Novelistic Genre Research Articles

Game or Supernovel? Playing and Reading Massive Game Novels

For half a century, digital machines have lent their computational power to mediate text-based, diegetic worlds, in the shape of software that we call games, video games, or sometimes interactive fiction. Perhaps the first such was Gregory Yob’s simple labyrinth-monster game Hunt the Wumpus (1973), but ever since then the games (if that is what they should be called) have become larger and far more complex, and, in recent decades, a single such work can contain more text than, say, Shakespeare’s collected plays. Given this massive textual content, as well as the often experimental and innovative nature of these works, they can also be considered a new form of novel; a kind of text that has much more in common with literature than with other digital games such as Candy Crush Saga, Age of Empires or Counterstrike. In these ‘games’, we find complex characters, difficult ethical choices (left to the player), imaginative landscapes and mythologies, and thousands if not millions of lines of carefully crafted prose. Teams of writers work collectively to stich these textual universes together, under production conditions that might remind us of multi-season TV series, but which are structured and consumed very differently – in fact, more like literature than TV. The claim made in this article is that the perspective of the novel (or supernovel) is a productive one for understanding the nature of these artistic works of ludic software. Should they be considered Literature? Through a discussion of the notions of literature, novel, and fiction and through a close ludic reading of Fallout: New Vegas (2010) I will argue that these textual games are in fact Literature, a new kind of novelistic genre, and discuss the wider cultural implications of this assessment.

Generic self-awareness in a Komnenian novel: the hero in Drosilla and Charikles

This article examines the twelfth-century novel Drosilla and Charikles by Niketas Eugenianos from the perspective of cognitive frames. Based on the analysis of two key passages (1.230–57 and 3.341–50), I argue that the hero recognizes himself as part of the novelistic plot. While such metanarrative features of the Komnenian novels have been recognized previously, the cognitive approach offered in this article allows for a better understanding of the narratological complexities at play in Eugenianos’ novel and in the ancient and Byzantine novelistic genre at large.

Power, Narrative, and Magical Realism in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ

Abstract This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ to draw on Omani women’s experiences of writing and speaking as sources of empowerment and narrative identity. Marking a shift from the dominant realistic and historical fiction often associated with male writers, Ḥamad experiments with magical realism, the carnivalesque, intertextuality, and metafiction to reconfigure the novelistic genre beyond the national prescriptions of literary production. Through the voice of the narrator, alongside the voices of other ordinary women, the novel underscores the significance of women’s symbolic practices within the societal and cultural boundaries of Oman. In an allegory of writing—a major thread running throughout the novel—the narrator/writer seeks to combine the composite, multiple, and fictional fragments of various women’s stories into a single readable text that preserves oral and cultural memory. Thus, on the one hand, this article explores the writer’s experimentation with narrative and storytelling within the context of the Omani literary tradition. On the other hand, it examines modes of women’s empowerment that work through articulative and enunciative practices in the face of linguistic frustration.

Matrice bisexuelle dans les Bildungsromane français contemporains

I analyze the way in which the Bildungsroman seizes on bisexuality in two contemporary French novels: Saccage (2006) by Éric Jourdan and A Boy Like Another (2012) by Joël Breurec. A novelistic genre representing the entry into adulthood of a young protagonist and his identity construction, the Bildungsroman proves here to be an adequate analytical tool for understanding the construction of bisexual identity through literary strategies aimed at represent it.

A gulf of secrets: Priya Kuriyan’s graphic memoir “Ebony and Ivory”

While the key role that migration plays in the economies of countries like India is widely recognized, subtler affective and cultural circuits are both less easily discerned, and perhaps as a consequence, less explored in scholarly literature. The transnational relation over the past several decades of India to West Asia has produced sophisticated and complex heterogenous forms — both traditional literary novelistic genres, as well as newer forms such as the graphic memoir. Through a close and attentive reading of one such memoir, Priya Kuriyan’s “Ebony and Ivory” (2017), this article seeks to articulate the fraught weight of migration. It probes the construction of migrant identities as they unfold over several generations within a single family. The memoir deconstructs the successful economic migrant as in reality bearing the scars of decades of secrecy and shame. Through the use of several refined visual strategies, Kuriyan tells us another tale of the migrant — one that, even as it seeks to carve a special narrative of courage and success in distant lands, must nevertheless also own up to a dismantling of the entrenched narrative of the happy, hardworking immigrant family.

The Precarious Balance of Refugees: Rupture and Connectivity in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Helon Habila’s

Contemporary novels about refugees often question the appropriateness of traditional narrative forms to relate stories of forced migration which involve a fragmentation of the self and of one’s sense of reality. Writers opt instead for forms which are as disjointed as the experience of refugees themselves. This paper explores the precarious balance between a poetics of rupture and an aesthetics of connectivity in two novels about refugees: Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid and Travelers (2019) by Helon Habila. It first examines the strategies developed by both authors to destabilize form in order to reflect the refugees’ shattering ordeals during and after their forced displacements. The multiplicity of stories as well as the shifts in focalization and narrative modes testify to the impossibility of inscribing refugees’ experiences within a single coherent and homogeneous pattern. However, Hamid and Habila also draw from the potentialities of the novelistic genre to devise formal ways of connecting apparently disparate story lines and thereby suggest possibilities for cross-cultural solidarity between refugees who share a common condition of vulnerability.

Tendances modernes du monde poétique à l'aube du XXIe siècle : modification de la forme romane

The research examines, theoretically and historically and literarily, the modern French novel of the late 20th and early 21st centuries as the “main genre” of fiction; characteristics of the functioning of novelistic genres in a period of transition; new forms of novelistic thought, new artistic strategies and aesthetic experiences of the French novel. In the French literature of the last decades, the interest in the specificities of the new novelistic form has increased. There were essays, monographs, and articles on the modern novel, but there are no systemic and holistic studies that detail the functioning of the novel form in contemporary times. In domestic literature, the French novel of the early 20th century, 50-80s, has been studied quite deeply, but the literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has still been analyzed too little.

Reading Deuteronomic Vision in Literature

The novelistic genre acquires its full nobility through its dynamic capacity to overcome any canonical forms, incorporating intertexts that belong to other discursive fields. It is a genre with no real borders –its heterogeneous and rhizomic identity corroborates its rebellious and conquering feature. Decrying conformism and traditional mimetic sectarianism, that genre renews its borders by appropriating innovative narrative techniques, consisting of interweaving literary, mythical, cultural, and biblical values. By imbricating those intergeneric or interdiscursive figures, Paule Marshall’s fiction illustrates itself as a crucible of extratextual and complex resources. Through their combination, a poetics of heterogeneity emerges, thus generating a semantic shift, which ranges from spiritual trend to cultural one. The “Annual Excursion,” which is thematized in Praisesong for the Widow, offers a substantial and spiritual way out for a cultural reconnection and wholeness –black characters who are involved in that journey to the homeland, construct their cultural identity, connect themselves with their ancestors’ past, and restore their tarnished image. They also promise faithfulness to the “Old Parents.” In return, the latter undertakes to provide the “Out-Islanders” with spiritual and cultural protection to them. That metaphorical, spiritual covenant, which is anchored in the book of Deuteronomy, is far from being pointless or accidental, for it embodies both spiritual and cultural stakes, which the current study aims to scrutinize through the lens of the semiotics of culture. For that purpose, two points will be considered, namely “metaphorizing black ancestors’ requirements” and “the cultural scope of the spiritual covenant.

La fantasma de Valencia y las comedias de Fiestas del jardín de Alonso de Castillo Solórzano: hipótesis de datación y circunstancias de representación

Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, prolific cultivator of the novelistic genre, gathered and published his work in miscellaneous volumes or colectáneas all along the XVII century. In these volumes, mainly formed by novels assembled in a narrative framework, dramatic pieces appear from time to time. This is the case of Fiestas del Jardín (1634), which alternates four plays written in prose and three comedies. We know about the last ones that they were brought to the stage by renowned authors of the time. However, the date of their composition remains unknown as well as the circumstances in which they were staged. It is our goal to shed light on these questions following the study of La fantasma de Valencia, one of the three aforementioned comedies.

Romanul ca barometru al gradului de maturitate a unei literaturi. Marile teme ale bătăliei pentru roman

The article below is conceived as a return to the theoretical debates around the novelistic genre, debates that will allow us to see: which were the main themes that animated the main critical figures of the interwar period, what arguments these critics used in their theoretical constructions and especially how was the novel instrumented in their polemics. We organised our discussion around main themes such as: the crisis of the novel, the limits of the novel, the theory of complexes, themes that illustrate what Romanian literary critics Aurel Sasu and Mariana Vartic called the ”battle for the novel”. Presenting them will help us understand which were the real purposes of these debates in which the novel became – not once – either an instrument in articulating some cultural modern(ist) projects, in legitimizing some literary groups or in fulfilling important cultural objectives that expressed the ambitions (and anxieties) of Romanian literature as a phenomenon, a literature that, in the interwar period, reached its maturity.

Between fiction and truth - W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz as an anti-novel

The aim of this article is to discuss the most important characteristics of the so-called anti-novel on the example of a literary work (literary "photo-text") by W.G. Sebald Austerlitz, which in the history of contemporary German literature is considered to be extremely original in terms of form and an unusual (unconventional) prose work drawing on numerous, non-literary means of artistic expression such as photography or film. At the same time, such an unusual (i.e. going far beyond the traditionally understood novelistic genre framework) and unambiguously unclassifiable prose form is an original literary exemplification of the fight against oblivion in the context of the experience of war trauma and the hardships of searching for one's own identity in the postmodern era at the threshold of the twenty-first century, it is strongly oriented towards the reader and the horizon of his reading expectations (Wolfgang Iser), and the line between literary fiction and truth seems to be almost abolished. When discussing the most important anti-novel features, reference was made to the definition of the term "anti-novel" and selected theories in the field of aesthetics of the reception of a literary medialized text (Dieter Wellershof).

The mother–daughter relationship and the quest for identity: a study of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The woman warrior as an ethnic female Bildungsroman

ABSTRACT German in origin, the Bildungsroman is a novelistic genre that refers to narratives that deal with the process of formation and development of its protagonist from childhood to adolescence. The Bildungsroman has been evolving and adjusting itself to new historical, social and literary concerns and a significant shift seems to be taking place in the area of family dynamics, particularly in the case of immigrant Bildungsroman. The rise of feminist, post-colonial and minority studies during the 1980s and 1990s broadened the definition and approach to Bildungsroman resulting in unprecedented increase in female Bildungsroman. Many emerging post-colonial writers are women and have migrant backgrounds and their personal experiences of migration are translated into their works, which have come to serve as metaphors for identity reconstruction. Filial relationships, mother–daughter relationship in particular, are an important theme in ethnic female Bildungsroman The Woman Warrior (WW). This article examines how the mother–daughter relationship in female Bildungsroman The WW marks significant departures from the conventional Bildungsroman – how the protagonist reinscribes herself within her parents’ culture by tracing the descent line of her Chinese–American, female, artistic self through her mother while at the same time reinscribing that culture into an American context; how the shared experience between Brave Orchid and her daughter as marginalized women in racist American society is used to forge an exalting relationship.

The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen by Marcie Frank

Reviewed by: The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen by Marcie Frank Alexandra G. Bennett THE NOVEL STAGE: NARRATIVE FORM FROM THE RESTORATION TO JANE AUSTEN, by Marcie Frank. Transits: Literature, Thought and Culture, 1650-1850. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020. 230 pp. $120.00 hardback; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 ebook. Though Marcie Frank's The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen came out in 2020, its subject matter certainly resonates at this moment, when theaters around the world have been forced to adapt their craft to new forms of media for over a year. As a drama specialist and a theater practitioner, I tend to assume that genres are inherently collaborative and intertwined and that influence is reciprocal and might be both innovative and hearken back to past ideas simultaneously; these threads are part of the warp and weft of my work. It therefore came as some surprise to me, I have to admit, when I understood that a common perspective posits dramatic and novelistic genres as not only distinct but opposed in fundamental ways, as if novels could not be performative nor plays consumed through print. As a counter to this mode of discourse, The Novel Stage works brilliantly, showing how dramatic genres such as tragicomedy, comedy of manners, and melodrama fundamentally affected the prose writings of figures such as Aphra Behn, the Earl of Rochester, [End Page 398] Elizabeth Inchbald, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen and how their prose works inherently affected audiences for theatrical genres over time. Not only does Frank explore the ways in which each writer portrayed aspects of theater performance in their works—such as the home performance of Inchbald's Lovers' Vows (1798) in Austen's Mansfield Park (1814)—she also carefully traces the overlapping elements of performance and publication in showing, for instance, how elements of stage action get turned into narrative description in Frances Burney's Evelina (1778). Given that many of the authors she discusses here wrote both plays and prose pieces of varying lengths, the intertwining of genres makes excellent sense, and Frank clearly shows how each form influenced the other during the course of the eighteenth century. Loud cheers and huzzahs are also due for Frank's insistence that none of these writers worked in isolation and that the integration of women's writings in reworkings of literary history gives important contextualization that separating "women's writing" into a subgroup might omit. The process of writing in any period is a tension between novelty and tradition, a process of saying "yes, and . . ." as the best improvisers do; indeed, one of the impressions from the book's argument is that the development of genre in this particular time period was one of both improvisation and careful connection so as to appeal to as wide an entertainment-seeking audience as possible. (This seems especially timely now, when the demand for entertainment sparks both innovation and rehashes of older popular material in the effort to drive more eyes to various media services.) Frank is fully aware of the wider implications of her re-examination of genre in the eighteenth century. Defamiliarizing the relationships between plays and novels not only as forms of writing but as aspects of media consumption enables her to question the idealized aesthetic autonomy that underpins some previous histories of the novel as "a fantasy deriving from a Hegelian aesthetics whose influence is still to be found in the prizing of objects whose form recapitulates their content" (p. 154). Instead, by showing some of the ways in which print and performance informed and fed the demand for one another through this time period, Frank opens up the discussion of literary history as one that is far more collaborative and dialectical than might previously have been posited in the transition from thinking of writing as "poetry" to the classification of "literature." As energizing as Frank's exploration of the interweaving of drama and novel is, it also implicitly emphasizes some of the remaining frameworks that underpin current literary studies, such as the time-bound silos of periodization. For instance, Behn's use of both dramatic and novelistic forms...

Проблематика и поэтика малой прозы Д. Рубиной 1970–1980-х годов

We consider thematic, genre-compositional, stylistic features of D. Rubina’s works of the early period of her work. We focus on the analysis of stories “On Saturdays”, “This wonderful Altukhov”, “The House behind the Green Gate”, “Thorns”, which were included in the collection of short prose by D. Rubina of the 1970s–1980s. The relevance of study is associated with the need to study the work of one of the leading modern literature authors in order to clarify the general picture of the literary process at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries and the place of a particular artist in it. We formulate the main features of D. Rubina’s early works, which consist in the increased role of the autobiographical beginning, the presence of special heroes-representatives of creative professions, attention to the problems of childhood and the relationship between the older and younger generations, the introduction of mystical elements, the proximity of stories to the novelistic genre. We draw parallels with some of the writer’s later works from the perspective of development of images, artistic techniques. We define the prospects for the study of D. Rubina’s short prose: the study of the cross-cutting motives of writer’s stories, novellas and novels from the initial to the present period of creativity, the analysis of the intertextual connections of author’s works with classical and modern Russian and foreign literature.

EU og arbejdspladsromanen


 
 
 The article presents a comparative analysis of two contemporary EU novels, Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt (2017) and Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine (2019). Based on the observation that both novels investigate the bureaucracy of the EU and the changing framework conditions of European farmers, this article argues that Menasse and Houellebecq present a peculiar EU power distribution that can be summed up in the formula sovereignty without a sovereign. In investigating the dynamics of this distribution, the novels are shown to combine elements from various novelistic genres, including the proletarian novel, the picaresque and the multiperspectival novel.
 
 

Pós-verdade e Distopia

Na nossa sociedade pós-moderna, um novo conceito surgiu com força: o de pós-verdade. Segundo o Dicionário Oxford, post-truth é um adjetivo que qualifica circunstâncias que denotam que os factos objetivos têm muito menos influência na formação da opinião pública do que os apelos à emoção e às crenças pessoais. Não parece plausível que Donald Trump tenha sido leitor de filósofos como Jacques Derrida ou Michel Foucault. É, contudo, evidente a ligação entre a pós-verdade e um clima de pensamento pós-moderno por eles propiciado. À parte os embustes de Trump e dos Brexiters, não deixa de denunciar-se a intensificação de campanhas desinfomativas noutros países como a Rússia, Hungria ou Turquia. E em Espanha, olhe-se para o chamado processo em Catalunha. O género romanesco das distopias conta já com um corpus considerável. Este assunto da pós-verdade encontra a sua primeira fundamentação distópica no romance 1984 de George Orwell, publicado em 1949, embora a primeira obra da série tenha sido Nós de Evgueni Zamiatin, de 1924. Entre ambas as distopias, Aldous Huxley tinha publicado Admirável Mundo Novo, de 1932, cujo título, tomado de Shakespeare, sugere uma tirania aparentemente amável. Porém, nela funciona já a pós-verdade.

PRODUÇÃO DE UMA VIDEONOVELA SOBRE A CRIAÇÃO DE MONOGRAFIAS EM LIBRAS PARA ALUNOS DE PEDAGOGIA DO INES

Este trabalho consiste em um relato e análise da experiência de produção de um material em vídeo do gênero novelístico que foi desenvolvido entre os anos 2018 e 2020 pelo grupo de pesquisa Educação, Mídias e Comunidade Surda. Este material tem como objetivo ambientar alunos do Departamento de Ensino Superior (DESU) do Instituto Nacional de Educação de Surdos (INES) na produção de suas monografias em Libras. A monografia em Libras é uma conquista da comunidade acadêmica, e principalmente das lideranças surdas que lutaram e conquistaram o direito de produzir como Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (TCC) suas monografias em Libras. A partir de estudos realizados no ano de 2017 e 2018 sobre características visuais, gêneros e tipologias catalogadas durante todo o ano e pesquisas feitas a partir dessa coleta de dados, concluiu-se que o gênero de vídeo que melhor se adequaria para a produção deste material é o gênero novelístico, tendo em vista que é o que mais se encaixa didaticamente com os objetivos dessa produção. A intenção desta ação foi relatar a construção de uma forma de acesso aos processos de elaboração de monografias, em Libras, que não fosse somente uma tradução direta do atual Manual de Monografia em Libras, ofertado até o momento em Língua Portuguesa.

ІНІЦІАЦІЯ ЯК ПОЕТИКАЛЬНА ОЗНАКА НОВЕЛ С. ЦВЕЙҐА (НАУКОВО-МЕТОДИЧНІ МАТЕРІАЛИ ДО ВИВЧЕННЯ НОВЕЛІСТИЧНОЇ СПАДЩИНИ ПИСЬМЕННИКА У ВИШІ)

У статті йдеться про поетикальну специфіку новел С. Цвейґа, зокрема в аспекті їхньої структури. Мета – довести, що ініціація є поетикальною ознакою новел С. Цвейґа, а також узагальнити й адаптувати науково-теоретичний матеріал з цієї проблеми для студентів-філологів під час їхньої підготовки до прак­тичних і семінарських занять. Дослідницька методика полягає в екстраполяції поняття ініціації як специ­фічного соціально-психологічного феномену на художній текст новел С. Цвейґа, а також у визначенні ініціації, що становить зміст і сутність кульмінаційного моменту в новелі, специфічною поетикальною ознакою цього жанру. Результати дослідження. Доведено, що кульмінаційний момент, закладений у саму природу новели на рівні її структури, утворюється за рахунок взаємодії двох специфічних особливостей новелістичного жанру – сюжету і підсюжету. З’ясовано, що в сюжеті розгортаються події з життя героя, змальовуються зміни, до яких вони призвели в його почуттях чи свідомості; у підсюжеті – паралельне розкриття сил, не усвідомлюваних героєм, які, проте, стали причиною саме такого розвитку подій і якісних змін внутрішнього світу героя – ініціації. Встановлено, що в кульмінаційний момент, – коли схрещуються сюжетна і підсюжетна лінії, – народжується ідея твору. У статті проаналізовано зміст поняття ініціації як специфічного соціально-психологічного феномену та її різновиди. Визначено, що ситуації, у які потрапляють герої новел С. Цвейґа і при цьому переживають миті духовного прозріння, є межовими (пограничними). Саме в такі моменти із персонажами відбуваються «стихійні» ініціації й онтологічні перетворення. Це знаходить вираження в їхньому образі мислення, у поведінці, в їхніх часто фатальних вчинках. Доведено, що ініціація і є кульмінацією новели, а відповідно, і її поетикальною озна­кою, закладеною в самій її природі. У науковій розвідці наведено приклади проходження ініціації голов­ними героями новел «Амок», «24 години з життя жінки», «Пекуча таємниця». Наукова новизна. Проб­лема ініціації як соціально-психологічного феномену включена в саму жанрову природу новел С. Цвейґа становить наукову новизну цієї статті. Практичне значення результатів дослідження полягає в мож­ливості їхнього використання при подальшому вивченні поетикальної специфіки новелістичної спадщини С. Цвейґа, а також при підготовці студентів-філологів до практичних і семінарських занять.

The philosophical problems in modern fiction: The concept of being in E. Schmitt’s "Noah’s child"

The article is devoted to the analysis of the novel by a contemporary writer, E.E. Schmitt “Noah‟s child” in terms of the realization of the important philosophical problems, updated with the time. The novelty of the given material is due primarily to the choice of the author, whose work is still to be reflected. This article examines the philosophical issues of existence implemented at various levels of the literary text: from the title to its symbolism. Drawing on biblical and historical material, in a novelistic genre E. Schmitt managed to present his vision of the problems of faith and disbelief, identity of the nation, the moral choice, etc. While not denying the value of the God in human perception of the world, the writer asserts the idea that the man himself is responsible for all what is happening on the ground and in the society, so the novel “Noah‟s child” can be seen as a passionate appeal to contemporaries to strive for the harmony of coexistence.

Коммуникативные стратегии в новеллистическом сборнике Сергея Очиняна «Казаки и мангусты»

Problem of genre nature of short novels by a contemporary Russian author Sergei Ochinyan is discussed. The relevance of the study is determined by the following factors: the genre nature of literary texts in some cases is determined by formal external features, but today the nature of this problem is such that it affects a number of related industries, so that the approach to solving this issue is relevant in interdisciplinary terms. Particular attention is paid to the theory and history of the novelistic genre. The author proceeds from the fact that in order to determine the genre nature of a text, it is necessary to rely on the theory of communicative strategies of their competences, reference, creative and receptive, which are formed by the narrative picture of the world and the conditions of eventuality. Object of study is the collection of stories by Sergei Ochinyan “Cossacks and Mongooses.” It is proved that the title and theme of the collection appeal to the work by O. Henry “Cabbages and Kings.” The results of comparative analysis of the texts of both authors using communicative strategies are presented. It is noted that the analysis of the texts, taking into account the communicative strategies, proves the belonging of the work “Cabbages and Kings” to the genre of a short novel, while “Cossacks and Mongooses” is a collection of stories, genetically ascending to an anecdote. It is concluded that only from the standpoint of the use of communicative strategies a genre becomes what B. M. Gasparov called “communicative contour of a statement.”