Academic literature on the topic 'Mudge (fictitious character), fiction'

The article is devoted to an important phenomenon — political fiction as a kind of an ideological construction analogue. Fiction has deepened the fantasy traits of an ideological structure. Irrespective of its imaginary character, it can produce a real impact on political and other social processes. Fictitious politics flourished during the French revolution and got consolidated in the era of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

Fantasy films were born from the development of fiction films that have shown existence since the beginning of its history. Fantasy films have their own charm because they can penetrate time and space compared to other genres. Fiction films develop from their creators both in terms of story and cinematography because fiction films are at the center of the poles: real and abstract. Its greatest strength lies in its ability to integrate and combine with other genres without exception and can be broadly developed unlimitedly. That is because fantasy films contain elements with different characteristics from other films where if a fantasy film has one element in the making of the film then it has been said to be a fantasy film. The elements or components that are seen are derived from the narrative and cinematic elements of filmmaking which contain ideas of stories, characters, and settings in a film. These three elements are the forming components of fantasy films that are fictitious and imaginative. The idea of the story is not based on an imaginary reality, that is a fiction that makes no sense. In the case of fantasy films, filmmakers will compete to develop and present ideas that have not been thought of before, so the audience seems to be carried away in a new world outside of real life. Character characters in fantasy films are the imagination of creators in fictitious forms, such as: animal characters, extraterrestrials, monsters, robots, and non-physical characters such as ghosts, spirits and holograms. While the background elements in fantasy films have a character setting place and time imaginative events are unique in unknown times or dimensions, can be past, present, and future with the centuries formed by the creators.

The article considers the legal symbol and legal fiction as special legal categories. The correctness of anarrow approach to their essence was established according to which the notion of «legal fiction» does notinclude fictitious phenomena, and the notion of «legal symbol» does not cover symbols prohibited by law,and symbols which represent certain values. It was revealed that both considered categories have a certaindegree of conventionality, in a specific way according to the scheme established by the legislator, thereforethey are sometimes mixed in the literature. Legal symbols, unlike legal fictions, are more fundamental, buthave an auxiliary character, since they reflect an existing legal precept, and are not part of a new legal norm,contain an encrypted meaning, but do not distort the legal reality.Legal symbols and legal fictions play a very important role in legal regulation, since they optimize it andmake it more quality, and also provide legal and linguistic economy.

Abstract This essay examines the question of whether and under what conditions a fictitious character can be an epistemic authority for (real) readers; more precisely: it asks whether and under what conditions readers can acquire (propositional) knowledge from the character, thus learning something from it. In answering this question, the essay brings together two debates that have so far hardly been related to each other: an epistemological debate on the concept of epistemic authority and a literary-theoretical debate on aesthetic cognitivism, i. e., the discourse about what can be learned from the reception of fictional texts. In order for a person to be an epistemic authority for another person, two conditions must be met: 1) the first person must have an advantage in knowledge over the second person that the second person recognizes and acknowledges as such; and 2) the second person must have appropriate access to this knowledge. In order to clarify to what extent a fictitious character and a real reader can be related in this way, I first examine what it means to attribute knowledge to a fictitious character. To do so, I suggest the following analysis: In story S, character C knows that p if and only if C believes in S that p; p is true in S; and C is justified in S to believe that p (this suggestion, based on the classical definition of knowledge, can easily be adapted for other suggested analyses: all that is required is that all conditions in the analysis – whatever they might be – lie inside the scope of the fiction operator). Furthermore, a knowledge attribution of the form »In S, C knows whether p« is true if and only if in S, C knows that p or knows that not-p. On the question of the correctness-conditions for knowledge attributions of the form »In S, C knows that p« and »In S, C knows whether p«, I will then enter the debate about fictional truths. This is necessary for two reasons. On the one hand, the attribution of knowledge is nothing but the assertion of a particular fictional truth. And on the other hand, an attribution of knowledge involves another fictional fact, namely the fact p (which I call the »underlying fact«). The view that is largely held in the discussion about fictional truth following Lewis is that what is true in a story does not result solely from the explicit assertions in the text, but also from plausible consequences [Plausibilitätsschlüssen] that we can be further justified in drawing. More precisely, the following possibilities arise for both facts – the underlying fact as well as the attribution of knowledge: Either the text explicitly contains a reference to the fact. Or it does not contain such an explicit reference, but the question of whether the fact obtains can still be answered on the basis of plausibility conclusions. Or there are no explicit references and plausibility conclusions cannot be drawn. In this case, there is a point of indeterminacy. These distinctions result in a number of possible combinations corresponding to different types of situations, some interesting instance of which I examine in more detail. One case that is especially remarkable is when there is a point of indeterminacy in the text with regard to the underlying fact, which – as I illustrate with an example – does not exclude the possibility that knowledge can be attributed to a character with regard to the proposition in question. The claim is often made about indeterminate passages that not even God can know whether the facts in question obtain – and this is correct. Hence if we are entitled to attribute the knowledge in question to a character, this shows that fictitious characters can not only know more than the reader or the author, but even more than God. Such situations also illustrate that more knowledge does not have to go hand in hand with more epistemic authority. For readers, the indeterminate passage remains unresolvable, and readers cannot learn anything from the character in this regard. This leads me to the question of under which conditions the reader can learn something from a character to whom knowledge is attributed that the reader does not possess. A fundamental problem for the idea that there could be something like a transfer of knowledge between a fictitious character and a real reader is that both belong to different ontological spheres, so to speak: the reader is real, the character merely fictitious. If a character were to be an epistemic authority for a reader, this would be a case of a transfictional epistemic authority, which must be distinguished from »ordinary« epistemic authorities as well as from fictitious epistemic authorities and from epistemic authorities for fictitious truths. I propose to analyze transfictional epistemic authorities using the make-believe theory and the extended-pretense operator: When readers find themselves in extended pretense and pretend to be part of the fictitious world, they become at least imaginatively capable of interacting with the characters, so that the characters can become imaginary epistemic authorities for the readers. I also discuss the cognitivism debate and argue that the (fictitious) knowledge of a character can affect not only intra-fictional but also extra-fictional objects and truths. A main objection to the cognitivist view that readers can acquire propositional knowledge of reality from reading fictional texts is that fictional texts are not reliable sources and that the beliefs the reader may form through reading cannot be justified. I reject this objection and argue that readers can also acquire knowledge about reality through the attribution of knowledge to fictitious characters or even from speech acts that the characters make in the story. Finally, I will deal with a possible objection that the epistemic authority that a character can have is completely parasitic on that of the author: the objection here is that if readers learn something, it’s actually from the author. In contrast, I argue that fictitious characters can acquire an independent epistemic authority that cannot be reduced to that of the author.

The proliferation of hybrid genres is a notable trend in contemporary French literature. Alongside autofiction, new hybrids are emerging in French literature, modelled on a mixture of fiction and factual genre. One of them is exofiction (“ex” + “fiction”), which implies a narrative about fictitious events from the life of a historical character or an attempt to introduce fiction into someone else’s biography. The neologism, belonging to the writer Philippe Vasset, is rapidly entering scholarly and critical discourse, but no systematic attempt to describe the phenomenon has been made. According to Vasset, exofiction can be defined as any narrative that “blends the reality with the phantasms that accompany its representations” (Ph. Vasset); in other words, exofictitious writing practices form the space of “enactivist literature” in the cognitive sense. Exofiction reveals itself in the search for a connection between inner narrator’s experience and the other subject’s experience — including traumatic — through the language. This article attempts to identify the main features of exofiction, according to the enactivist approach in cognitive science and narratology, and to propose an analysis of the genre characteristics of exofiction by the exаmple of the novels by Pascal Quignard, Jean Echenoz and David Foenkinos.

The object of research in this article was A. Matveeva's novel "Every Hundred Years", published in 2022 and included in the shortlist of the Big Book Award. A novel with a diary." The specificity of this work lies in the fact that the parallel developing life stories of the two heroines are presented in the form of their personal diaries, one of which is fictitious in nature, and the second is a real diary, which was kept throughout her life by A. Matveeva's grandmother, Ksenia Mikhailovna Levshina. In this regard, the question arises not only about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction literature, but also about what happens to the status of a personal diary belonging to the category of non-aesthetic texts when it is included in the context of a work of fiction, the solution of which became the purpose of this study. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the introduction to the theoretical basis of the study were the classical works of M. Riffater, J. Genette and V. Yser, devoted to the nature of fictionality, as well as general provisions concerning the signs of a fictional text, set out in the work of V. Schmid "Narratalogy". In the process of analyzing the novel, it was revealed that when fragments of the text of real diaries are placed in the context of a deliberately fictitious world, not only the relationship of the image of the character Xenichka to the real referent (K. M. Levshina) is lost, but also the text of her personal diaries lose their connection with factuality and acquire the status of an object of comprehension. The narrated event in the novel, therefore, is not only and not so much the life stories of the two characters, but also the interaction of the factual and fictional, intimate ego-document and novel, the very writing of any text, both artistic and documentary, and the understanding of life as an aesthetic object.

The postcolonial fiction of the 21st century has developed a new version of family chronicle depicting the life of several generations of migrants to demonstrate the complexity of their experience, different for each generation. This article aims at investigating this tradition from the perspective of three urgent problems: trauma, postcolonial experience, and the “female” theme. The author uses the most illustrative modern women’s postcolonial writings (Z. Smith, Ju. Chang) to show the types of trauma featured in postcolonial literature as well as the change in the character of traumatic experience, including the migrant’s automythologization from generation to generation. There are several types of trauma, or stages experienced by migrants: historical, migration and selfidentification, more or less correlated with three generations of migrants. Historical trauma is the most severe and most often insurmountable for the first generation. It generates a myth about the past, terrible or beautiful, depending on the writer’s intention realized at the level of the writer or the characters. A most expanded form of this trauma can be found in the novel Wild Swans by Jung Chang, where the “female” experience underlines the severity of the historical situation in the homeland of migrants. The trauma of migration manifests itself as a situation of deterritorialization, lack of place, when the experience of the past dominates and prevents the migrants from adapting to a new life. This situation is clearly illustrated in the novel White Teeth by Z. Smith, where the first generation of migrants cannot cope with the effects of trauma. The trauma of selfidentification promotes a fictitious identity in the younger generation of migrants. Unable to join real life communities, they create automyths, joining fictional communities based on cultural myths (Muslim organizations, rap culture, environmental organizations). Such examples can be found in Z. Smith’s White Teeth and On Beauty. Thus, the problem of trauma undergoes erosion, because, strictly speaking, with each new generation, the event experienced as traumatic is less worth designating as such. Compared to historical trauma or the trauma of migration, trauma of self-identification is rather a psychological problem that affects the emotional sphere and is quite survivable for most of the characters.

‘Toba Tek Singh’ is an Urdu Short story written by Saadat Hassan Manto and ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ is a French Novel Written by Taher Ben Jelloun. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was perhaps written in 1954 and published in 1955 whereas ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ was written in 2001. There is more than four decades span between both works of literature. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is pure fiction but ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ is although a novel but based on a true story or narration of a prisoner who spent eighteen years of his life in one of the worst prisons of the documented history. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is written in the third person whereas ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ is narrated in the first person. This research will be referring here to a 2002 translation of ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ by Linda Coverdale in English. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is a fictitious character who is a patient in a lunatic asylum. Before suffering from the mental illness ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was a landlord and during the partition of India, his village and his lands go to a Muslim majority country i.e., Pakistan. This research intends to study the effects of the pain, agony, and trauma on the psyche of the characters here.

The novel’s portrayal of an unknown part of the life of Štefan Krčméry (1892 – 1955), his stay in a psychiatric asylum (1949–1955), belongs to the category of rare topics in contemporary Slovak fiction. In the novel Povedz slovo čisté, Anton Baláž gradually uncovers Krčméry’s complex, dramatic internal life through depictions of the onset and overcoming of apathetic states in the narrative, which also contains a series of diary entries by Júlia Orlovská, Krčméry’s attending physician. These entries record his lasting commitment to such values as the nation, religious faith, creative freedom, and the liberating space of literature. Carefully revealing his thoughts, attitudes and desires, Baláž completes the image of Krčméry as that of an artist, scientist, and preacher, who tries to hold on to these values even at the end of his life journey. Karol Matulay, the director of the treatment center in Pezinok, who is closely monitored by the new totalitarian regime, perceives him as a person with a „liberated imagination” or creative freedom, which can serve as a model for the „crouched imagination of Bratislava’s literati”. While the image of the final stage of Krčméry’s life seems more static, the fictitious character of Jakub Daňo, an ambitious student interested the world of literature, appears as a more dynamic and emotionally active character. According to the author, Krčméry confronts himself with the emotional experience of situations in time and space contained in his memory, with the time against which he is powerless and deprived of human dignity, due to his illness, but free. As a historical and sociological document, Baláž’s novel Povedz slovo čisté (2017) did not generate the „hero/heroes” of the current chaotic digital age; instead, the motivation behind his characters’ actions and behavior is timeless, while its empirical and epistemological value for the present-day reader is indisputable.

In our article, the optics of research developed by I. Savkina on the material of women’s auto-documentary genres is applied to the artistic oeuvre of N. D. Khvoshchinskaya. Based on her correspondence, we have shown that there are no fixed boundaries between an autodocumentary and a fictitious letter in the case of N. D. Khvoshchinskaya. Her works are a kind of sublimation of life experience. In the article we touched on one of the private pages in the biography of the writer, specifically reflected in the mirror of her fiction, – her marriage with I. I. Zayonchkovsky. Against the background of correspondence highlighting the inner experience of the writer, we analyzed the structure and semantics of the maternal-filial plot, persistent in those works that were written after the marriage. Socio-political stories After the Flood (1881) and Blizzard (1889) have been used for the analysis. In the course of the research it was found that in the character analysis of mother heroines the historical component is “extinguished” and, conversely, supra-historical, archetypal features are actualized: maternal care, wisdom, empathy, spiritual elevation, kindness, support, suffering, etc. The article shows that the plot role of the mother is determined not by the socio-political plots that make up the external canvas of the stories, but by the underlying initiation plot. The mother, “superfluous” in the external event plan, plays an important role in the initiation plot: she happens to be near the hero at the moment of life’s trials. At the same time, it is established that she does not facilitate the change in the son’s status. This function is given to her plot “understudy” – the heroine-lover. The plot role of the hero also changes: he acts not so much as a revolutionary who has failed, but as a son experiencing the process of initiation. As a result, the range of themes dealt with in N. D. Khvoshchinskaya’s stories goes beyond the socio-political conflict caused by the historical situation, and acquires a universal scale.

viii, 94 p.
My thesis examines Star Wars fan fiction about Anakin Skywalker posted on the popular blogging platform LiveJournal. I investigate the folkloric qualities of such posts and analyze the ways in which fans through narrative generate systems of meaning, engage in performative expressions of gender identity, resistance, and festival, and create transformative works within the present cultural milieu. My method has been to follow the posts of several Star Wars fans on LiveJournal who are active in posting fan fiction and who frequently respond to one another's posts, thereby creating a network of community interaction. I find that fans construct systems of meaning through complex interactions with a network of cultural sources, that each posting involves multiple layers of performance, and that these works frequently act as parody, critique, and commentary on not just the official materials but on the cultural climate that produced and has been influenced by them.
Committee in charge: Dr. Dianne Dugaw, Chair; Dr. Lisa Gilman, Member; Dr. Debra Merskin, Member

Detective fiction highlights those qualities of masculinity that are most valuable to a contemporary culture. In mysteries a cultural context is more thoroughly revealed than in any other genre of literature. Through the crimes, an audience can understand not only the fears of a particular society but also the level of calumny that society assigns to a crime. As each generation has needed a particular set of qualities in its defense, so the detective has provided them. Through the detective's response to particular crimes, the reader can learn the delineation of forgivable and unforgivable acts. These detectives illustrate positive masculinity, proving that fiction has more uses than mere entertainment. In this paper, I trace four detectives, each from a different era. Sherlock Holmes lives to solve problems. His primary function is to solve a riddle. Lord Peter Wimsey takes on the moral question of why anyone should detect at all. His stories involve the difficulty of justifying putting oneself in the morally superior position of judge. The Mike Hammer stories treat the difficulty of dealing with criminals who use the law to protect themselves. They have perverted the protections of society, and Hammer must find a way to bring them to justice outside of the law. The Kate Martinelli stories focus more on the victims of crime than on the criminals. Martinelli discovers the motivations that draw a criminal toward a specific victim and explains what it is about certain victims that makes villains want to harm them. All of these detectives display the traditional traits of the Western male. They are hunters; they protect society as a whole. Yet each detective fulfills a certain cultural role that speaks to the specific problems of his or her era, proving that masculinity is a more fluid role than many have previously credited.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 1999.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-182). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9955914.

This thesis is a study of the first four books of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. It accounts for the widespread success of the novels by examining their publication and marketing histories, and their literary achievement as narratives including a sophisticated mix of generic traditions. Chapter One looks at the popularity of the novels, comparing their material production and marketing by Rowling’s English language publishers: Bloomsbury in Britain and Scholastic in the United States of America. The publisher’s influence on the public perception of each book is demonstrated by comparative study of its mode of illustration and layout. Further, the design of the books is linked to their strategic marketing and branding within the literary world. The second chapter considers Rowling’s debt to the school story. It concentrates first on the history of this relatively short-lived genre, briefly discussing its stereotypical features and values. Traditional elements of setting and characterisation are then examined to show how the Harry Potter novels present a value system which, though apparently old-fashioned, still has an ethical standpoint designed to appeal to the modern reader. Chapter Three focuses on the characterisation of Harry as a hero-figure, especially on how the influence of classical and medieval texts infuses Rowling’s portrayal of Harry as a hero in the chivalric mode. The episodes of “quest” and “test” in each book illustrate specifically how he learns the values of selflessness, loyalty, mercy and fairness. Chapter Four surveys the contribution of modern fantasy writing to the series. It shows how Rowling creates a secondary world that allows us to perceive magic as a metaphorical representation of power. This focus on the relationship between magic and power in turn has a bearing on our assessment of the author’s moral stance. The thesis concludes by suggesting that Rowling’s unusual mix of genres is justified by the values they share, and which are inscribed in her work: the generic combination forms a workable, new and exciting mode of writing that helps to account for the phenomenal popularity of the series.

Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).

This dissertation analyses the protagonists in The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin, and looks at the extent to which they confront the Jungian archetype of the anima. I demonstrate that individuation and wisdom are not achieved in these characters until they confront the anima archetype within their individual psyches. I analyse the experiences and behaviour of each protagonist in order to identify anima confrontation (or lack thereof), and I seek to prove that such confrontation precipitates maturity and wisdom, which are goals of the hero's journey. The essential qualities of the anima archetype are wisdom, beauty and love. These qualities require acceptance of vulnerability. I argue that the protagonist is far from anima integration when he displays hatred and fear of vulnerability, and conclude that each protagonist is integrated with the anima when wisdom, beauty and love are evident in his character.
English Studies
M.A. (English)