Video games have been created about political and social issues since the early days of the medium. In recent years, many developers are rapidly creating and releasing games in response to current events. These games are being referred to as newsgames. With an increasing number of people citing the internet as their primary news source, it would appear that newsgames could become an important p...

This thesis addresses issues of class as represented through the narrative agency exercised by the servant-narrator in Castle Rackrent and Wuthering Heights. Thady Quirk and Ellen Dean are servant-narrators who strategically use feigned allegiance, astute perception, and selective disclosure to wield power over the lives of their masters. These “arts of subordination” allow the servant-narrator...

Three experiments were conducted on how properties of the text control one aspect of the process of identifying with the central character in a story. In particular, we were concerned with textual determinants of character transparency, that is, the extent to which the character’s actions and attitudes are clear and understandable. In Experiment 1, we hypothesized that the narrator in first-per...

Scholarly inquiries into communalism in South Asia have often exclusively focused on politically constructed religious and ethnic identity categories. This article challenges these assumptions by arguing that territoriality and the designation of homelands played an important, but largely unrecognized, role in developing social and political boundaries in the region. By analyzing the writings o...

A lot of discourses about the so-called « screen civilization » pay little attention to screens. They usually speculate about a supposed cyberspace instead of examining the visible forms of effective communication. This paper looks at what is visible or invisible on computer-supported medias. To do this, it considers both the semiotics of visible signs displayed on the screen and the metasemiot...

In this article Paul’s argumentation is analysed from the perspective of sophistic rhetoric. In the first section the question is discussed what it means to label Paul’s rhetoric in his Letter to the Galatians ‘sophistic.’ To that end, an attempt is made to reconstruct the view of a contemporary critical reader who did not share Paul’s presuppositions and who was well acquainted with the discus...

In this paper we discuss several different perspectives on persuasion and behavior change and consider how they may be used to inform the design of serious games and other digital media for sustainability. These perspectives include the classic “information deficit” model of persuasion, as well as two more recent perspectives: “procedural rhetoric”, and “emergent dialogue”. We discuss how these...

This article addresses the hypothesis that scholarly argument as it is presently pursued is mediated through print; but the advent of modern ICT offers alternative media to support scholarly publication. However, few academics have much expertise with these media. Accordingly, if this technology is to be fully exploited the academic community will need to acquire such expertise and this may hav...