Storytelling is a pervasive part of our daily lives and culture. The task of creating stories for the purposes of entertaining, educating, and training has traditionally been the purview of humans. This sets up the conditions for a creative authoring bottleneck where the consumption of stories outpaces the production of stories by human professional creators. The automation of story creation may scale up the ability to produce and deliver novel, meaningful story artifacts. From this practical perspective, story generation systems replicate (...) the creative abilities of humans and can thus be considered instances of computational creativity. Computational systems that are purported to be creative typically utilize one of three general approaches: exploration of a space of concepts, combination of concepts, and transformation of concepts. In this article we present an approach to story generation that utilize exploration, combination, and transformation. Our approach, implemented in the Vignette Based Partial Order Causal Link story planner, is an algorithm that searches through a space of possible story solutions, guided by combinations of existing story fragments called vignettes. The vignettes are made relevant to novel story generation contexts through an automated transformation pre-process. Through these processes, we show that story generation can incorporate multiple perspectives on computational creativity. Our approach is presented at both the theoretical and technical levels. (shrink)

This article explores basic constraints on the nature and appreciation of cinematic adaptations. An adaptation, it is argued, is a work that has been intentionally based on a source work and that faithfully and overtly imitates many of this source's characteristic features, while diverging from it in other respects. Comparisons between an adaptation and its source are essential to the appreciation of adaptations as such. In spite of many adaptation theorists' claims to the contrary, some of the comparisons essential to (...) the appreciation of adaptations as such pertain to various kinds of fidelity and to the ways in which similar types of artistic goals and problems are taken up in an adaptation and its source. (shrink)

A comprehensive account of human kindness.

In the emerging field of animal studies, criticism turns to questions of ethics and animal rights by reading representations of nonhuman animals in philosophy and literature. A rhetoric of coming to terms often shapes such readings and points to a lack of satisfactory answers to two questions: why read nonhuman animals, and why now? These questions are crucial to animal studies but can only be answered by understanding this critical approach as an element of the anthropological discourse, fundamental to philosophy. (...) Examining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s approaches to thinking about the human-animal relation, it seems that the interest in reading how animals are presented in philosophy is not in coming to definitive terms with this relation or in correcting earlier theories. Rather, it appears to lie in reading the concept of the Animal as marking a limit of terminological language, and thus of theory. The Animal marks the point at which philosophy touches on poetry and withdraws. Criticism is concerned with animals now because the concept of “the animals” keeps casting doubt on theoretical conceptions of the Human and of human language. (shrink)

Since the Renaissance, dramatic theory has been strongly influenced, sometimes even dominated by Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle’s concept of tragedy has been perceived as both a descriptive and a normative concept: a description of a practice as it should be continued. This biased reading of ancient theory is not exceptional, but in the case of Aristotle’s Poetics, a particular question can be raised. Aristotle has written about tragedy, at a moment that tragedy had no meaningful political or civic function anymore. As (...) political theory—e.g. as developed in the Politics and the Art of Rhetoric—should contain the risks of transgression in political practice, so poetic theory can contain the risks of the representation of transgressions in poetic practices such as the performance of tragedy. Apart from an account on Aristotle’s Poetics as a integral part of his ethical and political theory, this article argues the (mis)readings of Aristotelian dramatic theory since the Renaissance, and especially in 17th century France are not coincidental. Aristotle’s theory itself fits neatly into a political-theoretical framework or, if one puts it more brutally, an ideology. The particular theatricality of French absolutism took clearly its advantage from this ideological (mis)readings of Aristotle. (shrink)

This article analyzes the concept of narrative.How do we recognize a narrative when we seeone? Which criteria do we or should we apply?The article itself serves as a (possible)example of a narrative, and is thus adiscussion of itself as a narrative product. Ialso discuss the possible narrative structureof the process leading up to the completedarticle. I first discuss two approaches tocategorization and the most commonly referredto criteria for identifying narratives. Next Idiscuss various roles found in narratives andthe roles found in (...) the current article. FinallyI discuss the problems principally involved inpunctuation of sequences and thus in decidingwhich narrative we are dealing with. Itis concluded that the categorization criteriaare too vague to perform the job they areintended to do. (shrink)