This chapter explores the development of empathy as a particular kind of historical sensibility that relates others’ historical experiences to interpreter’s affective semiotic processes. The chapter analyses negotiations of meaning about historical films in a university course to describe students’ affective involvement and moral engagement with the history of others. Learning about others’ history entails engaging in semiotic work to reconstruct past experiences which creates affordances for the past to become relevant in the present in axiological and affective terms. The chapter shows how through response papers and discussions about a film that depicts traumatic historical events, students display their positioning and the construction of axiological communities that connect past and present. The discourse analysis draws on the SFL concept of interpersonal meanings as construed through attitudes (Martin & White, 2005) and point of view (Unsworth, 2013) realising affective and moral orientations to others’ experience. The findings of this study offer some insights into Spanish interpersonal meaning-making resources and the potential of historical film as a tool to develop historical sensibility.

Chapter 1 introduces the fundamental tenets of perspectivism, its main characteristics and principles and the problems and challenges it poses for archaeology. A brief account of the genesis of perspectivism as a theory is provided, drawing principally on Viveiros de Castro’s writings and comparing it to other ontologies, particularly animism. The key perspectivist characteristics shared by many Amerindian populations are detailed. These include the quality internal to many entities of possessing a human soul, the importance of the body as the distinctive mark of subjects, seeing the world from a human point of view and predation as the model for human relationships. These fundamental cosmological premises derive from a set of underlying metaphysical principles with consequences for social practices, all of which are relevant for thinking about the archaeological record.

Statham analyses dialogue in a sequence from the TV series The Sopranos. He illustrates the complexity of communication by analysing how textual features work together with camera perspective, shot, gaze and action to orchestrate a character’s realisation of betrayal.

Who is telling the story and how are they telling it? The difference between the author and the narrator. Respective advantages and disadvantages of first- and third-person narrative voices. Varieties of first-person narrative. Unreliable narrators. Varieties of third-person narrative. Multiple narrative viewpoints. Direct address to the reader. ‘Other world’ narrative voices.

‘Most stories pivot on the question of which character knows what and – crucially – what your reader knows and when you let them know it. The choice of narrative voice and point of view defines how much the reader can know.’

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

This chapter outlines an approach to critical discourse studies (CDS) based in cognitive linguistics. The approach (CL-CDS) investigates the conceptual representations associated with particular linguistic forms and considers the ideological and (de)legitimating functions that such representations may serve when cued in specific discursive contexts. A number of conceptual operations are identified as significant in this process of meaning-construction, including schematization, point of view and metaphor. Drawing on examples from various discourses, including media discourses of migration and political protest, I show how these conceptual processes are indexed in texts and consider the ideological and (de)legitimating potentials of the representations they yield, e.g. in inference, affect and attitude toward social actions. These qualitative analyses, grounded in cognitive linguistic theory, although psychologically plausible, remain empirically unverified. In this chapter, therefore, I further suggest that CDS and CL-CDS in particular can benefit from the incorporation of experimental methods as a form of triangulation. The chapter presents the methods and results from recent experimental studies in CL-CDS and discusses their implications for CDS more generally.

The introduction considers ecological conservation movements in relation to modernity as a restless process of exhausting natural resources and human labor. I survey the emerging field of ecocritical modernist studies and situate my intervention as a focus on archival materials that chart the rhetorical development of environmental activists. I outline modernism as a strategic form of regeneration that avoids exhaustion through strategic breaks towards formal innovation. I consider the material and aesthetic basis of restlessness as it affects the artistic and contemplative life. I give the scope of the project and introduce the main authors in the study: D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and Chinua Achebe. I also look at E. M. Forster’s own environmental activism and Virginia Woolf’s new definitions of modern literature. I draw on aesthetic theories from Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Fredric Jameson to show how artistic contemplation may still take place in the chaotic environments of modernity.

In 1960, the Thomas Jefferson Center of the University of Virginia applied for a “massive” grant from the Ford Foundation. Although Buchanan, Nutter, and Coase had all received grants from Ford, it turned down their proposal because of the Center’s unified “point of view.” The chapter examines correspondence and private discussions of the events. Following the submission of their proposal, Buchanan, Nutter, and then-President of UVA Edgar Shannon met with representatives of the Ford Foundation, Tom Carroll and Kermit Gordon. Buchanan concluded that the “reaction of the Ford representatives must be considered to have been almost wholly negative.” The crux of the matter, in Gordon’s assessment, was the TJC’s supposed “single” and dogmatic “point of view,” an ideological perspective purportedly in line with early 1960s Chicago-style economics. Buchanan and his colleagues attempted to dispel this conclusion, arguing that the program focused on market activity as it reflected social consensus. Coase was particularly incensed by allegations of dogmatic ideological narrowness since he had close ties to the socialist Fabian Society.