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Raghunath, Riyukta. "Possible worlds theory, accessibility relations, and counterfactual historical fiction." Journal of Literary Semantics 51, no. 1 (April 1, 2022): 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jls-2022-2047.
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Abstract Possible Worlds Theory has commonly been invoked to describe fictional worlds and their relationship to the actual world. As an approach to genre, the relationship between fictional worlds and the actual world is also constitutive of specific text types. By drawing on the notion of accessibility relations, different genres can be classified based on the distance between their fictional worlds and the actual world. Maître, Doreen. 1983. Literature and possible worlds. Middlesex: Middlesex University Press for example, in what is considered the first attempt to adapt accessibility relations from logic to literary studies, distinguishes between four text types depending on the extent to which their fictional worlds can be seen as possible, probable, or impossible in the actual world. Developing Maître’s work, Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991a. Possible worlds and accessibility relations: A semantic typology of fiction. Poetics Today 12. 553–576, c.f. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991b. Possible worlds, artificial intelligence, and narrative theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press) creates a comprehensive taxonomy of accessibility relations that may be perceived between fictional worlds and the actual world. This includes assuming compatibility with the actual world in terms of physical laws, general truths, people, places, and entities. Using her taxonomy, she then offers a typology of 13 genres to show how fictional worlds created by different genres differ from each other. As it stands, Ryan’s typology does not contain the genre of counterfactual historical fiction, but similar genres such as science fiction and historical confabulation are included. In this article, specific examples from counterfactual historical fiction are analysed to show why it is problematic to place these texts within the genres of historical confabulation or science fiction. Furthermore, as I show, Ryan’s typological model also does not account for some of the characteristic features of the genre of counterfactual historical fiction and as such the model cannot account for all texts within the genre. To resolve this issue, I offer modifications to Ryan’s model so it may be used more effectively to define and distinguish the genre of counterfactual historical fiction.
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Šešlak, Mirko Ž. "PHILIP K. DICK’S UBIK: A NATURAL POSSIBLE WORLD OF SCIENCE FICTION OR A SUPERNATURAL POSSIBLE WORLD OF FANTASY?" Lipar XXIV, no. 82 (2023): 107–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.46793/lipar82.107s.
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The article aims to explore whether the text of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik constructs a natural (physi- cally possible) or a supernatural (physically impossible) fictional world. According to Darko Suvin, one of the fundamental traits of science fiction is that its texts construct natural, physically possible fictional worlds. Readers of science fiction have often complained of Ubik, regarding it a confusing work, riddled with supernatural impurities and a lack of precise explanations. The betrayal of these expectations often casts doubt on whether this novel is science-fictional or a work of fantasy. If we aim to determine whether the fictional world of Ubik belongs to the possible worlds of science fiction, the theoretical framework for such a task can be found in Lubomir Doležel’s possible worlds theory. To do this, we must analyze the alethic constraints of the given fictional world, for those narrative modalities govern the formation of the fic- tional world’s physical laws and determine what is possible, impossible and necessary within its boundaries. If our analysis shows that the alethic constraints present in Ubik are analogous to the physical laws of the real world, we will prove that this fictional world is physically pos- sible and therefore possesses one of the fundamental traits of science fiction, naturalness. If our analysis shows otherwise, the fictional world of Ubik can be relegated to the supernatural, physically impossible worlds of fantasy.
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Markussen, Thomas, Eva Knutz, and Tau Lenskjold. "Design Fiction as a Practice for Researching the Social." Temes de Disseny, no. 36 (October 1, 2020): 16–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.46467/tdd36.2020.16-39.
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The aim of this paper is to contribute to a new conceptual foundation for design fiction. Much attention is dedicated to theorising how design fictions relate to our so-called actual world. This work can be seen as an attempt at securing the seriousness and legitimacy of design fiction as an approach to design research. The theory of possible worlds has proven promising in this regard. We argue, however, that a detailed understanding of design fiction is still lacking. In design fiction literature, authors often engage in critiquing techno-centric approaches while paying less attention to how design fiction has a potential to foster social change in situated actual affairs. We argue that analysis should start from the messy unfolding of the design event itself rather than from big ontological discussions of the boundaries between fiction and reality. To grasp the messiness of design fiction, we offer an interdisciplinary framework, bridging knowledge domains such as literally theory and design anthropology.
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Mikkonen, Kai. "Minimal Departure and Fictional Narrative Situations." Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 13, no. 2 (December 2021): 71–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/stw.2021.a925851.
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Abstract: Readers understand fictional worlds at least to some extent by drawing on background knowledge of their own world. Some theories of fiction, however, hold that such realistic expectations, or processes of naturalization, are the default attitude in experiencing fictions. Thus, what Marie-Laure Ryan has called the principle of minimal departure (MD) states that readers understand fictional worlds and their components by drawing on background knowledge of their own world, unless otherwise indicated. This article is a critical examination of the relevance of the principle of MD and a contextualization of other theoretical notions of readerly attitude, including Thomas Pavel's principles of maximal departure (MxD) and optimal departure (OD) and Kendall L. Walton's principle of charity, within the broader framework of fictional verisimilitude and believability. The question of relevance will be discussed in relation to the idea of the contract of fiction by which is meant the knowledge that one is reading fiction. The analytic sections of this article focus on the question of fictional narrative situation, which in Ryan's possible-worlds theory functions as the trademark of fiction—as narrators and narratees (or narrative audiences) are exempted from the operations of MD. The "impossible" narrative situations that serve as examples include Jorge Luis Borges's loosely autobiographical story "Funes el memorioso" (1942) and two nineteenth-century French fictions: Guy de Maupassant's short story "La nuit" (1887) and a passage from Émile Zola's roman à thèse, Lourdes (1894).
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Fiorin, Gaetano, and Denis Delfitto. "A contextual theory of fictional names." Intercultural Pragmatics 21, no. 3 (May 15, 2024): 349–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ip-2024-3003.
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Abstract We review some of the most prominent challenges in the semantics and pragmatics of fictional names and propose a pragmatic theory of fictional names whereby understanding a fictional name requires imagining possible contexts of interpretation of the name. Similarly to other pragmatic approaches to fiction and fictional contexts, we maintain that fictional texts require that the interpreter engages in a game of pretense of sort and are, therefore, prescriptions to imagine a state of affairs that is not the real one. In contrast to these approaches, however, we propose that interpreting a fictional text does not require imagining a set of possible state of affairs where the text would be true but, rather, requires imagining a set of possible contexts where the text would be meaningful. In order to apply this framework to fictional names, we adopt a contextual theory of proper names, which we have proposed and defended in previous work.
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Livytska, I. A. "POSSIBLE WORLD THEORY AND IMAGINARY WORLD OF FICTION: POINTS OF INTERACTION." Тrаnscarpathian Philological Studies 2, no. 14 (2020): 149–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.32782/tps2663-4880/2020.14-2.27.
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Lähteenmäki, Ilkka. "Possible Worlds of History." Journal of the Philosophy of History 12, no. 1 (March 22, 2018): 164–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18722636-12341354.
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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.
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Maza, Antonio José Planells de la. "The expressive power of the Possible Worlds Theory in video games: when narratives become interactive and fictional spaces." Comunicação e Sociedade 27 (June 29, 2015): 289–302. http://dx.doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.27(2015).2102.
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The philosophical concept of possible worlds (Lenzen, 2004; Lewis, 1986) has been used in literary studies and narratology (Dolezel, 1998; Eco, 1979) to define the way in which we conceive different narrative possibilities inside the fictional world. In Game Studies, some authors have used this concept to explore the relationship between game design and game experience (Kücklich, 2003; Maietti, 2004; Ryan, 2006), while Jesper Juul (2005) has studied the fictional world evoked by the connection between rules and fiction. In this paper we propose a new approach to video games as ludofictional worlds - a set of possible worlds which generates a game space based on the relationship between fiction and game rules. In accordance with the concepts of minimal departure (Ryan, 1991) and indexical term (Lewis, 1986), the position of the player character determines his/her actual world and the next possible or necessary world. Lastly, we use this model to analyse the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and show that the possible worlds perspective provides a useful, flexible and modular framework for describing the internal connections between ludofictional worlds and the interactive nature of playable game spaces.
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Mosselaer, Nele Van de. "How Can We Be Moved to Shoot Zombies? A Paradox of Fictional Emotions and Actions in Interactive Fiction." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 279–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0016.
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Abstract How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? By asking this question, Colin Radford introduced the paradox of fiction, or the problem that we are often emotionally moved by characters and events which we know don’t really exist (1975). A puzzling element of these emotions that always resurfaced within discussions on the paradox is the fact that, although these emotions feel real to the people who have them, their difference from ›real‹ emotions is that they cannot motivate us to perform any actions. The idea that actions towards fictional particulars are impossible still underlies recent work within the philosophy of fiction (cf. Matravers 2014, 26 sqq.; Friend 2017, 220; Stock 2017, 168). In the past decennia, however, the medium of interactive fiction has challenged this crystallized idea. Videogames, especially augmented and virtual reality games, offer us agency in their fictional worlds: players of computer games can interact with fictional objects, save characters that are invented, and kill monsters that are clearly non-existent within worlds that are mere representations on a screen. In a parallel to Radford’s original question, we might ask: how can we be moved to shoot zombies, when we know they aren’t real? The purpose of this article is to examine the new paradox of interactive fiction, which questions how we can be moved to act on objects we know to be fictional, its possible solutions, and its connection to the traditional paradox of fictional emotions. Videogames differ from traditional fictional media in that they let their appreciators enter their fictional worlds in the guise of a fictional proxy, and grant their players agency within this world. As interactive fictions, videogames reveal new elements of the relationship between fiction, emotions, and actions that have been previously neglected because of the focus on non-interactive fiction such as literature, theatre, and film. They show us that fictional objects can not only cause actions, but can also be the intentional object of these actions. Moreover, they show us that emotions towards fictions can motivate us to act, and that conversely, the possibility of undertaking actions within the fictional world makes a wider array of emotions towards fictional objects possible. Since the player is involved in the fictional world and responsible for his actions therein, self-reflexive emotions such as guilt and shame are common reactions to the interactive fiction experience. As such, videogames point out a very close connection between emotions and actions towards fictions and introduce the paradox of interactive fiction: a paradox of fictional actions. This paradox of fictional actions that is connected to our experiences of interactive fiction consists of three premises that cannot be true at the same time, as this would result in a contradiction: 1. Players act on videogame objects. 2. Videogame objects are fictional. 3. It is impossible to act on fictional objects. The first premise seems to be obviously true: gamers manipulate game objects when playing. The second one is true for at least some videogame objects we act upon, such as zombies. The third premise is a consequence of the ontological gap between the real world and fictional worlds. So which one needs to be rejected? Although the paradox of interactive fiction is never discussed as such within videogame philosophy, there seem to be two strategies at hand to solve this paradox, both of which are examined in this article. The first strategy is to deny that the game objects we can act on are fictional at all. Espen Aarseth, for example, argues that they are virtual objects (cf. 2007), while other philosophers argue that players interact with real, computer-generated graphical representations (cf. Juul 2005; Sageng 2012). However, Aarseth’s concept of the virtual seems to be ad hoc and unhelpful, and describing videogame objects and characters as real, computer-generated graphical representations does not account for the emotional way in which we often relate to them. The second solution is based on Kendall Walton’s make-believe theory, and, similar to Walton’s solution to the original paradox of fictional emotions, says that the actions we perform towards fictional game objects are not real actions, but fictional actions. A Waltonian description of fictional actions can explain our paradoxical actions on fictional objects in videogames, although it does raise questions about the validity of Walton’s concept of quasi-emotions. Indeed, the way players’ emotions can motivate them to act in a certain manner seems to be a strong argument against the concept of quasi-emotions, which Walton introduced to explain the alleged non-motivationality of emotions towards fiction (cf. 1990, 201 sq.). Although both strategies to solve the paradox of interactive fiction might ultimately not be entirely satisfactory, the presentation of these strategies in this paper not only introduces a starting point for discussing this paradox, but also usefully supplements and clarifies existing discussions on the paradoxical emotions we feel towards fictions. I argue that if we wish to solve the paradox of actions towards (interactive) fiction, we should treat it in close conjunction with the traditional paradox of emotional responses to fiction.
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Oatley, Keith. "Worlds of the possible." Pragmatics and Cognition 21, no. 3 (December 31, 2013): 448–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.21.3.02oat.
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The ability to think in abstractions depends on the imagination. An important evolutionary change was the installation of a suite of six imaginative activities that emerge at first in childhood, which include empathy, symbolic play, and theory-of-mind. These abilities can be built upon in adulthood to enable the production of oral and written stories. As a technology, writing has three aspects: material, skill based, and societal. It is in fiction that expertise in writing is most strikingly attained; imagination is put to use to create simulations of the social world that can usefully be offered to others. Fiction is best conceived as an externalization of consciousness, which not only enables us to understand others but also to transform ourselves so that we can reach beyond the immediate.
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Fontaine, Matthieu. "Singular Terms, Identity, and the Creation of Fictional Characters." Disputatio 11, no. 54 (December 1, 2019): 207–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/disp-2019-0017.
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Abstract How to interpret singular terms in fiction? In this paper, we address this semantic question from the perspective of the Artifactual Theory of Fiction (ATF). According to the ATF, fictional characters exist as abstract artifacts created by their author, and preserved through the existence of copies of an original work and a competent readership. We pretend that a well-suited semantics for the ATF can be defined with respect to a modal framework by means of Hintikka’s world lines semantics. The question of the interpretation of proper names is asked in relation to two inference rules, problematic when applied in intensional contexts: the Substitution of Identicals and Existential Generalization. The former fails because identity is contingent. The latter because proper names are not necessarily linked to well-identified individuals. This motivates a non-rigid interpretation of proper names in fiction, although cross-fictional reference (e.g. to real entities) is made possible by the interpretative efforts of the reader.
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Allan, Angela S. "“Our Sense of Purpose”: Speculative Fiction and Systems Reading." Novel 52, no. 3 (November 1, 2019): 406–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00295132-7738578.
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Abstract This article reads Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990) and Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014) as works of speculative fiction that engage with the scientific concept of “the system” that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. It tracks this history, showing how ecologists and engineers generated their own speculative fictions of possible dystopian futures—environmental collapse, depletion of resources, and overpopulation—through models of dynamic systems. In turn, works of speculative fiction also began to borrow these models for understanding their own relationship to the world around them. This article argues that Jurassic Park and On Such a Full Sea reject the possibility of representing reality as a way to understand what a novel is. While speculative fiction primarily has been read as a popular vehicle for political critique, this article suggests how genre fiction can also generate new forms of literary critique and systems of reading.
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Hernández Ruiz, María Victoria. "Presence of Ethical, Aesthetic and Religious Keys in the Creation of Possible Literary Worlds." Cauriensia. Revista anual de Ciencias Eclesiásticas 17 (December 19, 2022): 171–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.17398/2340-4256.17.171.
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Literary works have structures that articulate the possible worlds represented in them using ethical, aesthetic, and religious keys -mimeses of these structures in the real effective world- so that the greater or lesser presence of these keys determines whether the work is coherent, plausible, and meaningful for the reader. Literary theories have omitted the study of this section of reality present in the structure of the works and, therefore, in this article we intend to systematise and describe, using the semantic theory of possible worlds, the functioning of these structures in the processes of representation, creation, and reception of a work of fiction. We also provide a proposal for a model of analysis that ratifies the presence of these articulating structures of the fictional world and regulators of the interactions of the possible characters among themselves, with the world they inhabit and with transcendence. With this research we want to confirm the need to include ethical, aesthetic and religious structures within the theory of literature and to offer a rich and fruitful model of analysis.
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Turvey, Malcolm. "Imagination, Simulation, and Fiction." Film Studies 8, no. 1 (2006): 116–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/fs.8.12.
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It is widely argued that engaging with a fiction involves imagining its content. Yet, the concept of the imagination is rarely clarified, and it is often used incorrectly by theorists. A good example, this paper argues, is Gregory Currie‘s simulation theory, and its claim that imagining the content of a fiction consists of simulating ‘the beliefs I would acquire if I took the work I am engaged with for fact rather than fiction’. The paper, following the philosopher Alan R. White, argues instead that imagining consists of thoughts about the possible.
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Teske, Joanna, and Robert Mirski. "Interactivist Refutation of Radical Epistemic Skepticism Characteristic of Postmodern Literary Studies and Fiction." ENTHYMEMA, no. 32 (July 14, 2023): 1–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.54103/2037-2426/19781.
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Postmodern fiction and literary theory have endorsed radical skepticism about knowledge, which was partly conditioned by philosophers’ inability to provide a viable epistemology that would resolve the radical skeptical problems. Most recent developments in both fiction and theory have largely ignored the apparently still unresolved issue and have instead embraced the position of active commitment that presupposes that knowledge is in fact possible. In this text, we address this apparent oversight and present an interactivist ontology of the mind and culture that explains how we can acquire knowledge about the world, and why the postmodern radical skepticism is ungrounded. We argue that once the interactivist theory of cognition as well as ontology of the mind and culture are assumed, the skeptical problems that troubled postmodern thought become non-problems and further pursuit of epistemically evaluable theory of culture (fiction included) gains solid theoretical grounds.
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Suvin, Darko. "On Understanding Our Needy World through Science Fiction and Utopia/nism." Minnesota review 2021, no. 97 (November 1, 2021): 122–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00265667-9335856.
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How do dominant epistemological frames create political understanding and violence in the public sphere and through cultural texts? This article explores a theoretical answer to this question by identifying narrative categories, or frames, that create shared realities and collective political understanding and action in contemporary antiutopian US culture. Much current public information is marred by the juxtaposition of fact and fiction, logic and emotion, creating forms of knowledge and thus political action not necessarily based, then, on actuality or a communal ethic of care. Through analysis of worlds made possible in science fiction, the author builds on his previous theoretical work to develop what he calls “a method for radical utopian cognition”—one that sees cultural cognition based in logic, emotions, and a utopian frame in which destiny or resolution is not dictated by class or preordained authorial expectation but is instead open for constructive possibilities and new realities through the presentation of alternative possible worlds.
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Khvastunova, Yulia V. "THE CONCEPT OF MULTIPLE IDENTITY IN TRANSHUMANIST LITERATURE (THE CASE STUDY OF D. BRIN’S VISION)." Russian Studies in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (March 31, 2023): 69–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2576-9782-2023-1-69-83.
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This paper deals with one of the urgent problems in the framework of the implementation of the latest radical technologies of “human enhancement” the so-called theory of multiple identity (multiple “I”, the theory of doubles, and the duplication of consciousness). This topic of a possible backup of our consciousness is analyzed in relation to the procedure for digitally uploading consciousness, creating digital avatars, cyborgs, and clones and cases of success in the field of gene editing as well as the application of this technology to humans. In fiction, particularly in science fiction, this problem is included in the list of top mysterious subjects. As an example, the paper considers a position of a famous science fiction writer and supporter of transhumanism David Brin, presented in the work “Kiln People”. The article highlights main ideas, possible risks, and negative consequences that the writer is trying to foresee and reveal scenarios for the development of launching a mass duplication of consciousness or creating a technology for implementing a multiple identity of “I”.
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Ong, Yi-Ping. "How Shall We Let This Text, or Anything, Teach Us?" Comparative Literature 73, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00104124-8738851.
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Abstract How do we come to share an ethical outlook with others? Is it possible to teach ethics? What does it mean to live with others when we do not (always) inhabit the same world? J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello engages these profound ethical questions in its very form. Whereas critics argue that the novel either takes up or evades the task of ethical instruction, this article shows that the text disputes the basic assumptions of ethical literary criticism. Elizabeth Costello makes a powerful case for the difference of the novel vis-à-vis other forms of ethical discourse. What is at stake in Coetzee’s choice of the novel qua fiction is an attempt to engage the status of fiction in relation to the status of ethical discourse in our time. Contemporary ethical discourse unfolds within a context in which it is considered to be no more than a necessary fiction. Coetzee’s text places this stance within the framework of fiction—not primarily to demonstrate its falsity but to stage an alternate or rival fiction, one that challenges our fundamental assumptions about fiction, ethics, and existence.
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Disney, Dan. "‘She would probably envy herself, from outside’: Auto-fictional narrations in Alice Munro’s ‘Fiction’." Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 13, no. 1 (March 1, 2023): 67–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fict_00074_1.
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In one of Alice Munro’s longer stories, the metafictional ‘Fiction’, readers encounter a series of contingent narratives in which characters exert explicit, self-constructing expressive labours. The text is split into two sections: in the first, the protagonist Joyce is betrayed by her husband, Jon and her life momentarily falls to pieces. In the second section, decades later, Joyce is remarried, surrounded by friends and family, her life replenished and thriving. A gamut of fictions suffuses this text, as if Munro’s scenes are case studies delivering heuristic knowledge and Joyce’s self-narrativizations act as if a generative mode of self-care (the talking cure for one, as such). At heart, Munro seems to explore for the possible functions of fiction: through Joyce’s example, it seems that part of the work of fiction remains intra-personal, in this text a means by which to switch trauma off. Joyce’s mind is shown to work in anti-repressive modes, creating clearly narrativized lines of self-understanding which, in this case, enable the protagonist to literally come to terms with a self-told story placing at the denouement her own blamelessness. Herewith, ‘Fiction’ can be read as a complexly woven narrative on modes of narrativization, Munro seemingly implying that memories retold and reframed are a functional gestalt enabling some to become more than the sum of past traumas. Through accepting that life sometimes can be as positively strange as fiction, Joyce is able finally to both rejoice and (as it were) re-Joyce.
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Zipfel, Frank. "Emotion, Darstellung, Fiktion. Literaturtheoretische Überlegungen zum Verhältnis zwischen Fiktionsparadox und Mimesisparadox." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 321–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0018.
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Abstract The discussions around the paradox of fiction that began 40 years ago have slowed down considerably during the last decade. The main reason for this decrease of interest can be seen in the fact that many theories have tried to show that the paradox can be solved or never existed. Nevertheless, there is hardly any major work on the theory of fiction that does not deal with the paradox in some way or other. Nowadays, however, the interest in the discussion has moved away from attempting to solve the paradox. Contemporary theory of fiction is rather interested in the question whether and how the long-lasting and extensive discussions around the paradox have led to a better understanding of the nature and variety of our emotional responses to fiction. This paper, however, sets out to investigate the discussions around the paradox from a different perspective. It undertakes to identify the blind spots in the discussions around the paradox, i. e. it aims at examining which aspects of our emotional response to fictional works did not come into view and, thus, have been neglected by the way in which the paradox has usually been dealt with. One of the most popular strategies for dealing with the paradox consists in comparing our emotional response towards fictional works with our emotional response towards objects that are before our eyes (or that we experience via other senses) and towards events that are actually going on around us. This strategy has led to unsatisfactory results because it highlights the representational content of art works and neglects the particular ways in which this content is depicted. It thereby fails to take into account one of the most crucial aspects of fictional works, i. e. the fact that they are representations. Few theorists have questioned this popular strategy. Among them are R. Moran, who claims that emotional reactions to objects in the actual here and now should not be considered as the paradigms of our emotional involvements when we deal with fictional texts, P. Goldie, who maintains that most of our emotional reactions regard non-actual states of affairs, and D. Matravers who distinguishes between emotional reactions in confrontation situations and those towards representations. And these doubts about the way the paradox is dealt with have hardly had any impact on the discussion. It can be shown, however, that due to the fundamental differences between emotional reactions regarding objects we are confronted with and objects we learn about via representations, some of the answers given to the questions that have been treated in the discussion around the paradox implicitly dealt with the representational aspect of fictional works but not specifically with their fictionality. Moreover, by analysing the theories by R. Moran, P. Goldie and D. Matravers it is argued that widely neglected, but helpful questions can be raised if we compare the emotional response to fictional representations with the emotional response to factual representations instead of comparing it to our emotions in real life situations. Especially Matravers’ theory has several advantages: it respects the representational aspects of our emotional response to texts and other art works, it provides us with an account that is based on semiotic features of these art works and the way we process them, and it can be productively linked to other relevant concepts like R. Gerrig’s willing construction of disbelief or H. Rott’s doxastic voluntarism. Moreover, by comparing Matravers’ theory of emotional response to (fictional) representations with the corresponding theory in G. Currie’s early works it is possible to raise further arguments in favour of the thesis that an explicit exploration of the representational aspects of fictional works is of vital importance for a discriminating theory regarding our emotional response to fiction. However, Matravers’ theory is not entirely satisfactory because it postulates that there are no differences between emotional responses towards fictional representations and those towards factual ones. It is argued that taking into account the representational aspects of factual and fictional works might be a promising way to look for such differences. Investigations into our various emotional responses to fictional works would then be led against the backdrop of our responses to factual representations. Moreover, insight might be gained if we compare fictional representations not only to truthful factual representations but also to deceitful ones. Such an approach that looks beyond the problems that have been debated in the discussions around the paradox of fiction would be able to fill the gaps regarding our response to fictional artworks caused by these discussions. This would lead us to learn to distinguish between the kinds of emotional responses that are specific for representations in general and those that are specific for fictional representations. Moreover, it would enable our investigations into the emotional responses to fictional works to take into account two aspects that have also often been neglected in the discussions around the paradox of fiction: the differences between the various semiotic systems on which works of the differing artforms are based and the specific representational features that are linked to the fictionality of every specific work.
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Berninger, Anja. "Empathy – Real-Life and Fiction-Based." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 224–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0013.
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Abstract In response to the so-called paradox of fiction, Kendall Walton famously argued that our affective reactions to fictions differ structurally from real-life emotions. Many authors now reject the idea that there really is a paradox of fiction. But, even if this is true, Walton may have been right in that there really are far reaching differences between the way we respond to fictions and our real-life emotional reactions. That is, even if we do not believe the paradox of fiction is a paradox, it can still lead us to doubt the homogeneity of our emotional responses and to reflect on the relation between real-life and fiction-based emotional reactions. In this paper, I want to further discuss this issue focusing on the case of empathy. The main questions I want to answer are: What are the differences between our real-life and fiction-based empathic reactions? Are there any far reaching structural differences between the two? In my discussion, I will stress the idea that real-life empathy is often built on a relatively complex interaction between the person that empathizes and the emotional subject. I will show, first of all, that this type of social interaction is not possible in literary fiction. Secondly, I will stress that literature often offers an introspective perspective on a character’s inner life. This is a perspective not open to us in real-life settings, which allows for a distinct kind of empathy. In discussing real-life and fiction-based empathy I differentiate between two different functions empathic reactions might fulfill. Thus, following Matthew Kieran, I suggest that some forms of empathy might allow us to infer the emotional state an agent is in and to predict his subsequent behavior. In other cases, however, the aim of empathy is not to achieve some sort of epistemic aim, but rather to feel a kind of solidarity with those that are in the grip of an emotion. In this paper, I concentrate on this second kind of empathy. I will start with some general remarks on the structure of real-life empathy. Drawing on some ideas originally voiced by Adam Smith, I will highlight the fact that empathy is a deeply social process involving two individuals: the one that empathizes (the empathizer or the spectator) and the one that is empathized with (the empathizee or the actor). According to Smith, both actor and spectator will often put themselves in the other’s shoes to bring empathy about. Furthermore, both sides engage in some form of emotion regulation: the spectator tries to regulate his emotions so they match those of the empathizee. The empathizee, in turn, may need to down-regulate his emotional reactions, so that they can indeed match. In how far he must do so, depends on his relation with the empathizer. I suggest that, additionally to these forms of emotion regulation, the empathizee also engages in some forms of reason giving. The exact form this takes again depends on his relationship with the empathizer. I then go on to show that this theory enables us to understand why empathy is sometimes so difficult to achieve in real life. Here, I show that high degrees of emotional intensity but also the type of emotion felt may make it difficult for the empathizee to engage in the sort of down-regulation and reason giving discussed. With these distinctions in place, I then turn to the case of fiction-based empathy. I will show that fiction-based empathy is not a social phenomenon in the same sense as real-life empathy. There is thus an important structural difference between the two. I then suggest that fiction often confronts us with the type of cases that present challenges to real-life empathy (i. e. cases where there is a lack of down-regulation, high emotional intensity and so on). Fiction, however, also provides us with additional resources that facilitate empathy even in these difficult cases. Fiction often gives us access to the stream of thought of a fictional character. Fictional texts thus allow us to get a glimpse on how emotional intensity and emotion type affect a character’s thinking, as well as offering us insight into the raw emotional feel, the intensity and urgency connected to many emotions. Fictional texts generally use aesthetic means to give us access to these aspects. Thus, when feeling empathy in response to a work of fiction we must therefore not only understand the situation in question, but must also be sensitive to (some of the) aesthetic features of the text.
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Parisi, Luciano. "DINO BUZZATI: l'AMBIGUITÀ DELLA FANTASIA." Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 39, no. 1 (March 2005): 83–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/001458580503900105.
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Imagination allowed Dino Buzzati to play with the readers' expectations, and to escape from stereotypes and conventions. It also allowed him to pay attention to the secret messages that nature seemed to send, and gave him a chance to interpret them. Imagination, finally, made it possible for Buzzati to create fictional worlds, more serene and just than the one in which he lived. In all these cases, imagination played a constructive part in Buzzati's work. There were, however, cases in which it led the writer to take the negative aspects of the world for granted, and provoked an excess of unjustified pessimism. Like everything else in his fiction, therefore, imagination had in Buzzati an ambiguous nature.
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Martínez-Gil, Víctor. "Mediterrani i apocalipsi en la literatura catalana de ciència-ficció." SCRIPTA. Revista Internacional de Literatura i Cultura Medieval i Moderna 22, no. 22 (December 3, 2023): 499. http://dx.doi.org/10.7203/scripta.22.27844.
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Resum: L’objectiu d’aquest article és analitzar la presència del mediterranisme, entès com a doctrina d’identificació col·lectiva, en la literatura catalana de ciència-ficció sobre la fi del món. L’article estableix les possibles relacions entre els motius que provoquen l’apocalipsi (guerra mundial destructora, invasió d’extraterrestres, motius ecològics) i les diferents imatges del Mediterrani com a refugi de valors clàssics i vitals (durant la postguerra i fins als anys setanta), com a imatge de la societat desapareguda (durant l’exili i en ecoficcions dels anys setanta) o, en la ficció climàtica apocalíptica i en la ficció de l’Antropocè, com a massa d’aigua amenaçadora o com subjecte de nous valors d’identificació. Aquest recorregut pot ajudar a entendre els canvis ideològics esdevinguts entre la guerra freda, la postmodernitat i l’actualitat.Paraules clau: ciència-ficció, apocalipsi, mediterranisme, postmodernitat, Literatura catalanaAbstract: The aim of this paper is to analyse the presence of Mediterraneanism, that is, a collective identification way of thinking, in Catalan science-fiction literature about the end of the world. The paper lays out the possible relationships between what causes the apocalypse (a destructive world war, an alien invasion, environment issues) and the different portraits of the Mediterranean as the sanctuary of classical and life values (literature after the Spanish Civil War and until the 70s), as the portrait of a lost society (literature of the Exile period and 70s eco-fiction), or as a menacing water body or a subject of new identity values in apocalyptic climate fiction and Anthropocene fiction. This paper can help understand the ideological changes that happened between the Cold War, Postmodernity, and the present time.Keywords: Science fiction, Apocalypse, Mediterraneanism, Postmodernity, Catalan literature
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ARIZA TRINIDAD, Eva. "MUNDOS POSIBLES DE LO FANTÁSTICO. UNA APROXIMACIÓN A LA ESTRUCTURA DE MUNDO." Signa: Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica 30 (January 6, 2021): 363. http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/signa.vol30.2021.26399.
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Resumen: La teoría de los mundos posibles que plantean Lubomir Doležel, Umberto Eco y Thomas Pavel se aplica en esta propuesta a lo fantástico para concretar los rasgos ontológicos, cualitativos, cuantitativos y de homogeneidad / heterogeneidad que configuran la macroestructura de este tipo de mundos; un análisis que posibilita diferenciar este territorio ficcional de otros con que suele confundirse, como lo maravilloso y la ciencia ficción. Así, se proporciona una definición de lo fantástico, alternativa a las actuales, que contempla las relaciones inter-mundos en que se fundamenta su especificidad ficcional.Abstract: In this paper, possible-world theory, as advanced by Lubomir Doležel, Umberto Eco and Thomas Pavel, has been applied to the fantastic in order to characterise its macrostructure through the identification of its defining features, namely, its ontological, qualitative, quantitative and homogeneity / heterogeneity traits. This analysis makes it possible to differentiate the fantastic from other fictional territories with which it is usually mistaken, such as the marvellous and science-fiction. Thus, an alternative definition of the fantastic is given by considering the interworld relations in which its fictional specificity lies.
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Dubois, Philippe. "Trace-Image to Fiction-Image: The unfolding of Theories of Photography from the '80s to the Present." October 158 (October 2016): 155–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00275.
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This essay traces how theories of photography have moved beyond the ontological theories of the trace-image (the index, the “it-has-been”) in the 1980s, toward, at first, more pragmatic theories linked to the uses of the image, and then toward what Dubois hypothesizes as the “theory of possible worlds” applied to the visual field. In this new understanding, the photograph is not a “trace-image-of-what-was-there” but rather a “fiction-image-of-a-world-possible.”
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Sadeghi, Leila. "Discursive Silence: A Tool to Read between the Lines in Persian Stories." International Journal of Linguistics 7, no. 5 (October 29, 2015): 99. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v7i5.8186.
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<p class="1">According to Hemingway, if a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may be silent about seven-eighth of the text (1996: 192). This silence as a notable absence leaves a meaningful trace, which is a marker of written silence. Such silence has an interactive role, employed as a discursive technique in literature to produce a fictional world. Based on this theory, the reader seeks to fill the empty places in the fictional text to understand the story completely. An appropriate device for filling the blanks would be possible through understanding the different six types of silence and its functions. To be exact, the narrative silence is represented in structural, semantic and pragmatic types discussed respectively in three syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and interactive axes. This paper examines these variations of narrative silence in five Persian short stories to analyze the structure of narrative and the creation of the elements of a story by means of silence. The purpose of studying silence is to establish how the narrative structure is based on untold or omitted parts in subtly differing ways, so each kind of silence has its special function in these five stories. Generally, the theory of silence not only proposes a universal pattern for studying fiction, but also suggests a comprehensive analytic tool to study the structuring of narrative that will then allow scholars to differentiate the different silences that constitute styles of fiction writing.</p><div> </div>
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Kušnír, Jaroslav. "The Real, Imaginary and Possible in Robert Coover’s Short Story “Stick Man” (2005)." CLEaR 4, no. 2 (September 1, 2017): 14–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/clear-2017-0008.
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Abstract In the context of Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, this paper analyzes Robert Coover’s depiction of different versions of “reality” as manifested in his short story “Stick Man”. The paper argues that through the depiction of transworld characters oscillating between different ontological levels and modes of representation, Coover treats the relation between fiction and reality, deals, in the context of some post-structuralist theories, with a question of representation connected especially with the relation between language and reality, parodies celebrity culture, mass media manipulation of the audience and consumerism as important aspects of contemporary (American) culture, and points out the replacement of the representation by “simulation” in the contemporary technologically advanced world.
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Bouckaert, Boudewijn. "Corporate Personality: Myth, Fiction or Reality?" Israel Law Review 25, no. 2 (1991): 156–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021223700010347.
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1. When touching upon the question of the nature of corporate personality most lawyers will at best make a link with some paragraphs from the introduction to their commercial law course. They will remember that during the nineteenth century fierce theoretical battles were fought on questions such as whether we should treat supra-individual and non-individual entities as “persons”, under what conditions we should recognize their personality and what should be the legal consequences of such recognition. But no matter how interesting this debate must have been, to revive it is tantamount to becoming a public menace. Already in 1953 H.L.A. Hart, certainly an authority on legal theory, declared that “the juristic controversy over the nature of corporate personality is dead”. In many respects this assessment is correct. Despite the numerous differences about the conditions of recognition, about the possible types of corporations and associations which are subject to corporate personality, about the solidity of the corporate veil, we can observe that nearly all legal systems in the world adopt the notion of corporate personality as such. We may assume the notion will become even more important in the former socialist world, as these countries try hard to reshape their economies along the lines of the market economies in the Western world.
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Srinivasan, Ragini Tharoor. "“English like Hindi”: Chetan Bhagat, Popular Fiction, and India’s Voice." Comparative Literature 76, no. 1 (March 1, 2024): 20–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10897094.
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Abstract This essay examines the rise of Chetan Bhagat, an icon of the New India “after English” who ironically writes his best-selling popular fictions in English. When Bhagat’s demotic English travels outside India, it is taken up by readers and critics whose responses to his work reveal the persistence of the fantasy of accessing India’s unmediated voice. The essay reads the extant Anglo-American critical discourse on Bhagat, with special attention to the postcritical and post-postcolonial turns in contemporary literary scholarship. It argues that Bhagat’s anointment as a global Anglophone literary icon with purchase on the “real” India lays bare a problem endemic to English literary studies—namely, the problem of enacting comparative literary analysis within English itself. It also raises a number of questions at the intersections of world literature and the global Anglophone, which are rival strategies for the teaching of non-Western literatures in English in US academe. In its concluding sections, the essay considers whether it is possible to teach Bhagat’s “English like Hindi” without allowing it to masquerade as a conduit to a supposedly authentic Indian vernacular sphere.
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Gutman, Jennifer. "Scenario Fiction and the Novel Claims of Insurance." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 56, no. 3 (November 1, 2023): 410–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10750577.
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Abstract Emerging during a Cold War era of nuclear uncertainty, refined in decades of neoliberal turbulence, and used today for modeling climate futures, scenario thinking has now entered the domain of the Anthropocene novel. This article argues for the adoption of scenarios as a formal strategy of two contemporary realist novels engaged in updating the genre to present scales of crisis: Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner's 10:04 (2014). As these novels process new forms of risk in a time of epochal fracture, they likewise signal a conceptual break in realism's capacity to imagine new configurations for the present based on the shape of things past. Scenarios prioritize plausibility over predictability, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in processing an age of planetary crisis while also showing the limits of statistical methods of world-building. By attending to the many configurations that could emerge from the volatile state of the present, scenario fiction seeks to preempt unmediated outcomes and insure the novel's critical extension into all possible futures.
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Vizmuller-Zocco, Jana. "(Un)Human Relations: Transhumanism in Francesco Verso’s Nexhuman." Quaderni d'italianistica 37, no. 2 (January 27, 2018): 211–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/q.i..v37i2.29236.
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Transhumanism is an international movement which espouses the idea that any human organ, function, sense, ability, can be augmented and ameliorated with the judicious use of technology. The ethical, cultural, social, biological, economic implications for this view are far-reaching and point to a number of complex questions whose solution eludes researchers so far. One of the possible sources for answers to these is found in science fiction. While transhumanism is a relatively recent phenomenon (last 25 years or so), science fiction published in English that mirrors some of its issues and ideas has been flourishing for at least as long. In Italy, science fiction is starting to enjoy popularity and critical depth in no small measure due to the untiring abilities of a number of authors. This article analyzes the intersections between human and machine as they are portrayed in Francesco Verso’s Nexhuman. Francesco Verso has published 4 award-winning science fiction novels and a number of short stories. Nexhuman offers a considerable narrative construct which paints a dystopian future where trash is formed and re-formed, sold and reworked; however, strong emotions are not absent, since love may flourish in this “kipple”-laden setting, as well as violence and obsession. Transhumanist ideas explicitly dealt with in the novel include the end of death, the question of the soul, mind uploading, limb prosthesis, the co-existence of humans with mind-uploaded beings. The amalgam between human and machine does away with the Self and the Other(s) as separate entities and constructs a completely different Weltanschauung. Nexhuman is not only a transhumanist trailblazer within the flourishing arena of Italian science fiction, but also a springboard for deeper understanding of what makes us human and the extent to which binary categories need to be overcome in order to create a more accommodating world.
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Scherübl, Florian Sebastian. "Versäumte Möglichkeiten." Scientia Poetica 22, no. 1 (December 1, 2018): 128–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/scipo-2018-005.
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Abstract During the last 30 years, talking about worlds in narratology has been largely based on the terminology and presuppositions of Possible Worlds-Theory (PWT). This branch of research originally developed out of analytical philosophy’s modal logic, and it treats the content of narrative fiction as entities that inhabit a world of their own. In recent years, some of PWTʼs major goals - like proposing a general theory of fictionality - have repeatedly become the object of criticism. Prior to this, PWT already had to deal with the problems that came up when texts were considered worlds. The aim of this paper is twofold: First, it strives to examine and illuminate general problems of PWT, some of which have not been broadly recognized. Second, it reconsiders Umberto Ecoʼs Lector in Fabula as an earlier but forgotten methodological attempt to describe world structures in narrative fiction. Ultimately it can be shown that a significant proportion of PWTʼs shortcomings, emphasized in the first part, could be compensated by a partial return to a textpragmatic model such as Ecoʼs.
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Boucher, Geoff M. "The Specificity of Fantasy and the “Affective Novum”: A Theory of a Core Subset of Fantasy Literature." Literature 4, no. 2 (May 17, 2024): 101–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/literature4020008.
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This article proposes a new approach to the nature of a core set within fantasy fiction that regards it as a speculative literature of the exploration of subjectivity, one which at its limit conjectures fresh possibilities for the subjective world. To motivate acceptance of this proposed approach, I begin by surveying the existing state of debate in the critical field. I notice the emergence of widening agreement on the idea that fantasy is a literature of the impossible. I then develop the logical implications of this widening agreement in the critical field, arguing that it entails a representational definition of fantasy literature, which implies a modal approach to the core set that defines this literary order. I suggest that the marvellous mode, the kind of writing which represents the impossible, is a broad class that includes other speculative literatures, and that what differentiates these is the referential world within which the impossible happens. The aim here is to break up monolithic conceptions of the impossible, while pointing to a motivation for developing an understanding of the specificity of a core set of fantasy texts that proceeds by way of contrasts. After explaining why I am extremely skeptical about the definition of science fiction as a “literature of the possible”, I probe descriptions of the difference between fantasy and sci-fi. I propose that whereas some science fiction is a literature of conjectural objectivity, guided by the “cognitive novum”, a significant group of fantasy texts is a literature of speculative subjectivity, guided by an “affective novum”.
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Constantinescu, Cătălin. "Fiction May Confront Theories. Locating Determinism of the Newspeak in G. Orwell’s 1984." Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 7, no. 2 (December 17, 2021): 216–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2021.12.14.
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The paper focuses on the relationships between theory and practice and the consequences of dislocating theory from practice as they are illustrated through fiction. The case study carried out here concerns an exemplary novel, Ninety Eighty-Four by George Orwell, observing how the literary discourse can display a confrontation between two linguistic models, each resulted from a different theory: “instrumentalism” (Winston Smith) and “determinism” (O’ Brien). Also, the possibility of identifying an Orwellian model as opposed to the Sapir-Whorf and the linguistic models deserves examination. Newspeak is full of problematic aspects: ideology shapes the language by means of “wooden language” (la langue de bois, in Françoise Thom’s terms). Therefore, the historical “regime of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) makes possible a peculiar (use of) theory: an instrument that translates the ideology becomes the very essence of the determinist theory on the language in a totalitarian state. In discussing the practical consequences of literary theory, Stanley Fish points out that they are inexistent, because theory can never be united with practice, as it is actually impossible to separate theory from practice – a similar observation made by Steven Knapp and Walter B. Michaels. Whether consequences are real poses a challenge: following Edward Said’s argument, Steven Mailloux observes that theory can be consequential by rhetorical means: theory does what all discursive practices do and that is that it attempts to persuade its readers (or population in a totalitarian state) to adopt its point of view, its way of seeing texts and the world.
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Aliaga-Lavrijsen, Jessica. "Ectogenesis and Representations of Future Motherings in Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season." Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies 43, no. 1 (June 28, 2021): 55–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.1.04.
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After the boom of feminist science fiction in the 1970s, many such novels have tackled the different sociocultural understandings of gender and sexual reproduction. Conventionally, patriarchal thinking tends to posit a biological explanation for gender inequality: women are supposed to be child bearers and the primary caregivers, whereas men should provide for the family through their work. However, if men could share procreation, would these views change? A recent work of fiction exploring this question from multiple perspectives is Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017), a novel that presents a near future in which babies can be grown in artificial wombs that can be carried around. As an analysis of the novel will show, The Growing Season creatively explores the existing tensions among contemporary understandings of motherhood and feminism(s), as well as developments in reproductive biotechnology, through the different perspectives offered by the heterodiegetic third-person narration and multiple focalisation. Ultimately, the voices of the different characters in the novel convey a polyhedral vision of possible future feminist motherhood(s) where ideas of personal freedom and codependency are radically reconceptualised—a rethinking that becomes especially important nowadays, for the biotechnological elements of this fictional dystopia are already a reality.
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Groeben, Norbert. "Biographische Real-Fiktion als Paradigma narrativer Erklärung." Journal of Literary Theory 14, no. 2 (September 25, 2020): 287–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2020-2008.
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AbstractThe two categories of »fiction« and »non-fiction« are most often conceived of – and treated as – disjointed and separate, not only in common sense but also in literary studies. This does not adequately reflect, however, the developmental trajectory of the non-fiction genre over the course of the twentieth century. After all, the popularization of expert knowledge has increasingly been effected with the help of narrative strategies which raise one crucial question: Just how much fiction can the factual nature – the dependence on facts – of non-fiction tolerate? However, as the more precise definition of the pertinent term, »fiction«, indicates, a distinction must be made between »fictionality«, on the one hand, and »fictivity«, on the other. »Fictionality«, that is to say, refers to narrative strategiesanalogous tothose of fiction, but which relate to historical facts. »Fictivity«, by contrast, refers to the representation of fictitious content. More precisely, then, the question is this: Just what degree of fictivity can the factuality of non-fiction writing tolerate? Since this question cannot be answered constructively from a quantitative but only from a qualitative point of view, we are faced with the ultimately crucial question: Just what kind of fictivity can the factuality of non-fiction tolerate?In trying to answer that question, it seems advisable to start from the structure of deductive-nomological explanation, in which a given phenomenon – the explanandum – is explained by deducing its description from regularities plus the antecedent conditions contained in them (the explanans). In the case of historical explanation, in particular, historical facts most often form the explanandum, while the antecedent conditions of the potentially explanatory regularity (i. e., of the explanans) are not historically documented. Even more specifically, the genre of biography presents a paradigmatic case of such historical explanations falling within the purview of literary studies as well. Not uncommonly, attempts to arrive at a coherent, psychologically convincing biographical portrayal are met with the problem that historically documented life events can be explained – as to their genesis or »coming about« – only by reference to ultimately fictitious – or, to take up the distinction introduced above, to ultimately fictive – assumptions regarding antecedent conditions. Literary biography may, therefore, be said to realize the desired combination of fictivity and factuality in the best possible way: namely, as fictivity in the service of factuality.To find a paradigmatic example of such a combination, one need look no further than the biography of the German chemist Clara Immerwahr, wife of the professor of chemistry, Dr. Fritz Haber, who during the First World War was in charge of German efforts to develop and deploy chemical combat agents such as poison gases. Clara Immerwahr demonstrably saw her husband’s work as a perversion of science but was completely isolated and powerless in her protest against it. Her suicide after the German gas attacks at Ypres in April and May 1915 may therefore be understood as a final and ultimate protest (attempt). There is no clear evidence for this, however, since Immerwahr’s farewell letters no longer exist. Accordingly, the path leading towards her decision to end her life has to be reconstructed using fictive assumptions (about decisive life events). This implies the following, central hypothesis: »Once a person breaks away from a religiously motivated rejection of suicide as an inadmissible interference in God’s plan, that person will, in a situation of hopeless, existential, despair, commit suicide.« In the example of a literary biography presented here, Immerwahr’s reaction to the papal encyclical of 1910 is posited as a fictive antecedent condition, for which no historical record exists. In particular, this involves the question whether Immerwahr was prompted by that experience to establish, in her own mind, the precedence of a scientific-humanistic ethos over any kind of religious ideology. That she did come to rank a scientist’s morality of a shared humanity more highly than religious dogma – particularly where self-determination over one’s own life (and the end of one’s own life) was concerned –, is, however, a highly probable developmental condition of her life story, considering its actual culmination in a highly demonstrative suicide.On the basis of this exemplary piece of biographical writing, the connection of fictivity and factuality may be considered in terms of its fundamental structures, and may be revealed as really a case of fictivity in the service of factuality. In fact, we are looking at an explanation of the »how it was possible that« type, in which the explanandum is a confirmed (historical) fact, while the antecedent condition of the explanatory regularity can only be postulated as a psychologically plausible, hermeneutically intelligible life event. It is this combination of factual effects (hence explained) and fictive conditions (thus explaining), or, otherwise put, of historical factuality and (psychologically) probable fictivity, which is meant to be captured by the term »real fiction«.Biography as a genre is particularly suitable for the elaboration of this concept of »real fiction«, because it has been seen as »fundamentally caught between facts and fiction« – between factuality and fictivity – for quite some time now. To justify the introduction of a new genre, however, the level of detail chosen must be such that it, on the one hand, allows us to apprehend the differences, in terms of literary theory, between this new model and other, established models of factuality, while at the same time giving a nuanced, structured account – one that meets the requirements of the philosophy of science– of how precisely fictivity might be said to be »in the service of factuality«. With regard to genre concepts already established in literary theory, one will have to consider the historical novel and the writing of the New Objectivity movement as well as documentary literature. In the case of the historical novel, writers’ »fictivity leeway« is much greater, since there is no requirement for a strict coherence with concrete factual explananda. As an antithesis to this, consider the writing of the New Objectivists, which is characterised by a predominance of factuality which is accompanied by a wholesale – if overgeneralised – rejection of aesthetic concerns and the demand for an unreserved critique of society and ideology. This same anti-ideological impulse also characterises documentary literature, in which the preferred narrative strategies are even fewer (being restricted to the modes of reportage, montage, etc.). The genre of »real fiction«, by contrast, is much more open and flexible, both in terms of (theoretical) content and narrative strategies. In return, however, it places significantly higher demands on the structural relation between fiction and factuality, insofar as an explanation of relevant historical facts has to be given. Thus, the concept of »real fiction« is characterised by a combination of openness (regarding its possible topics and content) with a formally concise explanatory structure. This is how »real fiction« particularizes the fictive in the service of the factual.In the end, »real fiction« can be explicated as a form of narrative explanation in the sense proposed by Danto. It is concerned with the historical explanation of developments – and in the case of biography, more specifically, with the explanatory reconstruction of a life story in ontogenetic terms. Thus, the reconstruction of fictive life events in the form of a narrative does indeed provide a causal explanation, but it does so employing narrative strategies. This permits an epistemological differentiation between »real fiction« and both explanatory narration and thought experiments, at the same time effecting a marked pragmatization (through recourse to the criterion of relevance) and a heightened flexibility of narrative strategies available. If one conceives of the combination of fictivity and narration as the source of literariness, we are ultimately confronted with a synthesis of (literary) art and science, of scientificity and literariness. Being, in the memorable phrase of Wilhelm Dilthey, a wissenschaftliches Kunstwerk (i. e., a »scientific« or »scholarly work of art«), »real fiction« is both: literature striving for the highest standards of scholarship – and scholarship given a literary form.
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Mikkonen, Kai. "The Rhetorics of Plot Function: Henry James's ficelle, Vladimir Nabokov's “Perry,” and James Phelan's “Synthetic Function” Reconsidered." Poetics Today 43, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 27–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9470968.
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Abstract This article discusses the literary character's plot function as an element of the author's rhetorical strategy, and in relation to the reader's active role in responding to that strategy. The main focus will be on characterological instances in narrative fiction that facilitate the development of the novel's plot by way of the character's movement, perspective, or moving perspective. These considerations will be brought to bear on James Phelan's rhetorical approach to the fictional character's basic functions, also known as the mimetic-thematic-synthetic model (MTS model). More precisely, this article will look harder at Phelan's so-called synthetic component of character, that is, those aspects that foreground the character as a construct (rather than as a possible person or a theme), to argue that much more work can be done with this category. In the course of this discussion, Henry James's notion of a ficelle and Vladimir Nabokov's term perry will serve as complementary ideas and as a counterpoint to Phelan's synthetic component. Hence this article will ask: how can we (re)integrate the plot-helper function into the rhetorical character theory?
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Salmose, Niklas. "“A past that has never been present”: The Literary Experience of Childhood and Nostalgia." Text Matters, no. 8 (October 24, 2018): 332–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2018-0020.
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This essay explores the modernist aesthetic involved in creating a fictive, nostalgic, childhood experience. Evoking the experience of childhood through fiction is as close to actually reliving childhood as we can get. The author argues that it is possible to actually transport the reader into not only the idealized world of childhood, but more so into an embodied experience of childhood through the use of different kinds of narrative and stylistic configurations. In a stylistic and narratological analysis of three modernist novels, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace [Is-slottet] (1963) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), the author explores the different ways that literature can create (or re-create) the very experience of childhood through literary style. The strategies involved in establishing a fictive experience of childhood extend from narratological choices such as free indirect style, strict focalization through a child in the narrative (which implies limitations in perception and cognitive abilities, as well as in linguistic terms) to the use of a child-like temporality, the hyperbolic use of phenomena, and an emphasis of the sensorial aspects of perception.
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Vorontsova, Galina N. "“Between Heaven and Earth”: A.N. Tolstoy’s Fiction of 1918–1919." Studia Litterarum 6, no. 2 (2021): 128–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/10.22455/2500-4247-2021-6-2-128-143.
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The article is based on the thesis that in the writer’s works it is always possible to trace the existence of periods marked by the emergence of new themes and motives. As a rule, this is due both to external circumstances and the artist’s reaction to them, his internal feeling of the need to change the paradigm of his further development. In the work of A.N. Tolstoy one of such periods was the era of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, in particular, the first revolutionary years, which are characterized by artistic experiments of the writer, allowing to talk about a definitely new vector of his searches. The article analyzes Tolstoy’s stories Mercy!, Peter’s Day, Count Cagliostro and Delirious in the context of the writer’s artistic searches of the 1918–1919. The writer’s work within the boundaries of small prosaic genres at that time allowed him, already in the second half of 1919, to come close to the creation of a full-scale canvas about the Russian Revolution, the novel The Road to Calvary.
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Vorontsova, Galina N. "“Between Heaven and Earth”: A.N. Tolstoy’s Fiction of 1918–1919." Studia Litterarum 6, no. 2 (2021): 128–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2500-4247-2021-6-2-128-143.
Full textAbstract:
The article is based on the thesis that in the writer’s works it is always possible to trace the existence of periods marked by the emergence of new themes and motives. As a rule, this is due both to external circumstances and the artist’s reaction to them, his internal feeling of the need to change the paradigm of his further development. In the work of A.N. Tolstoy one of such periods was the era of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, in particular, the first revolutionary years, which are characterized by artistic experiments of the writer, allowing to talk about a definitely new vector of his searches. The article analyzes Tolstoy’s stories Mercy!, Peter’s Day, Count Cagliostro and Delirious in the context of the writer’s artistic searches of the 1918–1919. The writer’s work within the boundaries of small prosaic genres at that time allowed him, already in the second half of 1919, to come close to the creation of a full-scale canvas about the Russian Revolution, the novel The Road to Calvary.
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Pak, S. M. "BORROWINGS AS AN ASPECT OF LINGUACULTURAL TRANSFER IN THE CONTACT LITERATURE IN ENGLISH." Humanities And Social Studies In The Far East 18, no. 1 (2021): 176–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.31079/1992-2868-2021-18-1-176-181.
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The article explores borrowings in terms of linguacultural transfer in the ethnic (Russian) fiction written in the English language, the material being works of Helen Litman, an American writer of Russian-Jewish ancestry. The research significance is related to communicative value of the original culture both for interpretation of the author’s style and purport as well as for developing the theory of Russian English in terms of the World Englishes paradigm. Since the primary message of H. Liman’s writings is the difficulty of integrating into a new reality, reference to the past is embodied in numerous cases of lexical and conceptual borrowings. The author explores such types of loans as exoticisms describing Russian prototypical historical, and everyday life concepts which are absent in American culture; Russian transcribed words including exclamations, slang words, incorporated in the texts; zoonyms as a particular case of conceptual borrowings, and phraseological calques. Numerous examples are conditioned by the absence of Russian culture-specific concepts in American linguacultural continuum. Traces of transferring cultural identity in bilingual writers’ fiction, which are found in this article, make it possible to infer the author’s purport as well as broaden the research field of contact fiction.
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Greer, G. H. "Patient teacher: The complexity of in-betweenness in the teaching profession." Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 12, no. 1-2 (April 1, 2019): 219–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jwcp.12.1-2.219_1.
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Using theory and analysis, I story my experience of being in-between ill and well as a teacher. First, I employ the work of Turner (1991), Massumi (2002) and Butler (2002) to define in-betweenness. Then I develop a tool for exploring the values of in-betweenness. Finally, I conduct discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003) on a small archive of non-fiction writing on teacher burnout in the Canadian north. I discover three possible values of in-betweenness in educational settings: (1) validation of diversity, (2) support of open dialogue and (3) development of self-reflection.
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Jehangir, Zenab. "Toward Posthumanism: Stigmatization of Artificial Intelligence in American Science Fiction." Journal of Posthuman Studies 6, no. 2 (December 2022): 168–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.6.2.0168.
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Abstract Posthumanism has become an important theme in science fiction (SF), and American SF is a significant popularizer of this genre in the modern world. The advocacy of a dystopian future in American SF has led to the stigmatization of artificial intelligence (AI). It has presented AI as a threat to humanity and has reduced it to a mere enemy of humanity in a posthuman future. The cyberpunk culture of SF plays a vital role in ostracizing AI, with many stories centered around an AI takeover where humans face the dilemma of extinction in the face of a technologically advanced world. This article deals with Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in the light of Goffman’s theory of stigmatization as the theoretical basis, using Link and Phelan’s stigmatization model to build the argument. The article focuses on the possible stigmatization of AI in American SF and its ethical and societal impacts. It is part of the continuum of knowledge production in SF, Cyberpunk, and techno-optimistic science fiction.
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Vasilenko, Mуkуta. "Historical Reporting. Development of Theory, Enrichment of Empirics." Scientific notes of the Institute of Journalism, no. 2 (79) (2021): 52–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2522-1272.2021.79.4.
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In the modern scientific developments, the topic of historical reporting rarely arises. Simultaneously, historical reporting with cognitive content in the current socio-economic conditions is invaluable in terms of aesthetic and patriotic education.The objective of the article is to use concrete empiricism to confirm the fact of real existence and rapid evolution of historical report- ing, defining its stylistic characteristics, specifics of collecting factual material, adherence to the rules of professional ethics when writing original material. Research methods. The historical-comparative method is widely used to cover objectively the problem throughout its development: from fixation in the scientific literature ten years ago to this scientific study. The method of content analysis allowed to summarize and to systematize the factual material that became the basis for writing the historical reports. The method of generalization could be used when summarizing the results and depicting the prospective ways of further scientific inquiry. Results. The social changes taking place in the country since 1991 could not fail to raise the questions in mass and especially public consciousness, as for the issue of the past and the prospects for the future. When it comes to historical researches, namely the fiction on interpretation of past events and facts, sometimes their concepts differ fundamentally. The historical reporting in its form may resemble a blog, historical investigation. The author of this scientific study insists that historical reporting is as close as possible to the objective reality. Conclusions and suggestions. The historical reporting develops as a genre. A number of empiricists is increasing, the editors publish the historical researches written in a fictional style. The historical reporting will soon be perceived as an everyday reality. In regards to the prospects of training of journalists who will work in this complex genre, it should be recognized that this activity provides for significant funding involving the experts in writing the material.
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Maleska, Kalina. "Environmental Threats in American and Macedonian Dystopian Fiction." Respectus Philologicus, no. 44 (49) (October 12, 2023): 69–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/respectus.2023.44.49.109.
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Various environmental changes threaten local environments and the world at large. Some of these changes have visible immediate effects on people’s lives, as exemplified by the pollution in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, which for several years has ranked among the world’s most polluted cities. Additionally, global warming is estimated to have devastating consequences for all life on Earth. While American writers have increasingly incorporated discussion of climate change into their fiction, Macedonian literature has rarely delved into environmental issues. Therefore, this article aims to contribute by exploring specific environmental aspects in several previously unexplored Macedonian dystopian works by Branko Prlja, Ivan Šopov and Biljana Crvenkovska. These works are compared to the novel Forty Signs of Rain by the American writer Kim Stanly Robinson, analysing the approaches employed in addressing environmental threats. The comparative view, as well as placing all of these works in the context of existing factual information about climate change and pollution, indicates the cultural differences between the narratives, but also the common ground they share about possible responses that may be undertaken to tackle environmental problems.
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Sergeant, David. "Fictions of Time and Space." Twentieth-Century Literature 67, no. 2 (June 1, 2021): 139–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9084315.
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This essay argues for a fuller recognition of the key transitional status of The Four-Gated City (1969) in Doris Lessing’s career. As an attempt to recalibrate the basic coordinates of the realist inheritance, the novel develops a strongly spatial narrative mode that coincides with a desire to write a utopian collective. This is confirmed both by previously unstudied draft material for Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and the published texts that followed. However, in The Four-Gated City this attempt to break from the destructive globalization of the postwar era becomes deeply problematic through its handling of history and time. Examining this struggle in Lessing’s writing can shed light on how the interplay of space and time informs the intertwined histories of realism and modernism in twentieth-century fiction, and on how Lessing’s work contributes to current debates about possible futures for the novel.
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Haj'jari, Mohammad-Javad, and Nasser Maleki. "Auster’s Man in the Dark: Human Existence and Responsibility for Creating Possible Worlds." Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies 44, no. 2 (December 23, 2022): 126–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2022-44.2.07.
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Possible worlds, governed by known or unknown cosmic rules, if ever they existed, do ontologically exist in the realm of the imaginary and relate to the human potential to imagine beyond what we recognize as reality. This cognitive potential, tinged with postmodernist narrative techniques, can create alternative histories through which to contemplate the possible scenarios of the potential reality that could have happened depending on whether certain events did or did not happen. As far as Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008) is concerned, imagining possible worlds has found an outlet not only through what could happen existentially, but also in terms of quantum physics. As one of Auster’s contributions to alternative fiction, Man in the Dark presents us with a portrait of the underlying currents of world affairs and how they are interrelated through the very basic rules of existential philosophy and astrophysics.
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Liaqat, Qurratulaen. "South Asian Transhumanist Posthuman Ontologies: The Relationship between Vehicle Art and Mind Uploading in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing." Journal of Posthuman Studies 6, no. 1 (June 2022): 33–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.6.1.0033.
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Abstract One possible way to decolonize the posthuman field of literary criticism is to find possible stylistic and thematic affinities between the literatures from the less technologically advanced regions such as South Asia and mainstream Euro-American science fiction. This article invites and affirms alternative ways of perceiving and comprehending the transhumanist posthuman paradigms from the technologically underdeveloped world (South Asia) through a critically informed analysis of the motifs, symbols, and characters in the Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan’s Anglophone novel Trespassing (2003). It argues that the nonhuman agency of truck art in Trespassing can be interpreted as a metaphor for a possible local technique for consciousness uploading. By applying the theoretical framework of transhumanist/posthumanist literary theory, this article demonstrates that the depiction of truck art in the novel can be analyzed as an analogy for the transhumanist posthuman dream of whole brain emulation.
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Almond, Ian. "Armenians in Modern Turkish Literature: The Ghost Stories of Orhan Pamuk." Journal of Modern Literature 47, no. 2 (January 2024): 53–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/jml.00018.
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Abstract: The relative paucity of Armenians in the novels of the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is ironic, given Pamuk's own political and very public stance on the Turkish government's silence concerning the twentieth century history of violence towards its Armenian minorities. I examine a possible relationship between this paucity and the influence of theory (deconstruction, new historicism) on Pamuk as an intellectual—whether a conviction regarding the intangibility of history, nationhood, or the self has any part to play in the way Armenians haunt Pamuk's work. If Armenians in Pamuk's fiction effectively amount to ghosts, examining the meaning of their spectral presence will highlight a strategy for lamenting a past one can now no longer articulate.
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Davis, Colin, and Hanna Meretoja. "Literature, Testimony, and Regimes of Truth." Comparative Literature Studies 59, no. 2 (May 1, 2022): 271–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.2.0271.
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ABSTRACT In the “post-truth” world, it seems possible to say anything we want. Drawing on examples from Holocaust testimony and fiction, this article argues that truth is nevertheless a central issue for readers, critics, and citizens, even if it is complex, difficult to grasp, and ethically fraught. It suggests that rather than retreating into a simple notion of truth, we need more refined vocabularies for talking about issues of truth. The article explores the relationship between literature and truth by outlining three different but interrelated regimes of truth: truth as correspondence, as disclosure, and as interpretative dialogue.