Fictional Modes Research Articles

Women Thinking in Public: An Introduction

Abstract: This introduction teases out the productive tension between female characters in modern fiction and the implied author as modeled by Mary Mc-Carthy's The Group . Fiction writers dramatize both women's intellection and self-expression and the barriers to that public role. Modern and contemporary women writers blur the lines between essay writing and fiction, professional and intellectual personae, and novelistic narration. Feminist theory also adapts fictional modes to speculate about living otherwise. Our special issue contributions feature collaboration, archives, praxis, the corporeal, and the posthuman. We highlight contemporary fictional modes of women thinking in public, particularly the weird and the everyday.

Nested Cinema: An Immersive Fiction-Film Experience

Abstract Nested Cinema is an original immersive experience that complicates the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, between the real and the imaginary. Nested Cinema reimagines film through the orchestration of technology across three distinct layers of experience—traditional screens, the installation space, and cinematic virtual reality—giving rise to a new immersive mode of dramatic fiction and expanded cinema. By combining established and emerging production and presentation technologies, the project explores the narrative and atmospheric effects of a nested multimodal environment, as well as new modes of visitor engagement and novel audiovisual expression and communication.

The Pretense Mode of Fiction. On the Practice of Fiction in Literary Studies

Since the late twentieth century, fiction, once primarily connected to the arts, has gradually become a much-debated topic in a wide range of research fields and disciplines including law and philosophy. However, as many different disciplines are now increasingly thematizing fiction and various usages of the term “fiction” exist, there is danger of mixing up the different definitions of this term, making it difficult to compare the approaches. In order to enable a comparison between “fiction” in those disciplines which this special issue focusses on, this article discusses fiction from a literary studies perspective. The aim is to unfold what it means for a literary text to be considered fiction and by doing so, elaborate on the peculiarities of fiction in the literary field. To facilitate the comparison, some essential distinctions that have become established in German scholarship require explanation first. The differentiation between fictionality as a potential property of texts and fictivity as a potential property of objects within fiction is rarely found in Anglo-American discussions of fictionality in literature but has become a central distinction in German discussions. By distinguishing between these two levels of fiction, it also becomes clear why reality does not necessarily function as fiction’s opposite—an assumption that can still be found frequently, especially in the everyday usage of the term “fiction.” Furthermore, this article will show that literary fictions do not even have to include invented characters, actions, and events, because the crucial point lies in the specific communicative stance authors of fiction demand from their readers. Hence, simply defining fiction as texts or other media that deal with invented characters, actions, or events would be inaccurate according to recent, pragmatic approaches in literary studies that clearly dominate the contemporary discourse on fiction. From the perspective of pragmatic approaches, what constitutes fiction is a very intricate question and cannot be answered by merely focusing on textual or semantic properties. That fiction cannot be determined through the content level will be demonstrated by evaluating the four most prominent and plausible accounts of fiction. After briefly discussing the pros and cons of these major accounts, I will focus on why this article favors John R. Searle’s approach to fiction, which emphasizes the pretense aspect as the peculiarity of fiction-making in communicative terms. The introduction concludes with a discussion of two core licenses that follow from the pretense strategy for authors of fiction, namely the license to choose any mode of presentation for their fictional story (communicative freedom), and secondly, the license to depict any topic and content they want (ontological freedom). Due to its clarificatory purpose, this essay does not offer a new understanding or even approach to fiction. Instead, it provides an overview of the core ideas regarding literary fiction for a readership that might come from various disciplines, albeit the special focus is on law as this issue’s central one. The article is deliberately written as a concise introduction to major approaches to fiction and fictionality in the field of literary studies or literary theory with a focus on the discussion in German scholarship in comparison to Anglo-American scholarship. This is meant to pave the way for the more detailed interdisciplinary and international discourse and discussion which make up the main bulk of the special issue.

Dissent and Posthuman Consciousness in Prabda Yoon’s Basement Moon

Abstract This paper examines Thai author Prabda Yoon’s Basement Moon, a 2018 science fictional novel that embodies the belief that art and science can play a vital role in triggering critical consciousness that keeps alive the spirit of dissent. A close reading of the novel also reveals that it mirrors several key concepts and ideas promoted by Gramsci pertaining to power relations between the ruling class and those under them and the educational roles of art and science. Of great significance is that this novel is exemplary of an innovative mode of political fiction in its employment of key posthumanist ideas that challenge human aspiration for absolute power and control. In discussing Basement Moon, I draw on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as well as relevant literature in dystopia, posthumanism and metafiction.

Home: Depiction Of Social Reality In Manju Kapur’s Novel

The portrayal of women in Indian English fiction as the silent sufferers and upholders of the tradition and traditional values of family and society has undergone tremendous change in the post independence period. Manju Kapur’s novel, Difficult Daughters, A Married Woman and Home, displays a new confidence in using the fictional mode for creative expression and depicting social reality. Taking into account the complexity of life, different histories, cultures and different structures of values, women’s question, despite basic solidarity, needs to be tackled in relation to the socio-cultural situation. The impact of patriarchy on the Indian society varies from the one in the west. Manju Kapur has her own concerns, priorities as well as her own ways on dealing with the predicament of women protagonists. Kapur, being one of the modern day women authors, has expressed herself freely and boldly on a variety of themes without adopting feminist postures. Her novels furnish examples of a whole range of attitudes towards the importation of Indian tradition. However, the novelist seems to be aware of the fact that the women of India have indeed achieved their success in sixty years of Independence, but if there is to be true female independence, too much remains to be done. The present paper attempts to portray the reality of a typical Indian family in Manju Kapur’s Home.

<em>Mandeville</em>, Mourning and National Myths: William Godwin's Civil War Novel and the Use of History

Mandeville (1817) is the second of William Godwin’s historical novels, and is set during the period of the English Commonwealth (1649–60). Readers at the time of its publication made comparisons with the ‘German school’ of novel writing, linking it with both the Gothic and sturm-und-drang fictional modes. Modern critics have recognised it as a work exploring psychological and cultural trauma, the aftereffects of war on the generation that came after. Godwin cited Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Joanna Bailie’s De Monfort (1798) as major influences on the novel, and this essay will attempt to use these texts as a vector to explore the direction of Godwin’s ideas. Like all of Godwin’s (mature) novels, Mandeville is a first-person narrative—and this essay will argue that here Godwin specifically uses this as a nod towards historical memoir, a genre that shaped understanding of the Civil War and Commonwealth period during Godwin’s lifetime. The novel’s narration is characterised by its paranoia and self-destructive violence, steeped in the era’s political and religious tribalism. In the context of Godwin’s ideas on the purpose of historical writing, fiction, and critical reading, this turn towards memoir can thus be seen as a challenge to the public understanding of the period (and its reliance on implicitly dubious memoir) and the cultural issues of the seventeenth century that persisted through to Godwin’s time.

Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence, by Frenchy Lunning

<i>Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence</i>, by Frenchy Lunning

Possible Futures

Possible Futures

Das Spiel der Emergenz. Aspekte ludischer Fiktion und Narration

"The focus of the contribution is the question of how the mode of fiction in the moderates emergence in the contact zone of games and narrative. In this zone - the residuum of the ambiguous, the non-actual, depragmatised - effects occur that assert themselves in paradoxes of understanding, action and evaluation. Ludic fiction - as play in narrative and narrative in play - confronts this problem through a cooperative 'modality management' that organises reality references through the principle of 'shared control'. In this way, the emergence of the of playful narration and narrated play becomes the task of interaction. "

Vulnerability, Relationality, Fragmentation and Networking in Linda Grant’s A Stranger City (2019)

Set during the immediate months before and after Brexit, Linda Grant’s novel A Stranger City turns London into a microcosm where the misfortunes linked to migration, racism, violence, terrorism, capitalism and individualism make a group of dissimilar characters’ lives intersect around the mysterious death of an ‘unidentified’ migrant woman. Grant’s literary works tend to represent female characters’ journeys in search of personhood. However, this time, she addresses more transnational and present-day issues to the extent that it has been considered as illustrative of hybrid literature produced during the post-2016 era. By relying on close-reading tools, one of the main aims of my study is to demonstrate that A Stranger City displays some specific narrative devices which feature those fictional modes that have been defined as translit (Legget 2016), networked novels (Edwards 2019) and fragmented narratives (Gioia 2013). Further, I will claim that women writers like Grant are resorting to new narrative forms to denounce the fact that the global crisis of values affects women more intensely. Moreover, I will link the notions of home and exile problematized in this novel to the modern construction of Jewish identity and, finally, conclude that this relational narrative proves that twenty-first-century Jewish women are embracing the transnational arena to redefine themselves in our global world.

Unsettling Ethnic Detail in Asian American Metafiction

AbstractThis essay examines the work of detail in contemporary Asian American metafiction by reconsidering Georg Lukács’s understanding of description as a mode of fiction that transforms humans into observers and objects via an excess of detail. Lukács’s work has informed views of how “exotic” details in Asian American fiction turn Asian American characters and people into objects of entertainment and edification for predominantly white readerships. Yet works of Asian American metafiction such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, and Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” deploy description to unsettle detail’s objectifying effects. Their authors invent techniques of deploying racist and exotic details to reveal how the logic of liberal multiculturalism and diversity rather than the aesthetics of description transforms Asian American persons into things.

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method, by Brian McCuskey

Reviewed by: How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method by Brian McCuskey Jonathan Cranfield (bio) How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method, by Brian McCuskey; pp. 195. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021, $34.95. Academics who have worked on Arthur Conan Doyle will recognize two types of articles that they are frequently asked to review: the first identifies an obscure topic from the Sherlock Holmes stories and pursues it in excruciating detail (imagine an article titled “Alpinestocks vs Alpine-Stocks: The Case of the Vanishing Hyphen”); the second operates in an entirely different discipline but uses the figure of Holmes to structure its argument (perhaps “‘Some Ecstatic Dream’: Sherlock Holmes and REM Sleep Cycles”). The former usually totters along the ill-defined border between Holmesiana (the half-satirical, half-earnest pursuit of canonical truths within the Holmes stories) and conventional literary criticism. The latter, an easy desk reject for scientific journals without the Holmesian framing, can be sanguinely passed on to a humanities scholar to fire the necessary bolt to the temple. The proliferation of both types illustrates the wide variety of truth-claims for which Holmes’s testimony can be summoned. Brian McCuskey’s How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method identifies and analyzes a series of public debates and controversies (political, religious, and academic) where Sherlock Holmes or the vaunted Holmesian method was generally invoked by all sides as a guarantor of their correctness. The examples are mostly drawn from the career and afterlife of Conan Doyle himself. McCuskey explores Holmes’s method in some detail, mostly offering a useful summary of work on the subject by the likes of Stephen Knight, Ronald R. Thomas, Thomas Sebeok, and Michael Saler. He argues, in broad terms, that the central “paradox” identified in Conan Doyle’s life by many writers and biographers—how could he create the great rationalist detective and also believe in spiritualism and fairies?—is a false dichotomy (46). While Holmes avowedly excluded the supernatural from his worldview, his mode of reasoning was entirely specious, unfalsifiable, and purposefully riddled with gaps that could be supplemented with leaps of faith, so-called common sense, nonsense, errata, confirmation bias, or ordinary prejudice. In short: you can find a Holmes quote to support any imaginable proposition whether profound, trivial, or unhinged. [End Page 687] Yet, since Holmes’s first appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887), he has been deployed in a bewildering array of debates. McCuskey’s chapters, though they do add up to an overarching argument, read more naturally as a series of smaller case studies. Chapter 1 examines a snapshot of religious debates around eyewitness testimony, textual reliability, and the limits of infallibility in 1887. Did the Reverend Malcolm MacColl really see the corpse of an impaled Christian martyr on the banks of the Sava River or was it a “large bundle of drying haricot beans” (15)? The terms of this debate, christened “What the Canons Saw” in The Times (1788–present), “seemed almost to summon” Holmes into being according to McCuskey (16, 17). This tendentious phraseology captures the book’s limitations but also some of its self-aware charm. McCuskey has written a book-length deconstruction of a purely fictional mode of reasoning that was never intended to be externally consistent. He occasionally chastises himself for this foolishness, belatedly and playfully pulling his own methodology into his critique. Other chapters examine the genesis and epistemic structure of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist beliefs, his career as a proselytizer and public debater, the growth of Sherlock Holmes fandom, the constructivist theory wars of the 1980s, and the character’s role in online conspiracy theories pertaining to 9/11 and post-Trump American politics. So how did Sherlock pull the trick and convince generations of readers that his method of crime solving was replicable in their everyday lives? How could the same character’s words be used in self-justification by 9/11 truthers and newspaper fact-checkers, QAnon devotees and august professors, evolutionary biologists and the Intelligent Design movement? The answer, of course, is that there is no Holmesian method, just a series of pleasingly-phrased, quotable...

Zionist Speculation: Colonial Vision and Its Sublime Turn

:This essay considers speculation as a colonial method. To this end, it interrogates the ideological role of vision, understood as both a plan for the future and a mode of seeing, in early Zionist writing. Through an analysis of Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (Old-New Land, 1902), a work of speculative fiction published by “the visionary” of Zionism, vision emerges as a practice of political and visual speculation that overlooks what already exists in Palestine in order to see beyond the land and into its hidden future potentials. By foregrounding intentional planning and prospective economic improvements, such speculation serves as a justification for colonization and as a counterclaim to indigenous presence, racialized as inefficient and unintentional. Colonial speculation further combines this practice of overseeing with an ethos overcoming. By centering the intentional choice to be present in Palestine and improve it, colonizers not only overcome their initial compromising position—their distance from the land—but also alchemically transfigure it into their greatest political asset, as distance becomes the precondition for speculative, intentional vision and its ownership claims. In this sublime turn, the colonizers’ subsequent presence is presented as superior to the “mere presence” of the indigenous population. While Zionism perceives itself as a thoroughly material project, it is thus exposed as a mode of speculative fiction, which requires distance from the land to justify colonization based on prospective rather than real improvements.

Book Review: Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence

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Between the Mythical and the Ironic: An Analysis of the Imaginative Structure of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

ABSTRACT The essay applies Northrop Frye’s theory of the imaginative structure of literature to the study of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Frye’s theory not only helps us to notice well-established structural patterns in Atwood’s work that echo the literary classics, but it also sheds light on the larger, socio-political meaning of the trilogy. Crucial to this meaning is the ending of the trilogy with its surprising narrative shift from an essentially realistic story of survival to a fairy-tale-like conclusion. Frye’s theory allows us to see this conclusion as reflecting a turn into the mythical fictional mode, which, however, fits the overall imaginative structure of the trilogy. Even more importantly, Frye also helps us to understand the visionary function of the ending, which may be interpreted in the light of his notion of the myth of concern.

Assertions of Truth Through Modes of Fact and Fiction: Texts and Paratexts and the “Autobiographical Pact” in Lualhati Abreu’s Agawdilim, Agaw-liwanag and Mila Aguilar’s The Nine Deaths of M

Assertions of Truth Through Modes of Fact and Fiction: Texts and Paratexts and the “Autobiographical Pact” in Lualhati Abreu’s Agawdilim, Agaw-liwanag and Mila Aguilar’s The Nine Deaths of M

Bad Realism

Bad Realism

Unpunishable Crimes in Claire G. Coleman’s Futuristic Novel Terra Nullius

Aside from being part of a vibrant corpus of Indigenous futurism, Claire G. Coleman’s novel Terra Nullius (2017) can also be analysed as an eco-crime novel. Indigenous Australian authors of this genre (e.g., Philip McLaren, Steven McCarthy, Nicole Watson) often anchor the source of criminal acts in the theft, loss and devastation of traditional lands, which provides their crime novels with a heightened awareness of environmental issues. The same applies to Terra Nullius. This is, however, a novel that successfully conceals its futuristic framework until halfway through. Equally, this successfully disrupts the usual postulates of crime fiction by shifting the reader’s attention from the usual “whodunnit” to the more elusive “whoizzit” mode of crime fiction. This, as the discussion reveals, means that the criminal acts in Terra Nullius are rendered unpunishable. This paradox, as it is argued, is strengthened by introducing the so-called “noir detective” (Timothy Morton) in the character of Father Grark, who cannot investigate that which constitutes the crime and the alibi shaping the world of Coleman’s futuristic novel.

Remembering Carol Lazzaro-Weis (1949–2022)

Remembering Carol Lazzaro-Weis (1949–2022)

Towards Goosepunk: A Contemporary Poetic Treatment of Francis Godwin's 'The Man in the Moone'

This article proposes a retro-futurist mode of science fiction based on seventeenth-century technology and culture. After a brief account of retro-futurist subgenres, named for the technology they are based on with the suffix -punk, I introduce my own poetic reworking of Francis Godwin's 1638 novel The Man in the Moone, one of a group of texts inspired by early modern New Astronomy. The novel's hero flies to the moon in a craft of his own invention drawn by a flock of migrating birds (swans in the original). Godwin's narrative is enjoyable for modern readers for its combination of vivid imagination, accurate speculation and, with hindsight, intriguing counter-factuality. My treatment aims to emphasise these aspects, eliminating other parts of the text such as the picaresque adventures that open the novel. Treated in this way, the story offers similar pleasures to more established modes such as steampunk. Godwin and his contemporaries were heavily dependent on animals for their power: to reflect this, the article proposes the term 'goosepunk' for its early modern retro-futurist subgenre.