Foreign Fiction Research Articles

의미 네트워크(Semantic Network)를 활용한 중국 독자의 한국 여성 서사 수용 연구: 최은영 『밝은 밤』의 정동(Affect)적 접근

This study analyzes Chinese readers' rating reviews of Eunyoung Choi's Bright Night using a semantic network to explore Chinese readers' acceptance of Korean female narratives in terms of affect. Eunyoung Choi's Bright Night was ranked second overall and first in the foreign fiction category in the 2023 annual book rankings on Douban, China's largest book rating site. The novel centers on the stories of four women: a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter. The relationship between the great-grandmother, aunt, and neighboring women who lived through the Japanese occupation and the Korean War, as well as the conflict and reconciliation between grandmother, mother, and me, are important narrative devices in the novel. Affect refers to the continuous transformation of potential states inherent in the body into reality through ‘encounter’. The bodies that are encountered are not only human bodies, but also literary works such as Bright Night. The idea transformed by the encounter between bodies is affect, and the actual state is objectified in language. The analysis showed that Chinese readers were most affected by the matriarchal narratives of the four women, and the women's painful lives and internal conflicts, and the friendship and solidarity of other women to help them overcome them. Cluster analysis of the reviewed texts to identify specific emotional patterns revealed four patterns: ‘empathizing with women's suffering and pain’, ‘emotions of healing and hope for female characters’ ‘friendship and reconciliation’, ‘literary emotions of female solidarity’, and ‘heart-to-heart encounters’. This study confirms that Korean women's narratives can reach readers with different national systems and social structures and cause emotional changes, which can be extended to East Asian women's narratives.

When cinema draws its inspiration from literature: Marcello Mastroianni and his literary characters’ embodiment

It is since the dawn of cinema that the relationship between literature and cinema exists. Despite the profound transformations taking place in production and consumption, cinema continues to draw inspiration from literature. The increasingly important role that new technologies have in the production of spectacular effects has not eliminated the need to have subjects of proven effectiveness: the recourse to works of both classical and contemporary literature. One of the film careers that has crossed paths on many occasions with the major Italian and foreign fiction, contemporary and classic, through the interpretation of some of the most famous characters of those books is Marcello Mastroianni’s, great actor on the Italian theatrical and cinema scene.

Произведения Н. В. Гоголя в китайской аудитории: история переводческой деятельности и особенности изучения творчества

Introduction. The early twentieth century reforms in China gave rise to the issue of renovating fiction that profoundly influences collective consciousness. Chinese translators started actively addressing foreign fiction, including classic Russian literature. Goals. The study attempts an insight how Chinese reading audience’s interest in Russian classics — and particularly in the works of Nikolai V. Gogol — would take form and develop. Results. As for the reasons behind the Chinese translators’ appeal to Russian classical literature, the paper notes those are associated with the huge political and social changes in Russia after the October Revolution. The latter facilitated that Russian literature has firmly entered the cultural space of China, having yielded strong impacts on both readers and Chinese writers. The May Fourth Movement not only marked the beginning of a new era in the history of twentieth century China, but also served as an impetus for the development of new Chinese literature. The works of N. Gogol began to occupy a special place in this cultural space. Since 1920, when N. Gogol’s first work was published in a Chinese magazine, attention to his literary heritage has grown significantly. The translation activities of Qu Qiubai, Geng Jizhi, Ren Guangxuan, Bai Sihong, Bai Chunren and many other associates contributed to the widespread interest in N. Gogol’s works all across China. These efforts were paralleled by literary studies of the writer’s fiction techniques and style. The 1950s witnessed a ‘pause’. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, articles dedicated to N. Gogol disappeared from Chinese newspapers and magazines, but already in the 1970s publications about his works started reappearing. Since the 1990s, the research of Chinese specialists into N. Gogol’s narratives has become far more profound and diverse, and this work will continue, since Russian classical literature has had — and still does — a great influence on the development of contemporary Chinese literature.

Between Breaking Bad and Big Brother: Social Class and Television Preferences in Croatia

This article addresses TV preferences as a marker of class divisions both as a type of embodied cultural capital and as a pattern of consumption within the local and global cultural structure in Croatia. Data analysis is extracted from the survey ‘Social Stratification in Croatia: Structural and Subjective Aspects’, conducted on a nationally probabilistic sample of adult Croatian citizens. Factor analysis discovered two main dimensions of television preferences: reality spectacle and foreign fiction preferences, which were recognised as indicators of localised and globalised culture preferences. Further analysis established that these factors are also structured along the class positions of the respondents. Using multiple regression analysis, data suggest the conclusion that the working class prefers TV content in the domestic language and heavy on popular entertainment programming (soap operas, talent, and reality shows). However, the dominant class repudiate ‘lowbrow’ TV content, which highlights class divisions in the cultural field. The analysis sheds light not only on how class positions structure these preferences but also on the important role of age, gender, and music taste play in the formation of television preferences.

Engaging English Audiences in the Dubbing Experience: A Matter of Quality or Habituation?

Although dubbing has traditionally been associated with the so-called dubbing countries, the advent of digitalisation and streaming is nowadays encouraging the consumption of dubbed content across territories unaccustomed to watching foreign fiction with dubs, such as the Anglophone market. Despite the effort put into drawing in a wide and satisfied audience in these countries, an unfavourable response from some viewers has called into question the quality of English dubbed versions and the odds of forging a consolidated dubbing industry in such regions. The main aim of this article is to offer insights into how poor quality and the lack of a long professional tradition might compromise engagement and cinematic illusion and into how the lack of exposure to this mode might have a negative impact on the way the dubbed content is received and enjoyed by English users. The article also intends to discuss the many ways in which quality and habituation affect the dubbing experi­ence. This is done by exploring both the potential constraints that impair the final version and the factors that encourage an amenable attittude to this mode amongst the audience, de­spite their inexperience as dubbing consumers. The conclusions stress the need to enhance English dubbing quality at different levels and the importance of habituation to make dubbing work from a cognitive, linguistic, and prosodic standpoint.

Foreign Fictions: ‘Research’ about Ethiopian Legal Reform in a Top-Tier Academic Journal

Top tier academic journals claim to publish the most rigorous, peer reviewed research. This evidence based found therein is utilized to support decision making for sustainable development. In parallel, many journals that are published in the Global South are accused of being lower quality or disregarded as ‘predatory’. This article explores an example of a ‘foreign fiction’ written about Ethiopia and published in a top tier academic journal. The narratives and evidence from that top tier journal are contrasted with research published in Ethiopian journals. This case study shows that Ethiopian scholars have produced important research and contributed evidence, but have largely been ignored, or silenced, perpetuating foreign fictions. This is important because policy and law seeking to enable development are informed and influenced by the research produced in top tier journals. Based upon this, this article critiques assumptions about “top tier” journals as well as those about Ethiopian journals, and further about the continued colonial power imbalances that exist within knowledge production systems. This has implications for universities and scholars, which continue to privilege a particular set of journals that are largely based in the Global North and wherein contributing authors are also largely based in the Global North. The reproduction of colonial relationships within global knowledge production systems calls for much broader critical reflection about whose voices are privileged as authentic conveyors of knowledge and how these privileges are institutionalized.
 Keywords: Ethiopia; Foreign Fictions; Knowledge Production; Power; Narrative; Sustainable Development; SDGs

Современная интерпретация традиционных сказочных мотивов (на основе сюжета СУС 325 «Хитрая наука»)

The paper traces transformation of the traditional fairytale plot ATU 325 “The Magician and His Pupil” in the modern Russian fanfiction. The research material includes over 1500 fanfics based on the Russian and foreign fiction. The study uses the comparative-contrastive method. Scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that the author traces the vector of transformation of the traditional fairytale plot ATU 325 “The Magician and His Pupil”: “myth - folklore - literature - fanfiction”. The research findings are as follows: the author identifies recurrent ATU 325 motives frequently used in fanfiction, reveals specificity of their integration into textual space of modern fanfiction and concludes about ambiguous attitude of fanfiction authors towards the motive under analysis.

Reading for Translation: Assessing Italian Fiction for British Publishers (1945–1968)

ABSTRACT Based on extensive archival research, this article focuses on the key role that the professional reading of foreign fiction had in the cultural mediation that takes place within publishing houses, arguing that readers’ reports should be regarded as a form of specialised discourse on literature. It provides the first historical account of the cultural agency of the most important readers of Italian fiction working for British publishers with an interest in European literature in the period 1945–1968 (Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press and The Bodley Head), assessing their educational and professional background and its influence on their critical perspective. To do this, it analyses three examples of professional reading, which concern the use of categories such as ‘realism’ and ‘neorealism’; the consideration of genre and readability (with a focus on the translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare); and the assessment of the political subtext of Vasco Pratolini’s trilogy Una storia italiana.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

"Iz ormara na police": O odrastanju i izlasku iz ormara u hrvatskoj queer književnosti

“OUT OF THE CLOSET, ONTO THE BOOKSHELF”: ON GROWING UP AND COMING OUT IN CROATIAN QUEER LITERATURE In the contemporary Croatian queer prose, growing up is represented as a process with uncertain outcomes. Contemporary writers do not describe gay and lesbian identities as already shaped, finalized, and unquestionably different from heterosexuality. Their poetics have many predecessors, Bildungsroman, the 19th-century genre that, despite conventional epilogues, depicts youth as a period of the adventure and overturn, being the oldest one. The second important influence are foreign coming out novels (texts that describe the articulation of gay and lesbian identities in the family and community) or narratives of affirmation, and the third Yugoslav young adult prose. The publication of the Croatian queer prose has increased dramatically since the first Gay Pride in Zagreb (2002) and the Queer Zagreb festival the following year. In the short story collection Poqureene priče [The queered stories] (2004) growing up is one of the prevailing topics with eventually popularized motifs such as coming out, moving away / traveling, cultural signifiers of gay identity, and crossings of sexual orientation with gender and class. Writing in the first person is also very popular. Vladimir Stojsavljević’s oeuvre is important because the author depicts growing up in three contexts, during Yugoslavia, in the war-time, and in post-transition, and texts by Nora Verde are a novelty because she writes about queer women as belonging to lesbian community. Young authors Mirta Maslać and Viktorija Božina reveal an interesting autobiographical discourse and share a tendency towards using diverse cultural references. This paper aims to show how the encounter of local gay and lesbian culture, foreign fiction, and already present genres has shaped the current texts about queer identity that manage to avoid writing about sexuality within simplistic, binary oppositions.

Natiolectismen in misdaadfictie

Abstract Natiolectisms in crime fiction. Language variation in subtitles studied linguistic variation in a diachronic corpus of television series broadcast by the Flemish public service broadcaster (VRT). To establish whether there had been a decrease in oral standard Dutch language usage between the late 1970s and the late 2000s, they scrutinised the actors’ rendition of their scripts. They found that less Standard Dutch, but also less dialects were used in the Dutch-language fiction of the late 2000s. The latter contained more colloquial Belgian Dutch, the so-called ‘in-between’ variety (‘tussentaal’). While such sociolinguistic research into local Dutch-language fiction is highly interesting, it is also important to study linguistic variation in translated foreign fiction, as Dutch speakers are exposed a lot to such (audiovisual) translations. This article presents the results of a lexical analysis of a diachronic corpus of crime fiction subtitles (). These were broadcast by the VRT before and after their language policy changed in favour of an adherence to the Belgian, rather than the Netherlandic Dutch standard. The aim is to establish whether this resulted in an increase of Belgian Dutch lexis in their subtitles. Remarkably, in each period under scrutiny, in fact, more Netherlandic Dutch lexis was retrieved.

Образ фантомной угрозы для детей со стороны США в советском историческом кинематографе периода холодной войны

The presented study is devoted to studying the practice of constructing the image of a phantom threat to children from the side of an external enemy through historical discourse in the cinema of the USSR and the USA during the Cold War. The aim of this work is to identify common and specific features in the approaches of filmmakers of the two countries to the formation of the image of a phantom threat for children from the side of an external enemy. The research methodology is built on the basis of a combination of historical genetic, comparative and descriptive, as well as content analysis. The author comes to the conclusion that in American films the historical texture in the framework of creating the image of the “Soviet threat” was used only occasionally. For the most part, the relevant plots were included in the cinematic description of actual military conflicts (for example, the war in Afghanistan), the futurological conflict of America and the USSR, or their confrontation in line with an alternative history. Soviet filmmakers were limited in terms of positioning the "American threat" by a series of unspoken rules. For example, the violent behavior of American characters toward children was described primarily verbally. Filmmakers from the United States had more freedom in terms of visualizing violence against children and adolescents. In addition, Americans could more freely and widely disclose the topic of “crimes” attributed to the Soviet side in the context of actual military conflicts. The presence of the indicated restrictions forced Soviet filmmakers to actively turn to historical subjects. However, the specifics of the origin of the basis of the corresponding narrative, which was played by foreign fiction, largely leveled its effectiveness from a political point of view. The literary sources of Soviet films were originally created by American writers for US citizens, whereby their content was saturated with positive images of America and its inhabitants. The latter often concerned the positioning of childhood, especially in a nostalgic manner. A natural consequence of this was the erosion of the negative images promoted by filmmakers. The theoretical significance of the work lies in summarizing the image of the phantom threat to children by the United States in Soviet historical cinema of the cold war period.

Художественные тексты в контексте культурологического образования (несколько замечаний о современной восточной литературе)

This research focuses on modern foreign literature which introduces readers to the socio-cultural field and widens the outlook of future professionals. Cultural knowledge allows to embrace both the values of the past and the best achievements of the present, which contributes to the formation of a well-rounded personality. Fiction is an important component of cultural knowledge thanks to its polyfunctional nature — it is a harmonious synthesis of science, technology and art, it facilitates personal growth and self-fulfillment. There are several strategies represented in foreign fiction. The article focuses on the following aspects vividly described in the 20th century literature: self-realization, self-development, self-discovery, the identification of “the other/ another” in social dimension, the relations between the person and the family, the person and the society as well as person to person relations. The evidence is taken from Eastern literature, which is less known to Russian readers. The article features examples that, in our opinion, highlight the socio-cultural issues that concern modern student audience. The article concludes that the world of fiction shapes a citizen and a highly cultured person. It develops heuristic thinking, esthetic taste and ideals and facilitates a more effective adaptation of a university graduate in market economy. Not only fiction as a whole, but also everyday realia provide for an integrated function of fiction in the educational process. As a whole, fiction forms students’ need for self-realization and self-assertion as an individual creative agent of culture, as a definite personality.

Кириллица в системе традиций письменной культуры калмыцкого народа

The paper considers the Cyrillic-based Kalmyk writing and is timed to the 95th anniversary of its introduction into practice in 1924. The advantages of this writing are considered in the context of the centuries-old rich tradition of writing culture of the Kalmyk people. First of all, it was the common Mongolian writing with more than one and a half thousand-year history,and “Clear writing” created in the middle of the 17th century. The Kalmyks chose a new script on a Cyrillic basis, leaving their traditional national scripts for socio-cultural, political, and technical reasons. It was impossible to print on a vertical line the merged writing of letters peculiar to traditional writing systems in those years. While using Cyrillic writing, the Kalmyk people, like other peoples of our country, achieved remarkable success in the sphere of educational, cultural, and economic development. The national intelligentsia was formed. Classical works of Russian and foreign fiction, as well as works of oral folk art and new Kalmyk literature, were published in the Kalmyk language. The extensive practice of establishing and using Cyrillic-based writing by the peoples of Russia, including the Kalmyk people, proves the completeness of alphabetic characters, the possibility of combining them for the written transmission of systems of different types of languages and their structural units, as well as the universality of the Cyrillic alphabet.

Professor M. P. Kovalskyi and the Library

The purpose: the article deals with the Dnipro period scientific achievements (1965–2004) of a scientist, historian, Oles Honchar Dnipro National University professor, Mykola Pavlovych Kovalskyi. According to the analysis of document resources university library using the elements of the search engine, 12 authorʼs monographs and more than 200 scientific articles were found. 5 editions, the editorial board of which included the name of M. P. Kovalskyi were also discovered. Research methods: systemic-structural, analysis and synthesis, comparative. Main results: The readerʼs ticket stored in the scientific library allowed to reveal a range of reading interests of the historian during 30 years of work at Dnipro University. A separate direction of his legacy is a collection of books which he gathered for a long time. The total number of his library amounts to more than 12 thousand items. In 2016, about 500 copies from his private book collection were donated to the scientific library of Oles Honchar Dnipro National University by the daughter of a scientist I. M. Kovalska. The value of each copy is the presence of exlibris, seals and gift inscriptions. The collection presents scientific, popular science and fiction in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish. The scientist was interested in art, diplomacy and literary studies. The research shows the first books from the library of the Ukrainian historian, provides a thorough review of professional publications, outlines unique books on Ukrainian and foreign fiction literature. The presence of unique books, illustrated albums, devoted to national decorative arts, customs and traditions in the collection testifies to the diverse interests of the scientist. He created an integral thematic card index and gave a clear quantitative circulation of publications. These facts testify to the high bibliographic level of M. P. Kovalskyi. Conclusions: M. P. Kovalskyi made a significant contribution not only in Ukrainian history, sources study and historiography, but also in library and bibliographic field. His reading interests and the presence of a valuable book collection allow us to expand the image of the historian, scientist, a remarkable person and a real fan of libraries. Practical significance: recommended for scholars to in-depth study of the figure of a historian. Scientific novelty: for the first time the image of a historian as a reader and owner of a personal library is illuminated. Type of article: descriptive.

«Отсюда — туда»: проза Петера Розая в русских переводах и проблема культурного трансфера

The article discusses the processes and strategies of translation as an interpretation of foreign fiction written by the Austrian author Peter Rosei. The study covers a lengthy period of Rosei’s creative life (from the late 1970s to the beginning of the 2000s) and focuses on the reception of his translated writings over the span of thirty years. Rosei’s dynamic system of fiction entered the space of the Russian language, Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture as well as other highly dynamic cultural contexts. These dynamics, including the dynamic processes in the minds of those who have been constructing these images of culture, underpin our focus on the issues of cultural transfer. Today, cultural transfer is defined and substantiated as an interaction between different cultures and as a method of analysis of intercultural interpenetration (M. Espagne, I. N. Lagutina, A. I. Zherebin). The emphasis is on cultural translation, i. e. the transformation of a foreign cultural text and the re-coding of its sign system, when “something changes in the host culture, but certainly something changes in the culture that influences” (M. Espagne). The analytical part of the study is a comparative analysis of the translation strategies of the Soviet cultural era which viewed traditionalism of literary writing (translation of the compendium of avant-garde experimental fiction by Peter Rosei “From here to there”, 1982) as the ultimate value. The study also explores the interpretation approaches used by translators in the early 2000s. A special focus is on the methods and scope of translating clearly marked ethnocultural components of Rosei’s late novels into the host culture.

Features of information psychological war in translated fiction

The article raises the question of the involvement of modern foreign fiction, offered to the Russian reader in the translation into Russian, to the phenomenon of information psychological war. The conditions of selection of the material for analysis are the same as in the previous publications of the author based on the material of Russian literature (see the electronic journal “Ecology of language and communicative practice” 2015, no 2; 2016, no 1; 2017, no3,4; 2018, no 1; 2019, no 1). The method of solving the problem is linguoideological analysis for the features/symptoms of information psychological war. The dominant targets are the aggressiveness of the Russian foreign policy; the results of the Second World War; the mentality of the Russian people (traditional laziness, theft, drunkenness, physical and moral incleanliness). A natural question is whether it is necessary to translate and print, and therefore, to popularize the foreign works that form and convey a negative, namely, totally negative image of our country. There is a complete coincidence of the dominant features and the totally negative vector of evaluation in the discursive practices of information psychological war in the studied Russian and translated texts. A paradoxical situation: some modern Russian writers create no less negative image of Russia in its present and historical perspective than foreign authors: the author is ours, a stereotype is the others’

The great divide? Cultural capital as a predictor of television preferences among Croatian youth

Despite the abundance of research on television genre preferences, the role of cultural capital has so far received little attention. This research employs Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital – and related theories of cultural consumption – to argue that there is a relationship between the respondents' television preferences and embodied, objectified, and institutionalized cultural capital of their parents. Empirical data was gathered from a large survey conducted on a quota sample of third- and fourth-year high school students in six larger cities on Croatia’s Adriatic coast. In order to determine different patterns of television genre preferences, factor analysis was used, which identified two types of taste in television: domestic television spectacles and foreign fiction television. Hierarchical regression analysis was employed to establish the effects of sociodemographic variables and cultural capital of respondents and their parents. The obtained results indicate not only the role of parental cultural capital and taste but also division between global cultural cosmopolitism and cultural seclusion.

Taste, Without Distinction

The phenomenon of the unprecedented sales success of Latin American and South Asian authors from García Márquez and Allende to Rushdie and Roy has had a disproportionate impact on models of the circulation of the literatures from the periphery in core markets. Yet what if these models err in extrapolating from the Latin American and South Asian booms the assumption of a single world market, perhaps even a single international literary field? This essay questions the evenness and general applicability of Bourdieu’s theory of taste to international publishing. Casanova, Moretti and Walkowitz describe a global publishing market, but how even is it? What is the impact of more national and local dynamics? Can publishers of foreign fiction really translate symbolic capital into commercial capital in the form of sales? The archival collection of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, registering the lack of demand for vernacular fiction from Latin America and South Asia well into the 1950s and 1960s, provides a counterfactual history. In postwar American foreign lists, the pressure to domesticate was not to an international literary field, but to the very specific fissures and pressures of an American market. An author did not write for translation per se, but for translation into American English and the New York market, or into Parisian French with its attendant editorial practices. Each literary field requires its own description. We need counterintuitive literary histories where it is not the unprecedented success of García Márquez or Rushdie that needs to be explained, but rather, how they and their precursors came to be published at all. We need accounts of the production, not merely the reception, of these works. Scholars must ask which foreign market an “international” author and supporting coterie of agents, translators and publishers is writing for.

Русская тема и русские темы в зарубежной художественной литературе (опыт систематизации)

Русская тема и русские темы в зарубежной художественной литературе (опыт систематизации)