Academic literature on the topic 'Charms – fiction'

Print literature has always existed in an ecosystem of media forms, among which the attention of audiences have been shared. Periodically, however, novelists have expressed concerns for the charms of literature in relation to its competitors. This article explores three interrelated experiments that harness the effects of authorial presence to revive the capacity of literary fiction to detain readers. Henry James's ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894), Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979) and Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers (2015) speak to each other by mobilising the trope of the author in ways that probe the fault lines in under-nuanced accounts of the author's coercive role in delimiting the meaning of a literary work. These texts, I offer, reimagine the author not as a disciplining force but as a compelling figure, working in distinctive ways to summon readerly attention.

Abstract Science fiction has a lengthy history of irreligion. In part, this relates to its titular association with science itself, which, as both methodology and ontological basis, veers away from revelatory forms of knowledge in order to formulate hypotheses of reality based upon experimental praxis. However, during science fiction’s long antipathy to faith, Buddhism has occupied a unique and sustained position within the genre. This article charts the origins of that interaction, in the pulp science fiction magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, in which depictions of Buddhism quickly evolve from ‘Yellow Peril’ paranoia towards something much more intriguing and accommodating, and in so doing, provide a genre foundation for the environmental concerns of much 21st-century science fiction.

The Chinese historical chronicle “The Annals of the Three kingdoms” relates the last years of Han dynasty before the country fell into chaos. According to the Chronicle, a frontier general Dong Zhuo marched with his troops to the capital and took control over the boy emperor. He wanted to get rid of his rival general Ding Yuan, so he bribed his officers with gifts and promises. A young junior officer Lü Bu killed general Ding and presented his head to Dong Zhuo. The daring and unscrupulous officer enjoyed the favours of the usurper, he became his adopted son and was placed at the head of cavalry. To his misfortune, Dong Zhuo’s uncontrolled temper threatened the very life of his closest henchmen. Besides, Lü Bu’s regiments didn’t enjoy benefits they expected and that annoyed the soldiers and their new commander. Finally, Lü Bu started a secret affair with a court lady and was afraid to be exposed. So, when minister Wang Yun asked him to kill the tyrant, Lü Bu agreed. Following Wan Yun’s plan, he killed Dong Zhuo with his own hands. This story was masterfully re-worked in Luo Guangzhong’s great epic “The Three Kingdoms”. The writer dramatized the plot and turned the nameless court lady into a renowned beauty Diao Chan who plays the key role in the conspiracy. According to the novel, Diao Chan seduced Lü Bu and later married Dong Zhuo to set the tyrant and his powerful bodyguard against each other. This scheme was called “The Chain Scheme”, for the idea was to break the chain between the male characters with the help of female charms. The Chain Scheme is the most stylistically strong and textually rich episode; in the course of Chinese history it served as a plot to masterful works of fiction and in 20th-21st centuries got numerous TV adaptations. In the present paper I analyse artistic devices and narrative tropes in literature versions of Chain Scheme plot, paying attention to the visual images of the characters, especially their bodily representations as well as the psychological interpretations of their actions. In the Part II of the work I hope to do the same for the screen versions of the Chain Scheme story.

Some of the most interesting narrative literature recently produced in Spain is distinguished by the incorporation of auto- or bio-fictional elements (for instance, Miguel Ángel Hernández, El dolor de los demás [2018]; Pablo Martín Sánchez, Diario de un viejo cabezota [2020]). Not surprisingly, this ‘trend’ has already led to many academic studies on different aspects of autobiographical fiction. The new book by Patricia López-Gay is an extremely valuable contribution to this field, since it charts in a convincing and sophisticated manner the specifically Spanish genealogy and phenomenology of this literary tendency, covers the work of representative writers in a synthetic fashion, and develops an original argument about the intersection of auto-fictional prose and the narrative configuration of the archive.

Over the last two decades, Philippe Lejeune’s research has established diary-writing as maybe the only form of life-writing immune from panfictionalism. In an oft-quoted article (Lejeune 2007), the French theorist famously expressed his fiction and autofiction fatigue (‘[…] j’ai créé “antifiction” par agacement devant “autofiction”, le mot et la chose’, 3) and set up an insurmountable ontological barrier between autobiographies and diaries: ‘autobiography has fallen under the spell of fiction, diaries are enamored with truth’ (‘[…] l’autobiographie vit sous le charme de la fiction, le journal a le béguin pour la verité’, 3).1 In his more recent book, Aux Origines du Journal Personnel: France, 1750–1815 (2016), Lejeune not only reasserted this privileged connection between diaries and truth/reality—not unlike Barthes’s claim in La Chambre claire that photography cannot be distinguished from its referent— but went as far as removing diaries from the field of literary studies as, according to him, they do not constitute a literary genre (or only as an epiphenomenon). In Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing, Sam Ferguson opts for an altogether different approach.

Abstract This article explores Marilynne Robinson’s attempt to reconcile the doctrine of predestination with a commitment to human agency by reading her novels Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack alongside their intertextual companion, John Calvin. I argue that, rather than attempting to penetrate the enigma of predestination and agency through theological treatises, Robinson embodies the tension between them in fiction. Rather than defining a solution to the problem, she meaningfully charts the lived experience of it. Indeed, in the Gilead novels the experience of agency is itself agency within a universe defined by God’s omnipotence. At the same time, characters’ freedom to act otherwise than habit or impulse would dictate depends on right perception. Robinson’s unique contribution to an American literary and theological legacy is to animate these tensions as only fiction can. Her novels offer a theological vista that cannot be separated from their fictional content, and so things that seem like tautologies grow profound through narration.

One salutary effect of encountering the often bizarre materials—Leibniz's possible worlds theory, war-games played in Prussian military academies, books about the presidency of Jefferson Davis—that Catherine Gallagher has assembled in Telling It Like It Wasn't is that one obtains a better purchase on the deep weirdness that also informs normal realist novels. That weirdness is central to the realist tradition's historical fictions especially, by virtue of the peculiar manner in which they compound together fictional invention and referentiality and call on readers to traverse the ontological chasms between the two.

As the most influential and wide-spread literary genre in Chinese literature, martial arts fiction is deeply loved by the public for its distinctive narration style and language charm ever since 1960s. However, the martial arts fiction, represented by Jin Yong’s works, was neglected by Western literary and translation field. The reason lies in the abundant cultural elements contained in Jin Yong’s martial arts fictions, which is particularly true in the names of characters and martial arts moves. Therefore, how to translate such information emerges as the key to translating the full text. Legends of the Condor Heroes that is translated by Anna Holmwood is well recognized by Western world. On the basis of cultural adaptation, this thesis aims to explore the translation strategies that were adopted from the perspective of adaptation to different sense of nature, religious culture, custom and tradition as well as appreciation of the beauty. This paper finds that cultural adaptation effectively guided the translation when Holmwood deals with heterogenous cultural elements. Besides, cultural adaptation can facilitate the translation and oversea introduction of the same literary genre, and it can also promote “Chinese culture goes global”.

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Bachelors
Arts and Humanities
English; Creative Writing

AbstractThis chapter of Animating Unpredictable Effects charts the development of the software tools used to create uncanny simulation-based digital animations, drawing a genealogy that starts with nineteenth century mathematics, which were transformed into management and prediction tools by private and military R&D between the 1940s and 1980s. Through this, the chapter identifies a connection between these animation tools and simulation tools used in fields as diverse as meteorology, nuclear physics, and aeronautics that create unpredictability through stochastic or dynamic simulation. Using this information, the chapter offers a theoretical framework for understanding how fictional simulations in animation and visual effects make meaning through “knowing how” as opposed to cinema’s tradition approach of “knowing that,” leveraging concepts from the history of science.

Abstract This chapter examines the five novels written by sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, with special attention to Du Bois’s mastery of literary form, genre, and narrative conventions, and Du Bois’s astute mastery of the era’s racialized hierarchies of taste and prestige. The chapter charts the development of Du Bois’s career as a fiction writer, alongside his professional work as a social scientist, activist, and editor, and argues that Du Bois’s fiction often recast key elements of both his nonfiction writings and his own biography. Beyond these links, Du Bois’s fictions frequently focus on rural and agricultural settings—a milieu associated with his rival Booker T. Washington. Du Bois’s fiction ingeniously melds high and low forms in a complex amalgam of popular and prestigious literary forms, in the effort to bring his antiracist perspective and analysis to a wider reading audience.

Abstract This chapter charts the trajectory of US historical fiction from the Second World War to the early decades of the twenty-first century. Prominent mid-twentieth-century historical novelists produced books that were well researched and often meticulously detailed, embodying a belief in the past as a knowable, documentable field that fiction can bring to life. Often celebratory in tone, these various works also presented America’s past largely in terms of American Exceptionalism, particularly in terms of social and technological progress. From the 1960s on, however, the project of US historical fiction increasingly sought to challenge the authority of the narratives that had been composed to construct the common understanding of US history. Novelists incorporated voices traditionally left out of historical fiction and often pursued narrative strategies designed to disorient their readers, challenging them to re-evaluate received truths and accepted stories.

Abstract Noting the affinity between modernist aesthetics and the vernacular “entertainment” of genre fiction—in particular, the detective story—this chapter charts the ways in which the style and tone of US detective fiction was intimately bound up with the growth of a Hollywood studio system organized around genres like westerns, adventure stories, musicals, screwball comedy, gangster dramas, and crime stories. The chapter charts the influence of the idea of film noir—conceived as a fusion of US hard-boiled crime fiction and German expressionist cinematography—on detective fiction in both text and film after 1940. It concludes by noting that in the last quarter of the twentieth century, hard-boiled detective fiction veered in two different directions: it was given new life as genre fiction by women writers, even as some notable practitioners of “literary fiction” took the idea of “mystery” in the direction of the fantastic.

This chapter charts to growth of the sf magazine in other English speaking countries, chiefly Canada, Australia and Eire, but also South Africa and Singapore. This brought other national identities into science fiction, with a wide range of approaches from Canada’s remote individuality to Australia’s recognition of its aboriginal influences.

Abstract This chapter defines US postmodern fiction by placing it in a central historical moment of cultural change: the early 1960s to the early 1980s. Marked by intense social conflicts and a fervent longing for new beginnings, as well as by the rise of multiculturalism and of the literatures that thrived with it, this period also witnessed the flourishing of literary postmodernism, which was characterized by a variety of experimental, especially self-reflexive, anti-realist/anti-modernist strategies of narration. The chapter charts the shift from late modernist to postmodernist aesthetics, which aim to decenter textual hierarchies as a part, yet also as a metaphor, of a larger process of cultural dehierarchization. The rise of literatures hitherto on the margins and their gradual institutionalization in academia—against much resistance from institutionalized “white” traditions—occur simultaneously and follow a similar logic of succession: they assert themselves by challenging what they perceive as a firmly established institution of literary postmodernism.

Charts the emergence of cyberpunk, especially through the pages of OMNI, and considers its leading authors, including William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling and John Shirley. It also considers the growth of ASIMOV’S SF MAGAZINE under the editorship of Shawna McCarthy who strove to publish more challenging and daring stories. Between these two magazines science fiction began to undergo a new revolution. Even ANALOG, the most conventional of the sf magazines, saw changes introducing more challenging high-tech stories exploring nanotechnology and the technological singularity.

Chapter 5 treats the first of Canal 11’s modern series, which, striking a blow against clichéd machismo, takes as its theme the crisis in contemporary manhood. Set at a fictional magazine, this workplace drama addresses the conflict between public interest and private profit in the media, even as it explores the relationships between varied models of men: old and young, rich and poor, straight and gay. More specifically, the sex scenes between men here provoked complaints to the Mexican authorities. The chapter argues, however, that the educational remit of the channel, previously expressed in dutiful documentaries, is properly extended here in a compelling fiction that charts new paths for men in modern Mexico.

Ion Creangă’s personality challenged the filmmakers on both banks of the Prut to create films in which to bring the famous storyteller back to the big screen. And if the genre of fiction film allows itself an artistic approach, with deviations and directorial inventions, then the non-fiction film is based on the document, drawing the true nature of the writer. In this context, there are a series of films, which aim to follow various aspects of the writer’s life, such as: Creangă (1973, directed by Vlad Druc), Creangă si Junimea (1989, directed by Ioana Holban), Ion Creanga’s God (1996, directed by Grid Modorcea), Ion Creangă (1999, directed by Anatol Codru) and others. But even these films are largely influenced by the writer’s work oscillating between document and fiction. We will refer to the films Ion Creangă’s God and Ion Creangă and analyze them from the perspective of that amalgam of events taken from the masterpiece of the writer Childhood Memories that form a common body with the rich iconographic material (photos, books, documents, archive documents, etc.) and biographical data, which being incorporated into a whole, give a special charm to the life of the writer.

Abstract This paper presents a novel approach to model the propagation of tolerance buildups in tolerance chains. Starting with a suitable representation of the assembly in terms of its functional elements grouped in pairs (points, curves, surfaces, either real or fictive), we associate a set of six virtual joints to one functional element in every pair, making it possible to simulate moves of this element with respect to others. For these moves to be general, i.e. to represent the manufacturing inaccuracies of a wide variety of manufacturing processes, the six virtual joints are divided into three mutually perpendicular translations and three mutually orthogonal rotations. As these moves are small (dispersions), the theory of small displacements using standard Jacobian matrix computations is directly applicable to model the individual or cumulative effect of any dispersion of any functional element in the chain. This paper describes in details how the Jacobian matrix is computed once the virtual joints have been assigned to the functional elements pairs. An example is provided to demonstrate the potential use of the developed model.

The article presents the results of the analysis of the functions of interrogative sentences in modern experimental (fragmented) fiction, that reflects the processes of disintegration, based on the works of small prose (about 5 % of all short story texts) published in the magazines “Znamya”, “Octyabr’” and “Novyj mir” in the last 5 years. The selection of the material is based on the author’s definition of the narrative genre (short story, small prose, other prose, prose), on the formed discreteness of the text (various types of rubrication at the level of macro-syntax, at the level of microsyntax — the dismemberment of the syntagmatic chain of the sentence, the elimination of connectivity indicators, the use of alternative punctuation), on the identification of non-standard metagraphemics as the design piece of art’s means. A comprehensive analysis of the disintegration degree of small volume texts with interrogative sentences (question marks), pragmatics (types of questions), structural features (single questions, chains of interrogative sentences, combination with parcellation), the context of the introduction (position in the structure of the text and the presence/absence of a direct answer in a question-and-answer situation) allows you to determine the following functions of interrogative sentences in the text of experimental prose of small form 1) complication of the subject perspective of the text by removing the traditional punctuation of the parties of speakers in dialogues and including private questions in them; 2) metalanguage narrator’s reflection performing in the text with the help of existential rhetorical questions and unanswered questions; 3) the performance of the text-forming function of interrogative sentences in lyric monologues reflecting auto-communication. The revealed features of questions in modern prose reflect the author’s search for a means of compensation for disintegration, the increasing colloquialism of a literary text and the change in the recipient’s perception of his narrative (the desire to remove distance, modeling online communication), which is predetermined by the orientation to the modern reader, the search for new forms of artistic communication. Refs 18.

Las ciudades turísticas intentan recrear los imaginarios internacionales sobre culturas determinadas, adaptándose a las expectativas que se tengan sobre el sitio a visitar. Los imaginarios son la realidad social construida desde los ciudadanos. A través de ellos las personas aprehendemos y explicamos las percepciones que nos formamos sobre los otros, los eventos y relaciones, así como sobre las obras y objetos. En las ciudades del turismo emergentes, la construcción de los equipamientos turísticos, tanto públicos, como privados, hace tabula rasa de la ciudad preexistente, dejando de lado las experiencias culturales locales, para preparar un escenario óptimo, que haga atractivo el sitio al público extranjero. En ese sentido los referentes culturales de lo mexicano, plasmados en la arquitectura, retoman elementos de distintas regiones y momentos históricos, acordes al imaginario internacional. Esos lenguajes arquitectónicos funcionan como referencia de autenticidad del espacio consumido, validando la experiencia turística. El objetivo de este trabajo es dar luz sobre el origen de las formas arquitectónicas –la morfogénesis- de una ciudad turística emergente. Es decir, observaremos los lenguajes urbanos y arquitectónicos, y la relación que los diseños exhibidos guardan hacia el imaginario internacional de la cultura mexicana. Para ello, utilizaremos como instrumentos los recorridos que los turistas hacen para acceder a los desarrollos turísticos, las imágenes expuestas en lugares específicos, así como el análisis del relato emitido por el turista en relación a la experiencia vivida. Nuestros medios de acceso serán las imágenes reales (tomadas in situ por las autoras) y aquellas recogidas de los sitios web de las cadenas hoteleras y de las bitácoras personales (blogs) de turistas disponibles en Internet. Con estos instrumentos pretendemos asociar los lenguajes plásticos del sitio con aquellos provenientes de imaginarios internacionales sobre la cultura mexicana, más allá de los de la realidad del sitio analizado. Retomamos a manera de ejemplo dos puntos de vista: el del promotor inmobiliario y del turista. El caso de estudio es Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, ciudad que ha sufrido una fuerte conversión a las actividades turísticas en los últimos diez años y cuyo auge inmobiliario, representa un caso emblemático del turismo en el noroeste mexicano. Adelantándonos a manera de breve conclusión, podemos señalar que las imágenes montadas en el armado y diseño del puerto anterior cumplen la paradójica función asentarse en la memoria del viajero (crear una ciudad memorable y singular), a la vez que autentifican la experiencia turística, es decir, son imágenes congruentes con el imaginario que el turista se ha formado aún antes de iniciar su recorrido, ya sea a través de los relatos de otros viajeros o del discurso del promotor inmobiliario. Ambos disponibles con la facilidad de un clic. Por otro lado, los referentes buscados por los promotores turísticos, están ligados, mediante la arquitectura y el urbanismo a la antigua arquitectura mexicana, de las culturas prehispánicas, las haciendas rurales y la arquitectura colonial, que poco o nada tienen que, ver con las actualidad de las ciudades mexicanas y mucho menos con el entorno regional de Puerto Peñasco. Sin embargo, ese tratamiento permite la creación de un ambiente "ideal" para el acercamiento a la cultura mexicana que los turistas esperan. Al contrastar los puntos de vista de un viajero y de un promotor inmobiliario de esta localidad portuaria, daremos cuenta de la ciudad deseada y de la ciudad ficción, acercándonos de esta manera a la "ciudad real", que bien pareciera la copia de las dos anteriores. The tourist cities intend to recreate the international imaginaries about certain cultures, adapting to the given expectations of the visiting place. The imaginaries are the social reality built by the citizens. Through them, people seize and explain their perceptions on others, on events and relationships, and as well as on objects. In the emerging cities of tourism, the building up of equipment, public as well as private, ignores the preexisting city. Cultural local experiences are left aside to prepare an optimal scenario that would make the place attractive for the foreign visitors. In this sense, the cultural references for “the Mexican” are captured trough architecture. They take elements from different regions and different historical momentums, according to the international imaginary. These architectural languages works as an authenticity reference for space, validating the tourist experience. The objective of this paper is to throw light on the origin of architectural forms –the morphogenesis- in an emerging tourist city. We will look at the urban and architectural languages, as well as the connexion that the exhibit designs keep towards the Mexican culture international imaginary. In order to do so, we will take advantage of the itineraries the tourists follow to get to the tourist developments, of the images exposed in specific places, and of the tourists account of their experiences. Our means of access will be the real images (taken by the author of this paper) and those collected in web sites of hotel chains and personal tourist journals (blogs). With these instruments we intend to associate the place plastic languages with those derived from international imaginaries on the Mexican culture. As an example we take into account to points of view: the real estate promoter’s and the tourist’s. The case of study is Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, a city that has suffered a tough switch to the tourist activities within the last ten years, and of which its real-estate growth represents an emblematic case in the Mexican northwest. Bringing forward a brief conclusion, it can be pointed out that the array of images and the port design achieve the paradoxical function settle themselves on the traveller’s memory (creating a memorable and singular city), and at the same time they authenticate the tourist experience. In other words, these images are consistent with the imaginary that the tourists have formed even before they began their tour. This recreation of the images is accessible through the stories of other travellers or trough the speech of realestate promoters (realties), both of which available with a single “clic”.On other side, the references seek by the tourist realties are attached to the antique Mexican architecture: the pre-Hispanic cultures, the haciendas and the colonial period, that have very few or nothing to do with the regional environment of Puerto Peñasco. However, that array allows the creation of an "ideal" environment, expected by the tourist to approach to the Mexican culture. Finally, contrasting the point of view of a traveller and a real-estate promoter, we will expose the desired city and the fictional city. In this way, we will approach to the "real city", which now seems the copy of the other two.

La pandémie actuelle a provoqué une onde de choc dont les conséquences se font sentir dans tous les aspects de notre vie. Alors que la santé physique a été généralement au cœur de l’attention scientifique et politique, il est devenu clair que la pandémie de COVID-19 a influé significativement sur la santé mentale de nombreux individus. Plus encore, elle aurait accentué les fragilités déjà existantes dans nos systèmes de santé mentale. Souvent moins financé ou soutenu que la santé physique, le domaine de la santé mentale pourrait-il bénéficier d’innovations en intelligence artificielle en période de pandémie ? Et si oui comment ? Que vous soyez développeur.e.s en IA, chercheur.e.s ou entrepreneur.e.s, ce document vise à vous fournir une synthèse des pistes d’actions et des ressources pour prévenir les principaux risques éthiques liés au développement d’applications d’IA dans le champ de la santé mentale. Pour illustrer ces principes, ce document propose de découvrir quatre cas fictif, à visée réaliste, à partir desquels il vous sera proposé de porter attention aux enjeux éthiques potentiels dans cette situation, aux enjeux d’innovation responsable à envisager, aux pistes d’action possibles inspirées de la liste de contrôle (Protocole Canadien conçu pour favoriser une utilisation responsable de l’IA en santé mentale et prévention du suicide, Mörch et al., 2020), aux ressources pratiques et à certains enjeux juridiques pertinents. Ce document a été élaboré par Carl-Maria Mörch, PhD, Algora Lab, Université de Montréal, Observatoire International sur les impacts sociétaux de l’Intelligence Artificielle et du Numérique (OBVIA), Mila – Institut Québécois d’Intelligence Artificielle, avec les contributions de Pascale Lehoux, Marc-Antoine Dilhac, Catherine Régis et Xavier Dionne.