This essay challenges the myth of Hannibal Lecter, in Demme's The Silence of the Lambs, as an enigmatic and unclassifiable character. Lecter's enigma is generated through a largely unexplored process ...of de-characterization, i.e. by recurrently presenting him through the speech of other characters who describe him as unknowable. After considering Lecter's case against the background of well-known literary unknowabilities, a deductive phenomenological exploration of Lecter's de-characterization is carried out with the assistance of tools from the disciplines of personality and social psychology, and supported by empirical evidence from those fields. The demystifying of Lecter's unreadability does not entail a debasement of the film or the character. On the contrary, Lecter's de-characterization, albeit a form of narrative manipulation, is viewed as responsible for much of the film's impact and success. It produces sensitivity-boosting effects; it mediates the indirect characterization of the other characters; and it engages the spectators' self-image thus contributing importantly to the enjoyment and appreciation of the film. KEYWORDS: Hannibal Lecter, psychonarratology, characterization, phenomenology, unknowability, realism.
The reception of film with a view to audiovisual translation (AVT) is a field that has been receiving more attention in the last few years. This shows a move away from product-oriented research. ...Nevertheless, methodologies for using eye tracking in this regard have not been established. This article presents an attempt to correlate eye-tracking data, collected from participants viewing Wallace Chafe's 1975 Pear Film, with viewer constructions of the narrative. As such, the article provides a different angle to the extensive Pear Tree Project. The findings of the experiment would seem to suggest that visually peripheral elements that play a covert, top-down role in the narrative (i.e. with a higher degree of narrative salience) gain particular narrative importance when competing with the more overt, bottom-up aspects of the narrative (with an equally high narrative salience, as well as a high visual salience).
New nature writing has been gaining popularity in the English-speaking world. Using participant observation of a book group, this article finds that reading such ecological writing can facilitate ...reader shifts in perceptions and the valuing of non-human organisms and the more-than-human world. Shifts are enabled when readers experience reading as an imagined conversation with knowledgeable, friendly author/narrators. Readers construct representations of author/narrators using textual and extra-textual information. Evaluative, narrative and aesthetic feelings, alongside inferences about author/narrators' abilities to provide accurate natural history information, evoke intellectual pleasure in readers which can transform difficult emotions. By modelling a self that values nature and brings together science and poetic language, author/narrators of ecological writing offer an alternative vision of the self that challenges problematic dualisms in society. Such a sense of self was adopted and developed upon within book group discussions, highlighting the importance of aesthetic, emotional and relational contexts for using ecological literature in environmental education.
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