Krzysztof Brenskott

The goal of the article is a proposal to read the output of Franz Kafka through the prism of Gnostic beliefs and ideas. The author, having noticed a certain convergence between the Gnostic experience of existence and the vision of the world presented in the works of Kafka, tries to seek the convergences between the former and the latter. The point is not to prove that The Trial, or any other work by the writer, may be subject to a full, self-contained and comprehensive Gnostic interpretation, let alone that Kafka was a Gnostic. The author of the article only suggests a different way of looking at The Trial, as just another tool used to extract different senses and new meanings from the work. The sketch analyses Kafka’s novel, focusing, consequently, on the Gnostic anthropology, the vision of reality, the question of the Law, and the possibility of salvation. The adopted perspective enables new readings of Kafka’s work, and the interpretation, on the one hand, stresses the demiurgic nature of Kafka’s Law, and on the other hand, seems to be an optimistic reading through underlining the possibility and role of salvation

In Storytelling in the Modern Board Game: Narrative Trends from the Late 1960s to Today, Marco Arnaudo describes how board games can create narratives by using the tools that ludology and postclassical narratology provide. The way narratives emerge from tabletop games is extremely unique and interactive: they are created through the synergy of the game rules, material components, and actions undertaken by players. Board games, treated as transmedial narrative systems in which the text is entangled in various relations with images, sounds, or the ludic aspects of games, can become an area of research in literary studies. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that a scholar can effectively use knowledge of hypertext novels or ergodic literature to study narrative-oriented board games.