Reading Fiction Research Articles

Methods and techniques of interpretation of mythical and magic characters’ names in Russian folk tales in Persian

The rapidly developing cultural relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia predetermine the importance of studying the realities of Russian culture in teaching Russian as a foreign language. Despite the constantly growing interest of the Iranian reader in Russian fiction, we have not found translations of Russian folk tales. A distinctive feature of fairy tales is the presence of specific monsters and mythical creatures in them. The relevance of this study is emphasized by the fact that the opinions of researchers on the issue of translating these realities are divided: some researchers note that realities are untranslatable, others argue that there are no words that would be impossible to convey in another language. This research work presents methods and techniques for an adequate and equivalent translation of the proper names of mythical creatures that are the heroes of Russian folk tales of a magical nature. The translation experiment was conducted in student classes of the RFL departments of higher educational institutions of Iran. The main methods on which the study is based are the comparative method, the method of linguistic description, and the method of experiment. The students were asked to translate typical sentences, selected by continuous sampling, in which there was a mention of the magical characters of Russian folk tales. The purpose of the experiment is to identify what methods and techniques of translation strategies were used in the process of translating realities that do not have equivalents in the Persian language. Thus, the empirical basis of this study is the interpretation of fragments of Russian folk tales of a magical nature in Persian by students learning Russian as a foreign language. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it is the first attempt to analyze the method of equivalent or adequate conveyance of national and cultural color of the Russian fairy tales characters into Persian. Based on the experiment, we can conclude that when translating the names of mythical heroes and monsters of Russian folk tales, students resorted to two main translation strategies − foreignization and domestication. Russian students chose the method of phonetic transliteration and transcription as the main method of foreignization, as well as calques that contribute to the preservation of Russian cultural and ethnic specificity and overcoming the difficulties of conveying semantic content and the national color of the mythical heroes of Russian folk tales. The main technique of the domestication strategy used by students is the borrowing of the designation of a fairy-tale character from the culture of other peoples with whom they were previously familiar. The results of our research can find practical application in literary translation in Iran. Theoretically, the material can contribute to the development of the theory of translation of literary texts of the folklore genre, as well as arouse interest in further research among undergraduates and graduate students studying in higher educational institutions of Iran.

Reading Fiction in the Tomsk City Public Library in the Late 19th — Early 20th Centuries

The relevance of reading is determined by its great role in the life of individual and society, due to its multifunctionality and priority position among other means of education and upbringing. Therefore, its study, including in historical retrospective, is an important area of the modern scientific research. Due to the lack of comprehensive studies of library reading in pre-revolutionary Siberia, this article for the first time examines the fiction books lending in the Tomsk City Public Library in the late 19th — early 20th centuries. The purpose of the article is to analyse the demand for fiction by users of the Tomsk City Public Library during the specified period. The tasks are to determine the share of fiction in the total amount of book lending; to make ratings of the most popular domestic and foreign authors of fiction works.The authors use methods of comparative analysis, statistical and source studies. Data were collected from ten reports of the Tomsk City Public Library, as well as from its catalogue, that allowed us to recognize the source base of the article as representative. For the first time, the relative and average number of fiction lending was calculated. The obtained results demonstrate that in the late 19th — early 20th centuries the fiction book lending compounds at least two-thirds of all books lending in the Tomsk City Public Library.The number of fiction lending exceeded the number of lending from other departments by dozens of times. The authors compiled and presented joint and separate ratings of popularity of Russian and foreign authors among users of the library, among whom there were almost only prose writers. It is proven that the works of domestic writers were more in demand among library users, and the percentage of female authors in the top 10 and top 30 was minimal. This study expanded the idea of reading fiction in pre-revolutionary Tomsk, its place in the reading circle and popular authors.

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF MODERN UKRAINIAN PROSE

Modern Ukrainian literature is diverse and interesting both for the Ukrainian readers and for those who want to learn more about the development of Ukrainian society through the literature over the last century. Along with the digitization of human life in general, reading fiction remains today one of the ways to acquire knowledge, replenish vocabulary, study history, it’s a part of meditative practice, etc. Today, reading literary works by Ukrainian authors has the following features caused by age, the nature of professional activity, gender, etc.: –– according to age features of the person (the program of preschool educational institutions, high school, professional reading in high school); –– determined by the need of each individual to read (psychological characteristics, upbringing in the family, etc.); –– professional activities (literary critics, journalists, translators, scientists and others). Often all these stages of readability are either ways to read throughout life, or the cause of spontaneous reading, which is often the result of excessive information in the world (social networks, Internet channels, etc.). The works of Ukrainian literature have changed because the world and the authors of these works have changed as well. Socio-economic development of Ukrainian nation influenced the worldview of the authors and the quality of their works. That is why Ukrainian literature is rich in its authors: world-known Lina Kostenko, philosophical and political Oksana Zabuzhko, patriotic and historical Vasyl Shkliar, universal Andrii Kokotiukha, humane and psychological Volodymyr Lys and many others who create modern Ukrainian literature. Of course, in today's works one can find elements of zealous-apocalyptic, peasantbourgeois, but all of them stem from those social phenomena that are still present in the life of Ukrainians. Reading works with such content, some are fascinated by them, and others are annoyed by putting aside the book, but everyone has a choice today.

DEVELOPING STORIES AS MINDFUL LEARNING MATERIALS FOR INDONESIAN EFL LEARNERS

In the era where fictional works are popular with teenagers while there are still challenges in understanding English, the researchers conducted a study to develop stories with the title “Berteman itu Sulit”. One of the challenges is the lack of varied learning material in grammar learning. The researchers propose to develop an English material based on the students’ own life context, that is mental health, to make the post-pandemic learning process interesting. The short stories are used as English mindful material with 5 tenses included; simple present tense, present continuous tense, simple past tense, past continuous tense, and present perfect tense. In developing short stories, the researchers went through 4 steps; 1) story development; 2) validation; 3) publication; 4) trying out 10 EFL students from random schools. With a total of 13 parts, the stories are being published on Wattpad platform, the most popular fiction reading site in the post-pandemic era. There are three things to be underlined as the result; 1) the content for grammar material is adequate; 2) the learning material is validated as mindful and suitable for students to read; 3) the try-out questionnaire showed positive results of EFL learners’ perspective to the material.

Fiction Reading and Empathy Capacity of Selected Filipino Adolescents and Young Adults

This study aimed to discover if adolescents’ and young adults’ empathy capacity is higher when they engage more in fiction reading. A total of 301 students, aged 16-22, completed a self-administered questionnaire. More than half (56%) of the respondents consider reading as a hobby with books as the preferred reading material. Around 38% have moderate fiction reading scores and around 77% have high empathy capacity scores. Findings showed that the older the respondent is, the less likely they would read fiction and the lower their empathy level. Females are more likely to read fiction and are more empathic than males. Also, results revealed that the more the individual reads fiction, the more empathic they can become. Home and school interventions can be created to increase opportunities and desire for reading fiction and enhancing empathy capacity.

The cheese was green with… envy: An EEG study on minimal fictional descriptions

Inconsistent information can be hard to understand, but in cases like fiction readers can integrate it with little to no difficulties. The present study aimed at examining if perspective switching can take place when only a minimal fictional description is provided (fictional world condition), as compared with general world knowledge (real world condition). Participants read sentences where food items had animated or inanimate features while EEG was recorded and performed a sentence completion task to evaluate recall. In the real-world condition, the N400 was significantly larger for sentences incongruent, rather than congruent, with general world knowledge. In the fictional world condition, the N400 elicited by congruent and incongruent sentences did not differ, confirming that the minimal description impacted online information processing. Information consistent with general knowledge was better recalled in both conditions. The current results highlight how contextual information is integrated during sentence comprehension.

Plague Fiction: Reading About Epidemics During Covid-19

How do we use literature during the time- and space-altering experience of a pandemic? That is the central question posed by the research project Lockdown Reading. During 2020 and 2021, Lockdown Reading collected information about pandemic reading habits through surveys and interviews, resulting in a collection of 860 survey responses and 68 qualitative interviews. Building on Lockdown Reading’s data collection, this paper presents one reading trend of 2020/2021: the interest in reading fiction about epidemics in general and Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague, in particular. Unsurprisingly, The Plague is not the only piece of plague fiction that appears in Lockdown Reading’s data. Novels such as José Saramago’s Blindness (1995), Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020), Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), Liam Brown’s Skin (2019), and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2015) are also frequently seen. But The Plague has appeared with a particular regularity in surveys, interviews, and in the press, exemplifying the idea that plague fiction is the ideal case-reading “for the moment”. In this paper, I will explore some possible reasons for the novel’s newfound popularity and present a reading of The Plague that takes readers’ responses into account.

Pengembangan Bahan Ajar Membaca Cepat Berbasis E-Learning (Studi Pengembangan Di SDN Tidung Kota Makassar)

This research is a development research. The focus of the research was to develop e-Learning-based fast reading fiction text teaching materials for grade 5 students at SDN Tidung Makassar City. The subject of this research is a valid, practical, and effective fast-reading teaching material for fiction texts. The teaching material product development method uses the Four-D model development design from Thiagarajan which consists of four stages. The four stages are define, design, develop and disseminate. The results showed that the e-Learning-based fast reading of fictional texts for grade 5 students at SDN Tidung Makassar City was in the very valid category because the average expert validation results for the e-Learning-based fast reading of fictional texts reached the predetermined standard, in the very category. practical because the average value of the percentage of students who agreed with the statement items in the student response questionnaire was 99.46%, and very effective because the pretest results were in the incomplete category, while the posttest results were in the complete category.

MODERN APPROACHES IN LEARNING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The authors of the article have critically analyzed the advanced methods of teaching and learning a foreign language (English). Having considered and summarized the accumulated experience, the authors tried to answer the controversial question of methodologists, psychologists, teachers: How to make training convenient and effective for both a teacher and a learner? The researchers believe that by adopting the recommended exercises, techniques, you can be not only tolerant, but also perform great skills in speaking, comprehension and even thinking in English. The work contains recommendations related to the process of language learning, based on a psychological basis. It is necessary to rely on the research conducted by neuroscientists and psychiatrists in order to achieve initial goal, namely: Fluency in foreign language communication. The effective life hacks, i.e., practical advice for learning a foreign language and technologies for their implementation, are analyzed in the article. In the article, analysis of some materials on the study of a foreign language have been made and expressions of our skepticism in the presentation of the phenomena of homonymy and polysemy, which is unacceptable for teaching sources. Many recommendations have points of contact: Reading of fiction, watching films in a foreign language, replenishing vocabulary with new words and expressions.

Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop

The charming world of fairy tales used to be, for many ages, the favorite world for readers of fiction. Until the moment, these magical tales, their adventurous journeys, and happy endings provide a vital source of enchanting entertainment. Throughout her literary career, Angela Carter (1940-1992), a contemporary British novelist and a short story writer, shows interest in the employment of fairy tales in her works, producing what is called modern fairy tales. Her rewriting of these tales rendered her a remarkable woman advocate who calls for women’s legitimate rights and an appreciation and a recognition of their active position in societies, things that men enjoy and always receive. This paper tackles The Magic Toyshop (1967), Carter’s second novel. It discusses the fate of its young heroine, Melanie, and her siblings, Jonathan and Victoria, who have become orphans by the death of their parents in a plane crash while in America. Melanie journeys from her middle-class luxurious house to Uncle Phillip’s poor house located in South London. Like Cinderella, the orphan girl dreams of being a bride and marrying a handsome man while suffering under the oppression of a stepfather, Uncle Phillip. Unlike her, Melanie will be shocked to meet a different version of Prince Charming of her imagination.

РОЗВИТОК ЕМОЦІЙНИХ КОМПОНЕНТІВ У МІЖОСОБИСТІСНОМУ СПІЛКУВАННІ ДІТЕЙ ДОШКІЛЬНОГО ВІКУ

The article highlights the development of emotional components in interpersonal communication. Based on the analysis of psychological literature, the role of emotions in the development of interpersonal communication was clarified from the point of view of the significance of the emotional saturation of the statement. Scientists emphasize that accurate expression of thought, successful flow of communication, mastering of various methods of interpersonal interaction, differentiation of the situation is facilitated by the emotional function of speech, which is closely related to the processes of speech development. The results of psychological research were taken into account in the analysis of statements when identifying the levels of formation of the skills of older preschool children to convey their emotional state verbally. In the process of experimental training, it was essential to develop children's ability to empathize and support emotionally, to convey their emotional state verbally; maintain emotional stability during interpersonal communication. During the entire experimental training, such methods were used as conversations about different emotional states (joy, fear, sadness, anger); sketch exercises for expressing certain emotions with the help of mimicry and pantomime; distinguishing similar and opposite emotional states; drawing to the music of various emotional experiences and changing the content of the picture by mixing the color palette; reading fiction, determining the emotional characteristics of characters in fairy tales; composing stories on a given topic that reflect the child's emotional experiences; consideration of reproductions of paintings reflecting different emotional states; conducting integrated classes, which include the use of various types of artistic activity. The author established a thematic sequence of classes on the development of emotional components in interpersonal communication. We see the prospect of further research in the development of experimental methods for the development of emotional components in game activities. Key words: emotional components, interpersonal communication, preschool children.

Deixis and Dissociation: On the Adaptive Power of Dissociated “I”s

This essay argues that a continuous and unified sense of self is, at times, achieved by cognitive dissociation and that deixis facilitates these dissociated states of consciousness. Making this argument illuminates a primary part of ordinary cognition that is underexamined. By rethinking dissociation as basic, not psychotic, this essay highlights the powerful cognitive tool that is personal deixis and attends to the cognitive strategy of self-separation that is, among other things, so foundational to the writing and reading of fiction. The aim is to provide a more expansive cognitive framework with which to view modernism.

Wolfish by Christiane M. Andrews

Reviewed by: Wolfish by Christiane M. Andrews April Spisak Andrews, Christiane M. Wolfish. Little, 2022 [416p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780316496063 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780316496070 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-7 A dreamy, aimless young boy becomes king after every person in succession before him is murdered, setting him up as the perfect token leader who can be manipulated by those who hunger for power After the oracle’s apprentice prophecies that the king’s own blood will be his downfall, the king is urged to order the baby of his pregnant mother killed before the child can fulfill their destiny. The twins his mother births, however, are not killed but instead left unprotected in the countryside, where the girl is found and taken in by a loving couple, and her male twin by a wolf mother. Twelve years later, Rae, the girl, is surprised to encounter a wolf that feels more like a familiar comfort than a threat. Meanwhile, Alba, the oracle apprentice who made that grim prediction, has desperately sought the babies impacted by her prophecy, even while she knows that it was simply her own fate [End Page 113] to deliver it. The king, twins, and oracle converge in startling final scenes that are ultimately sympathetic to all four. Fans of Roman mythology will appreciate the nods to classical literature, but fiction readers will gravitate toward the twins and their connection, and they will find this a contemplative and affecting read about the profound loneliness that has shaped each of the four main characters. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel: An ABC of Reading

This essay is an exercise in the phenomenology – and post-phenomenology – of reading in relation to Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel (1927), a novel that thematizes and reflects on the uncanny status of reading and provokes in response an experimental critical ABC. Special attention is given to the work of French psychoanalyst Charles Baudouin in foregrounding the role and effects of suggestion in reading. Engaging with the concerns of writing and reading fiction in the ‘Anthropocene’ (especially in the form of what is here called twi-fi) and drawing on notions of literary anachrony, cryptaesthetic resistance, queerness and deferred effect, the essay offers a new critical appreciation of the singularity of Bowen’s novel.

Editorial Board Reflections on Formative Books and Other Media

Reading Characters, People, and PropertiesIn this piece, I reflect on superhero comic books I read in my childhood and adolescence, noting that as I collected and read stories featuring the character known as the Silver Surfer, I slowly began to realize that the character’s traits, as established in the first comic in which he appeared, seemed to change in comics published later. In searching for explanations for these changes, I began to pay attention to a comic’s credits, recognizing that different writers and artists understood the character in different ways and often felt no obligation to maintain a consistent approach. I eventually realized that a comic’s credits sometimes misrepresented the labor invested by each of the story’s creators. This long process led to an ongoing interest—in both my writing and teaching—in the ways that our interpretation of a story and its characters can be enriched by understanding the conditions under which it was produced.Books of the HeartWhat might reflecting on favorite books from our childhood tell us about our past and current selves? This short meditation on that question first considers reading memoirs and experiments in rereading, and then reviews some favorite books from the author’s own childhood, speculating on their appeal and potential significance for identity consolidation.The Fantasy of the Boy Scout HandbookBorn and raised in Miami Beach, Florida, I opened my new Boy Scouts of America Handbook for Boys in the summer of 1956, at age 11, in anticipation of moving from the Cub Scouts to the Boy Scouts that fall. I found in those pages a fantasy that moved me deeply, a romantic fantasy of hiking and camping in the wilderness with a band of boy buddies. That fantasy has deep roots in fiction for boys and in books like the Handbook, appealing to the boy’s desire to escape the surveillance and control of adults and to fashion a community of “lost boys” in a wilderness setting ideal for strong male bonding in friendship.“I Never Had Any Friends Later on Like the Ones I Had When I Was Twelve. Jesus, Does Anyone?”: Reflections on Learning about Boyhood through Stand by MeThis piece offers reflections on the 1986 movie Stand by Me, drawing on some of the main themes and contextualizing them in relation to my own childhood as a girl growing up in the 1990s. I reflect on how in my rewatch of the movie, I was struck by the ways that the class positions of the boys echoed my own experiences of transition and liberation through education. I also reflect on the significance of seeing boys cry and be scared—feelings that the boys at my school were policed out of performing in public.Boy Genius: Reflections on Reading The Great BrainBased on reflection and analysis of a formative childhood text, this essay disentangles the relationship between reading, intelligence, and masculinity. The author argues that although reading fiction appears to encourage empathy, books written specifically for boys may contain detrimental messages about masculinity. The analysis reveals that the popular Great Brain series reinforces notions of whiteness, ableism, and masculine superiority. These messages are reinforced by the books’ emphasis on pragmatic “genius” and the savior trope in boyhood.

“A geography of the soul”: The displaced and the city in the work of Aleksandar Hemon

AbstractBosnian‐American author Aleksandar Hemon is a self‐described diasporic writer interested in questions of identity, displacement, and exile. This article proposes an approach to the Hemonian displaced character based on two of the most influential conceptualisations of contemporary subjectivity: on the one hand, Rosi Braidotti's critical posthuman subject, a nomadic, multiple subject who embodies complexity, favours a dynamic notion of relationality, opposes the view of difference as inferiority, and embraces a situated and accountable perspective. On the other, Nicolas Bourriaud's radicant subject, a wanderer caught between an urge to connect with the other and the forces of dislocation and removal, between individuality and the standardisation enforced by globalisation, between exchange and imposition, between enrooting and uprooting. In Hemon, subject and city are essential constituents of an elaborate system—aimed at fostering bonding and building community—which has been damaged by forced migration and violence. The insistence with which the subject's process of becoming is grounded in an urban context invites a topopoetic reading of Hemon's fiction and nonfiction. The obsessive description of the war‐ravaged architecture of besieged Sarajevo turns home into what Maria Tumarkin calls a ‘traumascape’, a place marked by violence and loss. Meanwhile, Chicago is the non‐place that the refugee is forced to shape into a narrative space in order to build a human network and a personal infrastructure—what Hemon terms ‘a geography of the soul’. Ultimately, the phenomenological approach to the sensory experiences and material practices of the displaced person reveals how their predicament adds new meanings to urban wandering and the construction and appropriation of the city from below. The human and the urban are seen as operating in a complex network of interconnections and interdependencies, generating an ongoing state of encounter that allows Hemon and his characters to feel ‘placed’, both physically and metaphysically.

Women’s Fiction in Postfeminist France: Léonora Miano, Camille Laurens, and Chick-Lit or Romances urbaines

Women make up a significant majority of fiction readers, in France as elsewhere, and the novel has long been – and remains – a widely shared medium that both reflects and reflects on gender norms and their effects on women’s lives. My paper examines three contemporary female-authored novels covering the spectrum from ‘literary’ to popular fiction, each of which might be described as a postfeminist story for a postfeminist France. The texts are: Camille Laurens’ Celle que vous croyez (2016); Marie Vareille’s Je peux très bien me passer de toi (2015); Léonora Miano’s Blues pour Élise (2010). My analysis asks in what ways the contemporary ‘women’s novel’ reflects postfeminist culture, in its negative sense as a market-oriented co-optation of feminist aims and achievements but also in its more positive sense, as a new stage in feminist struggles. To what extent can pleasurable fictions not only acknowledge the realities of a postfeminist climate, but also question and challenge them?

소설 속 프레카리아트 인물 읽기

Objectives The purpose of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of the character as a precariat, focusing on the unstable labor character in Cho Hae-jin's “Hana's Breath” (2019), and to derive the educational implications of reading a fiction based on the response of a college student reader.
 Methods The framework of the analysis of the character as a precariat in “Hana's Breath” is two perspectives, one is a political and sociological perspective that sees precariat as a ‘a-class-in-the-making’, and the other is an existential perspective that all human beings have no choice but to have precariousness, that is, vulnerability. The category of analyzing the characters in the fiction is, first, the description of the reality and situation in which precariat is placed as a new class, second, anxiety and alienation in the process of interacting with others as precariat, and third, existential vulnerability. The analysis of the reader's response was based on the precariat theory, and reflected the characteristics found inductively after repeatedly reading the critical essay.
 Results The fiction describes the social reality in which precariat appears, describes the feelings of anxiety and alienation caused by labor instability, and depicts human existential weakness beyond precarity at the political and social level. In response, the reader strongly recognized the class situation of the character as a social problem and expressed a critical consciousness about it. In addition, the reader felt an ethical consciousness to improve the current situation while sympathizing with anxiety and fear due to the persecution of the characters in the story, and expressed compassion for the inherent vulnerability of humans.
 Conclusions While reading fiction centering on the precariat characters, the reader can have a deeper understanding of the character's social context, recognize the responsibility as a community member, and acquire universal empathy.

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature