Works Of Fiction Research Articles

Fictions that don’t tell the truth

AbstractCan fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies? This article introduces two views that support a positive answer, and two that support a negative one. After examining various ways in which fictions can deceive, it concludes in favour of the view that fictional statements can mislead, but never lie.

RECYCLING SHADOWS: TOLKIEN’S INFLUENCE ON ROWLING’S COMPOSITION OF VOLDEMORT AND THE DEMENTORS

The shadow archetype is one of the most productive in fiction, where it usually manifests through personifications, characters which embody its principles of haunting, permanent returning, questioning, and debt: the villains and the creatures of the dark. The embodiment of the shadow is a compositional procedure that, in the case of Fantasy worlds, works by the means of creatively recycling and refiguring elements of previous personifications of the shadow. Thus, departing from a short theoretical consideration on Fantasy as the branch of the Fantastic that is the best place for dealing with the shadow archetype, we intend to demonstrate, as an example on how the two procedures of personification of the shadow work in fiction, the influence of Tolkien on J. K. Rowling’s composition of the villain Voldemort and the Dementors in her Harry Potter series.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome: A Pluriversal Narrative to Decolonise the Past and Confront Universal Eurocentrism

The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a convoluted journey through time and space. At once a work of science fiction, a medical mystery, and a history of malaria research, this hybrid novel sets into rivalry India’s old-time wisdom and spirituality against Western science and English colonial presumptuousness, thus advocating transmodernity and the pluriversality put forward by critics such as Rosa María Rodriguez Magda, Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo, among others. This paper will analyse the way in which this novel denies the existence of a universal scientific method by deconstructing the certainties of an exclusively rationalist discourse whose discoveries have often gone hand in hand with exploitation, unequal power relations and colonization. Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance and Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas about the ethics of silence and knowledge will also be used to analyse silence as an alternative epistemological framework through which the dominant discourse can be undermined and the subaltern heard, and as a means to make amends for the injustices of the past by reclaiming the histories written by those who were made ‘others’ by the English imperial power.

ЛИНГВОДИДАКТИЧЕСКИЕ ОСНОВЫ ВОСПРИЯТИЯ СКАЗОК МЛАДШИМИ ШКОЛЬНИКАМИ

The Linguistic and Didactic Foundations of the Perception of Fairy Tales by Younger Schoolchildren Summary The article reveals the linguistic and didactic features of the perception of a fairy tale by younger schoolchildren, the stages of perception of a literary work by children of primary school age. Russian folk tale is considered for the first time in the Azerbaijani primary school as an educational material, which causes the accumulation of informative and valuable information on Russian studies in the communicative activities of students in Russian. The author notes that fiction is the main means of developing a child's personality. It is possible to reveal the rich potential of works of fiction, provided that the work is fully perceived. One of the tasks of an elementary school teacher is to create conditions for a child to perceive an artwork emotionally, correctly. The analysis of the article leads to the conclusion that fiction is one of the means of forming a common human culture. Key words: linguodidactic basis, undergoes processing, native speaker, authentic texts

One Territory, Two Worlds

This paper analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans is a literary work that critiques and examines colonial structures and their consequences: Ishiguro criticizes the colonization of Shanghai by showing the inherent power imbalance between the native population and the colonizers, the chaos and lawlessness outside of the Settlement as opposed to within, and the general understanding of Shanghai and the Settlement held by characters from Britain. As a work of historical fiction, the novel serves to explore a particular society at a particular point in time, and therefore, must be analyzed with close consideration to the historical period and context in which the novel is set. At the same time, this paper concludes, Ishiguro’s observations and critiques are highly relevant in today’s society.

"To the Manor Born"

Matthew Speiser’s To The Manor Born is bold, but bold by the attempt alone. Speiser’s history where the American Civil War never ends is a work of fiction whose high-water mark is its own synopsis. Of course, same as anything in the world of imagination, Speiser’s America could have conceivably existed.

Interview: A Short Story

An Interviewer interviews “many characters,” initiating a conversation concerning characters in fiction, a concept introduced by Walt Whitman in Song of Myself of containing multitudes, the concept of self-identity. “Many Characters” is the name of one of those being interviewed, a character claiming to be many characters. We encounter characters from other works of fiction, such as Alice and the hookah-smoking Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. This leads us to encountering Lewis Carroll. We also encounter ancient writers, specifically Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, who themselves created many characters, and a character named Hineni, a Hebrew word meaning “Here I am,” who links the name Hineni to the 17 times the word hineni appears in the Torah, and to Leonard Cohen’s use of the word in his song, “You Want it Darker.” We also encounter Psychoanalyst and Forbidding Superego. Eventually, we meet an incarnation of William Shakespeare called “Willie the Shake.” How do characters exist? Storytellers channel them.

Artemio Cruz and the Question of Choice

Carlos Fuentes’s 1962 novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz is a fundamental work in twentieth century fiction. The theme of choice permeates and complicates the novel’s plot. Behind these choices is what appears to be a win-or-lose mentality, as Artemio seems to perceive the world as divided between chingones and chingados. This dichotomy is one that echoes the discourse of Mexican intellectual, writer, and diplomat Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in his well-known book on Mexican identity, El laberinto de la soledad (1950). Building on previous criticism that studies the intertextual relationship between the two works, this paper argues that Fuentes’s protagonist embodies Paz’s theoretical description of un hijo de la Chingada, simultaneously paying tribute to Paz’s book while also questioning and problematizing its dichotomous thinking. Artemio’s individuality, highlighted by the novel’s opening (“Yo despierto…”) and its closing (“moriré”), is something often overlooked by criticism that views Artemio Cruz as a trope, more than a man. Throughout the novel Artemio encounters doubles of himself that force moments of reflection. These doubles haunt him on his deathbed, creating a crisis of conscience that complicates the reader’s interpretation of Cruz as protagonist. To presume that Artemio Cruz is merely a literary manifestation of Paz’s theory is to overlook the craftsmanship behind his construction as a complex character who reflects on how the choices he has made have shaped his life and legacy.

The evolution of the author—authorship and speculative worldbuilding in Johannes Heldén’s Evolution

ABSTRACT This article analyses the digital work Evolution, designed to generate poetry mimicking its creator, Johannes Heldén. Created together with programmer Håkan Jonson, Evolution is, according to its abstract, made to replace the human author Heldén, making him redundant. The aim of this article is to examine how Evolution problematises the role of the author and the creative process in a current and future technological landscape. While previous research has focused primarily on medial and technical aspects of the work, this article employs an analysis of the conceptual aspects and focuses on the role of Evolution’s abstract in relation to the generative poetry and how the work navigates the dichotomies analogue/digital, as well as text/paratext. Through the lens of narratology, the article argues that Evolution engages in speculative worldbuilding, especially through the introduction of thought experiments in the abstract. Consequently, Evolution becomes a work of science fiction, posing rhetorical questions that impel the reader to think about the role of artificial intelligence in creativity.

Anti-marxist polemics in Mykola Rudenko’s novel-treatise “Formula of the Sun”

The research conducted by the Sumy branch of the Serhii Podolynskyi Scientific Society delves into the distinctive artistic legacy of the renowned Ukrainian writer Mykola Rudenko. This study sheds light on Rudenko's integration of ideas from the Ukrainian school of physical economy, which stood in stark contrast to Karl Marx's political economy. Mykola Rudenko, known for his literary prowess, often employed his fictional works to propagate his scientific, economic, and philosophical theories. The treatise “Formula of the Sun”, despite its limited recognition in 20th-century Ukrainian literature, holds a distinct place deserving comprehensive exploration. This novel not only showcases Rudenko's literary craftsmanship but also provides a platform for dissecting the literary discourse of the time. Through a combination of structural, narrative, and polemical elements, Rudenko articulates his worldview within the framework of physical economy. This study endeavors to elucidate the evolution of physical economy as a counterbalance to Marxian economics and to analyze its impact on Rudenko's prose, as evidenced by “Formula of the Sun”. Employing methodologies ranging from analysis and synthesis to a systematic and hermeneutic approach, the research aims to unravel the intricate interplay between literature and economic theory in Rudenko's work.

Social consciousness in the fictional works of Prem Chand

Prem Chand is called the god of fictional stories. The aspect of social consciousness is vivid in his writings. He peeps into society with deep insight and describes the social & psychological conditions of his characters. The commonness is his central characters. He was associated with progressive movement and wrote under its agenda. His writings are a silent protest against imperialism, colonialism, feudal system and slavery of every kind. His stories pose as a unique blend of idealism & realism. His story “Kaffan” (کفن) & Jarmana (جریمانہ) are exemplary in depicting social consciousness. He was a great preacher of harmony & peace in the society. His fictional writings show great advocacy in creating love, tolerance and harmony among Muslims & Hindus. In fact he was a writer of every deprived human being.

The Rhetoric of Indirect Translation: Out from the Shadows

This article seeks to contribute to the growing literature on indirect translation by exploring the phenomenon in the context of twentieth and twenty-first-century Russian-English translation flows. In addition to reflecting transnational networks and the cultural (and linguistic) asymmetries embedded therein, indirect translation became a defining other of "modern" translation practice, specifically, what Gideon Toury describes as the norm of directness. The first part of the paper investigates the cultural politics of relay translation in reference to two case studies: the one involving the first English translation of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's Voskresshie bogi [Resurrected Gods], published in the early twentieth century, with Russian as the source language, and the other concerns the first English translation of Georgian dissident Levan Berzenishvili's Gulag memoir Sacred Darkness, with Russian as the intermediary language, published in the early twenty-first century. Both case studies raise the question of the relationship between relay translation and textual integrity while underscoring the persistence of the phenomenon. The second part of the paper explores the rhetoric of indirect translation in Soviet culture, as represented in theoretical works, intelligentsia discourse and works of trans-fiction, that is, fictional works featuring translators and translation. While directness claims in the pre-World War II period were used to define Soviet translation practice as superior to pre-Soviet practice, those claims were deployed in the post-War period to critique the Soviet literary bureaucracy and to expose the hypocrisy behind the official policy of "Friendship of Peoples."

Fictional characterization through repair, membership categorization, and attribute ascription

Abstract Linguistics and discourse studies have recently started treating fictional interactions as data worth analyzing in their own right, rather than incomplete representations of naturally occurring conversations. Aligning with advances in research on the use of language in fiction, this study addresses the functions of characters’ conversational practices in fictional works from an interactional perspective. By applying conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to a sitcom series, this study explores how characters’ repair operation, membership categorization, and attribute ascription contribute to the construction and revelation of those characters (i.e., fictional characterization). Three patterns are illustrated: (1) a character engages in implicit categorization to account for trouble after operating repair; (2) a character’s changes of turn design in multiple repair operations show the character’s orientation toward an attribute of the other character; and (3) a character gives up repair operation and shows an orientation toward other characters’ attributes through implying negative assessment of them. The findings suggest that conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis are beneficial for research on fictional characterization. This study also discusses the reflexive and mutually constitutive relationship between the interactional participants’ characters and their conversational practices.

Mouvance and the art of fiction in performance in manuscripts of a Demotic Egyptian novella

Substantial textual variation found across manuscripts of a Demotic Egyptian novella, The prebend of Amun, bears upon closer examination the features of mouvance, a kind of textual impermanence found in written versions of literature for which performance contexts are not only ongoing but are constitutive of their very textual shape. Alongside this mouvance, manuscripts of this work also maintain a high level of similarity and coherence down to the phrasal and word level. I argue that this unique combination of sameness and mouvance points to the desire of performers who possessed libretto-like copies of The prebend of Amun to tweak their texts in order to match their understanding of this work of prose fiction.

The Frontiers of Collective Memory in Works of Refik Halid Karay

The aim of this article is to show that the economic, political, social and cultural traumas created by the historical turning points that the Ottoman Empire witnessed in the last period determined the memories of late Ottoman and early Republican writers. The article focuses on collective memory in the works of exiled author Refik Halid Karay who lived between 1888 and 1965. His memory was built with traumas, exiles, wars, economic and cultural transformations which form his dissident stance. He primarily uses his memory to show his stance in his novels and articles. His witness provides a framework to construct a memory of the era. Refik Halid, even in romance and adventure novels, persistently makes reference to critical moments of the historical change. The historic events witnessed by the author pervade the fictional narrative. These events shed light on wars, illnesses, shifts in population, the emergence of new social classes due to economic disparities, and socio-cultural transformations. The research question of this article is what the main source of Refik Halid Karay's novels is. In all his works of fiction and non-fiction, it is seen that the most important source of his literature is memory. This memory, however, is drawn not within individual but within collective boundaries.

Analysis of the Place of Ethical Behavior in the Fictional Works of Yaqub Yad Ali ased on the Doctrine of Jacques Marie Émile Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was one of the thinkers who reread the category of ethics based on psychoanalytical doctrine. He considered adherence to the sign of desire as a criterion for ethical behavior. In this research, we have tried to evaluate the actions of the characters in Yaqoub Yad Ali's fictional works according to the psychoanalytic teachings of Lacan. Based on this, it is necessary to explain the relationship between the place of desire as a psychological matter and ethic. One of the goals of the authors in this research is to explain the distinction between the desire of the subject and The Other as an irreconcilable divergence. In this regard, the question has been answered that based on Lakan's psychoanalytical teachings, which one of Yad Ali's fictional characters had an ethical action, and which one had an immoral action? This research has been done by qualitative analysis based on the teachings of Lacan and the collection of fiction works of Yaqub Yad Ali. The findings of the research show that the establishment of the desire suppression mechanism causes the subject to encounter the phenomenon of loss or deprivation. The subject identifies the signifier of The Other’s desire as the signifier of his desire and fulfills it. According to Lakan, the ethical behavior becomes possible when the subject always remains faithful to the signifier of his true desire. The ethical subject in Lakan's view is the one who, in the face of the law, always transgresses it through the sign of joesance

Human fragility and its environment in the literary production of Albert Camus

The article sheds light on one of the intellectual and fundamental issues of the French writer Albert Camus, who tried to determine how to confront human fragility in various circumstances such as wars, misery, and indifference to the suffering of others, and the disasters experienced by human societies. Albert Camus takes us on a journey through his creative imagination and important literary works to search for how modern man can escape from his crises. This article is based on dealing with human fragility and the world in which he lives in a number of his theatrical and fictional works, the following: Misunderstanding (Malentendu), Caligula (Caligula), and La Peste (The Plague). The article consisted of several axes for the purpose of answering a number of questions that revolved around ways to rid man of the causes of his weakness and fragility in the ordeals he is exposed to. The fragility of the human situation and ways to address it, according to Camus' philosophical vision, which is based on absurdity and rebellion.

Petani Tembakau dalam Genduk sebagai Realitas Sosial: Tinjauan Sosiologi Sastra

Genduk which was published in mid-2016 is a literary work that presents the life story of the tobacco farming community on the slopes of Mount Sindoro. The presence of tobacco farmers in Genduk implies a reality of social phenomena that occur in society, especially on the slopes of Mount Sindoro, Temanggung, Central Java. For this reason, this study was structured with the aim of analyzing the existence of tobacco farmers in Genduk as a social reality through a sociological review of literature. This study uses a qualitative descriptive research method that focuses on the sociology of literature approach through Wellek and Warren's sociology combined with the concept of social reality. The results of the study show that the tobacco farmers in Genduk are not mere works of fiction, but instead Genduk is the bearer of the "message" conveyed by the author about the life story of tobacco farmers on the slopes of Mount Sindoro. The social reality conveyed by the author is known to refer to objective reality, as a result of the author's thought on the experience he has gone through as a native of Temanggung, Central Java, who also has a life story on the slopes of Mount Sindoro. Therefore it can be concluded that the tobacco farmers in Genduk are a social reality resulting from the thought of reality combined with social phenomena, which refers to the essence of humanity.

Interethnic Contacts in Yugra and Christmas Stories of the Turn of the 19th – 20th Centuries

Ethnic stereotypes largely determine the actions of an individual during his contacts with strangers – representatives of a different culture. At the same time, these actions, like stereotypes, are not permanent. The objective of the paper is to study the evolution of the attitude to the Yugra aborigines at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries. To achieve it, it is necessary to address the local sociocultural realities. Information about them is reflected in various historical and ethnographic sources, which, in particular, can include some works of fiction. A special place belongs to the genre of Christmas (Yuletide) stories, which specifics are usually studied by literary scholars. At the same time, provincial literature often contains information about the perception of aborigines by the Russian population. The specifics of the study required the use of an interdisciplinary approach, in which the theoretical developments of literary criticism complement historical and ethnographic methods. The results obtained indicate an ambivalent attitude to interethnic contacts with the peoples of the North in Russian culture. Images of the aborigines were associated with potential threats from another world. And, at the same time, they acted as victims of deception, violence and rejection by bearers of genuine Christian virtues. In addition, there was a noticeable difference in value judgments between folk and official culture. Folk culture tended towards stability, repetition and cyclical nature. On the contrary, the official culture with its European rationalism, was oriented towards the values of progress. Christmas stories by peripheral writers complemented by ethnic flavor were the evidence of something new in the public consciousness. At the regional level, the importance of interethnic communication and ethnic tolerance increased. The disparate components of Russian culture gradually came closer together, although these processes were not yet completed. Only further consideration of literary tests can help in understanding the contradictions of the past.

Shadow Lives: Disrupting Gender Patterns in Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle and Maeve Brennan’s The Visitor

The decades that followed Irish independence witnessed a doubling down of efforts to reinforce established gender roles and conservative systems of power in the fledgling state. The tensions that emerged between the cosmopolitanism outside of Ireland and the increasingly isolationist policies within found suitable expression in the contradictory treatment of Kate O’Brien’s work, lauded outside of Ireland, yet subjected at home to the stringent censorship laws that saw both Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941) banned upon publication. While, across the Atlantic, Maeve Brennan, then at the very outset of her career, was undergoing a form of self–censorship writing her first extended work, later to be published as The Visitor (2000). In the mid-twentieth century, Brennan and O’Brien explored depictions of women living on the margins of normative domestic life, beyond the institutions of marriage and motherhood. And in this, they paved the way for the radical cultural and spatial re-formations that would signal a new Ireland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this essay, I consider Kate O’Brien’s novel Mary Lavelle (1936), alongside recently uncovered drafts of Brennan’s roughly contemporaneous novella, as a challenge to the patriarchal hegemony that emerged in the newly conceived Free State. And I suggest that in drafting her first extended work of fiction, Brennan was conscious of the proscriptions that O’Brien had fallen foul of in Ireland.