Form Of Fiction Research Articles

Escrituras Fílmicas Problematizadoras do Mundo Histórico: a "Questão Indígena" no Brasil

O objetivo é analisar como, em Serras da Desordem (2006) e em Martírio (2016), registro e artifício constituem escrituras fílmicas que problematizam o mundo histórico e, ao mesmo tempo, a imagem. Partimos do pressuposto que a “questão indígena” ensejou operações sensoriais, histórico-culturais e de significação (Rancière, 2012) que transfiguraram as formas documentárias e ficcionais. Como os filmes constituem-se enquanto linguagem; na dialética com o real tematizado; e são constitutivos do mundo histórico? Intercalamos à análise fílmica (Vanoye; Goliot-Lété, 1994), a abordagem cultural (Vargas, 1987; Quijano, 2005; Mignolo, 2017) e conceitos como opressão, resistência e a invenção do “outro”. Entre a arte e a política, ao recusarmos uma análise puramente imanente (Barthes, 1990), constatamos que o ato fílmico, em simbiose, coabita o ato político, que as escrituras de Tonacci e Carelli oscilam entre a reprodução e a produção do real e criam contranarrativas que colocam em crise a imagem e a realidade.

In Romesh Gunesekera’s Ghost Country

The French term “reconstruction” has two different meanings, both of which are in common usage. Its older meaning refers to the physical act of rebuilding what has been damaged or destroyed, as a like-for-like replacement. A more modern meaning suggests a more structural and systematic process. The present paper posits that understanding the differences between the two is helpful in post-conflict resolution and reconciliation. To provide a long-term approach to fractures and vulnerabilities, a nation must not only open a Pandora’s box of legal accountability. Reconstruction ultimately poses the challenge of redefining national identity. Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll explores such issues in the context of the three decade-long civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). Gunesekera’s choice of the short fiction form over the novel reflects the precariousness of the survivors’ disjointed experiences. As the ubiquitous driver demonstrates by looking at the road ahead while forever looking in the rear-view mirror, reconstruction is a trial and error, non-linear route that tries to steer clear of both amnesia and the trauma of nostalgia. This paper highlights the State’s rebuilding strategy which marginalizes the evacuees and antagonizes the Tamil minority with its one-dimensional war museography.

‘All good stories’: historical fiction in pedagogy, theory, and scholarship

Academics have long had a fraught, complex relationship with popular culture, frequently scoffing at, dismissing, or chiding producers and consumers for their choices to sanitize, exoticize, or romanticize the past in print, theater, and film. From the literary perspective, the relationship is no less acrimonious. Yet despite discomfort on both sides, fictional forms of history exert a powerful, even inexorable influence – especially on students, who may find their way into history classes because of dramas like The Tudors, complete with all of the baggage that such series carry. Drawing extensively on historiographical turns from positivism through postmodernism as well as my own experiences teaching at a small liberal arts college and conducting scholarly research on the afterlives of the Tudor dynasty, I argue that historical fiction – broadly defined – has a crucial, tripartite role to play in the pursuit of history: as a pedagogical tool by which to help students grasp the theory and practice of history, as a theoretical framework by which to reconsider the relationship between history and fiction, and as a source base and form by which to enlarge the field of traditional academic history.

Non-Fiction Transmedia: Seriality and Forensics in Media Sport

The article uses two examples (from 1908 and 1966) to analyse in greater detail why and how sport’s transmedia dynamic is very much fostered by the close interrelations between the seriality of sport events and the forensic attitude of fans. Two arguments are of special importance: (1) While social media add to forensic fandom’s proliferation, it was sport’s strongly serialized evaluation of performances that actually triggered the “spreadability” of sport-related topics across different media, first doing so at the end of the 19th century. What is more, modern sport owes its very existence to the cross-media circulation of its events. (2) So far, transmedia has mainly been researched with respect to fictional content, yet existing research on documentary transmedia forms and social media seriality has shown that the inclusion of non-fiction can broaden our knowledge of how storytelling sprawls across media and takes advantage of their specific affordances. This, I want to argue, ensures that sport is an insightful and important example for the understanding of transmedia world-building.

“A Question to Be Lived”

This essay develops an anthropological genealogy of the creolite literary project. Examining works by Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant, the author studies how the creolistes read ethnography and the social sciences into a revitalized creole literary history, generating a vision of creole fiction as ethnographic fiction. More specifically, he demonstrates how the human sciences perform three interrelated tasks in the history the creolistes create of their own literary production: first, they serve as disciplinary frameworks for creole fiction; second, they index and reflect empiricist desires in literature, gesturing toward a fictional form that would connect with the Real in ways that earlier modes of Caribbean writing could not; and, finally, they become figural modes in fictional texts, informing the creolistes' senses of narrative and characterology.

Los pichiciegos, de Fogwill : ficción contra ficciones y reparto de lo sensible en la guerra de las Malvinas

The novel Los pichiciegos, by Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, stages the testimony of an ex-combatant who, together with a group of comrades, is hiding in an underground cave to survive the Falklands War and his military superiors. Among the circumstances surrounding the writing of the novel, it stands out its simultaneity with the warlike conflict. This article proposes to reconstruct the production conditions of the novel and postulates that the text not only articulates with its present and as an “anticipation” of the future, but also tends networks towards the Argentine literary tradition. On the other hand, the present work intends to reconstruct the debate on Malvinas in the intellectual field to encourage the reading of Los pichiciegos as an intervention in that debate, which is linked to existing positions to which it will give a fictional form. Finally, this article provides a reading of Los pichiciegos as an aesthetic device that, taking the form and the intention of a counter-fiction, postulates a new “distribution of the sensible” (Jacques Rancière), that is, a new distribution in the order of the visible and the sayable in the debate on the Falklands War.

Dangerous visions? The circulation and translation of women’s crime fiction and science fiction

ABSTRACTCrime fiction and science fiction (SF) have long been associated with male writers and readers. Typically, in these popular genres the main characters have been men, while women have been mostly represented in a traditional way. This changed when, in the 1970s and early 1980s, a number of women writers appropriated these forms of popular fiction, subverting their conventional elements and introducing heroines and themes that had a strong feminist character. Since a number of these texts were also translated into Italian, the question I want to consider is to what extent these gender-based innovations in crime fiction and SF were represented in the Italian versions, at a time when Italy was going through remarkable transformations, in relation to the role of women in the family and society. In this article I explore this issue by analysing the way in which subversive models of female identity in a corpus of English crime fiction and SF were introduced and translated into Italian. The results show that while most of these texts were allowed entrance into the Italian cultural space, a number became the site of gendered discourses, affecting both the paratextual and the textual levels.

From Cheap Labour to surplus humanity

Conventions appropriated from certain forms of speculative fiction – sf, gothic and horror among them – have become increasingly discernible features of diverse contemporary postcolonial imaginaries. In this article, I consider Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) in light of questions posed by these developments. Drawing on world-ecological thinking (Moore 2015) and highlighting legacies of South African political economy (Wolpe 1972), I suggest the film deploys sf and horror traditions alongside invocations of local history in response to the reorganisation of ‘Nature’ in South Africa in the wake of the transition from apartheid to neoliberal governance. I show that Blomkamp manipulates speculative forms to register the febrile climate of this anxious time, and to contest the logic undergirding historic and ongoing unevenness. In conclusion, I point to key limitations to his project in this last regard.

Romance's Rivals: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer

Reviewed by: Romance's Rivals: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer Christine L. Krueger ROMANCE'S RIVALS: FAMILIAR MARRIAGE IN VICTORIAN FICTION, by Talia Schaffer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 352 pp. $69.00 cloth; $67.99 ebook. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."1 Unlike traditional love sonneteers, Elizabeth Barrett Browning does not ask "why do I love thee?" so that she can proceed to a list of her beloved's virtues. Instead, she is interested in examining her own diverse and multiple affective states—how she loves. Romance, if it makes her list at all, is merely one among many ways to love. Talia Schaffer's Romance's Rivals: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction reminds us of this point so that we can appreciate the affective variety of marriage plots in nineteenth-century fiction, including works by Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In Schaffer's view, several approaches to literary criticism in the past few decades have attempted to narrow the meaning of desire to sexual attraction and thereby limit what constitutes authentic reasons for marriage. This critical strategy undermines narrative advocacy for forms of desire much better suited to women achieving happiness under the legal and economic conditions of the nineteenth century. As relative creatures, women survived by cultivating affective ties with family, friends, and benefactors. Ideally, husbands would be drawn from these networks, both to ensure the men were reliable and to allow women to preserve their support systems. Drawing her evidence from narratives focalized by female characters, Schaffer demonstrates the range of women's marital considerations and desires, as well as agency and constraints. She develops her argument over topical chapters, including "Historicizing Marriage," "Neighbor Marriage," "Cousin Marriage," "Disability Marriage," and "Vocational Marriage." The most important contribution Romance's Rivals makes to current critical discourse may be to represent the wide array of scholarship from the past two decades that resists master narratives in favor of the variation and nuance in Victorian marriage plots. These critics include Mary Jean Corbett, Claudia L. Johnson, Elsie B. Michie, Kelly Hager, Sharon Marcus, Kathy Psomiades, and Martha Stoddard Holmes, among others who have maintained a healthy skepticism regarding the monolithic tendencies of psychoanalytic and Foucauldian-influenced accounts of desire. [End Page 452] Schaffer's study returns to two influential 1987 works of criticism: Joseph Allen Boone's Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction and Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. The former Schaffer describes as "the definitive book on the marriage plot in British history" (p. 43). The latter, Schaffer faults for using "'the history of sexuality' to mean 'the history of marriage,'" a conflation of what she considers to be "profoundly different fields" (p. 22). She complains of literary critics who merged an unnuanced version of companionate marriage from Lawrence Stone's 1977 The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 with a Foucauldian-inflected hermeneutics of suspicion in order to produce a teleological narrative of desire that was reductive and anachronistic. This move exacerbated the erasure of women's agency inherent in Ian Watt's equation of the novel's rise with that of an autonomous liberal subject in The Rise of the Novel (1957). Whereas Boone's interest lay in examining how novels elaborated a new idea of romantic love, Schaffer cautions against any tendency to infer that romantic love is the culmination of a teleological history of the novel. This caveat emerges from more recent historical and anthropological research, feminist scholarship, disability studies, and queer studies. But it is also worth noting that Schaffer is recovering a strain of scholarship that never bought into this reductive thinking, for example, that of Ruth Perry, whose Novel Relations (2004) she often cites. I would suggest that Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988) be acknowledged as well. Published the year after Boone's and Armstrong's books, The Sexual Contract demonstrates that social contract theory depended upon an unacknowledged sexual contract—the marriage contract—with the result that women's inferior legal status became a constitutive feature of...

Metautopic Discourse in Antoine Volodine`s novels

Poetical dominants of the novels by A. Volodine appear as the combination of elements of historical, political, science fiction discourses, aimed to represent the irreal world as the possible one. Within the aesthetic space of postmodernism, A. Volodine develops the reflection on the problem of relations in the triad of human/society/civilization in a fictional form. This original genre form combines various utopian modus elements: dystopian one in the denial of the utopian project and showing the individual`s impersonality and social decline in the conditions of utopia ("Minor Angels"), dystopian one – in the negative reality representations similar to the modernist detachment and «black novels» ("Dondog"), counter-utopian one – in the ironic interpretation of the 20th century utopia/dystopia tradition in terms of postmodernist mindset ("Bardo or not Bardo"). Such modifications resulted in the attribution of A. Volodine`s postmodernist novels as meta-utopia that is the architextual form based on the utopian canon, a kind of parody and rethinking of the utopia.

Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship by Edlie L. Wong

Reviewed by: Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship by Edlie L. Wong Lyndsay Campbell Wong, Edlie L. Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship. New York & London: New York UP, 2015. Pp. 304. Edlie L. Wong's Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship explores a range of literary texts produced between the 1850s and World War I to show how the processes of racialization of the Chinese diaspora, mainly in the United States, intersected with evolving post-Reconstruction concepts of American citizenship. Wong recovers and examines a variety of largely forgotten literary and journalistic genres about the phenomenon of Chinese immigration to, and presence in, the United States. She threads together the relationships between racializing discourses around African Americans and Chinese residents through an exploration of travel narratives about "coolie" labour in Cuba, journalism exposing white labour's fears in California, apocalyptic Chinese invasion narratives (harbingers of new forms of science fiction), and Chinese and English literary sentimentalism, which protested the treatment of Chinese in the United States and its expanding Pacific empire. Wong's incorporation of transpacific literary forms, including Chinese-language writing, into the corpus of the literature of the United States—which, by extension, would locate American literature in a kind of literature of the Pacific—is one great contribution that this book makes. Employing a highly theorized approach to literary and journalistic texts, Wong's Racial Reconstruction contributes an important chapter to the long, vexed, sad, and complex story of race in America, a story that continues to unfold. Wong demonstrates the roles that norms and assumptions around labour, religion, and family played in the racializing discourses that generated what Wong calls a "dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion" (3). This "dialectical configuration" structured arguments around the rights of both African Americans and those characterized as Chinese, wherever they were born or raised. She illuminates the wondrous illogic that permitted men viewed as abject virtual slaves (though of course bound by exploitative contracts) to be seen simultaneously as a looming [End Page 334] threat to the very existence of the (white) United States. She suggests how the characterization of African Americans-no longer susceptible to enslavement but still subordinate-inflected the characterization of Chinese residents as fundamentally unassimilable. She shows the absence of Chinese women-because they were legally excluded from the country-being interpreted as a sign of how very different the Chinese in America were in their approaches to familial relations and thus, again, in their assimilability. Wong weaves into the text the way that the supposed "heathenism" of Chinese residents in the United States also set them apart, and she links this religious angle to refusals to accept indigenous people's claims to American citizenship during the same period. I would have been curious to learn more about whether and how characterizations of people of Spanish and Mexican descent in California and the rest of the Southwest also inflected the racialization of Chinese immigrants and their descendants, in the nation as a whole or in the Southwest. Wong's discussion of journalistic depictions of the purported threat to white labour in California suggests that racialization was at least to some extent region-specific, with newspapers and stories-even if they circulated nationally-being interpreted against a regional or local context. Wong's discussion of literary forms is punctuated by treatment of legal milestones-cases and statutes-which created intolerable, frequently unstable, and even incomprehensible legal situations not only for migrant Chinese workers but for their American-born children. The literary and the legal were mutually constitutive. The contemporary echoes make these stories even harder to read than they would be if they could be comfortably relegated to the bad old days of the distant past. Relying on a solid base of legal historical scholarship, Wong describes the development of the doctrine that the decisions of immigration officers are not reviewable in courts and that Congress (not the president, it should be noted) has plenary power to make laws to defend the nation, even though this power is not among the enumerated powers that the states, through...

Artfulness and Style

Artfulness and Style J. Drake Portillo-Swails (bio) An Orchard in the Street Reginald Gibbons BOA Editions www.boaesitions.org/products 152 Pages; Print, $16.95 Reginald Gibbons explores the form of brief fiction with his latest book, An Orchard in the Street, and he does so with paintbrush in hand rather than pen. He captures his reader in each story with vivid descriptions and attention to detail. This collection appears to be an eclectic bunch of flash fiction upon first glance; however, every story functions as a still life, all forming a mosaic of human experience with one another. At the end of each story should be a long, quiet moment—just a moment—before the reader turns the page. It is in that instant that Gibbons's prose can be most appreciated. The first entry in An Orchard in the Street is "River." This story introduces the rest of the collection by providing a metaphorical tool to assist the reader in interpretation of the collection itself. The narrator of this story is told, "Stay in the river, don't be afraid of where it's going to carry you, that's where you're meant to be." This piece of advice serves as a sly just go with the flow from the author himself. Not only that, it warns the reader not to get caught up in what we find on the sides of the river, meaning the narrative this book captures is not found in any one story, but is instead a singular body formed by all. "River" also happens to be a single page; the reader knows, from the first page, exactly what this collection entails. Gibbons plays the role of writer and instructor early on in his book, and he does not let up after the first page. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this collection, carrying through the book's entirety, is its prose. Gibbons plants a rhythmic heartbeat into each of his sentences. In the story, "No Matter What Has Happened This May," the author smoothly carries the reader through each line. Each word leads into the next. "I love the little row of life along the low rusted garden-wire fence," is how this story starts. The rest of the story follows the narrator's thoughts as he appreciates every detail of the world surrounding him. Gibbons utilizes sounds, both in imagery and in word choice, efficiently and effectively. Following through the rest of the story is a similar sound, which leads us to the last line, "with the sound of that laughter and whispering in the last light of a day we had lived." The first and last lines, or more specifically the alliteration and consonance within these lines, tie this brief story together elegantly and neatly. Without his poetic style, these stories could not be told as powerfully, and it is not the action within this book that keeps you reading—it is the prose. The myriad of images that Gibbons evokes are unique in their simplicity. He takes the ordinary and shows it to you in ways you cannot see on your own. How could one, for instance, see their home when everyone is away for school or work? He takes the reader into the mind of narrator after narrator, most contemplating what most would call the mundane, and crafts an intimate portrait of words. Each moment shared with the reader is given an appropriate and deserved emotional depth. It is almost unfortunate that Gibbons creates this intimacy; as quickly as the bond between character and reader is formed, it is broken. Left behind as we continue down the river. One story in particular that takes the reader by surprise is the book's longest story, "A Man in a Suit." This is the first piece that deviates from more traditional and realistic imagery. Here we are shown, in the format of an official letter, a man (in a suit) that oozes to life from a pool of ectoplasm. After, the reader is again greeted with Gibbons's familiar and calm tone. Most stories stay away from such fantastical elements, but this story is still...

How the Past was Used: Historical Cultures, c. 750–2000 ed. by Peter Lambert and Björn Weiler

Reviewed by: How the Past was Used: Historical Cultures, c. 750–2000 ed. by Peter Lambert and Björn Weiler Sybil M. Jack Lambert, Peter, and Björn Weiler, eds, How the Past was Used: Historical Cultures, c. 750–2000, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017; hardback; pp. 330; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £90.00; ISBN 9780197266120. The pessimistic view of the manipulation of history might well be called the 1984 approach—that the story is re-written on a daily basis to create the image necessary for the moment. Editors Pater Lambert and Björn Weiler do not see changes as being as rapid as in this approach, but their introduction (p. 28) describes history as fragile, fraught, and fragmented. And this valuable volume, the result of many [End Page 218] years of discussion and conferences, brings together for comparison some of the distinctive approaches of various cultures to the formation and maintenance of their past. In many places, the concept of historical truth—as several of the contributors stress—was constructed in a way that was quite dissimilar to present-day academic belief. Dimitri Kastritsis, in analysing Ottoman narratives of the late fifteenth century, concludes that ‘historical memory was intimately intertwined with legends and apocalyptic expectations’ (p. 139). It was also, as Peter Lambert shows in his study of the way the Third Reich was used in the interwar period, a place where current debates that could not be directly treated, could be maintained as a form of historical fiction. Two chapters that consider alternative forms of establishing history in the minds of the people are critical to the collection. Matthew Phillips underlines the way in which ‘traditional’ practices—in this case Thailand’s royal barge processions that had been central from at least the sixteenth century—were revived and regenerated in the Cold War period to fulfil a present-day purpose of endorsing the legitimacy of the existing government of the state and Thai identity. This overturned the Thai past created in the interwar period. Richard Rathbone’s skilful unravelling of the significance of the yam festival in the ancient state of Ashante (now in Ghana) makes clear the historic manner in which it embodies ‘particular and partisan’ (p. 287) aspects of the former empire of Ghana, its culture and its institutions. It shows a re-statement of the past quite different from the usual employment of a literary record. Also different were many approaches in India, internally diverse with its many languages and religions. Allison Busch’s account of the neglected Hindi vernacular poetry of the early modern period—a genre that cannot be usefully classified in modern divisions as either literature or history but as the work of poet-historians—shows us the construction of a past that established normative emotions and the rules of honour, creating a community standard with real-life consequences. History was essential to that present. These distinctive pivots of memory which come from less familiar places give the chapters that re-examine forms of written presentation better known to Westerners a new viewpoint. The familiar trope that audience participation, which is central to an active performance, is absent from a narrative written and perhaps read aloud to groups of people, is examined afresh by Haki Antonsson in his chapter on the Norse sagas. Björn Weiler presents, through a careful examination of Matthew Paris’s Lives of the Two Offas, a new approach to the major type of narrative sources of medieval European history, the monastic chronicle. Not only is their purpose moral and ethical, it is also concerned with contemporary relevance to the institution promoting them. How history was legally defined and used in Spain in the beginning of the seventeenth century is revealed in a lawsuit examined by Richard Kagan. The position of the royal chronicler, Herrera, under attack for defaming the ancestor of a prominent aristocrat, uncovers exactly what was at issue, which was truth, the public good, and a guide to action. [End Page 219] Western historians have found the approach of Chinese professional historians and scholars writing since late antiquity problematic: their work was employed to shape particular ideas of cycles amongst parts...

The Politics of Escapistry: Harry Houdini, Nostalgia, and the Turn from Critique in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Politics of Escapistry:Harry Houdini, Nostalgia, and the Turn from Critique in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Iain Bernhoft (bio) Late in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Joe Kavalier returns home from years of self-imposed exile with 102 boxes of old comics in tow. Having endured the Holocaust, warfare, and addiction, Joe loves these comics for the escape they offer: when he is immersed in their pages, the ever-present "pain of his loss … melted away without him even noticing" (576). "[S]uch a feat of escape," the narrator declares, is "the genuine magic of art," and the fact that escapism "remain[s] so universally despised" indicates only how "fucked-up and broken" the real world is. In Kavalier & Clay, Chabon aims to correct this injustice by illuminating the therapeutic value of escapist entertainments. A defense of entertainment features prominently throughout Chabon's writing, as he consistently puts popular genres to serious purposes [End Page 1] (for instance, detective fiction in The Final Solution, or hardboiled in The Yiddish Policemen's Union).1 The politics and consequences of this escapism, however, merit closer consideration. Kavalier & Clay tells the story of Sammy Klayman, a Jewish teen in Brooklyn, and his Czech cousin Josef Kavalier, who arrives in New York as a refugee from Hitler-occupied Europe. Pairing Joe's drawing skills with Sammy's knack for yarns and entrepreneurial spirit, they find success in creating comic books about a Superman-style magician, titled (after its hero) The Escapist. The novel follows the cousins through their personal and professional maturation as they navigate the mass-culture industry, World War II, family, midlife crisis, and the McCarthy years. When Joe abandons his life in New York to join the war, the closeted Sammy marries Joe's pregnant lover Rosa and raises Joe's son as his own, preserving (with Rosa) a dwindling role in the comic book industry. Throughout, Kavalier & Clay underscores the idea that the primary good of imaginative entertainment is escapism, which it serves up in an immersive, harmoniously ordered narrative that reaches a satisfying closure. Criticism on Kavalier & Clay has largely taken for granted its premises concerning the merits of escapism, reading the novel as a vehicle for addressing representational issues of graphic narrative or post-Holocaust fiction. Marc Singer argues that the novel demonstrates how the literalized tropes of comics "have proven effective at embodying the real through hypostasis" because they offer a representative strategy for "transcending the symbolic" (275). Andrzej Gąsiorek views Kavalier & Clay as offering through ekphrasis "a meta-account of the act of creation itself," which thereby self-reflexively speaks to the dilemmas of post-Holocaust fiction (877). In a similar vein, Hillary Chute presents Kavalier & Clay as asking "how one responds to or registers history—especially traumatic history—in a popular medium" (280). She suggests that through graphic narrative it "enumerat[es] the new possibilities of popular forms to confront and articulate history" (291). This favorable disposition toward escapism, manifested by Kavalier & Clay and its critics, points to a larger trend in contemporary literary and cultural discourse: namely, the ongoing elevation of popular entertainment. So-called serious literature increasingly adopts the forms of genre fiction, while fantasy is lauded as a critically valuable activity precisely for its capacity to depart from existing conditions. Distinct from the postmodern blurring of high and low culture, this turn calls into question the superiority of critical distance to affective immersion. Seeking alternatives to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick dubs the "tracing-and-exposure" habit of critical hermeneutics, a [End Page 2] number of scholars have offered accounts of literature's function and relevance beyond critique (124). These approaches—surface reading, affect theory, the new sincerity—aim to "engage seriously with ordinary motives for reading," not the least of which is escape from the limits of quotidian life and the self (Felski 14). As Charles Altieri argues, "many readers see their interest in reading precisely as an opportunity to escape the empirical self, to undergo through imagination protean changes of identity and sympathy" (29). Imaginative escape from the self, the thinking goes, fosters greater empathy, sensitivity, and...

The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield by Minjie Chen

Reviewed by: The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield by Minjie Chen Claudia Nelson The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield, by Minjie Chen. Routledge Studies in Education and Society in Asia. Routledge, 2016. In The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature, Minjie Chen takes on two subjects that have received less attention in the West than should be the case: the China theater of the Second World War (which here extends from 1937, when the Japanese invaded and occupied much of the country, to 1945) and Chinese youth literature. Her principal interest is in how the latter represents the former and why the representations take the particular shapes that they do, but because she is aware of how much context her English-speaking readers are likely to need to make sense of the information provided, the book's focus is by no means unitary. Chen provides a brief history of children's literature in China from its beginnings to the present; a thorough discussion of [End Page 227] lian huan hua (LHH), a form of small paperback picture story book packaging fiction and nonfiction narrative that, like British chapbooks before the eighteenth century, addresses readers of all ages; a set of oral histories collected from elderly women in Yunhe, Zhejiang Province, and dealing with their memories of Japanese germ warfare as directed against their town; and an overview of Chinese American children's literature culminating in a discussion of the thirty-one titles that she has identified as dealing with the Sino-Japanese War. She is interested in political and military history, in gender, in illustration, in book history, in questions of readership, and more. While sometimes a bit of a grab bag, the result accordingly offers readers enlightenment and information on a variety of important topics. Following a brief introduction laying out research questions and offering background on the war, the book is organized into five chapters. "Chinese Youth Literature: An Overview" discusses the literature from its roots in the work of American missionaries to the present, and argues for the importance of LHH in any investigation of Chinese children's reading. "The Sino-Japanese War as Depicted in Chinese Youth Literature: The Big Picture" explains Chen's approach to gathering sources and lays out "publication and thematic patterns" to be found in LHH; the chapter offers "a quantitative analysis of how the history of the SJW has been reflected in 360 LHH titles and twenty-two youth literature works that also exist in LHH adaptations, published in mainland China from 1937 through 2007" (74). "The Sino-Japanese War as Depicted in Chinese Youth Literature: A Thematic Analysis" looks at the portrayal in LHH of military combat, violence and atrocities, social class, and partisan membership. "Family Narrative as Information Source: A Case Study" argues for the importance of considering the transmitted memories of elders alongside print sources as an alternative, potentially less heavily censored means for children to learn about the wartime past. The final chapter, "Ethnic Chinese Wartime Experience in American Youth Literature," provides a comparative dimension to the volume by tracing the social and political pressures that have historically operated to discourage the development both of a robust Chinese-American children's literature and, more specifically, of a body of works for children and adolescents focusing on the Sino-Japanese War that would not be as "disappointingly tiny … largely outdated, out of print, and contributed by white authors" as the works that we in fact have (205). Chen, a project cataloguer for the East Asian Children's Collections at Princeton University's Cotsen Children's Library, earned her PhD [End Page 228] in Library and Information Science (her dissertation, which won an award for outstanding doctoral work from the University of Illinois, was an earlier version of the present study), and her approach to her materials is accordingly more social-scientific than literary, with much discussion of data collection, methods, and the like. Techniques of close reading are not much on display in this book, and Chen's major question about her chosen texts—namely the extent to which they are historically accurate—may...

Comic Political Theology in Shakespeare's Richard II and the Glorious Revolution of 1688

Recent critics who have challenged or revised Ernst Kantorowicz's seminal reading of Shakespeare's Richard II as "the tragedy of the King's Two Bodies" share a common impulse to reject the tragic vision of political theology (inherited from Carl Schmitt) and imagine more affirmative, rational, and democratic alternatives. The first half of this essay returns to Richard II to uncover an overlooked model for a comedic political theology located not in King Richard's decline, but in Henry IV's ascension, particularly in the subplot of Aumerle's failed conspiracy. These scenes challenge Schmittian political theology in two ways. First, the moment of sovereign decision is temporally displaced; second, this displacement enables a political resolution through a distributed and participatory form of fiction- making, which enacts at a practical level, while it simultaneously obscures, the operations of constituent and constituted power. The second half of the essay tests the broader applicability of these concepts by examining the legal reasoning and narrative techniques of the 1689 English Bill of Rights, a text which reflects both displaced temporality and distributed participatory performance by assiduously avoiding any decisive location of political sovereignty—whether in the monarchs or the parliament.

Rational Choice Theory and Political Counsel

Continuing our discussion regarding political counsel in the history of political thought, there is a problem of futurology concerning good governance without accurate predictions when science recedes into mere metaphysics, and so counsel must occupy the clock tower, like the hilltop. When our science is still coming to an order, then we rely on fictional devices in political rhetoric. We must guard against those whom blame us for fictitious prose; as Aristotle reminds, without sight one cannot pass a judgement. Dialectics is an educational method used by political theorists, and to keep vivacity we will apply the story-telling of Plato the dialogian and Niccolo Machiavelli the Classicist. Dialogue is a fictional form of dialectics and Classical story-telling, though not classified in dialectics according to Aristotle, is an invention necessary to the student of doing. Plato once said, the tale has a truth to tell. As contestants we will need to choose a terrain to hunt on. This strategic inquiry consists of rational choice theory from Machiavelli’s beaten path in Ch. 6 of The Prince, Plato’s roads in his Laws, from Hesiod’s Works and Days, and some foresight regarding their problems of futurology in rational choice theory and consultancy.

Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson

Reviewed by: Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson Matthew Badura (bio) Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson, eds., Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives ( New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 200, $140/ £110 cloth. Most critical attention to Thomas Hardy's fiction has understandably focused on the novels, which remain fascinating examples of traditional realist technique employed for non-traditional social critique. Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives, edited by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson, is the first edited collection devoted to Hardy's short fiction. It aims to "refresh readers' sense of Hardy's professionalism in all the genres he practiced, and to show that he evolved as a practitioner of the long and short fictional forms at the same time" (7). Divided into four parts—"Periodical Publication," "Gender Relationships," "Community Relationships," and "Narrative Technique"—this volume does an admirable job of placing Hardy's short fiction in conversation with historicist, gender, and narrative theories while remaining accessible to beginning scholars of Hardy. The most successful part of the book, and the section most likely to appeal to readers of VPR, focuses on the periodical publication of Hardy's short stories. Graham Law's "Neither Tales nor Short Stories?: Issues of Authorship, Readership, and Publishing in A Group of Noble Dames" opens with a useful distinction between the Victorian-era tale and the short story theorized by the American educator Brander Matthews during the mid-1880s. Within this context, Law examines Hardy's negotiations to suit the six core "Noble Dame" stories to the tamer editorial and market expectations for the Christmas number of the Graphic in 1890. Since the four tales Hardy later added to the volume edition A Group of Noble Dames do not exhibit such sanitization, Law concludes that the "collection is fractured by the unsettled and unsettling development from traditional 'tale' to modern 'short story'" (26). In this way, Law identifies Hardy as a transitional figure in the development of British short fiction, much as his longer fictions have been cited as transitional examples of the British novel. Siobhan Craft Brownson's "'Moonlight nights': Hardy, Christmas and the Illustrated London News" features a useful history of Christmas print culture in periodicals such as the Graphic, Saturday Review, English Illustrated Magazine, Illustrated London News, and Harper's. Brownson's essay discusses "What the Shepherd Saw" and "The Son's Veto," which were published in the Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London News in 1881 and 1891, respectively. By taking a long view of Christmas culture, Hardy's publishing career, and these particular stories, Brownson argues that "Hardy could satisfy editorial needs yet still reshape audience expectations [End Page 205] of their Christmas literature because the holiday was subject to the same instability in its identity formation as was the short story genre of the day" (47). Any collection on Hardy would be remiss to ignore gender, and Part II of this collection offers three essays with distinct approaches to the topic. Suzanne J. Flynn's "'Getting life-leased at all cost': Marriage in Hardy's Late Short Stories" places Hardy in conversation with Mona Caird and other late Victorian feminists. Flynn argues that because novel plots traditionally conclude in marriage, Hardy's short stories "provided a sort of proving ground for his more controversial ideas about both marriage and family," including some of his most potent dissections of loveless marriages and the potentially constricting effects of biological birth (65). Moving from an historical to a highly theoretical approach to gender, Deborah Manion's "Pregnant by a Portrait: The Dynamics of Desire for Hardy's 'Imaginative Woman'" makes a case for the fluidity of Hardy's short fiction in relation to feminist film and image theory. Arguing that Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman" presents the reader with a "focalized account of a cinesthetic subject," Manion claims that "Hardy anticipates feminist models of visual pleasure not formally theorized until nearly a century later by scholars such as Laura Mulvey, Miriam Hansen, and Vivian Sobchack" (69, 68). Part II concludes with Karin Koehler's "'Imaginative sentiment': Love, Letters, and Literacy in Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction...

Typology of title transformations in self-translations of Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories

Abstract This article is dedicated to the issue of the adequacy of self-translations of Vladimir Nabokov’s small forms of fiction. Different types of transformations of short-story titles in the creative work of the bilingual writer were chosen as the object of the research. The article is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach, uniting aspects of linguistic, literary and cultural studies in the investigation of the self-translation phenomenon, an approach that provides for scientifically-grounded conclusions. The authors of the paper build a typology of structural and semantic changes reflecting the features of Nabokov’s interpretations of his own texts. Contrastive comparative, structural, intertextual and cognitive methods were employed as the main research methods. This complex approach to text analysis used in the paper permits an expansion of the idea of the semantics and poetics of separate texts as well as a collection of stories as a whole. The authors pay special attention to investigation of the following types of correlation between the original title and its equivalent: semantic specification, semantic narrowing, semantic broadening and modulation. The authors note that Nabokov in many cases does not follow his own principles of “literality”. The specializing character of correlation between the original text and the translation is predetermined by the author’s aspiration to convey the exact sense and to emphasize separate connotative shades of meaning, while devices of modulation and semantic broadening perform the function of an author’s comment.

Wątki religijne i postaci biblijne w astronomicznym traktacie Jana z Głogowa (1445 – 1507)

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