplines such as communication, education, cultural, and media studies. This form of analysis also finds a place in the broader notion of social or cultural identity.
The Topography of Silent Narratives
Transcript Conference theme: ‘Shifting Landscapes: Diversity, Text and Young People’ The Topography of Silent Narratives, 2016
The wonderful world of children's literature is characterised by its variable and mutable landscape. It is an environment that is undoubtedly affected by socio-cultural and technological winds of change. One of the elements to reshape the terrain of children's literature in recent decades has been the 'pictorial turn', that is, a different understanding of the way images are 'accounted for, validated, and valued', (J W Borchert, 2013) and their function in narrative texts. Visual modes of storytelling have altered the topography of narrative by exhibiting features that differ from the previously well-surveyed logocentric domain. In recent times, a proliferation of picture books, artists' books, and graphic novels has diversified the nature of material books available for children and young adults. Each of these predominantly visual modes of communication has its own unique form, style and integrity, and elicits different types of reading and cognitive experiences. Visual and visu-verbal narratives encourage readers of all ages to utilise a style of perception and cognition employed in the so-called 'preliterate' stage of development. Within the terrain of pictorial narratives there are examples of predominantly visual books often referred to as 'wordless' or 'almost wordless' picture books. However, since the term 'wordless' seems to suggest something lacking, I prefer descriptors such as 'pictorial stories', 'visual narratives' or, in the case of the particular books being discussed here, 'mute' or 'silent' graphic novels.
Any life story, whether a written autobiography or an oral testimony, is shaped not only by the reworkings of experience through memory and reevaluation, but also by art. Any communication has to use shared conventions not only of language itself but also the more complex expectations of 'genre': of the forms expected within a given context and type of communication.