Good Fiction Research Articles

Psychiatrists Explore Their Inner Hemingway

Psychiatrists Explore Their Inner Hemingway

Fictive Dreamin’

Fictive Dreamin’ Jake Maynard (bio) How often do writers dream about writing? I’m thinking about the physical act: ass + chair, furrowed squint, eyelid quaking, temple tap and chewed lips. The keyboard chatters. Writing. I’ve been wondering because it finally happened to me. I’ve been writing hard for maybe six years and finally some pages appeared in my dreams. Maybe it took so long because the act of writing, at least as I [End Page 91] practice it, is pretty bleh. It’s mostly sitting and thinking and walking to the window and drawing dicks in the fogged glass. Sometimes the good words come, and sometimes they don’t. Despite writers’ thirst for narrative, the act itself doesn’t have a particularly compelling one. Writers’ angst, at best, is melodrama—a little like the tangles of bodies and naked TED talks that haunt me while I sleep. I texted some writer friends about it: Meredith: Maybe once every other month? I feel like I get good ideas in my dreams but never remember them when I wake up. Or my dreams are like ‘make characters go mini-golfing.’ Me: So are you actively writing in these dreams? Meredith: Sometimes. They usually start with me getting feedback and feeling like I need to change something so I’m never straight up writing in my dreams. Randi: I used to dream about getting awesome story ideas and either I could not remember them when I woke up or they turned out to be trash in reality. Sometimes I dreamed about my books selling. Mostly I dream about solving mysteries or running from murderers and terrorists or junk like that. Noelle: No, but I did practice Chinese in a dream the other day. Whit: I don’t think I do. I’ll dream about work emails sometime, but most of the dreams are fast-paced, moving screenplays. Plot twist. Revelation. Very movie-like. Me jumping out of bed like a lunatic about once a month, turning the light on, thinking there’s a dead snake—or something like that—in my sheets. Me panting, confused but coming to, slowly realizing it’s all a dream. [End Page 92] _______ Hardly a reliable sample size, but research suggests writing as a physical act rarely makes the dreamscape. This makes me wonder what John Gardner would say about it. If writing prose is itself a kind of dream-state—he called it the fictive dream— dreaming about it becomes outright lasagnal. In The Art of Fiction, Gardner writes: In the writing state—the state of inspiration—the fictive dream springs up fully alive: the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols. The dream is as alive and compelling as one’s dreams at night, and when the writer writes down on paper what he has imagined, the words, however inadequate, do not distract his mind from the fictive dream but provide him with a fix on it, so that when the dream flags he can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again. Here, Gardner’s talking specifically about the fictive dream as the writer experiences it, but the term has grown to refer to the continuous state of immersion that you feel inside of good fiction. In a workshop, God Forbid, you might hear, “that part on page three with the bullet points breaks the dream.” Gruff, smug, and intimidating in an academic white-guy sort of way, Gardner’s the type of writer most folks read once as they start out, then not again. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1984 at age forty-nine, three days before his third wedding—tragedy stalked his family; a farm accident had [End Page 93] horrifically killed his brother, leaving Gardner with lifelong nightmares—but his short life was prolific to the tune of twenty-five books. His Beowulf retelling, Grendel, got the most contemporary attention, but The Art of Fiction might be the more important work. That quote pops up on every...

Muhammed Enes Topgül. Râvi: Hicri İkinci Yüzyılda Bir Muhaddisin İlim Serüveni. İstanbul: Ketebe, 2021. 193 sayfa.

Sıra dışı bakışıyla İslam tarihi alanına emsali az bulunur önemli çalışmalar armağan eden Richard W. Bulliet’ın aynı zamanda bir roman yazarı olduğu genelde dikkatimizden kaçar. Bulliet’ın ilk romanı, 1973’te yayınlanan ve Kicked to Death by a Camel adını taşıyan bir gizem romanıdır. Eleştirmenlerce mükemmel bir roman olarak görülmese de bu gibi kurgu eserleri Bulliet’ın bilimsel çalışmalarındaki başarısının sırrının bir yönünü ifşa eder. Neticede bir roman veya öykü yazsın ya da yazmasın, derleyip toparladıklarından iyi bir kurgu yapacak yetenekte olmak, kuvvetli bir hayal gücüne sahip olmak ve yapbozun elimizde olmayan parçalarını zihninde tamamlayabilmek iyi bir tarihçinin olmazsa olmaz niteliklerindendir. 
 Ülkemizde ilahiyat alanında bilimsel çalışmalarını sürdürenler arasında şiir yazanlara çokça rastlansa da roman ve öykü türü eserler verenler pek de fazla değildir. Muhammed Enes Topgül, son kitabı Râvi: Hicri İkinci Yüzyılda Bir Muhaddisin İlim Serüveni ile bu az sayıdaki yazar arasına katılmış olmaktadır.

The critic as a novelist: migrating between writing genres, execution, executing, and self-determination in Eustace Palmer’s A Hanging is Announced

Eustace Palmer was an established African literary critic for three decades before publishing his first novel. Using Palmer’s views about the qualities that define good fiction, this essay evaluates how and to what extent he has performed the African novel writing conventions that he spent decades codifying and refereeing. The essay argues that Palmer’s migration from critic to novelist mirrors modern African literature’s progression from the orthodoxy of inherited traditions to the freedom of self-determined creativity.

The Unknown Czycz

The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 61, issue 1 (2013).
 The presented material contains the first edition of an unknown story by the writer and poet Stanisław Czycz (1929–1996) with an introduction concerning the history of the work and with the editor’s commentary. The typescript survived in the writer’s home archive. Owing to another archive record it was possible to establish that the humorous sketch was written for a competition organized by the Magazyn Turystyczny Światowid. It was also possible to try to date the text more precisely. The rules of the competition said that its aim was to arouse writers’ interest in the subject of tourism and to win readers for good fiction dealing with this subject. The story is about a Sunday trip to the woods. The protagonist meets his friend who is riding a motorbike and offers him his company. The confrontation of the lover of walking tourism and the motorcyclist ends with the former one winning it. A cheerful tale has the same tone as Czycz’s Krzeszowice stories printed in the Przekrój weekly at that time, and then published in the volumes Nim zajdzie księżyc (Before the Moon Sets) (1968) and Nie wiem co ci powiedzieć (I Don’t Know What to Tell You) (1983). It reveals a different face of the writer, whose debut was the innovative And (1961), and who, after writing Ajol (1967) and Pawana (Pavane) (1977) was called the Polish James Joyce.

Climate Fiction as Environmental Education

Climate Fiction as Environmental Education

Nuruddin Farah in conversation: good fiction is never far from the truth

Nuruddin Farah, accomplished Somali novelist, dramatist, and essayist was in Nigeria as the headliner of the Ake Arts and Book Festival held in Lagos from 25–28 October 2018. As part of the events, he sat down with Kunle Ajibade, veteran journalist, author, and Executive Editor/Director of TheNews and PM News, for a wide-ranging interview before a packed live audience. Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia. His father was a merchant and a translator for colonial officials while his mother was an oral poet. He had his primary and secondary education in Somalia and Ethiopia. He then went to Panjab University in India, where he studied Philosophy and Literature and later to the University of Sussex in the UK, where he studied playwriting. He published his first novel, From a Crooked Rib, in 1970. He is uniquely popular as the author of three novelistic trilogies: “Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship,” which comprises of Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardine (1981), and Close Sesame (1983); “Blood in the Sun,” which includes Maps (1986), Gifts (1993), and Secrets (1998); and “Past Imperfect,” which ties together Links (2004), Knots (2007), and Crossbones (2011). His most recent novels are Hiding in Plain Sight (2014), and North of Dawn (2018). A universally acclaimed master prose stylist, Farah’s works have been translated into many languages and he has won numerous awards and prizes, including the African Literature Association (ALA) Fonlon-Nichols Award, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

A Calculus of Loss and Gain

A Calculus of Loss and Gain Maggie Trapp On Amina Gautier's The Loss of All Lost Things In her short story collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, Amina Gautier exposes small scenes of misunderstanding and shares with us moments of connection. In these stories Gautier probes the inner lives of characters lost and searching, characters attempting to forge bonds, seeking redemption, and looking for answers. In "Navigator of Culture," we witness daughters and mothers, girls and women, as they work to understand each other in a world where fathers and men are absent. In "Most Honest," we watch as a recently divorced man yearns for the family he's lost even as he fails to understand or accept his own part in his losses. In "A Cup of My Time," we enter the world of a pregnant woman who has been told she might lose a child. This is a short, spare story whose most memorable character seems to be a mere bit player—the pregnant woman's landlord and neighbor, Mrs. Majumdar, who comes over to borrow this and that and whose impact on the narrator, as well as the reader, is profound in surprising ways. In the title story, "The Loss of All Lost Things," we are presented with a catalogue of what seems to be loss without end, loss that defines who we are and what we do. While the parents in this story are coming to terms with the fact that their young son is missing, they initiate a grief-inflected meditation on loss in general, offering up a mental calculation of sorts that, while seemingly infinite in scope, can never account for the despair of each individual loss: They are not the first to suffer loss. They try to keep it all in perspective, to think of the myriad things that have been lost. Such as: The Ark of the Covenant. The city of Atlantis. The Dead Sea Scrolls. El Dorado. The Holy Grail. Amelia Earhart, somewhere over the Pacific. Pompeii, buried beneath volcanic ash. The RMS Titanic, at the bottom of the sea. Other lost things are lost slowly, over time, rather than in one fell swoop. Such as: Loss of feeling, of limb and life. Loss of blood. Loss of memory. Loss of looks, of faith and time. Loss of sanity. Teeth lost under the pillow. Long-lost relatives—ignored, forgotten, and pretended away. They make these lists to humble themselves, remembering the way their parents attempted to cure picky eating habits with reminders of children starving in Africa, but the shaming tactic doesn't work. Try as they might to think of others who have it worse, all that they can think of is themselves. These parents invoke a limitless loss to in some way reckon their own monumental loss, which of course they can never do. Gautier's prose here is almost prosody. She manages to step back from the particulars of this one story to offer a lyrical listing that speaks to each of us. As with any good fiction, these stories are more than the sum of their parts. We witness characters lose what they love or question their long-held attachments, [End Page 1] but at the same time these stories touch us in ways that can't be summed up or paraphrased. In this collection what's left unsaid is often incredibly evocative, but there are a few times when the stories say too much, when Gautier could offer more nuance, more telling moments rather than spelling things out for us. Some of the stories are uneven, moving from lyrical and layered moments to more pedestrian prose that drops us out of the story's spell. In "Navigator of Culture" we read, "Holding a can of pear halves, she eyes me with pity and condescension. 'For your own self-respect, Hazel, please tell me you're not here to fulfill some sort of nostalgic wish to get your hair done like you used to when you were a little girl.'" It doesn't seem natural that a young woman would, in an otherwise fairly restrained conversation, suddenly offer such trenchant psychologizing. This moment would have...

Introduction to Walt Whitman's "Life and Adventures of Jack Engle"

Nothing is ever really lost, or be lost.-Continuities (1888)In autumn of 1850, newspaper called The New-Yorker was set to debut in Manhattan.1 For six and one-fourth cents per week subscribers were offered latest news, plus a series of Nouvelettes or Stories, of highest merit, in advance of any other publication. Perhaps prematurely, it was promoted as the best Family Paper in Union.2 As literary daily, The New-Yorker was going to need steady stream of good fiction to maintain readership-and indeed, its editor, Carlos D. Stuart, received plenty of mail from writers offering stirring tales at modest prices. One author, novelist and short-story writer from Brooklyn, sent letter on October 10 volunteering particularly wide range of services. Did Stuart, he asks,have any sort of opening in your new enterprise, for services that I could render? I am out of regular employment, and fond of press-and, if you would be disposed to try it on, I should like to have an interview with you, for purposing of seeing whether we could agree to something. My ideas of salary are very moderate.Would you like Story, of some length for your paper?3After requesting reply through post office, fiction writer signs off: Yours, &c Walter Whitman.Though he rarely identified as an author of fiction, fact remains that by age of thirty, Whitman published popular novel and more than twenty well-received-and in some cases, widely republished-short stories and novellas.4 In their time, his tales appeared alongside Hawthorne's, Poe's, Cooper's, and Child's, in some of premier literary magazines in United States, including Democratic Review, Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, American Review, and Union Magazine. Counting reprints, Whitman's tales saw publication in more than two hundred periodicals across country. Even his temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842), an early effort he would later detest, sold 20,000 copies-making it bestselling literary creation of his lifetime.5 Whitman's years of engagement with fiction, and his popular and commercial successes as writer of stories, are enough to make one wonder, as Stephanie M. Blalock does, why and how Whitman left fiction writing to pursue poetry.6It is deceptively simple question. There is instinct to point to Leaves of Grass as full and final answer, to see it as creative work that could only have come from pencil of committed poet. By this logic, Whitman put away fiction because he had to. It is tempting to think so. Indeed, Whitman is now so deeply dyed in wool of American culture that it is difficult not to think so. How else to explain his shift from rather conventional newspaper poetry in 1840s, to revolutionary new prose-poetics, with free-verse effusions like Blood-Money (1850), Resurgemus (1850), and, eventually, Leaves of Grass (1855)? Surely something must have gotten left in dust, and critics from Edgar Lee Masters to Paul Zweig have long assumed that that something was Whitman's fiction. According to them, Whitman was no good at fiction-writing-or, at very least, it was insufficient for his expressive needs. After all, even poetry, Whitman writes, can merely hint, or remind, often very indirectly, or at distant removes. Aught of real perfection, or solution of any deep problem, or any completed statement of moral, true, beautiful, eludes greatest, deftest poet-flies away like an always uncaught bird.7 The fiction-writer, presumably, is left even more birdless.While tidy, such reasoning is prey to what Henri Bergson calls illusions of retrospective determinism, fallacy that because something happened, under circumstances it to happen.8 Further, it is simply too easy to underestimate breadth of Whitman's literary experimentation in fiction, and to downplay extent to which his fictions inform his poetic development. …

Genre Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Satisfying and Subverting Reader Expectations

Genre Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Satisfying and Subverting Reader Expectations Lou Berney (bio) Thank you all for having me here this evening. It’s a pleasure and an honor. I’d especially like to thank Julie Chappell, who extended the invitation to me. Julie can’t be with us tonight, unfortunately, so I can speak with complete honesty about her. She’s a wonderful writer, teacher, colleague, and friend, and I hope I don’t let her down. When I tell someone I write crime novels, I’m usually greeted with one of three facial expressions: Expression #1: Wide eyes, raised eyebrows, big smile. As in, “That’s awesome!” Expression #2: Knitted brows, nervous smile, rapid blinking. As in, “You know how to murder me and get away with it, don’t you?” (I do know how, by the way.) Expression #3: Chin lifted, nose pointed down at me, smug smile. As in, “Oh, for a moment I thought you were a real novelist.” In some circles, that last reaction is not uncommon. When I was in graduate school, for example, a student submitted a short story to our workshop. The story was about a couple of guys who find a bag of money in the woods and go on the run from some other guys who want the money back. The workshop started and—I remember this very clearly—one of the other students pushed the story away like it was this weird smelly knot of hair and gunk he’d fished out of a clogged drainpipe, and he said, “This is a crime story.” Well, my first idea, when I started planning this talk, was to fight that fight and make the case that crime stories (and so-called genre fiction in general) is worthy of serious consideration and study. But I know this is an enlightened bunch. You read and teach writers such as Raymond Chandler and Megan Abbott and Georges Simenon and Patricia Highsmith and Walter Mosely and Viet Nguyen. You believe that there’s good fiction and there’s bad fiction, there’s literature and there’s [End Page 6] product, and a crime novel—like any other novel—can be set down on either side of the ledger. So then I started to consider the Deep Thoughts that I might have about crime fiction. What’s the source of its universal appeal? What does it tell us about the dark corners of our own minds and hearts? Et cetera. But the problem, I have to admit, is that I don’t really have any Deep Thoughts. I’m the kind of writer who has to focus on the nuts and bolts of what I’m doing. Voice. Character. Plot. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, I have to stare for a long time, often an embarrassingly long time, before I understand what I’m seeing. In essence, I’m always trying to write a novel smarter than I am. For your sake and mine, then, I’m not going to attempt any Deep Thoughts tonight. Instead I’m going to talk about crime fiction, and so-called genre fiction in general, in the only way I can talk about it with any confidence or enthusiasm or expertise: from the perspective of a writer, one writer, for whom an understanding of genre—of conventions and expectations—is crucial. For several years I made my living mostly as a working-class Hollywood screenwriter. I got paid, but not millions, which means I had to go up for a lot of different kinds of writing assignments. Here’s what happens in a typical meeting with a producer. She’ll say, “Hey, Lou, so we’ve got this project we need a writer to tackle—it’s a light romantic comedy or psycho-sexual thriller or inspirational family sports drama or animated action-adventure set in a dystopian future where giant harpy eagles have enslaved mankind. Would you be into something like that?” And I’ll say, “Are you kidding me? You won’t believe this, but I have been passionate my entire life about psycho-sexual thrillers or inspirational family sports dramas or animated action...

Expanding the World of the Private Eye: Walter Mosley Becomes a Grand Master

32 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 M exican crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II frequently says that the North American crime novel is unthinkable in the context of Mexico , and his words are a reminder of how crime fiction, like all good fiction, is rooted in the cultural assumptions of a particular people and time. Mystery writing arose out of Enlightenment rationalization and the principle of empirical observation (the scientific sensibility) contrasted against the gothic and Romantic faith in the reliability of sensation. Science , in these stories, was contrasted with intense feeling and conquered it with rational explanations. This could only happen in a culture engaged with these opposing theses, as we still are. Along with this metaphysical conflict at the core of the mystery, many patriarchal and ethnocentric values were attached to the genre, as they were with other forms of entertainment. The great detective of early mysteries was often an odd person and occupied a place somewhere along a spectrum from passionate to passionless, but he imposed powerful skills of logic and observation to defend society against those who would undermine it. In the context of the time, for one example, the prejudice prevailed that women were not crime & mystery Expanding the World of the Private Eye Walter Mosley Becomes a Grand Master by J. Madison Davis above A promotional still from the 1995 film adaptation of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington as private eye Ezekiel “Easy”Rawlins. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 33 by nature as rational as men. Novels that resorted to women’s intuition or “playing a hunch” were regarded as cheating on the basic premises, ignoring the confirmable order of reality, never mind that the “logic” in many mysteries is ludicrous. Poe’s Chevalier Dupin, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Leroux’s Joseph Rouletabille are the whitest of white men, and demonstrated along with many other fictional detectives a set of values that protect Western civilization against the evil schemes of the “yellow peril” and an assortment of swarthy villains. Should we be shocked by the racial prejudice we see in Poe’s “The Gold Bug”? For us, it ruins a good kids’ adventure about lost treasure, but in that time? Though we now know such stereotyping generates a wrongheaded pattern of thinking that justifies discrimination and even violence, by their standards it was goodnatured comedy. If African Americans appeared in mysteries, they were similar to the servant Jupiter in Poe’s story, usually decorative. That is to say, they were not there as simulations of real people. They were there for setting, novelty, or Stepin Fetchit–style comic relief. If the butler was a black man, he didn’t do the crime. He wouldn’t have any more logical motivation than the furniture in the conservatory. He may have witnessed something minor to report it, but as to having a relationship in the story to the other characters or the crime, not really. In 1918 the Ebony Company produced a one-reeler called A Black Sherlock Holmes, a broad parody for African American audiences with characters named Rheuma Tism, I. Wanta Sneeze, and Cheza Sneeze. As to the realistic portrayal of African American family, or community, there was little of that even in “race films,” movies made specifically for black audiences. The same complaint can be made about the other “outsider” identities in such movies and stories—inscrutable Asians and deceptive Arabs, or even Cockney gardeners. Exotic detectives had a vogue—Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto—but blacks were evidently not exotic enough to participate in this and were generally ignored. I once had the misfortune of being on a conference panel discussing “political correctness” and vividly remember a writer declaiming that she saw no reason to put Pakistanis and Vietnamese in books simply to be politically correct. To which I said, “No, you put them in the book because they are here. Leaving them out is lying.” This is the importance of Walter Mosley , who was recently announced as the Mystery Writers of America’s newest Grand Master. It is only recently that African Americans consistently became more than one-dimensional characters in crime novels, and Mosley’s writing is often...

"I did a nice thing": David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy

"I did a nice thing":David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy James McAdams (bio) I The artist appeals to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation. Joseph Conrad Nigger of the Narcissus While david foster wallace only began writing seriously halfway through his undergraduate career, he experienced success at an extremely young age, an outcome he would later regret. Initially a self-described "hard-core syntax weenie," Wallace studied mathematical theory and modal logic at the University of Amherst until becoming exposed to avant-garde fiction, in particular Donald Barthelme's "The Red Balloon." Not until then, he admits, did he realize that those very special "clicks" one encounters in academia, described by a professor as "mathematical experiences," were essentially "aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce's original sense" (McCaffery 138). Ultimately, the work of fiction he submitted for [End Page 119] his English honours thesis would later be published as The Broom of the System, a zany, Pynchonesque novel replete with clever pyrotechnics and allusions to Wittgenstein, from whom it receives its title. However, as early as 1987, when he was obtaining his mfa at the University of Arizona, Wallace had grown ambivalent about the success and self-indulgent style of The Broom of the System. In 1993, he explained that the popularity of The Broom of the System mystified him, acknowledging, "there's a lot of stuff in that novel I'd like to reel back in and do better" (136). Much of his ambivalence involved the novel's penchant for what he identifies as narcissistic and egoistic writerly games that "deny" the essential fact that "the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader's over there … This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think." Wallace laments, "The paradox can't be resolved, but it can somehow be mediated—re-mediated" (137 emphasis added). This remediation takes the form of Wallace re-imagining art as not performative and self-indulgent but, rather, as a gift. At the same time he was reconsidering his own approach to fiction, Wallace began to also re-evaluate his attitudes toward the metafictional and postmodern writers whose techniques had influenced his debut novel. These authors, including Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth, had attracted the younger Wallace with their works' ironic humour, erudition, formal sophistication, and aesthetic innovation. As he became more critical of his own work, though, as well as the culture at large, Wallace began to question the effectiveness of these methods in a society dominated by corporate interests, marketing brands, and political cynicism. Ultimately, as he told David Lipsky about his time in late-80s Arizona: I was just really stuck about writing … I didn't know whether I really loved to write or whether I'd just gotten some kind of excited about having some early success. The story at the end of Curious ["Westward the Course of Empire Goes Its Way"], which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by the time I got to the end of that story, I figured I wasn't going to write anymore. (61) In "Westward," Mark Nechtr, Wallace's alter-ego, observes "metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love." Conversely, the narrator reveals, Mark Nechtr "desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write [End Page 120] something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die. Maybe it's called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn't know. He wonders who the hell really cares" (Girl With Curious Hair 332). If this story is a suicide note for a certain...

Writing Inspired

AbstractStudents need inspiration to write. Assigning is not teaching. In order to inspire students to write fiction worth reading, teachers must take them through the process of writing. Physical objects inspire good writing with depth. In this article, the reader will be taken through the process of inspiring young writers through the use of boxes. There is no substitute for physical objects when the goal is writing. By following this writing process, good fiction writing will be inspired.

Paul and I Like to Read Good Literature

To honor Paul Ornstein’s 90th birthday, his passion for good literature and his devotion to the study of Dostoyevsky, in particular, are honored. Research is cited that demonstrates that reading good fiction, compared to popular fiction or non-fiction, increases one’s empathy. It is suggested that good literature, books that focus on character, engage the reader’s affect and opens their inner worlds and promotes their imagination. In contrast, popular literature is plot driven and does not require such subjective expansion.

An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in Seventeenth-Century Japan by G. G. Rowley (review)

Reviewed by: An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in Seventeenth-Century Japan by G. G. Rowley Christina Laffin (bio) An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in Seventeenth-Century Japan. By G. G. Rowley. Columbia University Press, New York, 2013. xviii, 255 pages. $40.00, cloth; $39.99, E-book. After concluding her biography of Jane Franklin Mecon (1712–94), sister of Benjamin Franklin, the historian Jill Lepore notes, “in writing this book, I have had to stare down a truism: the lives of the obscure make good fiction but bad history.”1 In constructing the life of a seventeenth-century Japanese noblewoman, Gaye Rowley faces a similar conundrum: how does one recreate the history of a woman when there are scant materials documenting her life? Rowley’s response, An Imperial Concubine’s Tale, is an ambitious attempt to weave together disparate sources into a narrative revealing the life of a courtier, concubine, and nun known as Nakanoin Nakako (ca. 1591–1671). The focus of the book, Nakako, was an imperial concubine to Emperor GoYōzei (1571–1617, r. 1586–1611), who became embroiled in the “dragonscale scandal” (gekirin jiken) of 1609, an incident in which five imperial concubines and nine noblemen were discovered to have indulged in “illicit sexual escapades” (p. 2). Nakako is the only woman in the scandal whose life can be reconstructed, and, happily for the reader, her life is both eventful and illuminating. After various machinations between imperial and shogunal authorities, at the age of 18 she is banished to the island of Niijima in Izu. A typhoon leaves her ship beached on the Izu Peninsula, where she spends the next 14 years in the care of a village headman and his family, until her reprieve and return to the capital in 1623. Eighteen years later, she takes the tonsure and eventually becomes the abbess of Hōji’in convent (in Kyoto), living on until about the age of 80. Although Nakako represents the central figure in Rowley’s analysis, the book offers extensive commentary on the historical transformations taking place amid competing political, economic, and military interests. The author’s strength is in carrying out painstaking research, drawing from [End Page 450] myriad sources and utilizing her knowledge of the intricacies of late medieval (1467–1603) and early modern (1603–1868) history to offer a new perspective on these periods. Rowley explains the motivations for her project as follows: “Attempting to bring into sharper focus the dim and discontinuous contours of one imperial concubine’s life opens a new window on the past, through which we can see events, institutions, people, and even texts that would otherwise remain invisible” (p. 3). One would hope there is no longer any need to assert the importance of women’s history, but much work remains to be done in terms of excavating past women’s lives, experiences, and contributions, particularly before the modern era.2 Faced with the challenge of limited sources describing Nakako directly and nothing in her own words or hand, Rowley offers the best approach under the circumstances, bringing together a wealth of records that enable her to sketch out the events and narratives surrounding the “dragon-scale scandal” as it pertained to one woman’s life. As Rowley notes, Nakako’s story has not yet been told within the scholarly community in Japan. To date, the dragon-scale scandal and Nakako’s involvement have only been included in institutional histories of Japan in order to demonstrate the tensions between Emperor GoYōzei and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) as an example of court-shogunate relations. The tale of this scandal has thus been one of male actors, despite the fact that women are at its core. Through her eight chapters on the life and times of Nakako, Rowley attempts to remedy this imbalance. The introduction explains, in brief, the dragon-scale scandal and Nakako’s life, as well as the political events leading up to GoYōzei’s enthronement. Chapter 1 describes Nakako’s father, Nakanoin Michikatsu (1556–1610), and how his own sexual escapades led to his banishment, protection by the warrior and scholar Hosokawa Yūsai (1534...

History, Real and Invented

Like many people who eventually become professional historians, I read historical fiction long before I understood that real, academic history involved much more than identifying and listing the four causes of the Civil War. (1) I vividly remember learning, at the age of ten in my UK fifth-form classroom, that King George III had graciously granted the American colonists their independence after a bit of a brouhaha led by that traitor George Washington. After my parents moved us to Chicago the next year, I realized that historical fiction probably contained at least as much truth as that piece of nationalist propaganda. But it took me almost another decade to grasp that historians do not simply memorize facts. Instead, they begin with sources of which they ask questions and from which they develop hypotheses about this or that element of the past--hypotheses with which other historians are free to disagree. In short, I finally realized that history as a discipline could be as dynamic, as exciting, as controversial, and as appealing as any historical detective novel, family saga, or romance. That perception enlivened my graduate work, then my Ph.D. dissertation, which began as the search for an answer to a simple question: if books on domestic management were, as previously argued, associated with the rise of a middle class, then who was writing and reading Domostroi in 16th-century Russia, which supposedly had no middle class? (2) Finding an answer to that question led me down numerous highways and byways, eventually yielding a textual history that I could not have written when I started the project. In the process, I learned a great deal, not just about Russian language, history, and culture and the study of manuscripts but also about what it means to be a historian. Textual history, I think it is fair to say, probably does not qualify as most people's idea of scintillating reading. Yet I can still remember the day when I opened the Solovetskii Monastery account book from the 1570s, there in the Reading Room of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, and found myself staring at the name of Sil'vestr, former priest of the Annunciation Cathedral. I felt as thrilled as Hercule Poirot unearthing a crucial clue--or as Alan Grant, the bedridden detective in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, tracking down another detail about the life of England's Richard III. (3) Yet it was far from inevitable that I would eventually supplement my studies of Domostroi and Sil'vestr and Ivan IV the Terrible (1530-84) with the series of novels that I am publishing under the name C. P. Lesley. (4) On the contrary, had you asked me 20 years ago whether I would ever write anything besides nonfiction books and articles on Russian history, I would have looked at you askance. I still read and enjoyed historical fiction, but writing it was not on my list of skills to master. Nonetheless, here I am, with two novels in print and a rough draft of the third, ready to answer the question asked of contributors to this forum: how does historical fiction contribute to an understanding of history, and what can specialized knowledge add to novels about Russia? What changed me from an avid consumer of historical fiction to a producer was my decision to work in academic publishing rather than as a professor, meaning that I had no summers off, limited access to outside funding, and minimal opportunity for archival research. (5) One summer, more or less on a lark, I wrote down a single scene of what would become an excruciatingly bad novel. In hindsight, persisting with this dreadful book through multiple drafts and rewrites before I accepted that it was beyond salvation might seem like a waste of time. But it gave me the idea that I could, if I worked on it, learn to write good fiction--and, moreover, that I would have fun doing it. At that point, it dawned on me that, if I were to write novels, my chosen area of concentration, Muscovite history, made the ideal subject. …

Trust in Science

Before the Enlightenment, most individuals lived and died without a single scientific, technological, or medical breakthrough advancing their basic understanding of the world or influencing their lives. In his book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World author David Deutsch explores this interesting theme, but the idea is not unique to that source. By contrast, in the last century, we have seen perhaps dozens of such advances. In technology, the automobile went from an exotic novelty to a near-essential in most of the world. Air travel morphed from an inconceivable notion to a routine, if sometimes burdensome, mode of transportation. Of course, technology has also changed how we disseminate and consume information. For example, it is much more likely that you are reading this essay electronically, rather than on paper. Ten years ago, the opposite would have been true; 20 years ago, the question would not have even made sense. In science, we have seen the crystallographic characterization of DNA, providing an explanation for the genetic diversity whose origins previously were but a source of speculation. Medicine has commuted through cures what would have been death sentences only decades ago. Our own specialty now alleviates suffering with arthroscopes, microscopes, and arthroplasties, putting life back into the years of millions of people. Recognizing that not all of our “advances” are improvements, and also that some medical advances are thinly veiled approaches to allow physicians to deliver (and be remunerated for) more care rather than better health, there is still little doubt that the good far, far outweighs the harm. Despite these advances, trust in science remains low (about 45% of those surveyed in the United States), where it has been, more or less, since the 1970s [2]. Trust in science is even lower (approximately 35%) among self-described conservatives, who constitute an important element of one of the two dominant political parties in the United States [2, 3]. In light of all that science and technology have delivered — including the very media that facilitate the dissemination of antiscientific rhetoric — it is hard to understand why so much of society wants science kept at arms’ length, and why so many bring up the topic mainly to condemn it. I might offer the usual apologia — our self-defeating (and reality-obfuscating) use of jargon, the ways that academics can use discovery as vehicles for self-promotion, and our regular leaps from one bandwagon to another: Do vitamins help [5]? Do vitamins harm [4]? Or, should we just “Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements” [1]? Instead, I will save all that for another day, since none of those excuses prevented science and technology from changing our lives so dramatically. As of this writing, apart from a very few fringe candidates, there are no declared political candidates for the U.S. presidential race, and so the ideas here do not represent an endorsement of any individual or party. However, the upcoming race is an opportunity for those of us who think science is important to make that belief count: Consider adding “a thoughtful approach to science and technology” to whatever set of metrics you use to evaluate candidates. Science is the practice of asking important questions and answering them rigorously and reproducibly. I believe that facility (or at least familiarity) with it is a reasonable surrogate for curiosity, a hallmark of a good leader. Consider engaging in the process when and how you can. At the very least, vote. Caucus or participate in other ways if it is possible for you to do so. The participation of thoughtful people who understand science and can explain it will diminish people’s fear and mistrust of it. Be sure to recognize that while science is important and interesting, it is not the only source of truth. In order to serve as effective “messengers” as we engage in the political process, we must be sensitive to those who find truth elsewhere, and even look elsewhere for it ourselves. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote compellingly that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria,” meaning they are not in conflict because they speak to such fundamentally different questions. Beyond that, we can learn as much about what it means to be human in good fiction, great music, and visual art as we can in science. While many of us do not know how to read a novel for its deeper meaning, how to listen to a symphony and understand it, or how to look at a painting and really see what is there, none of us is too old to learn.

Daniel Cavicchi. Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum.

Daniel Cavicchi. <i>Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum</i>.

“Delicias holandesas” dirigidas por mujeres: cine contra estereotipos

This paper offers a brief history of women filmmakers in The Netherlands from the 1920s to the present, in an attempt to achieve two goals. The first aim is to show that despite the scarcity of women directors in the histories of the cinema of the Netherlands, there are many women in the Dutch film industry, particularly so given its small size in the European context. Secondly, this paper aims to show that many of the myths that have been commonly associated with Dutch cinema, such as its inability to produce good fiction films or to handle important socio-political issues, can be easily dismantled after seeing the work of Dutch women filmmakers. Although it is certainly much easier to find documentaries than dramas among their works, it is nevertheless true that they have also produced many of the latter. Moreover, in both categories they have explored complex and controversial themes that are highly relevant to their society, as well as opening up new thematic paths along which male directors had never travelled. Issues related to the new national identities resulting from the multicultural contexts of present-day Europe are among the former, while the latter is best represented by topics traditionally dealt with by feminism, such as the question of abortion, rape or women’s submission in patriarchal societies, among others.

Truth and Lies in a Chestertonian Sense: Father Brown and the Fault of the Depraved Saint

I. IN HIS ESSAY, Everybody's Protest Novel, (1) James Baldwin argues that is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like earth before Word was spoken, foundations of society are hidden. (2) When myths and legends become cages, Baldwin continues, we can turn from them to void if we dare, and from there new can relieve us of adroit lies that saturate social life. Political order is similarly cemented by myth in Republic. Socrates declares, want one single, grand lie which will be believed by everybody--including rulers, ideally, but failing that rest of (3) The lie Socrates tells is actually a story whose logic solidifies certain men in inferior or superior positions. The people are to be told that the rearing and education we gave them were like dreams, that in fact all those who inhabit city are brothers. But brotherhood does not translate into egalitarianism. The god who made them mixed gold in some, silver in others, and iron and bronze in remainder. Thus were born castes of city. (4) Stanley Rosen remarks that for Plato founders and preservers of a order must be very seriously concerned with art in that it is effective than philosophy in persuading us to behave in a particular way. (5) Rosen argues that this is a straightforward statement of need for lying and what is today called 'brainwashing,' (6) which is Plato's conception of price to be paid for establishment of just The philosopher feels to rule entire city, with no restrictions placed upon superior knowledge and Rosen contends that those who are not tempted by this are not genuine philosophers, but neither are those who embrace desire. In Hermeneutics as Rosen studies Immanuel Kant's contingent admission that esotericism--accommodation of truth to expediency [such as] in noble lie--has civilized and moralized us while contending that there is nothing more evil than using deception, the rank growth of weeds of a decent appearance, to preserve a good thing. (7) At same time, Kant argues, it is prudent to display a veneer of certainty over proofs if this is done not out of vanity but from a desire to protect common people from politically dangerous subtleties of reason. (8) We are then put up against wall and asked to answer a question: is prudent omission or obfuscation of facts really different from lying, or is perpetration of prudence as a virtue merely another means of casting a veil over noble lies? In his examination of prudence as it plays out in Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Dan Sabia notes that political prudence names both a kind of virtue, or excellence, and a kind of faculty, of judgment. (9) Traditionally prudent few are contrasted with many as they possess philosophical knowledge and are keen observers of human condition, with much experience and thus considerable worldly knowledge that makes them good at fashioning and evaluating moral and principles and ends, as well as particular laws and institutions, policies and actions. (10) Prudent policies are practical enough to work yet are morally or ethically best they can be, given typically constraining, complex, and contingent circumstances in and under which decisions have to be made. (11) Good fiction can help us probe complex and contingent circumstances in order to question difference between prudence and noble lies in concrete dilemmas. In Truth and Politics, Hannah Arendt argues that the function of storyteller is to teach acceptance of things as they are, as this acceptance gives rise to faculty of (12) II. In G. …