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1
Sloan, Casey. "POSSESSING DRESSES: FASHION AND FEMALE COMMUNITY INTHE WOMAN IN WHITE." Victorian Literature and Culture 44, no. 4 (November 4, 2016): 801–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s106015031600022x.
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Margaret Oliphant much preferredThe Woman in White(published serially 1859–1860) toGreat Expectations(published serially 1860–1861). This partiality emerges in a comparative treatment of the texts in her oft-quoted 1862 treatise on sensation fiction, and it rests on the desirability of authors producing thrills using “modest and subtle means” (“Sensation Novels” 569) instead of “by fantastic eccentricities” and “high-strained oddity” (“Sensation Novels” 574). While the existence of an argument against the allegedly regrettable excesses of fantastical narratives will not shock any reader familiar with contemporary criticism of sensation fiction, or, for that matter, Romantic-era novels or Gothic works in general, the primary evidence Oliphant uses to argue her case might come as a surprise. In order to discredit Charles Dickens's ghostly accounts of Miss Havisham's bridal tomb in favor of Wilkie Collins's eerie images of Anne Catherick appearing on a moonlit moor, Margaret Oliphant turns to clothing.
2
Carolin, Andy. "Apartheid's Immorality Act and the fiction of heteronormative whiteness." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 54, no. 1 (March 24, 2017): 111–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tvl.v.54i1.7.
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This article traces both the centrality and fragility of the figure of the heterosexual white male to the moral and ideological core of the apartheid regime. Through a comparative reading of Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Gerald Kraak's Ice in the Lungs (2006), the article examines how apartheid's Immorality Act functioned as the legislative mechanism to produce and police heteronormative whiteness. The randomness and unpredictability of sexual desire in both historical novels expose the tenuousness of this idealised heteronormative whiteness that lay at the centre of the apartheid project. Situated within the moral panic and political turmoil of the 1970s, the novels identify sex as a powerful lens through which to read the history of apartheid. While Mda's satirical novel focuses on transgressive interracial sexual desire, Kraak's realist text explores same-sex desire and intimacy. My reading of the two novels engages with the political history of apartheid's sexual policing and insists on the inextricable entanglement of its heteronormative and racial supremacist provisions. The traditional ideological centrality of the vulnerable white woman is displaced in the novels by white men whose transgressive sexual desires for black women (in Mda's novel) and other white men (in Kraak's) refuse the certainty and naturalness of heteronormative whiteness.
3
Armengol, Josep. "Sex and Text: Queering Older Men’s Sexuality in Contemporary U.S. Fiction." Innovation in Aging 4, Supplement_1 (December 1, 2020): 826. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igaa057.3018.
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Abstract This paper will explore the representation of men’s aging experiences in contemporary U.S. fiction. While most gender-ed approaches to aging have focused on women, which has contributed to the cultural invisibility of older men, this study focuses on men’s aging experiences as men, thus challenging the inverse correlation between masculinity and aging. To do so, the study draws on a selected number of contemporary U.S. male-authored fictional works, which question the widely-held assumption that aging is a lesser concern for men, or that men and women’s aging experiences may be simply defined as opposed. The literary corpus includes male authors from different backgrounds so as to illustrate how (self-)representations of aging men vary according not only to gender but also class (Richard Ford), race (Ernest Gaines), and sexual orientation (Edmund White), amongst other factors. The presentation will thus end up challenging the conventional equation of men’s aging processes with (sexual) decline, exemplifying their plurality as well as irreducible contradictions.
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Birns, Nicholas. "Introduction to John Kinsella's PINK LAKE." Thesis Eleven 155, no. 1 (December 2019): 3–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0725513619892170.
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John Kinsella’s fiction emphasizes similar themes of environmental activism, political protest, and critique of Australian society, as does his widely acclaimed poetry. As in his verse, his orientation as a fiction writer is both local and global, regional and cosmopolitan. But in his fiction Kinsella engages in a double interrogation of both mainstream society and his own posture in opposition to it. In the novella Pink Lake a film director is interviewed by an uncomprehending journalist and driven to desperation by the philistinism of Australian society. But his own arrogance, unexamined white and male privilege, and illusion that just because he practices what he calls cinema vérité he has in fact attained the truth mean that he is part of the problem as well. Kinsella examines the problematics of social critique in a neoliberal world, noting their ironies while still believing in their possibility and necessity.
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Urakova, A. P. "‘Injin gifts’: Interracial exchange and the image of the white avenger in frontier fiction." Voprosy literatury, no. 2 (May 27, 2019): 193–206. http://dx.doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2019-2-193-206.
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The essay focuses on the so called ‘Injin gifts’ – a racialist notion that James Fenimore Cooper attributed to his famous frontier hero Natty Bumppo in The Deerslayer (1841). While implying that certain traits of character, as for example vengefulness, was God’s ‘gift’ to the indigenous people, this notion also paradoxically questions the racial boundaries. The ‘gifts’ are both vertical (bestowed by God) and horizontal (liable to exchange) as Cooper’s novel demonstrates. To support this argument, the essay discusses the plot of racial violence and frontier war in the work of Cooper’s contemporaries – James Hall and Robert Montgomery Bird. Both authors introduce a new cultural hero – a white character who kills indigenous people out of revenge. While revenge is justified as an act of counter-violence, it also threatens to blur the racial boundaries since white characters put on the traits and share the spirit of their antagonists. This is especially evident in Bird’s novel Nick of the Woods (1837): Bird’s racist discourse, paradoxically and unwillingly, turns against itself as his white character Nathan Slaughter engaged in the potlatch-like exchange of violence and deaths, ‘mirrors’ the indigenous Americans he is trying to destroy.
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Vitackova, Martina. "Representation of racial and sexual 'others' in Afrikaans popular romantic fiction by Sophia Kapp." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 55, no. 1 (March 20, 2018): 122–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i1.3480.
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This article provides a feminist critique of representation, analysing the way sexual and racial others are represented in the work of the Afrikaans popular romantic fiction writer Sophia Kapp. Comparing her first three novels to the latest one, the article points to a development in her writing and tracks the changes it has undergone over the course of the almost ten years of Kapp's writing career. Starting off with exclusively white and heterosexual characters in her first novels, her latest novel includes a number of black and homosexual secondary characters. However, while these characters appear to be equal to the white hero and heroine, an analysis of their representation shows that they are rendered in such a way that they support the white heterosexual marriage as the unquestionable standard, and it becomes clear that the inclusion of sexual and racial others appears for the most part to be in the function of "surrogate and enabler" for the white heterosexual marriage ideal.
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Agho, Jude Aigbe. "Resistance, Liberation, and Aesthetics in the Early Novels of Alex La Guma." Matatu 48, no. 1 (2016): 7–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-04801002.
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Alex La Guma, the late South African Coloured novelist and short-story writer, died in exile in Cuba in 1985. Until his death, he was clearly the most ambitious novelist in South Africa of the apartheid era. Even while he was in exile, he kept in touch with the momentum of the anti-apartheid struggle, which culminated in the abrogation of apartheid and the attainment of independence with the ascendance of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first non-white president in 1994. Resistance and liberation are unmistakably the credos enshrined in La Guma’s fiction. But these thematic preoccupations did not distract him from his calling as a consummate writer who also needed to pay particular attention to the dictates of the art of fiction in his novels and short stories. Thus, in his fiction we find a true blend or matrix of resistance, liberation, and aesthetics. This essay sets out to unravel the trajectory of La Guma’s depiction of this matrix in some of his early novels which, by and large, could be said to have anticipated the revolutionary imperatives of his later fiction.
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Sen, Sucharita. "Memsahibs and ayahs during the Mutiny: In English memoirs and fiction." Studies in People's History 7, no. 2 (December 2020): 159–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2348448920951520.
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Drawing upon the personal accounts of British women who lived through the Mutiny (1857–58), this article argues that these accounts, being characterised by diversity, both supported and contradicted the official discourse of the British Raj. While the domestic spaces in the household were shaken by the storm of the Mutiny, interpersonal relations sometimes transcended the animosity which the Mutiny had garnered. By bringing the contemporary British fiction into the spectrum of analysis, this article argues that the Mutiny fiction and personal accounts have a common chord in their portrayal of the loyalty of the native servants in the hour of crises for their employers. These relationships, however, also implied the status of white superiority over coloured subordination as also the memsahib’s special preserve of idleness.
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Bercuci, Loredana. "Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel." Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia 66, no. 1 (March 30, 2021): 191–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2021.1.14.
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"James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel. In the wake of the Second World War, American literature saw the rise of a type of novel that is little known today: the white-life novel. This type of novel is written by black writers but describes white characters acting in a mostly white milieu. While at the time African-American critics praised this new way of writing as a sign of maturity, many have since criticized it for being regressive by pandering to white tastes. This paper sets out to analyze the most famous of these novels, namely James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). It is my contention that Giovanni’s Room connects blackness and queerness through the use of visual metaphors in the novel, disrupting thus the post-war consensus on ideals of white masculinity. The novel, while seemingly abandoning black protagonists, enacts a subtle critique of white heteronormativity akin to Baldwin’s own positioning within American thought of the post-war era. Keywords: blackness, James Baldwin, post-war fiction, queer, white-life novel "
10
Anderson, Brianna. "Revolutionary paratext and critical pedagogy in Nathan Hale’s One Dead Spy." Studies in Comics 11, no. 1 (July 1, 2020): 127–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jem_00018_1.
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Autobiographical accounts of historical violence and trauma in comics form have gained widespread recognition as valuable pedagogical tools, particularly in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus (1980–91). These comics often draw from the conventions of text-based autobiographies to provide first-person, non-fiction narratives of historical events, contributing to their perceived legitimacy as ‘serious’ texts worthy of inclusion in the classroom. However, this narrow focus on autobiographical comics as authentic windows to history has led educators to largely overlook the unique pedagogical possibilities offered by historical fiction comics, which can use both their fictionality and the comics medium to teach young readers to critically engage with history in different and deeper ways than traditional history textbooks and single-narrator autobiographical comics. This article remedies this gap by analysing how Nathan Hale’s middle-grade historical fiction comic One Dead Spy enacts a critical pedagogy approach to teach children to challenge hegemonic historical discourses and ways of thinking. The comic centres on the Revolutionary spy Nathan Hale (no relation to the comics creator) as he attempts to delay his hanging by narrating the American Revolution to his executioners. Nathan’s purportedly true account hinders children’s critical engagement with history by perpetuating dominant historical discourses, providing readers with a whitewashed, male-centric narrative of the Revolution. By contrast, the backmatter complicates Nathan’s one-sided representation of history by featuring a mini-comic narrated by the former slave Crispus Attucks and by attributing the comic’s non-fiction bibliography to fictional Research Babies. This blending of academic citational practices with absurd metafiction, as well as the introduction of marginalized counter-narrators, teaches middle-grade readers to question the authority of history writers and destabilizes all historical narratives as artificial constructs. However, the paratext also reinforces racist and sexist paradigms by displacing black and female voices to the comic’s supplemental endpapers, underwriting the comic’s well-intentioned attempts to educate readers about important voices excluded from white-centric narratives. Thus, while One Dead Spy demonstrates how historical fiction comics can provoke much-needed discussions about the inherent biases and erasures of dominant historical discourses, it also reveals the dangers of relegating opportunities for children to learn about marginalized perspectives in history to the literal margins.
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Anderson, Brianna. "Revolutionary paratext and critical pedagogy in Nathan Hale’s One Dead Spy." Studies in Comics 11, no. 1 (July 1, 2020): 127–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/stic_00018_1.
Full textAbstract:
Autobiographical accounts of historical violence and trauma in comics form have gained widespread recognition as valuable pedagogical tools, particularly in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus (1980‐91). These comics often draw from the conventions of text-based autobiographies to provide first-person, non-fiction narratives of historical events, contributing to their perceived legitimacy as ‘serious’ texts worthy of inclusion in the classroom. However, this narrow focus on autobiographical comics as authentic windows to history has led educators to largely overlook the unique pedagogical possibilities offered by historical fiction comics, which can use both their fictionality and the comics medium to teach young readers to critically engage with history in different and deeper ways than traditional history textbooks and single-narrator autobiographical comics. This article remedies this gap by analysing how Nathan Hale’s middle-grade historical fiction comic One Dead Spy enacts a critical pedagogy approach to teach children to challenge hegemonic historical discourses and ways of thinking. The comic centres on the Revolutionary spy Nathan Hale (no relation to the comics creator) as he attempts to delay his hanging by narrating the American Revolution to his executioners. Nathan’s purportedly true account hinders children’s critical engagement with history by perpetuating dominant historical discourses, providing readers with a whitewashed, male-centric narrative of the Revolution. By contrast, the backmatter complicates Nathan’s one-sided representation of history by featuring a mini-comic narrated by the former slave Crispus Attucks and by attributing the comic’s non-fiction bibliography to fictional Research Babies. This blending of academic citational practices with absurd metafiction, as well as the introduction of marginalized counter-narrators, teaches middle-grade readers to question the authority of history writers and destabilizes all historical narratives as artificial constructs. However, the paratext also reinforces racist and sexist paradigms by displacing black and female voices to the comic’s supplemental endpapers, underwriting the comic’s well-intentioned attempts to educate readers about important voices excluded from white-centric narratives. Thus, while One Dead Spy demonstrates how historical fiction comics can provoke much-needed discussions about the inherent biases and erasures of dominant historical discourses, it also reveals the dangers of relegating opportunities for children to learn about marginalized perspectives in history to the literal margins.
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Green-Barteet, Miranda A., and Jill Coste. "Non-normative Bodies, Queer Identities." Girlhood Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 82–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2019.120108.
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In this article we consider the absence of queer female protagonists in dystopian Young Adult (YA) fiction and examine how texts with queer protagonists rely on heteronormative frameworks. Often seen as progressive, dystopian YA fiction features rebellious teen girls resisting the restrictive norms of their societies, but it frequently sidelines queerness in favor of heteronormative romance for its predominantly white, able-bodied protagonists. We analyze The Scorpion Rules (2015) and Love in the Time of Global Warming (2013), both of which feature queer girl protagonists, and conclude that these texts ultimately marginalize that queerness. While they offer readers queer female protagonists, they also equate queerness with non-normative bodies and reaffirm heteronormativity. The rebellion of both protagonists effectively distances them from the queer agency they have developed throughout the narratives.
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Wodak, Ruth. "The glocalization of politics in television: Fiction or reality?" European Journal of Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (January 29, 2010): 43–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549409352553.
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This article investigates the ‘glocalization’ of the US TV popular drama series The West Wing, while focusing on one (in some ways) exceptional episode . Because politics is inherently linked to language, discourse and communication, I will take an approach from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (the discourse-historical approach), with a particular focus on elements of argumentation theory and rhetoric, and combine this with media studies. More specifically, I attempt to illustrate how a thorough understanding of the topoi operating within the complex dialogues and interactions helps to reveal the series’ (manifest and latent) political and didactic objectives, embedded in a longstanding tradition of conveying US American liberal values via films and TV.The episode analyzed in this article, Isaac and Ishmael (which was broadcast immediately after 9/11) is exceptional because it explicitly relates to salient real life events; its topical focus on the ‘war on terror’ shifts attention from US domestic politics to an issue that, according to US policy rhetoric, concerns the whole world. Thus, this episode links the debates taking place in one of the world’s most famous institutions, The White House, with those occurring in workplaces across the world: a truly ‘g/local’ moment. The interdisciplinary analysis allows insight into the intricate and complex discursive construction of new glocal narratives, particularly in times of political crisis, revealing which norms are projected and recontextualized both locally and globally, given the many translations of the series worldwide.
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Mazumder, Tanmoy. "Exploring the Eurocentric Heart: A Postcolonial Reading of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter." International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation 3, no. 8 (August 30, 2021): 113–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.8.17.
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A literary text can be a propagator of values- both explicitly and implicitly. As Edward Said claims in his book, Orientalism (1978), for centuries Eurocentrism pervades Western literary pieces; they somehow justify and/or uplift European values and perspectives as superior ones while portraying lands, people and cultures of the colonized nations elsewhere, especially in the East. Sometimes, it may become more oblique as the apparent issues dominating the text seem to be something very different, but the writing, however, in the undercurrent, portrays things in a Eurocentric way, often by “othering” the non-Europeans. Said famously terms, this process of creation of an alter ego of the West in the East as “Orientalism”. Graham Greene’s novel, The Heart of the Matter (1948), set in West Africa’s Sierra Leone, a then British colony during WWII, summons rethinking of its presentation of the non-White people and the land of Africa. This study would like to take the focus away from the dominating themes of religion, sin, pity, mercy, responsibility, love, etc. in this piece of fiction to assess its underlying colonial issues which often go unnoticed. The novel portrays a variety of characters- both the British colonizers and the colonial subjects- though the roles and space occupied by the non-British characters are mostly marginal. The “Whites” are portrayed sympathetically, whereas the “non-Whites” are presented as evil, naïve, weak and mystic. This study, thus, argues that the portrayal of Africa (Sierra Leone), the Africans, and the major “non-White” characters in the novel, in contrast to the empathetic presentation of the major “White” European characters, indicate an obvious “othering” of “non-Whites” and the marginalization of non-Europeans in the narrative of the novel. The paper further opines that this process of “othering” and marginalization underlines the operation of an underlying Eurocentric attitude in the representation of the Europeans and non-Europeans in Greene’s fiction.
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Fisher, Rudolph, and Molly Anne Rothenberg. "Rudolph Fisher's Missing Story “The Shadow of White”: A Study in the Transformation of Race Consciousness." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 127, no. 3 (May 2012): 617–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2012.127.3.617.
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During the nine years of his writing career, rudolph fisher published two novels as well as fifteen short stories and won Crisis magazine's Amy Spingarn Prize for fiction. He also published two scientific articles and a much anthologized essay, while writing two plays, a revue (with Langston Hughes), and eight other stories unpublished in his time. Seven of the unpublished stories were collected after his death, but one simply disappeared. In May 1925 Fisher submitted his only copy of “The Shadow of White” to Survey Graphic at the invitation of its editor, Paul Kellogg, whom he had met at that year's Opportunity dinner. Thirteen months after the submission, Kellogg offered eighty dollars for the story and said he hoped to publish it in 1926–27. Yet the story never appeared.
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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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Baya, Adina. "”Catastrophe is our Bedtime Story”: The Media-Fuelled Obsession with Death in Don Delillo’s Zero K." Romanian Journal of English Studies 16, no. 1 (November 1, 2019): 9–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/rjes-2019-0002.
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AbstractDeath and the mass-media represent two recurring and connected presences throughout Don DeLillo’s fiction. While his canonical novel White Noise is themed around the paradoxical link between the pathological fear of dying and consumerism, his latest novel Zero K is about the deferral of death through cryonics. Using the analytical tools of critical theory, the current paper aims to analyse how the portrayal of death appears in the media saturated and consumer-driven environment in which DeLillo’s characters evolve, and how technology contributes both to fuelling the obsession with dying and to feeding the illusion of immortality.
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Huang, Michelle N. "Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit." American Literature 93, no. 3 (July 26, 2021): 497–523. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361293.
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Abstract Illuminating how biomedical capital invests in white and Asian American populations while divesting from Black surplus populations, this article proposes recent Asian American dystopian fiction provides a case study for analyzing futurities where healthcare infrastructures intensify racial inequality under terms that do not include race at all. Through a reading of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and other texts, the article develops the term studious deracination to refer to a narrative strategy defined by an evacuated racial consciousness that is used to ironize assumptions of white universalism and uncritical postracialism. Studious deracination challenges medical discourse’s “color-blind” approach to healthcare and enables a reconsideration of comparative racialization in a moment of accelerating social disintegration and blasted landscapes. Indeed, while precision medicine promises to replace race with genomics, Asian American literature is key to showing how this “postracial” promise depends on framing racial inequality as a symptom, rather than an underlying etiology, of infrastructures of public health.
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Morris, Raphael. "Interpretive Context, Counterpart Theory and Fictional Realism without Contradictions." Disputatio 11, no. 54 (December 1, 2019): 231–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/disp-2019-0018.
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Abstract Models for truth in fiction must be able to account for differing versions and interpretations of a given fiction in such a way that prevents contradictions from arising. I propose an analysis of truth in fiction designed to accommodate this. I examine both the interpretation of claims about truth in fiction (the ‘Interpretation Problem’) and the metaphysical nature of fictional worlds and entities (the ‘Metaphysical Problem’). My reply to the Interpretation Problem is a semantic contextualism influenced by Cameron (2012), while my reply to the Metaphysical Problem involves an extension and generalisation of the counterpart-theoretic analysis put forth by Lewis (1978). The proposed analysis considers interpretive context as a counterpart relation corresponding to a set of worlds, W, and states that a sentence φ is true in interpretive context W iff φ is true at every world (w∈W). I consider the implications of this analysis for singular terms in fiction, concluding that their extensions are the members of sets of counterparts. In the case of pre-existing singular terms in fiction, familiar properties of the corresponding actual-world entities are salient in restricting the counterpart relation. I also explore interpretations of sentences concerning multiple fictions and those concerning both fictional and actual entities. This account tolerates a plurality of interpretive approaches, avoiding contradictions.
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Pihlainen, Kalle. "The ethics of fictionality in history writing." Prometeica - Revista de Filosofía y Ciencias, no. 22 (December 22, 2020): 50–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.34024/prometeica.2021.22.11549.
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Fictionality has long been viewed in history writing as near-synonymous with abandoning truth and any supposedly consequent, ethical commitments. Understandably, this attitude has impeded the acceptance of theoretical approaches that aim, instead, to reveal the fundamental connectedness of history’s fictional aspects with ethical concerns. This line of thought is nowhere more evident than in the reception of Hayden White. While instrumental in arguing for the similarities between history writing and literary fiction, White has also consistently defended the vital importance of rethinking history’s fictionality. His approach considers that historians might work in more consciously emancipatory and ethically informed ways. This article seeks to improve understanding of White’s complicated position in two distinct ways: firstly, by rehearsing his critical arguments in the context of their general and far-too-often hostile reception; here, the main goal is to address worries relating, in turn, to the claimed extreme textualism, the assumed denial of reality and the supposedly excessive formalism of his positions. Given the generational demand for reiterating these basics, some of this discussion may prove familiar to readers for whom White’s place is already evident. Secondly, the article hopes to contribute to the continuation of White’s legacy by indicating a way to by-pass these controversies through a reconceptualization of White’s ethical objectives and the responsibility he attributes to historians. This view includes examining an unwarranted tension between interpretations of White’s existentialist and poststructuralist commitments in previous readings. The article also identifies the point at which the overlap of these aspects constitutes his expressly ethically motivated relativism.
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Knadler, Stephen. "Miscegenated Whiteness: Rebecca Harding Davis, the "Civil-izing" War, and Female Racism." Nineteenth-Century Literature 57, no. 1 (June 1, 2002): 64–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2002.57.1.64.
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This essay examines Rebecca Harding Davis's resistance to the Civil War discourse in the Atlantic Monthly in order to complicate the relation between nineteenth-century racism and sentimental fiction. While much revisionary work has been done on nineteenth-century women'sfiction and how it reinforced racial ideologies, the misleading question often asked is whether white women did or did not participate in the public arena of race. Yet this initial framing of the question denies the alternative possibility: that white women might have engaged in their own gendered forms of racial activity, or in a "female racism" (to use Vron Ware's term), that did not correspond to or act in complicity with a racism that is by default seen as public and masculine. By imagining her heroine as a "woman from the border" inWaiting for the Verdict (1868), Davis works to oppose and overturn a particular regional and gender-based inscription of whiteness that was being disseminated amid the war crises as an emergent New England-based national identity. In contrast, Davis creates a particular feminine and liminal version of white racial power, or a "miscegenated whiteness." But this fantasy of an imagined national community based on the "white mulatto" finally undoes itself in the novel's moments of narrative crises about a free and open female sexuality, and Davis'snovel seeks to restore the white female body to its "purity."
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Kell, Katrina. "WHITE WHALE." RAUDEM. Revista de Estudios de las Mujeres 7 (September 14, 2020): 216. http://dx.doi.org/10.25115/raudem.v7i0.3888.
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Unigwe, Chika. "The Black Messiah: Writing Equiano." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55, no. 3 (January 7, 2019): 449–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989418816121.
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In this essay, Nigerian author Chika Unigwe discusses the challenges involved in writing the biographical novel The Black Messiah (currently published only in Dutch translation as De zwarte messias), which imaginatively retraces the life of Olaudah Equiano. Unigwe’s first attempt to reimagine Equiano took the form of a children’s book in the late 1990s. This project immediately drew her attention to the two primary, antithetical difficulties of writing biographical fiction: on the one hand, one needs to rely on historical information to recreate the past accurately but, on the other, fiction — being art — cannot impart a great deal of such information without becoming too didactic. Unigwe abandoned this early project but eventually took it up again in the form of an adult novel. Some of her creative choices in writing this book were guided by the imaginative spaces left in Equiano’s autobiography — for example, he hardly mentions his white wife and remains vague about his time as a plantation overseer. This prompted a series of questions for Unigwe to explore: how did a black man experience an interracial marriage in the eighteenth century? How did Equiano handle “stubborn” slaves as an overseer? How could a twenty-first century writer recreate Equiano’s state of mind without judging him by contemporary standards? There were additional challenges too. One pertained to the type of language to be used to recount Equiano’s story, another to the constraints involved in writing about a real figure, many aspects of whose life and death are on the historical record. Ultimately, Unigwe tried to find a balance between fact and fiction, history and imagination, so as to highlight the magnitude of Equiano’s accomplishments, while also exploring him as a human being whose story remains particularly relevant today.
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Franzén, Nils. "A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51, no. 3 (April 2021): 159–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/can.2021.10.
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AbstractThis article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl.This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction.To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.
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Cohn, Elisha. "Virtual Minds, Victorian Novels, and the Question of Modeling." Victorian Literature and Culture 48, no. 2 (2020): 471–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150319000652.
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Snagsby's paper shop in Bleak House (1853) deals in “all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention.” While one might imagine this stifling bookish environment as especially inviting for an object-oriented reading, this passage has recently attracted what I might call a newly inflected kind of subject-oriented reading. This description from Bleak House makes an appearance in two recent critical monographs concerned with how the reader's cognitive capabilities meet words on the page to transform them into a felt reality. How does a passage like this act on our minds, creating mental images or offering a sense of embeddedness in an unreal “reality”? How does fiction become phenomenological?
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Isto, Raino. "How Dumb Are Big Dumb Objects? OOO, Science Fiction, and Scale." Open Philosophy 2, no. 1 (October 30, 2019): 552–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2019-0039.
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AbstractThis article considers the potential intersections of object-oriented ontology and science fiction studies by focusing on a particular type of science-fictional artifact, the category of ‘Big Dumb Objects.’ Big Dumb Objects is a terminology used—often quite playfully—to describe things or structures that are simultaneously massive in size and enigmatic in purpose: they stretch the imagination through both the technical aspects of their construction and the obscurity of their purpose. First used to designate the subjects of several science fiction novels written in the 1970s, Big Dumb Objects (often called BDOs) have been understood in terms of science fiction’s enduring interest in the technological sublime and the transcendental. While object-oriented ontology has often turned to science fiction and weird fiction for inspiration in rethinking the possibilities inherent in things and their relations, it has not considered the implications of BDOs for a theory of the object more broadly. The goal of this article is to consider how extreme size and representations of scale in science fiction can help expand an understanding of the object along lines that are similar to those pursued by object-oriented ontology, especially Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects.
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Jenkins, Bruce. "Border Crossings: Two Installations by Chantal Akerman." IMAGES 1, no. 1 (2007): 80–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187180007782347665.
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AbstractBruce Jenkins' essay examines the critical and theoretical grounds for artist and filmmaker Chantal Akerman's interventions both within the cinema and within the space of the gallery. The curatorial perspective posed by Documenta 11 and its focus on "diasporic consciousness" forms the basis for examining Akerman's work through the lens of her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors—displaced Polish Jews who ended up in Belgium. Part of what she has called the generation for which the repressed returns, Akerman began to focus on this past in her 1989 feature film Histoires d'Amérique, a loose adaptation of the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer.Central to the analysis is her 1995 installation Bordering on Fiction, a work noted for its distinctive mode of interdisciplinary practice bridging film and video, projection and monitor display, the darkened hall of the cinema and the white cube of the gallery. Akerman's concerns with finding "other strategies" for dealing with the Holocaust are examined, as is the lucid analysis of her work by the artist Christian Boltanski.The essay lastly examines Akerman's recent film and installation From the Other Side (shown at Documenta 11), which represents a significant shift in perspective and tense. While Bordering on Fiction was a retrospective work searching for a lost past that could be captured only through absences and silence, From the Other Side, by contrast, focuses on the present and unfolds in a manner bordering on reportage.
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Demmerling, Christoph. "Von den Lesewelten zur Lebenswelt. Überlegungen zu der Frage, warum uns fiktionale Literatur berührt." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 260–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0015.
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Abstract The following article argues that fictional texts can be distinguished from non-fictional texts in a prototypical way, even if the concept of the fictional cannot be defined in classical terms. In order to be able to characterize fictional texts, semantic, pragmatic, and reader-conditioned factors have to be taken into account. With reference to Frege, Searle, and Gabriel, the article recalls some proposals for how we might define fictional speech. Underscored in particular is the role of reception for the classification of a text as fictional. I make the case, from a philosophical perspective, for the view that fictional texts represent worlds that do not exist even though these worlds obviously can, and de facto do, contain many elements that are familiar to us from our world. I call these worlds reading worlds and explain the relationship between reading worlds and the life world of readers. This will help support the argument that the encounter with fictional literature can invoke real feelings and that such feelings are by no means irrational, as some defenders of the paradox of fiction would like us to believe. It is the exemplary character of fictional texts that enables us to make connections between the reading worlds and the life world. First and foremost, the article discusses the question of what it is that readers’ feelings are in fact related to. The widespread view that these feelings are primarily related to the characters or events represented in a text proves too simple and needs to be amended. Whoever is sad because of the fate of a fictive character imagines how he or she would fare if in a similar situation. He or she would feel sad as it relates to his or her own situation. And it is this feeling on behalf of one’s self that is the presupposition of sympathy for a fictive character. While reading, the feelings related to fictive characters and content are intertwined with the feelings related to one’s own personal concerns. The feelings one has on his or her own behalf belong to the feelings related to fictive characters; the former are the presupposition of the latter. If we look at the matter in this way, a new perspective opens up on the paradox of fiction. Generally speaking, the discussion surrounding the paradox of fiction is really about readers’ feelings as they relate to fictive persons or content. The question is then how it is possible to have them, since fictive persons and situations do not exist. If, however, the emotional relation to fictive characters and situations is conceived of as mediated by the feelings one has on one’s own behalf, the paradox loses its confusing effect since the imputation of existence no longer plays a central role. Instead, the conjecture that the events in a fictional story could have happened in one’s own life is important. The reader imagines that a story had or could have happened to him or herself. Readers are therefore often moved by a fictive event because they relate what happened in a story to themselves. They have understood the literary event as something that is humanly relevant in a general sense, and they see it as exemplary for human life as such. This is the decisive factor which gives rise to a connection between fiction and reality. The emotional relation to fictive characters happens on the basis of emotions that we would have for our own sake were we confronted with an occurrence like the one being narrated. What happens to the characters in a fictional text could also happen to readers. This is enough to stimulate corresponding feelings. We neither have to assume the existence of fictive characters nor do we have to suspend our knowledge about the fictive character of events or take part in a game of make-believe. But we do have to be able to regard the events in a fictional text as exemplary for human life. The representation of an occurrence in a novel exhibits a number of commonalities with the representation of something that could happen in the future. Consciousness of the future would seem to be a presupposition for developing feelings for something that is only represented. This requires the power of imagination. One has to be able to imagine what is happening to the characters involved in the occurrence being narrated in a fictional text, ›empathize‹ with them, and ultimately one has to be able to imagine that he or she could also be entangled in the same event and what it would be like. Without the use of these skills, it would remain a mystery how reading a fictional text can lead to feelings and how fictive occurrences can be related to reality. The fate of Anna Karenina can move us, we can sympathize with her, because reading the novel confronts us with possibilities that could affect our own lives. The imagination of such possibilities stimulates feelings that are related to us and to our lives. On that basis, we can participate in the fate of fictive characters without having to imagine that they really exist.
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Mahlberg, Michaela, Viola Wiegand, Peter Stockwell, and Anthony Hennessey. "Speech-bundles in the 19th-century English novel." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28, no. 4 (November 2019): 326–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947019886754.
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We propose a lexico-grammatical approach to speech in fiction based on the centrality of ‘fictional speech-bundles’ as the key element of fictional talk. To identify fictional speech-bundles, we use three corpora of 19th-century fiction that are available through the corpus stylistic web application CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context). We focus on the ‘quotes’ subsets of the corpora, i.e. text within quotation marks, which is mostly equivalent to direct speech. These quotes subsets are compared across the fiction corpora and with the spoken component of the British National Corpus 1994. The comparisons illustrate how fictional speech-bundles can be described on a continuum from lexical bundles in real spoken language to repeated sequences of words that are specific to individual fictional characters. Typical functions of fictional speech-bundles are the description of interactions and interpersonal relationships of fictional characters. While our approach crucially depends on an innovative corpus linguistic methodology, it also draws on theoretical insights into spoken grammar and characterisation in fiction in order to question traditional notions of realism and authenticity in fictional speech.
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Alsanafi, Ismael Hasan, Siti Noor Fazelah Mohd Noor, and Zulida Binti Abdul Kadir. "EXAMINING THE CLARITY OF EXPRESSIONS IN DESCRIBING THE BLACK WOMAN’S OPPRESSION IN KENNEDY'S “FUNNYHOUSE OF A NEGRO”." Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews 7, no. 5 (September 20, 2019): 63–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.18510/hssr.2019.758.
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Purpose of study: This study tries to figure out whether Adrienne Kennedy’s play “Funnyhouse of a Negro” was direct and clear or indirect and implicit when she expresses a black woman’s struggle with identity.
Methodology: This study adopts a mix mode approach of Martin and white (2005) attitudinal category of Appraisal theory so as to analyze, frame, and to answer the research questions by which is proposed for this full research paper.
Main Findings: The inscribed instances have exceeded the invoked ones in the whole corpus of “Funnyhouse of a Negro”, concerning how did Sarah; the protagonist, as well as her split figures, have portrayed her white mother and a black father. The outcomes suggest that Kennedy was very clear and direct to deliver her moral judgment to her audiences/readers regarding the status of African American women in American based on analyzing the discourses of the main characters in the play.
Implications/Applications: Therefore, this play has gained very much respect and admiration from critics, readers, and audiences because of the playwright’s direct descriptions of Sarah and her parents in the American arena as well as her attempt to form new status as an individual human being who have a right to live such as any white American civilian.
Originality/Novelty of Study: The appraisal approach is a fairly new extension in the area of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It has been applied mainly to non-fictional discourse, particularly to certain texts with an argumentative task such as journalistic and political speeches. There is an increasing interest in the utilization of this theory to the analysis of literary texts, involving narrative fiction (Alsanafi&Mohd Noor, 2019). The researcher does not find any study employs Appraisal category to discover the clearness of expressions to describe woman’s oppression in Adriane Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse of a Negro”.
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Zachrison, Kori S., and Joshua N. Goldstein. "The White Whale." Stroke 50, no. 5 (May 2019): 1043–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1161/strokeaha.119.025262.
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Belsey, Catherine. "Narrative magic: Stories and the ways of desire." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 23, no. 1 (February 2014): 77–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947013510645.
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Fictions that include an account of how stories are received show narrative as enlisting the desire of the reader or hearer. While fiction demonstrates what the magic of the signifier can do to allay desire when language is set free from reality, in the end narratives withhold satisfaction of the desire they engender, since the worlds they create must eventually be relinquished. To that degree, narrative fiction brings to light the condition of the speaking being as Lacanian psychoanalysis conceives it, at once empowered and deprived by access to language, and in quest of a presence language cannot deliver. In so far as they are ungrounded, stories are able to exceed cultural orthodoxies, conjuring into being desired possibilities, aspirations, and corollary fears. Supplementary in that sense and dangerous, in consequence, to the orthodoxies they supplement, fictional narratives can therefore bring to light the inadequacy of customary assumptions. Located in time, stories offer a knowledge – of cultural difference, as well as of the laws of desire that underlie it.
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Mackereth, Kerry. "Mechanical Maids and Family Androids: Racialised Post-Care Imaginaries in Humans (2015–), Sleep Dealer (2008) and Her (2013)." Feminist Review 123, no. 1 (November 2019): 24–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0141778919879771.
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Feminist investigations into caring technologies emphasise the tension between their reproduction of care’s assumed femininity and their ability to destabilise gendered markers and systems. However, the existing literature ignores the historical racialisation of care and its perpetuation in the form of the posthuman caring object. This article examines how racialised relations of power shape the posthumanisation of care in three science-fiction works, Channel 4’s television show Humans (2015), Alex Riviera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008) and Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). While Her’s disembodied operating systems are premised upon an implicit whiteness, posthuman caring objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer take a racialised, embodied form. Drawing upon the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, this article examines how the racialised objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer are constituted as both labourers and commodities, purchased for the purpose of facilitating white reproductivity. Nonetheless, this article also documents how these caring technologies complicate key binaries such as subject/object, human/machine and productive/reproductive labour. In doing so, they disrupt the whiteness of the social reproduction paradigm. The article concludes by calling for greater feminist engagement with the racialisation of care labour in human and posthuman forms, in order to challenge white, heterosexual models of reproductivity based upon the exploitation of racialised labour.
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Barbero, Carola. "Genuine and rational tears." Theoria, Beograd 53, no. 2 (2010): 5–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/theo1002005b.
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In this paper I examine the emotions we feel while reading a work of fiction. Some philosophers think that our emotional engagement with fiction gives rise to a paradox and involves either irrationality or participation in a game of make believe. In this paper I argue that an Object Theory in a Meinongian style, by supporting a realistic perspective on fictional emotions, is able to dissolve the paradox of fiction.
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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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Cui, Zhenhua, Yanping Yang, and Yanping Yang. "THE NARRATOR IN DORIS LESSING’S THE FIFTH CHILD." Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal 7, no. 9 (September 14, 2020): 174–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.79.8823.
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This paper reviewed the theoretic classification on narrator of fictions. The narrator of THE FIFTH CHILD was described according to voice and point of view. The conclusion is the narrator in the famous fiction of Doris Lessing’s was omniscient, heterodiegetic/non-character, overt and reliable in its voice. While the fiction was narrated with the shift of multifocalizers in the point of view both from a character, Harriet, who witnessed the events, and from a heterodiegetic narrator, who made comments and questions to focus the readers’ attention on what he narrates.
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Avant, Nicole D. "Structural Racism and Supporting Black Lives – A Pharmacist’s Vow amid COVID-19." INNOVATIONS in pharmacy 12, no. 2 (June 10, 2021): 22. http://dx.doi.org/10.24926/iip.v12i2.3411.
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COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting Black communities in the United States due to racial structures that increase exposure (e.g., densely populated areas, substandard housing, overrepresentation in essential work) and promote underlying diseases that exacerbate COVID-19. This manuscript uses Oath of a Pharmacist as a framework to propose a set of best practices for pharmacists to mitigate inequities such as achieve competence in the ideology of structural racism; identify systems of power that jeopardize Black health; value Black voices; name the socio-structural determinants of health; define race as a socio-political construction; name historical and contemporary racism; apply resources equitably based on need; collect robust data to solve complex problems; diminish bias and view patients holistically in the contexts of inequities; and advocate for Black lives. While race is biological fiction, Black individuals are at an increased risk for COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths than their white counterparts due to navigating generations of racist practices that often converge with other inequities—such as sexism, classism. To describe these racial health disparities, structured, racial disadvantage is commonly ignored while personal choices and clinical care are highlighted as the culprits. Achieving health equity requires comprehension, acceptance, and assessment of structural racism, and pharmacists are highly trusted, uniquely positioned healthcare professionals who, through their knowledge, skills, and resources, can help attenuate the effects of structural racism to support Black lives.
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Descher, Stefan. "Satirical Novels of the Late Enlightenment and the Practice of Fiction. A Methodological Proposal for Investigations Into the History of Fiction." Journal of Literary Theory 14, no. 2 (September 25, 2020): 147–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2020-2003.
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AbstractThe paper examines German satirical novels of the late Enlightenment period, published roughly between 1760 and 1790, under the following question: Is there any evidence that the historical practice of fiction (concerning this time and these texts) deviates from the modern practice of fiction as described by institutional accounts of fictionality? First, it is explained what, in this essay, is meant by the ›modern practice of fiction‹. Four ›core rules‹ are identified that, according to institutional accounts of fictionality, characterize the practice of reading works of fiction. These core rules are: You should not conclude that what is expressed by fictional utterances is actually true! You should not conclude that the author believes that what is expressed by his fictional utterances is actually true! You should imagine what is expressed by fictional utterances (make-believe, pretence)! You should (or at least can) make your imaginations the object of higher-level attitudes (for example you can evaluate, emotionally respond to, interpret them etc.)! Then, using the example of German satirical novels of the late Enlightenment, seven features of fictional texts are discussed that may provide clues about the historical practice of fiction and that could give an indication of whether the core rules actually do apply. These features are: assurances of truthfulness by the author or fictional authors/editors; direct thematization of the fictional/factual-text-distinction; fictional reading scenarios; comments by fictional narrators and/or characters on the practice of reading; statements of the actual author in the fictional text; ›that cannot be true‹-passages (intentional mistakes, anachronisms, various ways of breaking the reader’s expectations, etc.); various kinds of reference to the actual world (for example satirical allusions to actual persons or states of affairs). It will be argued that, for the corpus of texts under consideration, there is no convincing evidence that the historical practices of reading works of fiction deviates in any significant way from the core rules of the modern practice of fiction. However, the main aim of this paper is not to provide an exhaustive historical case study. First, the investigation is limited to the exemplary discussion of some (although significant) texts and text passages, so the results can only be considered preliminary. Second, while the satirical novel of the late Enlightenment indeed is a particularly interesting and revealing genre for the study of the historical practice of fiction (arguments are given in section 3), the main purpose of this essay is to make a methodological proposal. A general procedure is provided for finding out whether the historical practice of fiction differs from our modern practice – a procedure that can be applied to texts of other times and genres as well.
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Rauf, Ramis. "Proyeksi Astral: Analisis Wacana Fiksi Posmodern dalam Naskah Film Insidious." Jurnal POETIKA 5, no. 1 (July 31, 2017): 51. http://dx.doi.org/10.22146/poetika.25994.
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This study aims to analyze astral projection as a concept of Death and Dying by using a postmodern fiction discourse analysis perspective in Insidious movie script. This study found that astral projection is a capability possessed by a person to leave physical body and explore an astral world or the spirit world. Astral projection is a death and dying concept that is presented as one of the postmodern fictional strategies known as superimposition. This strategy illustrates that there are two worlds that accumulate and co-exist with each other. Its presence is a way of deconstructing thoughts about something that is considered uncanny and unusual as well as a counterpart of totality that puts the ontological side of the existence of something. It is said by McHale (1987) that it is a sister-genre of postmodern fiction. Science fiction explores ontological issues in order to build a good story while postmodern fiction simply presents the problem without having to build a story. Furthermore, both genres can adopt each other's strategies. Meanwhile, postmodern fictional relations and fantasy fiction are the same, borrowing strategies for exploring ontological issues.
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Rauf, Ramis. "Proyeksi Astral: Analisis Wacana Fiksi Posmodern dalam Naskah Film Insidious." Poetika 5, no. 1 (July 31, 2017): 51. http://dx.doi.org/10.22146/poetika.v5i1.25994.
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This study aims to analyze astral projection as a concept of Death and Dying by using a postmodern fiction discourse analysis perspective in Insidious movie script. This study found that astral projection is a capability possessed by a person to leave physical body and explore an astral world or the spirit world. Astral projection is a death and dying concept that is presented as one of the postmodern fictional strategies known as superimposition. This strategy illustrates that there are two worlds that accumulate and co-exist with each other. Its presence is a way of deconstructing thoughts about something that is considered uncanny and unusual as well as a counterpart of totality that puts the ontological side of the existence of something. It is said by McHale (1987) that it is a sister-genre of postmodern fiction. Science fiction explores ontological issues in order to build a good story while postmodern fiction simply presents the problem without having to build a story. Furthermore, both genres can adopt each other's strategies. Meanwhile, postmodern fictional relations and fantasy fiction are the same, borrowing strategies for exploring ontological issues.
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Zhang, Xinyu. "Þannig er saga okkar“: Um sagnritunarsjálfsögur og skáldsöguna Hundadaga eftir Einar Má Guðmundsson." Íslenskar kvikmyndir 19, no. 2 (October 24, 2019): 249–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.33112/ritid.19.2.10.
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The ambiguity between reality and fiction haunts Einar Már Guðmundsson’s novel Hundadagar (Dog Days, 2015), as it is a fictional narrative about factual, historical figures and events, such as Jörgen Jörgensen, Rev. Jón Steingrímsson, Finnur Magnússon and Guðrún Johnsen, while the same can be said about many other novels labeled as postmodernism. Canadian literary scholar Linda Hutcheon coined the concept of historiographic metafiction to describe fictions as such, which are “intensely self-reflexive”, while “paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages”. Hutcheon suggests that historiographic metafictions fully illuminate the very way in which postmodernism entangles itself with both the epistemological and ontological status of history. This paper begins with an introduction to Hutcheon’s theoretical contributions on postmodernism, postmodern literature and the relationship between history and fiction, followed by a reading of Hundadagar as a historiographic metafiction. The narrator’s strategies—such as parataxis, metanarrative comments, we-narrative discourse and documentary intertext—largely indicate an imitation, a revelation, or say, a parody of the process of historian’s writings. The paper further suggests that it is the Icelandic financial crisis in 2008 that prompts the narrator to revisit the 18. and 19. century, since the financial crisis takes the role of a rupture of the Enlightenment ideals, leading to disorder and chaos. Moreover, the narrator finds an uncanny similarity between the past and the present, as if the history has been repeating itself. The spectre of history keeps (re)appearing in a deferred temporality. While revisiting the past, the narrator also (re)visits the present in an allegorical way. In a word, as a historiographic metafiction, Einar Már Guðmundsson’s Hundadagar is “fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political”, just as Hutcheon’s perception of postmodernism.
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Rhee, Jooyeon. "Making Sense of Fiction: Social and Political Functions of Serialized Fiction in the Daily News (Maeil sinbo) in 1910s Korea." Journal of Korean Studies 22, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 227–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/21581665-4153385.
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Abstract Modern Korean newspapers played a decisive role in transforming the Korean fiction genre in the early twentieth century―a transformation that was carried out in two distinctively different cultural and political environments. In the 1900s, reform-minded Korean intellectuals translated and authored fictional works in newspapers primarily as a way to instigate Koreans to participate in the nation-building process during the Patriotic Enlightenment movement (Aeguk kyemong undong) period. When Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the Daily News (Maeil sinbo) continually used fiction as a vehicle to deliver the colonial government’s assimilation policy, that is, to raise Korea’s socioeconomic and cultural status, with the aim of civilizing the society. The rhetoric of civilization is a common feature in fictional works produced during the period. However, what characterized the works serialized in Maeil sinbo was their increasing focus on individual desire and domestic affairs, which manifested itself in the form of courtship and familial conflicts. The confrontation between private desire and family relationships in these fictional works represented the prospect of higher education and economic equity while invoking emotional responses to the contradictory social reality of colonial assimilation in the portrayal of domestic issues in fiction. Looking at Maeil sinbo and its serialization of fiction not as a fixed totality of the Japanese imperial force but as a discursive space where contradicting views on civilization were formed, this paper scrutinizes emotional renderings of individuality and domesticity reflected in Maeil sinbo’s serialized fiction in the early 1910s.
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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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Vertesi, Janet. "“All these worlds are yours except …”: Science Fiction and Folk Fictions at NASA." Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 5 (June 12, 2019): 135. http://dx.doi.org/10.17351/ests2019.315.
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Although they command real spacecraft exploring the solar system, NASA scientists refer frequently to science fiction in the course of their daily work. Fluency with the Star Trek series and other touchstone works demonstrates membership in broader geek culture. But references to Star Trek, movies like 2001 and 2010, and Dr. Strangelove also do the work of demarcating project team affiliation and position, theorizing social and political dynamics, and motivating individuals in a chosen course of action. As such, science fiction classics serve as local folk fictions that enable embedded commentary on the socio-political circumstances of technoscientific work: in essence, a form of lay social theorizing. Such fiction references therefore allow scientists and engineers to openly yet elliptically discuss their social, political, and interactional environment, all the while maintaining face as credible, impartial, technical experts.
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Gittel, Benjamin. "In the Mood for Paradox? Das Verhältnis von Fiktion, Stimmung und Welterschließung aus mentalistischer und phänomenologischer Perspektive." Journal of Literary Theory 12, no. 2 (September 3, 2018): 300–320. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2018-0017.
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Abstract It is widely acknowledged that responses to fiction can be divided into two categories: emotions or moods. Research on the paradox of fiction, however, solely focused on emotional responses to fiction. This paper analyses the different potentials of the mood concept with regard to the paradox of fiction: its potential to avoid the paradox on the one hand and its potential to rise a new paradox of fiction, a paradox of fiction for moods, on the other. To this end, the paper distinguishes two different meanings of the everyday concept of mood and two different paradigms in the research on moods. The mood concept can designate not only affective states of an individual (moods1), but elusive, nuanced atmospheres of objects, places or situations (moods2). The mentalistic paradigm, widespread in psychology and analytic philosophy, generally assumes that moods are mental states with a certain quality of feeling (and physical symptoms). Moods2 are regarded by such approaches, if they discuss them, as a secondary phenomenon based on subjective perception. In contrast, the phenomenological paradigm focuses on moods2 and, if it accommodates moods1 as well, often postulates a characteristic connection between the two: moods1 reveal extra-individual atmospheres (moods2) that are assumed to exist in some ontologically robust sense. Therefore, moods1 can be said to have a world-disclosing function within the phenomenological paradigm. Researchers in the mentalistic paradigm deal, among other issues, with the difference of emotions and moods1. One way in which moods1 differ from emotions is that they lack an intentional object and it is for that reason that the concept of mood1, at first glance, seems to offer a solution to the paradox of fiction. The paradox of fiction presumes that we have emotions with regard to fictional objects. If it were possible to redescribe the alleged emotions as more subtle mood1 responses without clear intentional objects, this would undermine a central premise of the paradox and dissolve it. However, such a redescription seems not equally plausible for all cases discussed in the debate (e. g. the green slime case). Therefore, moods1 can only be one element of a more subtle ›phenomenology‹ of affective reactions towards fiction and the »paradox avoiding potential« of the mood concept is limited. The paradox creating potential of the mood concept emerges if one takes into account the outlined complex semantics of the concept »mood« and the postulated world-disclosing function of moods1. It seems possible to construct a new paradox, the paradox of fiction for moods: (a) Only real entities or representations of real entities can evoke moods1 with world-disclosing function (because this mood1 evocation is actually immersion in an atmosphere). (b) Many entities in fictions are not real. (c) Nevertheless, fictions can evoke moods1 with world-disclosing functions (e. g. with regard to places, situations) in the recipient. The paper argues that the outlined paradox can be dissolved by pointing out that the expression »moods1 with world-disclosing function« in sentence (a) means something different than in (c). While the expression in (a) relates to the idea of grasping an atmosphere (mood2) that somehow is »in the world«, it means acquiring a non-propositional form of knowledge, namely knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation, in (c). The idea that it is possible to acquire knowledge of what-it-is-like by means of fiction has often been postulated in the research literature, but rarely been spelled out in greater detail. The paper argues that such an acquisition can occur, among other possibilities, on the basis of mood1 evocation, but that the conditions for the acquisition of knowledge of what-it-is-like by means of fiction are more demanding than under usual circumstances: A recipient of fiction can reasonably be said to acquire knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation if the fictional representation evokes a mood1 which is characteristic of a situation S and the recipient understands this mood1 as an affective reaction to a situation of the type S. Please note that moods2 play no explanatory role in the second interpretation of »world-disclosing function«. Since assumption (a) and assumption (c) concern different world-disclosing functions or, in other words, different mechanisms of world-disclosure, there is no paradox. Although moods1 evoked by fictional representations (with some limitations pointed out in section 4) do not possess a world-disclosing function in the sense the phenomenological tradition postulated, it is possible to ascribe these moods1 a world-disclosing function, even within a non-phenomenological framework: They allow the recipient the acquisition of a knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation or in a certain place. Ultimately, for the paradox of fiction for moods seems to hold what could be said about the classical paradox of fiction as well: Even if the paradox ultimately dissolves, its analysis can be instructive for related research fields like the debate on knowledge from fiction which takes moods rarely into account until now.
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Saramago, Victoria. "The Rights of Nature, the Rights of Fiction: Mario Vargas Llosa and the Amazon." Novel 54, no. 1 (May 1, 2021): 19–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8868761.
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Abstract The Amazonian region occupies a singular place in the fiction and nonfiction of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Author of paradigmatic novels on the Peruvian Amazon, Vargas Llosa nevertheless has repeatedly defended extensive exploitation of Amazonian natural resources—at the expense of Indigenous rights and environmental conservation—in his essays and political activities. This article discusses this conflict between Vargas Llosa's fictional and nonfictional work on the Amazon through the lens of a theory of fiction that emerges from his essays across decades and that suggests that the fictional text is independent from the referential reality it represents. By revisiting his novels and writings about fiction, this article argues that Vargas Llosa's belief in the autonomy of fiction from its referential reality explains, to a certain extent, how the fascination with the Amazon present in the author's novels coexists with his defense of drastic changes in the region through environmental exploitation and the acculturation of Indigenous populations. While Vargas Llosa's work enjoyed a positive reception in the 1960s, the nontransitive notion of mimesis he proposed has gradually taken on reactionary undertones in the context of changing expectations since the 1980s and 1990s.
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Williams, Peter W. "“Does American Religious History Have a Center?” Reflections." Church History 71, no. 2 (June 2002): 386–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640700095767.
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The three essays presented in this session raise issues that remind me of two classic representations of the problem of interpretation. In the Japanese film Rashomon, four differing and incompatible accounts of the same event are presented by the central characters, leaving the viewer to wonder which, if any, is the “true” version. Similarly, in the “Doubloon” chapter of Melville's Moby Dick, Captain Ahab nails a Spanish gold coin to the mast as a potential reward for the first man to spot the white whale; subsequently, each member of the crew gazes at the doubloon and falls into his own unique chain of associations that it evokes. Each of these fictional situations evokes the dilemma of the historian in general and the religious historian in particular: how can I deliver an accurate, persuasive, and satisfying account of my material, given the inevitable differences in perception and value that separate me not only from my professional peers but from the vast numbers of individuals and groups whose account might well be different from mine? As Stephen Stein indicates, the dilemma is not purely “academic,” since our students expect a coherent narrative from us, and will inevitably go away frustrated if we simply give them fragments that seem to form no discernible whole.
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Hunt, Dallas. "“In search of our better selves”: Totem Transfer Narratives and Indigenous Futurities." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 71–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.42.1.hunt.
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Much contemporary science fiction urges us to focus on eco-activism and sustainable futures in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. From a critical Indigenous and anticolonial perspective, however, the question becomes “for whom are these futures sustainable”? Set in a nondescript desert dystopia, George Miller's film Mad Max: Fury Road 2015 alludes to the westerns of yesteryear and the Australian “outback”—spaces coded as menacing in their resistance to being tamed by settler-colonial interests. This article charts how Miller's film, while preoccupied with issues pertaining to global warming and ecological collapse, replicates and reifies settler replacement narratives, or what Canadian literature scholar Margery Fee has referred to as “totem transfer” narratives (1987). In these narratives, ultimately the “natives” transfer their knowledges and then disappear from view, helping white settlers remedy the self-created ills that currently threaten their worlds and enabling them to inherit the land. In the second half, I also consider how Indigenous futurist texts offer decolonizing potentials that refute the replacement narratives that persist in settler-colonial contexts. In particular, I examine how Indigenous cultural production emphasizes the importance of the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledges and refuses the hermeneutic of reconciliation that seeks to discipline Indigenous futures in the service of a settler-colonial present.
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BERNAULT, FLORENCE. "BODY, POWER AND SACRIFICE IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA." Journal of African History 47, no. 2 (July 2006): 207–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853706001836.
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This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written by anthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive integration of Africa in the world's economy and the commodification of the human body. While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches fail to understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participated in the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examines Equatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power and social reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonial intrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeral practices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questions anthropologists' and historians' tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between western and African imaginaries.
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Morris, Grant. "Devils Down Under: Perceptions of Lawyers' Ethics in New Zealand Fiction." Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 44, no. 3/4 (November 1, 2013): 609. http://dx.doi.org/10.26686/vuwlr.v44i3/4.4977.
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Sophisticated fictional portrayals of lawyers facing ethical dilemmas can provide important insights into the nature of legal ethics and morality in the New Zealand legal profession. These insights can assist the legal community in addressing complex issues surrounding professional regulation. This article reveals legal characters who act contrary to legal ethics but with moral justifications and characters who act ethically but in a way that laypeople may view as amoral or immoral. While the depictions of lawyers are generally negative, a close analysis reveals that this is partly a result of confusion over what Dare has termed the standard conception of a lawyer's role. Fewer insights can be gained from superficial characterisations. While much has been written on this topic in other jurisdictions, more light can be shed on New Zealand's ethical landscape through the study of New Zealand's fictional texts. This article exposes a rich resource for the legal community because as Economides and O'Leary have argued in relation to legal ethics, stories matter. This dictum should apply to works of non-fiction and fiction.