Fantastic Stories Research Articles

The artistic space in the fantastic story with the prerequisites of O.I. Senkovsky's fantasy "Satan's Big Exit"

The artistic space in the fantastic story with the prerequisites of O.I. Senkovsky's fantasy "Satan's Big Exit"

The Babadook by Jennifer Kent. Narrative analysis of a modern fantastic story.

En este artículo analizaré cómo se construye la composición narrativa del relato fantástico moderno a través del contraste de las perspectivas proporcionadas por los protagonistas y el espectador en la película The Babadook (2014) de Jeniffer Kent, en la cual se representa a través de una compleja urdimbre narrativa y simbólica un vínculo enfermizo de abuso madre-hijo. Para ello, basaré este estudio en el modelo de análisis narrativo de Luz Aurora Pimentel y recurriré a algunas consideraciones sobre el espacio de Gastón Bachelard. En consecuencia, identificaré los modos de articulación del sistema del relato fantástico de acuerdo con las delimitaciones teórico-críticas aportadas por Stephen King, Rosalba Campra, Omar Nieto y David Roas.

The Fantastic Story of How Cacti Thrive in the Brazilian Caatinga

In the sunny and dry land of Brazil’s Caatinga, a group of plants called cacti lives and thrives even though it does not rain much. But how do they do it? This article will take you on an adventure, in which you will learn how cacti survive in such a tough place. The Cereus cacti are like water-saving wizards, storing water in their bodies. Their spikes, which look and act like armor, also help them catch raindrops. Cacti have a cool way of making food. They do it at night when it is not too hot, to prevent themselves from losing water in the heat of the day. Cacti also have friends, like bats and hummingbirds, that bring pollen from one plant to another, helping the cacti to reproduce. The Caatinga can be a tricky place, with hot days and not much rain, but the story of Brazilian cacti reminds us of nature’s fascinating diversity and how life can be strong and beautiful, even in a very dry place.

”Min tröst var att författa en egen artikel om svamparna”

“My Consolation was to Write my Own Article on Fungi”: Fictional Representations of the Relationship Between Fungi and Humans This article explores fictional representations of fungi, understanding them as a materialization of theoretical ideas about the entangled relationships between humans and the more-than-human, central to humanistic and philosophical thinkers within the nonhuman turn. The point of departure is the growing interest in fungi over the last decades, scientifically and, more recently, also in arts and culture. To frame the discussion historically, concepts from ethnomycology is used as a background, describing cultural tendencies and attitudes towards fungi in terms of mycophobia and mycophilia. The American HBO-series The Last of Us (2023) is discussed as an example of the contemporary boom, using Anna Tsing’s ideas on fungi as a representation of multi-species collaboration in the era of capitalist destruction. The story raises questions about individuality, represented by the human, as opposed to the collective fungus. The main focus of the article is, however, a Swedish context and two prose narratives in which fungi play a significant role, Agneta Pleijel’s historical novel Fungi. En roman om kärleken (Fungi. A Novel on Love, 1993) and Lars Jakobson’s fantastic story “Nians nät över trapetsen” (“The Nine Net over the Trapezius”, 2004). In the postapocalyptic world of The Last of Us, the fungus is a dangerous parasite portrayed with horror and ambivalence. In Pleijel’s and Jakobsons’s stories the lives of fungi are associated with harmony, even joy. In different ways, their human characters relate to fungi with love and reverence, and strive to fully understand their nature. Nevertheless, all three stories raise questions about interspecies entanglements. The wonders and horrors of symbiosis that they portray point towards the complex condition of the anthropocene and the limits of a mechanistic worldview.

«Пиковая дама»: зоны молчания и призрак исторического романа

“The Queen of Spades” by Pushkin is considered in the article as two stories in one: the first is an exemplary, in the spirit of Hoffmann, fantastic story, very convincing from the point of view of the “poetics of expressiveness” and completely independent; the second is “analytical”, which contains the possibility of explaining a fantastic plot and, consequently, its “cancellation”. This “cancellation” itself has already been made by the author in another article, and this one is devoted to its consequences: filling in various kinds of omissions and omissions, the main one of which is the Paris episode. After the cancellation of the fantastic plot, it comes to the fore and poses many new mysteries to the reader. This story is structured as an analytical riddle with pre-given, incompatible answers to the question of what the secret of the three cards is (a chance, a fairy tale, powder cards, a joke). Since this secret is revealed three times in The Queen of Spades, it is possible to prove that all these answers are correct in relation to certain episodes of this story. The “cancellation” of the fantastic plot transforms both the events and the characters of this story. The heroine of the Paris episode turns out to be not a frivolous beauty who came to Paris to waste her life and her husband’s millions, but Catherine’s maid of honor and confidant. It was in this role that she was briefly acquainted with the Count of Saint-Germain, who helped her out with money by inventing the secret of three cards for her husband. The story of Chaplitsky, who lost a huge sum, “I remember, to Zorich,” that is, to Catherine’s favorite, also appears in a different light. Consideration of the historical context to which the formula “sixty years ago” refers allows us to see the Paris episode of “The Queen of Spades” as one of the fragments of a possible historical novel, a kind of double of “The Captain’s Daughter,” written by Pushkin three years later. The action of this unwritten novel could take place against the backdrop of the RussianTurkish war, Polish events, intrigues of European governments, the Pugachev rebellion – the whole complex of political circumstances in the life of Europe and Russia “sixty years ago.”

«Вечные книги» человечества в тезаурусе Ф.М. Достоевского

The article explores the significance of the Bible and the Quran as “eternal books” or “books of humanity” in the life and works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Along with the exceptional role of the Bible, the importance of the “heavenly book” of Muslims for the writer is also shown. From a typological point of view, these books combine the context of “eternity” and “all-humanity,” as well as graphic and lexical (synonymous and periphrastic) features of their categorical functioning both in Dostoevsky’s works and in the studies devoted to them. In this regard, the analogy between the biblical books and the “great Pentateuch” of the novelist is emphasized, in particular, the similarity of their meta-structures, as well as the evolution of the characters of Dostoevsky’s works in relation to the Book. The article also provides additional evidence of Dostoevsky’s thorough knowledge of the Quran. The acquaintance with it took place thanks to the writer’s personal impressions of meeting Muslims in Omsk prison and during the Semipalatinsk exile, reading the Quran in its various translations and editions and biographical books about Mohammed, and especially through the mediation of the eminent Kazakh orientalist Chokan Valikhanov, who, aligned with Russian orientalism, was interested in the history of world religions. Thanks to the interaction with him, Dostoevsky developed an understanding of the genetic relationship of the “heavenly book” with the Bible that was reflected in many of his works, in which the correlation of Quranic images and motifs with the Bible is obvious. One of the most striking examples is the “fantastic story” “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” which is an original “imitation of the Quran” by Dostoevsky that does not contradict the spirit of the Gospel. It is concluded that, following Pushkin, Dostoevsky, based on an understanding of the root connection between the Bible and the Quran as equivalent “eternal books” of mankind, came to their conjugation in artistic terms.

Рождение категории фантастического в русской эстетической мысли

The article attempts to identify the time when the category “fantastic” appeared in the aesthetic thought of the Pushkin era. Common and fixed in the poetics of this time was another, close in meaning, term “chudesnoe” (“miraculous”). It denoted the “supernatural” (a concept that has become crucial in literary fantastic) but did not fundamentally differ from similar phenomena, such as rare, unexpected, and extraordinary. According to the National Corpus of the Russian Language, the word “fantastic” finds frequent use only after 1830, which chronologically coincides with the period of active perception of foreign romantic prose in Russia, in particular the genre of the fantastic story. In most cases, the new lexeme appears in fiction, keeping “etymological” meaning (related to fantasy, dream, imagination). Many original statements and translations, however, reflect another trend: the “fantastic” in them describes a particular kind of composition or type of narrative, as well as the features of poetics inherent in these works. As such, the word acquires a wide range of meanings and evaluative characteristics, some of which reveal similarities with the semantic content of the concept of “fantastic literature” in contemporary studies. The publication in which a conceptual interpretation of the “fantastic mode of writing” was first proposed in Russian was the translation of Walter Scott’s article “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition, and particularly in the works of E.T.W. Hoffmann” (in Russian translation: “O chudesnom v romane” (“About the wonderful in the novel”)) (1829).

Pushkin’s “The Undertaker” (“Grobovshchik”) in dispute with the genre of the fantastic story

Pushkin’s “The Undertaker” (“Grobovshchik”) in dispute with the genre of the fantastic story

Exploring Nnedi Okorafor's decolonial turn in the Binti Trilogy

Nnedi Okorafor is one of the best-known speculative fiction writers who has centred African perspectives and delinked from Western models. In her trilogy, Binti (2015), Binti Home (2017) and Binti the Night Masquerade (2017a), Okorafor disrupts the dominant white-masculine supremacist convention and traditions for a more diverse and inclusive narrative. In this article, I use decolonial thinking and the lens of Sankofa, a decolonial and African knowledge philosophy and worldview, to explore how Okorafor uses settings, characterisation, and ancient African traditional knowledge to achieve a decolonial turn in speculative fiction. By centring Sankofa, Okorafor sets her fantastic stories in Namibia among the indigenous and marginalised Himba people. She creates strong female characters who embody a multiplicity of beings operating intricately in a complex earthly, spatial and spirit world, and she exploits ancient African traditional culture and knowledge systems to create her 'organic fantasy' and a world of speculative fiction that transforms Western understandings of the genre.

AUTHOR, NARRATOR, HERO IN M.YU. LERMONTOV’S NOVEL A HERO OF OUR TIME: NARRATIVE POETICS

The article is devoted to the analysis of the correlation between the figures of the real author and the fictional author-narrator in the novel by M.Yu. Lermontov A Hero of Our Time. It is shown that as a result of the inclusion in the text of the second edition of the novel (1841) of the author’s preface, containing Lermontov’s polemic with the reviewers of the first edition, there was an interference of the “I” of the real creator of the work and the “I” of the fictional author, to whom the stories Bela, Princess Mary and the preface to the diary of the protagonist are attributed. It is significant that some of the biographical features of Lermontov and the fictional author coincide, and the two prefaces overlap. Thanks to all this, the effect of a non-trivial literary game arose, based on the illusion of the authenticity of the events set forth in the novel: the real author seems to get acquainted with Pechorin. This game is fundamentally different from the Sternian play and violation of the boundaries of the real and the fictional in A.S. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, whose main characters are represented both by real persons and creations of the author’s imagination. Unlike Pushkin and many contemporary Russian prose writers, Lermontov does not expose, but, on the contrary, hides the fictional, purely literary nature of his narrative. At the same time, the creator of A Hero of Our Time does not resort to literary hoax, does not directly try to pass off either the first-level narrator or Pechorin as the real authors of the novel or part of it. The story of A. von Chamisso The Extraordinary Story of Peter Schlemil could serve as a model for such a game, in which the central character, who tells a fantastic story of the events of his life, is an acquaintance of the author and his real-life friends.

The Story of the Brain's Becoming-Mind

Can the brain become mind? If the question seems strange, aberrant even, it is perhaps due to the way the problem brain–mind is commonly presented, where what's repeatedly asked is whether the brain is or isn’t ‘mind’. Yet, if we take Deleuze and Guattari's provocation seriously, in the Conclusion of What is Philosophy?, the problem is radically recast: even if speculatively, that is, properly philosophically or conceptually, the brain, for them, involves its own becoming, both in terms of its ‘becoming-subject’ and ‘becoming-mind’, as ‘Thought-brain’. I will explore references within Deleuze's philosophy in relation to the brain, namely in The Logic of Sense and his work on cinema, as I try to work out what this fantastic story (with necropolitical undertones) may in fact look like, the one where the brain not simply is but becomes, and in becoming, becomes mind…

WU CHENG’EN’S NOVEL “JOURNEY TO THE WEST” AND ITS RESOURCES FOR ANIMATED ADAPTATIONS

This article explores the potential for producing animated movies based on the Chinese classic novel «Journey to the West». The author traces the evolution of the plot and characterizes the main features of the famous literary work, the adaptation of which was repeatedly used not only by Chinese, but also by Japanese, Korean and other animators. Over the years and centuries, the pilgrimage of the Tang monk and his companions to India in search of the sacred sutras has evolved from historical accounts to folklore tales, and eventually to plays, after which the journey has become the subject of several novels by different authors, with Wu Chen’en’s novel being the most renowned classic. And it is the very process of turning a real story and real people into a legend, a myth, geographical movement and physical travel into a metaphysical path, followed by characters whose image goes back to ancient archetypes that made the novel so popular during different centuries and in different countries. Furthermore, the article highlights the distinctive features of the novel that make it particularly suitable for adaptation through animation. Unlike written art, visual art can directly incorporate the images and forms of various folk art forms such as folk painting, sculpture, popular print, shadow theatre, Peking Opera, and traditional painting. Chinese animation based on the novel has successfully utilized these art forms. Additionally, one should consider the genre of the novel, which is rooted in the collective unconsciousness and rich in formal, plot, and thematic elements. As noted by Russian philologist and semiotician J. Lotman, animated cinema is the most appropriate means for adapting fantastic stories. At the same time, Wu Chen’en’s novel «Journey to the West» has the value of not only a national cultural heritage, but also a global one. The author notes the important idea of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan about the relevance in the information society of the Chinese way of thinking with its idea of a net world and a net person. Animated films based on the plots of «Journey to the West», can effectively broadcast the values of the Chinese worldview and mentality and thereby contribute to the mankind’s response to the challenges of the time.

Shakespeare’s Chair: Material Culture and Literary Phantasms

Out of no fewer than five so-called “Shakespeare’s chairs” that have been preserved or at least referred to in sources, the most remarkable one is probably the chair purchased by Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1746–1831) in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1790, today housed in the National Museum in Krakow.1 Despite its long and turbulent history, a large fragment of the chair has survived, having been kept in a reliquary-like case prepared especially for it at the beginning of the nineteenth century (figure 1). Moreover, the number of preserved documents related to the object is exceptional. The two most important ones are an extensive, extremely detailed, vivid, slightly amusing, and slightly gruesome description of the circumstances of the purchase, written by Izabela Czartoryska herself around 1820, and a certificate of the chair’s authenticity issued in Stratford in January 1791.2 The other available documents contain only passing references to the chair, but still throw some light on its history. Izabela’s account is well-known and has been frequently cited and repeated in academic literature.3 Thus far, it has never been questioned. In this essay, I present ample evidence to suggest that many elements of the story are inaccurate, to say the least, while its most extraordinary and exciting fragments are entirely fictitious. I aim to reconstruct as faithfully as possible the circumstances of Izabela Czartoryska’s purchase of “Shakespeare’s chair,” to describe its later fate, and to propose an explanation for the fantastic story about its acquisition. From a broader perspective, the essay is concerned with the problem of a material relic as an essential element of a poet’s cult.4

ACTS AND FORMS OF POPULAR LITERATURE IN BULGARIA FROM THE END OF THE 19TH AND THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

The article examines the manifestations of popular literature in Bulgaria from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It offers a commentary on the plots of those writings and some strategies to hold the reader’s attention. The primary focus is on three forms of popular culture: scary stories, fantastic stories, spiritualism, and somnambulism. The opinions of some elite Bulgarian intellectuals about popular literature, expressed in the periodical press, are discussed. The study analyzes the socio-cultural contexts in which popular literature existed in Bulgaria: a constant growth of the literacy level, formation of the elite-mass opposition, the industrialization of culture and literature in particular, and the appearance of popular literature on the pages of major newspapers and magazines. The thesis that is defended is that the popular literature of the period was based on the familiar and formulaic, rather than on creative experiment and innovation and its strategies to attracts its readers were descriptions of the exotic, the mysterious, and the construction of sentimental and melodramatic plots. The elite-mass boundary is problematized, and based on some memoirs, it is concluded that even elite intellectuals such as Simeon Radev and Alexander Balabanov or classics of Bulgarian literature like Ivan Vazov visited the theatrical-carnival manifestations of Bulgarian popular culture. Thus it seems justifiable to claim that the history of any national literature, including the Bulgarian one, would be incomplete if the forms and manifestations of popular literature were ignored.

Making the Bible French: The ‘Bible historiale’ and the Medieval Lay Reader. By Jeanette L. Patterson

In this impressive analysis of the thirteenth-century Bible historiale, Jeanette L. Patterson blends a detailed history of the text’s manuscript tradition with a sharp enquiry into the intellectual priorities that animated its translation into French by Guyart des Moulins as well as subsequent expanded versions produced in later centuries. It is argued that Guyart des Moulins, his successors, and the lay public for whom they wrote shared literary expectations that were determined by a range of historical factors: the waning importance of the Latin Crusader states; the emerging popularity of reading among the laity; and specific understandings of literature’s capacity to convey truth in biblical texts as well as in secular poetry and prose. On this last score, Patterson maintains that the author and his lay readers commonly evaluated the truth of a text by the spiritual edification that the written work produced in the reader. Such an approach to literary truth did not oppose truth and fiction, thereby allowing even the more fantastical stories of the Bible to advance the sanctification of laypeople without compromising exacting standards of credibility. In one especially compelling illustration, Patterson describes how two different versions of the Book of Job (one complete, one highly redacted) were juxtaposed in certain copies of the Bible historiale. By combining the more theologically conservative redaction with the unabridged text, the French translator gave lay readers the power to discern which version of Job they were spiritually equipped to read. Thus, Patterson helpfully uncovers how Guyart des Moulins’s Bible did not simply embody a clerical conservatism but actively empowered the laity through specific redaction and translation strategies. By interpreting the Bible historiale in this way, Patterson identifies a culture of biblical translation and reader reception that valued transformative reader responses above overly literal translation, historical facticity, or the imperatives of ecclesiastical control. The success of these arguments should make this book of interest not just within a range of disciplines in medieval studies but also in hermeneutics and literary theory. In fact, one of the most compelling aspects of Patterson’s argumentative approach is the way that she identifies the latent origins of hermeneutical thinking in the medieval translation practices studied here. We come to learn that Guyart des Moulins and his heirs were not simply rendering sacred text from Latin into the vernacular; they were engaged with the biblical text in playful, nuanced, and even daring ways that prioritized reader response as the engine of translation. Patterson’s project also offers a crucial anglophone counterpart to a growing investment in the study of medieval French Bibles within francophone scholarship, evident in the recent collection Écrire la Bible en français au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance (ed. by Véronique Ferrer and Jean-René Valette (Geneva: Droz, 2016)). Given Patterson’s thorough philology and insightful analysis, one hopes her book will occasion new interactions between francophone and anglophone discussions of vernacular biblical translations and their relation to medieval secular literatures.

Seeing Things Anew: Hoffmann’s Don Juan: A Fabulous Incident Which Befell a Travelling Enthusiast and Gogol’s The Portrait

Established criticism argues that the influence of the German fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) on Nikolai Gogol’s Russian supernatural tales was short-lived. This article disagrees. Gogol (1809-1852) achieved literary success in the late 1830s, when the future course of Russian literature was strongly indebted to late German Romantic literary concepts. We trace the relationship of Hoffmann’s short story Don Juan: a Fabulous Incident which Befell a Travelling Enthusiast with the early and late versions of Gogol’s short story The Portrait, showing that Hoffmannesque elements are stronger in the later publication. Our close analysis uses two critical theories: Shlovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation, or ostranienie (Note 1), and Todorov’s theories of the fantastic, the one being apposite on account of its Russian perspective, and the other because of its insights into Gothic literature. We also support our argument by historical and biographical evidence, with the overarching aim of bringing new critical perspectives to the study of the short fiction of Hoffmann and Gogol.

서사적 특성에 기반한 <마리 이야기>의 재조명

Through The Story of Mari (2002), this paper intends to discuss the narrative characteristics in terms of rediscovering masterpieces that failed to hit the animation. With the domestic animation market centered on works from the United States and Japan, I would like to re-examine the aspect that this text was not loved by audiences in Korea and was evaluated as a lack of narrative even though it was recognized worldwide. This paper studies narrative characteristics centering on the narrative of time and space, focusing on the animation The Story of Mari as a research method to materialize this, the following two methods are applied in combination. First, based on Gerard Genette’s concept of time, which is the basis of narrative structure in movies and novels, the relational categories of order, duration, and frequency are discussed. Second, based on Seymour Chatman’s theory, it is analyzed through elements such as size, outline and texture, density, location, and color, which are spatial parameters that convey narrative. Third, through Lacan’s theory of ‘the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real’, the growth narrative of Namwoo is analyzed to show that this theory can appear as a method of narrative imagery. Through convergent reading of time and space, the sequential characteristics between story-time and discourse-time and Namwoo’s time are analyzed. The order of story-time and discourse-time creates plot time in a retrospective way. This is simply a narrative device to compose another plot by time modulation that is not made of an antecedent arrangement of past-present events. The narrative characteristics of duration and frequency and the fantastic space of memories are discussed. The fantasy world where Namwoo meets Mari is repeated overlapping, and the fantasy world continues to unfold in Namwoo’s gaze. A fantastic story with Marie, a surreal being, and the arrangement of space and time show their relationship well. In particular, the scene of re-entry into the world of fantasy shows the process of Namwoo’s inner division and at the same time, he finds the direction of his life. Finally, unlike previous studies, the significance of this paper is to analyze the narrative characteristics of the animation The Story of Mari based on time and spatial characteristics and to examine its meaning.

Chronotope of modern fairy tale

One of the specifics of the oral fairy tale is its chronotope, which Vladimir Propp defined as onedimensional, in which space and time are indefinite, and the world of the miraculous and the real coexist in the same dimension of space and time. The indeterminacy of time and space in fairy tales has remained until today, however, in contemporary fairy tales, outlines of concrete space and time appear more and more often, so that the author's fairy tales change the chronotope in accordance with contemporary social circumstances. Chronotopes of a certain city, village, contemporary life and time appear, so it can be concluded that the change of chronotope in fairy tales is one of the specificities of contemporary fairy tales. The concretization of the chronotope of the fairy tale leads to the violation of one-dimensionality, which brings the narrative of the contemporary fairy tale much closer to a fantastic story. Examining the chronotopes in contemporary fairy tales, two ways of forming the narrative can be observed: retaining the chronotope of the oral fairy tale and the formation of a contemporary chronotope that is close to fantasy.

Fantasional dalam Novel Haniyah dan Ala di Rumah Teteruga Karya Erni Aladjai

This study aims to understand the structure of the story in the novel Haniyah and Ala di Rumah Teteruga by Erni Aladjai with the narrative approach of Tzvetan Todorov's fantastical story. The purpose of fantastics is to interpret reality. Where the tension of something unreal collides with the existing reality. As a fantastic story, the novel "Haniyah and Ala di Rumah Teteruga" by Erni Aladjai is a manifestation of the author's fictional depiction of reality. Haniyah and Ala novels in the Teteruga House are not fictional stories that only provide entertainment. But there is also a message that the author wants to convey to readers and literary connoisseurs. To understand more deeply what appears to be explicit in the novel, fantastical stories are useful for intercession of the meaning of reality in the novel. Based on the results of the analysis, Haniyah and Ala novels in the Teteruga House belong to the class of pure fantastical stories. Because, at the beginning of the story, there is already a vacillation between the magical and the logical. Meanings that can be explained outside the structure of the novel include labeling and bullying that have a negative impact and attitudes that can be used as a reference to maintain tolerance, maintain tradition, and balance. Haniyah and Ala's novel at Teteruga's house also has a medium of storing reality that is not explicitly featured in the novel including the labeling and bullying experienced by the character impacting mental and physical health. Another meal that can be explained is related to efforts to maintain tolerance, especially between religious people and maintain traditions that have become a real means of environmental and ecological education to the next generation.

Freud and Jentsch read Hoffmann’s Uncanny Automata

The following paper examines the elaboration of the concept of uncanny between literature and psychoanalysis. In shaping the concept, both Ernst Jentsch in “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906) and Sigmund Freud in “The Uncanny” (1919) carefully read Hoffmann’s fantastic stories of automata. While Freud develops his theory of the uncanny (concerning the automatism of unconscious repetition) by reading “The Sandman”, Jentsch dwells on “Automata” in his approach on intellectual uncertainty. In this paper I also discuss anthropomorphic machines and the idea of uncanny valley in robotics, concluding that the notion of uncanny always involves negative anagnorisis, or misrecognition between inside/outside; human/automaton; animate/inanimate.