Kind Of Fiction Research Articles

Ontology After Folk Psychology; or, Why Eliminativists Should Be Mental Fictionalists

ABSTRACTMental fictionalism holds that folk psychology should be regarded as a kind of fiction. The present version gives a Lewisian prefix semantics for mentalistic discourse, where roughly, a mentalistic sentence “p” is true iff “p” is deducible from the folk psychological fiction. An eliminativist version of the view can seem self‐refuting, but this charge is neutralized. Yet a different kind of “self‐effacing” emerges: Mental fictionalism appears to be a mere “parasite” on a future science of cognition without contributing anything substantial. The paper then rebuts the objection, illustrating that prefix semantics resolves a lingering problem for eliminativism from Boghossian. The problem is that eliminativists seem unable to adopt realism about neuroscience, for such realism implies that neuroscientific statements represent reality accurately. However, a deflationary version of prefix semantics allows the eliminativist to draw an ontologically relevant distinction (roughly) between truths that have a storytelling prefix and those that do not. (Deflationism means there is no implication that the unprefixed sentences robustly represent reality). The overarching lesson is that eliminativists need to approach ontology carefully so as to avoid self‐refutation; however, prefix‐semantical mental fictionalism provides the resources for them to do so.

NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIC MEMORY VS CATHOLIC TRADITIONAL DISCOURSE IN LOUISE ERDRICH’S NOVELS

This article analyses the Catholic interpretation of Bible-Christian imagery presupposition within Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine series. Religious discourse might be either explicit (when all the conclusions are clear) or implicit (when some shades of meanings are hidden). But this mystery is worth enshrouding with some linguistic technics. In this case, the most suitable approach would be the hermeneutical method, particularly utilizing its “hermeneutical circle” technique. This method involves breaking down the text into smaller fragments, interpreting each part individually, and then integrating these interpretations into a broader contextual understanding. Testament’s allusions are really vivid within the “Love Medicine” novel. The problem of interpreting Native American literature has been a concern for Ukrainian literary theorists since it first appeared in our country. It is worth mentioning that this kind of fiction is known in our country for less than ten years, and its interpretation is complicated not only because of the variety of positions, oppositions, and assumptions, but also due to the lack of thorough theoretical approaches to it that is caused by the lack of indigenist information. The post-millennium, the time of choices and challenges, provides an opportunity for Ukrainian scholars to expand the boundaries of their transnational research representation and include the names of indigenous authors in their research agenda.

Enseñar literatura en tiempos revueltos. El deseo de leer y la educación literaria

Why (and for what purposes) should we teach literature in the classroom today? What should we do with literature at school? How do we educate students in the appreciation and enjoyment of literary reading and writing at the beginning of the 21st century and in the context of an education and a society subjected to the fascination for other kinds of fiction and other stories that flood television screens and to the deluge of information from the internet? In this essay, we will refer to issues such as the evolution of literature teaching over time, the theoretical debate on the identity of the literary text, the sense and relevance of literary education in the context of current networked societies, the rights of the reader, and the desire to read; furthermore, at the end of the essay we provide didactic orientations for literature education in the classroom.

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis

Quotation and Narration in Contemporary Popular Fiction in Swedish

A fundamental feature of many genres of fiction is the alternation between a narrative frame (NF) and quoted inset (QI) dialogue. Both formal and representational features distinguish NF and QI segments. This paper is an explorative study on the stylistic differentiation between frame and inset material in recent commercially successful fiction in Swedish. There are mainly two orthographic options as regards this distinction: Explicitly enclosing inset segments within quotation marks is one. Using an initial dash to indicate utterance display is another, in which case frame and inset material typically alternate in a way not made explicit by the orthography. The corpus behind the present study comprised 450 novels. In order to deal with dash orthography data (135 books), we trained a multilayer perceptron classifier to tell NF and QI segments apart. We relied on the fact that native quotation mark text can be converted to annotated dash orthography data, which can then be used for supervised training and validation. A small-scale manual evaluation on the texts we aim to analyze, yielded an accuracy score around 95%. In order to explore the stylometric relations between NF and QI components in the novels, we looked at a selection of basic grammatical features. A characterization of each feature was made by means of recording the fraction of works in which the relative frequency of the feature is higher in QI than in NF. This summarizes how authors tend to “use” that feature to create a contrast between NF and QI. Another way to examine how the NF and QI styles are related is to apply a correlation test. We then saw, for instance, that QI material in 100% of the books are denser in auxiliary verbs, second person pronouns, and interjections, while NF segments in all or almost all cases are denser in nouns, adjectives, third person pronouns, and prepositions. We could also observe that e.g. noun density in NF and QI correlate in a strong way. The same holds for adverbs and cardinal numerals. This suggests that books and authors exhibit stylistic tendencies which affect both narrator and the characters, as far as the kind of fiction we have studied go.

Toddler-Hunting in Wartime: Kōno Taeko’s “On the Inside”

In the postwar 1960s, Kono Taeko (1926-2015) debuted with shocking stories of alienated modern women whose fantasies of pleasure in sadistic violence, masochism, and pederasty belied their otherwise routine exterior worlds. Kono's "Todder-Hunting" (Yojigari, 1961) remains most well known and representative but other works, including the Akutagawa Award-winning "Crabs" (Kani, 1963) that appeared in Lucy North's translated collection, cemented Kono's reputation and her reception in English as a writer of disturbing psychosexual fantasy. If critics read history into her work at all, it would be in order to note how Kono's heroines, like their author, emerged with such violent and repressed force on the literary scene precisely because of an unsustainable historical exclusion of women's voices. While this is partially true, it does not tell the whole story. This essay argues that Kono Taeko's fictional world can best be understood by also taking into account her reputation in Japan as a member of the senchuha, or wartime generation. In short, her wartime experiences in Osaka would go on to shape her choice of career and the kind of fiction she would later write. This essay analyzes in depth "Behind Bars" (Hei no naka, 1962), one of the few explicitly autobiographical works published by Kono around the same time as "Toddler Hunting," in order to contend that her wartime experiences of factory mobilization and terrifying daily bombing on the so-called "home front" would later shape her stories of violent gender relations, oppressive household institutions (ie seido), and lost childhood. Superimposing the irrational realities of wartime structures over fantasies of normal domestic life in "Behind Bars," Kono found a productive locus of distortion to motivate much of her later fiction.

Sensation Fiction, Sexual Health, and Medical Prose: John Milner Fothergill and the Late Victorian Novel.

This essay examines how cultural anxieties about the impact of novels on mental and physical health sparked by the sensation novel permeated late Victorian medical discourse, focusing on the prominent physician and novelist, John Milner Fothergill (1841-1888). I argue, firstly, that the articulation of these anxieties in medical writing was shaped by contemporary attitudes towards women and the working class, and secondly, that, despite his explicit censures, Fothergill's medical and literary works evince narrative and stylistic affinities with sensation fiction. The essay delineates the context behind physicians' opposition to the consumption of certain kinds of fiction in the period, demonstrating how the cultural impact of the sensation novel phenomenon can be more fully charted by incorporating explicitly medical responses. I conclude by emphasizing the need for medical humanists to attend to the diverse ways that contemporary literary developments shape medical prose, whether in the spirit of repudiation or appropriation.

From the Colonized Other to the Ruling Subject: A Post-colonial Subject Beyond the Theoretical Resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This study aims to analyze Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a postcolonial instigation that goes beyond the mere textual resistance of postcolonial theories. It does so by representing the colonial subject’s appropriation of a reversed form of power, so that the conventional subject/other relationship is already subverted. Assuming in advance the subversion of the existing colonialist power, this novel functions as an allegory by depicting the personal story of the protagonist, Changez, in a physical and mental environment in which colonial oppression and postcolonial resistance constantly collide. Setting up a subversive cognitive frame across the narrative that precludes any possibility of the West’s otherization of the East, Changez’s story is both personal and unavoidably political, persistently mocking the displaced power of the West to generate postcolonial resistance. Paying close attention to this narrative setup, this study will analyze Changez’s inverted appropriation of the narrative power of the West, symbolized in the person of the American visitor. It will further probe Changez’s love triangle with his white girlfriend, Erica, and her dead ex-white boyfriend, Chris, in terms of an analysis of the (post)colonial power relationship. Also, by examining the process of Changez’s awakening from a subordinate to an anti-American instigator or warrior suggest that literature, especially novels, can convey a provocative message of subversion by assuming a reality that is fictional and feasible at the same time. This kind of fiction can ultimately play a role as a medium for the radical expression of anti-colonial resistance.

How granular should our explanations of fantastic fiction be?

Explaining the reasons behind the success of various kinds of fiction is important, but how granular should our explanations be? I suggest that using a less granular, more general hypothesis would allow avoiding some pitfalls, such as using the concept of "imaginary world," which eludes precise definitions.

Heuristics as a cognitive function

The study conceptualizes science fiction as heuristics. To implement this conceptualization, a hybrid definition of science fiction is proposed: science fiction is a kind of fiction whose works can be characterized by secondary artistic conventionality, cognitive estrangement, and test of an intellectual idea or fantastic assumption. As an operational characterization of heuristics, V. Spiridonov’s concept of heuristics is used. Science fiction can be considered as a kind of heuristics under specific conditions, for example, when science fiction work contains the reflected-out heuristics or when heuristics are brought as science fiction work to stimulate the intuitive flash of the thought or insight. However, science fiction can only be regarded as heuristics with certain reservations: science fiction primarily solves artistic problems while heuristics primarily solve cognitive problems: and they can function independently of each other. But it shows that a heuristic function can be attributed to science fiction to solute a problem or to gain a piece of new knowledge (to make a discovery) in an intellectually and creative way.

Racism Is a Modifiable Risk Factor: Relationships Among Race, Ethnicity, and Colorectal Cancer Outcomes

Racism Is a Modifiable Risk Factor: Relationships Among Race, Ethnicity, and Colorectal Cancer Outcomes

Digitized Rights as an Electronic and Virtual Fiction for the Legal Support for the Turnover of Subjective Claims

Introduction: the paper examines the legal nature of such new categories as “digital rights”, “utilitarian digital rights”, “digital financial assets” and “digital currency”. The correlation of these phenomena with each other is clarified from the standpoint of modern civil turnover. The purpose of the study is to analyze the legally significant features of the above phenomena. Methods: the methodological framework for the study is a set of methods of scientific knowledge, among which the main ones are analysis, synthesis, generalization and comparative law. Results: the author’s position justified in the work is based on the legislation and the opinions of the competent scientists on the issues of clarifying the legal essence of the above-mentioned categories from the standpoint of civil law. Conclusions: the author suggests considering “digital rights”, “utilitarian digital rights”, “digital financial assets” not only from the standpoint of objects of civil rights, but also from the standpoint of the original digital form of fixing property rights. It is proposed to introduce the category “digitized rights” into the legal lexicon as a kind of fiction used to ensure the operability of the legal mechanism that mediates the turnover of subjective claims in the electronic and virtual environment.

Mere Inventions of the Imagination

Mere Inventions of the Imagination

How to Read the ‘Literary’ in the Literary Market

Abstract This essay argues that under contemporary capitalism, all literary production is, at first approximation, commodity production. This has consequences for our understanding of the work of literary studies. We are no longer able to easily recur to preformed theories of the ‘literary’ as a category at least in some way exempt from extrinsic pressures. Attention to the ‘literary market’ remains superficial when it insists on paying attention chiefly to so-called literary fiction on the understanding that it has prima facie higher claims to our attention than popular genre fiction—it does not. In fact, as this essay argues, appreciation of the thorough commodification of art under capitalism asks us to take seriously the need to break with our categories; to insist on the primacy of interpretative attention in determining what kinds of fiction we study.

Music, History and the Human Psyche: A Critique of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Culture and its ramifications, since time immemorial, have been hot seats of debates and negotiations. The myriad nuances which are associated with any culture for that matter glaringly and very rightly finds true expression in various kinds of fiction. Salman Rushdie has always emerged as one of the notable writers who is known for the enticing yet subtle amalgamation of different genres of writing in his so called “cult” pieces of artistic creation. Talking about a cult text, what better can fit in than the ever-popular The Ground Beneath Her Feet which makes one glued to the seat. Starting from the elements of history to the pivotal roles played by different songs and musical notes, the novel encapsulates them, thereby making the text a rich hotchpotch of schemas. However, what elevates the oeuvre of the piece is the inherent dealings with the psychological traits of human beings. This paper is an attempt to bring in the attributes of history and music to the forefront without neglecting the attributes of the human psyche. It also efforts to portray how distorted an individual can turn out to be with an improper psychological state of mind.

Global Borders: Power, Fragility, and 'a kind of fiction' (editorial introduction)

Global Borders: Power, Fragility, and 'a kind of fiction' (editorial introduction)

Editor's Note

5 welcome to a special fiction issue of The Yale Review. During the long days and (seemingly) short months of the pandemic, all of us at the journal found ourselves reading more fiction than ever before, perhaps to escape the grind of the news. In a moment when travel was not possible, transport still was. In a moment when ambiguity was sidelined, when leadership debased language, fiction reminded us of the essential ambiguities we all too often paper over or militate against. In this special issue, we are delighted to present six remarkable short stories. In these pages, you will read a debut short story by Jared Jackson, a writer of great talent; “Blanca” explores the life of an adolescent boy in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the first piece to be published from his collection in progress about residents of that city. You’llalsofindalateworkbytheItalianwriterAntonioTabucchi, who died in 2012, and who wrote a series of stories inspired by art; in “So Long,” translated by Elizabeth Harris, he responds to a work by the artist Tullio Pericoli. “The territory of writing is the imagination that goes beyond the image; it is the story of the pictures but also…the story of the unknown that surrounds them,” he wrote. “Ana and the Water,” by Carla Guelfenbein and translated by Nicole Bell, is set in the aftermath of the Chilean military coup of 1973; it offers a chilling, focused look at the ways violence changes everything we thought we understood about our lives. Jesse Ball is one of the most original writers at work today (a highly unoriginal way to express that sentiment, but why not say it plainly?); “Birthday” is a story I won’t forget. As he puts it in an interview in The Paris Review, Ball tries “to write very simply and clearly about things that are not a matter of consensus.” This is a writer who reminds us that so much of our days are propped up Editor's Note 6 by a kind of “groupthink” that obscures deeper realities lying right before us (as Guelfenbein does, in other ways). In “The Queen of Bark and Darkness,” Joanna Hershon delicately explores doppelgangers, betrayal, motherhood, and fear of what lies around us; the piece unfolds almost gently to its ending, which forcibly rearranges what the reader thought she understood. Irene Muchemi-­ Ndiritu, who was born in Nairobi, shares “The Blessing of Kali,” set in Kenya, an account of generational conflict that precisely captures postcolonial mores in a modernizing nation. Unsentimental, unflinching, the story contains a novel’s worth of event; devastation is almost too gentle a word for its ­ subtly managed conclusion. There are essays on fictions in our everyday lives—Kieran Setiya writes about finding companionship in the weirdness of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories; Wendy S. Walters diagnoses American fictions of hospitality and trespass; and Erica Berry characterizes our narratives of climate guilt. Alongside all this there is a portfolio of photographs by Adolfo Kaminsky, better known for his work as a forger of identity papers—another kind of fiction, one that proved essential to saving many lives during the Second World War. We hope you’ll travel along with us—that you might enjoy, for a few moments, the worlds these writers have built. —meghan o’rourke ...

Why are myths true: Plato on the veracity of myths

Distinguishing myths in terms of their veracity had almost been neglected in Plato’s studies. In this article, the author focuses on Plato’s controversial claims about the truth-status of myths. An attempt is made to elucidate what he really had in mind when assessing the veracity of myths. The author claims that Plato, while discussing the epistemic status of myths, actually distinguished three kinds of myths in regard to what they narrate. Additionally, it is argued that he endorses three different kinds of truth value for myths: they can be either true or false, probable, or factually false but conveying some valuable truths. In the Republic II and III, Plato implicitly distinguishes the truth value of theological myths from the truth value of aetiological and normative ones, each of which are explained in detail in the article. In Plato’s view, the theological myths can be either true or false, because he determines the divine nature a priori. When ascribing the probable character to myths, Plato has in mind mostly aetiological myths. Given that we are unable to establish the truths on the origins and development of many phenomena, because they originated in the remote past, what we can do is to reconstruct plausible and consistent myths of these phenomena, which, among others, might contain the arguments and even proofs, such as the proof of the cosmic destruction in Plato’s own myth in the Politicus. In the third case, when Plato says that myths are lies, yet containing some truth, he had in mind myths which might be the product of our imagination like eschatological myths, for example. Being a kind of fiction, they are false, in the sense they do not correspond to any real state of affairs. Since they convey profound ethical norms or religious insights, they can be regarded as true.

Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge

Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This “imaginative resistance” is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability or readers’ normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical work that has been asked of it. Resistance to taking things to be fictional is often best explained by unfamiliarity with kinds of fictions than any representational, normative, or cognitive limits. With training and experience, any understandable proposition can be made fictional and be taken to be fictional by readers. This requires a new understanding both of imaginative resistance and what it might be able to tell us about topics like conceivability or the bounds of possibility.

Reading Information in Crime Fiction: A Linguistic Analysis of Ruth Rendell’s The Bridesmaid (1989)

Crime fiction is a popular genre which deserves a close analysis of its overall communicative devices. It is the aim of this paper to analyse Ruth Rendell’s The Bridesmaid (1989), allegedly considered one of the masterpieces of this well-known genre. Our study endeavours to identify, on the one hand, features which characterize this kind of fiction and, on the other hand, passages where the reader may feel in that state of disappointment due to the author’s provision of unrequired information. The latter is undoubtedly one of the basic standpoints typically employed to deny the literary status to this genre.