Form Of Fiction Research Articles

The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse

The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse

Eóin Flannery, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

Eóin Flannery, <i>Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction</i>

“Realistic Villains”

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

Analisis Puisi “Aku Mencintaimu Diam-Diam” Karya Anwar Maulana

Poetry is a form of fiction that contains an implied meaning. Poetry can motivate writing lovers, especially readers who are interested in reading something that has meaning and meaning implied in it from a poem through analysis. Based on previous understanding or exposure, the author is interested in conducting a study, namely analyzing Anwar Maulana's poem entitled "I Love You Secretly" using an intertextual approach. The results of the analysis of the reading of this poem include heuristic reading, hermeneutic reading, matrix determination, model and meaning. The matrix in the poem "I Love You Secretly" is I love you secretly, the model is relationship and romance, the meaning of this poem is sincerity and eternal love which cannot be seen from a person's physique but seen from the sincerity of his heart. The results of the study of the intertextual relations of the two poems include the relationship between the structure of the poem, the relationship of the matrix, the relationship of the model, the relationship of meaning, and the hypogram.

Analisis Puisi “Tapi” Karya Sutardji Calzoum Bachri Dengan Menggunakan Pendekatan Struktural

Basically, literary works are works that are written in beautiful and orderly language. According to Taum (1997) literature is a form of creation or fiction that is imaginative and uses beautiful language and its presence can be used for other things. One example of a form of literary work is poetry. Poetry is a literary work of high value. Poetry is a literary work that is created as an expression of the wishes, circumstances, and feelings of the author as outlined in poetry (Putu Sudarma 2019). This study discusses the study of a literary work of poetry entitled "But" by Sutardji Calzoum. Bachri. The purpose of this research is to analyze the structure of the poem "But" by Sutardji Calzoum Bachri. Structural Analysis is a tool for studying poetry based on the structure that builds poetry. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method. The technique in presenting data is based on objective reality by examining poetry. In this case, the building blocks of poetry are the physical structure and the inner structure. The physical structure consists of the form of poetry, diction, concrete words, figurative language and imagery. Meanwhile, the inner structure that is analyzed in poetry is in the form of theme, tone, atmosphere and message. Both of these structures are the forming elements of the creation of poetry.

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis by Eóin Flannery

Reviewed by: Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis by Eóin Flannery Kevin Hargaden (bio) Eóin Flannery, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), ix + 239 pages Ireland almost went bankrupt in 2008. The aftermath was marked by devastating unemployment, a return to mass emigration, and the establishment of policy commitments directly responsible for the present housing crisis, along with innumerable cuts in funding and limitations on social initiatives as part of the crushing austerity regime. It is surprising how quickly the death of the Celtic Tiger has been assumed into Irish discourse as an event we all acknowledge but do not particularly need to reference. The economists who boosted the bubble are back on our screens and in our broadsheets as commentators. The ten-year anniversary passed without much more than a few newspaper features1 and we have slipped happily back into economic buoyancy, marked by inflated property prices and semi-regular chastisements about the importance of keeping wages low to maintain the market’s confidence in our productivity. It is hard not to think that this period in our recent history warrants more attention. And in Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction, Eóin Flannery, from Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, offers a crucial intervention. It might seem that an assessment of this period from an English literature department would be marginal. Surely it is the economists and sociologists who must take the lead on understanding the significance of these events? But Irish novelists were examining the economic and social changes wrought by the Celtic Tiger through the boom days and into the period of barren bust. Flannery considers Chris Binchy’s Open-Handed (2008), Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins (2010), Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood (2015), Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December (2015) and The Spinning Heart (2012), his debut novel that preceded The Thing About December in terms of publication but exists in a subsequent text within the novels’ narrative chronology. He also considers Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion (2013), Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past (2013), and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015), as well as discussing the poem The Celtic Tiger (1999) by the late Denis O’Driscoll. Throughout these discussions, Flannery is concerned with ‘how authors of Irish literary fiction grapple with the registration of debt and indebtedness in the Celtic Tiger period and its aftermath’ (p. 9). This is a fascinating way into [End Page 127] an essential conversation – the abstract concepts of neoliberal capitalism can be illuminated in a fresh light when set inside the plot of a novel. There is a logical progression through the different books discussed. We start with Binchy and Cunningham’s novels which present ‘not a clinical analysis of a crudely divisive economic system but a second-hand description of well-known commoditized types’ (p. 38, emphasis original). These may be entertaining novels, but they are structured so as to engage with the Celtic Tiger in a way that re-inscribes the consensus narratives which are grouped under the ‘we all partied’ and ‘a few bad apples’ clichés. We end with The Mark and the Void, a complex novel which confronts the reader directly with what we think a novel is and what it can do. The relationship established between the main characters – a novelist named Paul suffering writer’s block and a depressed financier named Claude – allows Murray to draw attention ‘to the fictive nature of the macrostructure of high finance’ (p. 181). This is a work of literary criticism before it is a work of social analysis and Flannery’s insights offer readers a renewed appreciation of the works under discussion. Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood is the focus for the second chapter and Flannery unveils the role shame plays in the narrative, proposing that while not perfect, the novel offers ‘a prompt with which to commence renewed discussions regarding the possibilities of shame in the Irish context’ (p. 73). Flannery shows us how Donal Ryan’s novels formally...

404 Utopia Not Found: Cyberpunk Avatars in Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis

AbstractScience fiction criticism has long attended the relationship between form and utopian thought. However, increased study of Latin American narratives has allowed for a return to foundational science fiction theories with renewed perspective. While critics have recognized the tendency of Latin American science fiction to slip between genres, a trend termed the “slipstream phenomenon,” there has been little analysis of its impact on utopian imagination. As a result, we miss one of the region's most unique contributions to broader science fiction traditions. In response, this article locates Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis (2018) within the legacies of cyberpunk and argues that the novel uses slipstream to establish and dismantle a series of classic utopian horizons by shifting its genre identity. In doing so, this work identifies a turn in recent Latin American science fiction that metacritically questions the ability of science fiction form itself to imagine a utopian horizon beyond global capitalism.

The Critical Electorate: On Democracy and Disenchantment

Abstract This essay uses Chantal Mouffe's work in The Democratic Paradox (2000) to think through the paradoxical status of democracy in this special issue. At a moment when democracy is under authoritarian threat worldwide, contributors often treat it not as an imperiled good but as a misty future horizon. Moreover, it is seen as held back most by a commitment to “liberal” values, though little consensus prevails here about this term’s meaning. This stance then dovetails with a predilection for speculative rather than realist fictional forms. And yet the essays in fact display an ongoing unacknowledged allegiance to various actual liberal ideals. Together with the markedly strong disagreements evident across the issue as a whole, this fact speaks to Mouffe's affirmation of an “agonistic”—but, crucially, not “antagonistic”—politics, in which “liberalism” and “democracy” need to remain ideas in necessary and essential tension with one another. Their clash demonstrates the way that modernity's lack of transcendent grounding generates a situation of ongoing and irresolvable value conflict. This essay then suggests that a version of this conflict plays out in the novel in formal terms as well, as an unresolved dual allegiance both to realism and to what exceeds its bounds.[The essays'] very embrace and even hyperbolization of liberal idioms of individual choice, freedom, and so on . . . suggests that we may have a more complicated situation on our hands than the by-now programmatic affirmations of “democracy” and repudiations of “liberal” can effectively address.

A Century of Weird Fiction 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell

Reviewed by: A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror by Jonathan Newell Michael Saler (bio) A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell; pp. ix + 241. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020, $60.00 paper. Over the past two decades, scholars have attempted to define the nature of weird literature, seeing it as either a mode of the gothic, a distinct genre, or a marketing gimmick. In A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, Jonathan Newell presents it as a specific genre that commenced in the mid-nineteenth century with Edgar Allan Poe, assumed momentum at the fin de siècle in works by Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson, among others, and culminated in the early-twentieth-century works of H. P. Lovecraft. Based on case studies of these five authors, Newell argues that “the [weird] genre’s key distinction from the gothic” is its “pivot away from the contents of the human mind towards the non-human world in all its horror and wonder” (58). The weird is fundamentally metaphysical, challenging the division in Western philosophy between human subjectivity and ontological reality, the “world-in-itself” (5). Weird tales express the radical alterity of existence that transcends all anthropocentric conceptions. Their narratives convey aesthetically that which cannot be apprehended logically—notably by deploying the affect of disgust. Newell’s linkage of the weird’s preoccupation with an ineffable ontology and its recourse to gross-out techniques nicely resolves the otherwise paradoxical feature of this form of fiction: its frequent combination of disgust and ecstasy, the abject and the empyrean. Writers of the weird use disgust not merely for sensational effects, but to intimate the intermingled, monistic nature of reality. Newell demonstrates that his five authors intuited what recent scholars of emotions have documented: disgust is often elicited when boundaries are violated. By dissolving rigid categories through representations of hybridity, decay, and alien incursions into quotidian reality, writers of the weird are able to evoke, at a visceral level, the fundamentally interconnected, porous nature of existence. Whereas Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s definitions of the sublime excluded disgust and exalted the human subject, Newell argues that disgust is the “sublime’s shadow,” dissolving anthropocentrism while evoking nausea as well as awe at the numinous nature of reality (69). Newell’s focused study should appeal to those who believe that the promiscuous use of the term “gothic” to cover virtually anything related to terror and horror from [End Page 722] the eighteenth century to the present renders that term meaningless. While he starts by defining both the gothic and the weird as “two modes . . . within a larger literary tradition” (5), he subsequently asserts that by the late nineteenth century, weird fiction becomes “a distinct genre . . . not merely a flavour of the gothic” (55). He charts a determinate genealogy for the genre beginning with Poe, who not only popularized the term “weird” but was an acknowledged influence on numerous fin-de-siècle writers who dabbled or specialized in works of fantastic literature. Many shared a common intellectual concern with the metaphysics of the nonhuman, thereby distinguishing the weird from the gothic’s focus on human subjectivity, as well as a recurrent affective strategy based on “the subject-dissolving power of disgust” rather than the gothic’s “subject-affirming power of sublime fear” (5). This argument about the weird supplanting the gothic receives empirical support from James Machin’s Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939; while Machin conceives of the weird as a mode rather than a genre, he observes that, “after the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly (1814), it is difficult to find examples of [the gothic’s] use as a literary term until the early twentieth century” ([Palgrave Macmillan, 2018], 14). Newell’s own study suggests that the pervasive use of the term “gothic” for material produced after the early nineteenth century is anachronistic and may occlude the unique cultural trajectories of modern fantastic literature. This work should also appeal to those interested in the intersections between theory...

Conan Doyle and the rhetoric of genre

Abstract Arthur Conan Doyle is recognized as a master of narrative. This essay argues that this mastery expresses itself in his management of genre, at a time when social and cultural changes had created a literary environment that saw the emergence of what is now called genre fiction. Crucial elements in the field of literary publishing which his stories served included the expansion of the monthly magazine market, the emergence of the short story as a popular form of fiction, and the appearance of a broad-based new reading public, well educated in the conventions of genre fiction and equipped with reading skills deriving from this ‘genre literacy’, which an author like Conan Doyle could foster and manipulate for rhetorical effect. I describe the conditions that created a taste for the popular genre fiction on which, somewhat to his chagrin, Conan Doyle’s reputation rested. He moved between genres with a versatility rivalled in his time only by Rudyard Kipling. But he also combined genres together in a single work, so as to satisfy or unsettle, disappoint, reward, or wrong-foot his readers pleasurably by playing on the expectations aroused by cues in the tales. Rather than the detective fiction which he made his own, I turn to his experiments in the genre of ‘imperial Gothic’ to illustrate this, and examine the rhetoric of three short stories with narrative tropes that depend for their effect on the genre literacy of the reading public to whom they were offered.

Two cheers for collapse? On the uses and abuses of the societal collapse thesis for imagining Anthropocene futures

ABSTRACT There is nothing new about predictions that climate change will cause serious social problems in the twenty-first century. However, in recent years, some tendencies in the environmental movement have made an even stronger assertion: the climate-induced collapse of industrial society is highly likely and may have positive consequences. This claim, which I term the collapse thesis, is associated with the deep adaptation movement in Britain and the collapsology movement in France. In this article, I analyse the work of key theorists associated with these movements to outline the core tenets of the societal collapse thesis. Responding to the criticisms directed against the idea of societal collapse, I partially defend the thesis by reading it as a form of science fiction. Following Darko Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement, it is argued that collapse encourages us to pinpoint the unstable ecological preconditions of everyday life and posit a new utopian world.

Foley gesture: Towards a theory of acousmatic foley

The research project "Acousmatic Foley" addresses common traits between foley art and Concrete Music, based on the idea that the foley artist is an acousmatic listener and, in turn, that acousmatic listening is a form of fiction. In this line, the study argues that both fields have similar treatment of the "sonorous object". For this purpose, the research builds on two lines of thought: the "son-en-scène" and the "mise-en-son". Firstly, the "son-en-scène" focuses on the sounds of the filmic miseen-scène (and its sound props), from very early cases to contemporary instances. The focus on these sound-props provides a perspective of sound for film that emphasizes its role as a tool of fiction and, thus, foley as the craft that leads to that experience. Secondly, "mise-en-son" sheds light on the making of the sound itself by exploring the concept of musical gesture. Either in contexts in which the musical gesture is visible (as with instruments), more cryptic (as with electronic devices), or completely delegated (as in acousmatic music), gesture can be seen a form of agency. Given that foley consists of maneuvering a sound-prop, gesture is as central to foley as it is to musical practices. This paper focus on the idea that gesture carries the same conception as the "sonorous object", that of an "intentional unit". In line with this, and in particular when of acousmatic nature, the research argues that the sonorous object is analogous to the sound-prop. In the end, these two lines of thought (son-en-scènce and mise-en-son) bridge the poietic and esthetic, as in Nattiez's semiotic distinction, towards an experience of "acousmatic foley".

The Concept of the Hero in Modernity

For as long as political theory and political philosophy have existed time immemorial, the concept of the hero has not been adequately treated. Although this appears to be the case, the surface does not reveal the entire truth, and fact does not fit fiction. The concept of the hero in political theory has existed indirectly. The concept of the hero and hero-worship has been applied to all walks of life and all forms of fiction, fantasy, and reality. This study explains the evolution of the concept of the hero in terms of Western philosophy and focuses on how it has evolved over the centuries. There can be no hero without the anti-hero and no victory without defeat.

The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880 by Anna A. Berman (review)

Reviewed by: The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880 by Anna A. Berman Philip Ross Bullock Berman, Anna A. The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2022. x + 262 pp. Notes. Appendix. Works cited. Index. £65.00: $85.00. As Anna A. Berman states at the very outset of the introduction to her new book, 'family is at the heart of the nineteenth-century novel' (p. 1). If that sounds like a potentially obvious or normative claim, then there is nothing obvious or normative about Berman's analysis of more than one hundred novels written between 1800 and 1880 in Russia and England. If scholars of reception and translation have pointed to the creative impact of English literature on the Russian novel (and, slightly later, vice versa), then Berman takes a rather different tack. Rather than comparing the two traditions from the perspective of style, genre or psychology, she turns instead to aspects of 'law, social customs, inheritance and property rights, and domestic ideology' (p. 1) in order to explain the different ways in which Russian and English authors emplotted the family narrative in fictional form. Despite the chronological range and thematic heterogeneity of texts under consideration, Berman's study proposes a simple and striking thesis, namely that 'the family can be conceived upon two axes' (p. 2). The first of these is 'a vertical, diachronic axis', whereas the second is 'a lateral, synchronic axis' (p. 2). The vertical axis, according to Berman, emphasizes 'the family's movement through time, the succession of generations', whereas the lateral axis prefers to see the family as 'extending outward: from the nuclear core, to extended kin groups, to chosen kin' (p. 2). As Berman demonstrates, the English novel's preference for linear, vertical chronology derives from the English legal system's commitment to primogeniture, 'with single sons carrying on their family names and estates' (p. 3). It is a tradition in which happy endings seemingly prevail and marriage underpins a largely conservative social order dominated by the gentry and the bourgeoisie. By contrast, the absence of primogeniture in Russian law and its commitment to a 'partible model of inheritance' (p. 20) meant that the emphasis fell on messier and more extended family structures, and the family itself was often treated as 'a backward institution […] in desperate need of reform' (p. 3). It wasn't just the Russian literary imagination itself that gave rise, in Henry James's famous formulation, to 'large loose baggy monsters with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary'. It was the Russian family itself. After a detailed theoretical and historical introduction, Berman structures her study as a series of expanding concentric rings that exemplify different ways of conceptualizing family relations and social structures. The three chapters that make up Part One focus on consanguineal relations within the nuclear [End Page 151] family itself, and in particular on the contrasting treatment of brotherhood in the English and Russian novel. Part Two turns to 'the historical factors that shaped the marriage plot' (p. 21), with three chapters devoted to ideas about gender roles, the nature of courtship, and a particular Russian interest in the shortcomings of marriage as an institution. The two chapters constituting Part Three set aside conventional understandings of the family to address alternative models of kinship that go beyond blood and marriage, embracing instead 'new kinds of family configurations' (p. 23). If Berman's overarching methodological claims lend her work its heuristic clarity, then her individual readings evince greater complexity and nuance. Alongside adroit and thoughtful readings of canonical family novels by Austen, Dickens and Trollope on the English side, and Tolstoi, Dostoevskii and Turgenev on the Russian, there are discussions of less familiar authors, particularly women. If female novelists have long been central to the English novel and its reputation, then Berman — generously building on the work of earlier generations of pioneering feminist critics — continues the important task of restoring writers such as Khvoshchinskaia and Tur to the canon. Some of the most productive readings proposed by Berman are those in which she draws on queer theory in order to arrive at a...

The Influence of William Hogarth on Later Generations

The Influence of William Hogarth on Later Generations

Young America: Dime Novels and Juvenile Authorship

American dime novels, first published under that term in 1860, built on earlier movements in American literary traditions. Critics for over a century have recognised that this popular form emphasised the same sense of literary nationalism strongly at play in the nineteenth century when cultural pundits sought to define and assert a properly American character for so-called “serious” publications. This essay expands that understanding by directly grounding the dime novel within the tenets of the 1830s and 1840s Young America movement, as it formed around the New York circle of Evert Duyckinck. Recovering that heritage stresses how Americanness was intrinsically associated with youth, innovation, and promise. It recovers as well another movement behind the growth and popularity of the dime novel: the juvenile tradition of teenage writers that had flourished in Britain and America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This tradition found a new form in popular fiction as young writers moved into the new markets of the dime industry. In addition to resituating the dime novel within the debate over what made literature American, augmenting literary history through an attention to the role of juvenile writing expands understandings of the changing definition of authorship. Wide-awake youth figured a new mode of authorship – not so much visionary and romantic as pragmatic, productive, capable.

“The Magician of Civilised Life”: The Literary Detective in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Early Penny Fiction

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s responses in her earliest novels to the mid-century city mysteries genre – an internationally popular form of penny fiction – allowed her to develop the detective genre in important ways. While attention to Braddon’s early work usually considers how it helped to establish the “sensation” fiction of the 1860s, this article examines how Braddon’s embrace of the earlier urban mysteries narrative both advanced the evolution of the Mysteries genre in the second half of the century and brought its maverick, socially marginal detective characters to new audiences. I argue that because of their roots in the penny Mysteries, Braddon’s detective characters act as agents of social equity rather than figures of surveillance, and they work to challenge many of the social hierarchies, stereotypes, and prejudices that form and undermine “civilised life,” often by magically dismantling or overcoming them.

Elements of Horror, Grotesque Bodies, and the Fragmentation of Identity in Mark Shelley’s Frankenstein

Gothic books emphasise the occult and the strange. Old buildings (especially castles or apartments with secret passageways), dungeons, or towers serve as the backdrop for the enigmatic events in Gothic literature. Obviously, ghost stories are a well-known form of Gothic fiction. In addition, distant locales that appear strange to the reader serve as part of the setting of a Gothic tale. Even the idea of resurrecting the dead is horrifying. Mark Shelley makes full use of this literary trick to heighten the eerie sentiments generated by Frankenstein in the reader. The idea of resurrecting the dead would have caused the typical reader to recoil in horror and unbelief.

Motivated by Hatred: Defoe, Deism, and the Novel

Motivated by Hatred: Defoe, Deism, and the Novel

Reincarnation of an Egyptian queen

This article proposes Nina Simone as an Afrofuturist artist who explores themes of utopia and dystopia in connection to posthuman discourses. Having established three main ways in which this is a speculative approach, it then explores gaps in existing theories of posthumanism and Afrofuturism. It also considers work that addresses the omission of female musicians in Afrofuturist theory and proposes alternative theories in the form of speculative fiction and Black utopias. The article discusses Simone’s frequent allusions to Egyptian myth, her self-identification as a ‘robot’ and her interest in other planets, planes and spheres. It argues that, beyond the unexplored parallels with ‘classic’ Afrofuturism, there is a sense of dystopianism, apocalypse and reterritorialization throughout Simone’s mature work. To explore these connections, three case studies are used: the 1969 album Nina Simone and Piano!, the song ‘22nd Century’, and Simone’s performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival.