FUSIONEN AF FIKTION OG IKKE-FIKTION - UDFORDRING AF DORRIT COHNS FIKTIONSTEORI

In this article, I discuss some influential Chinese theories of fiction and concepts of fiction in ancient times, as well as some contemporary trends in Chinese theories of literature, genre and fiction. This involves discussing several aspects, such as concepts of literature, genre and fiction, the role and status of fiction, recent developments in fiction theory, and the impact of cultural values and political climate etc.. I will also discuss certain features of Chinese theories of fiction and concepts of fiction in the context of influential theories and concepts of fiction in Western culture, such as those in Gregory Currie's The Nature of Fiction and Kendall Walton Mimesis and Make-Believe. Are these theories applicable to Chinese fiction? Are they reconcilable with Chinese theories and concepts of fiction? And finally, is it possible to create credible transcultural theories and concepts of fiction?

Good Family: Agreeing and Disagreeing with Richard Walsh James Phelan (bio) As a collaborator with Richard Walsh and Henrik Skov Nielsen on “Ten Theses about Fictionality,” I was not surprised to find myself nodding frequently as I read through Richard’s target essay. “Yes, Richard, just so!,” I thought to myself as I read such claims as the following: “The premise most fundamentally at odds with a rhetorical approach is that fictionality does not attach to the fiction-producing communicative act, but to its product, a fictional referent or object” (Walsh, “Fictionality as Rhetoric” 399). And As a rhetorical move [fictionality] is not intrinsic to any particular features of the utterance, but is circumstantial; it consists in the re-orientation of communicative attention achieved by the contextual assumption of fictionality itself. This assumption . . . is just a pragmatic, contextual inference about communicative purposes manifest in the shared cognitive environment between communicator and audience. (412) My overall responses to the target essay, then, are endorsement and admiration: how great to have Richard making such a forceful case for a rhetorical approach to fictionality. Nevertheless, as Richard notes, in order to focus on the “Ten Theses” that he, Henrik, and I put forward in 2015, we had to set aside some “significant points of difference” (“Fictionality as Rhetoric” 422n2) in our individual views. Since Richard appropriately uses the target essay to articulate his views, I respond with my take on some of the contested issues. Given the limits of space, I address only two points: (1) the relation of my proposal about narrative communication to an understanding of fictionality as rhetoric; (2) the relative explanatory power of our respective conceptions of fictionality.1 For [End Page 502] Richard, fictionality is “a contextual assumption prompting us to understand an utterance’s communicative relevance as indirectly, rather than directly, informative” (414), an assumption entailing the idea that the truth status of the utterance is beside the point. For me, fictionality is intentionally communicated invention, projection, or other means of directing an audience to consider nonactual states or events. This conception entails the idea that truth status is part and parcel of tellers’ and audiences’ judgments about an utterance’s fictionality—and about its effects.2 Here’s Richard’s characterization of my work on narrative communication3: [W]hen James Phelan, whose rhetorical approach to fiction has deep roots in the history of narrative theory, proposes to adapt and extend Seymour Chatman’s version of the narrative communication model (Phelan, “Authors, Resources, Audiences”) . . . it seems as if the weight of that heritage has pulled his concept of fictionality out of orbit, in another kind of lapse back into a representational model of fiction. (415) I see I need to clarify my argument. My discussion of Chatman is not an effort to “adapt and extend” his communication model (which famously posits a one-way transmission from real author to real reader through implied author, narrator, narratee, and implied reader). Instead, I reject the model and propose to replace it with one that I find more responsive to the practices of narrative artists. The fundamental difference between the two models follows from the difference between a structuralist and a rhetorical view of narrative. For Chatman narrative is a structure that synthesizes a what (story) and a how (discourse), and, thus, for him, communication is subordinate to structure. That’s why characters (elements of story) are not in his line of transmission. For me narrative is an action in which authors use (or opt not to use) a wide assortment of resources (narrators, characters, temporality, space, etc.) in diverse combinations in order to accomplish particular communicative purposes in relation to particular audiences—whose presence influences the teller’s narrative act. Furthermore, this account applies to both fictional and nonfictional narratives, and it locates the differences between them in the “context of communicative intent” (402) governing their production. Thus, in my view both structure and representation are subordinate to communication. I infer from the target essay that Richard would agree. If so, then he and I will continue to have some disagreements about details [End Page 503] of my model (e.g., the role of a narrative audience), but...

The role of the narrator in fiction has recently received renewed interest from scholars in philosophical aesthetics and narratology. Many of the contributions criticise how the term is used – both outside of narrative literature as well as within the field of fictional narrative literature. The central part of the attacks has been the ubiquity of fictional narrators, see e. g. Kania (2005), and pan-narrator theories have been dismissed, e. g. by Köppe and Stühring (2011). Yet, the fictional narrator has been a decisive tool within literary narratology for many years, in particular during the heyday of classical literary narratology. For scholars like Genette (1988) and Cohn (1999), the category of the fictional narrator was at the centre of theoretical debates about the demarcation of fiction and non-fiction. Arguably, theorising about the fictional narrator necessitates theorising about fiction in general. From this, it follows that any account on which the fictional narrator is built ideally would be a theory of fiction compatible with all types of fictional narrative media – not just narrative fiction like novels and short stories.In this vein, this paper applies a transmedial approach to the question of fictional narrators in different media based on the transmedial theory of fiction in terms of make-believe by Kendall Walton (1990). Although the article shares roughly the same theoretical point of departure as Köppe and Stühring, that is, an analytical-philosophical theory of fiction as make-believe, it offers a diametrically different solution. Building on the distinction between direct and indirect fictional truths as developed by Kendall Walton in his seminal theory of fiction as make-believe (1990), this paper proposes the fictional presence of a narrator in all fictional narratives. Importantly, ›presence‹ in terms of being part of a work of fiction needs to be understood as exactly that:fictionalpresence, meaning that the question of what counts as a fictional truth is of great importance. Here, the distinction between direct and indirect fictional truths is crucial since not every fictional narrative – not even every literary fictional narrative – makes it directly fictionally true that it is narrated. To exemplify: not every novel begins with words like »Call me Ishmael«, i. e., stating direct fictional truths about its narrator. Indirect, implied fictional truths can also be part of the generation of the fictional truth of a fictional narrator. Therefore, the paper argues that every fictional narrative makes it (at least indirectly) fictionally true that it is narrated.More specifically, the argument is made that any theory of fictional narrative that accepts fictional narrators in some cases (as e. g. suggested by proponents of the so-called optional narrator theory, such as Currie [2010]), has to accept fictional narrators in all cases of fictional narratives. The only other option is to remove the category of fictional narrators altogether. Since the category of the fictional narrator has proved to be extremely useful in the history of narratology, such removal would be unfortunate, however. Instead, a solution is suggested that emphasizes the active role of recipients in the generation of fictional truths, and in particular in the generation of implied fictional truths.Once the narratological category of the fictional narrator is understood in terms of fictional truth, the methodological consequences can be fully grasped: without the generation of fictional truths in a game of make-believe, there are no fictional narratives – and no fictional narrators. The fictionality of narratives depends entirely on the fact that they are used as props in a game of make-believe. If they are not used in this manner, they are nothing but black dots on paper, the oxidation of silver through light, or any other technical description of artefacts containing representations. Fictional narrators are always based on fictional truths, they are the result of a game of make-believe, and hence the only evidence for a fictional narrator is always merely fictional. If it is impossible to imagine that the fictional work is narrated, then the work is not a narrative.In the first part of the paper, common arguments for and against the fictional narrator are discussed, such as the analytical, realist, transmedial, and the so-called evidence argument; in addition, unreliable narration in fictional film will be an important part in the defence of the ubiquitous fictional narrator in fictional narrative. If the category of unreliable narration relies on the interplay of both author, narration, and reader, the question of unreliable narration within narrative fiction that is not traditionally verbal, such as fiction films, becomes highly problematic. Based on Walton’s theory of make-believe, part two of the paper presents a number of reasons why at least implied fictional narrators are necessary for the definition of fictional narrative in different media and discusses the methodological consequences of this theoretical choice.

A Basque Chronicle of Nine Months in the New WestBernardo Atxaga's Nevada Days David Rio (bio) Basque Literature and the American West The appeal of the American West in contemporary European literature can be regarded as the result of a recurrent transnational process of cultural exchange; this is not limited to major European literatures but also affects writers in minority languages, as exemplified by Basque literature. About 850,000 Basque speakers live on either side of the Pyrenees in Spain and France. The Basque language, or Euskara, is the only non-Indo-European language in Western Europe. Despite its repression during the Franco era (1939-75), the revitalization of this language is evident, as illustrated both by the growing number of speakers, at least south of the Pyrenees, and by its increasing presence on digital media and social networks. For example, Basque is the most tweeted minority language, according to Indigenous Tweets.1 This contrast between its global projection and its minority status has led Manuel Castells to define the Basque culture as "a small 'glocal' neighborhood" (qtd. in Alonso and Arzoz 11). Basque literature also enjoys good health in terms of both its quantity and its quality, though the number of readers is still quite limited (Zabala). Certainly, Basque literature has a rich oral tradition, particularly in the field of popular poetry (it has a long-established tradition of improvised poetry, or bertsolaritza), and the first book published in Basque can be traced back to 1545 (Bernat Etxepare's Linguae Vasconum Primitiae). However, it is also true that Basque literature achieved international visibility only in 1989 with the publication of Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak [Obabakoak: A Novel, 1992], [End Page 175] a book already translated into more than twenty-five languages (Olaziregi, "Introduction" 13). Atxaga, the leading Basque author of his generation, is also one of the first contemporary Basque authors to have used the American West as a prominent trope in his writings, as exemplified by books such as Bi letter jaso nituen oso denbora gutxian (originally published in 1984, its English translation was published in 2008 as "Two Letters All at Once" in a volume called Two Basque Stories), Soinujolearen semea (published in Basque in 2003 and translated into English as The Accordionist's Son in 2007), and Nevadako egunak (2006), awarded the prestigious Euskadi Prize for Literature in the Basque Country in 2007 and published in English as Nevada Days in 2017.2 This article focuses on Nevada Days as one of the most interesting examples of the transcontinental condition of the trope of the American West in contemporary literature, exploring both how Atxaga revises traditional Western imagery and his introduction of new cultural constructions of Western experiences. This fascinating fictionalized memoir illustrates the power literature has to reconcile the local and the global through an "unbounded regionalism" (Kollin 517) and exemplifies the new dimension of archetypal motifs, settings, and themes when integrated into a different literary tradition. The United States was for a long time neglected in Basque-language literature. In spite of the important role played by the Basques in the early Spanish exploration and administration of both North and South America, representation of the American continent in Basque literature was often biased because the idea that emigration somehow amounted to treason against the motherland pervaded most of these stories. As Mari Jose Olaziregi stated, "Although the Americas were represented in different genres of Basque literature from the nineteenth century onward, it was not until the 1960s that this representation ceased to be merely a reflection of the nationalist imagination's love for the motherland" ("Representations" 117). Although the presence of Basques notably increased in the North American West after the Gold Rush and Basque immigrants soon found their distinctive occupation as sheepherders, the literary neglect of the Basque role in the Americas [End Page 176] continued throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Even if we turn to Basque literature written in English during that period, we find very few examples of Basque American authors writing about the experience of these immigrants in the American West. The most notable exception is Mirim Isasi, who lived in exile in the States...

In this article, three recent works by French, English and German authors are analysed as examples of anti-Americanism in contemporary European literature. Luc Lang's travel book, 11 septembre mon amour (2003), John Le Carré's spy novel, Absolute friends (2003) and Frank Schätzing's apocalyptic ‘eco-thriller’ Der Schwarm (2004) were all written in response to the ongoing ‘war on terror’, and each presents a remarkably antagonistic interpretation of the United States and its role in the world today. Although the literary strategies employed in these negative representations of the US are very different in each case, the three books share a deep disgust not only with American foreign policy, invariably interpreted as a reckless, deranged bid for global hegemony, but also with American culture and society in general. This article interprets this disgust as an expression of a deep-seated, irrational Americanophobia—that is, of ‘anti-Americanism’.

Permanent Defamiliarization as Rhetorical Device; or, How to Let Puppymonkeybaby into Unnatural Narratology Stefan Iversen (bio) Brian Richardson’s work on the unnatural, spanning more than ten years, presents and refines two insights that continue to strike me as original and important. The first is the observation that what Richardson calls “anti-mimetic tendencies” are an integral part of (not only modern) literary narratives. The second is the idea that most of the dominant unified theories of narrative have been hindered in dealing adequately with these tendencies, due to their implicit or explicit reliance on models of storytelling derived from the way in which nonfictional narratives typically function. The following suggestions should be situated in the context of this broad appreciation of the general thrust behind Richardson’s contribution to narrative theory. What I want to suggest is that rather than talking about the unnatural narrative as a certain type of fictional narrative, an autonomous innovative or experimental text, we might consider talking pragmatically about the unnatural as a rhetorical device, defined in relation to existing processes of sense-making, rather than in relation to existing texts or poetics. While inspired by, and in most instances compatible [End Page 455] with, Richardson’s position, the approach suggested is motivated by an attempt to address a concern raised by the observation that the idea of the unnatural as antimimetic is based on what I find to be a debatable distinction between fiction and nonfiction. A pragmatic, rhetorical approach might be considered better designed for addressing not only the different functions of unnatural devices but also the many cases where such devices appear locally in otherwise traditional types of narratives, or appear outside of generic fiction, be it in poetry, in everyday communication, or in rhetorical discourse, such as advertisements. An example of the last is the advertisement featuring “Puppymonkeybaby,” a video spot aired in 2016 to promote the soft drink Mountain Dew Kickstart. The main protagonist of the short narrative is a CGI-generated, photorealistic, and fully animated hybrid creature with the head of a dog, the torso of a monkey, and the legs of a human baby. I establish my thesis through a short discussion of one of the main premises underlying Richardson’s definition of unnatural narratives, followed by a rereading of one of the most canonical, systematic attempts to address strangeness in semiosis, the concept of defamiliarization1 as presented by Shklovsky in “Art as Device.”2 Richardson defines unnatural narratives as those that “defy the conventions of nonfiction narratives and of fiction that closely resembles nonfiction” (“Unnatural” 1). This definition is “based on a significant distinction between fiction and nonfiction” (13). The idea of the antimimetic as that which defies the mimetic or nonfictive makes sense only when one relies on a fundamental “affirmation of the fiction/nonfiction boundary” (13). Under what logic does this boundary function? According to Richardson, the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is policed with reference to what he calls “the pragmatic theory of fictionality” (13) and “the standard conception of fictionality” (13). However, what this standard, pragmatic conception might entail remains a bit vague. Two understandings of the difference between fiction and nonfiction to which Richardson does not subscribe are clearly presented: he does not believe that fiction is recognizable through “distinctive syntactic components” (13), and he does not subscribe to the “more recent [theory of fictionality] offered by Nielsen, Walsh, and Phelan” (13n7). One may see these as two ends of a spectrum of ideas concerning how to distinguish imaginary from non-imaginary discourse. At the one end, we find what Herman would call an exceptionalist [End Page 456] position,3 which states that fiction is ontologically and/or formally distinct from nonfiction, and essentially operates with two mega-genres, one where everything is fictional and another where nothing is fictional. At the other end, we find the idea that fictionality, construed as the invitation to maximize the relevance of a particular discourse unit by understanding it as invented, is a quality often, but not only or necessarily, tied to generic fiction. With respect to this pragmatic position (Nielsen et al.), it makes sense to discuss fictionality outside of generic fiction...

Autofiction and theories of fiction seem to be at odds. Whereas the notion of autofiction capitalizes on a postmodern consensus regarding the fictional status of self-narration, recent theoretical approaches to fiction and fictionality have reaffirmed the distinction between fictional and nonfictional narratives. It is possible to move beyond this impasse, however, by drawing on narratological and rhetorical theories of fictionality to describe the precise forms and degrees of fictionality and fictionalization discernable in works received as autofiction. Different configurations of the fact/fiction relationship can produce various autofictional effects, and theory can help us locate sites of fictionalization and factualization within literary works. Conversely, the ambiguity and hybridity of autofictional texts serve as a useful empirical testing ground for theories of fiction and fictionality.

Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage

In this paper, my aim is to show that in Anglo-American analytic aesthetics, the conception of narrative fiction is in general realistic and that it derives from philosophical theories of fiction-making, the act of producing works of literary narrative fiction. I shall firstly broadly show the origins of the problem and illustrate how the so-called realistic fallacy – the view which maintains that fictions consist of propositions which represent the fictional world “as it is” – is committed through the history of philosophical approaches to literature in the analytic tradition. Secondly, I shall show how the fallacy that derives from the 20th Century philosophy of language manifests itself in contemporary analytic aesthetics, using Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s influential and well-known Gricean make-believe theory of fiction as an example. Finally, I shall sketch how the prevailing Gricean make-believe theories should be modified in order to reach the literary-fictive use of language and to cover fictions broader than Doyle’s stories and works alike.

Various scholars have made claims about literature’s potential to evoke empathy and self-reflection, which would eventually lead to more pro-social behav­ior. But is it indeed the case that a seemingly idle pass-time activity like literary reading can do all that? And if so, how can we explain such an influence? Would the effects be particular to unique literary text qualities or to other aspects that literary texts share with other genres (e. g., narrativity)? Empirical research is necessary to answer these questions. This article presents an overview of empirical studies investigating the relationship between reading and empathy, and reading and self-reflection. We reveal those questions in the research that are not addressed as of yet, and synthesize the available approaches to literary effects. Based on theory as well as empirical work, a multi-factor model of literary reading is constructed.With regard to reading and empathy, the metaphor of the moral laboratory (cf. Hakemulder 2000) comes close to a concise summary of the research and theory. Being absorbed in a narrative can stimulate empathic imagination. Readers go along with the author/narrator in a (fictional) thought-experiment, imagining how it would be to be in the shoes of a particular character, with certain motives, under certain circumstances, meeting with certain events. That would explain why narrativity can result in a broadening of readers’ consciousness, in particular so that it encompasses fellow human beings. Fictionality might stimulate readers to consider the narrative they read as a thought experiment, creating distance between them and the events, allowing them to experiment more freely with taking the position of a character different from themselves, also in moral respects. Literary features, like gaps and ambiguous characterization, may stimulate readers to make more mental inferences, thus training their theory of mind. However, apart from literature possibly being able to train basic cognitive ability, we have little indication for the importance ofRegarding self-reflection, while there is no convincing evidence that literary texts are generally more thought-provoking than non-literary texts (either narrative or expository), there is tentative indication for a relation between reading literary texts and self-reflection. However, as was the case for the studies on empathy, there is a lack of systematic comparisons between literary narratives and non-literary narratives. There are some suggestions regarding the processes that can lead to self-reflection. Empirical and theoretical work indicates that the combination of experiencing narrative and aesthetic emotions tends to trigger self-reflection. Personal and reading experience may influence narrative and aesthetic emotions.By proposing a multi-factor model of literary reading, we hope to give an impulse to current reader response research, which too often conflates narrativity, fictionality and literariness. The multi-factor model of literary reading contains (our simplified versions of) two theoretical positions within the field of reader response studies on underlying processes that lead to empathy and reflection: the idea of reading literature as a form of role-taking proposed by Oatley (e. g., 1994; 1999) and the idea of defamiliarization through deviating textual and narrative features proposed by Miall and Kuiken (1994; 1999). We argue that these positions are in fact complementary. While the role-taking concept seems most adequate to explain empathic responses, the defamiliarization concept seems most adequate in explaining reflective responses. The discussion of these two theoretical explanations leads to the construction of a theoret­ical framework (and model) that offers useful suggestions which texts could be considered to have which effects on empathy and reflection.In our multi-factor model of literary reading, an important addition to the previously mentioned theories is the concept »stillness«. We borrow this term from the Canadian author Yann Martel (2009), who suggests reading certain literary texts will help to stimulate self-contemplation (and appreciation for art), moments that are especially valuable in times that life seems to be racing by, and we are enveloped by work and a multitude of other activities. Other literary authors have proposed similar ideas. Stillness is related to, or overlaps with the more commonly used term »aesthetic distance«, an attitude of detachment, allowing for contemplation to take place (cf. Cupchik 2001). Stillness, we propose, allows a space in which slow thinking (Kahneman 2011) can take place. Stillness is not reflection itself, but a precondition for reflection. In our model, stillness is an empty space or time that is created as a result of reading processes: the slowing down of readers’ perceptions of the fictional world, caused by defamiliarization. Our multi-factor model suggests that while role-taking can take place for all types of narratives, literary and fictional narratives may evoke the type of aesthetic distance (stillness) that leads to a suspension of judgment, adding to a stronger experience of role-taking and narrative empathy.

While in the seventeenth century every effort was being made in the Dutch Republic to study eastern languages, similar initiatives were also being taken in the rest of Europe. As in Leiden, the study of Arabic was a mixture of secular and theological Interests. Under the influence of the Enlightenment and, from the second half of the eighteenth century on, early Romanticism, an educated public showed ever more interest in Arabic and Persian literature. Hendrik Albert Schultens took an active interest in contemporary European literature and his private library contained the latest German, French and English novels. As a moderate and amiable man with manners he was regarded as a Citizen of the Enlightenment, and he was portrayed as such by the artist Wybrand Hendriks, 'kastelein' or curator of the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. Schultens' views on Arabic literature and culture emerge clearly from a couple of lectures.Keywords: Arabic literature; Dutch Republic; early Romanticism; European literature; Persian literature

The cultural figure of the female journalist most clearly embodies the opportunities given to, and the anxieties caused by, the period’s working women. As writers, they fought for rhetorical space in the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and as women, they faced social pressure to avoid the male-dominated physical public sphere or move within it under specific conditions. Even the increasing number of female journalists at the turn of the century could not guarantee their place within the newsroom itself, let alone the world beyond its walls. Instead, their struggle to stake a claim in physical public spaces manifested in fiction and nonfiction narratives as a search for “home,” or a place of belonging. This article explores the exclusively white-woman fiction and nonfiction narratives by and about nonwhite and nonmainstream women through a human geography lens, arguing that their shared central issue is the social “gerrymandering” of women and other overlapping marginalized groups out of physical public spaces, as well as the efforts of women to “redistrict” the social spheres into a comfortable public place in which everyone could thrive.

WORLDLIT.ORG 61 I n 1997 I was offered a job to teach English to adults in Croatia. Of course I had been following the events that had torn Yugoslavia apart between 1991 and 1995; and just as I was learning what I could about the newly independent country of Croatia, Dubravka had already left it behind, in 1993, to go into exile first in Berlin and then Amsterdam . The irony is that I ordered two of Dubravka’s early books, to learn more about a country that, in fact, no longer existed, and where she no longer lived nor could feel at home. But these two books were a good introduction nevertheless: Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life and Fording the Stream of Consciousness are both works of fiction and belong to a tradition of playful satire and black humor that was prevalent all through Eastern Europe during the communist era. As a student of Russian I had read both the classics and the Soviet-era satirical work that followed, so there was something that felt wonderfully familiar about her fiction and new at the same time. Were it not for the accident of history, so to speak, Dubravka might have gone on writing novels in this satirical vein, poking fun at her fellow writers, or lovesick women, or life in the little republic of Croatia when it was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is significant that the breakup of the country drove her into exile only four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is also significant that the once-“dissident” writers of the Soviet cover feature Dubravka Ugrešić and Contemporary European Literature Along a Path to Transnational Literature by Alison Anderson 62 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 bloc suddenly found themselves in a literary context that was utterly changed—they had freedom of expression at last, yes, but not necessarily the freedom to publish or be read; market forces suddenly determined everything that was published throughout the former Eastern bloc. The breakup of Yugoslavia meant not only the transition to a capitalist culture but also a severing of ties among the former republics that at times bordered on the absurd, as new dictionaries were created for each republic’s “language”—no longer known as Serbo-Croatian but as Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (and sometimes Montenegrin). Now Dubravka found herself living in Western Europe but writing in Croatian, living in, as she calls it, a literary out-of-nation zone. Who would read her? Who was her audience? Whom was she writing for? Back then, perhaps only a few dissenting Croats or fellow exiles, unhappy with the nationalistic regime of the 1990s; her Yugoslav audience had virtually vanished. Would the Germans, the Dutch read her in translation? Could she find a place as a European writer ? These were some of the questions I asked myself as I began to learn both about Dubravka’s biography and about life in Croatia in the late 1990s. After the year I spent in Zagreb, I returned to the US and was heartened to see that Dubravka’s books were appearing regularly in English: Have a Nice Day, The Culture of Lies, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender , Thank You for Not Reading, Ministry of Pain, Nobody’s Home, etc. I realized too that she had found a new voice—the voice of exile, one might call it—and that the bubbly, sardonic novels of her youth had given way, for the most part, to incisive, often heartfelt and angry, but always ironic and cautionary essays about life in post-Yugoslavia, in Europe, and in the wider world. Her works appeared not only in English but in many countries, in translation, and she has, so fortunately for us, found her place, at latest count, in twenty-seven languages. I would like to focus briefly on her novel from 1997, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, because it is the pivotal work written from her first exile in Berlin, and it is also a work that echoes and reflects the events of the late 1980s and ’90s in Europe. Before 1989 Berlin was a divided city, the very heart...

The use of past tense in narrative discourse at first glance seems to imply that the narrated events are lying in the past as compared to the act of narration. However, this intuitive notion was doubted by several scholars in the mid 20th century, among them Käte Hamburger, Harald Weinrich, Émile Benveniste, and Ann Banfield. This article investigates the temporal constitution of literary narratives from a perspective of the biological evolution of Human cognition. My analysis begins with Hamburger’s most disputed claim that in epic fiction the past tense »loses its grammatical function of designating what is past« and proceeds by testing a derived hypothesis against a cross-cultural sample of (mostly oral) folklore. Hamburger denied any temporal relation between the speaker and that which he speaks of, assuming instead a fictitious neverland in which the narrated events are situated and to which the preterit refers. If Hamburger’s model is correct, so the derived hypothesis goes, then the use of past tense in fictional narratives is merely a cultural convention, and different narrative traditions should expose different conventions. Indeed it can be shown that in other cultures stories are told in the present tense, in infinitive verb forms, or in forms indicating abstractness or remoteness. It can be followed that Hamburger was right at least in presuming that reference to the past is not a necessary constituent of verbal storytelling. Actually, instead of referring to the past, the epic preterit rather seems to indicate a change in the modality of speaking, thus adhering to the category of grammatical mood rather than tense. In some languages of oral cultures, however, this presumed mood shows up instead as a way of indicating the source of information. This kind of source information – fully grammaticalized in a quarter of the world’s languages – is called ›evidentiality‹ by linguists. In a phylogenetic perspective on the evolution of cognition, source information only becomes necessary with extended inferential and communicative capabilities and may thus have emerged as a cognitive tool in early humans when entering the ›cognitive niche‹. Evidentiality markers in language may thus be the linguistic reflex of a very ancient cognitive scope category in the innate architecture of the human mind, one which served to separate first-hand experience from reported knowledge. In oral storytelling, evidentiality is marked not only by specific verb forms but also by specific formulas (›they say‹/›it is said‹), intonations, or rhetorical devices. From this perspective, the phenomenon observed by Hamburger and others can be said to originate in the beginning of Tradition – that is, of verbal transmission of cultural knowledge. My hypothesis is that literary narratives in literate cultures still use this ancient cognitive scope operator of ›tradition‹ when employing the epic preterit. Admittedly, in literate cultures it often suffices to put »A novel by« on the title page in order to signal the categorical otherness of narrative fiction. Yet still, authors employ additional means to evoke the atmosphere of a ›murmuring conjuring‹ – as Thomas Mann once called it – that creates the impression of an objective world of tradition behind the individual story told. I point toward examples in literary first-person narratives, because homodiegetic narration – in contrast to Hamburger’s classical case of heterodiegetic narration – shows a continuous spatio-temporal relation between speaker and that which he speaks of and thus requires additional means or efforts to signal a break between the ordinary world of first-hand experience and the world of the literary. Since Hamburger once treated the epic preterit as a signal of fictionality, I briefly discuss the notion of fiction in the last paragraphs of my paper. I consider ›fictionality‹ to be a late cultural concept in literate societies that is not identical with the cognitive category of ›tradition‹ but is ultimately made possible by the existence of the latter.

In the study we research intimacy in the poetry of Slovene Vida Jeraj (1875–1932). In the period of the Fin- de-Siècle Slovene women writers were no longer silent. Jeraj as the most distinguished poet from the Slovene female women writers’ circle of the newspaper Slovenka [Slovene women; 1897–1902], connected to the ascending Slovene feminist movement and became the first Slovene lyrical female poet. Jeraj was a nomadic person, part of the Habsburg myth with a bilingual, hybrid identity: Slovene and Austrian. With a passionate, delicate, and sometimes subversive voice Jeraj expresses intimacy in an impressionist, decadent and symbolist style, engaging in a dialogue with the contemporary European literature. Light, etheric poetry full of tender feelings proclaimed the new credo and also the philosophy of the ascending modernism in Slovene poetry. Jeraj wrote about the moments in nature, the blessing of the meetings of lovers and about parting and death. In connection to these motifs the temporality and the historical dimensions of her lyrical confessions will be explored. Furthermore, the expressions of intimacy will be connected to social and religious conditions in Central Europe of the period.