Fictional Narratives Research Articles

Mixtec Pictography and Immigrant Labor Resistance in the Comic Undocumented: A Worker’s Fight

The comic Undocumented: A Worker’s Fight (2018) by Duncan Tonatiuh (pronounced toh-nah-tee-YOU) depicts the fictional narrative of Juan, a Mixtec immigrant from Mexico. My article examines the use of Mixteco in the comic to make apparent how Indigenous Latinx workers in the United States are often left out of the larger narrative of immigration policy and reform. I argue that comics studies scholarship should include more Mesoamerican and Latin American art, history, and writing so that there is no question of image-texts in contemporary western comics as having their own distinct writing system. A Worker’s Fight’s Mixtec style art and lack of borders forces readers to consider an anti-colonial reading practice. Tonatiuh accomplishes this feat by shifting events in the narrative from a linear sequentiality (cause and effect) to make apparent the simultaneous issues of labor and immigration. The temporality and materiality of the comic in Tonatiuh’s rejection of drawn borders is thus also a rejection of the legitimacy of national borders. A Worker’s Fight is a spectacular comic as well as a valuable teaching tool. The feeling of intimacy in Juan’s personal story is significant. The graphic narrative places comics and sequential art in a longer writing tradition that has always included images.

Licking Meteorites and a Pharmacy of un·Earthing

In this text, I discuss my recent artistic work with meteorites in relation to possible future schemes to exploit non-terrestrial resources. Meteorites have been entangled with human cultures for thousands of years, from tool-making to religious practices, in scientific research and as commodities in online-markets. Whereas space mining has been a staple of Science Fiction narratives for over a century, national legislations have recently started to allow for actual future extraction and commercial use of resources on other celestial bodies. By employing the conceptual framework of “un·Earthing” as a transdisciplinary approach to explore existing and potential transformations of humans by and in outer space, I approach meteorites and their current commodification as a “pre-enactment” of these possible future scenarios of interplanetary extractivism. In collaboration with the Institute of Pharmaceutical Technologies at the University of Vienna, I produced pharmaceutical products containing meteoritic material and documented the process as well as my performative attempts to approach non-terrestrial material. The resulting short film raises questions about meteorites as a pharmakon of the ambivalent processes of un·Earthing and human-non-earthly relations.

Epoch Reality in Davit Turdospireli's Brief Fictional Narrative

Despite the strict canonical description for brief prose, Davit Turdospireli's brief fictional narrative not only give us a glimpse into the spiritual world of the writer and share his subjective feelings, but also clearly present a number of contemporary epochal problems of the writer. Davit Turdospireli was involved in active social and political life from an early age, while still studying at the seminary, he edited the literary and journalistic magazine "Our flag" and the almanac "Pirveli Talva". Gendarmerie carefully followed the socio-political steps of the young writer. Davit Turdospireli's miniature prose echoes in many ways the historical-political and cultural-social existence of Georgians at the beginning of the twentieth century. The historical and political events in the country pushed the writer to different ways of disguising what he had to say. In some cases, he tried to show the way to salvation for the country that had been disenfranchised, and in some cases, he created works with almost the same title and completely different content. The reason for the distress revealed in the miniature by covering it with "withered leaves" is undoubtedly caused by the contemporary presence of the writer. In the miniature dated 1916, "Love", seemingly a searcher of the philosophy of love, who has not heard anything about its annals since the beginning of the world, calls the reader to enjoy the charm of freedom and selfless struggle to break the shackles of slavery. The work on Davit Turdospireli's autographs has revealed a number of nuances characteristic of the writer's creative process. What is especially characteristic of his manuscripts, which are mostly black autographs and clearly show the writer's creative work process, are signed and undated by the author. We think that the writer deliberately did not date his manuscripts. As we have already mentioned, despite the fact that he tried to convey his message to the readers by various means, the undated manuscripts was probably one of the ways to protect free thought. Davit Turdospireli's miniatures, despite the persecution and harassment of free thought, interestingly reveal writer’s attitude to the historical and political existence of the country, at the same time, they also draw crystal paths for a better life of the country.

Understanding Nuance and Ambivalence in Intergenerational Relationships Through Fiction.

The term "intergenerational relationships" is widely used in gerontological literature and age-related policies. However, discussions of the term often tell us surprisingly little about what it means or why it matters. We suggest that this is due to a reductivism and instrumentalism in 2 main discourses within which intergenerational relationships are usually discussed. First, intergenerational relationships are often conceptualized through a binary "conflict/solidarity" lens, reinforcing an entrenched "generationalism". Second, they are predominantly constructed as a problem to be addressed within debates on how to tackle intergenerational segregation. Neither of these discourses provides much room for a more nuanced understanding of how intergenerational relationships are experienced or why they are meaningful. In this paper, we discuss how fictional narratives can introduce imagination and a richer vocabulary into discourses concerning how people of different ages relate to each other. We present findings from reading groups where adults discussed novels depicting themes of older age, intergenerational relationships, and time. In discussing the fictional narratives and characters, participants reflected on the significance and meaning of intergenerational relationships in ways that went beyond dichotomous and instrumentalist discourses. Drawing on the concept of lived ambivalence, we argue that fictional representations of intergenerational themes can elicit more meaningful reflections on the complexities and contradictions of relationships across age groups. We conclude that a more nuanced understanding of intergenerational interaction can inform gerontological discourses and policy, but also that gerontological awareness of social challenges concerning age relations can inform interpretations of fictional narratives.

A váratlan vendég

Can a reversal be something that we do not expect? In other words: can we recognise something as a twist if we have no prior expectations about the course of the plot, the characters, the dynamics of the development and resolution of conflicts? Yet if we do have a prior expectation, how can we even talk about a twist? In this paper, I would like to explore this paradoxical nature of the turn within the narrative plot, and in doing so, I would also like to examine to what extent the existence and designation of the narrative turn may depend on the interpreter’s activity, what its status is in our everyday, practical narratives when we „predict” with the help of our narrative interpretive competence, and to what extent it is a relevant aspect when we talk about fictional narratives.

Normality and Disability in H. G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind".

Describing someone as disabled means evaluating their relationship with their environment, body, and self. Such descriptions pivot on the person's perceived limitations due to their atypical embodiment. However, impairments are not inherently pathological, nor are disabilities necessarily deviations from biological normality, a discrepancy often articulated in science fiction via the presentation of radically altered environments. In such settings, non-impaired individuals can be shown to be unsuited to the world they find themselves in. One prime example of this comes courtesy of H. G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind." This paper demonstrates science fiction's capacity to decouple disability's normative quality from classical medical models stemming from the medical Enlightenment movement by challenging the idea of the biologically normal. It first provides a brief account of disability before exploring the concept of medical normality. It then problematizes the biologically consistent being, arguing that health is only understandable when environmentally situated. Next, the paper provides an overview of "The Country of the Blind" before analyzing how it challenges the idea of biological normality, framing it as a social product rather than a universal constant. Finally, the paper concludes that science fiction narratives effectively interrogate our world's seemingly consistent trends by envisioning (un)desirable alternatives.

“Realistic Villains”

Crime films–one of the most beloved forms of crime fiction—have a close relationship with society due to their themes and subject matter. Because of this relationship, crime films are able to use their genre-specific elements to include social commentary within their storylines. Using their victims, suspects, and resolutions of the crimes, modern crime fiction pieces such as Rian Johnson’s 2019 film Knives Out and Halina Reijn’s 2022 film Bodies Bodies Bodies both implement larger conversations within their stories. In Knives Out, the audience follows the mystery behind the sudden death of the renowned author, Harlan Thrombey—the suspects being his family and staff. Within the film’s mystery, Johnson uses elements of the story to recognize and critique those in power who benefit from privilege. Bodies Bodies Bodies focuses on couple Bee and Sophie as they join Sophie’s upper-class influencer friends for a weekend of partying, but mystery ensues when one of the friends is found dead, leaving only those within the house as suspects. Throughout the film, Reijn exemplifies the harmful way younger generations are utilizing technology while also critiquing problematic behaviors within influencer culture. This essay will use these pieces of modern crime fiction to explore how fictional crime narratives can use their stories to include social commentary.

How Young Adult Crime Fiction Influences and Reflects Modern Adolescents

When we read crime fiction, we oftentimes expect a cast dominated by adult characters. This is likely a result of decades’ worth of popular crime fiction narratives almost exclusively containing adult characters. The earliest literature in the mystery and crime genre that was targeted towards younger audiences contained teenage detectives and adult criminals because it allowed the younger audiences to read about powerful teenagers overthrowing adult authority while still only engaging in acceptable moral activities in an attempt to decrease or discourage juvenile delinquency. A newer trend among young adult crime fiction novels is the adolescent playing the part of the criminal in addition to the detective. Applying social cognitive theory explored in the study conducted by Black and Barnes to the roles of adolescents in Karen M. McManus’s young adult mystery novel One of Us Is Lying and its sequel One of Us Is Next, this paper will analyze the novels’ adolescent characters to show how adolescent characters in young adult crime fiction reflect their young audiences’ desires to subvert adult hierarchies while still displaying acceptable morals and how they possibly influence their sense of morality.

Mysteriously Murderous Manors of Crime Fiction

Crime fiction has many common tropes often associated with its setting, including large houses with wealthy families, isolated homes in vast expanses of forest, and technological deserts, in which everyday things like cell phones are all but useless. These characteristics assist with the plot, and oftentimes are key contributors to the facts of the case. The manor in the 2019 film Knives Out, directed by Rian Johnson, displays these tropes outrightly, as it is in a large expanse of woods, and the family living in the house is built upon a family legacy of vast amounts of wealth. In many cases of crime fiction, the old manors come from old generations of money. Many characters throughout the film believe victim Harlan Thrombey to be from old money, although it is revealed later that this may not be a genuine portrayal of his rise into wealth, altering the perception of how his manor and ultimately his legacy is viewed. Unlike other crime fiction settings, Knives Out utilizes technology in order to put together pieces of the crime, instead of eliminating its use, as is common in crime fiction settings. The setting of the film is as important a piece to a crime fiction narrative as any other plot devices, like characters or events. As Joel Goldman writes: “A setting with a heartbeat represents the difference between good and great crime fiction; and allows readers to develop a true attachment to protagonists and, yes, a deep-seated fear and loathing of the villain” (1). This essay seeks to examine the tropes utilized in the film, and how they worked in providing evidence towards the case of the murder of Harlan Thrombey. The film also plays with crime fiction tropes in terms of technology. The mansion has aspects that are both archaic, like the VHS tape security system, but also modern, in the use of social media throughout the film. This essay will also show how the film used inverse versions of crime fiction stereotypes to craft a crime narrative.

Working for Nico

SummaryOver the course of the last decade, I have conducted fieldwork on the militarization of Rio de Janeiro and on the security industry that developed in response to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. This fictional short story follows two different imagined security laborers, Nico and Valesca, reflecting the racial, gendered, and class tensions I saw play out between police and military operators from different regions during my research. Working alongside Nico and Valesca, a fictional narrator seeks to navigate fraught power dynamics in a highly masculine setting.

Rire et comédie: émergence d’un nouveau discours sur les effets du théâtre au xviie siècle. Par Coline Piot

Coline Piot’s nuanced study of the evolution of French seventeenth-century discussions on the role of laughter, and the perceived aims and the effects of comedy, offers a wide-ranging and robust contribution to scholarship. Piot begins by noting that the modern reader immediately links audience laughter with the genre of comedy, but reminds us that this link was long absent in theoretical discussion on comedy. In this way, she seeks to ‘déessentialiser le lien entre comédie et rire du spectateur pour mieux restaurer le processus historique de sa construction’ (p. 10). She does this by examining how the link was made in non-theoretical discussions on the theatre, the principal reasons that led theoretical writers to wrestle with such ideas, and the resulting change in attitudes towards the comedic genre in the seventeenth century. From the 1660s onwards, there was a new focus by critics on audience response to performances, and Piot thus extends the scholarship undertaken as part of the research ­project ‘Naissance de la critique dramatique’, led by Lise Michel and Claude Bourqui, along with other burgeoning research in the last decade on reception studies in the period. The corpus of texts examined (dating from 1660 to 1670) can be divided into three categories. The first involves accounts by real spectators of the time, with an impressive range including ‘écrits de constance, de témoignages de réception, de pamphlets et d’éloges, de descriptions de spectacle, de galanteries, de recueils mondains, de gazettes’ (p. 18). The second incorporates the perspective of playwrights of the time, ‘dans les paratextes de comédie ou les discours de défense ou de promotion’ (p. 18). The last category features discussions on performances in novels, fictional narratives, and comedies with a metatheatrical dimension. The first part of the book provides an overview of discourses on comedy in theoretical and non-theoretical texts from the sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth century (Chapter 1) and examines the influence that burlesque literature and Italian comedies had on discussions of audience laughter, which were gaining traction in France (Chapter 2). The second part of the book adopts a more analytical approach and investigates the aesthetic, social, and moral elements at the heart of such discussions. Chapter 3 of this section provides an excellent examination on the traditional discourse of l’honnêteté du rire in comedy, in the wake of discussions on Molière’s L’École des femmes. In the final part of the book, Piot focuses on the emergence in critical writings of certain commonplace ideas around laughter, principally the idea of comedy’s corrective role. She traces how this crystallized into a standard critical topos, with the expectation that classical comedy had a moral objective of correcting vice. However, the study also underlines the privileging of pleasure through a new form of galanterie in which ‘maîtriser “art de la raillerie” en société et savoir “entendre raillerie”’ became ‘des marques de distinction sociale’ (p. 13). Overall, this book presents a persuasive and detailed account of the way in which a new theory of comedy emerged and took centre stage.

Sagas and genre: A case for application of network analysis to manuscripts preserving Old Norse-Icelandic saga literature

Abstract This study applies statistical approaches to the analysis of the genre relationships of Old Norse-Icelandic literature in order to expand our understanding of the relationships between works, their transmission, and their possible modes of reception, as manifested in the extant manuscripts. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion of the genre boundaries of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and presents an alternative method of engaging with this material in the form of computer-assisted analysis, i.e. data visualization and network analysis. Using data collected from major online databases of Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts, we present the most complete to date network of co-occurrences in manuscripts of works belonging to a number of literary genres. The present study empirically demonstrates the manifoldness of the connections between the Old Norse-Icelandic works which transcend traditional scholarly genre boundaries. The study identifies two main communities within the network: a community of romances, or works of narrative fiction, which includes mainly legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur) and chivalric sagas (riddarasögur), and a community of historicizing narratives, or pseudo-history, which includes mainly sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) and kings’ sagas (konungasögur).

“Military Ethic Washing” - De-Politicization and Dis-Militarization in Representations of Internal Targeted Killings in Israeli Narrative Films and Television Drama

ABSTRACT The term “Military Ethical Washing” 1 is used to describe ways in which military ethics clears military organizations from moral responsibility for their actions in a post-national liberal militarism era. Film and television, now even more than in the past, serve as agents of ethics in general, and of military ethics in particular. Using the terms of the “Just War Theory,” the study shows how through processes of De-Politicization and Dis-militarization enhanced by fictional audio-visual narrative representations, narrative films and television dramas express the ethical-liberal turning point of our times, while at the same time using it to ratify national militarism. The process of “Military Ethical Washing” is illustrated in the paper in the Israeli context through cinematic and televised representations of internal targeted assassinations that took place during the constitutive national period of the struggle for Israel’s independence – a case study having critical potential for discussing current military practices and ethical issues being dealt with by the Israeli military, but also relevant to other cases.

Jorge Luis Borges' Poetics of Narrative Fiction: Magic Causality and Defective Memory

This article intends to discuss Jorge Luis Borges’ Poetics of the Narrative, that is, to question the form and the literary devices which make a narrative somehow effective. I shall focus on aspects associated with the buildup of the plot, such as the magic causality, the writing style based upon a concept of selective memory and oriented towards a dynamic and concatenated articulation of the events. The technicity inherent to these aspects increases the interaction between the reader and the text, makes of the former a machine operator of an open mechanism.

Review: Busse. 2020. Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction: A Corpus-Assisted Approach

<scp>Review</scp>: Busse. 2020. <i>Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction: A Corpus-Assisted Approach</i>

Comparison of Automatic Speech Recognition System for School-aged Children’s Narratives: Naver Clova Speech and Google Speech-to-Text

Objectives: Language sample analysis (LSA) is a critical component of child language assessment. However, most clinicians consider LSA to be time consuming work. In particular, transcription is seen as an overwhelming task. Due to rapid technological advances, various automatic speech recognition systems have been developed. This study aimed to investigate the accuracy and the characteristics of two automatic speech recognition programs, Naver Clova Speech (Naver Clova) and Google Speech-to-Text (STT).Methods: A total of 40 school-aged children with typical development (TD) and children with language learning disabilities (LLD) participated in the study. Each child was asked to generate two fictional narratives. In total, 72 narratives produced by 36 children were used. To examine the accuracy of Naver Clova and Google STT, syllable error rate was analyzed and compared to reference transcripts. For the detailed analysis, types of error such as substitution, deletion and insertion were examined.Results: Results showed that Naver Clova was significantly lower than Google STT in error rate of transcription. But the transcription error rate of the two child groups was not significantly different. Additionally, the Naver Clova error rate was higher in substitution, deletion, and insertion respectively. The Google STT error rate, on the other hand, was higher in deletion, substitution and insertion respectively.Conclusion: Naver Clova were more accurate than Google STT in transcribing children’s narratives. But the transcription accuracy of two child groups was not different. This suggests that recently developed automatic speech recognition systems have clinical utility. These systems can reduce clinician’s workload in regards to LSA and this would contribute to qualitatively enhanced language assessment.

СОБЫТИЕ: ИСТОРИЯ ВНЕ СЮЖЕТА

The author is looking for an opportunity to analyze the nature of a historical event, free from deterministic and constructivist premises of scientifical thinking, and not reducible to the logic and pragmatics of the structuralist and narrativist approaches. It starts from Heidegger’s understanding of it as “un-overpassed” (das Unumgängliche) scientific historiography and the so-called “unhidden” truth (aletheia). Since within the Heideggerian “being-historical thinking” the event reveals its derivative from the narrative structure of the “history of being”, an attempt is made to clarify the properties of the historical event with the help of its neopragmatist interpretation proposed in the works of R. Rorty. The latter sees the merit of Heidegger in the discovery of the contingency of any human project. However, Heidegger, according to Rorty, was not up to the mark of his discovery. He lacked the self-irony to refrain from presenting his own, finite and contingent, history of Western thought in terms of the “history of being” and the “event” of his truth. At the same time, Rorty does not hide his skepticism about the ability of philosophers to do without the “fateful” historical meaning. Rorty does not provide for any specificity of the historical event, reducing it without a trace in favor of private “selfcreation” carried out by means of fictional narrative. Therefore, the author finds the work “The Effect of Reality in Historical Writing” by F. Ankersmit more suitable for clarifying the contingent nature of a historical event, according to which the “non-functionality” of the details of ekphrasis can radically change the meaning of the historical narrative and even abolish the distance separating the past from the present. The text ends with a brief overview of the conceptions of historical event, which are developed in modern historical theory independently of Ankersmit, but reveal a similar view of the contingency of this event.

Life is a gift: Value cosmologies in Hollywood cinema

AbstractIs life “priceless,” or can life be bought and sold like a commodity? Anthropological theory has not yet been able to integrate incommensurable value with commensurable value. But such an integrated theory of value exists—not explicitly in theory but implicitly in everyday ethics and fictional narratives. I analyze how the movie Titanic, one of the most commercially valuable artefacts of all time, reveals a comprehensive ideology of how life and material wealth should be valued. Titanic works through key themes in economic anthropology: social inequality, class struggle, gift/commodity distinctions, the meaning of money, and inalienable possessions. Titanic demonstrates that the tension between ethical values and economic value can be resolved when short‐term individual gains are transcended by a mutuality of being that reaches beyond death. Titanic proposes that American capitalism can integrate core cultural values with economic freedom and self‐realization.

‘EXHAUSTION --- APPARENT ON MY FACE’1: FICTIONALIZATION, GRAPHIC HISTORIOGRAPHY AND DATA VISUALIZATION OF WOMEN’S EXCLUSION IN VIDYUN SABHANEY AND SHOHEI EMURA’S ‘HARD TIMES’

Deviating from commonplace comicbook superheroisms, recent comicbook graphic narrations of historical and statistical data promise to produce a humanization and visualization that apart from informing the audience about social realities of past and present manage also to stimulate an aesthetic response and emotionally attached sensitization. Based on statistical data provided in Indian Exclusion Report, 2015, ‘Hard Times’ by Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura is a comic that utilizes graphic language in order to voice concerns about struggles of working-class women and their exclusions. While it directly presents a literary and fictional narrative involving a young, widowed woman forced to work in the garments’ factory in the city and the challenges she faces in her workplace, it acts as a prologue to a graphic historical survey and data visualization of the general condition of women at workplaces and their position in the society at large. The present paper is a study of the ideologies and visual stylistics of graphic history and data visualization available in the fictional narrative in ‘Hard Times’ directed towards an attempt at identifying the processes of de-elitization of the comicbook narration and its ability to visualize multiple layers of personal and public history, historical and statistical data, the women’s spoken, unspoken, marginalized and unspeakable experiences, which often deviate from officially, academically and alphabetically mediated histories and statistics.

Vocative forms in G. Yakhina’s short story “A Moth”: Linguistic and cultural issues

This article deals with the features of vocative forms used in a literary text. Guzel Yakhina’s short story “A Moth” was chosen as one of the most meaningful in terms of presenting culturally significant information (due to the combination of fictional and documentary narrative). The aim of the article is to identify and comment on linguistic universals and peculiar Russian (including Soviet) linguistic culture, which are realized in special forms of Russian anthroponymic appellatives in specific speech acts of address in the story. Methodologically, the article is of interdisciplinary character, because the author uses methodological tools based on the application of general scientific methods (modeling, interpretation) and specific methods (linguistic reconstruction of culture, language and culture commentary). Having analyzed the corpus of appellative words that forms a specific space of interpersonal communication in a literary text, the author highlights the features of the worldview and communicative stereotypes of the era, reconstructed in the literary text. We identify the reasons for the unproductive use of appellatives in the analyzed text by G. Yakhina, as well as the most frequently used anthroponymic units.