Piece Of Fiction Research Articles

Urbanism, discourse and class in Amdo Tibet: analysis of five Tibetan fictions as ethnography

ABSTRACT This article examines how Tibetans in the cultural region of Amdo experienced urbanization as a social process when it began intensifying in the region in the early 2000s. By using five pieces of Tibetan fiction as ethnographic data, this article looks at the process of urbanization from the angle of class, analyzing the formation of the urban Tibetan class in relation to social spaces in cities, and its structural position in society. This article further explores the subjectivity of urban Tibetans through the discourse and quoted speech of characters in fiction. In doing so, the article demonstrates that urbanization is occurring as a social process, and Lishaypa, or government workers, react to urbanization intensively as a class. This results in a new social demarcation being established among Tibetans, one based on urban residence and in which urban residents place themselves above rural villagers.

Using Speculative Fiction to Imagine Queer Abolition Real Utopias

AbstractThis article uses speculative fiction as a method for exploring the potentialities of queer abolition utopias. Abolition utopias aim to strike a balance of hope and need, offering innovative alternatives to prison while also addressing the current penal and social realities of marginalised groups. Queer abolition utopias, informed by the literature in queer criminology, centres the experiences of LGBTQ + people in these innovative alternatives. This article presents 3 pieces of short speculative fiction (1) Finding Harmony House, (2) Glasgow East Community Forum, (3) Our Long weekend at Leuchars Lodge. All 3 stories centre an LGBTQ + character(s) who are facing a particular challenge or challenges in their life, and how said alternatives might play a role in their moving forward.

Imaginaries of Care and Science in Anthropocene Utopian Futurology: The Sociology of Science in Kim S. Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future

The article analyzes climate fiction utopia ‘Ministry for the Future’ by Kim S. Robinson. The analytical method relies on the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries proposed by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim and combines it with the critical history of science and feminist studies of care. Since in the process of writing the novel its author went through numerous consultations with scientists, in the article this oeuvre is analyzed both as a piece of science fiction and as a futurology essay. It is examined how the institutions of science are portrayed, how society of citizens is imagined and how this vision of the future remains trapped in the misconceptions regarding science that result from the Cold War modernistic propaganda of science. On the basis of this analysis, the article offers a discussion of how the imaginaries of Anthropocene are likely to repeat such tropes, unless history of science and sociology of science during the Cold War becomes a necessary part of the Anthropocene studies.

Storytelling as connectivity: expanding the digital geographies of the gig economy

ABSTRACT The last decade has seen unprecedented changes in working forms, not the least through technological innovation while leisure time is equally reshaped by platforms. Although relatively new, the gig economy – temporary work mediated through platforms – is increasingly an important form of employment globally and consequently, the gig economy is represented in popular culture. Popular culture is part of social-technical-spatial relations making these important spaces in digital geographies. However, digital content, for example from streaming programs, is often not considered in labour geography studies. By conducting ethnographic content analysis and doodling ‘think-with’ work on Beforeigners, a piece of speculative fiction from Norway, I explore how storytelling conjoins parallel digital practices. I show storytelling as a kind of softening of ground narrating technological-spatial relations and demonstrates how, from this Nordic example, storytelling is part of the continuative geographical ordering of work forms in digital spaces and places. Exploring other sites of digital spaces highlights the ways digital geography is multi-layered, inter-relational and gradient, and demonstrates the need to go beyond established sites of inquiry to understand the gig economy as a social-technological-spatial relation.

FICTION AS SYNTHESIS OF MULTI-MODE MEANS OF PRESENTING NARRATIVE INFORMATION

Despite a considerable number of discoveries made in the XX and XXI centuries in the field of linguistics, there still remain a few global problems demanding their solution or treatment on the new level of scientific and social development. Amongst those, we shall mention the issue of giving a clearcut definition of fiction. This challenge has become even more difficult due to such new literary forms as digital literature, comics, fanfiction, narrative videogames, etc. Thus, the topicality of the article follows from the linguo-gnoseological importance of defining the very term “fiction” in a world with the dominance of computer technologies, providing more and more new ways of transmitting information. Our work is also motivated by the lack of serious research suggesting objective criteria for a modern piece of fiction. Hence, the research aims at specifying what can be understood as fiction in modern conditions and at characterizing the peculiarities of narrative representation in fiction today. The work is grounded on the postulates of information theory and narrative studies, coupled with classical methods of linguistic analysis. Thus, the results obtained in the process of investigation can be summarized in the following conclusions. A piece of fiction is a work of art which is built around a certain narrative. Its aesthetic component is shaped by the latter and by the communicative goal set up by the author. Narrative here is codified by means of verbal (and sometimes non-verbal) signs and presents an extra-lingual situation arousing the reader’s interest since it reflects or has nothing to do with their own cognitive experience, teases their ability to predict the plotline and influences their world pictures in the process of indirect communication with the author. The very existence of a number of modes objectivizing one and the same narrative (or its close invariants), like movies, comics, fanfiction, gamebooks, videogames, etc., enhances the reader’s immersion and the impact made by the narrative, granting the audience multi-existence and generating a new Gestalt-like quasi-universe in their minds.

Aspects of Analysing Trauma Fiction by Observing Lolita’s Impact on the 21st Century Novel, My Dark Vanessa

Trauma studies in literature have only appeared towards the end of the 20th century, hence psychological analysis in fiction is a relatively new field, therefore observing pieces of trauma fiction has its challenges. Further improvement of trauma analysis is essential since earlier pieces of the literary canon can gain new interpretations with this method. This article aims to apply several methods of analysing trauma fiction from both psychologists and literary theorists. The focus is on the impact of trauma and its effect on the narrator’s memories making her fractured narration unintentionally unreliable. Consequently, the reader plays a significant part while reading trauma fiction since they are the ones who put the pieces of the story together when the narrator is set back by the overwhelming event. Moreover, due to the fact that repeated trauma is more likely to happen in captivity, it is essential to observe the setting of the novel. The emphasis is not only on the physical setting but also, due to PTSD, on psychological aspects like memories and dissociations.

Mariana Callejas: Literature and Horror in Pinochet’s Chile

Mariana Callejas (1932–2016) was an award-winning Chilean writer, active during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. At the same time, she and her husband, the American Michael Townley, were agents of the DINA, the Chilean intelligence service dedicated to the repression of opponents to the dictatorship. The couple was involved in several political crimes in Chile and particularly abroad, including the murder of former Unidad Popular Minister Orlando Letelier in 1976 in Washington DC. In 1995, Callejas wrote her memoirs and, after that, several fictional or semi-fictional works were published that had leading characters inspired by her. This article focuses on her autobiographical book and three fictional pieces written by leading Chilean writers (Pedro Lemebel, Roberto Bolaño, and Carlos Iturra) with a dual purpose. On the one hand, it analyses how different authors (including Callejas herself) use characters inspired by Callejas to conceptualise the relationship between literature and horror during the years of Pinochet’s dictatorship. On the other hand, the article studies how these writings thematise the tension existing in Chilean society (particularly among certain intellectual circles) between knowing, not knowing, and not wanting to know what was going on under the Pinochet regime.

LINGUO-STYLISTICS OF HORROR IN E. A. POE’S SHORT STORIES

Horror is a genre of science fiction which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten, scare or disgust the readers by inducing feelings of horror and terror. This piece of fiction in prose of variable length also shocks and startles the readers inducing feelings of repulsion or loathing through creating a frightening atmosphere. Horror is frequently supernatural, though it can be non-supernatural. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society. The present investigation of horror in E. A. Poe’s short stories through the linguo-stylistic and case study methods of analyses aims to disclose the very distinct role of horror fiction in the perspective of human emotions – a kind of “mediator” between the world and its reflection in the language. The results show that emotions as a psychological, physiological and philosophical phenomenon verbally reproduce the emotional attitude of the person towards the world, that emotions are contained, fixed, expressed and indicated in utterances in the form of ideas – and as such – emotions are a perfect object of linguo-stylistic study.

A Research Study on How AI Creates Fiction Stories

Abstract: This paper includes the study of complex process by which artificial intelligence systems create fictional stories. In this process we cover the five processes such as The pre -processing steps for using AI to create a fictional story, Plot structure and plot production process for creating fictional stories using artificial intelligence, Character growth in the process of creating a virtual story using artificial intelligence, Generating dialogue in the process of creating a virtual story using artificial intelligence, and Using AI to revisit and iterate the process of creating fictional stories. Using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models, especially those based on deep learning architectures such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformer models such as generative pre- trained transformers (GPTs), we analyse how these systems understand and manipulate language to create consistent fictional pieces. This paper This Make up story through empirical experiments and qualitative analysis, we carefully study the impact of different parameters, including Algorithm, Education, Fine-tuning Hint, Generation, and Evaluation methods, on the quality and diversity of the generated stories. The study also explores the role of artificial intelligence as well as human collaboration in the fiction stories writing and creative process. It discuss the Future Directions of AI’S role in creating fiction stories.

The Trees Speak for Themselves

Elif Shafak's 2021 novel The Island of Missing Trees describes fictional events that occur on the real island of Cyprus during the war between the Greek and the Turkish inhabitants of the island. This story is told from multiple points of view at various points in time in both Cyprus and London, where the characters move to and live following the events of the war and their families’ disagreements with their relationship. What is unique about Shafak's storytelling is her use of a fig tree as a primary narrator of events. While the use of non-human narrators is not a new strategy, most of these occurrences involve animal speakers rather than plants or objects. In delivering a fiction narrative from the point of view of a fig tree, Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees introduces readers to multispecies encounters by providing an example of how arboreal figures communicate and experience history alongside humans in an anthropocentric world, and further encourages prosocial behavior between human and non-human species. Based on Shafak's novel, theories of attentiveness and slow-violence, and studies on the effect of non-human narrators on readers, including these "non-living" narrators in widely accessible pieces of fiction not only informs audiences of the multispecies encounters that occur in everyday life, but also opens more avenues of multispecies conservation.

Shatila as a Campscape: The Transformation of Bare Lives into “Agent Lives” in Shatila Stories

Shatila camp in Beirut was founded in 1949 and now houses up to 40,000 refugees. In 2017, the Peirene Press publisher Meike Ziervogel and London-based Syrian editor Suhir Hedal travelled to the camp to hold a three-day creative writing workshop in which nine Syrian and Palestinian refugees participated. The result is Shatila Stories (2018), a brilliant piece of collaborative fiction translated from Arabic to English by Naswa Gowanlock. It is a hybrid between a novel and a short story collection, in which refugee voices are given the chance to speak up, share their stories, and negotiate their identities. This article examines Shatila Stories (2018) as a book that highlights Shatila as a campscape (Diana Martín). These stories show that the camp, as Adam Ramadan argues, is not empty of law and political life, but rather it is a meaningful space produced by who and what is in it, and how they interrelate and interact. Shatila Stories is, indeed, an effective platform that allows readers to understand how refugees’ conflicts and thoughts are processed and the ways in which refugees in Shatila accept and embody the camp’s liminality and their border subject identity to gain agency and resist the restrained passivity to which they are often relegated. Ultimately, my analysis pays attention to how these stories encourage the renegotiation of the refugees’ selfhood and counter Agamben’s perception of refugees as “bare lives” by portraying them as autonomous, active and humanized individuals in the eyes of the international reader.

The shackles of gender still exist: Chinese women authors’ consciousness in boys’ love fiction

Boys’ love (BL) fiction has flourished in China since the beginning of the twenty-first century. It primarily focuses on the romance between men, while most authors and readers of BL fiction are heterosexual women; thus it is paradoxically patriarchal and feminist. This study aims to explore two main questions: (1) What topics do Chinese BL fiction authors prefer? (2) How do the gender concepts of Chinese culture affect the topics and contents of BL fiction? Adopting machine learning methods––the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and word vector technology—this study presents the typical topics and specific contents of 72,548 original BL fiction pieces from synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The findings reveal that Chinese BL fiction extensively uses Chinese myths and history to create heterosexually structured fantasies. Furthermore, under the Chinese patriarchal culture, primarily the clan concept, BL authors attach great importance to marriage and reproduction issues. Such discourses eventually limit Chinese BL women authors’ awakening of a feminist consciousness.

Cats Can Be Dangerous to Your Relationships: Cats in the Fiction of Jim Grimsley

In the context of culture’s fascination with cats, the present article analyzes the use of felines in two pieces of fiction by the southern writer Jim Grimsley: the short story “The Cathouse Lovers” (1976) and his novel Comfort & Joy (1993 in German, 1999 in English). The two texts differ greatly in terms of the genre, period, as well as the role of cats in the story, yet both of them include the motif of cats that have a negative effect on the romantic and sexual relationships of their human protagonists.

Exploring Domestic Violence and Child Abuse in Select Novels of Toni Morrison

Violence against African American females, young and old, is an irresistible concern in the novels of Toni Morrison. Her best fictional pieces, ‘The Bluest Eye’, ‘Beloved’, and ‘God Help the Child’ are the vibrant spotlight of domestic violence and child abuse in variegated natures. Toni Morrison has dealt profusely with all sorts of child maltreatment in her oeuvre. In many of her narratives, Morrison weaves a tangled web of childhood trauma stories, in which all the characters have suffered some kind of abuse like racial discrimination, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, emotional and psychological abuse, molestation, sexual exploitation, verbal abuse, etc. She shows how the child’s exposure to traumatic experiences has far-reaching negative effects on adulthood, such as psychological, emotional, behavioral, and social. Morrison explores the curse of the past, the legacy of slavery and its aftermath, and its hold on the present, through the sociocultural phenomenon. Racism and intra-racial discrimination based on skin color result in childhood trauma. The sexual abuse of Pecola, the girl desiring the bluest eye by her drunken father has been very vividly picturized in the backdrop of racial conflict in ‘The Bluest Eye’. Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ fictionized the gruesome murder of an infant with a jigsaw by her mother, Sethe only to avoid escaping a slave. God Help the Child chronicled the ramifications of child abuse and neglect through the tale of Bride, a black girl with dark skin being born to light-skinned parents. Moreover, magic realism, socio-political aspects, and Toni Morrison’s lucid narratives provide ultra energy promoting her vivid message.

The conflicts among globalization, modernization and tradition in science fiction: The case of Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia

Science fiction takes many forms, including academic work that calls on readers to think about social and cultural problems. This paper takes a piece of science fiction, Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia, as an example and discusses the conflicts among globalization, modernization and tradition present in the text, thus highlighting the academic meaning of science fiction as a literary form.

History, the Mother of Truth

Abstract In this paper I offer a new reading of some of the philosophical and political implications of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ work. The aim of this new reading is to show that Borges exhibited broad ethical sympathies for the pragmatist imagination. The first section offers a genealogy of Borges’ unusual and original first fictional pieces and a reading of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” It is in this text that Borges first engaged William James. In the second section, the text presents a broad picture of pragmatism, from its origins in the work of Peirce to its recent revival in Rorty’s tour de force. In the final section I analyze Borges’ essays on James and suggest they are evidence that the former’s interest in James was related to something much more ethical and political than a mere attraction for the latter’s prose or his work’s overall aesthetic value.

The land of dreams

Abstract In this short piece of dystopian speculative fiction, Kashmiris are forbidden to dream.

MARY SHELLEY’NİN MATHILDA ADLI ESERİNİN EKOFEMİNİST ANALİZİ: KENDİ TABU KURGUSUNU YAZAN KADIN ANLATICI

Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novelette, Mathilda, in the twenty-first century from an ecofeminist perspective sheds a new light on contemporary criticism, opening up multifaceted perspectives. There was a critical moment in British literary history when Elizabeth Nitchie transcribed Mathilda from the microfilm of the manuscript and published it in 1959, which unveiled this piece of revolutionary taboo fiction suppressed for over a century by the author’s male relatives, chiefly Shelley’s father, William Godwin. Written in 1819-1820, Mathilda is the only work completed during Shelley’s lifetime. It is an artfully crafted epistolary work depicting the traumatic confessions and suicidal tendencies of the protagonist, Mathilda, a woman who isolated herself from society by integrating herself with nature due to her father’s confession for his incestuous passion towards her. Regarded as an underrated work, Mathilda has often been interpreted from biographical and incest-related perspectives by literary critics, which relegates its literary merits although it is in accordance with feminist and ecological theories and feminine writing. This paper, avoiding biographical accounts and the author’s life experiences and with theories consistent with those of ecofeminism, intends to show how nature functions as an effective instrument for the female writer to fictionalize her taboo story. By blending ecofeminism with feminine writing, this paper also investigates the interplay between woman and nature, and navigates how a female character courageously relocates her taboo story on a textual level from a feminist perspective in a natural setting, challenging the male-dominant Romantic tradition of the nineteenth century.

L-Space and Large Language Models

From the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, with boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what could be. Design fiction is an approach to understanding and speculating about alternate futures. One part of this can involve creating representative artifacts or prototypes from the future, as if they fell through a time warp to the present day. This column is a piece of such speculative fiction, set in 2025.

Caminante, No Hay Camino, Se Hace Camino al Andar: On a Creative Research Project in Urban Planning

This article looks back at a creative research project conducted in Geneva, Switzerland, which, by experimenting between art and science, sought to understand how citizen narratives can participate in the making of an urban plan. The approach presented here brought together geographers, architects, and novelists. Citizen narratives produced at writing workshops imagined the city of the future in ways that significantly contrasted with visions gathered from events organised by public authorities. These narratives were taken up by the novelists, who helped produce a piece of fiction containing the power to reveal the qualities of the present. This piece has since become a novel. By discovering what their future city could be, participants in this project were led to identify the places that should be preserved. Their narratives thus helped identify an ordinary heritage that could be included in an urban planning document. This reflective look at a project that gradually took shape could be useful to anyone wishing to conduct creative research in urban planning, particularly from the perspective of a more inclusive city.