This book is written in an effort to understand the multifaceted and dynamic role narratives play in politics in general, and in Turkish politics in particular. Narratives play crucial roles in politics and open fruitful areas of research. Narratives help us comprehend separate phenomena by weaving them into a comprehensible web of relationships. They turn ‘temporally distributed events into interpretable wholes’ (Wertsch 2000, 515). Narratives also reduce the number of possible interpretations of events by emplotting them in a certain way (Ewick and Silbey 1995, 213; Wertsch 2000, 515), and they give stories a sense of reality due to the common-sense properties of their truth claims (Bridger and Maines 1998). Narratives do not only help us comprehend the world but also our place within it. As Somers (1994, 625) maintains, identity formation takes shape within ‘relational settings of contested but patterned relations among narratives, people, and institutions’. In addition to making sense of our lives and ourselves in narrative form (Taylor 1989; Brockmeier 2002), we also express and transmit our ideas through narratives. Political narratives are key to our understanding of the role of ideas in politics as they are the vessels through which ideas are carried.

As Polletta (1998) points out, narratives can serve us better in understanding political communication than other discursive communication units such as frames or discourses for a number of reasons. Narratives have a temporarily configurative capacity, they rely on emplotment rather than explanation and they tend to be more vague, leaving room for personal interpretation and actually requiring our interpretative participation to ‘fill the gaps and resolve the ambiguities’. Relatedly, while the success of frames depends on how credible, logical and explanatory they are, narratives rely on ‘emotional identification and familiar plots rather than on testing or adjudication of truth claims’ (Polletta 1998). The temporal dimension and sense of movement also distinguishes narrative from discourse and frame (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle 2013, 7). As Ewick and Silbey (1995, 200) argue, the temporal and structural ordering inherent in narratives ‘ensure both “narrative closure” and “narrative causality”: in other words, a statement about how and why the recounted events occurred’.

‘Olé!’ I could not have found a better spin to conclude this long series of ‘Turkish’ observers and travellers with a text that went exactly in the direction of what I wanted to prove. Starting from almost total ignorance of what Andalusia represented from a historical and cultural point of view, they had gradually discovered – mostly through Western sources – a narrative and references that promised to bring a new dimension not only to their perception of the past, but also to their relations with an increasingly invasive Europe. Then, a third and final period of disenchantment, or even disappointment, was characterised by a notable decline in their initial enthusiasm, soon to be replaced by a more aesthetic, almost touristic, perception of the charm and exoticism of Andalusia. Yahya Kemal and his ‘dance’ represented a sort of peak in this turnaround, as embodied in the castanets and the flamenco dancers spinning on a stage in Jerez.

Of course, I can always be accused of having made an easy choice and consciously left aside the highly traditional side of Yahya Kemal's oeuvre, filled with frequent poetic references to the past glory of the Ottoman Empire, with a strong Islamic undertone. After all, if flamenco dancers triggered his senses in Jerez, in Istanbul, it was the call to prayer of the muezzin that echoed in his ears. That being said, I believe that it is precisely on this point that Turkish intellectuals stood apart from their Arab peers, given that even when they embraced a more conservative – and sometimes Islamic – ideology and political stand, their vision of the past still remained deeply anchored in an essentially Turkish geography and culture. One will always find cases of Turkish authors whose perceptions of Andalusia go against the examples I have listed earlier. While this is always a possibility, I firmly believe that even the most laudatory texts one might find in some obscure periodical or publication would still be heavily tainted with a national(ist) bias that would set them apart from not only those of Arab authors and thinkers, but even from the popular culture of Arab countries up to the present. I must admit, however, that such an analysis would by far exceed my competences, my ambition, but also my concerns.

In his 1999 debut novel, Ghostwritten, David Mitchell has writer Louisa Rey telephone a late-night radio talk show, where she offers her opinion on the relationship between author and their work. What she says encapsulates a sense which guides Mitchell and many other writers who strive to redefine the novel across the twentieth century. For Rey, ‘the human world is made of stories, not people’ and ‘the people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed’ (386). Where the traditional novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is built of individuated characters shaped by innate attributes and internal desires, for Mitchell and many before him, this model is fundamentally flawed. The circumstances which lead a given person to have an idea, to have a story to tell, are multifarious and circumstantial as well as imperfectly recollected and perceived. Insight, as a feeling, is often the product of oversight, of a failure to appreciate the external triggers of an apparently personal breakthrough. Across the twentieth century, this book argues, a succession of writers have rejected the individuated character and the narratives of personal development which stem from it. Critical paradigms bound to the novel as fundamentally individualistic have failed to perceive these challenges to the novel's assumed basic unit and have thus struggled to address a major trajectory in its development across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

The writers this study focuses upon approach character as porous in its boundaries, changing with the often unbidden inflow and outflow of ideas. For most, the porous self is informed by theories of psychic connection: telepathy and other models of psychic connection are an explicit presence both in their novels and in their wider writings about the nature of self. Many writers in the early and mid-twentieth century were among the large numbers who believed that telepathy and other psychic faculties had been experimentally proven, either by the tests conducted by the Society for Psychical Research around the turn of the century, or the many laboratory trials of J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s. Such convictions are the function of a climate in which reputable publications were ready to cast the evidence in favour of telepathy as compelling.

Oppressors of all kinds

The literal meaning of an expression

It seems, it appears that . . .

Externally, seemingly, outwardly, presumably, ostensibly

Adverb of place (gram.)

Extenuating circumstances

Extenuating circumstances

Aggravating circumstances

He remained silent, persisted in his silence

To persist in a standpoint or attitude

He remained as he had always been, as everybody used to know him

He continued to live in the house

Unjustly, wrongfully

To think ill of s.o., have a low opinion of s.o.

To suspect s.o. of stupidity

He considered him capable of . . .

Since he believed that . . .

To think s.o. capable of doing s.th., believe of s.o. that he would do s.th.

To turn up, appear on the scene

From the ground up, radically, entirely, completely

Upside down, topsy-turvy

Biological phenomena

As Donald Meek noted in 2013, Thomson took the opportunity ‘to stamp his own vision on Gaelic and on Scotland’, arguing that ‘it is not too much to say that that vision made Gaelic what it is today, with its numerous means of enlightened support, but it also went some way to making Scotland what it is today’, and adding that those engaged in Gaelic revitalisation efforts nowadays are ‘by and large, doing no more than finessing the templates which Derick Thomson and his team created all those years ago’. In 1966, Thomson himself made a list of the most important tasks a writer working in a minoritised language should carry out: ‘to increase the range of writing in that language, to provide a minimum bulk of such writing, to express the ethos of his society but also to interpret the outside world to it, and to satirise it periodically’.

He exerted himself to fulfil these assignments (and many more) and to provide opportunities and encouragement for others to do likewise, and, as this book has tried to illustrate, he succeeded in carrying out much of what he attempted, although some of the initiatives did not always achieve immediate resonance or inspire followers. The tendency of being ahead of his time had the effect that what he proposed during the most active periods of his career was only accomplished decades later, and he did not play an active role in the major developments regarding the provisions for Gaelic in Scotland in the period 1985 to 2012, including the passing of the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 and the launch of BBC Alba in 2008.

Had Thomson lived to be a hundred, he would have witnessed some satisfying events and tendencies, in the Gaelic world and in Scotland, and others that would have likely merited some sharp commentary. This short concluding chapter touches on selected developments in the last decade, i.e. the ten years between Thomson's death and the completion of this study, discusses Thomson's legacy and suggests possible directions for future work.

The time is right for reassessing what Paul's letters have to say about sin. Modern scholarly treatments of the topic usually assume that Paul had a unified and coherent doctrine of sin that somehow lay behind all of the many things that he says about sin, including the rich and varied metaphorical language. I will call this the “invisible meta-narrative.” This habit arises at least partly as a holdover from ancient and medieval Christian thinkers who constructed unifying narratives by synthesizing from all parts of scripture in light of their assumptions about human moral psychology, cosmology, physics, and Christian tradition. I will argue that Paul employed a number of distinct discourses about sin among which he made certain connections, but without condensing these into one theology of fallen human nature as Augustine did. These discourses, known to have been prevalent in Paul's time account for letters’ language about sin. Further, I will argue that the eclipse of the discourse about moral psychology in modern scholarship has led to distortions in understanding Paul's thought about sin.

A number of new assumptions and perspectives that are an outgrowth of scholarship in the last forty years motivate my conviction about a need for reassessing Paul on sin. I will list some of these that I consider most important.

• 1. The persuasive critique of the binary opposition between Jewish and Hellenistic (or Jewish and Persian, Babylonian, “Canaanite,” and so on) that rendered anything Jewish or “of the Old Testament” sui generis, unique and therefore incomparable, has enabled research into the complex cultural mix of which Paul was heir. Many of the numerous studies claiming to show “the origins of Paul's theology” regarding sin and other matters “in the Old Testament” and in Judaism are ways of reading contemporary theological convictions into Paul's letters.

• 2. Now a substantial amount of historical work has been done on the various discourses that may have contributed to Paul's thinking about sin. Discourses do not respect boundaries that writers and authorities claim for or seek to impose upon particular populations (such as the thought of Syrians, Greeks, Judeans, Romans, Christians). Such discourses above all circulated among networks of literate experts, and the networks crossed ethnic boundaries.

Consider the following quotations:

The first quotation is from the deracinated Canadian writer John Prebble (1915–2001)'s Culloden (1961), the second from indigenous Scots journalist Brian Pendreigh's 1992 newspaper account of the 300th anniversary of the 1692 massacre of Glencoe, the third from a 1935 essay by the Scots novelist Neil Gunn (1891–1973) and the fourth is a statement by a transatlantic Scot on her recent return to Scotland. Speaking generally, the four quotes illustrate the extent to which ‘[Cultural] identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past’. More specifically, a related factor worthy of investigation is the extent to which all four quotations, despite being produced at diverse moments and by both indigenous Scots and North Americans, sound the same elegiac note and/or display the same rhetorical trope of running, mantra-like, the names of people and places off the tongue.

The view from above has a strange, unavoidable attraction for pinpointing the essence of epistemological and ontological relationships between humans and the world. There are three terms in the phenomenology of the view from above: the subject that sees, the object that is seen and the context that structures this encounter. It is easy to imagine the subject as human, though, materially, it is often an animal or a machine. The object can be any kind of ‘view’, from a natural feature to a human settlement. The context of this experience can be a meditation during a mountain hike, a terrified stare in flight, a bored glance from a tall building or a camera pointed vertically down at a shoreline, obliquely across a desert or moving automatically to track a target. In daily experience, the object is primary; I look down from the top of this peak and wonder at how the trees are reflected off a lake to show the scene twice. But in analysis, the context or the subject is considered primary: who sees, why and how?

In this book, I will maintain the object as the main term in my study of the view from above. But there is a twist, because I am considering the objectivity of fictional descriptions of the view from above. To do so, I am constructing a different third term: the form of environment mediated by literary images in description.

In literary and cultural criticism, the context is almost always taken for granted to be as real as the first two terms, and it is usually considered to be the ideology of dominant, globalising reflection. Only recently have critics begun to challenge this third term by developing other, nonanthropogenic definitions: Caren Kaplan in Aerial Aftermaths considers the materiality of war and Heather Houser in Infowhelm thinks about climate change. Unlike Patrick Ellis's valuable recent book Aeroscopics that details the forgotten archival responses to the popular amusements of pre-aeroplane aerial images and experiences such as balloon rides and panoramic paintings, I focus on the ways that the reading experience and the literary work of art as an object affords its own, specifically imaginary structure of the view from above and the environment implaced in it.

O my father!

What a calamity is . . .! How unfortunate is . . .!

What’s your opinion? Would you say . . .? I wonder . . .? (in interrogative sentences)

That’s just wonderful

What a pity! Too bad! Oh my misfortune!

What a pity!

Good lord! Good heavens! dear!

What a loss!

How often, how many times . . .

What a long night it is!

O my God! Good heavens!

What a calamity!

Alas! Unfortunately!

O disgrace! The shame of it!

What a shame!

Oh, how wonderful!

Oh, how terrible!

What a man!

Oh, what a pity! What a pity!

Too bad!

Oh, what a pity! What a pity!

Too bad!

Oh, how sorry I feel for you!

I wish he had gone!

O ye young men!

He says or does everything conceivable

They became enemies

It remains unchanged, just as it is

It is worth mentioning

It is worth mentioning

He acts in accordance with this rule, follows this principle

The book contains, lists

The plural of bayt is buyūt

It is conceivable, probable, likely

The hope of . . . spurs them on

It is to your advantage that you, you ought to . . .

To be right in s.th.

He is entitle to it, he has a right to it

He has every reason to . . .

He acts blindly, thoughtlessly, at random, haphazardly

They differ widely

The left hand

Labour force

Conjugal authority (Isl. Law)

Favour

Unrightful possession (Isl. Law)

Rightful possession (Isl. Law)

Personal(ly), from hand to hand

He meddles in my private affairs

To leave room

He is incapable, his powers are limited

He calls on her time and again or constantly

Deplorable, regrettable

The reason is to be found in

The merit thereby is his due, he deserves all credit for it

He considers it his duty

To (at, on) the left

He is responsible, answerable for

Worth mentioning, noteworthy

To pave the way for s.o. to, enable s.o. to do s.th.

He is a famous man (lit. he is pointed at with fingers)

He drags her by the hair

Worthy of thanks, deserving, meritorious, praiseworthy

He attends to it morning and evening, he is constantly, incessantly occupied with it

While television news and early documentaries laid the groundwork for the memorialization of the Rwandan genocide, quintessential films like Hotel Rwanda, Ghosts of Rwanda, and Shake Hands with the Devil most certainly transformed those often-dissented histories and created what could be labeled as an official historical media memory of the genocide with global reach. As we shall see, this official historical media memory was often maintained in the subsequent production of films and documentaries on the Rwandan genocide. However, the ten-year commemoration of the genocide against Tutsi marked a surge in the production of films that has continued to this day, significantly with peaks in connection to the fifteenth and twentieth commemorations in 2009 and 2014, when eighteen and twenty-nine films were released respectively. Altogether, another 150 films have been produced in the wake of the surge in 2004. This vast global production has not only maintained the official historical media memory but also—almost unavoidably due to the diverse nature of film and television and the creating process involved in cinematic history—extended, developed, and even revised the historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide.

The purpose of this third part is to create an overview of the films that have maintained the official historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide while, at the same time, acknowledge, contextualize, and explicate the competing historical memories that likewise have emerged within this substantial production of cinematic history. This part of the book is therefore divided into five chapters. The first two chapters will commence with a discussion of the international production of feature films and documentary films, respectively, on the Rwandan genocide, partly because the feature film and the documentary film potentially have the opportunity to spread globally, and partly because the majority of these films tends to uphold the official historical media memory. These two chapters are then followed by three chapters concentrating on three specific themes that have crystallized out of the large body of films in comparison to the official historical media memory, namely women, reconciliation, and revision.

Wanderer, wayfarer

To create disaster, cause havoc, rage, rave

To squander, or dissipate, one’s fortune

Soon, presently, before long

Sooner or later, now or later on

To lose the game, return empty-handed

To retrace one’s steps, to turn back, go back

To fall back, retreat, withdraw

Peace has been restored

To start s.th. all over again

To regain consciousness, come to, examine o.s. introspectively, search one’s soul

He returned safe and sound

To retrace one’s steps, turn back

To bring about, entail s.th. for s.o., yield

He continued (after a pause in his speech)

The war broke out again, started all over again

The situation returned to normal

To retrace one’s steps, turn back

The cheeks

Mannequin

Long live the king!

To enjoy one’s life, make much of one’s life

Storm of applause, thundering applause

To be repetitious in one’s speech, use tautologisms, repeat o.s. in speaking

To lose patience

Living at the expense of, entirely

dependent on, being a burden on (s.o.)

To be on the verge of death, be dying

To land a stab on s.o., stab s.o.

The entire Islamic world

The world in itself, the world as such

Inhabitants of the world

The common people, the masses, the populace

With a full pocket

Obliged to s.o., committed to s.o.

Obsessed by, possessed by

Full of hope

To repay s.o. like for like, treat s.o. in like

Net profit, net gain

Burden of proof

To mobilise, call up an army

Consisting in, tantamount to, equivalent to, meaning

Sentence by sentence, word by word

In vain, futilely, to no avail, uselessly, fruitlessly

The crucial factor(s) is (are), decisive is (are) . . .

To give s.o. an angry look, scowl at s.o.

To cross the threshold of s.o.

Old-fashioned, outmoded

To raise, swirl up (the dust)

Most prodigious happening, wonder of wonders

How strange! How odd! How astonishing! How remarkable!

His obvious and hidden shortcomings, all his (its) faults

Steering wheel (of an automobile)

To try, test s.o., put s.o. to the test

To watch closely over s.o., keep a sharp eye on s.o., watch s.o.’s every move (lit. to count s.o.’s breaths)

I do not think that the author of the Gospel of Matthew was a Stoic, but I do think that the writer freely adapted elements of Stoic thought in creating his picture of Jesus the moral teacher. I arrived at my conclusions by asking what is distinctive about Matthew's depiction of Jesus as a teacher of ethics. This holds especially for the so-called Sermon on the Mount, but recent scholarship has shown that Stoicism was also a component of the gospel's thought more generally.

Recognizing the importance of Stoic thought for Matthew should entail a revolution in our scholarly thinking. We have all been captured by the narrative world created by the writer that both informed and coincided with our romantic and theological stereotypes of what was genuinely Jewish, an imagined “Palestinian Judaism.” But Matthew was not written in archaizing Hebrew or in Aramaic and discovered in some Judean cave. It was written in Greek and directed toward that cosmopolitan world eager for exotic foreign wisdom. We should have long ago guessed the imaginative construction at play from the fact that Matthew makes its Markan source more Jewish in its exoticizing and ethnicizing way. Now current scholarship has rightly shifted the cultural locations of the gospels from the ghetto of our imaginations to the known vigorous cultural landscapes of the early Roman empire.

It will be helpful to review what are taken as basic facts in gospel studies and studies of the earliest traditions about Jesus. In the earliest sources, the only sources that precede and are not definitively shaped by the Roman destruction of the Judean temple in Jerusalem, one cannot even determine that Jesus was a teacher of ethics. If Paul knew that Jesus was such a teacher, he does not appeal to the teachings or the idea that Jesus was a teacher, even though the teachings from the later Matthew and Luke would be very relevant and overlap with his own teachings. In the Gospel of John, Jesus teaches, but those teachings are about himself (such as “I am the light of the world” in 8:12) and there are no teachings that might be considered broadly moral teachings beyond the saying that his disciples should love one another (John 15:12).

Gothic architecture has often been positioned as antithetical to urban modernity. In Contrasts: or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (1836), A. N. W. Pugin lays out the view that European Gothic was the pinnacle of Christian architecture and, in a related way, of unified social order, in contrast to the degraded and fragmented modern city. Before the English Reformation, it was ‘the faith, the zeal, and, above all, the unity, of our ancestors, that enabled them to conceive and raise those wonderful fabrics that still remain to excite our wonder and admiration’, but once ‘schism’ and ‘avarice’ took over, ‘the spell was broken, the Architecture itself fell with the religion to which it owed its birth, and was replaced by a mixed and base style’. For Pugin, the restoration of Gothic architecture must be accompanied by ‘a restoration of the ancient feelings and sentiments that motivated’ its creators, otherwise ‘all that is done will be a tame and heartless copy’. Similarly, at the end of Volume 1 of The Stones of Venice, which has celebrated Venetian Gothic, Ruskin argues that for city-dwellers, the function of architecture should be ‘to tell us about nature’, but that this is no longer possible in London, dominated by ‘grim railings and dark casements, and wasteful finery of shops, and feeble coxcombry of club-houses’. Ruskin contends that ‘the fresh winds and sunshine of the upland’ that true Gothic is able to evoke is always ‘better than the choke-damp of the vault, or the gas-light of the ball-room’, which define the modern city. As Barry Bergdoll observes, ‘the notion that Gothic was associated with England's glorious past and cherished institutions was established as early as 1741’, generating a form of Gothic nationalism that would later spread across much of Europe, alongside an attempt to ‘craft identity through nostalgia for a lost “natural” community’.

In Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), the vampire count (Gary Oldman) strolls through London, depicted in grainy footage that appears to have been shot at 16 or 18 frames per second. The sound of a projector clicks in the background while a street barker invites everyone to experience the “Amazing Cinématographe.” Dracula and Mina (Winona Ryder) attend the exhibition, the images quickly arousing the vampire's passions. On two occasions, a phantom-like train appears on the screen.

Coppola created these images for his film, inspired by such early moving pictures as L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat/The Arrival of a Train (Lumière Brothers, 1895) and The Ghost Train (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1901). Bram Stoker's Dracula thus links vampirism and the cinema. Indeed, Stoker's novel first appeared in print in 1897, at approximately the same time that public film screenings became commonplace. As he wrote, “It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.”

Connections between vampirism and silent cinema resonate loudly. E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire (2000) stars Willem Dafoe as actor Max Schreck. In this fantastical alternate history about the production of Nosferatu (1922), Schreck is an authentic vampire, hired by director F. W. Murnau (John Malkovich) to add realism to his film. Murnau confidently declares, “If it's not in frame, it doesn't exist.” In one scene, Schreck becomes fascinated by a film projector, peering into its lens without speaking, the light flickering on his face. The project has become the projected.

We need only consider the question of where cinema resides to understand the potency of these metaphors. Film is archived on a film reel or on a DVD or in hard drives, but that is not where the audience sees it. Rather, light pulses temporally and temporarily on a screen.

Originally written and published in 1993, this essay sought – and still seeks – to enter into dialogue with certain ideas proposed by the sociologist David McCrone in his 1992 monograph, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. In setting out to pursue that aim, the work of another eminent sociologist came swiftly to mind, for reasons that will become steadily more apparent as this essay's argument progresses. The second sociologist is Stuart Hall (1932–2014), who argues that:

The particular strength of McCrone's Understanding Scotland is to see Scotland in its specificity, but a specificity constrained, if not determined by, supranational economic and political institutions. Within this framework McCrone offers sociological data and perspectives on phenomena (for example, the myth of Scottish egalitarianism; the nature of the Scottish polity; the extent to which Scotland's relationship with the British state has been one of dependence) which many of us have tended to deal with impressionistically.

One of the chapters in the book deals with Scottish culture and McCrone poses the problem thus:

In 1953 a film was made in which a tough American executive comes to Scotland and is softened by his encounter with the land and the people to the extent that he sheds his suit, dons the garb of a fisherman and eventually sacrifices his property to save a beat-up old Clyde puffer boat. In 1983 a film was made in which a tough American executive comes to Scotland and is softened by his encounter with the land and the people to the extent that he sheds his suit, dons the garb of a fisherman and his company eventually abandons the plans it had to build an oil terminal in Scotland and instead creates an observatory and a marine life sanctuary.

The 1953 film is, of course, Alexander Mackendrick (1912–93)'s The Maggie and the 1983 film Bill Forsyth's Local Hero. Since Bill Forsyth had apparently not seen The Maggie before making his film, what, then, might be the explanation for the two films’ similarity? Not the similarity of their respective plots, which is relatively unimportant, but the fact that they land on exactly the same ideological spot, equating Scotland and the Scots with Nature and suggesting that to encounter both is to be transformed from a materialistic into a spiritual being.

My argument is that when they came to make their films, both Mackendrick and Forsyth fell under the sway of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious, a mechanism which, potentially at least, comes into play when anyone seeks to represent Scotland and the Scots in any sign system: literature, easel painting, music, photography, advertising, journalism and, of course, film and television.

The Scottish Discursive Unconscious is a theoretical construct, invented to try to explain a phenomenon otherwise inexplicable, that is, why those seeking to tell stories about Scotland will often move into automatic pilot, so to speak. The storytellers in question will have their hands guided unconsciously by one or other of several powerful, pre-existing narratives about Scotland which they may have internalised to the extent that those narratives have become ‘natural’ to their eyes.