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Journal articles on the topic 'Fictional turn'
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Chemodurova, Zinaida. "The Affective Turn in Metamodernist Fiction and “New Sincerity”." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 2. Jazykoznanije 23, no. 2 (June 26, 2024): 84–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2024.2.7.
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The aim of the article is to analyze pragmatic strategies and mechanisms to enhance narrative empathy, the key notion of metamodernist fiction that distinguishes it from postmodernist and modernist literary texts. The article postulates foregrounding of emotivity markers in metamodernist texts as a linguistic manifestation of the cultural logic of “new sincerity” in the contemporary fiction that is characterized by the lack of an explicit ludic modality of postmodernist fiction and by stressing means of producing emotional resonance on the part of the reader and their active perspective-taking. The article makes an original contribution to cognitive stylistics, multimodal studies and narratology by hypothesizing polyphony of narrative “voices”, second-person narrative and visual foregrounding as effective pragmalinguistic tools of triggering emotive and cognitive empathy that increases reader’s immersion in metamodernist fictional worlds. Using the novels by M. Porter and J. Egan, the short stories by J.S. Foer and D. Eggers as its case studies, the article proves the relevance of viewing the “new sincerity” concept as a driving force behind the authorial empathy towards fictional characters, which enhances emotionogenic potential of metamodernist fiction and contributes to reader’s engagement with modeled emotive situations. The findings of the research testify to the importance of further research into “new sincerity” and potential mechanisms of inducing reader’s empathy which is justly considered a powerful instrument for promoting social interaction, helping readers of all ages to inhibit aggression and develop understanding of others’ motives, emotions and desires.
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Donnarieix, Anne-Sophie. "Les chamanes contemporains – figures d’instabilité." Quêtes littéraires, no. 6 (December 30, 2016): 187–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.31743/ql.229.
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Antoine Volodine and Christian Garcin both make a distinctive use of shamanism in fictional novels. By multiplying shaman characters and intertwining the shamanistic principles and the narrative, they develop a poetic of instability noticeable through various hybridization processes notably strengthened by the intrusion of supernatural elements. The analysis of three motives in which this game of unstable balance is particularly mirrored – identity, History and fiction – shall turn our attention to the role of shamanism as a vector of fictional dynamism.
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Dadlez, Eva. "Ideal Presence: How Kames Solved the Problem of Fiction and Emotion." Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9, no. 1 (March 2011): 115–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jsp.2011.0009.
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The problem of fiction and emotion is the problem of how we can be moved by the contemplation of fictional events and the plight of fictional characters when we know that the former have not occurred and the latter do not exist. I will give a general sketch of the philosophical treatment of the issue in the present day, and then turn to the eighteenth century for a solution as effective as the best that are presently on offer. The solution is to be found in the account of ideal presence given by Henry Home, Lord Kames.
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Ben-Ari, Nitsa, and Shaul Levin. "Translators and (their) authors in the fictional turn." Beyond transfiction 11, no. 3 (November 7, 2016): 339–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/tis.11.3.01ben.
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Chamberlain, Stephen. "Truth, Fiction and Narrative Understanding." International Philosophical Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2020): 201–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/ipq2020602153.
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This paper defends the cognitive value of literary fiction by showing how Paul Ricoeur’s account of narrative understanding emphasizes the productive and creative elements of fictional discourse and defends its referential capacity insofar as fiction reshapes reality according to some universal aspect. Central to this analysis is Ricoeur’s retrieval of Aristotelian mimesis and mythos and their convergence in the notion of emplotment. This paper also supplements and specifies further Ricoeur’s account by retrieving an Aristotelian concept disregarded by Riceour, namely, synesis (understanding). Although Ricoeur connects narrative understanding to the intelligibility of praxis and in turn phronêsis, as opposed to theoretical knowledge (theōria or epistēmē), he overlooks Aristotle’s discussion of synesis. This paper then clarifies how the fictional truth of narrative understanding remains related to, and yet distinct from, both theoretical discourse (science) and praxis (politics).
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Fargione, Daniela. "The Aquatic Turn in Afrofuturism." Le Simplegadi 19, no. 21 (November 2021): 55–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.17456/simple-173.
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The recent efflorescence of fictional writings and artistic works examined under the rubrics of Blue Humanities (Mentz 2009), Critical Ocean Studies (DeLoughrey 2019), Hydro-Criticism (Winkiel 2019), or New Thalassology (Horden and Purcell 2006), testify a recent cultural shift from the land to the sea. In this article, the hydrosphere is analysed in two female Afrofuturist works – Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2010) – to address the global capitalist order and to imagine an aquafuturist multispecies aesthetics that springs from the countermemory of the Middle Passage and its undersea myths
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Fan, Christopher T. "Semiperipherality and the Taiwanese American Novel." College Literature 50, no. 2-3 (March 2023): 212–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902217.
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Abstract: While Asian American authors have certainly produced narratives of return to their or their predecessors' countries of origin, these narratives have, until recently, predominantly appeared in memoir and autobiography. Since the turn of the millennium there's been a significant uptick in the fictional portrayal of return. In stark contrast to the spiritual and filial returns in memoir, these fictional portrayals tend not to sentimentalize return. The protagonists who return more often follow economic or professional trajectories. In novels like Tao Lin's Taipei (2013), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), Han Ong's The Disinherited (2004), Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son (2001), and Lucy Tan's What We Were Promised (2018), return to Asia intensifies rather than vitiates material structures of alienation. What we find is that they tend to undermine an emerging Twenty-first century racial form that welds the Asian to neoliberal flexibility, even if they often forego critique. This article will describe contemporary Asian/American return fictions in contrast to earlier manifestations of the genre and explore their problematic relationship to categories like Asian American and Anglophone Asian fiction.
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Pietrzak, Przemysław. "Points of View and the Daily Press at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries." Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo, no. 8(11) cz.1 (June 28, 2019): 69–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.32798/pflit.55.
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The following article concerns the issue of point of view in Polish daily newspapers at the end of the 19th century. The daily is considered here as a coherent and cogent literary work based on fictional as well as non-fictional genres and their specific layout. The author proves that what makes the press characteristic in terms of points of view is not so much the introduction of a new, individual voice but rather the introduction of a collective perspective in several variants. Literary fictional genres serve as an instrument of the counterpoint in that they provide an individual position, usually one that is opposed to what one can read in the feature sections.
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Nikolajeva, Maria. "Recent Trends in Children's Literature Research: Return to the Body." International Research in Children's Literature 9, no. 2 (December 2016): 132–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2016.0198.
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Twenty-first-century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. Cultural theories have generated fruitful approaches to children's fiction through the lenses of gender, class, race and sexual orientation, and psychoanalytically oriented theories have explored ways of representing childhood as a projection of (adult) interiority, but the physical existence of children as represented in their fictional worlds has been obscured by constructed social and psychological hierarchies. Recent directions in literary studies, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies and cognitive criticism, are refocusing scholarly attention on the physicality of children's bodies and the environment. This trend does not signal a return to essentialism but reflects the complexity, plurality and ambiguity of our understanding of childhood and its representation in fiction for young audiences. This article examines some current trends in international children's literature research with a particular focus on materiality.
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Domanskii, Y. "The reality of fiction in a literary world: on an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris." Slovo.ru: Baltic accent 11, no. 1 (2020): 101–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.5922/2225-5346-2020-1-6.
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Using an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, this article explores the idea that, in a literary text, a fictional world and the world of physical reality may interact to form such a reality that can paradoxically turn out to be more real than what we believe to be the actual reality. It is also shown that the fictional world realized in a literary text may bring the reader to certain conclusions about the world in which he or she lives. Thus, even if literature is incapable of affecting reality, it can change the way the latter is perceived. A fictional world is not just a reality — it is a reality of a higher order.
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Jakha, Hicham. "Ingarden’s Aesthetic Argument Against Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism Turn." Analiza i Egzystencja 63 (2023): 89–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.18276/aie.2023.63-04.
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Husserl’s allegiance to realism came under attack following his Ideas. Ingarden was a fierce critic of his teacher’s turn to transcendental idealism, and provided compelling arguments both for his idealist reading of Husserl and for his rejection of idealism. One of the main arguments Ingarden devised against Husserl’s turn was based on his aesthetics. Against Husserl, Ingarden established literary works and fictional objects as purely intentional objects that are (1) doubly-structured, vis-à-vis their formal ontology, and (2) endowed with spots of indeterminacy. These facts, Ingarden argues, necessitate the transcendence of the purely intentional object. In this paper, I explore his argument, while establishing the ontological foundation on which it rests.
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DENTON, STACY. "Nostalgia, Class and Rurality in Empire Falls." Journal of American Studies 45, no. 3 (April 27, 2011): 503–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875811000119.
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In American society, rural spaces – particularly those of the working class – are seen as stagnant holdovers from a temporal past that “modern” society has evolved beyond. As a result, working-class rurality and those living within these places are viewed as static, ignorant, insular and so on: whatever places do not conform to the appearance of “modern” progress and development simply must be regressed, on both socioeconomic and cultural levels. While scholars in some disciplines are attempting to redress this misconception, other disciplines (like literary studies) largely align with the mainstream perspective that rurality represents a regressed past to our evolved present. However, despite the critical lack of attention to rurality as a viable space in the present, we can see in various fictional works that working-class rural spaces can effectively show us the interrelationship of rural spaces with “modern” society and culture in the present, the continuing relevance and deep history alike of said spaces, and the potential of these fictional working-class rural places to confront America's norms of progress and development within and without their fictional borders. Richard Russo's fiction illustrates the potential to bring out this critical working-class rural voice. Russo's fictional treatments afford the reader an opportunity to witness the ever-changing complexity (not the temporal and cultural regression) of working-class rurality. In turn, Russo's fictional working-class rural spaces offer a counterperspective to the mainstream (defined here as middle-class and (sub)urban) notions of progress that otherwise dismiss these perspectives. In his book Empire Falls, Russo uses nostalgia to assert this counterperspective. This nostalgia not only reaffirms the postwar and early twenty-first-century working-class rural identity of Empire Falls, but it also offers a critique of dominant conceptions of progress and development that continue into our present.
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Stock, Kathleen. "Knowledge from Fiction and the Challenge from Luck." Grazer Philosophische Studien 96, no. 3 (September 12, 2019): 476–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18756735-09603015.
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In order for true beliefs acquired from reading fiction to count as knowledge proper, they must survive ‘the challenge from luck’. That is, it must be established that such beliefs are neither luckily true, nor luckily believed by readers. The author considers three kinds of true belief a reader may, she assumes, get from reading fiction: a) those based on testimony about empirical facts; b) those based on ‘true in passing’ sentences; and c) those beliefs about counterfactuals one may get from reading a ‘didactic’ fiction. The first group escape the challenge from luck relatively easily, she argues. However, things turn out to be more complicated with the second group. The author examines Mitchell Green’s suggestion, effectively, that knowledge of fictional genre may see off the challenge from luck here, but rejects this in the form presented by Green, adapting it substantially to offer beliefs of this kind a more promising escape route. The author finishes by following Green’s lead once again, and discussing the category of ‘didactic’ fiction, as he calls it. She argues that any true beliefs about counterfactuals gained from such fictions are likely to be lucky. The author concludes however that things are much more promising for any true beliefs gained about oneself as a result of engaging with what Green calls an ‘interrogative’ fiction.
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Düringer, Eva-Maria. "Desires and Fiction." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 241–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0014.
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Abstract It is often claimed that we cannot desire fictional states of affairs when we are aware of the fact that we cannot interact with fictional worlds. But the experiences we have when we read an engaging novel, watch a horror film or listen to a gripping story are certainly very similar to desires: we hope that the lovers get together, we want the criminal to get caught, we long for the hero to make his fortune. My goal in this paper is to outline the reasons why we might find it difficult to call these experiences genuine desires and to argue that they are not good reasons. In the second section I look at three reasons in particular: first, the reason that, if we genuinely desired fictional outcomes, we would act in silly or dangerous ways; second, the reason that, if we genuinely desired fictional outcomes, we would change plot lines if we had the chance, which in fact, however, we would not; and third, the reason that, if we genuinely desired fictional outcomes, we would not think it impossible to interact with fictional worlds, which, however, we do. I will dismiss the first two reasons right away: depending on how we interpret the first reason, either it does not have much weight at all, because we have many desires we never act on, or it rests on a functionalist definition of desires that wrongly takes it to be the functional role of desires to bring about action. I will dismiss the second reason by arguing that, if we desire a particular fictional outcome that we could bring about by changing the plot line, whether or not we would do it turns on our assessment of the cost of interference; and this, in turn, depends on the perceived quality of the literature. There is nothing that speaks against taking both the desire for a particular fictional outcome and the desire for a work of literature to remain what it is as genuine desires. I turn to possible ways of dealing with the third and strongest reason in the third section. The claim that, if I desire that p, I must not think that there is nothing I could possibly do to bring it about that p, is plausible. And of course, I do think that there is nothing I could possibly do to bring about a fictional state of affairs. I will argue that there are three possible ways of dealing with this problem. The first is to point to partners in crime such as the desire that one is reunited with a loved one who has recently passed away. I take these to be genuine and ordinary desires, even though they are accompanied by thoughts, indeed agonising thoughts, that there is nothing we could possibly do to bring about the desired end. Secondly, I will look at Maria Alvarez’s recent account of desires as multi-track dispositions. Alvarez claims that desires are dispositions not only to actions, but also to certain thoughts, feelings, and expressive behaviours and that they need to have had at least one manifestation in order to exist. Modifying this view a little, I argue that desires need to have manifested at least once in action preparations and show how, on this picture, the thought that I can do nothing to bring about the desired end is not in unbearable tension with the existence of the desire. Finally, I will point to the distinction between physical and metaphysical possibility and argue that, even if we accept the claim that a mental attitude cannot be a desire if it is accompanied by the thought that there is nothing one could possibly do to bring about the desired end, then this is only a problem for desires about fictional states of affairs if we think that metaphysical possibility is at play. However, there is no problem for desires about fictional states of affairs if they are accompanied by thoughts about the physical impossibility of bringing them about. I begin the paper by describing in the first section how desires enter into the controversies surrounding the classic Paradox of Fiction, which is the puzzle about whether and how we can have emotions about fictional characters, and by providing some examples designed to feed the intuition that we do, indeed, have genuine desires about fictional states of affairs.
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Foss, Katherine A. "Death of the Slow-Cooker or #CROCK-POTISINNOCENT? This Is Us, Parasocial Grief, and the Crock-Pot Crisis." Journal of Communication Inquiry 44, no. 1 (February 5, 2019): 69–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0196859919826534.
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Even though viewers understand that a television show is fictional, they can still mourn the demise of their favorite characters. This fictional grief became apparent with the on-screen death of the character Jack in the program This Is Us. The current study analyzed the death narrative and perceived responsibility in first and second seasons of This Is Us, paired with the online responses posted to social media and the short promotional video between the show and Crock-Pot. Findings suggest that fans experienced and expressed parasocial grief for Jack’s death on social media, attributing blame to the Crock-Pot brand. In turn, the company’s tweets and replies acknowledged and participated in the fans’ mourning rituals while reassuring the brand’s safety, ultimately aiding the brand’s public recovery. From fans’ displaced blame to the later partnership between the show and brand, labeled “#CrockPotIsInnocent,” this case demonstrates the impact of fictional media, social media engagement for parasocial grief, and a successful real-life brand recovery for a fictional crisis.
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Heywood, John, Elena Semino, and Mick Short. "Linguistic metaphor identification in two extracts from novels." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 11, no. 1 (February 2002): 35–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/096394700201100104.
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This article examines a series of issues involved in identifying metaphors in texts. Metaphor identification is, in turn, a fundamental part of the more complex issue of how to relate linguistic metaphors in texts to the conceptual metaphors of cognitive metaphor theory. In section 1 we list a number of general issues involved in metaphor identification. In sections 2 and 3 we examine two short fictional extracts from novels written in the 1990s (one from popular fiction and one from serious fiction), relating our detailed analyses to the general questions raised at the beginning of the article. We thus raise and exemplify a series of issues which do not have easy resolutions but which must be grasped (a) if a corpus-based approach to metaphor is to become a reality and (b) if the relations between conceptual and linguistic metaphors are to be fully understood. Interestingly, this attempt to be extremely detailed and systematic in turn leads us to comment on differences in aesthetic effects between the use of metaphors in the two extracts examined.
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Beloborodova, Olga. "The modernist mind extended: Samuel Beckett, his fiction and the extended mind theory." Manuscrítica: Revista de Crítica Genética, no. 28 (September 29, 2015): 74–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2596-2477.i28p74-87.
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This paper presents an on-going PhD project that is part of the effort to reassess the alleged “inward turn” (Kahler, 1973) in modernist literature and place modernist fictional minds within their fictional environments. Borrowed from the domain of cognitive science, the principle of “active externalism” in general and the Extended Mind Theory in particular form the theoretical framework of the project. The practical component draws on the work of the Late Modernist Samuel Beckett and examines (1) the interactive cognitive relationship between the author and the material output of his work at various stages of the writing process (by means of genetic manuscript analysis), and (2) the way Beckett’s fictional characters interact with their environment. The purpose of the article is thus twofold: on the one hand, it demonstrates in a nutshell that cognitive processes involved in the production of narratives can be extended to include extracranial objects. In a separate line of enquiry, Beckett’s fictional minds are shown to be firmly embedded in their narrative contexts (contrary to the popular belief in the hegemony of introspection in modernist narratives), as several examples from Beckett’s (published) texts will demonstrate how fictional minds, too, extend beyond skin and skull.
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de Jonge, Julia, Serena Demichelis, Simone Rebora, and Massimo Salgaro. "Operationalizing perpetrator studies. Focusing readers’ reactions to The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell." Journal of Literary Semantics 51, no. 2 (September 29, 2022): 147–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jls-2022-2057.
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Abstract Within the field of Holocaust Studies the last decade has witnessed a turn to the figure of the perpetrator, who had hitherto received little attention due to ethical, legal and psychological reasons. A similar turn can also be observed in connection with the study of empathy. In this context, the concept of “negative empathy,” intended as a sharing of emotions with morally negative fictional characters, has become an increasingly discussed topic. For research in this area, the novel The Kindly Ones (2006) by Jonathan Littell takes up a privileged position in light of its intrinsic literary quality and due to its commercial and critical success. This novel recounts the memories of an SS-officer, Maximilian Aue, who participated in the Shoah. We have carried out an experiment using some passages of this novel to test the empathic reactions of (104) readers. Passages were presented under either of two conditions: as a fictional text or as part of an autobiography. Results showed that fictionalization has a significant effect on moral disengagement; readers who read the narrative presented to them as fictional experienced higher levels of moral disengagement compared to readers in the autobiography condition. Moreover, higher levels of moral disengagement led to significantly higher levels of empathy for the protagonist of the novel.
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Staes, Toon. "Narrative Complexity and the Case of Pfitz: An Update for the ‘Systems Novel’." Interlitteraria 26, no. 1 (August 31, 2021): 295–308. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/il.2021.26.1.20.
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Recent narrative studies of complexity theory have shown that so-called ‘emergent complexity’ does not accommodate to narrative form. Complexity theory is an interdisciplinary field of study that researches how large-scale phenomena emerge from simple components without the guidance of a plan or a controlling agent. Emergence happens by chance, through decentralised interactions at lower levels. Its lack of clear causal chains makes the process difficult to conceptualise in narrative so this article turns to a fictional narrative to demonstrate how complexity theory has trickled down into contemporary literature: the historical novel Pfitz (1995) by Scottish novelist and theoretical physicist Andrew Crumey. While there have been a spate of publications on complex narratives in film studies, literature studies has lagged behind. As a counter, the article revives Tom LeClair’s notion of the systems novel (1987, 1989) as one useful model for thinking about narrative complexity in prose fiction. I first turn to LeClair’s definition of the systems novel and bring it up to date with recent discussions of complexity theory, then turn to Crumey’s novel to illustrate how Pfitz imitates the logic of complex systems through its looping structure, its interconnectedness, and its thematic insistence on chance and necessity.
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Engelhardt, Nina. "“Real Flight and Dreams of Flight Go Together”: High Technology and Imaginary Heights in Early Modern and Postmodern Science Fiction." Space and Culture 23, no. 4 (December 25, 2018): 382–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1206331218819714.
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This article examines how science fiction literature illustrates that exploring the “space above” and journeys toward it necessitates engaging with different types of knowledge, not least scientific-technological and imaginative ones. Scholarship in geography and urban and social studies has recently experienced what has been called a “vertical turn,” that is, a growing attention to the third dimension of space, and researchers call for more interdisciplinary experiments and commitment. This article argues that fictional literature is a valuable source of inquiry and, moreover, that it is precisely science fiction itself that illustrates the need to draw on various types of knowledge in order to explore issues of verticality and the space above. It examines an early modern text from a period before technological ascent into space became possible and a 20th-century novel set at the beginning of the rocket age: Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone; or a Voyage Thither, written sometime after 1628 and published in 1638, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Both texts illustrate that scientific-technological and imaginative investigations of “the above” are inseparable and emphasize the role of the imagination in fictional as well as in technological ascents. Moreover, in these texts, travelling into the space above involves complex ethical and moral dimensions. Exploring these in relation to the inseparability of scientific-technological and imaginative investigations, the analysis of the science fiction texts also develops the ethical and cognitive value of making scholarly analysis of verticality an interdisciplinary endeavor.
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Tyers, Rhys William. "Historiographic Metafiction and the Metaphysical Detective in Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet." MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities 24, no. 2 (December 6, 2021): 270–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/26659077-24020005.
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Abstract Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet explores the writing of history as an attempt to construct a narrative from a multitude of unreliable and conflicting sources. As a result, any attempt at historiography is also plagued by the problems of representation found in literature. More particularly, not unlike detective fiction, history is concerned with identifying the inspirations and actions of its players and with revealing the truth about an episode or series of episodes, using historical information, all of which may or may not be reliable. By examining the relationship between the historical and the fictional in Amulet this paper will discuss Bolaño’s use of the tropes of metaphysical detective fiction and how they help foreground the difficulties posed by historical facts by reinventing them in fiction. This will, in turn, highlight the intersection between detective fiction and historiographic metafiction and how by combining these two genres writers can reimagine historical contexts and find new meanings and significance.
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Salgaro, Massimo, and Benjamin Van Tourhout. "Why Does Frank Underwood Look at Us? Contemporary Heroes Suggest the Need of a Turn in the Conceptualization of Fictional Empathy." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 345–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0019.
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Abstract Fictional heroes have long attracted the attention and emotions of their audiences and readers. Moreover, such sustained attention or emotional involvement has often taken the form of identification, even empathy. This essay suggests that since 9/11, however, a new cycle of heroism has emerged that has taken its place, namely the hybrid hero (cf. Van Tourhout 2017; 2018). Hybrid heroes have become increasingly popular during the post 9/11 period, offering escapism and reassurance to audiences in difficult times in which clear-cut divisions between good and bad, between right and wrong came under pressure. These characters challenge audiences and creators on moral and narrative levels because of their fluid symbiosis of heroic and villainous features. We find some well-known examples in contemporary TV-series such as Breaking Bad, House of Cards, etc. Hybrid heroes are looking for ways to arouse audiences and are aiming at the complicity of the audience. The most striking example of this complicit nature can be seen in the TV-series House of Cards when Frank Underwood addresses the audience by staring into the camera. Traditional psychological and aesthetic theories on empathy are challenged by the phenomenon of the hybrid hero because empathy is generally conceived in prosocial terms, with most of the current research being geared toward a positive notion of empathy (cf. Johnson 2012; Bal/Veltkamp 2013; Koopman/Hakemulder 2015). Additionally, there has been a prevalent confusion between sympathy and empathy that has impacted our understanding of the perception of such heroes (cf. Jolliffe/Farrington 2006). In fact, one of the reasons for the predominantly positive connotation of empathy in the study of literary reception is that empathy has been narrowly defined as »sympathy and concern for unfortunate others« (Bal/Veltkamp 2013, 2). The distinction between empathy and sympathy is crucial in the study of immoral figures because, as research has shown, only sympathy involves a moral judgement. The concept of a hybrid hero pushes us to decouple the core of fictional empathy from moral impulses or prosocial actions because it demands a »suspension of moral judgement from its viewer« (cf. Vaage 2013). Some recent studies (cf. Happ/Melzer/Steffgen 2015) have found that empathic responses to videogames cause antisocial effects, while others report cases of »tactical empathy« (cf. Bubandt/Willerslev 2016) or »empathic sadism«, which allows the fiction reader to predict the feelings of the characters and to find enjoyment in this prediction, independently of the negative state and the pain of them (cf. Breithaupt 2016). We believe that the conceptualisation of an emotional bond between the audience and questionable or hybrid heroes will only be permitted through a turn in the approach to the concept of fictional empathy in media studies and aesthetic theory. Thus, the scope of the present paper is not only to describe the phenomenon of the hybrid hero, but also the specific notion of empathy and aesthetic enjoyment that the concept of a hybrid hero demands, that, compared to the present concepts of empathy: (1) distinguishes empathy from sympathy, (2) decouples empathy from morality, (3) takes into account the aesthetic enjoyment associated with negative emotions and moral violations. Finally, we argue that this renewed concept of fictional empathy should be incorporated into newly introduced models of art reception, which integrate both positive and negative emotions in art fruition (cf. Menninghaus et al. 2017). Recent research in empirical aesthetics and media psychology seems to support this view in showing that a moral violation in fictional stories produces mixed emotional and enjoyable responses (cf. McGraw/Warren 2010). The success of the hybrid hero confirms that the interplays of positive, negative and mixed emotion elicited by ambivalent figures such as the hybrid hero can partially explain the massive success and broader impact of contemporary TV series.
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Koval, Oxana A., and Ekaterina B. Kriukova. "Ludwig Wittgenstein As a Fictional Character. Part I." Voprosy Filosofii, no. 3 (2021): 196–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/0042-8744-2021-3-196-207.
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In these latter days, there is a clear tendency towards convergence in the complex relationship between the two language practices – fiction and philosophy. On the one hand, philosophy increasingly turns to the interpretation of important literary texts. On the other hand, literature responds to the challenges of modern thought. This paper focuses on the creative heritage and personality of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the main initiator of “linguistic turn”, from the point of view not of philosophical, but of literary reception. The art of the word in the 20th century was strongly charged due to the language problems. That is why it could not pass over in silence the philosopher, who showed that language activity is one of the fundamental factors in understanding the world. Different authors, such as Terry Eagleton, Bruce Duffy, Winfried G. Sebald, Umberto Eco, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, brought out in their works – directly or indirectly – a character undoubtedly similar to Wittgenstein. Eventually, the combination of different aspects creates an integral portrait of the Austrian thinker, representing an adequate alternative to philosophical approaches. The fictitious space of literature allows us to show something that philosophy is unable to say – because of its disciplinary limits and its need to stay inside the facts and laws of logic. This confirms the well-known thesis of “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”: “What can be shown, cannot be said” (4.1212).
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Carmona Rodríguez, Pedro. ""En Route" : narratives of travel and displacement in contemporary Canadian writing." Journal of English Studies 3 (May 29, 2002): 21. http://dx.doi.org/10.18172/jes.67.
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From a fictional as well as a theoretical point of view, the present interest in travel is a consequence of the increasing relevance of postcolonial discourses and the ongoing processes of cultural transference and globalisation. These phenomena have resulted in a re-conceptualisation of notions of identity, location, place and site, which foster, in turn, the rethinking of terms like home, margin and periphery. Most of these have been targeted by post-structuralist and postcolonial theories in their attempt at disrupting unified and imperialist conceptions of subjectivity and place. In Canadian fiction, the abiding relativism affecting notions of culture and nation elaborated on binary pairs is laid bare by physical and metaphorical displacement. This paper examines the arena of de/re-territorialisation provided by travel and displacement in a number of Canadian fictions. Many contemporary Canadian narratives are cohesively joined by the recurrent motifs of travel and displacement, paralleling the geographical movement to a re-organisation of identity paradigms at personal, cultural and national levels. Hence, the sample of Canadian writing presented here exhibits a concern with journeying as destabilization of unified subjectivity, mirroring, in this way, much of the debate of contemporary theory
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LaLande, J. "The Making of a New Western Hero: The Forest Ranger in Popular Fiction, 1900–1940." Journal of Forestry 98, no. 11 (November 1, 2000): 43–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jof/98.11.43.
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Abstract Newcomers on the scene at the turn of the century, the first foresters in the American West sometimes faced a reluctant and even hostile public. But as the Old West waned, popular authors like Zane Grey chose the Forest Service ranger as a protagonist in their stories. More than simply another romantic and courageous hero, the steadfast forest ranger—as portrayed in numerous novels published during the early 20th century—popularized notions of conservation and scientific forestry among a national audience. The fictional ranger brought the “gospel of forest conservation” to countless readers, just as he converted most of his fictional antagonists to the very same principles.
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Mackey, Margaret. "Formative Young Adult Literature: Negotiating the Terms of Reading." Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 14, no. 2 (December 1, 2022): 180–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0004.
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Joshua Landy says “formative fictions” help us fine-tune our mental capacities. This article looks at how novels for young adults may challenge readers to fine-tune their capacities as readers of more complex fiction. Three sample titles ( I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy, and Slay by Brittney Morris) make use of character-authors to invite readers to negotiate the terms of reading. Young readers normally have extensive childhood experience in the social negotiation of the terms of make-believe games (“You be the daddy”) and can apply this expertise to the challenge of these novels as they interact with the explicit observations of the heroines about the making of stories. This article takes up Aidan Chambers’ challenge to analyze materials for youth as a separate literature. By exploring the work of three novels published over a 70-year span, (the titles were published in 1948, 1986, and 2019), it meets his demand to include the history of youth literature in our considerations. In these sample texts, young readers are invited to turn back to early childhood in order to make use of the skills and experience of fictional engagement as first developed in pretend games; as a consequence, they develop more subtle capacities as interpreters of complex fiction, thus addressing a major challenge of what Chambers calls “the age between.”
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Valdeón, Roberto A. "On fictional turns, fictionalizing twists and the invention of the Americas." Eurocentrism in Translation Studies 6, no. 2 (November 16, 2011): 207–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/tis.6.2.06val.
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In his 2008 book, Translation and Identity in the Americas, Edwin Gentzler proposed a “fictional turn” to refer to translation in connection with the construction of identity in the Americas, a highly positive view of the role played by this activity since the arrival of the Europeans. This paper proposes a “fictionalizing twist,” that is, a complementary approach that would attest to the less positive use of translation in the relation between Europe and the Americas on the one hand, and among European nations on the other. Thus, I examine how translation and Translation Studies have contributed to create certain negative images of translators and nations, a tendency that can still be traced nowadays. First, I discuss the views on the indigenous interpreter Malinche and her part in the conquest of Mexico. Then I move on to examine the ideological manipulation of texts to promote antagonistic national identities within the European context at the time. Finally, it is argued that both the fictional turn and the fictionalizing twist need to be considered as an integral part of the identity-construction process in the Americas and in Europe.
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Elina, E. G. "Kholikov, A. and Orlova, E., eds. (2021). Russian literature and journalism during the pre-revolutionary period: Forms of interaction and analysis methodology: A co-authored monograph. Moscow: IMLI RAN. (In Russ.)." Voprosy literatury, no. 3 (September 13, 2022): 294–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2022-3-294-299.
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The book’s three parts feature studies, publications and supplements which include contents descriptions of the newspaper Nov, the journal Bogema, and archival materials connected with the newspaper Russkoe Slovo. It is for the first time that a co-authored monograph has brought together authors united by their study of the fundamental question about the role of fiction in the shaping of the Russian cultural and social landscape ahead of the calamity that was revolution. The book discusses the following topics: the balance between fiction and journalism, the journal context and the methods of its study, the interconnectedness of artistic texts against the background of journalistic output, the perception of literature and its various modifications in central Russia and the country’s periphery, the literary trends that emerged at the turn of the century and their influence on the contents and aesthetic programs of periodicals, and journalists as fictional characters.
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Skinner, Stephen. "‘As a glow brings out a haze’: understanding violence in jurisprudence and Joseph Conrad’s fiction." Legal Studies 27, no. 3 (September 2007): 465–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-121x.2007.00063.x.
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This paper explores connections between jurisprudential discussion of pain and violence and the methodology of law and literature. Starting with Robert Cover’s work on law’s ‘field of pain and death’, it argues that the theory on which he relied in rejecting literary approaches to law can equally justify a turn to fiction in understanding violence. It then considers the experiential dimension of Austin Sarat’s and Thomas Kearns’s jurisprudence of violence and argues that interdisciplinary perspectives, including relevant fiction, can assist in engaging with the challenges of capturing such experience in textual form. Situating the argument in relation to broader law and literature rationales, the paper finds relevant illustrations in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. It argues that Conrad’s stories represent dimensions of pain and violence that might otherwise be irreducible to non-fictional textual discourse, whilst also expressing the limits of that representation.
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Ksenofontova, Alexandra. "Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach to Time in Fiction." KronoScope 23, no. 1 (May 31, 2023): 86–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685241-bja10008.
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Abstract The paper surveys five major perspectives on studying time in fiction: narratology, history of temporal regimes, temporal pluralism, aesthetics of time, and politics of time. It argues that these approaches have so far remained largely unintegrated, leading to a separation between areas of literary criticism that are in reality closely linked. In particular, some approaches separate time as subject from time as the principal element of narratives. Some approaches disregard the transhistorical plurality of temporal experiences, while others turn a blind eye to larger historical changes in the perception of time. Finally, some scholars choose to focus only on temporal aesthetics, while others explore only the fictional politics of time. Scrutinizing these three schisms of studying time in literary criticism, the paper argues for a re-integrated approach that accommodates insights from various disciplines and adopts a broader perspective on time and temporality in fiction.
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Berninger, Anja. "Empathy – Real-Life and Fiction-Based." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 224–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0013.
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Abstract In response to the so-called paradox of fiction, Kendall Walton famously argued that our affective reactions to fictions differ structurally from real-life emotions. Many authors now reject the idea that there really is a paradox of fiction. But, even if this is true, Walton may have been right in that there really are far reaching differences between the way we respond to fictions and our real-life emotional reactions. That is, even if we do not believe the paradox of fiction is a paradox, it can still lead us to doubt the homogeneity of our emotional responses and to reflect on the relation between real-life and fiction-based emotional reactions. In this paper, I want to further discuss this issue focusing on the case of empathy. The main questions I want to answer are: What are the differences between our real-life and fiction-based empathic reactions? Are there any far reaching structural differences between the two? In my discussion, I will stress the idea that real-life empathy is often built on a relatively complex interaction between the person that empathizes and the emotional subject. I will show, first of all, that this type of social interaction is not possible in literary fiction. Secondly, I will stress that literature often offers an introspective perspective on a character’s inner life. This is a perspective not open to us in real-life settings, which allows for a distinct kind of empathy. In discussing real-life and fiction-based empathy I differentiate between two different functions empathic reactions might fulfill. Thus, following Matthew Kieran, I suggest that some forms of empathy might allow us to infer the emotional state an agent is in and to predict his subsequent behavior. In other cases, however, the aim of empathy is not to achieve some sort of epistemic aim, but rather to feel a kind of solidarity with those that are in the grip of an emotion. In this paper, I concentrate on this second kind of empathy. I will start with some general remarks on the structure of real-life empathy. Drawing on some ideas originally voiced by Adam Smith, I will highlight the fact that empathy is a deeply social process involving two individuals: the one that empathizes (the empathizer or the spectator) and the one that is empathized with (the empathizee or the actor). According to Smith, both actor and spectator will often put themselves in the other’s shoes to bring empathy about. Furthermore, both sides engage in some form of emotion regulation: the spectator tries to regulate his emotions so they match those of the empathizee. The empathizee, in turn, may need to down-regulate his emotional reactions, so that they can indeed match. In how far he must do so, depends on his relation with the empathizer. I suggest that, additionally to these forms of emotion regulation, the empathizee also engages in some forms of reason giving. The exact form this takes again depends on his relationship with the empathizer. I then go on to show that this theory enables us to understand why empathy is sometimes so difficult to achieve in real life. Here, I show that high degrees of emotional intensity but also the type of emotion felt may make it difficult for the empathizee to engage in the sort of down-regulation and reason giving discussed. With these distinctions in place, I then turn to the case of fiction-based empathy. I will show that fiction-based empathy is not a social phenomenon in the same sense as real-life empathy. There is thus an important structural difference between the two. I then suggest that fiction often confronts us with the type of cases that present challenges to real-life empathy (i. e. cases where there is a lack of down-regulation, high emotional intensity and so on). Fiction, however, also provides us with additional resources that facilitate empathy even in these difficult cases. Fiction often gives us access to the stream of thought of a fictional character. Fictional texts thus allow us to get a glimpse on how emotional intensity and emotion type affect a character’s thinking, as well as offering us insight into the raw emotional feel, the intensity and urgency connected to many emotions. Fictional texts generally use aesthetic means to give us access to these aspects. Thus, when feeling empathy in response to a work of fiction we must therefore not only understand the situation in question, but must also be sensitive to (some of the) aesthetic features of the text.
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MILOVIDOV, STANISLAV V. "TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING AS A WAY TO TURN FAN PRACTICES INTO A CULTURAL INDUSTRY." ART AND SCIENCE OF TELEVISION 17, no. 1 (2021): 29–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.30628/1994-9529-2021-17.1-29-47.
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There are numerous empirical sociological researches of transmedia storytelling media consumption. However, they mainly record either the practices of media consumption of specific media formats included in the structure of a transmedia project or the producers’ ways for constructing a narrative that creates transitions between media platforms. Often, researchers pay little attention to the circumstances of users’ interaction with the fictional world and their social relationships that form around a transmedia project. This study consists of a series of in-depth interviews and observations on the media consumption practices of users and fans of the fictional world which has formed around a series of fantasy works under the general name The Witcher. This transmedia project is interesting because, unlike specially created transmedia franchises with the expansion structures carefully planned by media companies, it forms itself spontaneously, as a result of the activities of different institutions and user participation, does not have a single development strategy, and is shaped by “grass-root” practices. The observation of media consumption practices of transmedia storytelling allows us to conceptualize construction’s НАУКА ТЕЛЕВИДЕНИЯ № 17.1, 2021 31 THE ART AND SCIENCE OF TELEVISION peculiarities, such as narrative structures. Based on this data, it is possible to construct a network of interactions formed by the user migration between media platforms and compare such practices with the audience’s everyday practices. Since modern people form their understanding of the world based on their own experience and by using mediatized communication, transmedia storytelling represents a special kind of virtual reality or its particular case, which can be supplemented with the help of VR-technologies.
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Acharya, Pushpa Raj. "New York in Salman Rushdie's Fury." Literary Studies 29, no. 01 (December 1, 2016): 57–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/litstud.v29i01.39612.
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Postcolonial and diasporic novels, such as Salman Rushdie's Fury, explore the interconnections between the global cities and human mobility. Bodily as well as other physical rhythms create affects, which in turn shape rhythm of the urban spaces. New York in such fictional works appears as an exploding, spasmodic city that renews itself with renovations and destruction.
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Milner, Andrew. "Resources for a Journey of Hope: Raymond Williams on Utopia and Science Fiction." Cultural Sociology 10, no. 4 (June 21, 2016): 415–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1749975516631584.
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Raymond Williams had an enduring interest in science fiction, an interest attested to: first, by two articles specifically addressed to the genre, both of which were eventually published in the journal Science Fiction Studies; second, by a wide range of reference in more familiar texts, such as Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, George Orwell and The Country and the City; and third, by his two ‘future novels’, The Volunteers and The Fight for Manod, the first clearly science-fictional in character, the latter less so. This article will summarise this work, and will also explore how some of Williams’s more general key theoretical concepts – especially structure of feeling and selective tradition – can be applied to the genre. Finally, it will argue that the ‘sociological’ turn, by which Williams sought to substitute description and explanation for judgement and canonisation as the central purposes of analysis, represents a more productive approach to science fiction studies than the kind of prescriptive criticism deployed by other avowedly ‘neo-Marxist’ works, such as Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction and Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future.
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González, Aníbal. "La ciencia ficción latinoamericana y el arte del anacronismo: "Otra" ciencia ficción es posible." Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 58, no. 1 (March 2024): 145–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2024.a931923.
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Abstract: This essay seeks to establish a broader conceptual framework for studying the historical development of Latin American science fiction and its recent turn—in a genre usually focused on other times and worlds—to references to the past and present of Latin American history and culture. Valuable current studies of Latin American science fiction have been devoted primarily to the history of the genre itself and to tropes that have recurred in certain periods of the development of Latin American science fiction, such as cyborgs, androids, and zombies. Few have been devoted to the issues and forces at play in the current rise not only of science fiction in Latin America but of a recognizably Latin American form of science fiction. Through readings focused on the role of history and time in representative Latin American science fictional narratives of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, from the Argentine Juana Manuela Gorriti and the Chilean Jorge Baradit to the Cuban Yoss, the pervasiveness of historicity, the view of indigenous knowledge as proto science (rather than superstition), and a penchant towards dystopias, horror, and the Gothic, are considered as possible defining traits of Latin American science fiction.
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Smid, Robert. "On Cartographic Techniques in Literature." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66, no. 2 (June 27, 2018): 221–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0022.
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Abstract My article investigates the manifold interactions between textual and diagrammatic elements. First, it outlines the changes in literary and cultural studies in the wake of the so-called ‘topographical turn,’ which have made possible the identification of certain cartographic practices as cultural techniques. Second, it discusses Friedrich Kittler’s idea of literature as a cultural technique itself, and considers how this concept can be reconciled with the topographical turn. Third, it analyses a handful of cartographic techniques employed in narratives and argues for a field of scriptural operations that provide a common ground for jointly reading maps and novels. Fourth, it carries out a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow which focuses on how the diagrammatic inscription of the V2 rocket and its arc condition both the protagonists’ movement on the novel’s plane and the map-making instances in the narrative. Fifth and finally, it points out why Pynchon’s work might be considered a medial counterpart of a map if the topographical approach, instead of being considered a comparison between fictional and real locations, is understood as a scrutiny into the operations indispensable to creating a fictional territory.
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Tóth, Zsuzsanna. "Mirror-Images, or Love As Religion in Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, His Dark Materials." Romanian Journal of English Studies 10, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 293–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/rjes-2013-0028.
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Abstract Philip Pullman retells mankind’s archetypal memories of the Fall in his fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. I aim to prove that the age-old religious desire for the oneness of the sacred and the profane, as well as of spirit and matter is manifested in Pullman’s fictional mythology in a way that religion and love also turn out to be one.
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Li, Mengjun. "‘Carving the Complete Edition’: Self-commentary, Poetry, and Illustration in the Early-Qing Erotic Novel Romance of an Embroidered Screen (1670)." East Asian Publishing and Society 7, no. 1 (April 20, 2017): 30–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22106286-12341303.
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Scholars of late imperial Chinese fiction have demonstrated that Ming ‘literati novels’ possessed both intellectual sophistication and aesthetic seriousness. Nonetheless, the large corpus of mid-length fictional narratives of the Qing remains mired in problematic assumptions about its ostensibly popular nature. The self-commentaried edition ofEmbroidered screen(Xiuping yuan) presents a salient example for reassessing the nature of Qing novels and the reading of fiction in the seventeenth century. First circulated in manuscript copies, extensive auto-commentary was added when the novel was committed to print. The commented edition incorporates different genres—poetry, examination essay, and anecdotal accounts—as well as visual elements, all intended to appeal to elite literati tastes among Qing readers. Its literary, visual, and formal heteroglossia also contributed to its popularity in eighteenth-century Japan, which in turn secured its preservation and eventual modern rediscovery, even while it fell into obscurity in Qing China, most likely due to political censorship.
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Sen, Madhurima. "(Re)Constructing the Bengali: Propaganda and Resistance in Immediate Post-1971 Pakistani Fiction." Southeast Asian Review of English 60, no. 1 (July 16, 2023): 103–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.22452/sare.vol60no1.7.
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During the war of 1971 and for a considerable amount of time afterward, manipulation of media reports and military propaganda in Pakistan contributed to cultural stereotypes of Bengalis as ‘others’. This paper analyses two immediate Pakistani fictional responses to the war published in 1973: “Bingo” by Tariq Rahman and “Hearth and Home” by Parveen Sarwar. It considers the relationship between literature as a medium and the rigid structure of religious nationalist loyalties and state propaganda, probing the dynamics between imaginative fiction and the top-down approach of statist historiography. It draws attention to the heterogeneity of literary strategies employed by authors and their divergent engagements with formulaic images of the Bengali ‘other’, which in turn shape the construction of national identity in the narratives. Along with focusing on the role of literature in ‘shattering the silence’, it aims to foreground the role played by fiction in maintaining stereotypical, archetypal, and antagonistic inter-ethnic relations.
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Kobayashi, Masaomi. "Poe's Prehistoric Fiction and Pre/Post-Humanity: Speculation via "Silence"." Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 80, no. 4 (December 2024): 81–104. https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2024.a947166.
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Abstract: The word "prehistoric" came into general use in the 1860s, and it was not until around the turn of the twentieth century that saw the emergence of prehistoric fiction in English. In his 1838 tale, "Silence," however, Edgar Allan Poe had presented a form of prehistoric narrative by creating a fictional setting of West Central Africa. While casting new light on prehistoric fiction by discovering the tale's unexplored potential, this study finds itself associated with philosophy with special reference to the French-Continental philosophers Jacques Derrida and Quentin Meillassoux. Their deconstructive/speculative philosophies serve to reveal what has been unexplored in "Silence," hence allowing an understanding of how widely open it is to what belongs outside of history and humanity. An attempt is ultimately made to demonstrate that the tale's potentiality lies in its capacity to generate fresh perspectives not only on prehistory but also on pre-humanity and even on post-humanity.
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PONTARA, JOHANNA ETHNERSSON. "‘You Want Drama? Go to the Opera!’." Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 18, no. 1 (July 2024): 7–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2024.3.
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This article addresses the role played by opera in fiction film by drawing attention to the action film Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015). Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (1926) is treated here in a way that makes it appear as something more than a diegetic background and energy reinforcement for action scenes. By taking into consideration Daniel Yacavone’s (2012; 2014) view of film as a combination of a construction and a known world, I argue that the use of opera displays a stretching of the boundaries between fiction and real life, which in turn has implications for how the film can be regarded as an opera–film encounter. The film makes the opera emerge as significant in its own right through an intricate interaction between fictional denotation and engagement with the lived reality of the film viewer. Ultimately, I suggest that Rogue Nation provides an opportunity not only to reconsider a common way of approaching intersections between opera and fiction film, but also to extend and refine Yacavone’s theory.
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Juvan, Marko. "From Spatial Turn to GIS-Mapping of Literary Cultures." European Review 23, no. 1 (January 29, 2015): 81–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1062798714000568.
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Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systemic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, and so on). In conclusion, the author presents the tentative results of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis’, which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyses data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between ‘spaces in literature’ and ‘literature in spaces’ has historically established a nationalized and aesthetically differentiated literary field.
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Hatavara, Mari, and Jarkko Toikkanen. "Sameness and difference in narrative modes and narrative sense making: The case of Ramsey Campbell’s “The Scar”." Frontiers of Narrative Studies 5, no. 1 (July 2, 2019): 130–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/fns-2019-0009.
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AbstractThe article discusses basic questions of narrative studies and definitions of narrative from a historical and conceptual perspective in order to map the terrain between different narratologies. The focus is placed on the question of how fiction interacts with other realms of our lives or, more specifically, how reading fiction both involves and affects our everyday meaning making operations. British horror writer Ramsey Campbell’s (b. 1946) short story “The Scar” (1967) will be used as a test case to show how both narrative modes of representation and the reader’s narrative sense making operations may travel between art and the everyday, from fiction to life and back. We argue that the cognitively inspired narrative studies need to pair up with linguistically oriented narratology to gain the necessary semiotic sensitivity to the forms and modes of narrative sense making. Narratology, in turn, needs to explore in detail what it is in the narrative form that enables it to function as a tool for reaching out and making sense of the unfamiliar. In our view, reading fictional narratives such as “The Scar” can help in learning and adopting linguistic resources and story patterns from fiction to our everyday sense making efforts.
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Jiménez, Beatriz Valverde, and Marta Pérez-Escolar. "Guarding the Guardians: Fictional Representation of Manipulated and Fake News in Graham Greene’s Work." Anglia 138, no. 1 (March 4, 2020): 98–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2020-0005.
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AbstractDrawing upon mass communication theories, concretely Walter Lippman’s theory of stereotypes, Erving Goffman’s theory of frames, and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulation, we examine the fictional representation of manipulated and fake news in three novels by Graham Greene, Stamboul Train (1932), The Quiet American (1955), and A Burnt-Out Case (1960). In this paper, within the frame of one of the key concepts in his work, the ‘virtue of disloyalty’, we argue that Greene’s fictional representation of journalism (mal)practice constitutes a piece of grit in the machinery of the western press, questioning the political and cultural dominant discourse conveyed to the public. In this line, Greene’s literary representations of the journalistic practice can be read as indicators (and, in turn, shapers) of the western culture’s prevailing perceptions of the reported news and the professionals that convey the facts to a general public. With his fictional representation of the profession of journalism, Greene makes readers aware of the way information can be manipulated and the necessity of developing a critical mind concerning the news and how they are conveyed through the media.
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Kysh, Judith. "Implementing the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards: First-Year Algebra." Mathematics Teacher 84, no. 9 (December 1991): 715–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.5951/mt.84.9.0715.
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Fans of Dr. Doolittle may recall his famous fictional beast, the Push-Me-Pull-You. It had heads at both ends but never knew which way to go. Many secondary school mathematics teachers feel as though they are trying to ride one of these creatures when they examine the NCTM's Curriculum and Evaluation Standards (1989) and then turn around to consider the institutional demands of their schools and local universities.
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FINCH, LAURA. "The Un-real Deal: Financial Fiction, Fictional Finance, and the Financial Crisis." Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4 (October 20, 2015): 731–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875815001693.
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The credit crisis of 2007–8 prompted a Manichean discourse that labeled finance the flighty and unreal other of the solidity of the real economy. Almost overnight the “speculative finance” shifted from a descriptive term to an evaluative one, with freewheeling finance singled out as the main cause of the crisis. The fictionality of finance is, of course, a fiction itself. Not only is finance a part of the real economy but since the 1970s it has played an increasingly significant part in it. This essay aligns with recent work in critical finance studies that puts pressure on the idea that finance can be separated from the real economy. Supplementing the world-historical scale at which this work often remains, this essay theorizes the real abstraction of finance through its lived social experience. The year 1973 was replete with financial events: the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and the gold standard, the Middle East oil crisis, the creation of the Chicago options exchange, and the invention of the Black–Scholes equation governing derivatives. It also saw the birth of the financial thriller with Paul Erdman’sThe Billion Dollar Sure Thing. Seizing upon a formulaic genre and opening it up to a flood of real events from the trading floor, the financial thriller acts as a dynamic interface and sensitive seismograph for theorizing the fictionality of finance. This essay opens with a reading of Bret Easton Ellis’sAmerican Psycho(1991) as an example of a work that renders real abstraction in an explicitly social way. Rather than viewing the novel as a hyperbolically postmodern reflection of abstract financial maneuvers, I argue that it is thickly embedded within the historically specific financial cityscape of 1980s Manhattan. I then turn to a comparative reading of recent financial thrillers written in response to the twenty-first-century credit collapse. Unlike Ellis’s novel, these thrillers strive to keep the unreality of finance segregated from the real economy at the level of plot, while also making use of generic strategies to do so at the level of form, pushing financial data into footnotes, descriptive asides, and a different tonal register of narrative. By reading these thrillers alongsideAmerican Psycho, a book written before the shock of terminal economic crisis, I offer a more historically nuanced reading of their attempts to salvage a workable economy out of the mess of the twenty-first-century American economy.
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Koval, Oxana A., and Ekaterina B. Kriukova. "Ludwig Wittgenstein as a Fictional Character. Part II." Voprosy Filosofii, no. 2 (2022): 169–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/0042-8744-2022-2-169-179.
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The second article continues to acquaint with the image of Wittgenstein, as he appears on the pages of fiction. The key thesis of the study, according to which the imaginary strategy of world literature provides new meaning to the strictly rational understanding of Wittgenstein’s works and personality, is confirmed on the basis of the works of various authors. Perspectives in which writers discover Wittgenstein’s innovative ideas turn out to be interesting and very unusual. In particular, Percival Everett plays in the ironic style on the content and structure of “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and extends its linguistic concept directly to the field of literature itself. Enrique Vila-Matas, who studies the phenomenon of silence in literature, reveals an ethical paradox between Wittgenstein’s theory and practice. In the novel of Ciaran Carson and in the texts of Thomas Bernhard, the philosopher’s behavior and eccentric features of his character, which contributed to the formation of the legendary cult around his person, receive an original explanation. Thus, fiction creates a many-sided portrait of a philosopher, in which his thought is a continuation of his outstanding personality.
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Bray, Joe. "“Come brother Opie!”." Nineteenth-Century Literature 76, no. 2 (September 1, 2021): 137–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.2.137.
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Joe Bray, “‘Come brother Opie!’: Amelia Opie and the Courtroom” (pp. 137–162) This essay examines how Amelia Opie’s lifelong fascination with the human drama of the courtroom is reflected in her fiction, specifically in her tales that revolve around trial scenes. Focusing on three examples in particular, “Henry Woodville” (1818), “The Robber” (1806), and “The Mysterious Stranger” (1813), it argues that Opie’s fictional courtrooms encourage an emotional engagement on the part of both characters and narrators, which in turn can be extended to that of the reader. In the case of “The Mysterious Stranger,” a character is on figurative trial throughout, with both narrator and reader frequently in the dark as to her motives. As a result, judgment is both hazardous and uncertain. Through a sympathetic representation of the passions and vicissitudes experienced by all those in the courtroom context, whether real or metaphorical, Opie’s fiction develops a model of readerly participation that adds a new, affective dimension to traditional accounts of the relationship between early-nineteenth-century literature and the law.
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Chen, Ting-fu. "Illuminating Obscurity: The Youming Lu and the Optical Dynamic in Early Medieval Chinese Gothic." Gothic Studies 26, no. 1 (March 2024): 18–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2024.0183.
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This article reads the Youming lu ( Records of the Hidden and Visible Realms) as an epitome of the central tension in the tradition of ‘anomaly accounts’ ( zhiguai) between a desire for order and an openness to uncertainties. By conceptualizing the zhiguai as ‘early medieval Chinese Gothic’, this article attempts to disclose the contemporary significance of a premodern non-Anglo-European genre, as well as unbind the Gothic from cultural or socio-historical determinism. It attends to an ambivalent solicitude for the obscure embedded in the Youming lu’s iconic dynamic of light and darkness to theorize such epistemic hospitality into an alternative enlightenment also crucial to the Gothic. Shifting the focus of globalgothic from ontology to epistemology, from the clearly marvelous to the interplay of clarity and obscurity, this article seeks to open up an intermediate space between cultural colonialism and esotericism, where the zhiguai, as ‘strange non-fiction’, can be considered to have prefigured a gothic sensitivity that in turn illuminates its own fictional potential which predated classical Chinese fiction proper.
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Festino, Cielo Griselda. "The Process of Literary Creation Across Cultural Borders: A Reading of Rohinton Mistry’s “Swimming Lessons”." Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura 22, no. 3 (December 31, 2012): 205–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2317-2096.22.3.205-213.
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The aim of this paper is to consider the process of literary creation as recreated by the Indian author Rohinton Mistry in his short story “Swimming lessons.” The dislocation of the main character from India to Canada allows him to turn his memories into fictional material and cross cultural borders. Literature is thus turned into a space of reflection which allows him to makes sense of his own experience in the diaspora.