Self In Fiction Research Articles

Wilhelmina Wittigschlager’s Minna: The Portrait of a Dazzling Jewish Feminist, Anarchist, and Nihilist

Abstract Wilhelmina Wittigschlager’s novel, Minna: Wife of the Young Rabbi, published in 1905, serves as a case in point for characterizing a young audacious Jewish female protagonist who, against all odds, by breaking societal conventions and exercising a strong will and remarkable determination, attains individual freedom and struggles for political and social justice This study has yielded some important insights regarding the key role Minna’s multiple racial, religious, and national identities play in the construction of her fictional self. By examining the cultural, historical, and societal influences upon Wittigschlager, as she was in the process of writing the novel, this paper aims at showing how the fictional portrayal of a Jewish defiant female protagonist is interlaced with the factual lifestyles, culture, and representations of some actual contemporary female rebels such as Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, and Hesya Gelfman Minna’s Jewishness serves as the central point of her characterization, while the exploration of the pertinent socio-historical, cultural, political, and economic aspects outlines the environment in which her character was conceived

Fanning Out Possibilities: Dung Kai-cheung and the Multiplicities of Time

Hong Kong has brought to world literature some of the most prolific and best-loved fiction writers in modern Chinese history. Dung Kai-cheung is one of them — a Hong Kong-based writer who has found the city to be a constant source of inspiration. This article discusses the significance of multiplicity in Dung’s fictional representation of Hong Kong (“the V-City”), focusing on his 2007 novel Histories of Time: The Luster of Mute Porcelain. In this novel, Dung explores the narrative possibility of perceiving Hong Kong as a multi-historical space through the lens of multiplying temporalities. I have coined the term “V-shaped time” to refer to this multiplication of characters and archaeology of ideas. Time, in Dung’s work, fans out with multiple possibilities of individual and collective experiences in history, with mirrored Vs resembling an hourglass. In this stratified narrative, characters create their fictional selves in their own writing. Identifying the creative self as a literary architect, Dung’s fictional writing challenges the reader to rethink a local history that has been marginalized in the linear narrative of colonial modernity.

Land Lyricism and the Homodiegetic Narrative Register

The homodiegetic narrator, emphasizing in his narrative emotional feelings of great sensitivity, often shows predispositions to lyricism. The source of this lyricism is located in the so-called original, artistic self, which works as a source of emotional irradiation that resonates in the person of the author. He, in turn, creates in the work, under the aspect of a fictional identity, a discursive instance, the narrator, following a human model, most often, his model. If the author himself as a person is marked by emotional exuberance, has inclinations towards the predominantly affective assessment of reality, then, mainly, his fictional self will be endowed with an emotional-psychological structure similar to his, so he will have a lyrical identity. And lyricism, intrinsic to the actual identity of the author, is called land. The article comprises some essential theses about the nature of land lyricism and its manifestations in the works written by M. Sadoveanu, L. Blaga, Z. Stancu

Perception/Deception: Fictional Selves and the Peculiarly Digital Phenomenon of Catfishing

Abstract Catfishing is a peculiar digital phenomenon that involves a relationship using a fictional online persona. What distinguishes catfishing from other forms of digital production that deploy ‘misleading’ information or impersonation is that although this phenomenon might include such strategies, it is often employed for romantic scams. This paper looks at the alternative forms of intimacy afforded by digital platforms with their particular set of tools, especially in the context of digital cultures in India. By using catfishing as a lens to read intimacy in the digital, this study looks at unexpected possibilities of the digital as a mediatized space that in turn generates new types of relationalities.

The Human Geometry of Deathscapes and Homes in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock

In her semi-autobiographical collection, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Alice Munro claims to portray the history of her ancestors by traveling through time and space and putting her fictional self at the centre of the narrative. This paper explores a set of complex relationships between space, place, and identity formation with the help of various spatial trajectories. At the thematic and structural centre of the narrative there are two recurring spatial trajectories that most commonly manifest themselves in the form of deathscapes and homes. This paper will map the different deathscapes and homes in relation to their physical locations in Scotland, the United States, and Canada, in the timeframe of the past 400 years, but more importantly in the context of their fictional meaning and the formative role they play in the protagonist’s self-quest.

The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Return of the Real

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

Co-animation and the Multimodal Management of Contextualisation Problems when Jointly ‘Doing Being’ Others

In everyday interaction, participants speak on their own behalf but may temporarily speak as or on behalf of a figure (i.e. past or fictional self, others or objects). This practice of ‘animation’ can be continued or extended by co-participants in responsive position, resulting in co-animation (Cantarutti, 2020) of the same figure. Animation relies on the successful ascription of roles, participation framework shifts and projected stances to either the here-and-now of interaction or the there-and-then of animated content. In turn, the recognition of a response as a co-animation requires the creation of similarity between animated contributions. Through a multimodal interactional linguistic analysis of 89 cases of co-animation, this paper discusses how participants jointly solve these interactional contextualisation ‘problems’ smoothly through multimodal gestalts of lexico-grammatical, prosodic and gestural detail.

Marital Realism: Beauty and Pettiness inMiddlemarch

Marital Realism: Beauty and Pettiness in<i>Middlemarch</i>

Intercultural Dialogue, Diaspora, and the Divided Self in Nasrallah's Canadian Fiction (2004)

This article looks at the second part of Dimitri Nasrallah's novelBlackbodying(2004), which takes the form of an embedded novella, “Canadian Fiction.” This novella explores how an immigrant's traumatic diasporic experience silences intercultural dialogue in an inhospitable Toronto. Drawing on the conceptual framework of internalization, this study first examines the stigmatizing condition of the immigrant in exile, which projects a whimsical obsession with Heidi, a fictional woman, as a nostalgic object of desire. Second, the novella underpins the loss of real-life dialogue that disfigures Sameer's genuine pursuit of social integration. This study, therefore, argues that the loss of the ideal not only traps immigrants in a never-ending chase but also threatens their very capacity to recreate third space realities. Third, the study negates the often-romanticized meta-narrative of successful immigrants living in welcoming cities.

3·1운동과 영어(囹圄)의 시간 -1920년대 소설에 나타난 자아와 정치

3·1운동과 영어(囹圄)의 시간 -1920년대 소설에 나타난 자아와 정치

Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography by Heidi L. Pennington

Reviewed by: Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography by Heidi L. Pennington Anne Reus (bio) Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography Heidi L. Pennington U of Missouri P, 2018, 240 pp. ISBN 978-0826221575, $50.00 hardcover. Heidi Pennington's Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography begins with a challenge to our understanding of identity. The book's central tenet is that identity creation in the real world uses the same cognitive and narrative processes as those used by readers of works of fiction. Consequently, Pennington argues, fictional autobiographies can be used to investigate the strategies we use to become real to ourselves and others: readers of fictional autobiographies occupy a doubled reading stance where "the experience of seeming to discover the genuine identity of the main character through the text coexists with the readerly awareness that this character's identity has no real referent to be discovered" (6). Pennington's most notable deviation from other theories of (fictional) autobiography lies in proposing that readers will be focusing on the fictional character as both subject and narrator of the text, leaving the author outside the scope of her argument. The introduction and first chapter offer a comprehensive account of the fictional autobiography as a genre: drawing on a great number of secondary sources, Pennington demarcates its properties and peculiarities against the related subgenres of (realist) novels and autobiography, and traces its development from the early novels of Daniel Defoe to its culmination in the Victorian period. That the twentieth century and the rise of Modernism's often semi-fictional New Biography are outside the scope of this discussion is perfectly understandable, but nevertheless a slight disappointment. Given Pennington's thorough examination of the subject, a brief comment on how these future developments relate to their Victorian predecessors would have been a valuable and interesting addition to this otherwise comprehensive overview. A particular strength of her discussion lies in the detailed attention she pays to the shifting constructions of the self in a variety of fictional and factual texts. Pennington finds a tension at the heart of Victorian identity, which pits an assumedly stable and permanent interior self against the necessity to socially constitute it—a process which her study of the fictional autobiography aims to illuminate. Bringing together theorists ranging from Lejeune and Iser to Lisa Zunshine (proponent of the theory of mind approach to literature), Pennington offers a useful discussion of truth, referentiality, and the reading process as she substantiates her claim that these processes function identically for real [End Page 430] and fictional selves. Unfortunately, the reader's enjoyment of this insightful analysis is slightly hampered by the book's dense and complex style. Additionally, at times Pennington's own voice threatens to be lost amongst the copious amounts of criticism she draws on. The subsequent three chapters offer a more concrete demonstration of the communal identity-building process at the heart of fictional autobiography, and focus on the narrator-protagonists of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Villette. Pennington defends her textual selection with the iconic statuses of Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens. As generally accepted representatives of Victorian literature and familiar cultural touchstones, they allow her argument to be more accessible to a wider, non-Victorianist readership. Additionally, one might argue that the doubled reading stance demanded of the reader leads to a slightly wider focus on four fictional narrators rather than two real-world authors. However, especially when compared to the breadth of Pennington's use of secondary literature, this very narrow focus on just four texts published between 1847 and 1853 raises some questions for the more historicist-minded amongst us. Most obviously, this limited selection suggests a monolithic Victorian period and fails to address the changing literary and cultural norms of the fin de siècle, for instance. It also suggests a very conservative Victorian canon: much Victorian biography was ephemeral and dealt with obscure lives, as works like Juliette Atkinson's Victorian Biography Reconsidered and Alison Booth's study of collective biography have shown, and a perspective on the existence and popularity of fictional autobiographies outside of our Victorian canon would have offered an intriguing addition to their...

Conflict between Self and Society in Hemingway's Short Fiction

Conflict between Self and Society in Hemingway's Short Fiction

American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55: The Politics of Enchantment

American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55: The Politics of Enchantment

The Fictional Selves of A Moveable Feast

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways Ernest Hemingway's memoir responds to, ventriloquizes, and finally revises Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. A Moveable Feast, much like Autobiography, dramatizes its author's contradictory impulses for both self-promotion and self-effacement. A Moveable Feast is in this way a kind of pentimento, where the “I” is both obscured by and visible through layers of otherness.

Writing Amélie-the-Writer: Nothomb's Autofictional Quest for Jouissance

In many of Amélie Nothomb's autofictional novels, the final step toward regaining the jouissance of her lost childhood is the development of the character Amélie-the-writer. Nothomb depicts in multiple accounts her character Amélie's coming to writing, a process that mirrors her nostalgia for the tube-like identity of her prelinguistic self and her perceived divinity during her childhood in Japan, as well as her desire to return to the womb. This article considers first the characteristics that are associated with Amélie's childhood, her sense of a divine and mythic self, secondly the various scenes in Nothomb's autofictional novels in which the narrator Amélie experiences a moment of death and rebirth through violence at sea, and, finally, how the character Amélie achieves, to some extent, the desired return to the ideal of childhood through the creation of a fictional self in her writing.

The Idiosyncratic Narrator in␣Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina

One of the key components of Javier Cercas’s novel Soldados de Salamina (2001) is its unreliable narrator, whose name is also Javier Cercas. This article proposes that we need to take a closer look at the psychology of this character as it is delineated in the text, not only because he turns out to be a more complex individual than is usually recognized, but also because his particular psychology has a significant bearing on the nature of his narratorial unreliability and how it manifests itself. Several categories of personality traits are identified: self-deprecating; libidinous/indiscreet; opinionated; superior; punctilious; over-precise; and error-prone, and then each is illustrated and analyzed in turn. Having established this psychological profile, of an idiosyncratic, quirky, and inconsistent individual with several internally contradictory features, we can contrast it with the various pronouncements made by the real Cercas about his fictional self, determine how these traits interact with the notion of the “relato real” favored by the narrator, and appreciate how, ultimately, this profile contributes substantially to the sense of contingency and undecidability that permeate the novel.

BONNIE LATIMER. Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson: The Novel Individual.

BONNIE LATIMER. Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson: The Novel Individual.

Appetites and consumption: designing the self in Jenefer Shute's fiction

The common denominator in Jenefer Shute's four novels is their female characters' concern with the construction of a meaningful sense of identity. Although every Shute protagonist seems to be informed by a similar existential ethos, the scope of this essay is limited to Life-Size and User I.D. for they significantly engage in two different yet related explorations of the intricate connections between corporeality and the female self: anorexia nervosa on the one hand, consumerism and cosmetics on the other. Drawing on Dominick LaCapra's notion of structural trauma and on approaches to the female body like those expounded by Julia Kristeva and Susan Bordo among others, my main contention is that the above-mentioned novels expose the dangers of the culture-induced rejection of the female body as a requisite for achieving a satisfactory sense of self, while unraveling the search for the meaning of one's life as an ongoing process inherent to human existence.

Does Autobiography Matter?: Fictions of the Self in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project

In this article, I examine Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon’s relationship to and intervention in life-writing. Hemon’s fiction provides rich terrain for exploring the key shifts and obstacles facing the genre(s) at present by crossing national as well as aesthetic borders. In doing so, I trace his first autobiographical gestures in his earlier fiction against his recent insistence that his stories are “antibio graphical” since they are the very “antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me” – thus, an alternate, unrestrained space in which Hemon can flesh out multiple fictional selves. With his novel, The Lazarus Project, he delivers, in essence, a fictional biography on two levels: a main narrator (Brik) who enacts the author’s own exodus but also traces and retells an immigrant stranger’s past (Lazarus) in order to work through his present conflicts, anger and sadness. The novel’s tensions between biography, autobiography and photography emerge from what Hemon calls a “conditional Americanness” that has overtaken the American Dream. Hemon employs photographic imagery not only to refute given notions of history and archive but also to craft a narrative imagination that builds on late German writer W. G. Sebald’s own transgressions within (auto)biographical writing, yet targets and questions more American and cross-cultural identity categories.

Fictions of the Studio

Fictions of the Studio