Nonfiction Prose Research Articles

Особенности мемуарной прозы А. Урусовой (на примере книги «Ёмюр танышланы сагъы-ныу» («Воспоминания о современниках»)

The work examines the features and historical and cultural significance of memoir prose, theoreti-cal and methodological approaches to the study of the genre. Based on the work of A. Urusova, an attempt was made to identify the aesthetic beginning of the memoirs in the totality of their dis-tinctive features: personal experience (through the prism of the author’s individual perception), factuality, retrospectiveness, authenticity, as well as a comprehensive and new look at the work of the Karachay writer, characterized by a non-standard set axiological models of self-expression, a tendency towards clairism, modality. Because of the study of the text of A. Urusova’s book “Yomur tanyshlany sagynyu” (“Memories of contemporaries”, 1975), which reflected the histori-cal fate of the Karachay people through the prism of the activities of passionaries, the concept of historical and typological study of the memoir genre was substantiated, the features of the style and language of memoirs, principles images, the role and place of memoirs in the cultural life of the people and era are revealed. The theoretical significance of the work is in deepening ideas about various literary phenomena, in particular the genre of non-fiction prose - memoirs. Research methods: cultural-historical, descriptive-functional, biographical, historical-typological.

THE ANTHOLOGY “STATE OF WAR”: SYNERGY, PROBLEMATICS, GENRE ORIGINALITY OF THE TEXTS

The anthology “State of War” is a fiction and documentary prose about the bloody war unleashed by Russia on Ukrainian lands, a prose in which the authors, through the prism of their own worldview, experience and emotions, offer the general readership the recorded tragedies of “timeless truth”, the facts of grave illegal crimes committed by the Russian occupiers. The article aims to examine the reception of martial law events in the anthology as non-fiction literature in contemporary Ukrainian prose. The object of the study is the texts of the anthology “State of War”, united by the subject of depicting military events in Ukraine in order to document the war in its various manifestations and tell the world about it in the “Ukrainian voice”. The study was conducted using elements of descriptive, structural and semantic, receptive and interpretive, and contextual methods of analysis. The anthology “State of War” is a genre transformation that combines “sophisticated fiction and the accuracy of documentary” (V. Sayenko), and is dominated by essays, narratives, and memoirs that have only recently been classified as fiction and documentary literature. The textual and social conclusions of “State of War” with an appeal to autobiographical memory made it possible to consider texts in the genre of “non-fictional prose” (T. Bovsunivska): they contain autobiography, the authors appeal to personal experience, indicate involvement in the events described, the narrative is in the first person and is based on a reliable fact, as in memoir genres. The core format of the anthology’s textual content is determined by the history of everyday life. The authors of the book (fifty of them), like the characters in the stories, are writers and public figures, journalists and scholars, volunteers and soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Combatant writers, i.e., active military personnel – Oleksandr Mykhed, Artem Chapai, Artem Chekh – create stories not based on other people’s impressions but on what they have seen and experienced, proving that the problems of a soldier are not only related to fighting and defending positions, but also to the aesthetics of survival, to the belief in victory over the aggressor for the further development of society. The texts of the anthology “State of War” contain genre “inclusions” (“Siren-Hyena” by L. Taran, “Under the Bridge” by S. Povaliaiev, “After the Occupation” by V. Puzik) that organically fit into the author’s narrative, confirm significant events, and increase the recipient’s responsibility in the reading process. The semantic core of the narrative of “State of War” is determined by the titles: they influence architectonic expressiveness, inform the reader about the objective reflection of events, facts and phenomena, transform into message titles, decode the content (“Being a Teacher Under Occupation” by L. Denysenko, “My First Bomb Shelter” by I. Pomerantsev, “After the Occupation” by V. Puzik, “Roots Up, or Fear of Migration” by T. Gundorova, “Presentation with Stress” by Y. Vynnychuk).

The evolution of bare nouns in the history of French. The view from calibrated corpora

Abstract This article investigates the evolution of bare nouns, used without a determiner, through the history of the French language. The loss of bare nouns is charted through calibrated corpora of non-fictional prose texts from the same genres and region, ranging from the 12th to the 19th century. The change is first completed with nouns in subject function, significantly advances with direct objects, and progresses with obliques. The extensive quantitative documentation demonstrates that the change is impacted by the syntactic function of the noun, along the Accessibility Hierarchy. The speculation is examined that the more accessible functions encourage expression of (definite) determiners, thus explaining the pattern of change.

“Etudes About Tel Aviv”: The Image of Tel Aviv from the Perspective of Russian-Speaking Repatriates

The article offers an analysis of the collection Ėtiudy o Telʹ-Avive [Etudes about Tel Aviv], which was published in Russian in 2004 and edited by Sonia Chesnina and Leonid Finkelʹ. The study attempts to show the image of the city of Tel Aviv from the perspective of Russian-speaking repatriates. The author treats the analysed texts as non-fiction prose, expressing authentic migration experiences and problems. In those texts, Tel Aviv exists as a city-myth, a city of culture, and a place where a new identity is born and shaped. The analysis allows us to conclude that Etudes about Tel Aviv is not only a text about urban space. It is primarily a cultural text, a place of literary search for knowledge about its inhabitants’ culture, history, and identity. If we look at the relationship between geography and literature, the text (Etudes about Tel Aviv) and the city (Tel Aviv) constitute a “common territory”.

CRITERIA FOR DIFFERENTIATING KAZAKH FOLK PROSE TEXTS

This paper deals with the analysis of Kazakh folk prose texts and provides the criteria for performing functions such as aesthetic, didactic, and practical education of genres. Through this study, distinct attributes and cultural significance within Kazakh folk prose were uncovered, fostering a profound comprehension of literary heritage. To achieve this, various global folklore studies approach is employed to explore the enchanting appeal of Kazakh folk prose, particularly within the realm of fairy tales, and its ability to impart invaluable life lessons. Furthermore, non-fictional prose was revealed to serve as a conduit for conveying practical knowledge concerning Kazakhstan’s natural environment and historical past. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the unique nature and features of Kazakh folk prose, it is imperative to adopt an inclusive approach that takes into account both its cognitive and artistic dimensions. Scholars who have delved into the genres of Kazakh folk prose and their artistic functionalities have made substantial contributions to our holistic comprehension of this cherished legacy, shedding light on its cultural implications, and showcasing the collective wealth of the Kazakh people. By dissecting these notions, this study unveils the efficacy of a comprehensive grasp of the literary heritage, encompassing its cultural significance and nuanced delineation of invaluable ideas. We are of the conviction that this endeavor will kindle the ardor for safeguarding and distinguishing the prose legacy within Kazakh folklore, propelling onward investigations and a heightened reverence for this illustrious literary lineage.

Review of The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis’ Nonfiction Prose

Review of The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis’ Nonfiction Prose

The Care of Environment in the Characters Pandawa of Mahabrata's Story: The Study of Literature Ecology

This writing examines a non-fiction prose by using the study of literary ecology. Literary ecology is a study related to the environment that arises from the results of thinking about ecological problems in literature. This writing aims to describe the Pandawa character's attention to the environment, the form of the Pandawa character's concern for the environment, and the interaction of the Pandawa character towards the environment in the Mahabharata story. The formulation of the problem in this writing is as follows, namely (1) How is the concern of the Pandawa character towards the environment depicted in the Mahabharata story?; (2) What is the form of the Pandawa character's concern for the environment described in the Mahabharata story?; and (3) How is the interaction between Pandawa figures and the environment described in the Mahabharata story? This type of research is a qualitative literature study model using an ecological literature approach. The main focus in this research is to describe the environmental care attitude of the pandawa character in the Mahabharata story. The data source is the text of the Mahabharata transliterated by C. Rajagopalacari. The data are in the form of words, phrases, dialogues, and sentences in the Mahabharata story which contain attention, forms of concern, and interactions of Pandawa characters towards the environment. Data collection using documentation techniques. Data analysis using interactive analysis techniques. The results of the discussion show the concern of the Pandawa characters for the environment, namely Nakula and Sadewa for livestock, there is a form of concern for the Pandawa characters for the environment, namely rebuilding the abandoned old city, and the interaction between Pandawa figures and nature, namely using rivers and snake venom as an antidote to poison in the story. the.

STORIES VERSUS THEORIES: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS OF FICTION AND NON-FICTION PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE WRITING

Using the multidimensional analysis conducted on a corpus of 40 texts, this positivist study investigates the linguistic variation between philosophical fiction and non-fiction prose writings based on the scores of five dimensions calculated by MAT software. It uses the functional mapping of linguistic items to justify the differences in the dimension scores of both categories. The study finds that score difference on dimension three named explicit versus situation-dependent is quite significant because philosophical non-fiction is highly explicit in references. It hints at the independent status of the two types of writing as sub-genres of the philosophical prose.

The Authenticity and Poeticity of Li Juan’s Non-Fiction Prose

The Authenticity and Poeticity of Li Juan’s Non-Fiction Prose

Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Fractality in Chinese prose

Abstract This study explores long-range correlations in terms of sentence or segment length variation in Chinese narrative texts and nonfiction prose. (Drożdż et al. 2016, Quantifying origin and character of long-range correlations in narrative texts. Information Sciences, 331 32–44) analyzed Western novels and found fractal patterns, defined as self-similar, wavelet recurrence, and alternation. Inspired by this study, our research tries to determine whether similar patterns commonly exist in Chinese literature and compares the similarities and differences with Western literature. We calculated the Hurst exponent, β-values, and Δα values for ninety-five Chinese novels, ranging historically from late Qing to contemporary Internet novels, covering the geopolitical regions from Mainland China to Taiwan and Hong Kong. We also made comparisons with pre-modern vernacular novels, historical texts in classical Chinese, contemporary nonfiction and expository writings, as well as randomly generated texts. We found that Chinese novels exhibit fractal patterns as well. In particular, the texts exhibit a better fractal quality if the sentence lengths are measured by Chinese characters, instead of words. There is no clear correlation between fractality and cultural–political contexts and individual authors, but historically speaking, modern Chinese texts show stronger long-range correlations than pre-modern texts. Moreover, long-range correlations in Chinese literature are weaker than in Western literature, and there is a lower percentage of novels with multifractal structures. Our data also show that the fractality not only exists in literary texts, but also in nonliterary, non-narrative, and expository writings; yet, there is no long-range correlation in randomly generated texts. We further conclude that fractality is a fundamental feature of prose writing and human writing.

Australian women writers’ popular non-fiction prose in the pre-war period: Exploring their motivations

Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have undertaken important critical work on Australian women’s writing of earlier eras, profiling and promoting their fiction. Less attention has been afforded to the popular non-fiction produced by Australian women writers and, in particular, to that produced before the Second World War. Yet this writing is important for several reasons. First, the non-fiction writing of Australian women was voluminous and popular with readers. Second, this popular work critically engaged with a tumultuous political, social and moral landscape in which, as women’s rights were increasingly realized through legislation, the subjectivity of women themselves was fluid and contested. Third, as many of these women were also, or principally, fiction writers, their non-fiction can be shown to have informed and influenced many of their fictional interests, themes and characters. Lastly, and critically, popular non-fiction publication helped to financially sustain many of these writers. In proposing a conceptual framework informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyse examples of this body of work, this article not only suggests that important connections exist between popular and mainstream non-fiction works – newspaper and magazine articles, essays, pamphlets and speeches – and the fictional publications of Australian women writers of the early twentieth century but also suggests that these connections may represent an Australian literary habitus where writing across genre, form and audience was a professional approach that built and sustained literary careers.

Word and World: Bodily Perception in the Narrative Non-fiction of Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd

In a tradition of nature and mountain writing in which the solitary male intellectual has long dominated, Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd stood out as offering a new way of writing about the natural world. Inherent in their writing is a repositioning of humanity that neither separates the human from the living world, nor determines anything that is perceived there. Instead, both Jamie and Shepherd focus on their sensed experience of the world, on their bodily perception, as a means by which to interpret that world and to express their part of it. I will draw primarily on the non-fiction prose of both writers to establish this privileging of the senses of the body, and to consider then the relationship that language has with the body and the role that it can play in what Shepherd calls the ‘interpenetration’ of place and mind. 1 I will then consider how Jamie's and Shepherd's perspective shapes the writing of their texts, the journey from sensed experience of the living landscape, through its transformation into language, to the text formed by the writer, and the subsequent implications for the way in which nature writing connects with the living world from which it came.

The Names of the Unknown Soldiers. Soviet War Literature and Journalism, or Verisimilitude and Truth: Two Case Studies

Vasilij Subbotin’s We Stormed the Reichstag is a typical specimen of the wave of non-fiction prose about World War II which sprang up in the wake of the 20th Congress. The search for the unjustly forgotten war hero, one of the major themes of this kind of literature, is represented here by the story of Pëtr Pjatnickij, a soldier who fell on the steps of the Reichstag entrance with a red flag in his hand and was then forgotten.
 If, hypothetically, this story was false, it would echo the (probably false) story of the 28 ‘panfilovcy’ who purportedly fell at Dubosekovo during the battle for Moscow. In that case, Subbotin’s text would embody a characteristically literary device: giving a name to an anonymous character, the anonymous figure, for example, carrying the flag in Vladimir Bogatkin’s well-known painting, as a way to give life and credibility to the image. The Dubosekovo story, as developed by journalist Aleksandr Krivickij, appears to employ the same mechanism for achieving credibility. In this case the operation was twofold: Krivickij gave his heroes first a number, and only later names. The second move was the most hazardous. A story that pretends to be true must be verifiable in real life; this is where Krivickij failed and where Subbotin may have succeeded.
 Stalinist culture fundamentally refused to separate fact from fiction. The non-fiction literature from the Thaw is exactly the opposite: an attempt at reinstating the separation.

‘PERFORMANCE DOES NOT CHANGE THE SEX’: A STUDY OF JUDITH HALBERSTAM’S NOTION OF FEMALE MASCULINITY IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND LITERATURE

Gender and sexuality are two dominant aspects in queer and feminist studies. The idea of feminine masculinity has been extensively discussed in Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998)[1] to bring attention to masculine manifestations by female actors in butch-femme interplay and drag king performances. Halberstam’s arguments are based on the prevalent socio-political and cultural monopolization of gender identity that endorses patriarchy as the dominating force of economic and state manipulations. In a bid to challenge the status quo, Halberstam has propagated the notion of an alternative masculinity evident in childhood tomboyism that may lead to gender fluidity, frequently reflected and enacted in lesbian films and the American nightclub theatricals within an emergent drag king culture. The present article contends that Halberstam’s arguments for a feminine masculinity in his non-fictional prose work Female Masculinity (1998) are flawed in view of biological science, fictional representations of sexual orientations in dramatic performances, and real-life experiences. The results of the study indicate that outstanding human performances do not erase gender identities evident in biological anthropology.

Walking Memories: From the Red Zone to the City on the Tenth Anniversary of the Canterbury Earthquakes

SummaryThis piece of creative nonfiction prose explores memory, landscape, and materiality in the “Red Zone” of Christchurch (Ōtautahi), New Zealand—a formerly residential area devastated by an earthquake in 2011 and subsequently turned into a public green space. The writing is informed by my intermittent ethnographic fieldwork in Christchurch—a European settler‐colonial city established on Ngāi Tahu (indigenous Māori) lands—which has spanned ten years. In recent trips, influenced by a phenomenological lens and sensory methodologies, I began to incorporate walking into my research practice. The walk described in this piece took place on the tenth anniversary of the deadly quake. It begins at the earthquake memorial site in the middle of the urban center, then moves from the Otakaro River Corridor in the Eastern suburbs back towards the city. The journey enables thinking about ruins, hauntings, and the tension between official and alternative narratives of progress—acknowledging the material agencies of the more‐than‐human world as part of this. I reflect on the accesses granted by walking, connecting grief and trauma to dis/oriented movement, materiality, and texture; considering the possibilities for people to work on, as well as walk on, these collective landscapes of memory.

EXISTENTIAL EXPERIENCE IN BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S NOVEL JASMINE: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Bharati Mukherjee was a Calcutta born an Indian American Canadian writer and professor emeriti at the University of California, Berkely. She is one of the promninent and leading Indian women writers in English. Like Kamala Markandaya, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai, she is well recognised as a diasporic novelist in the literary arena. She is a representative novelist of Asian immigrants. Her experience as an expatriate in America and Canada forms the main source of her creative writing and literary talents. Her oeuvre comprises novels, short stories, nonfiction prose, socio-political commentaries, journal articles and interviews. The present novel’s title, the character, Jasmine, continually sheds lives to move into other roles. She gets uprooted and re-routed thrice in a new world and establishes a new identity. Jasmine dislocates from Indian traditional conventional life and relocates with modern liberal American life. She is an innocent, diffident woman who has become a fighter, adapter and adventurous in America. Through her novel, Bharati Mukherjee presents Jasmine as a Phoenix who rises from her ashes again and again in the form of different names and characters. She clearly exhibits the life of an Immigrant Indian as well as woman and the obstacles. She needs to break for the transformation of her life in an alien land. The major theme is about Jasmine's love story and the minor one is about her struggle in life. This paper analyses the existential experience of Jasmine in the foreign culture.

Ivan Bunin’s Early Prose: Source Studies, Textology, Attribution, Dating

The present paper represents a first attempt at the general idea of textology of Ivan Bunin’s early prose. The problematic issues of source studies, textual studies, dating, and attribution are considered. Also, the paper aims at giving a brief overview of the archive collections of Ivan Bunin’s materials as well as studying the problems of the choice of the main text of early prose works, and revealing the main difficulties in dating the writer’s early prose. The author presents a newly developed general methodology for attribution of anonymous or pseudonymously signed publications of conditionally non-fictional prose by Ivan Bunin (articles, correspondence) in the provincial newspapers of Orel, Kiev and Odessa. The main issues of source studies, textual studies, attribution and dating of the writer’s early prose studied in the paper are to reveal more specific problems and issues that will be solved during the preparation of the first academic Complete works and letters of Ivan Bunin.

NONFICTIONAL LITERATURE: NATURE, TYPOLOGY, TERMINOLOGY

The article is devoted to the reviewing of theoretical aspects of nonfiction literature. Similar in semantic content, but not identical terms as nonfictional literature, nonfictional writing, literature of fact, factography, fiction-documentary literature, fiction-documentary prose, fiction-documentary writing, literary nonfiction, literature of non-fiction, nonfictional prose, factual narrative, which have become commonly used in American, Spanish, Ukrainian, French, Slavic terminology, are analyzed. All these terms refer to a set of texts written on the basis of real events without the use of fiction. Typical features of this type of literature are the synthesis of documentary components and fiction, veracity, factuality, authenticity, objectivity, the use of real names, dates and geographical indications. At the same time, the reflection of real events and their participants is presented through the prism of the author’s self, and therefore subjectivity, personal component, merging of images of the author and the narrator are added to the leading features of nonfiction literature. The article focuses on the main structural and typological branches of nonfiction literature – historical nonfiction, literary biography, fictional journalism and memoirs. In compiling this classification, the main object of the non-fiction narrative was taken into account in the first place; sources of documentary information; varieties of author's presence in the text (in particular, as an outside observer, witness or main character); subjective factor of personal participation in the events described in the work, or personal acquaintance with the direct participants in the events; genre-typological characteristics of nonfictional works. The article highlights the main typological characteristics of each type of non-fiction, analyzes their genre system, presents the characteristics of varieties and subvarieties. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of memoirs, which is a complex and multilevel type of non-fiction, which, in turn, consists of several subvarieties – the memoirs, the autobiography, the diary, the epistolary. The article differentiates the subvarieties of memoir literature, considers options for the synthesis of its types and forms.

Introduction to Struggle and Hustle: Trans and Queer Nonfiction Prose

ABSTRACT Trans and queer people have long both been written about and written about themselves in popular nonfiction prose. Indeed, nonfiction prose’s sense of immediacy and materiality insists on self-defined reality of people who challenge conventional notions of gender, sexuality, gender expression, race, disability, class, geography, size, immigration status, and employment—daring to imagine what a thriving self and community can look like. In exploring this body of work as well as the bodies in this work, the vital scholarship of each article takes up the issue’s theme by affirming, in unexpected and shifting ways, that, for queer and trans writers, the struggle has always been real and the hustle has always been deep.