Hugo Liu (2004). Articulation, the letter, and the spirit in the aesthetics of narrative. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism, and Context (SRMC’04), New York.
Liu, H. (2004). Articulation, the letter, and the spirit in the aesthetics of narrative. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism, and Context (SRMC’04), New York.
@inproceedings{liu2004articulation,
author = {Hugo Liu},
title = {Articulation, the letter, and the spirit in the aesthetics of narrative},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism, and Context (SRMC’04), New York},
doi = {10.1145/1026633.1026635},
url = {https://starheartsong.com/papers/pdf/SRMC2004-Articulation.pdf},
year = {2004}
}This essay distinguishes the spirit of a story—personal, affective, mythical meaning—from its letter, the explicit form through which a culture makes that meaning shareable. Articulation moves between them, but perfect articulation can flatten the ambiguity that lets a reader participate. Drawing on literary and cultural theory, the paper describes partial articulation, defamiliarization, re-articulation through myth, and hyperarticulation in a culture saturated with familiar forms. It proposes four ways to preserve aesthetic life: intertextuality, unusual representation, a recognizable aesthetic signature, and personalization to a reader's background or interests. This is a position paper, not an implemented narrative system or experiment. It also admits that intertextuality can exclude readers and that personalization can harden into another cliché.