Journal articles on the topic 'Science fiction – history and criticism – theory, etc'

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary is a science fiction by Chinese American science fiction writer Ken Liu (1976-). Based on the theory of Post-Colonial Criticism, this paper makes a concrete analysis of the text from the perspectives of three eminent contemporary theorists, aiming at the readers’ better understanding of the work, and eliminating ethnocentrism, racism, unilateralism and hegemony; keeping history in mind and justifying the names of innocent humans who have been persecuted; safeguarding world peace, and building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Abstract The theory of possible worlds has been minimally employed in the field of theory and philosophy of history, even though it has found a place as a tool in other areas of philosophy. Discussion has mostly focused on arguments concerning counterfactual history’s status as either useful or harmful. The theory of possible worlds can, however be used also to analyze historical writing. The concept of textual possible worlds offers an interesting framework to work with for analyzing a historical text’s characteristics and features. However, one of the challenges is that the literary theory’s notion of possible worlds is that they are metaphorical in nature. This in itself is not problematic but while discussing about history, which arguably deals with the real world, the terminology can become muddled. The latest attempt to combine the literary and philosophical notions of possible worlds and apply it to historiography came from Lubomír Doležel in his Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (2010). I offer some criticism to his usage of possible worlds to separate history and fiction, and argue that when historiography is under discussion a more philosophical notion of possible worlds should be prioritized over the metaphorical interpretation of possible worlds.

Allusions to rabbits and poaching recur throughout H. G. Wells's work. In spite of the frequency with which they appear, these motifs remain overlooked within scholarly criticism. This article, by analysing Wells's representations of rabbit-poaching, first considers how nineteenth-century histories of industrialisation and game-crime shape his science fiction. It then explores the contradictory nature of these representations, which both demonise and sympathise with the figure of the rabbit-poacher, providing further insight into the class confusion that recent criticism perceives to characterise Wells's writing in this period.

Detective fiction as parodic reformulation of genre’s defining patterns has a long history in the Latin American tradition: Borges, Bioy Casares, Soriano, Levrero, Ibargüengoitia, etc. Besides, the evolution of Latin American detective genre has always been characterized by a progressive focalization in the social aspects over the detective story line which has served as a mask to depict in a critical way the flaws of the region’s societies and governments. In nowadays Cuba it could be highlighted the crime narrative of parodic slant by Lorenzo Lunar Cardedo. Among the major features of Lunar Cardedo’s style there are the marginal atmospheres, the stylization of popular speech, the intertextuality, the humor, the parody, and the social criticism. This article focuses on the parodic, intertextual and satiric aspects of his work, particularly discernible in the novel Proyecto en negro (2013), in which the author emphasizes – in opposition to the official discourse – the perpetuation of corrupt, chauvinist, racist, and homophobic behaviors in contemporary Cuba, while relaxing the genre formula limits in order to follow a much more irreverent path within the new Latin American detective fiction.

Current methodological discussion within the field of New Testament studies focuses today on the influence of the work and its history, and is often motivated by newer findings in linguistics and literary criticism. Such inquiry is broadened through its correlation to reception theory, i.e. that inquiry that focuses on how readers understood the work during the course of its transmission or reception. By contrast to the above, textual criticism is that science that tries to discover the ‘original text’ as exactly as possible. Here I would like to ask, to what extent do the ‘witnesses’ (e.g. manuscripts, versions, quotations, etc.) of textual criticism also function as interpreters and ‘receivers’ of the text. In all three of the topics handled here we have been aware of an interaction between text and reader.

Abstract In the Olympica, the lost manuscript wherein Descartes described his famous three dreams, he wrote that on the night of Saint Martin in 1619 he felt asleep in a state of enthusiasm. He interpreted the dreams that ensued as the divine revelation of the principles of a new and admirable science. I here propose that the Olympica were a literary fiction devised by Descartes to legitimize his arrival on the philosophical scene by proposing the principles of a new science. The function of dreams as the best way to reach true wisdom is in line with a long philosophical tradition. This paper offers an attempt to understand the Cartesian enthusiasm in its context, that is, before the criticism of enthusiasm as something incompatible with reason became widespread and when it was still linked to the Platonic theory of furor – poetic and divine – the state that allows the subject access to the truth.

In this essay, the author offers a candid discussion of Sebald’s legacy and the flurry of criticism aimed at securing his place in the literary canon. It engages many of Sebald’s signature themes: memory, amnesia, silence, history, and trauma. The author acknowledges Sebald’s masterful blend of language, photography, and archival material, resulting in a uniquely hybrid narrative form falling somewhere between essay and fiction. The essay is critical of Sebald’s most dedicated admirers—not because of any perceived paucity in Sebald’s work, but rather the shortsightedness of the critical machine that is desperately trying to fossilize Sebald as the end point of modern literature.

This paper examines the standard criticism of the neoclassical economic theory that takes mathematical formalism and the practice of modelling as the most problematic aspect of orthodox economics. The aim of the paper is to explore the epistemic properties of models in science (particularly in economics), and to incorporate the insights from the recent debates in the philosophy of science into the framework of historical epistemology of economics. The main claim of this paper is that history is important for understanding how economic models operate and why have they been accepted as legitimate instruments of inquiry in economic theory. However, since modelling practice clearly is not limited to neoclassical economic theory, the difference between economic orthodoxy and heterodoxy has to be explained in a different way. The paper argues that the theory of fiction can provide an important clue inasmuch as the epistemological and political commitments are a part of the story that underpins the modelling practice in economics.

The new possibilities of global communication and the latest information technology bring the history of literary translation as a scientific discipline within the science of translation to a new level since it infinitely expands the possibilities of searching and comparing historically significant information necessary to build a coherent concept of the evolution of translation activity in the history of human civilization. The problem of translation of fiction is one of the most important in both linguistics and literary criticism. Disputes about the methods, techniques and principles of translation, about the requirements for translations and the degree of their correspondence to a target text, about the originality of a translated text, as well as the problem of interlingual communication in general do not lose relevance in modern science. It has been by time that for a correct and profound interpretation of a literary text, a translator must know well the information about the era described in the work and the time in which the author lived; philosophical and socio-historical prerequisites for the creation of the work to involve “out-of-text structures” [Lotman: 1970, p. 65]. In the paper the authors explore the peculiarities of translation of literary texts, consider different points of view on this issue and draw appropriate conclusions. Also, to reveal the specifics of fiction translation, in addition to the theory of proposition, the article deals with the theory of primary and secondary genres by M. M. Bakhtin [Bakhtin: 1986]. The authors hold the opinion that there are no good or bad translations of literary texts in general, no perfect, no canonical ones. No translation fully renders the text of the source material: each translator selects only the essentials in the original and subordinates the secondary and the tertiary to them. What they consider primary or minor is a matter of individual taste.

Abstract The narrative theory of history that studies historical works from the viewpoint of their narrative, rhetorical devices, and ideological strategies highly emphasized the necessity of renewing historiography. In his early essays, the trend’s founding father, Hayden White, positioned history between art and science or fiction and reality and defined the role of historical theory as a kind of “critical historiography” that is both a criticism of actual historical works and a prescriptive theoretical approach with which the contemporary historical discipline can reform itself. This renewal basically meant a formal reorganization with which the historical works and the historical discipline itself could come closer to literature by using narrative methods and rhetorical devices of recent literary works and films. However, after the 1990s, White and his followers had to face some radical problems that compelled them to rethink the role of recent historiography and their theoretical positions as well. Firstly, the so-called “new” historiography did not actually come into existence, or at least not in a way they suggested. Secondly, new forms of “unofficial” history, from varieties of public history through conspiracy theories to contemporary historical fictions, forced to reconceptualize the task of historical theory and its approach to the social and ideological functions of “official” history. Analysing some recently published works of this trend (above all, Hayden White’s concept of “modernist event” and his distinction between two forms of the past, theoretical and practical), my essay tries to define the situation of historical theory among the forms of contemporary historical experience.

The present article interprets the symbolic elements in Lu Xun’s short stories which have been neglected in earlier studies about Lu Xun. I intend to show that the most obvious symbols in his fiction, like the iron room, the cannibalism, etc., have their counter balance in the animal symbols present in his work. Following this idea, I will focus on his less famous stories, such as A Comedy of Ducks and Some Rabbits and a Cat.

This study attempts to reassess the critical discourse on the Francophone African detective fiction in order to show how the dynamics of genres and discourse in the crime novel participates in a reflection on writing and the boundaries between so-called popular literature and the so-called ‘literate’. It is about analysing the workaround strategies implemented by writers to lift the crime novel from the sidelines in which it has long been placed. Born in the nineteenth century with modernity, the African detective fiction is today one of the axes of development of African literature. It competes, by its dynamism and its originality, with the canonical novel. The resumption of thematic recurrences (immigration, social and political criticism) shows that it contributes to a broad representation of social semiosis. It now claims a discursive space of which the dominant field is obliged to recognize the relevance.

One common criticism of deflationism is that it does not have the resources to explain defective discourse (e.g., vagueness, referential indeterminacy, confusion, etc.). This problem is especially pressing for someone like Robert Brandom, who not only endorses deflationist accounts of truth, reference, and predication, but also refuses to use representational relations to explain content and propositional attitudes. To address this problem, I suggest that Brandom should explain defective discourse in terms of what it is to treat some portion of discourse as defective. To illustrate this strategy, I present an extension of his theory of content and use it to provide an explanation of confusion. The result is a theory of confusion based on Joseph Camp’s recent treatment. The extension of Brandom’s theory of content involves additions to his account of scorekeeping that allow members of a discursive practice to accept different standards of inferential correctness.

At first glance, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ Serenghetti (2009) appears to be a documentary, capturing nothing more than an amateur women’s soccer match filmed in Santo Domingo Ocotitlán (Morelos, Mexico). Commentary on the film has focused on social issues such as urban development, anthropocentrism, and sport as spectacle. This essay, however, argues that Serenghetti is much more interested in examining the aesthetic dimension of cinema, or what Reygadas calls the film’s “fiction.” In some respects, Serenghetti recalls Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), as both movies record complete soccer matches. But where Gordon and Parreno’s film engages, as Michael Fried contends, with the issue of absorption in contemporary art, this essay suggests that Reygadas’s film is concerned with contesting an anti-representational account of cinema, particularly the question of time, which has been central to how slow cinema scholarship has understood his work. Indeed, since his Cannes award-winning film Japón (2001), Reygadas’ films have been labeled as slow cinema—films that are understood less as a representation of time than as what Thiago de Luca calls “duration itself.” This essay proposes that through the concept of the soccer game, Serenghetti not only asserts itself as fiction but also, in doing so, provides a reading of cinematic time that challenges many political and aesthetic fantasies endorsed by contemporary cultural criticism.

In the paper, the author has examined the principles of design and structure of key content-thematic chapters (“Sexuality”, “Identity”, “Finance”, “War/Terrorism”, etc.) in one of the fundamental literary compendiums of the recent years – “The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction”. This edition proposes a scientific systematization of key issues related to the discourse of English-language literature of the XXI Century. The authors of the chapters pay attention to the genre of the novel, which represents the key philosophical, genological, narrative modifications in the stream of the contemporary fiction of Great Britain, the United States and some other countries. “The Routledge Companion…” summarizes the logic of the development of the contemporary literary process in English-speaking countries, emphasizing the forms of distancing from the postmodern novel and defining those worldviews, narratives and otheraspects that give grounds to talk about the emergence of the novel, which reflects a new cultural and historical period, different from the postmodern configurations. It was found out that the editors of the compendium seek to capture the logic of the literary process, while combining historical and literary facts with the delineation of theoretical problems that are reflected in the literary process. Innovative aspects have been identified, the question of the anthropocene has been outlined, the genre of comics and graphic novels and the stream of the contemporary literature has been studied, the theory of realism(s), etc. has been outlined, the way the literary compendium inspires further development of the humanities has been studied. The principles of structuring theoretical problems, the relationship between history, literary theory and philosophy of literature as key factors determining the epistemological basis of the publication have been discussed. “The Routledge Companion…” summarizes key issues related to the humanities in general and cultural studies, phenomenology and anthropology, and, therefore, the compendium is based on a comparative approach (in the broadest sense) involved in writing a 21st century history of literature. The work was prepared within the framework of the Program and Competitive Themes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine “Support of Priority Scientific Research and Scientific-Technical (Experimental) Developments of the Department of Literature, Language, and Arts of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for 2022-2023”. Title: “Scientific and conceptual principles of contemporary literary encyclopedias: world experience”.

Following his Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (1994) and the Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (2000), the Columbia History of Chinese Literature intends to complement these two widely used readers. Edited by Victor H. Mair, the 55 chapters of this single-volume history of Chinese literature are chronologically arranged with thematic chapters interspersed. Indeed, a closer look at the chapters reveals that the book at hand follows the traditional dictum of wen shi zhe bu fenjia, i.e. that literature, history and philosophy should not be separated but regarded as one field of studies. Hence the scope of this history goes far beyond the scope of what is traditionally subsumed under the heading of literature. In addition to the topics (all genres and periods of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama) that one expects in a book of this sort, wit and humour, proverbs and rhetoric, historical and philosophical writings, classical exegesis, literary theory and criticism, traditional fiction commentary, as well as popular culture, the impact of religion upon literature, the role of women, and the relationship with non-Chinese languages and peoples (ethnic minorities, Korea, Japan, Vietnam) feature as topics of individual chapters.Most of the chapters are written by leading specialists in those areas and are highly informative as well as concisely presented. Moreover, a number of chapters are thought-provoking enough to inspire questions that may lead towards a more focused research on hitherto neglected or less well-documented topics. In this sense, The Columbia History of Chinese Literature may also be perceived as a potential major impetus for further developments in the study of pre-modern and modern Chinese literature and related fields. Since the volume aims at bringing the riches of China's literary tradition into focus for a general readership, the majority of chapters can probably be best described as outlines of specific developments that should encourage readers to consult more specialized publications.

The beginning of 2006 marked two decades since the death of Stana Djuric-Klajn, the first historian of Serbian musical literature. This is the exterior motive for presenting a summary of the state and results of up-to-date musicology research into Serbian musical criticism and essay writings during the XIXth and the first half of the XXth century, alongside the many works dedicated to this branch of national musical history, recently published. In this way the reader is given a detailed background of these studies ? mainly the authors' names, books, studies, articles, as well as the problems of this branch of Serbian musicology. The first research is associated with the early years of the XXth century, that is, to the work of bibliography. The pioneer of Serbian ethnomusicology, Vladimir R. Djordjevic composed An Essay of the Serbian Musical Bibliography until 1914, noting selected XIXth century examples of Serbian literature on music. Bibliographic research was continued by various institutions and experts during the second half of the XXth century: in Zagreb (today Republic of Croatia); the Yugoslav Institute for Lexicography, Novi Sad (Matica srpska); and Belgrade (Institute for Literature and Art, Slobodan Turlakov, Ljubica Djordjevic, Stanisa Vojinovic etc). In spite of the efforts of these institutions and individuals, a complete analytic bibliography of music in Serbian print of the last two centuries has unfortunately still not been made. The most important contributions to historical research, interpretation and validation of Serbian musical criticism and essay writings were given by Stana Djuric-Klajn, Dr Roksanda Pejovic and Dr Slobodan Turlakov. Professor Stana Djuric-Klajn was the first Serbian musicologist to work in this field of Serbian music history. She wrote a significant number of studies and articles dedicated to Serbian musical writers and published their selected readings. Prof. Klajn is the author and editor of the first and only anthology of Serbian musical essay writings. Her student Roksanda Pejovic published two books (along with numerous other factually abundant contributions), where she synthetically presented the history of Serbian criticism and essay writings from 1825 to 1941. Slobodan Turlakov, an expert in Serbian criticism between the World Wars, meritorious researcher and original interpreter, especially examined the reception of music of great European composers (W. A. Mozart, L. v. Beethoven, F. Chopin, G. Verdi, G. Puccini etc) by Serbian musical critics. Serbian musical criticism and essay writings were also the focus of attention of many other writers. The work quotes comments and additions of other musicologists, but also historians of theatre, literature and art philosophers, aestheticians, sociologists, all members of different generations, who worked or still work on the history of the Serbian musical criticism and essay writings. The closing section of the text suggests directions for future research. Firstly, it is necessary to begin integral bibliographical research of texts about music published in our press during the cited period. That is a project of capital significance for national science and culture; realization needs adequate funding, the involvement of many academic experts, and time. Work on bibliography will also enable the collection and publication of sources: books and articles by Serbian music writers who worked before 1945. A separate problem is education of scholars. To study musical literature, a musicologist needs to be knowledgeable about the history of Serbian literature, aesthetic theory, and theatre, national social, political and cultural history, and methodology of literary study. That is why facilities for postgraduate and doctorial studies in musicology are necessary at the Faculties of Philology and Philosophy.

<p>The relevance of referring to Lev Vygotsky's works and discovering the unknowable in them is a natural phenomenon that accompanies brilliant works of science, literature, art, etc. Discoveries are accidental and non-accidental at the same time, so they are either accepted immediately or pass the "corridor" of criticism. The history of the formation of Vygotsky's psychology is also the history of our way of understanding Vygotsky. The aim of the article is to reveal what Lev Vygotsky himself might not have highlighted. We have tried to penetrate into the logic, the scheme of his thinking. It is possible to carry out the reconstruction in different ways, as evidenced by the experience of the world "vygotskopovedeniya". In this article we argue the hypothesis about the logic of triangulation by L.S. Vygotsky. Triangulation acts as a method of analyzing the psyche with the help of "units of analysis of the whole". In our opinion, L. S. Vygotsky analyzed the psyche as a triangular dynamic network. The network structure allows to reveal new, logically substantiated connections between its elements. He constructed a logical "construct" allowing to confirm it empirically. The basis of the network is formed by trinities of mental functions and connections between trinities, when the same function is included in different trinities. A trinity is formed and in it`s development represents a synthesis of the elements forming it. Each mental function is a whole and reflects in itself a larger whole, i.e., the psyche. It is in the structure of the trinity network that this is most clearly traced. The analysis undertaken by L.S. Vygotsky undoubtedly belongs to the post-nonclassical type of scientific rationality.</p>

This paper addresses the theory of knowledge in relativistic terms of Paul Feyerabend, stressing the importance of personal involvement in the research and theorizing. Since the topic is a constant and widely accepted premise the author is insisting that it has been actually ignored in the sociology and philosophy of science. It is apparent in discursive form, neglected in actual consequences for science in general. Defending the thesis of relativism had remained unacknowledged by the general scientific community. Biographies of mavericks and their struggle and exclusion from scientific community etc. had been constant in the history of science. Is science nowadays able to accept criticism and implement arguments of knowledge beyond the institutionalized standards? Throughout this article we argue that personal involvement creates biased scientific facts; acknowledging and applying tacit knowledge we move beyond personal involvement and create appropriate interpretations of facts and phenomena under investigation, where we reconsider the construction of facts and personal beliefs, knowing that our fields of expertise are incommensurable.

The paper is a reflection on the book The New Science of Politics: An Introduction by the German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin. The book is considered as a classic work in the field of the political theory of the 20th century. The first edition of the book was published in 1952, but its Russian translation was only completed in 2021. The author notes that although Voegelin’s thought is clear, the reading of the work may be difficult because Voegelin re-invents the terms that were already established in the scientific field, such as positivism, Gnosticism, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of consciousness, etc. To clarify the thinker’s contribution to political philosophy, the author addresses several studies that describe this contribution. After a brief enumeration of the components of this ‘contribution’, the author discusses how fully these points are reflected in The New Science of Politics. It turns out that although this work is based on six lectures, it contains all the topics of Voegelin’s political theory. The author further clarifies several key terms of the philosopher, and proceeds to the presentation of Voegelin’s concept. This technique makes Voegelin’s political theory crystal clear. Finally, the author turns to the context of “before-Rawls” political theory and briefly describes how the jurist and (later) political scientist Hans Kelsen reacted to Voegelin’s work. The author also analyses the polemics between Hannah Arendt and Voegelin, explaining why Arendt’s reaction to Voegelin’s criticism might seem strange, although it should not be considered as such. He concludes by referring to some excellent assessments of Voegelin’s philosophy, and states that the great hope that Voegelin would become the most important philosopher of the twentieth century did not come true.

The image of ancient Lithuania in Latvian fiction of the first half of the 20th century is usually revealed through works of various genres and uneven artistic quality depicting the ancient history of Latvia and not the history of Lithuania directly. Nearly all such literary pieces are on the tribes that lived in the southern part of Latvia: the Selonians, and especially the Semigallians, whose history is inseparable from Lithuanian history. Unlike the works of 19th-century Latvian authors, 20th-century works no longer depict ancient Lithuanians only in a romantic way, as heroic people that belonged to the same Baltic tribe, but as a powerful and hostile force that threatened the Latvian lands. The image of ancient Lithuania containing the most common historical characteristics prevails; however, it also contains a lot of authorial invention (e.g. the authors write about imaginary “Lithuanian princesses,” or they expand the boundaries of 13th-century Lithuania in an unrealistic way, etc.). The realities of ancient Lithuania, e.g. the historical names and events, are usually presented without any further explanation, which is a sign of an attitude and belief that the reader of the time had sufficient information on the subject.

The paper analyzes Margaret Atwood’s postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels from the psychological perspective of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes and from the perspective of Robert Graves’s mythological figures of the triple goddess presented in his work The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1997). In this regard, the paper focuses on the mythic and psychological roles embodied and played by Atwood’s victimized female protagonists who actively seek their identity and professional self-realization on their path towards personal evolution in the North American patriarchal society of the twentieth century. Thus, they are no longer passive as female characters of the nineteenth-century colonial novels which are centered on the male hero and his colonial adventures. In her postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels, Atwood further introduces elements of folk tales, fairy tales, legends, myths and revives different literary genres, such as a detective story, a crime and historical novel, a gothic romance, a comedy, science fiction, etc. Moreover, she often abuses the conventions of the existing genre and mixes several genres in the same narrative. For instance, her narrative The Penelopiad (2005) is a genre-hybrid novella in which she parodies the Grecian myth of the adventurer Odysseus and his faithful wife Penelope by subverting Homer’s serious epic poem into a witty satire. In addition, the last part of the paper analyzes the author’s cult novel Surfacing (1972 (1984)) according to Joseph Campbell’s and Northrop Frye’s archetypal/myth criticism and it demonstrates that Atwood revises the biblical myth of the hero’s quest and the idealized world of medieval grail romances from the ironic prospective of the twentieth century, as it is typical of postmodernism.

The article deals with the construct of cosmic Christianity in Mircea Eliade's project of the history of religion. Links are established with other concepts of the author, such as creative hermeneutics, homo religiosus, the horror of history, etc. Parallels are also drawn with German Idealism, Protestantism, traditionalism, Jungian psychoanalysis, and conservative-revolutionary thought. The criticism of A. Lenel-Lavastin and D. Dubuisson is drawn upon, arguing that the construct of cosmic Christianity can work within a national-conservative synthesis, so that the nation becomes the guarantor of the purity of church tradition. Eliade's method by which he contrasts cosmic Christianity with Judeo-Christian messianism is discussed. As part of the concept of cosmic Christianity the implicit use of the author's original concept of tradition as a virtual chain of initiations is found. Eliade's assembly is viewed through the lens of P. Berger's social constructivism. It is argued that Berger bases his theory of secularization on Eliade's working definition of religion and concept of cosmization. The metaphysical opposition of Eliade's vital immanentism to Berger's transcendentalism is stated. Immanentism is correlated with the traditional and archetypal folk re-evaluation within cosmic Christianity, transcendentalism with the radical and historical interpretation of the Gospel in Lutheran theology. Eliade's history of religion is characterized as a modernist theory, with inherent qualities of M. such as: a desire for a totalizing worldview, an interest in building a synthetic ideology on the border of archaic myth and scientific knowledge, a sense of the removal of the divine and an acceleration of the end of history. A connection is established between Eliade's theory of religion and the metaphysical framework of the "natural" in Modern science and culture. The reality of the sacred is characterized as a living self-organizing system, and its manifestation as a hierophany of the natural. The conclusion is made that the essentialism and naturalism of such metaphysics do not allow the history of religion to transcend the categories of Modern science and culture, which, according to the author of the article, was the goal of Eliade's project.

Based on the analysis of the published works by M. Varshavchyk, the development of problems of theoretical source studies by scholar is investigated, in particular, methods and methodologies of source science. It is noted that during the entire period of the historian’s scientific work, his vision included issues of organizing the methodological paradigm of historical source studies, and finding ways to form a complex of approaches, principles and methods of criticism of sources, their systematization and analysis. In this article emphasized that many of ideological Soviet content by the scholar’s publications are commitment to the defined policy by the Communist Party, the socialistical way of life and worldview in the Soviet era. However, it is emphasized that the scientific opinion of the scholar, constant attention to the questions about the methodology of history and other theoretical problems of source studies that testify to the powerful work of the historian in his creative laboratory, where these questions were developed for half a century. The evolution of M. Varshavchyk’s scientific views on the formation of a complex theory of methods as a system of knowledge about internal architectures, meaningful content and solving the researcher’s cognitive needs is followed. The analysis of the works of M. Varshavchyk made it possible to establish the structure of the theoretical and methodological principles concluded by himself and their hierarchy, to focus on the definition of the subject and object of source studies, the concepts of «method» and «methodology», classification of methodological principles, etc. The M. Varshavchyk’s approach to the development of the conceptual-categorical apparatus of methodology at source studies, principles and methods of scientific thinking, the main ones of which the scientist considered historical, logical, comparative-historical, retrospective, statistical, method of specific social studies, was clarified. It was established that the scientist developed a phased scheme for working with sources (documents), the process of clarifying their internal connections, grouping sets of documents in order to obtain a set of scientific facts. Among methodological and methodical issues, the scholar emphasized insufficient attention to such problems as discussion of the content of the historical methodology, classification of methodological principles, criticism of documents, etc. It is proved that despite the constant control of the party-nomenclature over the activities of humanitarian scientists, M. Varshavchyk managed to realize his own scientific potential and contribute to the development of problems of methodology and methods of historical source studies.

The author analyzes the multifaceted research, theoretical, and practical activities of A.V. Dukhnovych (1803–1865) – a talented poet, prose writer, publicist, historian, ethnographer, playwright, teacher, publisher, a well-known “Buditel’” (i.e. awakener) of the Carpathian people. The author studies and describes Dukhnovych’s creative heritage to define the main directions of his cultural and educational activities in the fields of philosophy, history, geography, pedagogy, socio-culture, linguistics, theology, ethnography, agriculture, phytotherapy, etc. Dukhnovich was a convinced traditional educator, who sincerely believed that education can significantly alleviate the plight of the masses. He founded educational societies, organized more than 70 elementary schools, published textbooks, almanacs, calendars. He supported several gymnasiums in Subcarpathian Rus, where teaching was conducted in Russian. Dukhnovich established a scholarship fund for poor pupils and students, organized free cafeterias, etc. The analysis of his epistolary, autobiographical materials, and works of fiction provide an insight into the socio-political and cultural life of the Rusins in the middle of the 19th century. Dukhnovich’s creative heritage includes the first “Primer” for public schools (“Reading Book for Beginners” (1847)); the first textbooks on geography (“A Short Landpiece for Young Rusins” (1851)); history (“General History for Young Rusins” (1851), “The True History of the Carpathossians, or Hungarian Rusins” (1853)); the ethnographic work “On the Peoples of the Extreme or Ugric Carpathians, living near the Beskid in the Zemplínska, Uzhhorod and Sharisha capitals” (1848); “Abridged Grammar of the Written Russian language” (1853); “Folk Pedagogy for the Benefit of Rural Teachers” (1857), which was the first textbook on pedagogy in Western Ukraine published in Lvov; “Menology” (1850, 1851, 1854, 1857), other teaching manuals, articles, poetic works, dumas, and plays. His poem “Vruchanie” became the national anthem of Ugrian Rus. As a democratic educator, he convinced many that the active national and cultural life of the Rusins fully depends on the dissimination of education among the people to bring up the younger generation in the vein of virtue and national dignity. By his personal example, Dukhnovich lead people to spiritual dimensions and influences the worldview and patriotism of the intelligentsia in Subcarpathian Rus. He made a significant contribution to the education of the people, laid the foundations for many cultural and educational societies in Subcarpathian Rus in the 19th century and later – not only in his native land, but also far beyond its borders.

Ivan Porfirevich Filevich (August 20 (September 1), 1856 – January 7 (20), 1913) – a Russian historian, publicist, and public figure, born in Chełm Land to the family of a Uniate priest, a native of Galicia, Orthodox. He graduated from St. Petersburg University, later taught Russian language, literature, and history at the First Realschule and at the Gymnasium of the Imperial Philanthropic Society in St. Petersburg. Since 1890, he worked at the Department of Russian History at the Imperial Warsaw University, first as an extra-ordinary professor, and since 1897 as an ordinary professor. His origin predetermined his interest in the history of Carpathian Rus, in particular Galicia and Chełm Land, and its population. In 1890, he received a Master’s degree for his work “The Struggle of Poland and Lithuania-Rus for the Galician-Vladimir Legacy”. In 1897, he defended his doctoral degree at Kazan University on “History of Ancient Rus. Territory and Population”. He frequently travelled across Carpathian Rus. Having retired in 1908, he devoted himself to journalistic and social activities. Ivan Filevich authored monographs: “The Struggle of Poland and Lithuania-Rus for the Galicia-Vladimir Legacy. Historical Sketches” (1890) and “History of Ancient Rus. Territory and Population” (1896), as well as numerous studies, among which were: “A Forgotten Corner” (1881), “Ugric Rus and Related Issues and Tasks of Russian Historical Science” (1894), “Sketch of the Carpathian Territory and Population” (1895), “On the development of geographical nomenclature” (1899), “Concerning the theory of two Russian nationalities” (1902), “The question of two Russian nationalities and ‘Kievan Antiquity’” (1902), “Carpathian Rus on the eve of the 20th century” (1905), “From the History of Carpathian Rus. Essays on Galician-Russian Life Since 1772 (1848–1866)” (1907) etc. Many of his minor materials (criticism and bibliographies) were published in Izvestia of the St. Petersburg Slavic Charitable Society, Slavic Review, Journal of the Ministry of Public Education, Warsaw University News, etc. In his last years, Filevich was actively involved in social and journalistic activities, popularizing scientific knowledge and informing readers about Western Russian, especially Chełm and Polish issues. His articles were published mainly in Novoye Vremya. He drew up notes and historical references for the development of legislative proposals on the Chełm and presented historical, statistical, and economic materials in the Duma commission on the separation of Chełm. Filevich managed to see the results of his work. The law “On the formation of Chełm province from the eastern parts of the Lublin and Sedletsk provinces, with its removal from the administration of the Warsaw Governor-General” was approved on June 23 (July 6) 1912. However, in fact, the province was officially opened on September 8, 1913, after I.P. Filevich’s death.

The issue of the journal opens with an article dedicated to the formation of metrology as government regulated activity in France. The article has discussed the historical process of development of metrological activity in France. It was revealed that the history of metrology is considered as an auxiliary historical and ethnographic discipline from a social and philosophical point of view as the evolution of scientific approaches to the definition of individual units of physical quantities and branches of metrology. However, in the scientific literature, the little attention is paid to the process of a development of a centralized institutional metrology system that is the organizational basis for ensuring the uniformity of measurements. The article by Irena Grebtsova and Maryna Kovalska is devoted to the of the development of the source criticism’s knowledge in the Imperial Novorossiya University which was founded in the second half of the XIX century in Odesa. Grounding on a large complex of general scientific methods, and a historical method and source criticism, the authors identified the stages of the formation of source criticism in the process of teaching historical disciplines at the university, what they based on an analysis of the teaching activities of professors and associate professors of the Faculty of History and Philology. In the article, the development of the foundations of source criticism is considered as a complex process, which in Western European and Russian science was the result of the development of the theory and practice of everyday dialogue between scientists and historical sources. This process had a great influence on the advancement of a historical education in university, which was one of the important factors in the formation of source studies as a scientific discipline. The article by Tetiana Malovichko is devoted to the study of what changes the course of the probability theory has undergone from the end of the 19th century to our time based on the analysis of The Theory of Probabilities textbook by Vasyl P. Ermakov published in 1878. The paper contains a comparative analysis of The Probability Theory textbook and modern educational literature. The birth of children after infertility treatment of married couples with the help of assisted reproductive technologies has become a reality after many years of basic research on the physiology of reproductive system, development of oocyte’s in vitro fertilization methods and cultivation of embryos at pre-implantation stages. Given the widespread use of assisted reproductive technologies in modern medical practice and the great interest of society to this problem, the aim of the study authors from the Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was to trace the main stages and key events of assisted reproductive technologies in the world and in Ukraine, as well as to highlight the activities of outstanding scientists of domestic and world science who were at the origins of the development of this area. As a result of the work, it has been shown that despite certain ethical and social biases, the discovery of individual predecessor scientists became the basis for the efforts of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe to ensure birth of the world's first child, whose conception occurred outside the mother's body. There are also historical facts and unique photos from our own archive, which confirm the fact of the first successful oocyte in vitro fertilization and the birth of a child after the use of assisted reproductive technologies in Ukraine. In the next article, the authors tried to consider and structure the stages of development and creation of the “Yermak”, the world's first Arctic icebreaker, and analyzed the stages of preparation and the results of its first expeditions to explore the Arctic. Systematic analysis of historical sources and biographical material allowed to separate and comprehensively consider the conditions and prehistory for the development and creation of “Yermak” icebreaker. Also, the authors gave an assessment to the role of Vice Admiral Stepan Osypovych Makarov in those events, and analyzed the role of Sergei Yulyevich Witte, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev and Pyotr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shansky in the preparation and implementation of the first Arctic expeditions of the “Yermak”icebreaker. The authors of the following article considered the historical aspects of construction and operation of train ferry routes. The article deals with the analysis and systematization of the data on the historical development of train ferry routes and describes the background for the construction of train ferry routes and their advantages over other combined transport types. It also deals with the basic features of the train ferries operating on the main international train ferry routes. The study is concerned with both sea routes and routes across rivers and lakes. The article shows the role of train ferry routes in the improvement of a national economy, and in the provision of the military defense. An analysis of numerous artefacts of the first third of the 20th century suggests that the production of many varieties of art-and-industrial ceramics developed in Halychyna, in particular architectural ceramic plastics, a variety of functional ceramics, decorative tiles, ceramic tiles, facing tiles, etc. The artistic features of Halychyna art ceramics, the richness of methods for decorating and shaping it, stylistic features, as well as numerous art societies, scientific and professional associations, groups, plants and factories specializing in the production of ceramics reflect the general development of this industry in the first half of the century and represent the prerequisites the emergence of the school of professional ceramics in Halychyna at the beginning of the 20th century. The purpose of the next paper is to analyze the formation and development of scientific and professional schools of art-and-industrial ceramics of Halychyna in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. During the environmental crisis, electric transport (e-transport) is becoming a matter for scientific inquiry, a subject of discussion in politics and among public figures. In the program for developing the municipal services of Ukraine, priorities are given to the development of the infrastructure of ecological transport: trolleybuses, electric buses, electric cars. The increased attention to e-transport on the part of the scientific community, politicians, and the public actualizes the study of its history, development, features of operation, etc. The aim of the next study is to highlight little-known facts of the history of production and operation of MAN trolleybuses in Ukrainian cities, as well as to introduce their technical characteristics into scientific circulation. The types, specific design solutions of the first MAN trolleybus generation and the prerequisites for their appearance in Chernivtsi have been determined. Particular attention has been paid to trolleybuses that were in operation in Germany and other Western European countries from the first half of the 1930s to the early 1950s. The paper traces the stages of operation of the MAN trolleybuses in Chernivtsi, where they worked during 1939–1944 and after the end of the Second World War, they were transferred to Kyiv. After two years of operation in the Ukrainian capital, the trolleybuses entered the routes in Dnipropetrovsk during 1947–1951. The purpose of the article by authors from the State University of Infrastructure and Technologies of Ukraine is to thoroughly analyze unpaved roads of the late 18th – early 19th century, as well as the project of the first wooden trackway as the forerunner of the Bukovyna railways. To achieve this purpose, the authors first reviewed how railways were constructed in the Austrian Empire during 1830s – 1850s. Then, in contrast with the first railway networks that emerged and developed in the Austrian Empire, the authors made an analysis of the condition and characteristics of unpaved roads in Bukovyna. In addition, the authors considered the first attempt to create a wooden trackway as a prototype and predecessor of the Bukovyna railway.

The article analyses the task of measuring completeness, representativeness, and balance when creating a corpus of Russian-language texts on Slavic literature. The criteria for a disciplinary corpus can be calculated using a bibliometric and scientometric approaches. Different categories of historical knowledge can denote phenomena comparable to the themes and problems of research in Slavic studies. A total of 76 historical categories have been tested (historical analogy, historical memory, historical possibility, historical time, historical personality, etc.). All historical categories associated with Slavic studies or with Rusins have been ranked according to the frequency of search results of full-text resources in scholar.google.ru and academia.edu. The following indicators have been identified and analysed: representation of Slavic studies in a number of other regional studies disciplines; joint occurrence of various linguistic disciplines with Slavic studies; correlation and distribution of the category of historical knowledge in texts with Slavic themes. The author has studied the frequency distribution of the connection between historical categories and Slavic studies and shown the specificity of the influence of Slavic subjects on different categories and functioning of historical consciousness in the Slavic academic community. He concludes that corpus balance can be considered at four levels within the possibility of creating: 1) a philological corpus with texts in various areas of linguistics and literary criticism; 2) a historiographic corpus with historical texts of various themes and genres in one language; 3) a regional corpus with texts on various regional disciplines; 4) a disciplinary corpus only on the subject of Slavic studies.

The subject of the article: works of contemporary art created by non-human agents, on the example of which one can analyze the ways of interaction of contemporary artists with non-trivial media (algorithms, robots, "half-life artists", etc.). The object of the article: the impact of technological innovations on contemporary art production, as well as the need, in connection with the artist's appeal to science and the latest technologies, to rethink the goals and objectives of communication through images and the very concept of art. The purpose of the project: to update the information for the scientific world about the strategies of interaction between a human artist and a non-human agent, as well as about the nature of this interaction. Results of the work: the study showed that the creation of a work of art (both physical and as part of a post-production strategy, as a re-significance) – despite the criticism of anthropocentrism by representatives of the Actor-Network Theory and individual media theorists, should still be understood as purposeful activity inherent in a human, but not in a non-human agent. Appeal to non-human agents can be considered within the framework of the paradigm of "assistive technologies" and "chimerical" actor. Scope of the results: expanding the boundaries of the application of art history methodology and related disciplines, which contributes to the development of a language for describing the phenomena of contemporary art in the interdisciplinary field of modern media, in particular, in the dynamically developing field of art & science. Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, key trends were identified that determine the nature of our interaction with the other in the process of creating a work of art and interacting with it.

I was very excited to get my hands on what was promising to be a magnificent and extremely helpfulHandbook of Rhetorical Studies, and my expectations were matched – and exceeded! This handbook contains no less than sixty contributions written by eminent experts and is divided into six parts. Each section opens with a brief orientation essay, tracing the development of rhetoric in a specific period, and is followed by individual chapters which are organized thematically. Part I contains eleven chapters on ‘Greek Rhetoric’, and the areas covered are law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, poetics, tragedy, Old Comedy, Plato, Aristotle, and closing with the Sophists. Part II contains thirteen chapters on ‘Ancient Roman Rhetoric’, which similarly covers law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, and the Second Sophistic, and adds Stoic philosophy, epic, lyric address, declamation, fiction, music and the arts, and Augustine to the list of topics. Part III, on ‘Medieval Rhetoric’, covers politics, literary criticism, poetics, and comedy; Part IV, on the Renaissance contains chapters on politics, law, pedagogy, science, poetics, theatre, and the visual arts. Part V consists of seven essays on the early modern and Enlightenment periods and is decidedly Britano-centric: politics, gender in British literature, architecture, origins of British Enlightenment rhetoric, philosophy (mostly British, too), science, and the elocutionary movement in Britain. With Chapter 45 we arrive at the modern age section (Part VI), with two chapters on feminism, one on race, and three on the standard topics (law, political theory, science), grouped together with those on presidential politics, New Testament studies, argumentation, semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, social epistemology, and environment, and closing with digital media. The volume also contains a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms. As the editor states in his Introduction, the aim of the volume is not only to provide a comprehensive history of rhetoric, but also to enable those interested in the role of rhetoric in specific disciplines or genres, such as law or theatre and performance, to easily find those sections in respective parts of the book and thus explore the intersection of rhetoric with one specific field in a chronological sequence.

The article represents the history and modernity of philological scholarship in Kuban State University, the oldest university of classical education in the south of Russia, which has been preserving and developing the traditions in the sphere of education, science and social and educational activity since 1920. The authors describe the principal directions of philology development at the faculty: teaching Russian language and literature, academic research work in the field of literary studies, the history of Russian literature from its beginning up to present times, including literature of Russian expatriate community, literature of the peoples of Russia, literary regional studies, literary criticism, folklore studies, etc. One of the main directions of the research activities which the scholars have chosen is the search and comparison of the universal and nationally specific in the works of foreign and Russian poetry and prose. The problems of contemporary Russian language are discussed in the research and development project “Russian language potential”. The scholars of Kuban State University devote a lot of attention to studying Russian language from the perspective of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, cross-cultural communication, sociolinguistics, terminology studies, discourse theory. The leading idea of scholarly interests of professors and associate professors is the theme of “Linguoaxiology”, revealing a valuable component of Russian language unit and Russian discourse field. It’s necessary to point out that the research of linguistic and methodological basic training of Russian as а Foreign language/Russian as Non-Native language, the training of specialists in this field, questions of linguo-didactic testing in Krasnodar region are carried out only at the department of Russian as а Foreign language at the Kuban State University. The scholars deal with the description of the semantics of Russian language, study the regional cultural component of onomastics and problems of language policy. The development and teaching of Russian as а foreign language are also aimed at the perception of the uniqueness of Russian civilization. Russian philology on the 45th parallel is trying to preserve and develop the world of the Russian word, and the Russian world as a concept containing natural bounds of language, mentality and culture.

Counterfactualism is used in interdisciplinary fields such as philosophy, logic, psychology, history, child development, and linguistics. Counterfactualism enters the empirical study of the philosophy of language. In linguistics, counterfactuals are conditional sentences that cannot be implemented. In philosophy, impossible, counterfactual worlds are increasingly being discussed and thought experiments are being carried out with them. It is necessary to extend the theory of possible worlds to real, concrete, but impossible worlds. Conditional counterfactuals are expressions used with sentences that contradict facts, deliberately saying things you don’t know, and standing in the verbal mood: “If it were summer now, I would live in a hot country” (this month is not summer, but I I don’t live in a hot country. Such words are widely used both in everyday life and in science (for example, in thought experiments) and fiction. In recent years, in the works of historians and linguists, the constructions “If there were ... then ...” have become especially common. “Alternative date”, “experimental date”, “virtual date”, “fail date”, etc. There are many studies published on this topic. This study will discuss the functions and syntax of sentences with contradiction in Kazakh and Turkish. According to the data, the Kazakh novel by Ilyas Esenberlin “Koshpendiler II Zhantalas” and its translation into Turkish, the novel “Göchebeler - II Jan Chekishme”, whose translator is Abdulvahap Kara, Ismail Dogan, Murat Aydinly, will be reviewed and counterfactual expressions will be found. The classification developed by Uzyum (2020; 123) using research by Lyons (1977), Deklerk (2011) and Kumakiri (2013) will be used as a method. For example, in Kazakh the past tense is conjugated with edi, in Turkish the main sentence conjugated with eğer, keşke has a counterfactual reading. The study gives definitions and classifications of conditional sentences of counterfactuals, counterfactual expressions of wishes and other counterfactual statements, conditional sentences in the Kazakh-Turkish language, with examples, the use of conventional designations and the meaning of these word usages.

The International Tchaikovsky Competition has been held for sixty years and has become a tradition with an intention to renew itself. An essential aspect of this is the webcast, which, being performed at the highest level, not only develops the established democratic orientation of this competition, but makes the competition a relatively independent artistic event. The empirical base of the research is Internet broadcasting of XV and XVI competitions. Method – a comparative analysis, performed in the context of cultural knowledge. The article analyzes the features of the modern Internet broadcast of the competition, which distinguish it from previous TV and Internet broadcasts. The specific difficulties of shooting musical events related to their duration and the static of what is happening, as well as the resources that were used by the director and operators of "Medici.tv" in the creative solution of these problems, were understood. It is shown that the perception of the online broadcast of the competition is not inferior in terms of artistic criteria to the impression that the listener who attends the concert receives, but this is a different impression, not canceling, but supplementing the traditional one. On this basis, the conclusion is formed that the Internet broadcasting enriches the artistic culture. It provides the audience with new opportunities for creative perception of an artistic work. In addition, the webcast allows the art critic to carry out research on the phenomena of the performing arts at a fundamentally different level, to increase the degree of reliability of the knowledge gained. Previously, the theory of performing arts relied on an unreliable empirical research base: a single viewing and listening to a concert version of a work and memories of it. Webcasting allows multiple viewing and listening, verification of the findings, including through the use of computer programs, which allows one to overcome the degree of subjectivity that is unacceptable for science, which is inevitably present in art criticism, based on the empirical experience of a researcher attending a concert, protects against the accidents of perception that lie in wait for the listener in the concert hall. And the theory of performance objectively becomes on a par with other branches of art history - the theory of painting, architecture, musicology, studying musical notation, etc. The webcast changed the status of the Tchaikovsky Competition. Initially, in 1958, it was conceived and implemented as, first of all, a socio-political event, marking the beginning of the period of the "policy of openness" pursued by the leadership of our country. Thanks to the webcast, the competition has become a completely self-sufficient event - it exists as a “piece of art”, which you can which can be enjoyed again and again, just as we re-read works of classical literature over and over again.

The study of Bosniak literature in the period of the Independent State of Croatia has been marginalized in previous literary-historical studies, and the reasons for this were ideological and political in nature, and not scientific. This work deals with the status of Bosniak literature in the literary-critical horizons of Vladimir Jurčić, the bellwether of the Ustasha national ideology in Bosnia and Sarajevo, in the period from 1941st to 1945th. As a professor, editor of daily and periodical publications, he wrote about Bosniak literature and its canonical writers in the light of the ideological and political worldviews. He propagated theses about socio-political function of literature that extends „people's spirit”, „racial-biological” and „national” features. Jurčić attributed to literature a mediating role in transmitting the deep identity of the Croatian people, and developing a thesis on the Croatian national identity of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) he treated Bosniak writers as the most representative reflectors of Croatian national consciousness in Bosnia. In addition to individual studies on Bosniak writers, Jurčić stated that they were separate units of the unpublished book Muslims in Croatian Literature. Jurčić's literary critical habitus is a product of socio-political and intellectual circumstances in Croatia - in the narrower sense and in the SHS - in the broader sense, which were used as a starting point for the production of certain ideological, political and cultural values in the NDH. As a follower of the ideological platform of Radić's HSS (peasant movement) and its reflections on discursive practices, especially in the social - humanities sciences (Dvorniković, Radić, Tomašić, Lukas), he interpreted literature in accordance with these practices, reducing its meaning only to ruling ideologues. He valorized Bosniak literature as a component of Croatian literature, applying several criteria: collective, linguistic, territorial and religious, which he sought to include the widest possible range of identity features and thus support the thesis of Croatianness Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). In literary criticism, he promoted theses on racial, ethical and eugenic superiority, then on the national spirit, linguistic and stylistic specifics of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) as an „organic“ part of the Croatian people. He emphasized the „poljodjelski“ character of Bosniak writers between the two world wars, while in older literature, especially in the oral literary tradition- and all that for need of ideological manipulation in the time of the Independent State of Croatia - war, he emphasized the highland (tribal) character that manifested itself in the epic-agonal consciousness. All these theses arose from the idea of unity and continuity of the „organic nation“, but did not find a stronghold in Bosnia because it was cultural and historical terms different from the native Croatian space, which was in principle a fundamental obstacle to its realization. Aware of the insurmountability of the cultural, literary and historical uniqueness of Bosnia, Jurčić constructed and established the literary-historical construct „literary Bosnia“ which was based on the theory of the history of regional / provincial literature. By „literary Bosnia“ he meant everything that was its „provincial features“: folk history, genealogy, specific speech (dialect - ikavica), lifestyle (Muslims), and the canonical line consisted of Bosniak writers from Safvet-bega Bašagić, Musa Ćazim Ćatić, Edhem Mulabdić, Ahmed Muradbegović, to Alija Nametk, Enver Čolaković, Murat Šuvalić etc.Since in this period the pretensions towards Bosnia and Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) were also part of the Serbian national ideology, Jurčić's „literary Bosnia“ can be understood as a counterbalance to the then established Kršić's literary-historical construct „narrative Bosnia“. Unlike Kršić's „narrative Bosnia“, whose canonical line was mostly made up of Bosnian Serb writers (Ćorović, Kočić, Andrić, Ćopić, etc.), Jurčić's „literary Bosnia“ was made up of Bosniak writers as „the purest element of the Croatian people“.

The article examines the development of narratology from its inception to the latest trends, showing the crisis of discipline and the prospects for the future progress. Within structuralism and semiotics ‘narrative’ was one of the study fields uncovering ‘deep structure’. The quest for universal categories determined the ambition of structural narratology as a discipline, with the help of the description reducing narrative structure to the combination of formal elements. In the article Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits by Roland Barthes that was published in the journal Communications 8 in 1966, the understanding of the narrative did not confine to literary narratives alone, but it became an object of research for structural narratology. Comprehension of the structure of text within narratology was influenced by the binary model of the sign offered by Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as latest discoveries in linguistics that were discussed and incorporated in the literary theory during the 1950s and 1960s. Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp is one of the milestones in the context of classical narratology, analysing the narrative as a grammatical system. Selecting 100 Russian folktales as a research object, Propp described their general structure and regularities, demonstrating the limited number of elements that were used, and offered the classification after morphological parameters. French structuralists later on hastily applied these features to the analysis of literary narrative, but it should be noted that the universal model of plot proposed by Propp illustrates primitive narratives where reiteration has a functional dimension by transmitting texts. Although primitive narratives follow a certain scheme, the basic units of the narrative demonstrate universal phenomenon. It was soon realized by the structuralists. Mutual emulation created a series of theoretical constructions seeking for the smallest narrative unit, most comprehensive explanation of the concept of narrative, venturously offering an arsenal with new concepts in order to make the description process more accurate. Gérard Genette replaced the binary opposition of story/fable that was adopted from formalists with the three-part model, thus offering new perspectives on the temporality and the point of view in the analysis of literary text. Decentralized approach to knowledge of Post-Structuralism, as well as interest in ideologies, marginalized and the other, contributed to the crisis of formal approach in narratology. A new challenge was also presented by more complicated types of literary narratives—often atopic, atemporal, fragmented. Particular importance in the crisis of structural narratology was the idea of “grand narratives”—a term introduced by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his significant book La condition postmodern: rapport sur le savoir (1979). Although Lyotard’s study is dedicated to science, universal statements more widely influenced culture studies and the development of literary theory. In the context of narratology Lyotard contributed to a double ‘fracture’. First, the quest for narrative structure turned out to be not only intractable, but also abstract, because of the lack of the context. Second, “small narratives” came to the forefront, thus emphasizing the other and marginal, for instance, gender, race, social class, etc. This shift of interest from structure to context was termed by David Herman as the postclassical phase in narratology that initially sought to divest from the overwhelming heritage of structuralism, interacting more with gender and postcolonial studies as well as with the New Historicism and anthropological theories. In the coming decades the denial of structural heritage is softened. The expanded criticism that was carried out by post-structuralists contributed not only to a new theory influx in the narrative research, but also hybridisation. The change of focus marked rather radical rearrangement of interest in narratology, switching from the systemic view of literary functions to the analysis of context and cognitive poetics. Narratology nowadays is not evading from the epistemic polimodality of the text that rejects the categories of neutral and universal. On the contrary, the various theoretical ramifications demonstrate avoidance of creating generalized concepts and new supertheories.

THE POETRY AND MUSIC OF SCIENCE: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art by Tom McLeish. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 414 pages. Paperback; $16.95. ISBN: 9780192845375. *In this tour-de-force book, British physicist Tom McLeish finally comprehensively argues, in one dense volume, what so many scientists have been claiming piecemeal for centuries: that doing science often looks and feels like doing art. That is a broad, amorphous statement, of course, and scientists have not done a very good job of fully understanding this idea or selling it to the rest of the world. This carefully crafted volume must be the most exhaustive work in this area, treating the notion that the creative work of scientists and artists is extraordinarily similar, in that they both fundamentally involve an intimate passion for describing and representing the world around us. *This is not a book about beauty or wonder in science, but rather it examines how scientific ideas and theories come to a scientist's mind and find fruition as publishable science. The entire book juxtaposes literature and art with science and mathematics to help understand the creative process. One important impetus for writing the book, according to McLeish, was recent evidence that smart, capable high schoolers in England were choosing not to go into science because they believed it would not be nearly as fulfilling, creatively, when compared to work in the arts or humanities. McLeish, a Christian, succeeds in this book in showing that not only is creative thinking and experimenting necessary and "part of the chase" in science, but that it is also a natural fulfillment of our creative mandate as human beings made in the image of God. McLeish is also careful to give examples of "more-regular" science, rather than relying solely on the popular accounts of the creativity of exceptional geniuses; he trys to show that all scientists participate in this artistic-like creativity no matter what they are studying. *The first two chapters introduce the concepts of creativity and inspiration in science. McLeish begins an interaction with several important works that he draws on throughout the book: William Beveridge's The Art of Scientific Investigation from 1950, Henry James's The Art of the Novel, and Howard Gardner's 1993 work Creating Minds (one of many surveys of particularly creative individuals). Chapter 3, "Seeing the Unseen," is about visual imagination and its role in theory creation, artistic design, and general problem solving. Visual imagination is seeing things in the mind's eye, but it is obviously linked to actual sight and seeing the world, too. Surveying the history of thought in this area, McLeish ranges from Plato to Gregory of Nyssa, to the thirteenth-century polymath Robert Grosseteste, to the Italian painter Giotto, to Einstein, who said his theory creation and problem solving started with visual images in his mind, which often led to his famous gedanken experiments. Grosseteste is one of the main interlocutors for McLeish throughout the book, being an exemplar of someone having a broad view of thought and creative exploration, not just compartmentalizing a premodern understanding of the physical world from his theological and philosophical commitments. *Chapters 4 through 6 sequentially juxtapose each of the three main areas of scientific work (experiment, theory, and mathematics) with their natural counterpart in literature and music. Experimental science is akin to writing a novel (!?) in that both set up artificial worlds that are tested against the real world and help illuminate the real world. Theoretical science is akin to writing poetry, in that both re-imagine the universe within fixed constraints: poetry within a certain shaping but constraining form, and theoretical visions of what goes on "under" the natural world constrained by a necessary conformity to that world. Chapter 6 compares mathematical creativity with composing and listening to music--the two "wordless" human endeavors in the world of the abstract. *The book is ultimately a treatise on creativity, and as such applies not just to science and art, but to all human endeavors that require creativity. In the final two chapters (7 and 8), McLeish develops what he describes as an "Ur-narrative of creative experience." Starting with a four-step creative process taken from Graham Wallas's 1926 work The Art of Thought, he adds in three more important stages that emerge from his analyses. The seven steps are: vision, desire, industry, constraint, incubation, illumination, and verification. (McLeish has added in desire, industry, and constraint, along with switching Wallas's ideation to vision.) Chapter 7 deals with emotion and drive in scientific creation, and chapter 8 ponders the purpose of human creativity, the telos that ultimately drives scientists and artists to such great lengths in pursuing their creative work. McLeish brings the imago Dei front and center, drawing on the two great hymns in the Book of Job, "Voice from the Whirlwind" (Job 38-42) and "Hymn to Wisdom" (Job 28), as guides to understanding the creative impulse to understand creation. In this he draws on his previous volume with Oxford, Faith and Wisdom in Science. *I believe that listing all the scientific works that McLeish describes in detail with regard to the creative elements behind the works is a good way to convey the magisterial scope of this intellectually rich book. Topics that get 2-10 pages each of description include Feynman's theory of beta decay, McLeish's own considerable contribution to viscous flow in branched polymer melts and his idea of entropically based allostery in biology, Belgian scientist Jan Vermant's work in mesoscale properties of "living matter" (which involves cellular-based material science), "collective phenomenon" and its original invocation by Pierre Weiss in 1907 to explain ferromagnetism, the centuries-long premodern controversy over the nature of sight (intromissive vs. extramissive, etc.), the recent evidence of a star being destroyed by a black hole, Boyle's contributions to the founding of modern experimental science, Alexander von Humboldt's important contributions to the value of a wholistic, multilevel vision of nature and science, Emmy Noether's astonishing discovery of the theoretical origin of conservation laws in physics, the discovery of the all-important fluctuation-dissipation theorem over 30 years (inaugurated by Einstein in 1905, applied to electrical noise by Nyquist in 1928, and fully generalized by Callen and Welton in 1951), the recent development at Caltech of a jet fuel polymer additive that greatly inhibits explosions of jet fuel (motivated in part by the horror of the fuel explosions on 9/11), and finally the full discovery of what causes rainbows by Theodoric in ca. 1310. The descriptions of these historic achievements are each fascinating in their own right and very readable--they alone, for me, would justify an investment in this book. When they are paired with a similar creative work from art, poetry, or fiction, the juxtaposition is extremely fruitful, though the philosophical/psychological analyses get much denser. *Many other discoveries are given much shorter treatment (less than one page), including Andrew Wile's solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, Dirac's mathematical discovery of spin and anti-matter, Poincaré's discovery of a new class of Fuchsian functions, Royer's recent proof of the Gaussian Correlation Inequality in statistics, and Heisenberg on discovering quantum matrix mechanics. The explorations into artistic and literary creativity are typically much shorter, but are nearly as numerous; they include a painting conceptually representing a string-quartet performance by English artist Graeme Willson, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Robert Schumann's orchestral work Konzertstück, and Picasso's masterpiece Guernica. *At nearly four hundred pages, this is not light reading and takes some patience and time to get through. It is written at a very high level of sophistication, and therefore one is often "bogged down" trying to make complete sense of what one is reading. (However, if one is not writing a review of the book, one need not spend quite so much time disentangling every dense sentence to get the main gist of the passages.) Also difficult are the many references to previous parts of the book. While these references are entirely appropriate, they are quite demanding of the reader given the sheer number of names and amount of material covered. I had to do quite a bit of flipping back and forth, checking the index to remember exactly what so-and-so said that is now being referenced 100 pages later. In other words, this is a thoroughly academic text. *This is a revised edition of the book, which was first published in 2019. The overwhelming positive response, according to the new preface, prompted the author to immediately answer some of the initial reviews and friendly critiques, which I believe made the book quite a bit better (initially there was not nearly as much about poetry; the comparison of poetry with theoretical science now became a separate chapter, enabling McLeish to more logically and thoroughly cover the territory he had staked out). McLeish sadly died very recently (February 2023) at age 60, while holding the newly created chair in Natural Philosophy at University of York. He was a lay preacher in the Anglican Church and a Fellow of the Royal Society. *Reviewed by Peter Walhout, Chemistry Department, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. 60187.

Dievturība (dievturi - "God keepers", "people who live in harmony with God") is a newly created religious tradition having appeared in the second part of the 1920s – 1930s, its most essential source includes materials of Latvian folklore and folk traditions. These are interpreted by construing a religious ethical theory and creating a religion which is alternative to Christianity, with its own doctrine and rituals, and the conception of Latvianness in culture and politics. Latvianness is the most essential concept of cultural politics to which all activities of the dievturi are subjected (exaltation, family celebrations (krustabas, vedības (marriage), bedības (funeral)) as well as seasonal rituals, cultural historical excursions, tidying and spiritual restoration of the sacral sites (sacred places, castle mounds), folklore activities, article publications in mass media, summer thematic camps in the countryside marked by intensive mastering and cultivation of history and culture, celebration of Latvian public holidays and the most important remembrance days. Contemporary dievturi groups are seeking for new ideas in order to develop and popularize their conceptions, which can partly be characterized as a cultural political programme for theoretical (doctrine) and practical (exaltations, ceremonies, seasonal rituals) realization of Latvianness and its components. Within this publication, creativity means the system of ideas and values that promotes the development and perspectives of dievturi groups as well as includes them into a wider cultural political environment thus performing a culture-creating job. A special attention is paid to the essential ideas and values guiding the creativity of contemporary Latvian dievturi groups, making ample use of storyteller habitus, thus intentionally allowing the domination of group participant discourse. The two main directions of dievturi group participant creativity are the development of their doctrine (teaching) and the ritual practice (exaltations). These directions allow to attract wide attention of the society and mass media, new participants and supporters, to influence the political and cultural processes in Latvia. An important part in the doctrinal reflections of the dievturi, especially in the ritual practice (exaltations), has always been taken by Latvian literature writings. A selective choice of these supplement the textual canon of the dievturi continuing the tradition in line with “the mood of Latvian folk songs” and attributing a more modern shape and world outlook concepts to dievturi undertakings. The aim of an exaltation is always associated with the main cultural political concept of the dievturi – Latvianness, namely, to make Latvianness more active, to offer an opportunity to approach Latvianness, make efforts for deeper comprehension of it, being aware and living through it, although thematically it may be dedicated to separate components of Latvianness (people, land, language, God, Māra, Laima, work, virtues, human life, and the like). Also, the most essential ideas and values of dievturība – gender equality, domesticity, antiglobalism, ecology, traditional marriage formula, life style and appearance, environment (for example, use of Latvian language), music, art and literature priorities (classical and/or national music, use of local building materials and ornaments (all ornaments have been observed in Latvia’s nature), writers, poets and playwrights who most precisely depict the “Latvian spirit” – derive from folk songs and the cultural concepts deriving thereof. Activity in the field of Latvianness (ethnicity conception) is in accord with the activity in favour of the future of the Latvian people, symbolical non-forgetting of culture correspond to generating of culture. This attributes a political and social dimension to the cultural activity of dievturi. Dievturība does not perform an official cultural politics of cultural values, heritage, traditions etc., this is a task for politicians; however, it is at least a marginal participant of the cultural political sphere. Placing ethnicity, or the Latvian discourse, at the centre of cultural politics encompasses the range of further impact when the seeming encapsulation within the margins of culture are replaced by reflections on Latvian economy, guidelines in education and science, health care system, axiological juxtaposition of the countryside and city. Also, the evaluation and criticism of the activity of the Christian Church by the dievturi is connected with the conception of Latvianness. Dievturi strongly disclaim Christianity and any chance of mutual cooperation (and also vice versa), protest against its monopoly position in Latvian society, consider Christianity a historically alien religion having been forced upon Latvians and demanding the status of a traditional religion in Latvia also for dievturība including, for example, the right to wed, to celebrate religious festivals. The results of field research do not allow to speak about dievturība today as a strong and united manifestation of Latvian religious experience and way of life. Rather, it is possible to register (after the decline of the movement at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s) a quite consistent and sufficiently active revival which is connected with the appearance of new persons and creative ideas among Latvian dievturi. The future events depend on the fact whether dievturi themselves would be able to solve the protracted inner inconsistencies and find a uniting grounds for further development of the movement. The article is based on the study results obtained during the 2006–2008 field research carried out in dievturi groups (interviews with group leaders, participants and individual representatives, transcripts of audio and video materials). The study was carried out with the financial support of the project “Society and lifestyles” and using its accepted methods – ethnographic description, semi-structured interviews and methods of visual anthropology (photography, filming) and instructions by the Ethical Commission (for example use of assumed names for storytellers).

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

In August 2006 the LiveJournal (hereafter LJ) community sga_flashfic posted its bimonthly challenge: a “Mission Report” challenge. Challenge communities are fandom-specific sites where moderators pick a theme or prompt to which writers respond and then post their specific fan works. The terms of this challenge were to encourage participants to invent a new mission and create a piece of fan fiction in the form of a mission report from the point of view of the Stargate Atlantis team of explorers. As an alternative possibility, and this is where the trouble started, the challenge also allowed to “take another author’s story and write a report” of its mission. Moderator Cesperanza then explained, “if you choose to write a mission report of somebody else’s story, we’ll ask you to credit them, but we won’t require you to ask their permission” (sga_flashfic LJ, 21 Aug. 2006, emphasis added). Whereas most announcement posts would only gather a few comments, this reached more than a hundred responses within hours, mostly complaints. Even though the community administrators quickly backtracked and posted a revision of the challenge not 12 hours later, the fannish LiveJournal sphere debated the challenge for days, reaching far beyond the specific fandom of Stargate Atlantis to discuss the ethical questions surrounding fannish appropriation and remix. At the center of the debate were the last eight words: “we won’t require you to ask their permission.” By encouraging fans to effectively write fan fiction of fan fiction and by not requiring permission, the moderators had violated an unwritten norm within this fannish community. Like all fan communities, western media fans have developed internal rules covering everything from what to include in a story header to how long to include a spoiler warning following aired episodes (for a definition and overview of western media fandom, see Coppa). In this example, the mods violated the fannish prohibition against the borrowing of original characters, settings, plot points, or narrative structures from other fan writers without permission—even though as fan fiction, the source of the inspiration engages in such borrowing itself. These kinds of normative rules can be altered, of course, but any change requires long and involved discussions. In this essay, we look at various debates that showcase how this fan community—media fandom on LiveJournal—creates and enforces but also discusses and changes its normative behavior. Fan fiction authors’ desire to prevent their work from being remixed may seem hypocritical, but we argue that underlying these conversations are complex negotiations of online privacy and control, affective aesthetics, and the value of fan labor. This is not to say that all fan communities address issues of remixing in the same way media fandom at this point in time did nor to suggest that they should; rather, we want to highlight a specific community’s internal ethics, the fervor with which members defend their rules, and the complex arguments that evolve from all sides when rules are questioned. Moreover, we suggest that these conversations offer insight into the specific relation many fan writers have to their stories and how it may differ from a more universal authorial affect. In order to fully understand the underlying motivations and the community ethos that spawned the sga_flashfic debates, we first want to differentiate between forms of unauthorised (re)uses and the legal, moral, and artistic concerns they create. Only with a clear definition of copyright infringement and plagiarism, as well as a clear understanding of who is affected (and in what ways) in any of these cases, can we fully understand the social and moral intersection of fan remixing of fan fiction. Only when sidestepping the legal and economic concerns surrounding remix can we focus on the ethical intricacies between copyright holders and fan writers and, more importantly, within fan communities. Fan communities differ greatly over time, between fandoms, and even depending on their central social interfaces (such as con-based zines, email-based listservs, journal-based online communities, etc.), and as a result they also develop a diverse range of internal community rules (Busse and Hellekson, “Works”; Busker). Much strife is caused when different traditions and their associated mores intersect. We’d argue, however, that the issues in the case of the Stargate Atlantis Remix Challenge were less the confrontation of different communities and more the slowly changing attitudes within one. In fact, looking at media fandom today, we may already be seeing changed attitudes—even as the debates continue over remix permission and unauthorised use. Why Remixes Are Not Copyright Infringement In discussing the limits of unauthorised use, it is important to distinguish plagiarism and copyright violation from forms of remix. While we are more concerned with the ethical issues surrounding plagiarism, we want to briefly address copyright infringement, simply because it often gets mixed into the ethics of remixes. Copyright is strictly defined as a matter of law; in many of the online debates in media fandom, it is often further restricted to U.S. Law, because a large number of the source texts are owned by U.S. companies. According to the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8), Congress has the power to secure an “exclusive Right” “for limited Times.” Given that intellectual property rights have to be granted and are limited, legal scholars read this statute as a delicate balance between offering authors exclusive rights and allowing the public to flourish by building on these works. Over the years, however, intellectual property rights have been expanded and increased at the expense of the public commons (Lessig, Boyle). The main exception to this exclusive right is the concept of “fair use,” defined as use “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching..., scholarship, or research” (§107). Case law circumscribes the limits of fair use, distinguishing works that are merely “derivative” from those that are “transformative” and thus add value (Chander and Sunder, Fiesler, Katyal, McCardle, Tushnet). The legal status of fan fiction remains undefined without a specific case that would test the fair use doctrine in regards to fan fiction, yet fair use and fan fiction advocates argue that fan fiction should be understood as eminently transformative and thus protected under fair use. The nonprofit fan advocacy group, the Organization for Transformative Works, in fact makes clear its position by including the legal term in their name, reflecting a changing understanding of both fans and scholars. Why Remixes Are Not Plagiarism Whereas copyright infringement is a legal concept that punishes violations between fan writers and commercial copyright holders, plagiarism instead is defined by the norms of the audience for which a piece is written: definitions of plagiarism thus differ from academic to journalist to literary contexts. Within fandom one of the most blatant (and most easily detectable) forms of plagiarism is when a fan copies another work wholesale and publishes it under their own name, either within the same fandom or by simply searching and replacing names to make it fit another fandom. Other times, fan writers may take selections of published pro or fan fiction and insert them into their works. Within fandom accusations of plagiarism are taken seriously, and fandom as a whole polices itself with regards to plagiarism: the LiveJournal community stop_plagiarism, for example, was created in 2005 specifically to report and pursue accusations of plagiarism within fandom. The community keeps a list of known plagiarisers that include the names of over 100 fan writers. Fan fiction plagiarism can only be determined on a case-by-case basis—and fans remain hypervigilant simply because they are all too often falsely accused as merely plagiarising when instead they are interpreting, translating, and transforming. There is another form of fannish offense that does not actually constitute plagiarism but is closely connected to it, namely the wholesale reposting of stories with attributions intact. This practice is frowned upon for two main reasons. Writers like to maintain at least some control over their works, often deriving from anxieties over being able to delete one’s digital footprint if desired or necessary. Archiving stories without authorial permission strips authors of this ability. More importantly, media fandom is a gift economy, in which labor is not reimbursed economically but rather rewarded with feedback (such as comments and kudos) and the growth of a writer’s reputation (Hellekson, Scott). Hosting a story in a place where readers cannot easily give thanks and feedback to the author, the rewards for the writer’s fan labor are effectively taken from her. Reposting thus removes the story from the fannish gift exchange—or, worse, inserts the archivist in lieu of the author as the recipient of thanks and comments. Unauthorised reposting is not plagiarism, as the author’s name remains attached, but it tends to go against fannish mores nonetheless as it deprives the writer of her “payment” of feedback and recognition. When Copyright Holders Object to Fan Fiction A small group of professional authors vocally proclaim fan fiction as unethical, illegal, or both. In her “Fan Fiction Rant” Robin Hobbs declares that “Fan fiction is to writing what a cake mix is to gourmet cooking” and then calls it outright theft: “Fan fiction is like any other form of identity theft. It injures the name of the party whose identity is stolen.” Anne Rice shares her feelings about fan fiction on her web site with a permanent message: “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.” Diana Gabaldon calls fan fiction immoral and describes, “it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.” Moreover, in a move shared by other anti-fan fiction writers, she compares her characters to family members: “I wouldn’t like people writing sex fantasies for public consumption about me or members of my family—why would I be all right with them doing it to the intimate creations of my imagination and personality?” George R.R. Martin similarly evokes familial intimacy when he writes, “My characters are my children, I have been heard to say. I don’t want people making off with them.” What is interesting in these—and other authors’—articulations of why they disapprove of fan fiction of their works is that their strongest and ultimate argument is neither legal nor economic reasoning but an emotional plea: being a good fan means coloring within the lines laid out by the initial creator, putting one’s toys back exactly as one found them, and never ever getting creative or transformative with them. Many fan fiction writers respect these wishes and do not write in book fandoms where the authors have expressed their desires clearly. Sometimes entire archives respect an author’s desires: fanfiction.net, the largest repository of fic online, removed all stories based on Rice’s work and does not allow any new ones to be posted. However, fandom is a heterogeneous culture with no centralised authority, and it is not difficult to find fic based on Rice’s characters and settings if one knows where to look. Most of these debates are restricted to book fandoms, likely for two reasons: (1) film and TV fan fiction alters the medium, so that there is no possibility that the two works might be mistaken for one another; and (2) film and TV authorship tends to be collaborative and thus lowers the individual sense of ownership (Mann, Sellors). How Fannish Remixes Are like Fan Fiction Most fan fiction writers strongly dismiss accusations of plagiarism and theft, two accusations that all too easily are raised against fan fiction and yet, as we have shown, such accusations actually misdefine terms. Fans extensively debate the artistic values of fan fiction, often drawing from classical literary discussions and examples. Clearly echoing Wilde’s creed that “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Kalichan, for example, argues in one LJ conversation that “whenever I hear about writers asserting that other writing is immoral, I become violently ill. Aside from this, morality & legality are far from necessarily connected. Lots of things are immoral and legal, illegal and moral and so on, in every permutation imaginable, so let’s just not confuse the two, shall we” (Kalichan LJ, 3 May 2010). Aja Romano concludes an epic list of remixed works ranging from the Aeneid to The Wind Done Gone, from All’s Well That Ends Well to Wicked with a passionate appeal to authors objecting to fan fiction: the story is not defined by the barriers you place around it. The moment you gave it to us, those walls broke. You may hate the fact people are imagining more to your story than what you put there. But if I were you, I’d be grateful that I got the chance to create a story that has a culture around it, a story that people want to keep talking about, reworking, remixing, living in, fantasizing about, thinking about, writing about. (Bookshop LJ, 3 May 2010)Many fan writers view their own remixes as part of a larger cultural movement that appropriates found objects and culturally relevant materials to create new things, much like larger twentieth century movements that include Dada and Pop Art, as well as feminist and postcolonial challenges to the literary canon. Finally, fan fiction partakes in 21st century ideas of social anarchy to create a cultural creative commons of openly shared ideas. Fan Cupidsbow describes strong parallels and cross-connection between all sorts of different movements, from Warhol to opensource, DeviantArt to AMV, fanfiction to mashups, sampling to critique and review. All these things are about how people are interacting with technology every day, and not just digital technology, but pens and paper and clothes and food fusions and everything else. (Cupidsbow LJ, 20 May 2009) Legally, of course, these reuses of collectively shared materials are often treated quite differently, which is why fan fiction advocates often maintain that all remixes be treated equally—regardless of whether their source text is film, TV, literature, or fan fiction. The Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works, for example, does not distinguish in its Content and Abuse Policy section between commercial and fan works in regard to plagiarism and copyright. Returning to the initial case of the Stargate Atlantis Mission Report Challenge, we can thus see how the moderator clearly positions herself within a framework that considers all remixes equally remixable. Even after changing the guidelines to require permission for the remixing of existing fan stories, moderator Cesperanza notes that she “remain[s] philosophically committed to the idea that people have the right to make art based on other art provided that due credit is given the original artist” (sga_flashfic LJ, 21 Aug. 2006). Indeed, other fans agree with her position in the ensuing discussions, drawing attention to the hypocrisy of demanding different rules for what appears to be the exact same actions: “So explain to me how you can defend fanfiction as legitimate derivative work if it’s based on one type of source material (professional writing or TV shows), yet decry it as ‘stealing’ and plagiarism if it’s based on another type of source material (fanfiction)” (Marythefan LJ, 21 Aug. 2006). Many fans assert that all remixes should be tolerated by the creators of their respective source texts—be they pro or fan. Fans expect Rowling to be accepting of Harry Potter’s underage romance with a nice and insecure Severus Snape, and they expect Matthew Weiner to be accepting of stories that kill off Don Draper and have his (ex)wives join a commune together. So fans should equally accept fan fiction that presents the grand love of Rodney McKay and John Sheppard, the most popular non-canonical fan fiction pairing on Stargate Atlantis, to be transformed into an abusive and manipulative relationship or rewritten with one of them dying tragically. Lydiabell, for example, argues that “there’s [no]thing wrong with creating a piece of art that uses elements of another work to create something new, always assuming that proper credit is given to the original... even if your interpretation is at odds with everything the original artist wanted to convey” (Lydiabell LJ, 22 Aug. 2006). Transforming works can often move them into territory that is critical of the source text, mocks the source text, rearranges relationships, and alters characterisations. It is here that we reach the central issue of this article: many fans indeed do view intrafandom interactions as fundamentally different to their interactions with professional authors or commercial entertainment companies. While everyone agrees that there are no legal, economic, or even ultimately moral arguments to be made against remixing fan fiction (because any such argument would nullify the fan’s right to create their fan fiction in the first place), the discourses against open remixing tend to revolve around community norms, politeness, and respect. How Fannish Remixes Are Not like Fan Fiction At the heart of the debate lie issues of community norms: taking another fan’s stories as the basis for one’s own fiction is regarded as a violation of manners, at least the way certain sections of the community define them. This, in fact, is not unlike the way many fan academics engage with fandom research. While it may be perfectly legal to directly cite fans’ blog posts, and while it may even be in compliance with institutional ethical research requirements (such as Internal Review Boards at U.S. universities), the academic fan writing about her own community may indeed choose to take extra precautions to protect herself and that community. As Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson have argued, fan studies often exists at the intersection of language and social studies, and thus written text may simultaneously be treated as artistic works and as utterances by human subjects (“Identity”). In this essay (and elsewhere), we thus limit direct linking into fannish spaces, instead giving site, date, and author, and we have consent from all fans we cite in this essay. The community of fans who write fic in a particular fandom is relatively small, and most of them are familiar with each other, or can trace a connection via one or two degrees of separation only. While writing fan fiction about Harry Potter may influence the way you and your particular circle of friends interpret the novels, it is unlikely to affect the overall reception of the work. During the remix debate, fan no_pseud articulates the differing power dynamic: When someone bases fanfic on another piece of fanfic, the balance of power in the relationship between the two things is completely different to the relationship between a piece of fanfic and the canon source. The two stories have exactly equal authority, exactly equal validity, exactly equal ‘reality’ in fandom. (nopseud LJ, 21 Aug. 2006) Within fandom, there are few stories that have the kind of reach that professional fiction does, and it is just as likely that a fan will come across an unauthorised remix of a piece of fan fiction as the original piece itself. In that way, the reception of fan fiction is more fragile, and fans are justifiably anxious about it. In a recent conversation about proper etiquette within Glee fandom, fan writer flaming_muse articulates her reasons for expecting different behavior from fandom writers who borrow ideas from each other: But there’s a huge difference between fanfic of media and fanfic of other fanfic authors. Part of it is a question of the relationship of the author to the source material … but part of it is just about not hurting or diminishing the other creative people around you. We aren’t hurting Glee by writing fic in their ‘verse; we are hurting other people if we write fanfic of fanfic. We’re taking away what’s special about their particular stories and all of the work they put into them. (Stoney321 LJ, 12 Feb. 2012)Flaming_muse brings together several concepts but underlying all is a sense of community. Thus she equates remixing within the community without permission as a violation of fannish etiquette. The sense of community also plays a role in another reason given by fans who prefer permission, which is the actual ease of getting it. Many fandoms are fairly small communities, which makes it more possible to ask for permission before doing a translation, adaptation, or other kind of rewrite of another person’s fic. Often a fan may have already given feedback to the story or shared some form of conversation with the writer, so that requesting permission seems fairly innocuous. Moreover, fandom is a community based on the economy of gifting and sharing (Hellekson), so that etiquette becomes that much more important. Unlike pro authors who are financially reimbursed for their works, feedback is effectively a fan writer’s only payment. Getting comments, kudos, or recommendations for their stories are ways in which readers reward and thank the writers for their work. Many fans feel that a gift economy functions only through the goodwill of all its participants, which remixing without permission violates. How Fan Writing May Differ From Pro Writing Fans have a different emotional investment in their creations, only partially connected to writing solely for love (as opposed to professional writers who may write for love but also write for their livelihood in the best-case scenarios). One fan, who writes both pro and fan fiction, describes her more distanced emotional involvement with her professional writing as follows, When I’m writing for money, I limit my emotional investment in the material I produce. Ultimately what I am producing does not belong to me. Someone else is buying it and I am serving their needs, not my own. (St_Crispins LJ, 27 Aug. 2006)The sense of writing for oneself as part of a community also comes through in a comment by pro and fan writer Matociquala, who describes the specificity and often quite limited audience of fan fiction as follows: Fanfiction is written in the expectation of being enjoyed in an open membership but tight-knit community, and the writer has an expectation of being included in the enjoyment and discussion. It is the difference, in other words, between throwing a fair on the high road, and a party in a back yard. Sure, you might be able to see what’s going on from the street, but you’re expected not to stare. (Matociquala LJ, 18 May 2006)What we find important here is the way both writers seem to suggest that fan fiction allows for a greater intimacy and immediacy on the whole. So while not all writers write to fulfill (their own or other’s) emotional and narrative desires, this seems to be more acceptable in fan fiction. Intimacy, i.e., the emotional and, often sexual, openness and vulnerability readers and writers exhibit in the stories and surrounding interaction, can thus constitute a central aspect for readers and writers alike. Again, none of these aspects are particular to fan fiction alone, but, unlike in much other writing, they are such a central component that the stories divorced from their context—textual, social, and emotional—may not be fully comprehensible. In a discussion several years ago, Ellen Fremedon coined the term Id Vortex, by which she refers to that very tailored and customised writing that caters to the writers’ and/or readers’ kinks, that creates stories that not only move us emotionally because we already care about the characters but also because it uses tropes, characterisations, and scenes that appeal very viscerally: In fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material, and we all know it, and so we can’t really pretend that we’re only trying to write for our readers’ most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all. (Ellen Fremedon LJ, 2 Dec. 2004)Writing stories for a particular sexual kink may be the most obvious way fans tailor stories to their own (or others’) desires, but in general, fan stories often seem to be more immediate, more intimate, more revealing than most published writing. This attachment is only strengthened by fans’ immense emotional attachment to the characters, as they may spend years if not decades rewatching their show, discussing all its details, and reading and writing stories upon stories. From Community to Commons These norms and mores continue to evolve as fannish activity becomes more and more visible to the mainstream, and new generations of fans enter fandom within a culture where media is increasingly spreadable across social networks and all fannish activity is collectively described and recognised as “fandom” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). The default mode of the mainstream often treats “found” material as disseminable, and interfaces encourage such engagement by inviting users to “share” on their collection of social networks. As a result, many new fans see remixing as not only part of their fannish right, but engage in their activity on platforms that make sharing with or without attribution both increasingly easy and normative. Tumblr is the most recent and obvious example of a platform in which reblogging other users’ posts, with or without commentary, is the normative mode. Instead of (or in addition to) uploading one’s story to an archive, a fan writer might post it on Tumblr and consider reblogs as another form of feedback. In fact, our case study and its associated differentiation of legal, moral, and artistic justifications for and against remixing fan works, may indeed be an historical artifact in its own right: media fandom as a small and well-defined community of fans with a common interest and a shared history is the exception rather than the norm in today’s fan culture. When access to stories and other fans required personal initiation, it was easy to teach and enforce a community ethos. Now, however, fan fiction tops Google searches for strings that include both Harry and Draco or Spock and Uhura, and fan art is readily reblogged by sites for shows ranging from MTV’s Teen Wolf to NBC’s Hannibal. Our essay thus must be understood as a brief glimpse into the internal debates of media fans at a particular historical juncture: showcasing not only the clear separation media fan writers make between professional and fan works, but also the strong ethos that online communities can hold and defend—if only for a little while. References Boyle, James. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Ithaca: Yale University Press, 2008. Busker, Rebecca Lucy. “On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse.” Transformative Works and Cultures 1 (2008). http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/49. Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson. “Work in Progress.” In Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. 5–40. Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson. “Identity, Ethics, and Fan Privacy.” In Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis, eds., Fan Culture: Theory/Practice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 38-56. Chander, Anupam, and Madhavi Sunder. “Everyone’s a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of ‘Mary Sue’ Fan Fiction as Fair Use.” California Law Review 95 (2007): 597-626. Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” In Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. 41–59. Fiesler, Casey. “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content.” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law 10 (2008): 729-62. Gabaldon, Diana. “Fan Fiction and Moral Conundrums.” Voyages of the Artemis. Blog. 3 May 2010. 7 May 2010 http://voyagesoftheartemis.blogspot.com/2010/05/fan-fiction-and-moral-conundrums.html. Hellekson, Karen. “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture.” Cinema Journal 48.4 (2009): 113–18. Hobbs, Robin. “The Fan Fiction Rant.” Robin Hobb’s Home. 2005. 14 May 2006 http://www.robinhobb.com/rant.html. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Katyal, Sonia. “Performance, Property, and the Slashing of Gender in Fan Fiction.” Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 14 (2006): 463-518. Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008. Mann, Denise. “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management.” In Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, eds., Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge, 2009. 99-114. Martin, George R.R. “Someone is Angry on the Internet.” LiveJournal. 7 May 2010. 15 May 2013. http://grrm.livejournal.com/151914.html. McCardle, Meredith. “Fandom, Fan Fiction and Fanfare: What’s All the Fuss?” Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law 9 (2003): 443-68. Rice, Anne. “Important Message From Anne on ‘Fan Fiction’.” n.d. 15 May 2013. http://www.annerice.com/readerinteraction-messagestofans.html. Scott, Suzanne. “Repackaging Fan Culture: The Regifting Economy of Ancillary Content Models.” Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0150. Sellors, C. Paul. Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths. London: Wallflower, 2010. Tushnet, Rebecca. “Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author.” In Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds., Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 60-71.

In his most seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn advances a notion that science is embedded in historically contingent constellations of practices and ideas. In this view, history is part and parcel of science. Science develops by transforming that, which it emerges from – a theme later picked up by Polish philosopher of science, Stefan Amsterdamski. Kuhn also noticed important parallels between psychological and historical development. These insights have led him to the conclusion that what scientists do and what the science does are two different things. Scientific development is discontinuous in the sense that it cannot be measured by any external standard. Science is therefore its own judge. This paper identifies critical shortcomings of Kuhn’s theory of psychological development, which most affect his vision of scientific development. Subsequently, the problem of development is recast in terms of dynamic system theory or embodied cognition. The ensuing insights are organized into a cyclical model, with two main trajectories: one creative, the other generative. It is argued that the cyclical approach permits to overcome the dualisms, which plagued Kuhn’s original account (engagement versus criticism, creativity versus rule-following, etc.) and to further develop Amsterdamski’s idea that absent universal norms or standards, criticism and rationality are nonetheless possible.

This study deals with three science fiction novels published in the Romanian interwar period, using concepts and theories from the field of posthumanism. My approach will consist of three interconnected but equally important steps. In the first place, these novels are part of a larger cluster of 20th-century art that thematizes technological development and the ‘crisis’ of modern man. Their importance also arises from the need to expand our understanding of world literature beyond the phenomenon of translation and the national canon. In addition, I will examine how posthuman configurations activate different reactions to the dominant ideologies of the age (modern machinism, feminism, species expansion, etc.). A second step will entail reconstructing the scientific, ideological, social and artistic contexts that made the articulation of the three novels. Last but not least, in the background of my study, I will lead a demonstration of the incompatibility between posthumanist ideology and the interwar science fiction novel, which rather features a posthuman imaginary without posthumanism. This result invalidates Simona Micali’s thesis that considers any SF product as a critique of anthropocentrism.

In this essay I show that the picture of universal extinction in the poem Satire I of the Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) is deeply and rigorously inspired by a theory of thermodynamics of the 1870s, more precisely by the theory of universal “death” launched in the second part of 19th century by physicists William Thomson and Rudolf Clausius. My interpretation addresses competing interpretations, from literary-centric scenarios claiming that Eminescu’s representation of the extinction is inspired by or approaches models of the mythological-Christian tradition or universal literature, to scenarios that also launch hypotheses in the field of science, but other than thermodynamics. I am also interested in producing here, in the alternative, a critique of the thesis – widespread not only in popular culture but also in the most serious academic circles – according to which many of the discoveries of modern and even contemporary science would have been “announced,” “contained,” or “coded” in literary fiction, mythology, religious narratives etc., from ancient times (Indian, Judeo-Christian mythology etc.) to modern authors.

In this essay I show that the picture of universal extinction in the poem Satire I of the Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) is deeply and rigorously inspired by a theory of thermodynamics from the 1870s, more precisely by the theory of universal “death” launched in the second part of 19th century by physicists William Thomson and Rudolf Clausius. My interpretation addresses competing interpretations, from literary-centric scenarios claiming that Eminescu’s representation of the extinction is inspired by or approaches models of the mythological-Christian tradition or universal literature, to scenarios that also launch hypotheses in the field of science, but other than thermodynamics. I am also interested in producing here, in the alternative, a critique of the thesis – widespread not only in popular culture but also in the most serious academic circles – according to which many of the discoveries of modern and even contemporary science would have been “announced,” “contained,” or “coded” in literary fiction, mythology, religious narratives etc., from ancient times (Indian, Judeo-Christian mythology etc.) to modern authors. Keywords: classical mechanics, cosmology, termodinamics, entropy, poetry, Immanuel Kant, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Rudolf Clausius, Spiru Haret, Mihai Eminescu, Scrisoarea I, G. Călinescu, Ion Heliade Rădulescu.

Metamodernism is a Eurocentric theoretical fiction, with no adherence to the social and cultural realities of post-communist Romania. This article provides a critique of the theory of metamodernism proposed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker and used by Alex Ciorogar to describe the post-2010 Romanian poetry system. Even if the concept is inoperative for Romanian literature, it is a symptom of the overcoming of the postmodernist framework, felt by writers as anti-essentialist, light-hearted, and unconcerned with the problems of today’s society (climate crisis, immigrants, marginalized communities, economic inequalities between classes, etc.). What I notice in the footsteps of Jeffrey Nealon & Galin Tihanov is that the focus shifts from an autonomist “regime of relevance” to one that is socially, politically, and identity-building oriented. My analysis will propose a number of criticisms of the internal contradictions generated by the two Dutchmen’s theory: firstly, that the “Yo-yo effect” of metamodernism – a metaphor I coined to better understand the basic concept – does not fully explain the cultural landscape of the Romanian literary system. In addition, it is built on a sum of generalizations of modernism and postmodernism, which have not been unanimously accepted by the theorists. A second criticism of Vermeulen and van den Akker’s study is its Western-centric stance, which ignores the (semi-)peripheral specificity of cultures. If we absurdly accept the existence of metamodernism, it is only a combination of ideologies and styles of historical currents subsumable to modernity. Therefore, I will propose, following in the footsteps of Fredric Jameson and the Warwick Research Collective, the concept of singular modernity, and I argue why there cannot yet be a postmodernity in Eastern Europe. Discussing post-communist Romanian literature in terms of unfinished, combined, and unevenly developed modernity is much more productive because it takes into account both the material-social conditions of Romania and the cultural-artistic acquisitions thanks to the transfer of symbolic capital between central and (semi)peripheral systems.

Among the diverse methodological approaches that are currently represented in the postmodern studies, the one, which dominates nowadays, is the statement that there cannot be any methodology in postmodernism per se otherwise it would be a “relapse” into constructing one more “universalizing method”. Evidently, this assertion is stipulated by the highly pluralized context of the postmodern “normalization of change”, the transformations of the socio- cultural order in accordance with the postparadigmatic shift of the theory. Postmodern researchers both implicitly and explicitly state that the only way to “manage” the increasing pluralism and diversity is unmasking prior modernist ideas and ideals in the individual and general meanings of the human experience. On the other hand, the postmodern methodological “openness” encourages academic ambivalence, which results in the denial of the universal notions and absolute moral values. With the apparent postmodernist accent on the interdisciplinary approaches, the “scientific conditions” have become even more complicated: nowadays philosophy, history, theology, gender studies, arts are being connected with biology, genetics, cybernetics, economics, etc. As one of the main components of the postmodern intertextual analysis the historical method is vividly represented both in the western feminist theory and in the eastern post-colonial criticism, poetics of fiction and cultural studies. All mentioned above, appearing in the pluralized modes, occasion the turn into considering interdisciplinary techniques more scrupulously. The objective of this research is to reconstruct conceptually the comparative-historical methodology in the theoretical field of the postmodern humanities with the focus on the specific character of the interpretation of history in the cultural texts. The main thesis of the research reflects the reconstruction of the historical methods as an important systematic and meaning-conscious component in postmodern theoretical studies. The research proves that nowadays historical approaches are significant and valid because they locate certain techniques into the contemporary scholarly work in order to properly utilize the sources and pieces of evidence in writing “history”. The value of the comparative-historical method is also based on the fact that it proposes some models and patterns in dealing with the analysis of the particular theory in interdisciplinary studies. The historical narrative with its objective to tell the “truth” cannot be reflected according to some simple schemes, without taking into account the “hardcore” role of the context in the hermeneutic reading of history. Though there is a view that historiography is located “between” modernity and postmodernity, the articulated point of view is that postmodernism, being a theoretical cluster of historical disruption and “brokenness”, in fact, cannot reject the tradition of historicism in the humanitarian studies.

Historical fiction, a widely-read genre, continues to engender contradiction and controversy within the fields of literature and historiography. This paper begins with a discussion of the differences and similarities between historical writing and the historical novel, focusing on the way these forms interpret and represent the past. It then examines the dilemma facing historians as they try to come to terms with the modern era and the growing competition from other modes of presenting history. Finally, it considers claims by Australian historians that so-called “fictive history” has been bestowed with historical authority to the detriment of traditional historiography. The Fact/Fiction Dichotomy Hayden White, a leading critic in the field of historiography, claims that the surge in popularity of historical fiction and the novel form in the nineteenth century caused historians to seek recognition of their field as a serious “science” (149). Historians believed that, to be scientific, historical studies had to cut ties with any form of artistic writing or imaginative literature, especially the romantic novel. German historian Leopold von Ranke “anathematized” the historical novel virtually from its first appearance in Scott’s Waverley in 1814. Hayden White argues that Ranke and others after him wrote history as narrative while eschewing the use of imagination and invention that were “exiled into the domain of ‘fiction’ ” (149-150). Early critics in the nineteenth century questioned the value of historical fiction. Famous Cuban poet Jose Maria Heredia believed that history was opposite and superior to fiction; he accused the historical novel of degrading history to the level of fiction which, he argued, is lies (cited in de Piérola 152). Alessandro Manzoni, though partially agreeing with Heredia, argued that fiction had value in its “poetic truth” as opposed to the “positive truth” of history (153). He eventually decided that the historical novel fails through the mixing of the incompatible elements of history and fiction, which can lead to deception (ibid). More than a hundred years after Heredia, Georg Lukács, in his much-cited The Historical Novel, first published in 1937, was more concerned with the social aspect of the historical novel and its capacity to portray the lives of its protagonists. This form of writing, through its attention to the detail of minor events, was better at highlighting the social aspects than the greater moments of history. Lukács argues that the historical novel should focus on the “poetic awakening” of those who participated in great historical events rather than the events themselves (42). The reader should be able to experience first-hand “the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (ibid). Through historical fiction, the reader is thus able to gain a greater understanding of a specific period and why people acted as they did. In contrast to these early critics, historian and author of three books on history and three novels, Richard Slotkin, argues that the historical novel can recount the past as accurately as history, because it should involve similar research methods and critical interpretation of the data (225). Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk go even further, suggesting that “historical fiction may offer a more plausible representation of the past than those sources typically accepted as more factual” (144). In its search for “poetic truth,” the novel tries to create a sense of what the past was, without necessarily adhering to all the factual details and by eliminating facts not essential to the story (Slotkin 225). For Hayden White, the difference between factual and fictional discourse, is that one is occupied by what is “true” and the other by what is “real” (147). Historical documents may provide a basis for a “true account of the world” in a certain time and place, but they are limited in their capacity to act as a foundation for the exploration of all aspects of “reality.” In White’s words: The rest of the real, after we have said what we can assert to be true about it, would not be everything and anything we could imagine about it. The real would consist of everything that can be truthfully said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be. (ibid) White’s main point is that both history and fiction are interpretative by nature. Historians, for their part, interpret given evidence from a subjective viewpoint; this means that it cannot be unbiased. In the words of Beverley Southgate, “factual history is revealed as subjectively chosen, subjectively interpreted, subjectively constructed and incorporated within a narrative” (45). Both fiction and history are narratives, and “anyone who writes a narrative is fictionalising,” according to Keith Jenkins (cited in Southgate 32). The novelist and historian find meaning through their own interpretation of the known record (Brown) to produce stories that are entertaining and structured. Moreover, historians often reach conflicting conclusions in their translations of the same archival documents, which, in the extreme, can spark a wider dispute such as the so-called history wars, the debate about the representation of the Indigenous peoples in Australian history that has polarised both historians and politicians. The historian’s purpose differs from that of the novelist. Historians examine the historical record in fine detail in an attempt to understand its complexities, and then use digressions and footnotes to explain and lend authority to their findings. The novelist on the other hand, uses their imagination to create personalities and plot and can leave out important details; the novelist achieves authenticity through detailed description of setting, customs, culture, buildings and so on (Brown). Nevertheless, the main task of both history and historical fiction is to represent the past to a reader in the present; this “shared concern with the construction of meaning through narrative” is a major component in the long-lasting, close relationship between fiction and history (Southgate 19). However, unlike history, the historical novel mixes fiction and fact, and is therefore “a hybrid of two genres” (de Piérola 152); this mixture of supposed opposites of fact and fiction creates a dilemma for the theorist, because historical fiction cannot necessarily be read as belonging to either category. Attitudes towards the line drawn between fiction and history are changing as more and more critics and theorists explore the area where the two genres intersect. Historian John Demos argues that with the passing of time, this distinction “seems less a boundary than a borderland of surprising width and variegated topography” (329). While some historians are now willing to investigate the wide area where the two genres overlap, this approach remains a concern for traditionalists. History’s Dilemma Historians face a crisis as they try to come to terms with the postmodern era which has seen unprecedented questioning of the validity of history’s claim to accuracy in recounting the past. In the words of Jenkins et al., “ ‘history’ per se wobbles” as it experiences a period of uncertainty and challenge; the field is “much changed and deeply contested,” as historians seek to understand the meaning of history itself (6). But is postmodernism the cause of the problem? Writing in 1986 Linda Hutcheon, well known for her work on postmodernism, attempted to clarify the term as it is applied in modern times in reference to fiction, where, she states, it is usually taken to mean “metafiction, or texts which are in some dominant and constitutive way self-referential and auto-representational” (301). To eliminate any confusion with regard to concept or terminology, Hutcheon coined the phrase “historiographic metafiction," which includes “the presence of the past” in “historical, social, and ideological” form (302). As examples, she cites contemporary novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The White Hotel, Midnight’s Children and Famous Last Words. Hutcheon explains that all these works “self-consciously focus on the processes of producing and receiving paradoxically fictive historical writing” (ibid). In the Australian context, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish could be added to the list. Like the others, they question how historical sources maintain their status as authentic historical documents in the context of a fictional work (302). However, White argues that the crisis in historical studies is not due to postmodernism but has materialised because historians have failed to live up to their nineteenth century expectations of history being recognised as a science (149). Postmodernists are not against history, White avows; what they do not accept “is a professional historiography” that serves self-seeking governing bodies with its outdated and severely limited approach to objectivity (152). This kind of historiography has denied itself access to aesthetic writing and the imaginary, while it has also cut any links it had “to what was most creative in the real sciences it sought half-heartedly to emulate” (ibid). Furthering White’s argument, historian Robert Rosenstone states that past certitude in the claims of historians to be the sole guardians of historical truth now seem outdated in the light of our accumulated knowledge. The once impregnable position of the historian is no longer tenable because: We know too much about framing images and stories, too much about narrative, too much about the problematics of causality, too much about the subjectivity of perception, too much about our own cultural imperatives and biases, too much about the disjuncture between language and the world it purports to describe to believe we can actually capture the world of the past on the page. (Rosenstone 12) While the archive confers credibility on history, it does not confer the right to historians to claim it as the truth (Southgate 6); there are many possible versions of the past, which can be presented to us in any number of ways as history (Jenkins et al. 1). And this is a major challenge for historians as other modes of representing the past cater to public demand in place of traditional approaches. Public interest in history has grown over the last 20 years (Harlan 109). Historical novels fill the shelves of bookstores and libraries, while films, television series and documentaries about the past attract large audiences. In the words of Rosenstone, “people are hungry for the past, as various studies tell us and the responses to certain films, TV series and museums indicate” (17). Rosenstone laments the fact that historians, despite this attraction to the past, have failed to stir public interest in their own writings. While works of history have their strengths, they target a specific, extremely limited audience in an outdated format (17). They have forgotten the fact that, in the words of White, “the conjuring up of the past requires art as well as information” (149). This may be true of some historians, but there are many writers of non-fiction, including historians, who use the narrative voice and other fictional techniques in their writings (Ricketson). Matthew Ricketson accuses White of confusing “fiction with literariness,” while other scholars take fiction and narrative to be the same thing. He argues that “the use of a wide range of modes of writing usually associated with fiction are not the sole province of fiction” and that narrative theorists have concentrated their attention on fictional narrative, thereby excluding factual forms of writing (ibid). One of the defining elements of creative non-fiction is its use of literary techniques in writing about factual events and people. At the same time, this does not make it fiction, which by definition, relies on invention (ibid). However, those historians who do write outside the limits of traditional history can attract criticism. Historian Richard Current argues that if writers of history and biography try to be more effective through literary considerations, they sometimes lose their objectivity and authenticity. While it is acceptable to seek to write with clarity and force, it is out of the question to present “occasional scenes in lifelike detail” in the manner of a novelist. Current contends that if only one source is used, this violates “the historiographical requirement of two or more independent and competent witnesses.” This requirement is important because it explains why much of the writing by academic historians is perceived as “dry-as-dust” (Current 87). Modern-day historians are contesting this viewpoint as they analyse the nature and role of their writings, with some turning to historical fiction as an alternative mode of expression. Perhaps one of the more well-known cases in recent times was that of historian Simon Schama, who, in writing Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), was criticised for creating dramatic scenes based on dubious historical sources without informing the reader of his fabrications (Nelson). In this work, Schama questions notions of factual history and the limitations of historians. The title is suggestive in itself, while the afterword to the book is explicit, as “historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation . . . We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot” (320). Another example is Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine, which was considered to be “postmodern” and not acceptable to publishers and agents as the correct way to present history, despite the author’s reassurance that nothing was invented, “it just tells the story a different way” ("Space for the Birds to Fly" 16). Schama is not the only author to draw fire from critics for neglecting to inform the reader of the veracity or not of their writing. Richard Current accused Gore Vidal of getting his facts wrong and of inaccurately portraying Lincoln in his work, Lincoln: A Novel (81). Despite the title, which is a form of disclaimer itself, Current argued that Vidal could have avoided criticism if he had not asserted that his work was authentic history, or had used a disclaimer in a preface to deny any connection between the novel’s characters and known persons (82). Current is concerned about this form of writing, known as “fictional history," which, unlike historical fiction, “pretends to deal with real persons and events but actually reshapes them—and thus rewrites the past” (77). This concern is shared by historians in Australia. Fictive History Historian Mark McKenna, in his essay, Writing the Past, argues that “fictive history” has become a new trend in Australia; he is unhappy with the historical authority bestowed on this form of writing and would like to see history restored to its rightful place. He argues that with the decline of academic history, novelists have taken over the historian’s role and fiction has become history (3). In sympathy with McKenna, author, historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen claims that “novelists have been doing their best to bump historians off the track” (16). McKenna accuses writers W.G. Sebald and David Malouf of supporting “the core myth of historical fiction: the belief that being there is what makes historical understanding possible.” Malouf argues, in a conversation with Helen Daniel in 1996, that: Our only way of grasping our history—and by history I really mean what has happened to us, and what determines what we are now and where we are now—the only way of really coming to terms with that is by people's entering into it in their imagination, not by the world of facts, but by being there. And the only thing really which puts you there in that kind of way is fiction. Poetry may do so, drama may do so, but it's mostly going to be fiction. It's when you have actually been there and become a character again in that world. (3) From this point of view, the historical novel plays an important role in our culture because it allows people to interact with the past in a meaningful way, something factual writing struggles to do. McKenna recognises that history is present in fiction and that history can contain fiction, but they should not be confused. Writers and critics have a responsibility towards their readers and must be clear that fiction is not history and should not be presented as such (10). He takes writer Kate Grenville to task for not respecting this difference. McKenna argues that Grenville has asserted in public that her historical novel The Secret River is history: “If ever there was a case of a novelist wanting her work to be taken seriously as history, it is Grenville” (5). The Secret River tells the story of early settlement along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Grenville’s inspiration for the story emanated from her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life. The main protagonist, William Thornhill (loosely based on Wiseman), is convicted of theft in 1806 and transported to Australia. The novel depicts the poverty and despair in England at the time, and describes life in the new colony where Grenville explores the collision between the colonists and the Aborigines. McKenna knows that Grenville insists elsewhere that her book is not history, but he argues that this conflicts with what she said in interviews and he worries that “with such comments, it is little wonder that many people might begin to read fiction as history” (5). In an article on her website, Grenville refutes McKenna’s arguments, and those of Clendinnen: “Here it is in plain words: I don’t think The Secret River is history…Nor did I ever say that I thought my novel was history.” Furthermore, the acknowledgements in the back of the book state clearly that it is a work of fiction. She accuses the two above-mentioned historians of using quotes that “have been narrowly selected, taken out of context, and truncated” ("History and Fiction"). McKenna then goes on to say how shocked he was on hearing Grenville, in an interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National, make her now infamous comments about standing on a stepladder looking down at the history wars, and that he “felt like ringing the ABC and leaping to the defence of historians.” He accuses Grenville of elevating fiction above history as an “interpretive power” (6). Koval asked Grenville where her book stood in regard to the history wars; she answered: Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars. . . I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they’ve got themselves into these polarised positions, and that’s fine, I think that’s what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other. But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, [emphasis in original audio] and say there is another way to understand it. ("Interview") Grenville claims that she did not use the stepladder image to imply that her work was superior to history, but rather to convey a sense of being outside the battle raging between historians as an uninvolved observer, “an interested onlooker who made the mistake of climbing a stepladder rather than a couple of fruit-boxes to get a good view.” She goes on to argue that McKenna’s only sources in his essay, Writing the Past, are interviews and newspaper articles, which in themselves are fine, but she disagrees with how they have been used “uncritically, at face value, as authoritative evidence” ("History and Fiction"), much in contrast to the historian’s desire for authenticity in all sources. It appears that the troubles between history and fiction will continue for some time yet as traditional historians are bent on keeping faith with the tenets of their nineteenth century predecessors by defending history from the insurgence of fiction at all costs. While history and historical fiction share a common purpose in presenting the past, the novel deals with what is “real” and can tell the past as accurately or even in a more plausible way than history, which deals with what is “true”. However, the “dry-as-dust” historical approach to writing, and postmodernism’s questioning of historiography’s role in presenting the past, has contributed to a reassessment of the nature of history. Many historians recognise the need for change in the way they present their work, but as they have often doubted the worth of historical fiction, they are wary of the genre and the narrative techniques it employs. Those historians who do make an attempt to write differently have often been criticised by traditionalists. In Australia, historians such as McKenna and Clendinnen are worried by the incursion of historical fiction into their territory and are highly critical of novelists who claim their works are history. The overall picture that emerges is of two fields that are still struggling to clarify a number of core issues concerning the nature of both the historical novel and historiographical writing, and the role they play in portraying the past. References Brown, Joanne. "Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults." ALAN Review 26.1 (1998). 1 March 2010 ‹http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall98/brown.html›. Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 2000. Clendinnen, Inga. "The History Question: Who Owns the Past?" Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1-72. Current, Richard. "Fiction as History: A Review Essay." Journal of Southern History 52.1 (1986): 77-90. De Piérola, José. "At the Edge of History: Notes for a Theory for the Historical Novel in Latin America." Romance Studies 26.2 (2008): 151-62. Demos, John. "Afterword: Notes from, and About, the History/Fiction Borderland." Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 329-35. Den Heyer, Kent, and Alexandra Fidyk. "Configuring Historical Facts through Historical Fiction: Agency, Art-in-Fact, and Imagination as Stepping Stones between Then and Now." Educational Theory 57.2 (2007): 141-57. Flanagan, Richard. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish. Sydney: Picador, 2002. Grenville, Kate. “History and Fiction.” 2007. 19 July 2010 ‹http://kategrenville.com/The_Secret_River_History%20and%20Fiction›. ———. “Interview with Ramona Koval.” 17 July 2005. 26 July 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm›. ———. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. 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Ricketson, Matthew. “Not Muddying, Clarifying: Towards Understanding the Boundaries between Fiction and Nonfiction.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 14.2 (2010). 6 June 2011 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct10/ricketson.htm›. Rosenstone, Robert A. “Space for the Bird to Fly.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. 11-18. ———. Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Schama, Simon. Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations). 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. “Fiction for the Purposes of History.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 221-36. Southgate, Beverley C. History Meets Fiction. New York: Longman, Harlow, England, 2009. White, Hayden. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 147-57.