Works Of Fiction Research Articles

Archaism, “Elegant Paraphrase,” and the Chinese Translation of Three Modern Japanese Novels

ABSTRACT The article examines the use of archaization as a strategy of aesthetic translation in rendering modern Japanese fiction into Chinese. The “classical” style, which resurged at the end of the twentieth century after decades of active championing of the vernacular in China, has been deployed in domesticating major Japanese fictional works originally written in quite different registers. Through close textual analyses of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s “Portrait of Shunkin (1933),” Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country (1935–1947), and Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian Wood (1987), this article shows how the inclusion of elements from the literary language significantly reshapes the source texts for the Chinese audience and how attempts were made to justify these stylistic deviations. In reading these cases against the belles infidèles tradition in seventeenth-century France and contemporary translation theories that favor foreignization, one sees the underlying ideology that led to the preference for “elegant paraphrase” in the late twentieth-century China.

The (in) Visible Father in Moroccan Women’s Writings

Postcolonial Moroccan women's writings significantly contribute to the re-evaluation of the father-figure. Their narratives reflect a constant battle to challenge patriarchal structures and establish a democratic "imagined community" where women are recognized and celebrated. The female voice rises, and the dominant father is reduced to invisibility as these writers assert their presence and subvert traditional gender roles. This study aims to explore how Moroccan women writers depict the father-figure in their polemical and fictional works. It scrutinizes how they have effectively portrayed the father as a formidable force challenging emancipation. The paper also examines the different manifestations of the father-figure and the various relationships these women writers establish with this pivotal element in their narratives. The findings indicate that these writers ultimately reduce the father-figure to invisibility as they appropriate narratives, feminize language, and celebrate their bodies, breaking free from the patriarchal paradigm.

A Postmodern Psychoanalytic Critique of Narrative Disruptions and Subversions in Dalit and Post-apocalyptic Narratives: A Comparative Study

This research study investigates narrative disruptions and subversions in Dalit and post-apocalyptic literature using a postmodern psychoanalytic methodology. Drawing on the concepts of Jacques Lacan and Homi K. Bhabha, the research argues that these literary genres use language and plot to subvert and disrupt dominant power structures, social hierarchies and hegemonic discourses. The study examines a few works of Dalit and post-apocalyptic fiction to show how both genres use narrative methods such as fragmentation, irony, parody and subversion to question established standards of representation and disclose the traumas and disjunctions of the oppressed. The voice of the oppressed is explicit through the analysis of the selected texts.

“I Heard You Went to Nam”: Home, Hospitality, and Legitimated Violence in Percival Everett’s Walk Me to the Distance

Historian Daniel S. Luck has noted in Selma to Saigon that “the civil rights movement and the debates over the Vietnam War were at the center of the turbulence of the 1960s” (1). While true, one also recognizes that the afterlives of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War are momentous historical events with which America continues to contend. Several African American writers of the post-civil rights/post-Vietnam era, including Percival Everett, have written works of fiction that continue to grapple with the afterlives of these cataclysmic historical events. Set in the American West, Everett’s 1985 novel Walk Me to the Distance finds its protagonist, David Larsen, a returning Vietnam veteran, at loose ends. David winds up stranded in a small, remote town, Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he eventually decides to stay. His decision to settle in the West is as much influenced by his romanticization of life on the American Frontier as it is with his disgust for a rapidly changing country where he feels he no longer belongs. In this essay, I argue that Walk Me to the Distance is not only an astute meditation on Frontier Mythology and Frontier justice associated with the early settlement of the American West but also that the novel reveals that these foundational myths and ideas continue to be paradigmatic features of American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Subalternitas Penganut Ahmadiyah dalam Novel Maryam Karya Okky Madasari

<p><em>The issuance of the Indonesian Ulema Council (Indonesia: Majelis Ulama Indonesia or MUI) fatwa declaring Ahmadiyya as a deviant sect and its followers as having departed from Islamic teachings has impacted the stereotypes surrounding the majority community. The novel "Maryam" is a work of fiction based on the experiences of Okky Madasari's best friend as an Ahmadiyya adherents. The novel narrates the discrimination and injustice faced by Ahmadiyya adherents and serves as a form of social criticism by the author towards the subaltern discourse surrounding Ahmadiyya adherents. This research aims to identify the various forms of subalternity experienced by Ahmadiyya adherents in the novel "Maryam". The research specifically examines the different forms of subalternity imposed by the majority group against Ahmadiyya adherents based on the concept of subalternity, which refers to the oppressed who lack access to voice their concerns developed by Spivak. The utilization of critical discourse analysis in this research helps identify and categorize the various forms of subalternity through the predetermined data corpus. The compiled data corpus is the primary source for the researcher to describe, interpret, and analyze the text, context, and discourse in the novel "Maryam". The data corpus will be analyzed through three stages: 1. Description, 2. Interpretation, and 3. Explanation. The research results indicate that the forms of subalternity depicted by the author in the novel "Maryam" include marginalization and silencing. </em></p>

Giving a Voice to the Silenced Women of Francoist Spain

During the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship that followed, women were shielded from the public eye. Their predetermined social role was that of submissive and devoted wives to their husbands as well as homemakers and childcare providers. There are few artistic works that suggest otherwise. However, during the Civil War and after, many women were in fact politically active. They occupied important positions in the resistance and were present along with the men in the trenches. Spanish graphic novels have managed to create many works of fiction based on the Civil War, mainly drawing on (auto)biographical accounts. There are so many significant works dealing with the war and Francoist repression that they represent a genre of their own. Nevertheless, the authors of these works, as well as their main protagonists, are usually men. This is true despite the fact that after the war, during the four decades of the Franco dictatorship, many women suffered from political persecution. The aim of this article is to analyze the role of women outside the domestic space as it appears in selected graphic narratives set in the period of Franco’s regime. Given the extent of the regime’s repression, these works are frequently set in the prisons around Spain where female prisoners were incarcerated and tortured. The narratives we analyze are based on real testimonies from real victims. Their individual experiences are joined together in a collective whose voice has long been silenced until recently.

“Flaming Madras handkerchiefs and calico blazing with crimson and scarlet flowers”: Antebellum World Systems in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative

Abstract Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1853–61) is the earliest known work of fiction written by a Black woman in the United States. Its distinctiveness lies in the internationalism through which the labor regimes of the southern plantation are shown to be intimately bound to global sites of colonial dispossession. Besides unpacking the entangled strands of British and American imperialisms, the author-narrator critically emulates conventions of the nineteenth-century transatlantic literary marketplace, evincing an understanding of both her embodied self and her intellectual labor as commodities in a world system built with racialized labor. Crafts’s novel revises the notion of chattel slavery as provincial, situating it instead within the Atlantic World’s expansive flows of capital and commodities. It presents not a geographically and socially demarcated institution but a plantation empire that goes far beyond the contours of the American South or, indeed, the continental United States, creating a remarkably nuanced conception of Black positionality, one informed not only by race but also by global capital. As part of a broader field-based inquiry, this article probes the affordances of thinking about antebellum Black Atlantic political subjectivity as positioned between two imperialist projects: British abolitionism and American plantocratic expansionism.

Beyond Reproduction: An Epistemological Search for a “Woman” in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape and The Island of Lost Girls

Abstract Who is a woman? In a gender-fluid typical world, the answer to this question invites a serious exposition of non-linear and non-binary possibilities. As the biological definition becomes more inclusive of fragmented identities, it becomes extremely complicated to arrive at a simplistic, innocent truth of recognition. Within the third-world dynamics, this question invites more dimensions. Set against the backdrop of mass female genocide on the occasion of perfecting cloning, Manjula Padmanabhan in her works of futuristic dystopian fiction, Escape (2015) and The Island of Lost Girls (2017), has taken up this issue of womanhood and furtively trodden to arrive at a philosophical space that allows the modernist epistemological notion of a “woman” as a well-defined category to reincarnate within a postmodern paradigm to help locate women beyond the generic nuances of reproduction and menial labour. Through analysing the selective works, this research article aims at arriving close to the model of womanhood and depicting the plurality of truth in action.

Lexico-stylistic features of the expression of indignation in a fiction and its film version: comparative analysis

The subject of the study is the lexical means of expressing indignation. The object of the study is statements with the intention of indignation. The theoretical basis of the study is the idea of perturbation as an integral part of conflict communication. The study reveals the most general patterns of changes in statements with the intention of indignation during the screening of fiction. The analysis is carried out in the comparative aspect of the statements of the characters of the literary work with the statements of the characters of the film adaptation of the literary work. The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as lexical changes in the text of a work of fiction during its film adaptation. Special attention is paid to the reasons for changing the literary text in its screen version. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time a comparative analysis of statements with the intention of indignation is carried out, the analysis is carried out in comparison of the text of fiction with its film adaptation. The following transformations were identified: verbatim preservation of lexical composition, omission of lexical units, addition of lexical units and their replacement. The main conclusions of the study are the reasons for the identified transformations, which are due to the desire of the creators of the film adaptation to have a greater emotional impact on the audience - for this reason, the characters of the film adaptation are more emotional in expressing their feelings and experiences, their statements are more categorical, and there is more speech aggression in the film adaptation. Transformations occur due to changes in the details of the content of situations. Finally, the film adaptation has more features peculiar to oral colloquial speech: there is more colloquial vocabulary in the film adaptation, and the characters speak more briefly, since this is due to the general tendency of oral colloquial speech to save speech resources.

Mage aesthetics in the fiction works of Fahad Mahmoud al-Asad

mage aesthetics in the fiction works of Fahad Mahmoud al-Asad

HASIDIC INFLUENCES IN HUNGARIAN LITERATURE AFTER 1989

The present study is an overview of the reception of literary Hasidism and its impact on Hungarian literature after 1989. Even at the end of the 1980s, traces of the anamnesis of the Jewish and Hasidic heritage of rural Eastern Hungary can be discerned in literature and public discourse. In fact, we can speak of the reception of literary Hasidism after the end of the fall of the regime and the tabuization of Jewish topics. Indeed, publishing the Hungarian translation of Martin Buber’s (1995) and Jiří Langer’s (2000) collection of Hasidic stories has influenced several works of fiction. Géza Röhrig’s prose poetics of his “imaginary Hasidic stories” resemble those of the magical realism, with their traditional mixture of imitation and imaginary elements. Langer and other Hasidic story collections inspired some dramatic works in the years following the millennium, notably the plays of Péter Kárpáti, Martin Boross and Szilárd Borbély. Szilárd Borbély’s case is special for our study, as he incorporates Hasidic motifs and reminiscences in several of his works, but mixes them with Christian elements, creating a specific, culturally hybrid bricolage-poetics.

Under the shade of colonialism: Mary Kingsley and her Travels in West Africa

Texts are not independent entities that are detached from their social, ideological, economic and cultural background. They are shaped by their authors who are affected by the discourse of their times. Thus, they make valuable sources in getting more information about social, political, and economic conditions of their periods. Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, as a part of colonial discourse, reflects the colonial world at the end of the Victorian period, which was rich in literature. This was a period during which British Imperialism reaches at its peak and leads to the saying, “the empire on which the sun never sets”. Travels in West Africa, as a travel narrative, serves the interests of the colonizing powers by describing the lives of the natives in West Africa and their lands sometimes using wry humour, unlike some other contemporary fictional works that depict a savage and brutal Africa as the dark continent. Michel Foucault’s theories regarding discourse and power have been used to understand the ideological formations and power relations in the mentioned travel account in the second half of the nineteenth century. Kingsley’s female narrative, with its representation of Africa, echoes the superiority of the white over the black through an embedded ideology in text.

Translators’ subversion of gender-biased expressions: a study of the English translation of The Three-Body Problem trilogy

ABSTRACT The Three-Body Problem trilogy, a work by Cixin Liu, won the Hugo Award, making it the first Asian science fiction work to achieve this. The English translation of this trilogy has garnered significant attention from academics, emphasizing its literary significance. However, the androcentric and gender-biased expressions in the original text, as well as the subversive translation used to mitigate them, have received little attention. This mixed methods study, based on Theo Hermans’ concept ‘modalities of normative force’ (1996), aims to examine the translation norms in this regard and discuss how these norms define the relation between source and target texts. The findings indicate that translators Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen were required to employ subversive translation norms to eliminate gender-biased content that might cause discomfort and aversion among the target audience. This highlights the importance of translators’ subjectivity in balancing divergent social and cultural contexts during the translation process.

COMPOSITION AND ARCHITECTONICS OF A WORK OF FICTION AS A CHARACTERISTIC OF THE AUTHOR’S STYLE. J. CHAUCER «THE CANTERBURY TALES»

COMPOSITION AND ARCHITECTONICS OF A WORK OF FICTION AS A CHARACTERISTIC OF THE AUTHOR’S STYLE. J. CHAUCER «THE CANTERBURY TALES»

The Female Man ve The Left Hand of Darkness Romanlarında İkinci Dalga Feminizmin Yansıması

Women science fiction writers of the 60s and 70s reflected second wave feminist ideologies in their fictional works. The distinctive narrative techniques of science fiction genre brought out various aspects of feminist ideas in different ways. Issues related to gender and sex were embedded in the elements of science fiction such as parallel universes, androgynies, intersex, mindreading, planets, aliens, and inventions. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), through these elements, raise questions about gender equality, body politics, ethics, and social constructions. These science fiction novels have themes that are closely related to the central texts debated among second wave feminists such as Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). Le Guin and Russ apply feminist theories to unconventional lives and societies, whose uniqueness or oddity helps readers think outside of the box. By presenting alternative societies, they unfold how male domination can cause sexual objectification and gender inequality, and anatomic differences in science fiction worlds creates an awareness concerning constructed gender roles. Moreover, the second wave feminists’ emphasis on sexual freedom, birth control, and marriage are illustrated through the multi-faceted outcomes of these multi-directional utopic and dystopic societies. This paper aims to bring together second wave feminist ideas and science fiction through an examination of two works, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Female Man, both of which present resisting interpretations of traditional gender issues. Unorthodox approaches to gender, the peculiar structure of the societies, and body politics will be analyzed through the narratives and elements of science fiction. Further-more, this paper will illustrate how these novels challenge conventional definitions of gender and sex in the light of second wave feminism.

John Fowles’s diaries as a creative biography of the writer

J. Fowles’s diaries illustrate the emergence of the creative career of the prominent 20th-century English writer. In Russian science, there is an opinion that Fowles’s oeuvre belongs to postmodernism. However, Fowles persistently separated himself from postmodernism. A thorough study of his diaries testifies that with all the variety of themes and images and the abundance of the techniques of artistic representation of reality, the key issue of his works was the theme of the individual gaining self-awareness as a necessary condition for achieving freedom. His diaries can be considered as a compact documentary and fictional work, as a presentation of the principles of literary development and its continuity. Fowles’s diary is a peculiar confession of a young man, his creative pursuits and doubts of self–determination in society and life. In his aesthetic principles Fowles focuses on the classical tradition of literature in the 18th–19th centuries. Continuing the tradition of Rousseau, Fowles creates a model of a man who is characterized by the cult of emotions and nature. For Fowles, the world of art is the world of spirituality. Fowles’s diaries allow us to consider the attitude of the autobiographical protagonist to important phenomena of public life. In his diaries, special attention is paid to the topics of time, memory and nature. The diary of John Fowles describes the process of the person’s psychological formation with a real chronotope, with an analytical, informative and aesthetically rich word.

An analysis of the Vodolazkin’s novel "The Aviator" in senior high school

The study of the semiotic space of literature still remains interesting and in demand, and the semiotic analysis has proved to be a rather successful method in the collection of methods of a literature teacher at school. In the article, the author proceeds from the necessity of using a complex analysis of a fiction text based to a greater extent on semiotic consideration, which includes, in addition to semiotic analysis, analysis of biographical context and partly philological analysis, in senior high schools. The author substantiates the necessity of introducing such a method in the study of modern literature, showing it on the example of complex analysis of the Evgeny Vodolazhkin’s novel "The Aviator". Thus, the aim of the study is to describe the application of the method of semiotic analysis (in combination with others) of works of fiction in the course of literature in senior high school. The relevance of the chosen topic in the novelty of the researched material: the text of the novel. Modern literature still needs a comprehensive study. The novelty of the article consists in the chosen approach to the analysis of the novel with the use of semiotic arsenal of means, as well as in the description of the application of the novel's material in the curriculum at the lessons of literature in senior high school. Using the methods of semiotic, philological and contextual analyses, the author developed a literature lesson plan for the 11th grade of a comprehensive school. This plan can be used in practice, which will allow a teacher supplement and expand the school study of modern literature by a popular new author. As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that this kind of complex analysis of modern fiction can reveal lines of interconnection and continuity with classical literature. Finding such intertextual links with both Russian classical and world literature will allow students to build a logical and coherent picture of the development of the literary process up to the modern stage. As a result of the analysis, the conclusion is made about didactic applicability of the text of the novel in the practice of teaching literature, and the novel itself is presented within the framework of the analysis as a rather complex and rich artistic work in terms of meaning, involving numerous interpretations.

Conjuring Up a King

Conjuring Up a King

An Exploration of Gender Discrimination and the Quest for Feministic Identity in Angami Culture in Easterine Kire’s A Terrible Matriarchy and Mari

Nagaland is one of the significant political divisions of India, which is geographically divided into eight states. The cultures of India's northeastern states are distinctive. Each state is discrete regarding its custom, diverse culture, and language. As such, Nagaland, too, is rich and varied in cultural heritage, housing 16 distinct tribes, each with its lingo-African language. Extending the premise of social realism, this paper critically examines the fictional works of Easterine Kire, namely Mari and A Terrible Matriarchy. It brings out the social disparity and injustices meted out to the women's community of the Angami tribes. This research paper focuses on social injustice, matriarchal oppression, and sexual molestation as prevalent in the Angami tribal culture. This work ventures to spread awareness and educate the Angami tribal community on their enshrined prerogatives and the restitution of their emancipation in northeast India while unearthing some of the squalid working conditions of the tribal labour community. The novels Mari and A Terrible Matriarchy deal with social realism, the literary mode of choice in the nineteenth century. It also vividly portrays how the Nagaland community has been plundered and smeared by battle and bloodshed.

Self-Identity: Mid-Twentieth Century Philosophical and Literary Interaction on the Experience of “I” and “Non-I”

This article substantiates the autonomy of a philosophical text in relation to a literary text. Max Frisch's novel Stiller 1 is used to illustrate the idea of the dialectical nature of the process of concealing/revealing metaphysical meaning in a work of fiction regarding the problem of self-identification and the construction of one's own “I,” which is pivotal in this novel. The philosophical idea of self-identity as the goal of the process of self-knowledge exists only as a projection; it is not feasible in life. On the contrary, the novel Stiller, considered through the prism of basic ideas of philosophy of the twentieth century, allows the reader not only to better understand the inconsistency of the process of self-knowledge, but that it involves a reconfiguration of meanings in a conversation about being, and therefore requires a philosophical revision of the essence of the problem.