Literary Fiction Research Articles

Proposals for unification and use of the Ukrainian national nomenclature for native and exotic species of the longhorn beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) in Ukraine. Part III: subfamilies Lepturinae and Necydalinae

The emerging and development of Ukrainian biological nomenclature has a long tradition that dates back more than a century and a half. The Ukrainian vernacular nomenclature of the longhorn beetles is found in scientific publications, starting from the middle of the 19th century. For the most part, these are names collected from oral folk speech. The stage of scientific construction of the Ukrainian vernacular nomenclature began at the beginning of the 20th century. Further development and use of the Ukrainian vernacular nomenclature was artificially interrupted for political reasons in the middle of the 20th century. We examined in detail this historical dimension of the Ukrainian vernacular nomenclature of the longhorn beetles from its origin, development, artificial interruption to the modern need for its restoration, and also proposed a methodology for the formation of the modern names. This is presented in the first part of our study. In the first and second parts, we also provided a detailed Ukrainian vernacular nomenclature of the longhorn beetles for three subfamilies: Spondylidinae, Prionunae, and Cerambycinae. The other three subfamilies - Lepturinae, Necydalinae and Lamiinae are still not codified, and their Ukrainian vernacular nomenclature has not been developed. The current (third) part of our study is devoted to the unification and codification of the Ukrainian national vernacular nomenclature of the names of two subfamilies: Lepturinae and Necydalinae. Ukrainian vernacular names of taxa from these subfamilies are very few and scattered in a number of papers published over the last 160 years, starting from 1864. Such an unusual situation occurred despite the fact that these beetles are among the most common and recognizable in the fauna of Ukraine, numbering 79 species from 37 genera, 9 tribes and 2 subfamilies. Today, there is a critical lack of their vernacular names for use in scientific, technical, popular, educational and fiction literature. The main principles we used for the unification and codification of the longhorn beetles Ukrainian vernacular nomenclature: 1) only the binomial name of a specific taxon consisting of the name of the genus (noun) and the specific epithet (adjective) is suitable for use; 2) the names of taxa in the form of three- and four-nomen, transliterations from Latin, transfers from Russian and other languages, appositions, names with a hyphen are unsuitable for use; 3) priority is given to the oldest or most used Ukrainian names; 4) proposals for new names were made only if necessary. It was revealed that for the indicated subfamilies, only 24 taxa (19%) out of 127 have Ukrainian vernacular names. These include 17 species, 6 genera, 1 tribe. At the same time, only 3 binomens and 8 specific epithets have been considered suitable for use, since they correspond to the defined rules of nomenclature. The rest are unsuitable due to non-compliance with the criteria of the nomenclature. On the whole, we unified and codified 137 names of the longhorn beetles in the Ukrainian language, including 6 subspecies, 79 species, 1 subgenus, 39 genera, 9 tribes, 1 supertribe and 2 subfamilies. For the first time, we proposed Ukrainian names for 123 taxa of different ranks.

О новом словаре-справочнике цитат для школьников (Рецензия на издание: Дунев А.И. Цикады цитат. Цитатный минимум школьника. Словарь-справочник. – Санкт-Петербург: Изд-во РГПУ им. А.И. Герцена, 2022. – 160 с.)

The article represents a review of a glossary that contains quotes from school literary fiction books. The relevance of the publication is defined by disturbing trends of modern reality: teenagers' narrow reading interests, decrease in the general index of precedence, cognitive distortion while interpreting axiologically marked content of precedent units. The essential set of glossary units contains 350 quotes chosen according to the program content of literature education at school. The choice of quotes to be included in the glossary is due not so much to a methodological tradition as to the actual existence and frequency of the quote. A glossary entry includes several zones that give information about the length of a quote, its source and possible usage. Appendixes with quotes distributed accordingly to levels of education, as well as teaching tips to create various tasks based on quotes, add practical value to the glossary. The author of the glossary rightfully argues that the utterances that have become independent pieces of culture help to understand cultural meanings on the one hand, and on the other hand, start the mechanism of word coinage that affects the linguistic personality development.

“There was much new to grok”: an analysis of word coinage in science fiction literature

Abstract As can be witnessed in projects such as The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Prucher, Jeff. 2007. Brave new words: The Oxford dictionary of science fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press), science fiction has been fertile ground for the creation of new words and concepts. Whereas the aforementioned dictionary was constructed by eliciting examples and citations from volunteers, this paper presents an initial foray into data-driven methods for uncovering lexis unique to science fiction. Words unique to science fiction texts are extracted by comparing a science fiction corpus against the British National Corpus (BNC Consortium. 2007. The British National Corpus, XML edition. Oxford Text Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2554 (accessed 29 June 2022)) to produce a list of 306 neologisms from 74 texts. In addition, this study seeks to examine the ways in which authors impart the meaning of such words to the reader, drawing on frameworks of semantic word relations and work in cognitive linguistics. This reveals the use of definitions and glosses by the authors, both in narration and direct speech, co-occurrence with synonyms, and the drip-feeding of attributes pertaining to the concept being referenced. In addition, characters can be shown to struggle with the concepts to which neologisms refer, allowing authors to explore themes of alienation and other-worldliness.

Attentional modulation in literary reading: A theoretical‐empirical framework

AbstractWhen we think of a person engaged in the act of reading literary fiction, the mental image that readily comes to mind is one of focused concentration. In our current information age, such a form of reading seems especially necessary, and often lacking. This causes a change in how we read, often described in terms of close reading versus hyperreading. Literary reading is typically associated with the former; screen‐based reading of information texts with the latter. Accounts of attention and distraction in reading research are often informed by a binary way of thinking. Literary reading, while often aligned with close reading, also involves selection, strategic allocation of attention informed by textual cues, condensation, and mind‐wandering. It never occurs in a state of continuous attention: we combine different modes, triggered by both textual and readerly characteristics. A challenge for literary studies in the present media landscape is to determine more precisely when readers read with close attention and when they skim, or what they skip. This article presents a theoretical contribution to studies of literary reading in the form of a literature review and a framework for attentional modulation. Education might benefit from a more sophisticated concept of such attentional modulations.

Organization and the arts: Critical conversations on expanding meanings and understandings of who matters

In this article, I celebrate and discuss Organization’s contributions to the conversation between organization studies and works of art, such as literary fiction, poetry, film, etc. I take this critical conversation forward by highlighting several ways in which such works of art expand meanings for our research, and I then build on this to call for expanding understandings of “who matters” in our engagement with the arts and in our scholarship. In particular, I argue for the case of works of art from/of/about the Global South as an opportunity to take our critical project forward, tracing the promising but complex contours that one is likely to encounter in traversing this relatively unchartered terrain. I conclude by building on this discussion to suggest doing art and being ourselves through art as a part of our conversation with the arts in the role of academic activists and as a means of resistance to current oppressive systems.

Wer die worheit gerne mynn / Und sich güter dinge versynn, / Der müsz der besten einre sin

Abstract Lutwin’s late 13th century account of the lives and deaths of the protoplasts and their first descendants, ‘Eva und Adam’, employs traits and literary techniques usually associated with vernacular courtly literature to convey its religious message to an audience of German speaking nobility. Such techniques include the amplification of the source material by adding newly invented sequences to the narrative’s plot as well as a highly self-conscious narrator, reflecting on his role as a mediator of divine revelations while, at the same time, openly exhibiting his ability to orchestrate the events and characters within his narrative. For decades, the scientific community has been split over the question whether these features may present evidence that contemporaries might have viewed the majority of courtly epics and romance as purely fictional. However, considering the religious nature of Lutwin’s themes and statements, it seems unlikely to assume that a medieval audience had to actively suspend their disbelief in order to accept courtly adaptations of biblical stories. Applying the modern dichotomy between factuality and fictionality therefore leads us to regard Lutwin’s ‘Eva und Adam’ as a paradoxical text riddled with inconsistencies. The concept of ‘fideales Erzählen’, recently introduced by Elke Koch, provides an alternative and potentially more adequate means of describing the historical modes of conceiving and perceiving premodern religious literature. Accordingly, instead of empirical verifiability being the main criteria in determining the status of factual or fictional texts respectively, faith, divine inspiration and adherence to common orthodoxy could, in the notion of a medieval audience, enable authors to present truthful insights into otherwise unattainable religious truths. Based on Koch’s deliberations, this paper re-evaluates several aspects of Lutwin’s ‘Eva und Adam’ – most notably the conception of its narrator – which in the past would have been considered as traits of fictional literature. It can be shown that, although Lutwin acts as a conscious arranger of his narration, his account’s proclaimed verisimilitude remains unchallenged.

Cutting through the Fog: Harvey Swados, C. Wright Mills, and Mid-Twentieth Century America

The sociologist C. Wright Mills is no stranger to students of treatments of both the mid-twentieth century American Left and U.S. intellectual history. Mills’s confidante, neighbor, and intellectual ally, the novelist and essayist Harvey Swados, remains an understudied figure in the history of the twentieth century intellectual and literary left. A deeper examination of the Mills-Swados relationship provides not only with a more complete portrait of Mills, but another unique and independent voice in mid-twentieth century intellectual radicalism more clearly emerges. A one-time Trotskyist and a former member of the Max Shachtman-led Workers Party, Swados not only wrote acclaimed literary fiction, but also addressed issues that were distinctly unfashionable among the intellectual left in the 1950s and 1960s: the less ideological and more business-unionist labor leadership; the realities, including the humiliations, of the lives of blue-collar workers in the “Fat Fifties”; and the problems of how to interact with a generation of restless young people were coming of age in an era of material comfort, but who also increasingly wanted a larger voice in American society. Examining the relationship also allows us to better able understand the increasing tension between the different tendencies among leftist intellectuals in the years when Cold War concerns dominated American society, and accommodation with Soviet communism or new forms of socialism was seen as unacceptable by a once-radical generation of intellectuals disillusioned by the atrocities of Stalinism.

ChatGPT Isn't Magic

ChatGPT Isn't Magic

КӨРКЕМ МӘТІННІҢ ТЕОРИЯЛЫҚ ЕРЕКШЕЛІКТЕРІ

The article analyzes the problem of the literary text, the reasoning of scientists about the text. Differentiation of definitions to the text is given, several types of literary text are considered. In particular, the concept of fiction and popular science literature was described. While a literary text is based on associative-imaginative thinking, a science fiction text is based on logical thinking. According to the work of M.K. Akhmetova, the external and internal form of the text is explained. In addition, it tells about the concept of a text addressed to the recipient. The logical, stylistic and pragmatic position of literary scholars M. M. Bakhtin, I.R. Galperin, N.S. Valgina about the text is touched upon. The features of the literary text proposed by N.A. Nikolina a highlighted. The social, everyday, terminological meanings of the term "information" are given. The types of information in texts and its three types are distinguished

Research on the Foreign Communication of Chinese Science Fiction Literature in the Perspective of Public Diplomacy

Research on the Foreign Communication of Chinese Science Fiction Literature in the Perspective of Public Diplomacy

Effects of Ismat Chaghtai on Fareha Arshad's Fiction

Ismat Chaghtai has a prominent status in Urdu fiction literature. He has presented a true picture of the events and tragedies that happen day and night in the society. Every writer has his own style which is adopted by later writers. Ismat Chaghtai is also counted among the writers whose style was followed. Fareha Arshad is a fiction writer in Urdu literature who adopted the style of Ismat's fiction. Fareha has written on women who are rendered helpless by poverty, sexual violence after seduction, and the state of the dancer. Fareha also gave place to such stories in her legends which are clearly visible in the society. This article discusses the elements of Fareha Arshad's fiction which seems to be influenced by Ismat Chaghtai's fiction

LITERATURE AND ETHICS

“Literature is the teacher of ethics” (Temkov). If one assumes that literature reflects life, then it only serves to pedagogically illustrate classic questions: how one should behave towards one’s fellow human beings, what virtue and vice are, how conflicts arise and how they are to be solved and which are the highest goods are in life. However, literature itself teaches us much more: it touches delicate issues that no other medium would dare to do. Only literary works can delicately, profoundly and provocative handle questions like love, war, guilt, (un)justice. The modern moral standards would not allow Lolita, Tadzio, or Törleß. New theories of literature and ethics focus on the reading process because ‘literary fiction debates norms and values’. In this paper, the attempt has been made to acknowledge the value of theme diversity in literature in order to broaden the limits of moral dilemmas, but also to discuss the cultural influence, as well as the role of the narrative, author and reader in the comprehension of ethical questions. Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader” and Peter Handke`s “Winter Journey” are only the tip of the iceberg concerning a much broader topic realm.

Desire for Trans Ancestors

In this article, the relationship between the affective histories of queer and trans activism and the reading and writing of contemporary fictional trans literature is explored. The focus lies on the analysis of Jordy Rosenberg’s (2018) Confessions of the Fox, which allows for an investigation into how trans histories can be written and read. The article emphasizes the intricate interplay between literature and history, specifically examining the tensions and pleasures that arise from balancing authenticity and fictionality. Additionally, the role of literature as a medium for expressing emotions and inspiring activism is considered. Confessions of the Fox tells the story of a fictional transmasculine literary scholar who discovers a mysterious manuscript that reveals the trans identity of 18th century London’s infamous thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard. The narrative of Confessions of the Fox establishes an analogy between human bodies and written texts, specifically referring to the trans body. In this article, I argue that the narrative itself approaches the body and the manuscript through the affect of desire. Drawing on the concept of textual desire, as found in Roland Barthes' (1975) The Pleasure of the Text and in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985), the article analyzes the relationship between text and readership to trace pleasurable and ethical encounters with otherness. Overall, the article puts forward the idea to consider reading practices as a tool through which we can investigate the significance and ramifications of queer and trans histories and activism. Keywords: trans literature, historiographic metafiction, Confessions of theFox, textual desire, queer reading, trans reading, authenticity, trans literacy

Cyberpunk as a Metacultural Movement: Philosophical-Cultural Analysis

The aim of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of modern mass culture and during this analysis find out its ontological status including scientism-technological imperatives of cyberculture and ideas of transhumanism. Results. Cyberpunk is an interesting, functional and new (in comparison with classical examples) form of mass culture, cultural-ideological movement, and sphere of translation and the intersection of protest ideas and meanings, due to its genre and sectoral pluralism (science fiction, film industry, music, design, video games, fashion, ideology, etc.), and also logics of technodeterminism, is still an important factor of transformation cultural-art space in the 21st century. Scientific novelty. In the article, for the first time, realised the philosophical-cultural analysis of cyberpunk including its peculiarities as a literary genre, phenomenon of mass culture and aesthetics. Conclusions. It is proved that cyberpunk appeared as a genre of science fiction literature in the 1960s-1970s and then later through conceptualisation of ideas in the 80s and agreeing of transcendental impulses counterculture of the 60s with computerisation and the specifics of technological evolution in the 90s, has evolved to the level of a metacultural movement. As the latter, it encompasses the literary genre, the film and fashion industry, architecture and graphic design (with a special aesthetic), technoanthropology, futurology and identity theory, and ideological discourse. It is confirmed that thanks to protest as a manifestation of freedom, the actualisation of the problem of corporeality, and dystopian high-tech projections, with the help of postmodern relativism and poststructuralist rhizomorphism, cyberpunk annihilates modern cultural narratives, thus creating many risks, including the potential formation of pathological forms of identification, declarative asociality, and cyber-prosthetics, which often develop into horrific manifestations of dehumanisation.

Where Is Utopia in a Time of Disaster and Catastrophe?

In search of new literary voices that might present an answer to Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 lament on the failure of contemporary literary fiction to find forms that adequately express the multiple challenges of the Anthropocene, I came across a review of Allegra Hyde’s debut novel in the Los Angeles Times. The novel’s title, Eleutheria, was suggestive enough to pique my interest: etymologically, it evokes the concepts of liberty and freedom; geographically, it calls to mind the small island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas that was colonized in the late 1640s by a group of English Puritans known as the Eleutheran Adventurers. Add to this that Willa Marks, the novel’s narrator-protagonist, is a twenty-two-year-old member of Generation Z, the same generation as the students we teach these days, and Eleutheria (2022) becomes a worthy candidate for an American Studies syllabus. What kind of narrative tapestry was the author able to weave out of the materials of history, climate change, and a young generation’s growing frustration with the ecological and political state of the world? I was ready to discuss these and similar questions with a group of students in a seminar on Anglophone Literature in the Anthropocene during the summer semester 2023. Serendipitously, the son of an American colleague and long-time friend studied with Allegra Hyde at Oberlin College, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He suggested that she might be willing to discuss her novel with a group of German students. When I issued the invitation to join us digitally for one session, she accepted. I interviewed Hyde, who is also the author of two short story collections – Of This New World (2016) and The Last Catastrophe (2023)– a few days later. The following text is the transcript of that conversation. It has been edited for readability.

Transnationalism and the Literary Reception of Australian Women Writers’ Fiction in the US, 2010–2020: Three Case Studies

ABSTRACT The following article examines how Australian literary fiction by women is received in the United States. In particular, it considers how books are positioned by publishers, reviewers and authors as relevant to an American audience as well as to what extent Australian literary fiction’s appeal is borne out in reviews and in an online forum, Goodreads. To address these questions, I examine the US reception of three diverse literary novels by Australian women: Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Atria Books, 2016), Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (Riverhead, 2020), and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (Little, Brown, 2013). I argue that recent Australian literary fiction by women makes an appeal to US readers through a combination of “transnational orientation”—or ideas, characters and settings that a novel evokes to address a global readership—which are leveraged by publishers in book design and endorsements, and “authorial disambiguation”, in the form of essays and websites written by authors and addressed to local and global readers. Efforts to draw attention to a novel’s currency for a US audience are unevenly evident in reviews in broadsheets and trade publications, as well as on Goodreads.

How Male and Female Literary Authors Write About Affect Across Cultures and Over Historical Periods

A wealth of literature suggests the existence of sex differences in how emotions are experienced, recognized, expressed, and regulated. However, to what extent these differences result from the put in place of stereotypes and social rules is still a matter of debate. Literature is an essential cultural institution, a transposition of the social life of people but also of their intimate affective experiences, which can serve to address questions of psychological relevance. Here, we created a large corpus of literary fiction enriched by authors’ metadata to measure the extent to which culture influences how men and women write about emotion. Our results show that even though before the twenty-first century and across 116 countries women more than men have written about affect, starting from 2000, this difference has diminished substantially. Also, in the past, women’s narratives were more positively laden and less arousing. While the difference in arousal is ubiquitous and still present nowadays, sex differences in valence vary as a function of culture and have dissolved in recent years. Altogether, these findings suggest that historic evolution is associated with men and women writing similarly about emotions and reveal a sizable impact of culture on the affective characteristics of the lexicon.

The aqueous form and the Afro–Sino encounter in Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea

ABSTRACTThrough a focused study of Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, this article seeks to develop an aqueous hermeneutics of Africa–China literatures. Such a reading practice highlights the waterways that fundamentally shape Afro–Sino relations but have not been properly theorized in oceanic studies or Global South studies and challenges the ways we think about global connectivity and its associated genre – world literature. Owuor uses an aqueous form to tackle the Afro–Sino encounter’s complex temporalities – its maritime connections in antiquity, its present moment in capitalist modernity, and its unpredictable futures. Furthermore, her novel draws on water’s materiality to respond to the unevenly powered global literary market. Using Owuor as a starting point, this article considers whether the Indo-Pacific waters might offer a generative frame for cross-cultural comparisons, complicate the dominant paradigm of Afro–Sino literary studies, and integrate Chinese/sinophone maritime fiction and Indian Ocean literature of the anglophone and francophone worlds.

Sense and Sententiae

This essay aims to rethink a rhetorical microgenre: the “sentence” or sententia, a brief maxim usually stating a moral principle. My aim is to show that rhetorical sentences entail more flexible cognitive and interpretive acts than has usually been recognized. I read the theory and practice of the sentence alongside that of legal maxims, arguing that these small forms can cast a useful light on each other. I focus in particular on literary characters who misuse sentences in ways that prompt inferences about them that go beyond anything they either could or would say themselves. The act of sentence-making entails a judgment that balances the content of the statement against the context in which it is made; that judgment has analogues in law, in both equitable interpretation and the theory of fictions; in literature, that legal hermeneutics is put to work for the construction of character, conscripting what cognitive science calls “mentalizing” for the projection of a kind of inwardness fashioned out of the materials of common opinion. The essay ends by arguing that connecting rhetorical sentences to legal maxims allows us to think seriously about the relationship between legal and literary fiction as it shapes Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

A. S. Makarenko and the fate of his legacy in nowadays Russia

Introduction. The problem of educating the younger generation is one of the most important in modern Russian pedagogy. Russian scientists and teachers are carefully studying the legacy of their outstanding predecessors, the teachers of the past. Anton Semyonovich Makarenko (1888-1939) is one of such scientists who have left a unique mark in pedagogical science and practice. The article was written in connection with the 135th anniversary of his birth. The purpose of the article is to show the importance of Makarenko's personality in the development of Russian education. As tasks, the author highlights the characterization and evaluation of his achievements in practical work and pedagogical theory, the presentation of previously unknown biographical data of the teacher, his colleagues and relatives. Materials and methods. In the process of working on the article, the author used the following research methods: analysis of historical and pedagogical, memoir and fiction literature on the topic of the work, biographical, historical and comparative methods, as well as axiological (value) approach to the study of pedagogical innovations by A. S. Makarenko. Results. Up to the present time, Makarenko's personality, his practical activities and literary works cause heated debates among Russian practical teachers and theoretical teachers. The author characterizes Makarenko's achievements as a teacher, manifested in a factually reliable and accurate disclosure of the events of the biography of an outstanding teacher and his selfless efforts in the re-education of pupils and the pedagogization of their social environment. Makarenko is shown as a prominent writer and teacher. In fact, he is the founder of Russian artistic and pedagogical literature ("Pedagogical poem", "Flags on towers", "Book for parents"). Conclusion. The Soviet education had developed itself for decades in the main stream of the pedagogy of Makarenko. But the post-Soviet Russian education seems to avoid the Makarenko’s legacy. A. S. Makarenko is one of the most important teachers in the history of Russian education. His personality and pedagogical heritage need further study by historians of pedagogy.