Collection Of Fiction Research Articles

Do generation Z students read? Reading habits of the students of Dhaka University

PurposeThe proliferation of digital tools and instant access to information has diversified reading habits among Generation Z (Gen Z) students. The primary objective of this study is to examine the reading habits of Gen Z students at Dhaka University.Design/methodology/approachA survey questionnaire method was employed to collect data from 354 university students. We collected research data through printed questionnaires, and randomly selected students to answer survey questions. A total of 500 printed questionnaires were distributed to the seminar library, university hall library and Dhaka University library. Additional efforts made to engage students in classrooms.FindingsStudents prefer printed materials, particularly fiction and enjoy reading at home. The majority have emerged as dormant readers and prefer using mobile phones for reading. Hobbies and interests have been identified as significant influencers in shaping reading habits. Promoting a reading culture, improving access to books, integrating technology, expanding fiction collections, creating engaging content and tailoring outreach strategies are key steps to enhancing the reading habits of the Gen Z students in Bangladesh.Social implicationsThese findings provide valuable guidance for policymakers and educators seeking to foster effective reading habits among students by aligning strategies with their preferences and needs.Originality/valueThis study offers original insights into the reading habits of Gen Z students at Dhaka University, focus on enhancing library collections, particularly in fiction literature, addresses challenges such as space constraints and reflects innovative approaches to fostering improved reading habits among students.

Miraji ke Liye: interview with Julien Columeau

ABSTRACT Mehr Afshan Farooqi interviews Julien Columeau, author of five collections of Urdu fiction, about his novella Miraji ke liye (For Miraji), a fictional account of the infamous Urdu modernist poet. Farooqi contextualizes Miraji within Urdu literature and explores his relationship with French literature, especially Baudelaire and Mallarme. Farooqi’s interview with Columeau explores his fictional ‘evocation’ of Miraji, which draws on Miraji’s own fascination and imaginative response to Baudelaire.

The Biography and Bibliography of Ivan Antonovich Efremov Expanded with New Materials [Review: Efremov I.A. Women in My Life: Novels; Letters. Moscow, Izd. Yukhnevskaya S.A., 2022. 480 p. A Retro Collection of Adventure and Science Fiction. Ser.: Collections. Complete Works by I. Efremov. Vol. VIII. (In Russian)

This article reviews the first-ever published materials from the archive of Taisia Iosifovna Yukhnevskaya, the late wife of Ivan Antonovich Efremov (1908–1972). The focus is on I.A. Efremov’s collection of autobiographical and erotic short novels titled “Women in My Life”. These fourteen stories (one of which is incomplete) are believed to have been written between the 1950s and 1960s. They fit perfectly with the style of the writer, for whom there was no division between the physical aspects of love and the spiritual development of a normal person. The short novels contain a wealth of personal details, thus offering a new and deeper perspective on the early years of the rising geologist and social thinker. In terms of fiction, they continue the 1940s series “Tales of the Extraordinary” and conform to the genre characteristics of romantic storytelling, as well as colonial and Western novels. There are clear similarities and plot parallels with I.A. Efremov’s other novels such as “Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale”, “The Bull’s Hour”, “Razor’s Edge”, and “Thais of Athens”. An interesting finding is that the letters between I.A. Efremov and his wife bring out an unforeseen side of the writer’s character, especially his ability to inject humor, which is a departure from his usual literary approach.

Queer African literary communities: The anthology as political genre

The inaugural Gerald Kraak anthology titled Pride and Prejudice (The Gerald Kraak Anthology: African Perspectives on Gender, Social Justice and Sexuality) (2017) is a collection of poetry, fiction, journalism, photography, and scholarly writing that focuses on queer and other marginalised identities in Africa. The individual contributions place the queer cultural outsider at the centre of the text. The power of the anthology’s collective voice challenges normative subjectivity and its practices of exclusion by showcasing the subjects’ joy and suffering, and, through the collectivisation of individual experience, new possibilities arise for a recentred queer subjectivity that challenges imposed normative boundaries. The process of writing is a relatively private activity to explore and express identity and sexuality. In contrast to the privacy of writing is the act of sharing this writing with an audience that witnesses these private and often hidden identities and sexualities. This article focuses on how this anthologised collection of marginalised cultural ‘others’ shifts the borders of what is considered deviant by reading the entries through Judith Butler’s concepts of ‘legibility’, where the outsider is placed at the narrative centre.Contribution: This article contributes to studies on marginality, queer African literature, genre and anthologies.

PEMANFAATAN KOLEKSI BAHAN PUSTAKA DI PERPUSTAKAAN SMPN 4 MANADO DALAM MENUNJANG KEGIATAN BELAJAR SISWA

This research aims to determine the role of library managers or teachers at State Middle School (SMP) 4 in Manado City in utilizing library collections to support student learning activities. The model used in this research employs a descriptive qualitative method that can provide a detailed depiction of the actual conditions. The SMPN 4 Manado library has its own room with a collection of fiction and books according to the Merdeka Curriculum. The existing collection of books is not well arranged on bookshelves and is only arranged on tables, some are stacked on the floor. Another condition where users get hot quickly is because the room does not have a fan or AC. Existing deficiencies can be improved for the better, because the library management is committed to improving the library at SMP Negeri 4 Manado, but is hampered by support from the previous school principal. It was only then that the new principal had the intention to make the library better. The arrival of the research team also strengthened the principal's commitment to organizing the library.

From Christmas [Rozhdestvo] to Ariel’s Message [Soobshchenie Arielya

The article discusses the poetic evolution of the contemporary author Polina Barskova. Nuzhdina follows the logic of Barskova’s poetic experimentation: from her early works written in the 1990s–2000s and inspired by the then-fashionable postmodernist intertextuality to the present-day verse marked by Barskova’s engagement with other, non-poetic new genres. Particularly important are her historical essays, such as The Seventh Alkali [Sedmaya shchyoloch], a book concerned with the distinguishing features of the poetry written in the besieged Leningrad in the 1940s, or her article in the collection of fiction and literary criticism entitled After the Siege [Blokadnye posle], which she also prepared for publication. The matter of genre becomes prominent in Nuzhdina’s analysis: the scholar argues that, following her beginnings in the tradition of intertextuality, typical of the period, Barskova, as early as in the 2010s, went on to master a specific genre of a ‘poetic archive,’ evidenced both in her poetry and historical research. Her poetic texts and essays share a number of characteristics: a diversity of ‘disguises’ and voices, a focus on documentary accuracy, and an ‘uninterrupted alternation’ of narrative and lyrical scenes.

Genrefication in Secondary School Libraries

Most school libraries organize fiction books alphabetically by an author’s last name. In order for a student to find and compare potential fiction reading material, the traditional school library model would have the student either search the library system for the topic and then go from stack to stack looking for books about the topic from any number of locations or seek advice from school library staff who would direct the student to potential titles as part of a reader’s advisory. In an effort to make fiction book selection easier for students, some school librarians have turned to genrefied fiction collections. However, there are many school librarians who feel that organizing fiction books by genre first rather than author’s last name creates more problems than it solves. This paper will explore the history behind genrefication, discuss the Paradox of Choice and patron browsing habits, and present the modern debate regarding genrefication of fiction books in school libraries.

Uprooted in the ‘Postcolonial’ Moment: Attia Hosain’s No New Lands, No New Seas

‘Attia has come home.’ This is how Shama Habibullah describes the publication of a Distant Traveller (2013), a collection of essays and fiction written by her mother Attia Hosain. After the Partition of India in 1947, Hosain could not reconcile herself to India or Pakistan, created by imperial border-making and nationalist sentiments, and decided to remain in England. Hosain continued to grapple with the multitudinal meanings that came with leaving, making, and claiming a ‘home' in an unfinished novel No New Lands, No New Seas included in Distant Traveller. The novel centred recently settled and itinerant South Asian migrants in Britain as they struggle to establish roots and reconcile the borders of new homes. This article explores Attia Hosain's portrayal of migratory experiences in No New Lands, No New Seas on three levels. Firstly, it contends with how the migrant writer, Hosain, navigates border-making and the reorientations of ‘home' within these half-formed, tentative chapters. Secondly, it reflects on the form of the unfinished novel — Hosain embeds a longer pre-war, pre-Partition migratory narrative into chapters set in the 1970s. Thirdly, it considers how the novel’s protagonists deal with migration, economic hardship, racism, early formations of British South Asian identities, and the trauma-laced consequences of finding home after Partition.

The Story of the Maiden Laciona: Plot and Motif Composition of the Handwritten Tale in the Context of Russian Fiction of the 17th – 18th Centuries

A handwritten tale of the middle of the 18th century The Story of the Maiden Laciona is known in a single copy. The tale tells about the escape of a girl with a lover from her parents’ house. To solve the question of whether the Russian fiction of the 17th – 18th centuries became a source of inspiration for the unknown author of the story, we applied the following methodology. Identifying a certain motive, we take into account its role in the plot of the Story and compare it with the function of the same motive in popular works of Russian fiction of the 17th – 18th centuries. In the typology of motives, the basis of our work was the MotifIndex by St. Thompson, taking into account the additions of D. P. Rotunda; in the classification of plots – the system for describing fairy-tale plots by A. Aarne and S. Thompson, modernized by H. J. Uther. As the analysis showed, the Story has no direct links with the works popular in Russia in the 17th – 18th centuries about the abduction of a maiden’s honor or about the abduction of a wife – stories on the plot of a picky bride and ATU 1419E. To search for possible sources of tale, the stories of the 17th – 18th centuries were drawn on related subjects or with similar motivic components. Based on the works of Thompson and Rotunda, the following motives were identified: an unfavorable prediction, paternal love in a daughter, a beautiful and intelligent girl, protection from men, boasting of a daughter, a secret lover, dates in the garden, a skilled musician, flight from home. In the details and motional components of the Story, parallels are found with the Story of Peter the Golden Keys, with the novel about Alfonzo Ramir and Angelica, with the Story of the Russian cavalier Alexander, perhaps with the Story of Yaropol Tsarevich and the Old Belarusian Story of Tristan. The Story is included in the so-called “fifth manuscript” of the combined manuscript from the Main Collection of the NIOR BAN (19.2.38). Based on the analysis of the paper, it can be concluded that the formation of the manuscript in which the Story is located dates back to the 1750s – 1760s. The literary setting of this original tale consists of popular love stories, most of which are found in other collections of fiction. The literary monument is being published for the first time.

Tracing Death as a Political Instrument: A Study of Osama Alomar’s Selected Collections of Flash Fiction

This research article analyzes two collections of flash fiction including Fullblood Arabian (2014) and The Teeth of the Comb and Other Stories (2017) written by Osama Alomar, a Syrian refugee author. Guided by the theoretical framework of necropolitics as proposed by Achille Mbembe, this article investigates the constant presence of death and its multifaceted role in the wake of the Syrian civil war as portrayed in Alomar’s selected collections of flash fiction. The article attempts to study how death becomes an instrument in the civil war, widely used, manipulated, and exploited by various actors during the conflict-ridden period, each employing it differently. Although the selected collections of flash fiction demonstrate that death takes on many forms and performs multiple functions in the backdrop of the Syrian civil war, this research article narrows its scope to the analysis of how death is used as a political pawn and a political statement. At the outset of this research, it is postulated that the ruling Syrian regime transforms death and its fear into an instrument to intimidate and subdue Syrian civilian characters, thereby downplaying death as merely a political pawn. On the contrary, death also emerges as a political statement of the Syrian civilian characters as they begin to embrace death as a form of political activism to bring about social and political change in Syria. Invoking Catherine Belsey’s textual analysis method, some flash fiction stories from the selected collections are analyzed to study how the ruling Syrian regime and civilian characters reconfigure death in the wake of the Syrian civil war.

Persian Manuscripts of the K. Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts

About 700 Persian manuscripts have been preserved in the Oriental collection of Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts. Among them are poetry, history, collections of various contents, epistolary literature, lexicology, medicine, fiction, religion and Sufism, astronomy, poetics, ethics, geography, grammar, philosophy, alchemy, travel, even sports, etc. The chronological boundaries of the manuscripts cover the 14th-19th centuries. Manuscripts of the Persian collection are marked as follows: PK, PL, and PAC. The article deals with the Persian manuscripts preserved in the Oriental collection of Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts (except the historical documents) and their historical, cultural, social, and educational significance. In addition, the album of Persian manuscripts prepared at the National Centre of Manuscripts is presented.

Seizing the Alterity of Futures

Abstract This article contextualizes growing interest in futurity and minoritarian futures as connected to movements in speculative fiction, particularly Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism, and the ways in which this genre reimagines both history and futures. These developments are read through two groundbreaking anthologies—Dark Matter, a collection of speculative fiction from the African diaspora, and Walking the Clouds, a collection of Indigenous science fiction—and the social conditions of their publication. Using the work of Walter Benjamin and his writing against the notion of progress in history, the article posits the shared grounds for a philosophy of history that disrupts the singular future of speculation-driven capitalism with alternative forms of speculative imagination.

Pojok Literasi Sebagai Upaya Meningkatkan Minat Baca Di Pulau Panjang, Lepar Pongok, Kabupaten Bangka Selatan

Students Association of Himakuatik was implemented The Bina Desa program in Panjang Island, Penutuk Village, Lepar Pongok District, South Bangka Regency. Panjang Island is one of the isolated islands in the Bangka Belitung Islands which has a low literacy culture, especially among children. One of the causes of the low level of literacy skills of elementary school students in Panjang Island is due to the small collection of fiction and non-fiction reading books at school and at home. The purpose of the work program to create a literacy corner in Pulau Panjang is to provide reading facilities and form reading habits for Pulau Panjang children. The implementation of activities goes through several stages, namely preparation, implementation and evaluation. The results of the service obtained are the availability of literacy facilities in the form of a literacy corner and forming reading habits for children in Long Island Hamlet.

Short, Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices ed. by Mark Budman and Susan O'Neill

Reviewed by: Short, Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices ed. by Mark Budman and Susan O'Neill Kathryn Savage Short, Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices ED. MARK BUDMAN & SUSAN O'NEILL Portland, Oregon. Ooligan Press. 2022. 160 pages. WHAT CAN BREVITY OFFER readers that length cannot? A specific style of intimacy; an intimacy borne out of a glance, or an impending departure. The intimacy of flash fiction, of brevity, is the intimacy of mystery. It is the intimacy of potential. The form is not synonymous with poetry; a contained and glancing short story isn't the same thing as a lyric instant in a narrative poem, because flash fiction also contains a propulsive narrative arc. The story must hold more, while paradoxically, the story will contain less. Character specificity and interiority drive such works. Works that recall the wisdom of Flannery O'Connor in her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, essays on the craft of writing. Fiction that is brief relies on an inner coherence in the characters and a quality of the spectacular and specific all at once—why this story, why this day? Such characters have an "inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected. It is this kind of realism that I want to consider." Short, Vigorous Roots is a new anthology of multivoiced, contemporary works of flash fiction. The book is about various and diverse experiences of migration. The flash fiction anthology, as the editors note, "looks critically at what it means to forsake tongues, traditions, and comforts in the hope of starting a new life in another world." The collection of forty flash works is written by multigenerational authors from countries around the world, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, China, Cuba, Lebanon, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam, and beyond. Many of the most affecting stories in the anthology take place in a specific place and time. In "My First Day in Monterey," Nina Kossman describes an encounter inside a Safeway, "the nearest supermarket" to where the narrator [End Page 70] now lives. "I get something called Havarti. I choose it because it is sliced, and I can eat it in my room without a knife. Cheese in my right hand, strawberries in my left, I stand in line at a cash register when I hear Russian speech behind me. I turn around and see a man unloading groceries from a cart back onto a Safeway shelf, saying to a small blond woman next to him, We don't need this. And we don't need that. And that. And that. I can't see his companion's face, but from her tense neck I can tell that she isn't happy with the way he is emptying the cart of all the things she was looking forward to tasting." In Kossman's gorgeous story, the scene-work draws the reader closer inside a specific moment, tied to a particular place and time, but also to a particular point of view and, ultimately, the ways that the two women are seeing and relating to each other. This quality of both intimacy and distance moves across the various flash fictions that compose the book, each of which is one thousand words or fewer. The anthology is a space of brevity and closeness; this quality unites the deeply character-driven works. Some works veer speculative, as in Amit Majmudar's "Throwing Down Roots." In Majmudar's story, a six-year-old child swallows an apple seed in the backyard. "My mom screamed for my dad, and together they marched me by my elbows, like a dissident in the old country, into the backyard. Did I feel it? Was it coming?" The child soon grows roots that lengthen and dig into the "hard Ohio soil where our ancestors had never sunk a spade." The child sprouts branches and grows plump apples. "The trunk swelled, too, cracking my ribcage. I had lost sensation in my legs by then, and in my chest, and in my arms." The chasm between generations presented in...

Russian Literature of the 19th — Early 20th Centuries in the Infosphere of Theological Academies of the Russian Empire

The purpose of the article is an attempt to develop approaches to the reconstruction of the place and role of literature in the intellectual and information sphere of Russian theological academies of the nineteenth — early twentieth centuries. The current publication has been prepared on the basis of sources of various origins: catalogs of libraries of theological academies, periodicals published in the Orthodox theological academies of the Russian Empire (Khristianskoe chtenie (Christian Reading), Trudy Kievskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii (Proceedings of the Kiev Theological Academy), Pravoslavnyi sobesednik (Orthodox Interlocutor), Bogoslovskii vestnik (Theological Bulletin), for instance), Orthodox autobiographies, proceedings of meetings of councils of theological academies, programs of training courses, teaching manuals (textbooks and anthologies), etc. The analysis of those numerous sources shows that the libraries of four Orthodox theological academies of the Russian Empire had large collections of fiction in various languages, including works of Russian literature. Studying Russian literature was also part of a number of training courses. Initially, it was due not so much to the desire to provide students with a versatile education, but to the desire to develop their artistic taste and literary abilities, which was necessary for composing sermons. But later, literature was interpreted as something of powerful influence at a person’s worldview, something that could compete with religion. The study shows that the influence of contemporary Russian literature was constantly increasing, and, by the early twentieth century, the programs of theological educational institutions included studying works by almost all Russian writers. At the same time, not only ‘spiritual’ writings were studied, but also those which were considered ‘harmful’, and the last one got almost a central place in the ecclesiastic periodicals (L.N.Tolstoy).

Aspects of the Unconscious Mind in the Fictional Collection "An Kahi"

In psychology, there are three parts of the mind that interact together to form behavior and personality of an individual. These are Conscious, unconscious and subconscious. Consciousness is related to awareness and is Submissive to psychology that directly affects the actions, words and character of an individual. It is not possible to directly acknowledge everything from unconsciousness. They are those memories of mind, which usually exists in the intellect of a person as an urge or desires but they do not come up in practical life until they are faced by movement or after getting a hint about it. While sub-consciousness is the intermediate level between consciousness and unconsciousness. It consists of anything that can potentially be brought into the conscious mind with a little effort. Mumtaz Mufti (famous fiction writer) who has left nine fictional collections in his literary life. “Ankahi” is the first fiction collection of Mumtaz Mufti which was published in 1943. It contains seventeen stories in which he tried to express some aspects of the unconscious mind. In this article, the writer has tried to explore many aspects of the unconsciousness.

The Silver Sword and the New Windmill Series: The Legacy of Ian and Anne Serraillier

Ian Serraillier is best remembered for his children’s book, The Silver Sword, first published in 1956. However, along with his wife Anne, he was also instrumental in creating The New Windmill Series, an imprint of Heinemann Educational Books, and one of the first collections of teenage fiction aimed for the education market. This article discusses the way in which Serraillier’s ideological beliefs, rooted in his Quaker faith, can be traced not only through his nuanced depiction of children displaced by war in The Silver Sword, but also in his objectives for the New Windmill list. It explores the Serrailliers’ progressive approach to the provision of reading material for young people moving towards adulthood, and their early understanding of the need to broach the contested and complex boundaries between children’s and adults’ fiction. The New Windmill Series was created in 1949 and the Serrailliers remained the list’s editors and driving force for over thirty years, throughout a period of great sociological and political change. Both The Silver Sword and the books selected for The New Windmill list reflect the way in which attitudes towards the sharing of difficult truths and challenging ideas with this audience changed for ever during this time, due in no small part to the work of visionary authors and editors such as the Serrailliers.

Cinema as Method: Re-vision in Ramón Gómez de la Serna's Film Script Cifras (1930)

AnnaTorresCacoullos is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research spotlights practices of experimental film writing in Spain in the early twentieth century, including literary-cinematographic scripts and novelized film plots. m ode rnism / modernity volum e twe nty nine , num b e r four, p p 717–740. © 2023 johns hop kins unive rsity p re ss Cinema as Method: Re-vision in Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Film Script Cifras (1930) AnnaTorres-Cacoullos In 1927 Luis Buñuel approached Ramón Gómez de la Serna and proposed to the author that they collaborate on a film based on the vanguard writer’s short fiction. In his memoir Buñuel recalled that the film would feature “A man [who] buys a paper from a kiosk and sits down on a nearby bench to read it; as he reads, Serna’s stories appear on the screen, each preceded by a newspaper headline—a local crime, a football match, a political event. When the ‘stories’ are over, the man gets to his feet, crumples up the paper, and throws it away.”1 Although Buñuel referred to the title of the film as “Caprichos” in his personal papers—taking its cue from Gómez de la Serna’s short narrative collection Caprichos (1925)—he also had variously referred to it as “El mundo por diez céntimos” (“The World for Ten Cents”), suggestive of the price of a newspaper at the time and indicative of the Ramonian vignettes that were to be presented as though from the page of a newspaper.2 Agustín Sánchez Vidal’s research claims that another of the film’s tentative titles had been simply “El periódico” (“The Newspaper”).3 If all went according to plan, the film—Buñuel’s first directed motion picture—would premier in October 1928 to coincide with the First Spanish Conference on Cinematography organized by the popular Madrilenian film magazine La Pantalla. Gómez de la Serna, leading figure of the Spanish avant-garde and labeled by Nigel Dennis as “the embodiment of modernity,” was intrigued by the opportunity to engage the emerging moving image medium , which he saw as probing the limits of representation and perception, and which appeared to challenge traditional modes M O D E R N I S M / modernity 718 of literary writing.4 Tasked with writing the film’s script, “Ramón,” as he liked to be called, shifted his gaze from the art of prose fiction to the craft of screenwriting. Ramón defied the influential belief that cinema was a new, so-called “Seventh Art,” expounded in 1923 by film theorist Ricciotto Canudo, who hailed cinema as “a plastic art in motion,” the new, Seventh Art, proposing that it was a synthesis of three rhythmic arts (music, dance, poetry) and three plastic arts (painting, sculpture, architecture).5 Ramón conceived of film as el séptimo procedimiento or the “seventh method,” where he did not suppose cinema to be a new art but rather a distinct way of producing art.6 Significantly, he viewed this “cinematographic method” ultimately as a literary method, declaring in 1928 in Madrid’s most important cultural magazine, La Gaceta Literaria, that cinema, like “todas las artes son evocación literaria, quieran o no quieran” (“La nueva épica”; all arts are a literary evocation, whether they want to be or not). With this radical idea, Ramón experimented with cinema by revisiting and revising his prior work published in his short fiction collections Greguerías (1917), Disparates (1921), Ramonismo (1923), and Gollerías (1926). It is not known whether Ramón ever completed the script for Buñuel’s proposed film, a project that was ultimately abandoned by the following year and never filmed.7 In any case, Ramón could not resist cinema’s methodological potential because in 1930 he published a film script titled Chiffres in the prestigious Parisian film magazine La Revue du Cinéma.8 Critics believe this script is in part the product of Ramón’s partnership with Buñuel, though Chiffres displayed significant discrepancies from what Buñuel...

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community

Mormonism and the Natural World

Mormonism and the Natural World