We establish concrete mathematical criteria to distinguish between different kinds of written storytelling, fictional and non-fictional. Specifically, we constructed a semantic network from both novels and news stories, with N independent words as vertices or nodes, and edges or links allotted to words occurring within m places of a given vertex; we call m the word distance. We then used measur...

In his article "Academic Discourse and Narratives of Literacy as 'Equipment for Living'" Kris Rutten discusses practices of academic discourse and argues that students entering higher education have to become part of a specific community of institutional discourse. Rutten claims that narratives of and about literacy — narratives that revolve around issues dealing with language and the acquisiti...

A virtual form is an abstraction that enhances existing products and services by adding a layer to virtualize them. From a technical point of view, the current information technologies already make it possible to develop a virtual form using various techniques that represent information such as augmented reality technologies or ubiquitous display technologies. The virtual form can return a imme...

Fictional characters (FCs) and mediated persons in literature, theater, film, art, TV, and digital media fulfil basic psychological functions, although the processes involved remain unspecified. Departing from identification and empathy hypotheses, a new context-sensitive model draws upon similarity studies, empirical aesthetics, persuasion, emotion and social psychology. The PEFiC-model (Perce...

This review examines issues relating to biomedical ethics and literature in the African drama The President's Physician by Emmanuel Babatunde Omobowale. The play investigates the psychological dilemma of Doctor Bituki Warunga, a personal physician to General Kalunga Ntibantunganyah who brutally and inhumanely rules Wavaria, a fictional African country. The doctor is faced with deciding to uphol...

Brazilian regionalist literature and popular narratives since colonial times have too often depicted the semi-arid environment as being too harsh for femininity. Women have been constructed with masculine traits, as is the case for a myriad of fictional characters and real historical figures. Perhaps the most prominent cases are Maria Bonita, wife and member of the band of Lampião, the most fam...