Fictional Construction Research Articles

Český úděl z pohledu konce 60. let

This study attempts to capture the origins of the differences in opinion on the fate of the Czech nation which arose in the period known as the Prague Spring in 1968 as espoused by two of the period´s historical actors, based on an analysis of media sources of the time. Though the controversy was unleashed at the turn of 1969 by Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, other important intellectual figures from Prague and Brno, such as Karel Kosík, Jaroslav Střítecký and Lubomír Nový were eventually to join the fray as well. Within the controversy, two basic approaches may be observed, whose antagonistic tendencies arise out of the generational differences of the participants: the first, represented by Kundera, Kosík and Nový, sees the democratisation experienced in the Prague spring as an integral process within a continuum of Czech history and thus exalt it as a singular process bringing Bohemia once again into a world context; the second approach, however, represented by Havel and Střítecký, looks upon the reform with critical skepticism and refutes the so-called "fate of the Czech nation" (which purports to situate Bohemia in the context of world history) as a fictional construct which takes away the individual´s historical responsibility.

The Poetics of Journey to the West (2021): Disclosing a Way to Dwell in the World

Abstract Science fiction films and poetry are often assumed to be unrelated or even mutually opposed. Among Chinese science fiction films in recent years, Journey to the West is a uniquely poetic example. It offers a secular challenge to science fiction while simultaneously performing a dual construction of science fiction textually and thematically through poetic expressions – thereby expanding the genre boundaries and localized creation possibilities of science fiction films. This paper uses life-world philosophy to examine the film’s existential theme and analyzes the film’s science fiction poetic expressions through the theoretical perspectives of film poem, poetic thinking, poetry-film, and Chinese poetics, arguing that they illustrate and compensate for the limited meaning of the science fiction genre and scientific rationality itself, while exemplifying the ability of science fiction films to serve as a way of disclosing being-in-the-world.

The Postmodern Rewritings of Great Expectations to Reinvent Antipodean identities; A Study on Jack Maggs by Peter Carey and Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

The present study pivots on the individual analysis of the antipodean writers` novels Jack Maggs by Peter Carey and Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones the retellings of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The paper concentrates on the approaches based on its perception towards ideological, historical, authorial, cultural, narrative and geographical representations of Australia in literature. The select novels are under analysis for their employment of postmodern narrative strategies such as intertextuality and carnivalesque. By applying these theories, the writers are successful in generating new ideologies, varying perspectives and reframing the status of canon. The fictionist takes cues from the fictional world which is a rhetorical construct, by having the possibility of adding and filling gaps to complete it by using intertextuality. In a postmodern scenario, the literary mode of carnivalesque is utilized to reverse the conviction of realism. The novelists give liberty to their protagonists Maggs and Matilda to vindicate their rights by unearthing the voices as well as to vocalize their stories in a way of deconstructing artificial stereotypes. One of the ideologies of postmodernism is “incredulity towards metanarratives” (p. xxiv) propound by Lyotard, it replaces by mini or local narratives. Thus, oral narratives/ storytelling take dominion and unfold a space for a new authentic narrative rendering from the indigenous other, by a subaltern voice and a cast-out victim. Objective: The paper strives to analyze its antipodean characters and their continuum with historical equivalents in Australia. The novelists try to imply and recontextualize rewritings from a broader spectrum of cultural reproductions. The article also endeavors to readdress nineteenth-century texts into their contemporary postmodern relevance. Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework of the study is to look through the lens of postmodernism. Postmodernism believes that every text carries the fragment or traces of other texts and every work can be read against the relation or background to each other texts. In Jack Maggs the story gives the background to why and how the eponymous character becomes a convict and thus offering him a voice and re-centering him in the center like an Englishman Pip. Mister Pip is about the journey of an indigenous girl named Matilda who dives into the fictional world of Dickens amidst war and personal losses. The select novels have the ability of genre-blurring intersecting with historical novel, fictional biography, and metafiction. The point of departure from the existing research about the novels Jack Maggs and Mister Pip is that there is an alteration of focus from political resistance towards foregrounding postmodern literary struggle in rewriting. Method: The paper discusses with a postmodern study of the novel Jack Maggs and Mister Pip as a retelling of Dickens` Great Expectations. The methodology of the study is qualitative textual analysis with a postmodern approach. The theories that are applied to the select texts are, Julia Kristeva`s Intertextuality and Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnivalesque. The select novels are written to subvert Eurocentric metanarratives, which is further explained by Jean-Françoise Lyotard that, ‘those totalizing narratives are to be replaced with mini or local narratives.’ The framework of the paper is restricted to study the textual, intertextual, thematic and contextual analysis. Results and Discussion: This article investigates the way in which Australian identities are remodeled using fictional constructs. Finally, by reading these novels the readers get to know the multiple perceptions of the canon. The novel`s self-reflexivity has subdued any fixed, totalizing or final assertion towards any narrative. These novels foreground the importance of storytelling, writing, each creating their own story amid falsehood and misrepresentation. Postmodern novels are concerned with the representation of reality. It is cynical towards versions of history and reminds the readers that history itself is an artificial construct. The oral narratives/ storytelling take dominion and unfold a space for a new authentic narrative rendered from the indigenous other, by a subaltern voice and a cast-out victim. The fictional reinvention of the antipodean authors not only questions the ambiguous status of representation, but they are successful in recreating their autonomous versions of their self-supporting narratives. Thus, by reading Careys` and Jones` novels through the lens of postmodernism have attempted to evaluate the validity of western metanarratives and cultural conventions.

(Un)muzzled: Dogs in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction

ABSTRACT This article considers the relationship between dogs as fictional constructs and the shifting dynamics of the novel form in the mid-nineteenth century in order to account more fully for their particular importance to realist writing. In revisiting three canonical novels associated with the realist tradition, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), it demonstrates the ways in which writers regularly rely on dogs in depicting moments of deep personal and interpersonal conflict. Where most previous analyses of animals in Victorian fiction have tended to treat them as minor characters within their respective human narratives, this article is attuned to the affective functions of the domestic dog in contexts that exceed mere verisimilitude, exploring the significance of the connection between the dog’s textual body and the intense experience of grief, sexual desire, and anger respectively. I argue that the dog’s simultaneously narrative and extra-narrative position in the emergent realist novel reflects the genre’s larger formal tensions, generated by the representation of excess affects. These tensions are closely linked to the novel’s primary mode of representation: language. I conclude that it is the dog’s extralinguistic presence, predicated on its inability to encode affect in language, that marks it as the ideal, if increasingly unstable, nexus of powerful, unprocessed emotion in the mid-nineteenth-century novel.

Irish English and Irish Studies: exploring language use and identity through fictional constructions of laddism

ABSTRACT The construction of a linguistic collective identity uses a pool of conscious and unconscious elements that deal with age, gender, or ethnic belonging. In the Irish communicative system, one present-day type of collective masculine identity is that of “the lads.” Previous studies on “laddish” behaviour and performance from literary or social perspectives explored conduct in contexts such as sports, violence, sex, or alcohol. To encourage interdisciplinary research in the field of Irish Studies, this paper analyses the language of “the lads” in literary discourse through corpus linguistics as a contribution to the field of digital humanities. Fourteen novels make up the specialised corpus on which the analysis is based paying attention to verbs of speech and adverbs. The verbs show utterances by “the lads” illustrating and providing aggressiveness and adverbs provide a second layer of meaning. Finally, a number of power struggles these characters experience in interaction are studied to differentiate the status quo of “the lads.”

The criminal law's person By C.Lernestedt, M.Matravers (Eds.), Oxford: Hart. 2022. pp. 216. £85.00 (hbk). ISBN: 9781509923748

The criminal law's person By C.Lernestedt, M.Matravers (Eds.), Oxford: Hart. 2022. pp. 216. £85.00 (hbk). ISBN: 9781509923748

Prensa, boxeo y muerte. El caso del ‘primer’ idolo popular deportivo argentino

The present work explores the different meanings that the heterogeneous press produced, transmitted and put into circulation when narrating the death, burial and posthumous biography of the famous Argentine boxer Justo Suárez (1909-1939). Based on works on the social and cultural history of sport and death, the funeral is analyzed as a polyphonic ritual in which different social actors contributed to construct a new figure never seen before in modern Argentina: the ‘first’ popular argentine sports idol. The hypothesis suggests that the death of Justo Suárez and his particular biography consolidated and, at the same time, amplified the fictional construction of the ‘first’ popular argentine sports idol, being the press a key actor in this process.

Surrealizing Wifredo Lam?

Abstract In their writings on the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, Surrealists and the related avant-garde forge a fictional construct, ‘Wifredo Lam.’ Their texts are explored in relation to what André Breton identified as the two approaches to the artwork: a subjective approach expressed through poetic language; and an interpretation based on objective knowledge expressed through rational language. An overview of Lam’s artistic activities focuses on his participation in Surrealist activities and his affinities with its principles. Breton goes further, appropriating the artist for Surrealism, attributing poetic, mythical and primitivizing qualities to the paintings. His interpretation contrasts with Leiris’s ethnographic approach to Lam as ‘un homme métis’ [a man of mixed ethnicity], corresponding to the second ‘temptation’ proposed by Breton. Finally, it will be argued that the two discourses often cohabit and merge, notably in texts on the artist by Aimé Césaire, for whom Lam was a political companion in their shared commitment to political liberation and the recognition of a Caribbean identity.

Dopuszczalność podjęcia uchwały o nieudzieleniu wójtowi wotum zaufania

By the Act of 11 January 2018 amending certain acts in order to increase the participation of citizens in the process of selecting, functioning and controlling certain public bodies, a new institution was introduced to local government in the form of a vote of confidence. It was she who became the subject of the analysis of this study. While the procedure of adopting a resolution on granting a vote of confidence does not arouse controversy, the question arises whether it is possible to pass a resolution with the opposite content in the same procedure, i.e. not to pass the vote? This is largely the result of the fact that the legislator, in the regulations concerning the vote of confidence, additionally provided for the construction of a legal fiction, modeled on the solutions that had been operating for years in the local government, regarding the discharge procedure, establishing the presumption that failure to adopt a resolution on granting a vote of confidence to the tantamount to adopting a resolution not to grant it. Adopting such a structure raises further doubts which the author submits to a thorough analysis and tries to answer the bothering questions.

The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Return of the Real

I feel that my analysis, which endeavours to articulate the operational Lacanian concepts onto Wilde’s fiction, will achieve a “liberating” of the meaning from the text, an enterprise which can be equated with a transvaluation of the textual psychical values. One of the points I argue in what follows is that the readers of The Picture of Dorian Gray are encouraged by Wilde to transcend the limited perspective of the fictional selves (characters) in the story. To use Lacanian terms, consciousness equals a fictional construct that performs a masquerade of truth because it is attached to signifiers that reside beyond the subject in the Other (and in the unrepresented sphere of the Real). Approaching the text from a Lacanian perspective will make the reader aware of how one constructs an ideal image of one’s ‘self’ and seduces others into recognizing it. The results that such an enterprise yields point to the fact that there is an eccentric relationship between what a person (Dorian Gray, in our case) is and what one desires, a lack-in-being that haunts the human subject. Even if the portrait fills his lack-in-being, by bestowing upon him everlasting beauty, there remains a gap within itself likewise. It lacks life. To conclude, the portrait becomes more Dorian-like in proportion as Dorian himself gets alienated from his self, so that eventually it becomes the real Dorian. When the latter fully realizes that, he tries to reconquer his life, even if the price is his death.

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism

Modelling the personage’s fictional consciousness in the play by Igor Kostetskyi “The twins will meet again”

The objective of the article is to outline the correlations between the usage of the elements of the absurdist aesthetics, different artistic paradoxes and methods of modelling the fictional consciousness of personage. The aim of research is to define internal and external dimensions of personage’s fictional consciousness construction with the help of the cognitive literary studies methodology. The methodology of cognitive literary criticism is the basis for the analysis of modelling principles, applied in the research of personage’s fictional consciousness in I. Kostetskyi’s play “The Twins Will Meet Again”. Thus, the study of the play is based on actualization of cognitive phenomena and establishing their correlations with forms of artistic reflection. The cognitive method is used to determine the theoretical foundations of the functioning of the character’s fictional consciousness in the dramatic work. The poetics of the absurd in a drama defines agglutinative forms of reflection of the personages’ fictional consciousness.

The “Cairé” and “The Ghost of Komat” Textual Landscapes and Cultural Heritage in Argentinean and Slovenian Folktales

The present article proposes a comparative approach to Argentinean and Slovenian tales that share thematic features with ATU 326 (“The youth who wanted to learn what fear is”) from the standpoint of the fictional construction of verbal landscapes. The comparison is oriented to identifying similar narrative patterns dealing not only with thematic tale types but also with structural and stylistic features, along with changing details. The thematic, structural, and stylistic features common to different versions conform to a narrative matrix, which acts as a pretext to be recreated in diverse narrative contexts. The changing details give new meanings to universal pattern connected with the cultural heritage of different local contexts, such as the Argentinean and the Slovenian ones.

Nie do przebycia? O granicach i ich przekraczaniu w powieści "Tunel" Magdaleny Parys

This article is an analysis of Tunel (The Tunnel), the novel by Magdalena Parys, a Polish author living in Germany. The action of the book focuses on the fictional construction of an escape tunnel built under the border wall between the western and eastern part of Berlin in the early 1980s. This, somehow, predestines Parys’s work to be read in the context of transgression, and crossing limitations. Starting with the writer’s non-literary inspirations, the article shows the multiplicity of literal and metaphorical meanings of the term “border” and examines how the motif functions in the presented world.

The Enduring Influence of Female Special Operations Executive Agent Biopics on Cultural Memory and Representations in France and Great Britain

Seventy-five years have elapsed since the end of World War Two. Yet, the memory of the conflict still occupies a central place in British and French collective consciousness. Fiction and film representations of the war act as powerful ‘vectors of memory’, to borrow an expression from French historian Henry Rousso, and as such, they have deeply contributed to shaping popular and cultural memories of the war.
 This article investigates a specific aspect of World War Two representations, namely the cinematic representations of the female agents from the SOE F section, focusing on the ‘generic’ or archetypal figure of the female SOE agent as generated by the post-war cultural industry. After a brief contextualisation focusing on Churchill’s clandestine organisation, the article will analyse the contribution of Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (Lewis Gilbert, 1958) to the construction of a World War Two ‘mythology’. It will then address more recent films, concentrating on Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong, 2001) and Female Agents (Jean-Paul Salomé, 2008).
 How did the fictional construction of the female spy come to influence the social and cultural perception of the SOE agent? Are the tropes developed in such post-war films as Odette or Carve Her Name with Pride still current or have they evolved with time? The analysis of these fictional representations will reveal the permanence or evolution of certain representational patterns and also allow us to approach different perspectives on the cultural representation of World War Two on both sides of the Channel.

LAS NOVELAS BREVES DE ONETTI, POR RICARDO PIGLIA: SECRETO, MACGUFFIN Y MARCO NARRATIVO. NOTAS PARA PENSAR EL ARTISTA-INVESTIGADOR

We will seek to analyze in this article the role of researcher-artist of the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia. For this, we will reconstruct the main arguments of Piglia present in his classes on the short novels of the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti, dictated in 1996, but only published in 2019. The first topic that we are interested in highlighting is the articulation between the secret and the Macguffin in the construction of the mystery of the story. The second topic that concerns us is the fictional construction of the narrative framework, considering the narrator’s bias as part of the story. We are especially interested in Piglia’s compositional gaze in his reading of Onetti. Finally, we will analyze two works by Piglia to understand how the author applies the compositional principles of his fictional reading in his own works: Prison perpetua and El camino de Ida.

La ficción, el relato y la construcción mítica del paisaje como herramientas activas de producción territorial

The following essay attempts to establish the pertinence of an evolution in the traditional work potocol of the disciplines of the architecture and territory, as a consequence of the identification of a serie of transformative socio-cultural emergencies (new transcendent topics) for, on the basis of a genealogical analysis, found the theoretical bases of a new sight of the intervention into the former ones. This, alternative to the current technological accent vision, favors creative tools over diagnostic ones and postulates fictional construction as a basis, the use of the landscape (understood in a complex way) as a connective tissue of the territory (socially, culturally, aesthetically, productive, economic, ethical, etc.) and the story (storytelling) as a fundamental tool and vehicle that generates possible, credible and shared futures. For this protocol ideation, it explores the history of mythological and epic constructions of the intangible and of the concrete (city, geography, landscape) and the evolutions of fictional construction from the mythical and epic to the iconic and thematic. Delves into the role of telling and narration as an architectural and territorial practice, unveiling its tools and studying its possible disciplinary migration from literature to architecture, landscape, urban planning and territorial ordinance. Finally, it analyzes the specificity of the Latin American territory (of 'recent invention', unusual dimensions, dispersed and varied specificities) and its innate condition of told and lettered territory, as indicative elements of the opportunity for the initial trial of this new method in the aforementioned territorial cut.

From Soldier-Poet to Veteran Memoirist: Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, and the Limits of Life-Writing in Prose

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent Great War-writer. Critics have nevertheless reached no consensus as to whether these lightly fictionalised “memoirs” represent true accounts of Sherston’s/ Sassoon’s war or fictional constructions. They have also yet to account for the differences between the Memoirs and Sassoon’s war-poetry, and between Sherston’s stated commemorative goals and his complete account. This article dissects the Memoirs’ adaptation of Sassoon’s front-line poetics of commemoration: it reads their new application of this poetics via his compositional difficulties, his dependence upon his own wartime writings, and life-writing’s uneasy relationship to truth. As I show, Sherston has more in common with his author than Sassoon intended, but differences remain; still, his memoirs have as much right to that appellation as any other text in the language.

Hume’s Dialogues: a natural explanation of natural religion?

ABSTRACT Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) describes a philosophical discussion on the validity of the argument from design. What Hume investigates, however, is not the rational grounds of religion, but human nature and its attraction to the idea of design. I argue that the key to understanding Hume’s Dialogues is his conception of the imagination as described in the Treatise. Hume characterizes the human imagination or mind as self-indulgent, with a strong drive to unite perceptions in relations of resemblance, contiguity or causality, often adding fictional constructions to create an easy transition between ideas. Natural religion is a prime example, as the whole universe is united in orderly means-to-ends relations and provided with a familiar cause: something resembling the human mind. This reading of the Dialogues, however, does not warrant the conclusion that Hume provides a reductionist natural explanation of natural religion. Knowing human nature helps to understand religion’s attraction and the attraction of religion helps to understand humans, because it is paradigmatic of who we are. To connect perceptions, construct wholes and create meaning out of chaos is an essential feature of human nature, and a source of great pleasure.

Net Neutrality from the Ground Up

In the long-running net neutrality debate, a key assumption has been that broadband and broadband Internet access service are “jurisdictionally interstate.” But are they really? And what does that mean? In practice, the interstate assumption has meant that important decisions about broadband law and policy -- whether online content delivery will be akin to the common carrier model of the legacy phone network or the entertainment model of the cable television industry, for instance – are made almost exclusively by the federal government. The “who decides” question took on new immediacy in 2017, when the Federal Communications Commission gutted federal net neutrality rules, and then attempted to preempt the states from adopting their own. Several states nevertheless enacted open network/non-discrimination laws; two of them (in California and Vermont) were promptly challenged on preemption grounds. This paper examines the interstate assumption “from the ground up.” It starts with wires in the ground and radio links to local cell towers, i.e., “last-mile” infrastructure without which there would be no broadband Internet access. It arrives at the conclusion that “jurisdictionally interstate” is more of a fictional construct than a factual description, one that expresses unexamined policy choices more than essential network attributes. It concludes by reflecting on alternate ways that federal, state, and local interests might more harmoniously be integrated in light of the network’s physical presence and the state laws that enable that presence.