Good Fiction Research Articles

The Viability of the Philosophical Novel: The Case of Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay

This article begins by asking if the project to write a philosophical novel is not inherently flawed; it would seem that the novelist must either write an ambiguous text, which would not create a strong enough argument to count as philosophy, or she must write a text with a clear argument, which would not be ambiguous enough to count as good fiction. The only other option available would be to exemplify a preexisting abstract philosophical system in the concrete literary world. To move beyond such an impasse, this article turns to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's unique aesthetic theory in “Literature and Metaphysics” envisions philosophy as an integral part of the literary text and sees the novel not as an argument but as something called a “philosophical appeal” (Beauvoir 2004b). In her first novel, She Came to Stay, such a concept of the philosophical novel allows Beauvoir to make an original contribution to the philosophical tradition—one in which Beauvoir rethinks the problem of solipsism—while still creating a stunning literary work (Beauvoir 1954). A study of the theory and the novel together thus provides a solid understanding of what philosophers stand to gain from the philosophical novel.

'Ouvrière des lettres'. Writing as Work, Fiction as Play: The Case of Daniel Lesueur

The manufacture of fiction at the Belle Époque was a veritable industry, employing a large, privatized workforce that included many aspiring writers from social groups with limited access both to 'respectable' employment and to high culture — notably women. Among these 'ouvrières de lettres' (Ellen Constans) was Daniel Lesueur (pen-name of Jeanne Loiseau, 1860– 1921), studied here as a particularly interesting practitioner and theorist of the roman-feuilleton. Through analysis of Lesueur's theory of the popular novel, expressed in prefaces, articles, and interviews, and of the narrative techniques that enabled her to captivate a huge (arguably female) readership, this article argues that complex, skilful work is needed to produce the space of play provided by good popular fiction. It contends, too, that the ideological work performed by such fictions, contrary to the view of their many detractors, can be both constructive and instructive. The successful 'roman romanesque', as Lesueur argues and demonstrates, offers play that is at once cognitively and emotionally enriching.

“Temperate and Nearly Cloudless”: The 9/11 Commission Report as Postmodern Pastiche

“Tuesday, September 11, 2001 dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States”. Thus begins Chapter One of the 9/11 Commission Report, a chapter that bears the title, “‘We have Some Planes’”. As with all good pop fiction, the reader awaits to see what this quote means, although we know already that it will mark a crucial moment, one that renders the innocuous urgent, or gives meaning to a startling chaos of coincidence. Pop culture has taught us the formula well: Everything looks fine; high school kids sip pop and dance in front of the juke box; Ole Doc Jones is mowin’ the lawn while Mrs. Jones makes lemonade. BUT strange noises have been heard in the cellar; no one can find the cat; Mr. Grundy insists he saw flashing lights last night, but no one believes him because Mrs. Grundy says he’s been acting strange ever since she flushed his Viagra; mysteriously, all the clocks in Indianapolis have started running fast or slow by exactly 24 hours. Then we hear the message on the police radio: “we’ve got some planes…as large as football fields hovering over every Wall-Mart in the nation”. At last someone will believe the geeky newspaper boy and his big brother’s girlfriend, who knew all along he was on to something. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Property and Application of Austempered Ductile Cast Iron

Austempered ductile cast iron is newly developed engineering material with a favorable combination of comprehensive mechanical properties. Its properties, such as good comprehensive mechanical properties, high fatigue strength, and good fiction and wear characteristics are included. The application of ADI at home and abroad was presented as well. In order to ensure and improve mechanical properties of ADI, it should ensure high rank nodularity in terms of nodular cast iron, improve graphite nodules, reduce segregation and properly cut down the content of silicon and manganese. While in terms of heat treatment, in order to achieve ideal austenite ferrites, stable and reliable heat treatment process as well as relevant equipment is required.

“Come Here Jesus … Wonder What God Had in Mind:” Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald as Narrators of (Anti-) Theodicy

This article argues that realist and tragic fiction can and should play a central role in Religious Education in communities of faith and in theological education in schools of theology—thereby contributing to theological construction—because good fiction produces truth. Fiction is a vital source for producing the questions that theology needs to address first (especially questions pertaining to suffering and evil) rather than last.

Procrustes’ Bed

Procrustes’ Bed George Core Fiction, whether the loose and sprawling novels of the great Russians or the well-wrought and symmetrical works of Henry James, exercises a fascination and hold on the reader that other literary modes, especially poetry, do not. In the novel we enter a self-contained world, real or surreal, and see the action from within. The stronger the novel in terms of character and plot and action, the more we are held by that world. That is my experience in reading Mary Ann Taylor-Hall’s splendid new novel, At the Breakers (University Press of Kentucky, $24.95), which occurs chiefly in the recent past at an old beach hotel in New Jersey. There are also segments of the action in New Brunswick and in New York City, with the long middle unfolding at the hotel—a microcosm of roiling humanity. The geographical area involved is tightly focused, and at the center of this bustling crowd of people, a good number of whom are complicated and complex figures, is the extended family of the protagonist and viewpoint character, Jo Sinclair, who has been married three times and borne four children by these various husbands, none of whom is close to being admirable and none of whom has afforded her and her children a decent stable life. She has been deceived and frustrated in every male affection. In her ongoing life Jo is involved with three men, the best of whom is Victor Mangold, a sophisticated and generous man whose machinations are reminiscent of Prospero. Jo’s world has but one [End Page lxv] other such male creature in it and a good number who are monstrous. Her new life begins when she happens upon the old hotel, helps renovate it, and later runs it. The creator of this fascinating world gives us not only the velleities and vicissitudes of Jo’s busy and frustrating life—its ups and downs, upheavals, occasional periods of tranquility and accomplishment—but at the same time limns the exterior and interior lives of many other people within and without the four generations of Jo’s family. The life of the hotel, with its vast assortment of humankind, its endless tasks from the initial refurbishment to the continuing work of dealing with boarders, some permanent, most transient, seizes our attention. The author presents a crowded and fast-paced plot that includes various celebrations for holidays, beginning with Thanksgiving and ending with a gloriously improbable wedding, as some of the best comedies do. There is little humor here but much in the way of accommodation, reconciliation, forgiveness, and redemption. At the Breakers is a novel that any real reader should relish—and see as a cause for celebration. Like Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, Gladys Swan is a woman of letters who is accomplished not only as a writer of fiction long and short but as a poet and essayist. A Garden Amid Fires (BkMk Press, $15.95 pb) is her latest selection of stories, nine in all; three of them, including the title story, were first published in the Sewanee Review. The most ambitious and impressive fiction in the book is a long story entitled “Exiles,” a story good enough to appear in any magazine, including the New Yorker. It turns on an incipient affair (which goes nowhere in the end) between a widow, who is the protagonist, and an intense talented writer from Albania. Nothing physical happens between the two, and yet both are changed for life. The story ends, as good fiction often does, without a resolution; and Suzannah, the widow, is still frozen with indecision about her life in Spain and whether to return to the U.S. “The Death of the Cat” is a more representative story than “Exiles.” The action is remembered long after it occurs when the protagonist and viewpoint character recalls, late in her life, the events that precipitated her parents’ increasingly fractious relation that led to their separation and divorce. The turning point, which occurs during the Christmas season, is the disappearance of the family cat, who is pregnant and should soon give birth. The mystery is one of several that are resolved as Lauren...

Intelligence in fiction

In this literary lecture, presented in Ottawa at a 2006 conference on intelligence sponsored by the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS), spy novelist Charles McCarry ruminates on his profession as a writer. He reflects back on how his work has been influenced by his first career as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s. After leaving the CIA, he wrote about his experiences in the world of espionage (sans anything classified) while operating in deep cover and engaging in covert action in, as he recalls, ‘some of the world's most godforsaken places’. The key to good spy fiction, in McCarry's view, is to write ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’.

The Ombudsman: Forecasting Conflict Resolution. Is It Worth Asking an Expert?

All good fiction writers know that a story seldom interests readers if it does not involve conflict? conflicts between individuals, institutions, nations, and between all of these and natural forces. Our interest in life mirrors this. Good news is no news; our media reports on strikes, international disagree ments, legal disputes, terrorism, and political antago nism every day. Our interest in these conflicts, and in their resolu tion, can be more than a passing curiosity Correctly anticipating a dispute's outcome can be advanta geous. Accurately foreseeing the resolutions of inter national or civil conflicts could save lives or avert

Good Fiction Guide. 4000 Great Books to Read. Ed. Jane Rogers.

Good Fiction Guide. 4000 Great Books to Read. Ed. Jane Rogers.

Tragicomic Historiography in Tibor Fischer's Under the Frog

Good fiction relies to a large extent on an appropriate relationship between style and content. A narrative's story and its treatment should support each other, lest the effect of the work of art be confusing to the reader and hence a failed effort to create an aesthetic version of reality. A novel that attempts to retell the tragic history of a violent revolution and at the same time tries to entertain the reader with a wealth of comic elements is facing a tough challenge, a challenge that Tibor Fischer takes on in Under the Frog . This essay deals with how Fischer combines what might seem to be mutually exclusive attitudes; the argument also examines the author's idiosyncratic comic technique. A close reading of Under the Frog shows that while the story supplies the tragic element, the novel's comic style provides the contrast and counterweight to the seriousness of its topic.

Good Fiction, Better Science: Using the Humanities to Promote Reflective Practitioners of Science

Good Fiction, Better Science: Using the Humanities to Promote Reflective Practitioners of Science

It's What You Have

It’s What You Have Amy Sumerton You are a writer, and so you write what you know. You never knew that you wanted to be a mother. You know about being a nanny; you nannied for a little boy for a year and still regularly baby-sit for him and his half-sister in the evening. Write a story about it. You write fiction, so you’re supposed to write out of what you know and into what you don’t know. Base the nanny somewhat on yourself, base the kid on the boy since he’s the only kid you’ve ever really known. Think about “nanny folklore” and incorporate that—it’s the part you don’t know, the part you must write into. Create a mother who’s both sympathetic and insane. Create a mother who is nothing like the mother you worked for, mostly because the character is expected and more interesting that way. You want to make the story more compelling than it actually was. In all actuality, you barely dealt with the mother at all. She was already gone when you got there in the morning and still hadn’t arrived home when you left. You dealt with the father. You got along with him exceedingly well, in fact. Actually, you got along with both of them. You would see her at birthday parties, events, and sometimes in the evenings if you baby-sat. They were, without question, some of the best bosses you’d ever had; they treated you with respect, as an equal, and they paid you fairly and on time. The mother was an employee rights lawyer and such things were important to her. Create a mother who’s a single parent, who has a terrible relationship with the nanny. She doesn’t treat her with respect, she’s jealous, she doesn’t know how to parent her child. All these things are different from what actually happened, but that’s what makes it fiction. It makes for a better story; people don’t want to read about a nanny and a mother sitting around drinking beer and talking after the kid has gone to bed on a Friday night. You are a writer, and so you write what you know. [End Page 39] You write a scene based on events that actually happened—the mother got off work early one day and came home as you were about to take the kid to the pool. She came with you and the three of you had a lovely time, laughing, swimming together. Again, this is not the stuff of good fiction. Recreate the scene when you write it, but twist it around. The mother is embarrassed to change in front of the young nanny. Put in some interesting stuff about the duality of the female body, young versus old, pre-versus post-motherhood. Have the kid cry every time the nanny swims away. All these things are different from what actually happened, but that is fiction. It makes for a better scene this way. An early draft of the story wins honorable mention in a contest. The finished draft gets published in Red Cedar Review. It’s been two and a half years since you nannied, but you still baby-sit for the family a couple times a month. The mother comes home and the kids are in bed, so you and the mother crack a few beers and catch up. You tell her you’re getting published again, this time in a more prestigious publication. Laugh a little—you’re into your third beer at this point—and tell her that, interestingly enough, the new story is about being a nanny. Tell her that you are sort of like the nanny, her child is the kid, but the mother’s character is definitely not based on her. Later, looking back on this conversation, you’ll think about your innocence, that seemingly innocuous thing. With hindsight hardening you, you’ll look back at yourself and laugh, but it will be a bitter, cynical laugh. You had the best intentions. It seemed like the honest thing to do. True enough, the...

They might be giants: a review of small presses and little magazines: an interview with Whitney Pastorek, Editor of Pindeldyboz

This installment of “They Might Be Giants” highlights a small online/print zine from New York called Pindeldyboz. Described by its editor Whitney Pastorek as a lit mag, Pindeldyboz publishes new fiction every week or so at the Web site but then publishes longer fiction once a year in the annual print zine of the same name. While this may indicate a split personality on the part of the editor/publisher, the goals of both the print and online versions are the same: to publish good fiction.

They might be giants: a review of small presses and little magazines: an interview with Whitney Pastorek, Editor of Pindeldyboz

This installment of “They Might Be Giants” highlights a small online/print zine from New York called Pindeldyboz. Described by its editor Whitney Pastorek as a lit mag, Pindeldyboz publishes new fiction every week or so at the Web site but then publishes longer fiction once a year in the annual print zine of the same name. While this may indicate a split personality on the part of the editor/publisher, the goals of both the print and online versions are the same: to publish good fiction.

Object relations in Harry Potter.

Good fiction helps children address their emotional dilemmas by evoking repressed content, and offering strategies and meaningful values that help them work towards resolutions. Because certain fundamental conflicts continue to be revisited and reworked throughout adulthood, it follows that masterful children's literature might enthrall adults as well. Given the extraordinary, worldwide success of the Harry Potter stories with both children and adults, it might be inferred that they, indeed, are among such literature. Common object relations themes, as well as other intrapsychic processes, are presented in such an imaginative and resonant way that the unconscious is readily engaged. The character of Harry Potter, specifically, embodies such universal (repressed) torments as the agony of destroying and losing the mother; the ominous perception of good and bad objects at war within the self; and the earnest reparative efforts offered to save the self from eternal separation from the beloved other.

Reducing intercultural friction through fiction: virtual cultural learning

Intercultural training poses a special challenge due to the fact that it is most often attempted in isolation from the new culture. This experience gap, which those involved with intercultural training will readily recognize, is the focus of this article. Can quality, imaginative fiction be a source to bridge this pedagogical chasm between the “we” and the “they?” Nothing can take the place of actual experience, but until that most important facility is available, engaging fiction can provide a type of virtual learning. If the human brain can be likened to the hardware, then imaginative, interculturally oriented fiction, is the software. Intercultural competencies can be better achieved by evoking the imagination of the culture learner through the vicarious experience afforded through good fiction. This article will offer a sampling from the vast body of culturally significant literature to see how such works could support the training process. These practical examples from a variety of genres will be couched in the framework of a transformative training theory that is workable.

Spectacular Happiness

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: FictionFull AccessSpectacular HappinessTODD GRISWOLD, M.D., TODD GRISWOLDSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Arlington, Mass.Published Online:1 Dec 2001https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.12.2096AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail This is the audacious first novel from the author of Listening to Prozac(1), Should You Leave?(2), and Moments of Engagement(3). This rich and wonderful book defies distillation. Somehow Kramer successfully weaves together a poignant family saga with anarchist theory, suspenseful intrigue with social criticism, dark cynicism with hope for humanity. Reading this book (like so many things) will not be the same after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The story centers on a divorced community college professor involved in anarchist bombings of beach-front mansions on Cape Cod. Although the bombings are scrupulously orchestrated to avoid direct injury to people, Kramer’s sympathetic portrayal of any type of terrorism may be troubling for some readers. Yet the provocative aspects of this book are in some ways prescient and, perhaps, especially relevant to a nation engaged in a war against terrorism.The novel takes the form of a journal written by Chip Samuels, the divorced professor who deeply misses his son after the breakup of his family. Kramer’s introspective narrative voice draws the reader into the psyche of the protagonist. Samuels is a sharply intelligent man whose personal wounds and principled views lead him on an increasingly high-stakes odyssey. Samuels addresses the journal to his son in an effort to explain himself and somehow bridge the distance between them.On this poignant framework, Kramer builds a lively tale of an anarchist movement that targets ostentatious beach-front structures while fastidiously avoiding harm to people. The Free the Beaches campaign becomes a sort of terrorist performance art that challenges modern American capitalist values. Kramer’s social criticism cuts deeply and widely, and he does not spare psychiatry. He questions our current readiness to medicate our children and ourselves, and he challenges conceptions of psychotherapy. Ultimately, he leads the reader to question his or her own principles and relationship with the prevailing culture.This review cannot do justice to the breadth of issues Kramer explores. Most immediately, the novel charts a man’s struggle to maintain integrity and keep his family together in the turbulent seas of the modern world, seas that can erode our foundations and threaten us with riptides and rogue waves of fate. Kramer resists simple formulas regarding motivation or how one might influence the course of events. Contradictions, unintended consequences, and ironies abound—the stuff of good fiction and interesting life.Kramer’s indictment of modern society is indeed penetrating, but ultimately he writes of people saving one another. He has written a subversive and triumphant work that asks us to do all we can for one another. The attacks of September 11 may complicate the feelings aroused by this book, but by all means read it and enjoy Peter Kramer’s deeply thoughtful fiction.By Peter D. Kramer. New York, Scribner, 2001, 313 pp., $25.00.

The whore's story: women, pornography, and the British novel, 1684-1830

This fresh and persuasively argued book examines the origins of pornography in Britain and presents a comprehensive overview of women's role in the evolution of obscene fiction. Carefully monitoring the complex interconnections between three related debates-that over the masquerade, that over the novel, and that over prostitution-Mudge contextualizes the growing literary need to separate good fiction from bad and argues that that process was of crucial importance to the emergence of a new, middle-class state. Looking closely at sermons, medical manuals, periodical essays, and political tracts as well as poetry, novels, and literary criticism, The Whore's Story tracks the shifting politics of pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain and charts the rise of modern, pornographic sensibilities.

The Best American Short Stories 2000 (review)

new cities and destroyed the Old West. It created a new kind of wealth. Its construction remains one of the most important events in our history. (BS) The Best American Short Stories 2000 E. L. Doctorow, Editor. Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 381 pp., $13 In his introduction to this year's Best American Short Stories, guest editor E. L. Doctorow suggests that the contemporary short story is in a state of transformation, moving away from the twentieth-century epiphanic model while borrowing ideas from earlier, episodic fictions. The result? "Oddly," Doctorow attests, "the reader discerns a nice sense of freedom in what has to be thought of as a conservative tendency, one that glances back to the nineteenth century. It's as if some literary shackle has been broken —one made of gold, admittedly, but a shackle nevertheless." Whether a shackle has been broken in these twenty-one stories is arguable; what feels more certain is that this year's selection is as strong as, if not superior to, last year's anthology, edited by Amy Tan. That anthology featured a standout story by Nathan Englander, "The Tumblers." I was happy to discover that Englander has been selected again, this time for "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a comic tale about a financial analyst who experiences a midlife religious awakening in the back of a New York City cab. The story succeeds largely because Englander finds quiet humor and pathos where a lesser writer might have found absurdity alone. Ha Jin and Jhumpa Lahiri also return with new offerings. Jin's "The Bridegroom " is one of his best, a sharp and revealing story about a father's reluctance to accept his daughter's marriage to a gay man; and Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent" shows why the author received a Pulitzer Prize for her last collection of stories, The Interpreter ofMaladies. A reader might do a double-take to see Raymond Carver's name on the list of contributing authors, but Carver 's "Call if You Need Me" is a reminder of just how powerful this writer's vision was—is. Carver's story, discovered last year and published by Granta, pivots on an image of horses lost in a nighttime fog, an image Carver uses as a metaphor for the unhappy couple who witness the event. The story's conclusion is both unexpected and apt. Other familiar writers include Annie Proulx, Tim Gautreaux, Allan Gurganus, Amy Bloom, Ron Carlson and Junot Diaz (strange to think of Diaz as "familiar" already!). Although all their stories are excellent, none felt as memorable to me as Michael Byers' "The Beautiful Days," a lyrical yet candid story about a loss of innocence, hinging on a sexual favor. Other remarkable selections are Percival Everett's "The Fix," about a magical healer whose talent for fixing broken hearts and household appliances brings his eventual ruin, and Kathleen Hill's "The Anointed," in which the twelve-year-old protagonist has a literary coming-of-age in the dull, dismal room that passes for a school library: "The pages I had read threw open the strange possibility that looking at things, feeling them, were also things that happened The Missouri Review · 173 to you, just as much as meeting someone or going on a trip. What you thought and felt when you were alone or silently in the presence of someone else also made a story." But the story that will linger the longest for me is ZZ Packer's "Brownies," about a troop ofBrownies from the suburbs of Atlanta who conspire to beat up a troop of white girls at summer camp. The story's sad, tender and regrettable crisis is matched only by the power of its quiet dénouement, where Packer's narrator comes to realize "there was something mean in the world that I could not stop." Moments like these reveal what short fiction has always done best: illuminate and instruct. These stories do just that. (AV) House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III Vintage Contemporaries, 2000, 365 pp., $14 Now and then a novel comes along that makes us recall what really good fiction is all about. A really...

Kate Chopin's "One Story": Casting a Shadowy Glance on the Ethics of Regionalism

In Kate Chopin's first two critical essays, both written in 1894, same year her first collection of short fiction, Bayou Folk, was published, St. Louis-born walter--who was best known for her Louisiana fictions--demonstrates ambivalence with which many nineteenth-century American authors approached terms like regionalism and local color. The essays are brief but incisive accounts of strengths and weaknesses of regional writing and offer a quick glance at literary conflicts at end of century. The first reports on Western Association of Writers, a mostly Indiana group that Chopin chides for clinging to past and conventional standards, [for] an almost Creolean sensitiveness to criticism and a singular ignorance of, or disregard for, value of highest art forms.(1) The group's provincialism, Chopin suggests, prevents from realizing that there is a very, very big world lying not wholly in northern Indiana. But to ensure that her criticism of local writing here is not itself read provincially, Chopin continues to describe world good fiction must attempt to configure: nor does lie at antipodes, either. It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it (691). The second is a more measured piece, a mixed review of Crumbling Idols, Hamlin Garland's collection of essays championing use of regional and local color elements in service of a literary realism. By Chopin's estimation, when Garland advocates breaking free of the hold of conventionalism, he ends up undervaluing the importance of past in art and exaggerates significance of present, especially as present makes itself visible through meticulous detailing of local life. Though she herself was a writer of regional fiction that was enthusiastically promoted for its artistic and faithful rendering of local life, Chopin here warns that problems, social environments, local color and rest of are not of themselves motives to insure survival of a writer who employs them (693). Chopin's curious aversion to efforts of her fellow regional writers in these essays seems to come from a suspicion of any ethical motive or naturalist principle and favor a strict formalism or aestheticism. The critiques also show Chopin to be reluctant to throw in with any aesthetic ideology that blindly attacks powers that support or artistic forms that enable it. Thus she characterizes Western Association's eschewing of high art as naive and childish, and she takes Garland to task for his impolitic criticism of East as a tyrannous literary center. There can no good come of abusing Boston and New York, Chopin cautions: On contrary, as `literary centers' they have rendered incalculable service ... by bringing to light whatever ... has been produced of force and originality in West and South since war (694). Such a position is coincidentally (and perhaps ironically) in step with much of early twentieth-century literary criticism of regional fiction that kept Chopin an admired but minor figure until rediscovery of her second novel, The Awakening. At first glance, much of Chopin's own fiction seems to discount her critique of Garland's veritism and of regional writing in general, but a closer inspection, particularly of short fiction, tells a different story. Chopin delivers her criticism with authority and conviction, with authenticity of one who speaks from within a region and tradition, suggesting not that Chopin is simply inconsistent in her criticism and practice, but rather that Chopin's understanding of regional writing includes a sophisticated and indeed implicitly ethical knowledge of dangers inherent in claiming to offer an authentic or enduring relation of another person or community. Published six months before her review of Garland's manifesto, Chopin's Bayou Folk contains two stories that explicitly challenge impulse of local color to provide an authentic vision of a region. …