Journal articles on the topic 'End of the world (Astronomy) – Fiction'
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1
Hasty, Olga Peters. "Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading or the Artifice of Mortality." KronoScope 8, no. 1 (2008): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852408x323184.
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AbstractInvitation was one of Nabokov's favorite novels, written “in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration.” Although it reads like an attack on dictatorial rule, Nabokov denied it political relevance, aiming at totalitarianism of a higher order: the constraints of mortality that he seeks, as the epigraph indicates, to refute: “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.” The novel rebels against the certainty that life is movement toward death operating in conjunction with the uncertainty of when death will come. Its hero is condemned to execution, but denied “compensation for a death sentence”—the “knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die.” His nearing end is manifested metaphorically, but it is in the construction of the world of Invitation that Nabokov—whom one reviewer called “almost as much a theorizer of fiction as a practitioner”—develops narrative strategies that engage the reader in his challenge to mortality. This article considers his strategies.
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Lāms, Edgars. "Draugos ar zinātni: zinātniskie aspekti Jāņa Veseļa daiļradē." Aktuālās problēmas literatūras un kultūras pētniecībā: rakstu krājums, no. 26/1 (March 1, 2021): 77–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.37384/aplkp.2021.26-1.077.
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Writer Jānis Veselis is a classic of the Latvian literature, one of the most peculiar prose writers from the 1920s to 1940s. Initially, the artistic style of Veselis was heavily influenced by World War I poetics of collision and expressionism, later by the ideas about neopagan movements. The writer has an active imagination. His writing style is characterised by fabulous neo-mythical tendencies. Despite that, Veselis was friends with science. Many of his texts are filled with delight about the achievements of modern science. He is taken away by the explosive growth of the exact sciences, especially astronomy. In the centre of many of Veselis’s works (“Sun’s Cemetery” (Saules kapsēta, 1921); “People of Fields” (Tīrumu ļaudis, 1927); literary cycle “Soul of Steel” (Tērauda dvēsele, 1934–1946)), there is a representative of engineer’s profession. Scientific aspects in the most concise way are integrated into the literary cycle of novels called “Soul of Steel” (“Human Uprising” (Cilvēku sacelšanās, 1934); “Soul of Steel” (Tērauda dvēsele, 1938); “Big March” (Lielais gājiens, 1946)). The novels are interspersed with science-fiction motifs. The first two novels of the cycle revolve around an engineer-constructor named Rudājs. He postulates ideas about man’s ability to control natural processes, and he also dreams about expanding into the universe. The novels “Human Uprising” and “Soul of Steel” are saturated with reflections about different modern science problems. For example, about obtaining energy from splitting atoms, endless lengths of space, and the universe’s eventual border. Scientific concepts and terminology from physics, chemistry, and astronomy are all common in the novels. At the end of the cycle’s second novel, the main character goes into the vast universe in his self-constructed rocket. The trilogy shows the writer’s power of insight and his rich imagination. In the context of the time, that is considered a rather innovative occurrence in Latvian novel. The dissonant mixture of scientific and mythological elements is regarded as a misleading element.
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Tsu, Jing. "When Literary Relations End." Journal of World Literature 5, no. 2 (May 29, 2020): 278–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00502003.
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Abstract Of the existing approaches to engaging with world literature, Pascale Casanova’s contribution remains the most prescient and relevant to the contemporary world. In this paper, I examine Casanova’s legacy in the context of contemporary Chinese literature – not only as the Sinophone, Chinese, or diasporic, but also in terms of the diverse genrification and creation of new types of media for literary inscription that border on obliterating the primacy of literary aesthetics. Is this a threat to the literary establishment, as it has been practiced, critiqued, and known in the European lineage? I argue that the literary space has never been in starker contrast with the world space, and that the emergence of a different “world normal” is challenging and fortifying Casanova’s legacy in deeply profound ways. To be examined, among others, are recent debates over world and Sinophone literature, science fiction, internet fiction, and diasporic writings.
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Caracciolo, Marco. "Child Minds at the End of the World." Environmental Humanities 14, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 145–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481484.
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Abstract This article focuses on the evocation of children’s experiences in fiction that engages with postapocalyptic scenarios. It examines three contemporary novels from profoundly different geographic contexts—Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna, and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness—that evoke a child’s experience of societal collapse in the wake of a catastrophic event. Diverse meanings come to the fore as these novels outline, through child focalization, the relevance of bodily experience, materiality, and reenchantment vis-à-vis the climate crisis and its uncertainties. This discussion shows how formal choices in climate fiction are instrumental in creating an affective trajectory that complicates adult readers’ perception of our collective future. These close readings stage an encounter between the fields of ecocriticism and childhood studies that speaks to the significance of the figure of the child in the environmental humanities: even in literature by and for adults, the integration of children’s perspectives on the end of the world performs important cultural work by questioning and decentering an understanding of the ecological crisis shaped exclusively by the adult (and adultist) anxieties of parenthood.
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Powell, Gareth L. "IT’s the End of the World as We Know It." Engineer 302, no. 7930 (September 2021): 42. http://dx.doi.org/10.12968/s0013-7758(22)90656-7.
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Dydrov, Artur, and Vera Neveleva. "“End times” and “End of the World”: philosophical interpretation of post-apocalyptic fiction." Socium i vlast, no. 5 (2018): 100–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.22394/1996-0522-2018-5-100-108.
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De Bruyn, Ben. "The Great Displacement: Reading Migration Fiction at the End of the World." Humanities 9, no. 1 (March 9, 2020): 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h9010025.
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This paper examines how contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction reflect on anticipated cases of climate dislocation. Building on existing research about migrant agency, climate fiction, and human rights, it traces the contours of climate migration discourse before analyzing how three twenty-first-century novels enable us to reimagine the “great displacement” beyond simplistic militarized and humanitarian frames. Zooming in on stories by Mohsin Hamid, John Lanchester, and Margaret Drabble that envision hypothetical calamities while responding to present-day refugee “crises”, this paper explains how these texts interrogate apocalyptic narratives by demilitarizing borderscapes, exploring survivalist mindsets, and interrogating shallow appeals to empathy.
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Kociatkiewicz, Jerzy, and Monika Kostera. "Stories from the end of the world: in search of plots for a failing system." Journal of Organizational Change Management 33, no. 1 (November 13, 2019): 66–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/jocm-02-2019-0050.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider three types of stories: media, personal accounts and fiction, and look for plots depicting situations of fundamental shift in the framing and basic definitions of reality. The authors examine them from the point of view of their usefulness for developing creative responses to systemic change. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a narrative study in three stages, aimed at identifying strong plots pertaining to systemic change. The analyzed material came from three different sources of narratives (fiction, media and creative stories) and was approached by the use of two different narrative methods: symbolic interpretation and narrative collage. Findings Currently many voices are being raised that the authors are living in times of interregnum, a period in between working systems. There is also a mounting critique of the business school as an institution perpetuating dysfunctional ideologies, rather than enhancing critical and creative thinking. The authors propose that the humanities, and, in particular, learning from fiction (and science fiction) can offer a language to talk about major (systemic) change help and support learning about alternative organizational realities. Research limitations/implications The study pertains to discourse and narratives, not to material aspects of culture construction. Practical implications Today, there is a mounting critique of business schools and their role in society. Following Martin Parker’s call to transform them into schools of organizing, helping to develop and discuss different alternatives instead of reproducing the dominant model, the authors suggest that education should be based, to much larger extent than until now, on the humanities. The authors propose educational programmes including the study of fiction and film. Social implications The authors propose that the humanities (and the study of fiction) can equip society with a suitable language to discuss and problematize systemic change. Originality/value This paper adds to narrative social studies through providing an analysis of strong plots showing ways of coping with systemic collapse, and through an examination of these plots’ significance for organizational education, learning, and planning. The authors present an argument for the broader use of fiction as a sensemaking, teaching, and learning tool for managing organizations in volatile environments.
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Lai-Ming, Tammy Ho. "Female Researchers in Neo-Victorian Fiction." American, British and Canadian Studies Journal 26, no. 1 (June 1, 2016): 72–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/abcsj-2016-0005.
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Abstract Neo-Victorian novelists sometimes use postgraduate students – trainee academics – who research nineteenth-century writers as protagonists. This article discusses four neo-Victorian novels, Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), Justine Picardie’s Daphne (2008), A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005) and Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006), in which female postgraduate students take the centre stage. In Victorian literature, which mirrors the gender bias in the academic world and in society at large at that time, most scholars are male. The contemporary writers’ choice of female trainee academics is worth investigating as it speaks to the visibly changed gender make-up of contemporary academia. However, this utopian situation is complicated by the fact that the writers have chosen to frustrate the characters’ entry into the world of scholarship by having them leave the university environment altogether before the end of the novel. The fact that these females all choose to depart the university forms a contrast with notions of the university found in Victorian novels, in which leaving or not attending university might have detrimental effects on the characters.
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Jones, Calvert W., and Celia Paris. "It’s the End of the World and They Know It: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes." Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 4 (November 23, 2018): 969–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1537592718002153.
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Given that the fictional narratives found in novels, movies, and television shows enjoy wide public consumption, memorably convey information, minimize counter-arguing, and often emphasize politically-relevant themes, we argue that greater scholarly attention must be paid to theorizing and measuring how fiction affects political attitudes. We argue for a genre-based approach for studying fiction effects, and apply it to the popular dystopian genre. Results across three experiments are striking: we find consistent evidence that dystopian narratives enhance the willingness to justify radical—especially violent—forms of political action. Yet we find no evidence for the conventional wisdom that they reduce political trust and efficacy, illustrating that fiction’s effects may not be what they seem and underscoring the need for political scientists to take fiction seriously.
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Prakash, Chetan, Chris Fields, Donald D. Hoffman, Robert Prentner, and Manish Singh. "Fact, Fiction, and Fitness." Entropy 22, no. 5 (April 30, 2020): 514. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22050514.
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A theory of consciousness, whatever else it may do, must address the structure of experience. Our perceptual experiences are richly structured. Simply seeing a red apple, swaying between green leaves on a stout tree, involves symmetries, geometries, orders, topologies, and algebras of events. Are these structures also present in the world, fully independent of their observation? Perceptual theorists of many persuasions—from computational to radical embodied—say yes: perception veridically presents to observers structures that exist in an observer-independent world; and it does so because natural selection shapes perceptual systems to be increasingly veridical. Here we study four structures: total orders, permutation groups, cyclic groups, and measurable spaces. We ask whether the payoff functions that drive evolution by natural selection are homomorphisms of these structures. We prove, in each case, that generically the answer is no: as the number of world states and payoff values go to infinity, the probability that a payoff function is a homomorphism goes to zero. We conclude that natural selection almost surely shapes perceptions of these structures to be non-veridical. This is consistent with the interface theory of perception, which claims that natural selection shapes perceptual systems not to provide veridical perceptions, but to serve as species-specific interfaces that guide adaptive behavior. Our results present a constraint for any theory of consciousness which assumes that structure in perceptual experience is shaped by natural selection.
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Behrens, Roger. "Pädagogik der Hoffnungslosigkeit." Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik 99, no. 3 (September 8, 2023): 356–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.30965/25890581-09703105.
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Abstract Pedagogy of Hopelessness. After the End of Utopia The end of utopia, of which Herbert Marcuse speaks in 1967, means both: the illusory, because false, realization of the ›better life‹ in and as capitalism as well as – therefore – the suspension of a concrete utopia as a dream of a human world. As culture-industrial spectacles, utopian social ideas turn into dystopian visions of the future; social, even socialist fiction becomes mere science fiction. In a world of accumulated crises that threaten humanity, utopia is now missing. To learn to hope again would be – not only pedagogically – necessary the utopian project of ›delearning‹ hopelessness. There is no alternative. utopia – critical pedagogy – principle of hope – critical theory – Herbert Marcuse
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Salman and Dr. Rani Tiwari. "Use of Conspiracy Theories in The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea." Creative Launcher 7, no. 6 (December 31, 2022): 210–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2022.7.6.24.
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Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both have been influenced by anarchism, Discordianism and conspiracy theories. They both use conspiracy theories about Illuminati, knights Templars, Freemasons and New World Order, anti-semitism, end time prophecies of the Bible and world domination plans etc. Their main genre of writing is conspiracy fiction. Conspiracy fiction is a sub-genre of thriller fiction. Both the authors have filled their works with various types of conspiracy theories and thrilling feel. The focus of the present research paper is on the use of conspiracy theories in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea made this trilogy one of the best works in the field of conspiracy fiction. Although the writers have used several of them, in the present paper only use of the New World Order conspiracy theories and secret societies, especially the Illuminati conspiracy theories will be analyzed. The study of conspiracy theories is an emerging field and little work has been done on this topic. So, the present paper will enrich the information about conspiracy theories and conspiracy fiction.
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Sidiq, Bushra Osman, and Ansam Riyadh Abdullah. "Self-Reflexivity and Inter-textuality: A Study of Jostein Gaarder 's Sophie's World as a Meta-fictional Work." JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE STUDIES 7, no. 1 (September 30, 2023): 105–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.25130/jls.7.1.9.
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Jostein Gaarder (1952- ) is a Norwegian thinker and author of a great number of novels, short stories, and children's books among them Sophie's World. This novel deals with a number of issues, and uses a lot of postmodern techniques like meta-fiction. This paper is to explain the use of meta-fiction in the concerned novel to the readers as a postmodern element. Sophie's World, besides being a great philosophical one, it contains several meta-fictional elements like: the story has another story within, commenting on the story while telling it; the narrator exposes himself as both: a character and the narrator, and many more elements. The paper is divided into two sections and a conclusion. Section one deals theoretically with meta-fiction, self-reflexivity and inter-textuality as postmodern techniques. Section two is the analysis of the novel. At the end of the paper is the conclusion which will show the findings of the analysis. The paper end with the works cited.
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Shynkarenko, Oleh. "Science Fiction in Ukraine: 1920–2020." Információs Társadalom 23, no. 4 (December 31, 2023): 58. http://dx.doi.org/10.22503/inftars.xxiii.2023.4.4.
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The variability in the genre of Ukrainian science fiction (SF) has always been determined by the requirements of the time and the political situation. That is why the fiction of the 1920s promoted the ideology of naive techno-communism, but during the next forty years it became obvious that the Soviet project had reached a dead end, and its positivist component had not brought the desired results. Ukrainian SF writers then turned to mysticism and denial of a rational view of the world.
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Plain, Gill. "‘Tale Engineering’: Agatha Christie and the Aftermath of the Second World War." Literature & History 29, no. 2 (October 19, 2020): 179–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306197320945945.
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The ‘golden age’ of clue-puzzle detective fiction is usually considered to end in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet Agatha Christie, the most high-profile and successful exponent of the form, continued to produce bestselling novels until her death in 1976. This essay examines three novels from the immediate postwar period to consider how she adapted her writing to negotiate a changing world and evolving fashions in genre fiction. Engaging with grief, demobilisation, gender, citizenship and the new fears of the atomic age, Christie proves unexpectedly attentive to the anxieties of a new modernity.
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Agustin, Cindy, Munaris Munaris, and Heru Prasetyo. "Analisis Puisi “ Sejadah Panjang” Karya Taufiq Ismail Dengan Menggunakan Pendekatan Mimetik." J-CEKI : Jurnal Cendekia Ilmiah 3, no. 1 (June 15, 2023): 12–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.56799/jceki.v3i1.1843.
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This mimetic approach assumes that poetry is a duplicate of the human world and a picture of the life of the universe. The extent to which poetry represents writers in the real world is explored alongside works of fiction or non-fiction and other works. Literature is dialectical, that is, it gives a journey back and forth to literary works and gives meaning in the end to the world of reality or imagination. The reality of an essential literary work will lose something when it is published, the disappointed participation in reading literature denies something that is no less important, namely for humans there are choices and shortcomings that exist.
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Semenova, N. A. "Phraseology in M. A. Sholokhov’s Fiction Prose." Russian language at school 81, no. 5 (September 15, 2020): 43–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.30515/0131-6141-2020-81-5-43-48.
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The article discusses the functioning of phraseological units in the language of M. A. Sholokhov’s prose and their role in creating a linguistic picture of the world. The research objectives were to describe various types of phraseological units, to show the methods of introducing them into the literary text and to identify approaches used by the writer to create new phraseological units. To this end, the methods of structural-semantic, component and comparative analysis were used, along with statistical description and contextual analysis. It is concluded that phraseological units, being figuratively emotionally expressive signs of the language, reveal the figurative and artistic world of the writer. The idiostyle of M. A. Sholokhov is largely determined by the widespread use of dialect phraseology and the creation of phraseologisms – structural and semantic modifications of linguistic units and the writer’s idioms.
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Althaff, Safiyyah. "After “The End”." After Dinner Conversation 3, no. 10 (2022): 51–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/adc202231095.
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How would you live if you knew there would be no tomorrow? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, the earth is coming to an end. A free-floating planet, dubbed the “black sun” is on a collision course with earth. The narrator goes out into the darkness of the streets to walk, lost in thoughts about his life, about its happiness, and its failures. He hears a tv on and wanders into a house to find a little girl, watching the tv. She is alone in the house, she explains. Her mother left years ago, and her father left earlier in the week, leaving the house stocked with food for her. He talks to her, and they decide to face the end of the world together.
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Afanasov, Nikolai B. "Cyberfeminism as Science Fiction. Drawn in Japan." Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies 4, no. 1 (March 21, 2022): 71–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.46539/gmd.v4i1.248.
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In the 80’s representatives of the second wave feminist theory nurtured hopes that new technologies would become an effective instrument of liberating from binary oppositions of patriarchal culture. Donna Haraway saw the potential of social transformations in cybernetic technologies. The fusion of biological, mechanical and cybernetic was to have led to the emergence of new cyborg subjectivity. It should be capable of creating its own culture as well as a new world. Later this narrative would be widely criticized, but in this optimistic form it greatly affected science fiction of the period. The author makes an attempt to present the theoretical components of cyberfeminism as science fiction that engenders cognitive estrangement. Catchy images of cyborgs were born in the performative framework of cyberfeminist theory and popular culture. They continue to affect imagination to the present day. Japanese animation stood at the vanguard of this cultural process. The article considers the visions drawn in Japan as a narrative that represents historical evolution of cyberfeminism. The end of anime’s “golden age” meant the end of a thorough work with cyberfeminism in the language of popular culture. The findings of the study reveal that cyberfeminism is a part of general theory that has subsequently become a part of global discourse of a new posthuman subject. The article emphasises the other part of the phenomenon – cyberfeminist practice – that has successfully adapted to the modern world.
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Shultz, David. "Abrama's End Game." After Dinner Conversation 2, no. 5 (2021): 98–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/adc20212545.
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What does it mean to be alive? Can a computer program be sentient? What would it need to do to prove it? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Abrama is summoned to the Grand Temple by Sir Gödel. Gödel informs Abrama that he is living in a simulated world (a computer game) created by her people as a place to play in their free time. She also informs Abrama that the game is not as popular as it once was and is scheduled to be permanently turned off. It turns out Gödel is an AI researcher that was given permission to test out her AI by implanting characters like Abrama into the game. Over 100’s of versions, the AI continued to improve, and now the researcher feels an ethical obligation to tell her creations their world is coming to an end. Abrama, using this new information, organizes the AI characters in the game and starts trading virtual goods for real-life services from computer hackers that play the game. The computer hackers create computer code and sell it to Abrama. If triggered, or if the game is turned off, the code would expose top secret information to the general public. A bargain is struck, the game will continue on a closed world for the AI characters and, in exchange, the sensitive information will never be made public.
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Shultz, David. "Abrama’s End Game." After Dinner Conversation 5, no. 7 (2024): 67–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/adc20245772.
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What does it mean to be alive? Can a computer program be sentient? What would it need to do to prove it? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Abrama is summoned to the Grand Temple by Sir Gödel. Gödel informs Abrama that he is living in a simulated world (a computer game) created by her people as a place to play in their free time. She also informs Abrama that the game is not as popular as it once was and is scheduled to be permanently turned off. It turns out Gödel is an AI researcher that was given permission to test out her AI by implanting characters like Abrama into the game. Over 100’s of versions, the AI continued to improve, and now the researcher feels an ethical obligation to tell her creations their world is coming to an end. Abrama, using this new information, organizes the AI characters in the game and starts trading virtual goods for real-life services from computer hackers that play the game. The computer hackers create computer code and sell it to Abrama. If triggered, or if the game is turned off, the code would expose top secret information to the general public. A bargain is struck, the game will continue on a closed world for the AI characters and, in exchange, the sensitive information will never be made public.
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Raymen, Thomas. "Living in the end times through popular culture: An ultra-realist analysis of The Walking Dead as popular criminology." Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 14, no. 3 (July 26, 2017): 429–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1741659017721277.
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This article provides an ultra-realist analysis of AMC’s The Walking Dead as a form of ‘popular criminology’. It is argued here that dystopian fiction such as The Walking Dead offers an opportunity for a popular criminology to address what criminologists have described as our discipline’s aetiological crisis in theorizing harmful and violent subjectivities. The social relations, conditions and subjectivities displayed in dystopian fiction are in fact an exacerbation or extrapolation of our present norms, values and subjectivities, rather than a departure from them, and there are numerous real-world criminological parallels depicted within The Walking Dead’s postapocalyptic world. As such, the show possesses a hard kernel of Truth that is of significant utility in progressing criminological theories of violence and harmful subjectivity. The article therefore explores the ideological function of dystopian fiction as the fetishistic disavowal of the dark underbelly of liberal capitalism; and views the show as an example of the ultra-realist concepts of special liberty, the criminal undertaker and the pseudopacification process in action. In drawing on these cutting-edge criminological theories, it is argued that we can use criminological analyses of popular culture to provide incisive insights into the real-world relationship between violence and capitalism, and its proliferation of harmful subjectivities.
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Auklend, Morten. "Fabelvejen mod nord." Passage - Tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik 34, no. 82 (December 20, 2019): 67–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/pas.v34i82.118283.
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Merethe Lindstrøm’s novel Nord [North] (2017) deals with end time-themes. The novel formally departs from mainstream science fiction and apocalyptic fiction by providing flashes of the past and the present in concentrated lyrical images that are repeated throughout the novel. Through poetic rituals and ceremonies, and in metaphorical patterns of personification wherein a devastated nature comes ‘alive’, a world is reborn rhetorically and the reader is forced to ponder the abilities and qualities embedded in an overwhelmingly poetical language. By focusing on the demarcation of literal and figurative language and the transcendence of poetic images of nature, the novel becomes a contemplation of individuals coping with questions concerning identity and remembrance in an inhuman world. The article demonstrates how devices and perspectives provided by science fiction can provide strong thought for hard times.
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Ruszkiewicz, Dominika. "“Be War in Tyme, Approchis Neir the End”: The Sense of an Ending in the Testament of Cresseid." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 51, no. 2 (December 1, 2016): 93–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/stap-2016-0011.
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Abstract The story of Troilus and Criseyde - whether in Chaucer’s or Henryson’s renditions - is not a story about a new beginning, but a story about an end: the end of love, of hope, and finally - the end of life: Troilus’s life in Chaucer’s poem and Cresseid’s life in Henryson’s. The Scottish version of the story, however, not only evokes the end of an individual life, but also the end of the world. The purpose of this paper is to situate Henryson’s poem in the context of apocalyptic fiction - fiction which is concerned with loss, decay and the finality of things. My contention that the poem belongs to the apocalyptic genre is based on a number of its features, such as the elegiac mood and imagery, the contrast between the past and the present, as well as the pattern of sin-redemption-preparation for death, which applies to Cresseid’s life, but also invites reflection on our own.
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Joo, Hee-Jung S. "We are the world (but only at the end of the world): Race, disaster, and the Anthropocene." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38, no. 1 (May 12, 2018): 72–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263775818774046.
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This essay explores the racial politics of a select group of contemporary disaster film and fiction to reveal the relationship between race and futurity that also undergirds discussions of the Anthropocene. I provide a comparative close reading of the disasters in Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, Behn Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. I argue that the cultural anxieties that structure these texts are expressions of the racial logic rooted in universalist concerns for the future of humanity, the very concern of the Anthropocene. Arguing against inclusion as the means of achieving equality and toward a new materialist understanding of race, my paper illuminates not only the racial assumptions of the Anthropocene but also, and perhaps more importantly, its racial consequences.
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Daechsel, Markus. "ālim Ḍākū and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 13, no. 1 (April 2003): 21–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1356186302002973.
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AbstractDetective fiction counts amongst the most successful literary products that the metropolitan west has exported to the world periphery. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War the genre acquired a global presence – both in the form of translations of existing works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations. This kind of literature represented a prime example of the mass-produced and mass-circulated print entertainment that was part and parcel of the emergence of mass consumption as a social form. Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and an expression of modernity. While some literary theorists have pointed to longstanding historical antecedents, detective fiction would not have made sense in earlier historical epochs. The principles of scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout, not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifying glasses, finger-prints and assorted scientific apparatuses, but in terms of the subject matter itself – the fact that it is possible to make sense of an increasingly confusing world by uncovering hidden causal connections through rational enquiry.
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Martel, Michael. "Radioactive Forms: Radium, the State, and the End of Victorian Narrative." Genre 52, no. 3 (December 1, 2019): 151–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00166928-7965779.
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This article examines Edwardian “radioactive fiction”—narratives about radium’s transformative political implications—to demonstrate how radioactivity shaped narrative form and English politics between 1898 and 1914. Recent scholarship on this period’s literary engagements with energy physics and politics shows that thermodynamics’ second law provided the narrative structures that shaped turn-of-the-century scientific, cultural, and political discourses. At this moment, however, radioactivity upended these “entropolitical” narrative forms through its seemingly endless self-regeneration. Attending to this narratological and scientific upheaval, the article argues that formal experiments as varied as Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent ([1907] 2007) and H. G. Wells’s World Set Free (1914) exemplify a widespread regrounding of narrative and political form in a universe where the fundamental laws of energy no longer apply. The article first examines how espionage, detective, and invasion fiction, exemplified by The Secret Agent, incorporated the Edwardian press’s figuration of radium to suggest that the entropic nation-state’s raison d’être, degenerate populations, was not so entropic after all. It then examines utopian treatments of radioactivity to argue that nonentropic narrative forms modeled political orders beyond the nation-state. Through narrative chiasmus, The World Set Free figures an atomic state capable of organizing its constituent parts into a new collectivity, the global atomic commons.
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Scott, Conrad, Portia Priegert, Darren Patrick, and Frank Frances. "The End of the Beginning: Environmental Apocalypse on the Cusp in Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence and Nicolas Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners; InVoice; Road’s End; & The Outside." UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 18 (April 27, 2014): 28–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/38543.
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Scott Fotheringham’s novel The Rest is Silence and Nicolas Dickner’s novel Apocalypse for Beginners both mix coming-of-age narratives with environmental destruction through apocalyptic events. Similarly, concerns about global environmental destruction populate the bildungsroman in fiction from nuclear-era texts such as John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids to ongoing narratives such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series. However, both Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence and Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners integrate coming-of-age narratives with apocalyptic threats to the characters’ environments that climax at the edge of a point-of-no-return and then subside without having completely eradicated the living environment beyond recognition. The two novels represent a rethinking of how apocalyptic threat effects the world: these texts reject the idea of immediate doom represented by, for example, fiction focused on nuclear destruction, and the notion “’[t]hat there’s no problem that can’t be fixed with a good old end of the world’” (Dickner 89).....inVoiceimountainssoured with bitterroot stumps at half mastiibarren logs float in biers, await their final rites —plywood and profitiiithe wind tuneless without branches to pluckthe outsidea swing forwardout the windowand into somethingbreaking bough into somethingfinding medicinein pain and poison
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Nikolov, Anton. "Exploitation of the Natural World in Bulgarian Science Fiction Utopias and Dystopiasofthe Socialist Period." Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum 10 (2024): 55–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.60056/ccl.2024.10.55-71.
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The articleexamines the exploitation of the natural world and its individual consequences as they are presented in a number of utopian and dystopiannovels of Bulgarian science fiction during the socialist period. Attention is first given to the post-1956 scientificand technical utopias that depictthe future communist world. In these texts, nature is the enemy and victim of man; there are many scenes of ecocide and ofsevere industrialisation which changesnature’s landscapein accordance with theto human needs and desires. This exploitation is seen as positive andnecessary for the construction of the new human world.However, later,towards the end of the 1970s, Bulgarian science fiction began to develop a more ecological attitude towards nature. The exploitationof the natural world became something characteristic of dystopiantexts and the capitalist regimes described in them, albeit this time seen in its destructive aspect.
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Brake, Mark, and Martin Griffiths. "Science, Fiction and Curriculum Innovation." Symposium - International Astronomical Union 213 (2004): 572–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0074180900193933.
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The academic world is now becoming so specialized that the advantages of a cross disciplinary education are being lost in the tidal wave of scholarship concentrating upon narrow subject fields whilst displacing the values of connected disciplines from the sciences and humanities. The almost rigorous segregation of science and the arts at degree level is being felt not only within academia, but within society. The more a subject is concentrated, the less profound and applicable it appears to the public who should ultimately be the beneficiaries of such knowledge. In order to achieve a form of parity through which our modern world can be examined, the University of Glamorgan has introduced an innovative degree course aimed at developing a multidisciplinary knowledge of science and the arts via an exploration of the science, history, philosophy, religious, artistic, literary, cultural and social endeavours of the fields of astronomy and fantastic literature.
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Ishchenko, Olena. "GENRE FEATURES OF MODERN NON-FICTION LITERATURE (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE BOOK "DREAM OF ANTARCTIC" BY MARKIYAN PROKHASKO)." Dialog: media studios, no. 29 (March 15, 2024): 73–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.18524/2308-3255.2023.29.300636.
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The end of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st century is characterized by the fact that during this period, interest in non-fiction literature – a special literary genre of documentary prose, which is based on real events, without fiction or conjecture – begins to grow actively. Facts are presented through the imaginative perception of the world by the author of the work. Therefore, in our opinion, this genre can still be called “documentary journalism of life”. Non-fiction has gained particular popularity over the past few years. This is connected, first of all, with the events that are taking place, namely: with the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine. Collections of books about the war, the Maidan, and the Revolution of Dignity are published, as well as books that have become bestsellers in the world of psychology, travel journalism, and literature. The article examines the issue of genre features of the book “Dream of Antarctica”, which is an example of modern non-fiction literature. It is clarified why the diffusion of genres is a part of the analyzed book, and how the author combines features of other genres in one work.
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Moore, Bryan L. "“Evidences of Decadent Humanity”: Antianthropocentrism in Early Science Fiction." Nature and Culture 9, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 45–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/nc.2014.090103.
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Early science fiction (SF) is noted for, among other things, its conservatism and lack of interest in ecology. Brian Stableford, a well-known SF writer and critic, writes that "there are very few early stories with ecological themes" (1993, 395). This article shows that, in fact, many early SF works (those written between the Enlightenment and World War II) employ ecological themes, especially as applied to questioning our anthropocentrism. These works suggest that humans are but one species among many, that we are not the end of nature/history, that the natural world may be better off without us, and, in some cases, that humanity is fated to go extinct, the result of its own hubris. Such views are undoubtedly pessimistic, yet these works may also be read as warnings for humans to seek a more humble view of ourselves as members of what Aldo Leopold calls the land community.
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Musser, Charles. "Paul Robeson and the End of His “Movie” Career." Hors dossier 19, no. 1 (March 18, 2009): 147–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/029503ar.
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Abstract Paul Robeson made his last fiction film appearance in Tales of Manhattan (directed by Julien Duvivier, 1942), which the black star ended up denouncing for its demeaning racial stereotypes. Robeson scholars have echoed this negative assessment while French critics have likewise dismissed the film as a minor effort in Duvivier’s oeuvre. This article reassesses and resituates the film historically, arguing that the black-cast sequence, when viewed intertextually, was much richer and more progressive than generally appreciated. In production before World War II and released almost ten months after Pearl Harbor, Tales of Manhattan was historically out of sync.
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Utilov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich, and VladimirAlexandrovich Utilov. "In Anticipation of Esthetic Revolution: Western Fiction and Documentary Film of 1940-1945." Journal of Flm Arts and Film Studies 2, no. 2 (May 15, 2010): 37–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/vgik2237-53.
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The article reveals the processes in Western cinema during World War II and tells about the creation of educational and propaganda films which were made by famous directors for quite pragmatic purposes but in the end led to the appearance of new forms and new esthetics.
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Gulcu, Tarik Ziyad. "Women as “The Fittest” for a New Post-Pandemic World Order: Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men." Journal of Advanced Research in Women’s Studies 1, no. 2 (December 5, 2023): 32–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.33422/jarws.v1i2.495.
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As a major invisible global threat causing unprecedented disruptions and restrictions in daily life all over the world, COVID-19 pandemic has been among the most popular subject matters of contemporary fiction. At this point, the first work of fiction focusing on COVID-19 is Lawrence Wright’s The End of October (2020), in which coronavirus is fictionalised as the Kongoli breaking out in Indonesia and spreading all over the world. Elaborating on the effects of the virus on daily life, Wright puts emphasis on the need for global solidarity to combat the virus and save the global society. However, different from Wright’s work, Christina Sweeney-Baird discusses the issue of pandemic, reinterpreting COVID-19 from a futuristic perspective, envisaging a post-pandemic world order dominated by women, with men’s death due to a lethal virus showing its effects all over the world in her debut novel, The End of Men (2022). In the work, the deaths of Fraser McAlpine, Catherine’s husband, Anthony and the wealthy Mr Tai signify men’s failure in adaptation to circumstances of the pandemic, while women’s survival, the domination of once male-dominated jobs by women, Catherine’s solo impregnation by donor sperm and the use of apps for dating and love just between women embody females as the “fittest species” for survival to bring a new world order dominated by women. Thus, Sweeney-Baird’s work invites reading for the evolutionary transformation of the global society due to a lethal pandemic from male-dominated to female-dominated system with reference to Darwin s theory of evolution.
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Adams, Dale. "„Die Wirklichkeit ist die Unwahrscheinlichkeit, die eingetreten ist“: Wahrscheinlichkeit, Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit im Werk Friedrich Dürrenmatts." Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 59, no. 4 (November 1, 2023): 315–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.4.1.
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This paper examines the role of probability in the thought and work of the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990), focusing on his definition of reality as the improbability which occurred. I argue that this expression encapsulates his lifelong critical investigation of the possibilities and limitations of the representation of the modern world. The polyvalent concept of probability serves Dürrenmatt in his essays, drama, and prose fiction to illuminate the irreducible complexity of reality, the inevitable constraints of human perception, and the futility of seeking to reconstruct empirical causality end-to-end. The concept of reality as an improbability which occurred defines both the empirical reality which Dürrenmatt seeks to analyze through his fiction, as well as the subjective reality he creates within his “fictional worlds,” thus forming a crucial conjunction between his worldview and his literary work.
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Nammi, Srividya. "Universal Vision in the Fiction of Ben Okri." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 11 (November 28, 2020): 135–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i11.10841.
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Okri’s fiction is a mix of fantasy, realism and oral tradition of Africa. Though the trilogy nearly covers some fourteen hundred odd pages, it doesn’t have a proper beginning or end. Okri’s view of an unnamedAfrican ghetto, which is going to get independence, is presented in these novels. He is not giving solutions to the existing problems , he is simply presenting the true nature of an African state in an elusive manner. He narrates The Famished Road through the experiences of an ‘abiku’, Azaro, a seven year old child. He uses Azaro to narrate the chaotic state of affairs in an African state , and educates Azaro with the rich African culture in the form of stories told by his mother and father, and shows the real state of Africa in the form of photographs taken by the photographer, Jeremiah. Okri’s fiction has many layers of meaning which makes the task of analysis difficult. Though several labels like magical realism, Post-colonial, post-modern text are given the trilogy defies any particular definition. After examining his Trilogy thoroughly, it seems that Okri though elusive in his writings apparently wants a new – world. The Trilogy moves in the direction of anticipating a world fine tuned to harmonious living.
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Fludernik, Monika. "First-Person Plural Fiction and Its Challenges." Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines 50, no. 1 (2017): 149–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/ranam.2017.1555.
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Depuis les années 1990, la narratologie s’intéresse à la fiction expérimentale, qui recourt à des choix de pronoms inattendus. Cette contribution a pour objet l’utilisation de la première personne du pluriel comme pronom narratif principal. L’analyse des for readers to get involved in the story. Among the first-person plural narratives to be analyzed will be John Barth’s Sabbatical (1982), Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983), Maxine Swann's Flower Children (2007), Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011), and TaraShea Nesbit’s The Wives of Los Alamos (2014) as well as Joshua Ferris's When We Came to the End (2007). The techniques to be considered are the ambiguous reference of the “we” pronouns in these texts, especially regarding inclusive and exclusive we-reference ; the use of free indirect discourse in combination with the representation of collective minds ; the illogical combinations of unity and diversity, and the propagation of specific attitudes and world views.
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Kotva, Simone, and Eva-Charlotta Mebius. "Rethinking Environmentalism and Apocalypse: Anamorphosis in The Book of Enoch and Climate Fiction." Religions 12, no. 8 (August 9, 2021): 620. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel12080620.
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Biblical apocalypse has long been a source of contention in environmental criticism. Typically, ecocritical readings of Biblical apocalypse rely on a definition of the genre focused on eschatological themes related to species annihilation precipitated by the judgement of the world and the end of time. In this article, we offer an alternative engagement with Biblical apocalypse by drawing on Christopher Rowland and Jolyon Pruszinski’s argument that apocalypse is not necessarily concerned with temporality. Our case study is The Book of Enoch. We compare natural history in Enoch to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological analysis of Biblical apocalypse as a way of seeing the world that worries human assumptions about the nature of things and thereby instigates an “anamorphosis” of perception. Following Timothy Morton’s adaptation of Marion’s idea of anamorphosis as an example of the ecological art of attention, we show how apocalypse achieves “anamorphic attention” by encouraging the cultivation of specific modes of perception—principally, openness and receptivity—that are also critical to political theology. In turn, this analysis of anamorphic attention will inform our rethinking of the relationship between environmentalism and apocalyptic themes in climate fiction today, with special reference to Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From.
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Singh, R. N. "SSC's End Imperils Third World Science." Physics Today 48, no. 2 (February 1995): 77–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2807925.
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Serrano-Muñoz, Jordi. "Closure in dystopia: Projecting memories of the end of crises in speculative fiction." Memory Studies 14, no. 6 (November 18, 2021): 1347–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17506980211054340.
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In this piece, I approach the relationship between the paradigm of imbricated crises pertaining to the second decade of the twenty-first century and its contemporaneous dystopian literature. I focus particularly on how dystopian literature forges a sense of closure that attempts to give meaning through the construction of imaginary memories of how crises came and went, or came and stayed. Dystopian tales provide the troubled reader of its time with a sense of narrative continuation and a substitute for closure. For my analysis, I draw on a corpus of literary works from around the world, which includes The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz; Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel; The Emissary, by Tawada Yōko; Severance: A Novel, by Ling Ma; China Dream, by Ma Jian; Ansibles, Profilers and Other Machines of Wonder, by Andrea Chapela; and The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson.
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Petasyuk, O. "THE PHENOMENON OF THE "EXECUTED RENAISSANCE" (FOR THE 80TH YEAR OF THE COMMEMORATION OF THE VICTIMS OF THE EXECUTION IN THE SANDARMOKH FOREST MASSIF)." Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. History, no. 132 (2017): 39–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/1728-2640.2017.132.1.08.
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In this paper we review the contribution of the writers, poets and painters of the so-called "Executed Renaissance" to Ukrainian culture. We showcase the peculiarities and dimensions of this phenomenon. The Ukrainian National Revival of the 1920s is shown as a spiritual process and movement, a model of perception of the world of the executed generation. We try to outline the most important features of the Ukrainian elite's worldview and to showcase their political, ideological and ethical principles which partly caused further repressions. The creative process of the Ukrainian intellectual elite had stunning results: thousands of papers and translations of the world best fiction and non-fiction books, numerous poetic anthologies, bibliographical reference books, readers, monographs. This fast cultural growth was aborted by the World War I. The National Revolution of 1917 droved for a very short time a new spire of the cultural prosperity, but the establishing of the Soviet State directed this cultural Renaissance to its very end, so to say to the execution of the Ukrainian cultural elite.
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Belousova, Elizaveta O. "AND THE STARS OF HEAVEN FELL TO THE EARTH: ESCHATOLOGICAL MOTIVES IN RUSSIAN SCIENCE FICTION LITERATURE OF THE 2010S (WITH THE EXAMPLE OF “THE FOUR” BY ALEXANDER PELEVIN)." RSUH/RGGU Bulletin. "Literary Theory. Linguistics. Cultural Studies" Series, no. 7 (2022): 63–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2022-7-63-75.
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Due to its allegorical nature, science fiction narrative in Russian literature-centric culture becomes a transmitter of sociocultural metamorphosis. Science fiction literature of the 2010s constructs fictional spaces appealing to the recipient’s emotional background. The primary purpose of this is to initiate a call to action by referring to the reader’s fundamental experiences and anxieties, hopes, ambitions, and frustrations. Reality is often depicted as traumatic, and by integrating eschatological motives, authors implement both escapist and expressive functions into their texts. The illustrative material for the article below is the novel “The Four” by Alexander Pelevin – it is especially representative within the context of individual creative practices, as the author makes a point of marketing his works via social media, and direct communication with the audience. The category of the end of the world is interwoven into the genre both metaphorically and as a structural aspect of the plot (apocalyptic/postapocalyptic fiction), and in “The Four” it is extended throughout the narrative layers, both vertically and horizontally. From a purely religious impression, Apocalypse shifts into the everyday motive, and it ensures strong connection between the main character and the recipient by the means of shared experience. The recipient of the 2010s, just as the character whose path they observe, undergoes the chaos, colossal change, and suffering that comes with it. In other words, by referring to the end of days, science fiction literature of the 2010s reflects the prosaic yet tragic everyday turbulence.
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Annesley, James. "Decadence and Disquiet: Recent American Fiction and the ComingFin de Siècle." Journal of American Studies 30, no. 3 (December 1996): 365–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875800024865.
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Contemporary culture seems to be increasingly preoccupied with the millennium. “Endism,” the cult of the end, casts a familiar shadow. As memories of the cold war fade and the threat of nuclear apocalypse recedes, concerns about the environment and the disturbing activities of millenarian sects provide new sources of anxiety. Academic texts, like Robert Sinai'sThe Decadence of the Modern World(1978) and Francis Fukuyama'sThe End of History and the Last Man(1992), echo this apocalyptic atmosphere. One of the most striking versions of the endist thesis is offered by Alain Mine who, inLe Nouveau Moyen Âge(1993), suggests that modernity's dream of a “clean, well-lighted place” is being supplanted by a new medievalism, a period characterised by doubt, fear and superstition. This entropic zeigeist is sustained by a series of obvious comparisons between the anxieties of the contemporary period and those of the lastfin de siècle. Elaine Showalter'sSexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècledetails some of the points of comparison and produces an argument which identifies a strong image of the past in her vision of the present.
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Gittel, Benjamin. "In the Mood for Paradox? Das Verhältnis von Fiktion, Stimmung und Welterschließung aus mentalistischer und phänomenologischer Perspektive." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 300–320. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0017.
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Abstract It is widely acknowledged that responses to fiction can be divided into two categories: emotions or moods. Research on the paradox of fiction, however, solely focused on emotional responses to fiction. This paper analyses the different potentials of the mood concept with regard to the paradox of fiction: its potential to avoid the paradox on the one hand and its potential to rise a new paradox of fiction, a paradox of fiction for moods, on the other. To this end, the paper distinguishes two different meanings of the everyday concept of mood and two different paradigms in the research on moods. The mood concept can designate not only affective states of an individual (moods1), but elusive, nuanced atmospheres of objects, places or situations (moods2). The mentalistic paradigm, widespread in psychology and analytic philosophy, generally assumes that moods are mental states with a certain quality of feeling (and physical symptoms). Moods2 are regarded by such approaches, if they discuss them, as a secondary phenomenon based on subjective perception. In contrast, the phenomenological paradigm focuses on moods2 and, if it accommodates moods1 as well, often postulates a characteristic connection between the two: moods1 reveal extra-individual atmospheres (moods2) that are assumed to exist in some ontologically robust sense. Therefore, moods1 can be said to have a world-disclosing function within the phenomenological paradigm. Researchers in the mentalistic paradigm deal, among other issues, with the difference of emotions and moods1. One way in which moods1 differ from emotions is that they lack an intentional object and it is for that reason that the concept of mood1, at first glance, seems to offer a solution to the paradox of fiction. The paradox of fiction presumes that we have emotions with regard to fictional objects. If it were possible to redescribe the alleged emotions as more subtle mood1 responses without clear intentional objects, this would undermine a central premise of the paradox and dissolve it. However, such a redescription seems not equally plausible for all cases discussed in the debate (e. g. the green slime case). Therefore, moods1 can only be one element of a more subtle ›phenomenology‹ of affective reactions towards fiction and the »paradox avoiding potential« of the mood concept is limited. The paradox creating potential of the mood concept emerges if one takes into account the outlined complex semantics of the concept »mood« and the postulated world-disclosing function of moods1. It seems possible to construct a new paradox, the paradox of fiction for moods: (a) Only real entities or representations of real entities can evoke moods1 with world-disclosing function (because this mood1 evocation is actually immersion in an atmosphere). (b) Many entities in fictions are not real. (c) Nevertheless, fictions can evoke moods1 with world-disclosing functions (e. g. with regard to places, situations) in the recipient. The paper argues that the outlined paradox can be dissolved by pointing out that the expression »moods1 with world-disclosing function« in sentence (a) means something different than in (c). While the expression in (a) relates to the idea of grasping an atmosphere (mood2) that somehow is »in the world«, it means acquiring a non-propositional form of knowledge, namely knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation, in (c). The idea that it is possible to acquire knowledge of what-it-is-like by means of fiction has often been postulated in the research literature, but rarely been spelled out in greater detail. The paper argues that such an acquisition can occur, among other possibilities, on the basis of mood1 evocation, but that the conditions for the acquisition of knowledge of what-it-is-like by means of fiction are more demanding than under usual circumstances: A recipient of fiction can reasonably be said to acquire knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation if the fictional representation evokes a mood1 which is characteristic of a situation S and the recipient understands this mood1 as an affective reaction to a situation of the type S. Please note that moods2 play no explanatory role in the second interpretation of »world-disclosing function«. Since assumption (a) and assumption (c) concern different world-disclosing functions or, in other words, different mechanisms of world-disclosure, there is no paradox. Although moods1 evoked by fictional representations (with some limitations pointed out in section 4) do not possess a world-disclosing function in the sense the phenomenological tradition postulated, it is possible to ascribe these moods1 a world-disclosing function, even within a non-phenomenological framework: They allow the recipient the acquisition of a knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation or in a certain place. Ultimately, for the paradox of fiction for moods seems to hold what could be said about the classical paradox of fiction as well: Even if the paradox ultimately dissolves, its analysis can be instructive for related research fields like the debate on knowledge from fiction which takes moods rarely into account until now.
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Simpson, Candace Y. "For My Daughter Kakuya: Imagining Children at the End(s) of the World." Religions 14, no. 9 (September 20, 2023): 1204. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel14091204.
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The COVID-19 pandemic revealed individual and institutional anxieties about the apocalypse. Pastors and activists alike turned to the depiction of the apocalypse in popular media to describe the urgency of decisive action. Implicitly, these depictions offer a curious method for engaging and imagining children. Assata Shakur writes compelling poetry in her autobiography about her hopes for the world. In one poem, entitled For My Daughter Kakuya, I argue that Shakur engages in Afrofuturist speculative fiction as she envisions a future world for her daughter. This paper explores how writers living through these times themselves imagine Black children at the end of the world. What would happen if we took seriously the notion that the “end of the world” is always at hand for Black people? This article explores the stomach-turning warning that Jesus offers in Mark 13:14–19 regarding those who are “pregnant and nursing in those days”. Using a reproductive justice lens, this paper explores the eternal challenge of imagining and stewarding a future in which Black children are safe and thriving. It also explores the limits and possibilities of partnering with radical Black faith traditions to this end.
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Khagi, Sofya. "One Billion Years after the End of the World: Historical Deadlock, Contemporary Dystopia, and the Continuing Legacy of the Strugatskii Brothers." Slavic Review 72, no. 2 (2013): 267–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.5612/slavicreview.72.2.0267.
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The importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet science fiction has been thoroughly examined. A less-explored question concerns how they have continued to inspire post-Soviet authors who muse on an environment that differs drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. Sofya Khagi explores how prominent contemporary writers—Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin—examine the Strugatskiis to dramatize their own darker visions of modernization, progress, and morality. They continue the tradition of science fiction as social critique—in this case, a critique of society after the collapse of socialist ideology with its modernizing projects of historical progress, technological development, and social improvement. According to their parables a contrario to the Strugatskiis, the dreams of modernity embodied by the classics of Soviet fantastika have been shattered but not replaced by a viable alternative social scenario. As they converse with their predecessors, contemporary writers examine stagnation, not just in post-Soviet Russia, but in global, postmodern, commodified reality.
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Roelofse-Campbell, Z. "Enlightened state versus millenarian vision: A comparison between two historical novels." Literator 18, no. 1 (April 30, 1997): 83–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v18i1.531.
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Two millenarian events, one in Brazil (Canudos Rebellion, 1897) and the other in South Africa (Bulhoek Massacre, 1921) have inspired two works of narrative fiction: Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World (1981) and Mike Nicol’s This Day and Age (1992). In both novels the events are presented from the perspectives of both the oppressed landless peasants and the oppressors, who were the ruling élites. In both instances, governments which purported to be models of enlightenment and modernity resorted to violence and repression in order to uphold their authority. Vargas Llosa's novel was written in the Latin American tradition where truth and fiction mingle indistinguishably while in the South African novel fictional elements override historical truth.
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Paranyuk, Dan. "“The End of Human Exceptionality”: The Shift of the Anthropological Dominant in Science Fiction." Pitannâ lìteraturoznavstva, no. 104 (December 27, 2021): 163–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.31861/pytlit2021.104.163.
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Based on the methodological proposals of literary anthropology, in particular on the conceptual ideas of C. Levi-Strauss (structural anthropology), J. Ortega y Gasset (“dehumanization of arts”), J.-M. Schaeffer (“the end of human exceptionality”), M. Foucault (the fall of a human being from the humanistic pedestal of culture), the article under studies emphasizes the violation of the anthropological dominant in science fiction, which is very typical of the fantasy genre. Consequently, there arise new principles of constructing personosphere of a literary text. On the example of the novel “City” (1953) by an American science fiction writer Clifford Simak, the article traces the way a human being shifts from the center of personosphere to the “outskirts” of narration, whereas its image acquires fictional parameters. This all happens due to the phenomenon of “anthropocene” (the term by G. Canavan), which implies the harmful consequences of the human reigning over the nature. In addition, the author of the article introduces the notion of “phantasoid’ – a character of the fictional world of fantasy (outlined by the narrator) that functions exceptionally in the imagination of a certain fantastic character and is somehow related to his previous experience. The novel by C. Simak outlines a gradual shift of the anthropological vector: the heterogeneous image of a human turns into a counter-image, whereby particular significance is attached to the change in the attitude towards mankind. In the text, human culture is perceived as something alien, while Simak’s image of a human being ruins the so called imagological stereotype, along with the reader’s receptive expectations. The role of the attractor in the novel is assigned to “antromorphized” and “humanized” creatures (plants, animals, objects, robots, mutants), which indicates the drastic breach with the previous genre tradition, as well as higlights a peculiar polemic connection with classical literary science fiction. This all proves the metamorphic nature of science fiction and its transition into the hyperreal dimensions of fantasy, where different artificial forms of life and mentality can peacefully coexist with each other.