Fictional Representations Research Articles

‘The Book of My Mother’ as national allegory: subaltern nationalism and political unconscious in early twentieth century Azerbaijani fiction

ABSTRACT This paper analyses Jalil Mammadquluzadeh’s drama, The Book of My Mother (Anamın Kitabı), to understand Azerbaijani nationalism in the early twentieth century. Under the repression of industrialization and colonialism, Azerbaijani national identity found its expression in literary products. Through Fredric Jameson’s concepts of national allegory and political unconscious, we examine The Book of My Mother as a fictional representation of Azerbaijani nationalism during its formative period. Ultimately, this article addresses a gap in the growing literature on Azerbaijani nationalism by applying Jamesonian critical literary theory to encourage further research in subaltern nationalism for other cases, especially within the Central Asian context.

Mapping desert narratives: A systematic review of desert representations in postmodern English and Arabic fiction

O deserto é um motivo significativo na literatura e nos romances. Não é apenas um cenário para o romance, mas também um espaço que destaca as tensões e a complexidade da experiência humana em relação à sociedade, ao patrimônio e ao meio ambiente. Das paisagens sagradas dos textos religiosos aos desertos estéreis retratados na literatura pós-apocalíptica, os desertos são retratados tanto como espaços de revelação espiritual quanto de desolação existencial. Este artigo de revisão sintetiza estudos acadêmicos anteriores sobre narrativas do deserto, com foco em como o deserto foi explorado e compreendido em diferentes tradições culturais e literárias. A revisão abrange uma ampla gama de fontes publicadas entre 1990 e 2022, examinando como os desertos funcionam como espaços liminares na mitologia, folclore e literatura, onde as fronteiras entre o mortal e o divino se confundem, oferecendo insights profundos sobre a existência humana. Para ilustrar esses temas, este estudo inclui uma análise de dois romances pós-modernos: The Bleeding of the Stone (1995), de Ibrahim Al-Koni, e In the Distance (2017), de Hernan Diaz. Essas obras servem como estudos de caso que destacam o papel do deserto em refletir temas existenciais, culturais e filosóficos mais amplos, particularmente no contexto da literatura pós-moderna. O artigo também investiga as narrativas ecológicas e ambientais dentro desses romances, lançando luz sobre as maneiras distintas pelas quais a literatura inglesa e árabe conceitua o deserto. Ao avaliar criticamente pesquisas relevantes, esta revisão visa compreender de forma abrangente o deserto como um espaço literal e metafórico no discurso literário contemporâneo. As descobertas contribuem para o diálogo contínuo entre estudos ecológicos, culturais e filosóficos, enriquecendo nossa compreensão do significado multifacetado do deserto na literatura e suas implicações mais amplas para a identidade e experiência humanas.

Breastfeeding, Folklore, and Nature

This article focuses on depictions of breastfeeding that move beyond idealization and/or realistic depictions of breastfeeding, and do not necessarily elicit an empathic, personal connection with the reader, but rather, I argue that it is via their engagement with Japanese folklore and nature, that they create the necessary distance to critically explore the question of breastfeeding within a feminist framework. I analyze the fantastical treatment of breastfeeding through its fictional representation in two short stories: “Higanbana” (彼岸花 Spider Lilies, 2014; trans. 2014) by Oyamada Hiroko, and “Enoki no isshо̄” (エノキの一生 Enoki, 2019; trans. 2020) by Matsuda Aoko. One of the representative features of the writing of both Oyamada and Matsuda is how they bring together fantastic events within realistic settings, blending realism and science fiction, the human and the non-human, the ordinary and the extraordinary. In the selected stories, both authors play with traditional beliefs and popular stories passed by word of mouth as well as feature personification and imagery of plants, flowers, and trees. This literary quality—problematizing “nature” and folklore while blending fantasy and reality—can be read as a subversive strategy for potential feminist critique. Hence, I read their depiction of breastfeeding in terms of it being fantasy grounded in reality, focusing on unraveling affects of shame and disgust, often associated to breastfeeding, and moving towards a reproductive justice framework.

Co reprezentují historické reprezentace?

The study is concerned with the question of literary historical representations in fiction around 1900 and towards the end of the 20th century. It compares the nature and form of the gnoseological scepticism about the possibilities and meaning of historical knowledge articulated by writers in both these periods. On the basis of a number of texts from Czech, French and British literature the author shows that the genre known as "historical metafiction", which is one medium for the expression of such scepticism, is not just a product of the later 20th century as might appear from the studies by Linda Hutcheon or Ansgar Nünning. Similar reflective texts had been written at the turn of the 19th/20th century, when in the context of the deepening crisis of historicism, writers had expressed a gnoseological scepticism similar to that of contemporary writers influenced by post-modernism. The writers in the early period employed rather different literary strategies, however, and their transformation can be defined as a shift from assertion to performance.

Infernal Heavens: Narratives of Africa. From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise

Situated at the intersection of literary studies and cultural studies, the present article looks at how fictional representations of Africa have evolved over the past century, from Conrad’s canonical Heart of Darkness, which has unjustly become the landmark of colonial biased narratives of Africa despite the author’s declared disengagement with his protagonists’ perspectives, to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s recent reverse rewriting of Marlow’s journey, this time from the heart of darkness outward. Dwelling on the spatial metaphors of Heaven and Hell, this study argues that the two works under scrutiny put forward two essentially dichotomic representations of the same place, the African continent, which are largely dependent on the cultural environment and on cultural constraints. Whereas Conrad’s infernal depiction of Africa relies mostly on Eurocentric stereotypes and on a personal experience whose horror mostly stemmed from a cultural shock produced by experiencing difference as evil, Gurnah’s more complex and authentic depiction is a result of telling the story from within, as an insider, and reflecting on difference as productive diversity. In this respect, this study brings into discussion Ranjan Ghosh’s recent dialogue with J. Hillis Miller on Literature and Globalization (2016) to argue that a transnational, transcultural and transdisciplinary approach to the narrative text would actually result in bridging the gap of classical binary difference and would emphasize the immanence of the literary text. Thus, Gurnah’s Paradise reconstructs pre-WWI Africa from within, as a sum of lost Paradises which are by no means of Western extraction, while Conrad’s canonical Inferno echoes the fears of an empire.

Film and the stigmatisation of ageing female sexuality: consumer commentary of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of macro-level discourses of age, gender and sexuality in a meso-level consumer discussion from social media revealing how gender ideology and power materialise in the consumption of the 2022 film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. We respond to the call to establish ‘how fictional representations in films…can be used discursively to understand market structure and consumption experiences’. We demonstrate the enduring value of popular culture as a window into understanding consumers. By establishing that postfeminist and successful ageing discourses are appropriated to inform consumption, we contribute to the theorisation of affective marketplace exclusion by arguing that these powerful ideologies weaponise stigma to marginalise and exclude, in other words, that the symbolic consumption of popular culture informs marketplace gendered and sexual politics.

‘Agency, voice and choice’: reflecting on assisted reproductive technologies through select Indian films

ABSTRACT The article examines the contested aspects of neoliberalism through cinematic narratives, addressing the issue of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) in India, a debated subject in socio-legal spheres. Existing literature extensively discusses the biopolitical and bioethical dimensions of commercialization and commodification, particularly concerning organ, egg, sperm donations, and gestational commercial surrogacy. This research endeavors to scrutinise and appraise the ethical quandaries emanating from the technological transformation of motherhood, as portrayed in fictional representations. These narratives shed light on the difficult situations faced by surrogates and egg donors, who are often driven by familial or socio-economic pressures to provide their reproductive services. Consequently, they become commodified within the context of India's In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) industry. Ergo, through the films I Am (2010) and Mimi (2021), this article probes into the intertwining socioeconomic situations of the large percentage of infertile women and claims that the positive discourse around the ‘new Indian women’ is inherently diluted and undermined. Additionally, the research emphasizes that ART—and more importantly, a new agency for single women—is reiterated within the political and socio-historical contexts of the films discussed.

The Post-Communist Novel of Transition as Realism of Transition. Thematic Precedents in Romanian and East-Central European Literature

The Post-Communist Novel of Transition as Realism of Transition. Thematic Precedents in Romanian and East-Central European Literature. The present study aims to analyze how certain narrative formulas circulate within the world literary system – one but unequal (Moretti 2004, WReC 2015) – starting from the case of the novel of post-communist transition, specific to many Eastern European literatures. The Romanian literature abounds in such novels, which take various forms according to the different literary paradigms from which they have emerged. Thus, we consider that post-communist Romanian literature, or at least its social-political regime of relevance, is a symptomatic case of what the authors of Combined and uneven development: Towards a new theory of world-literature (WReC) call “(semi-)peripheral irrealism”. According to this study, the literature produced in peripheries and semi-peripheries is often formally dominated by a series of practices identified as specific to modernism, which arise, determined by the condition of the semi-periphery, in the unique and uneven system of world-literature, in which fiction becomes the narration that mediates lived experience in the “palimpsestic, combinatory and contradictory ‘order’ of peripheral experience.” (WReC). Nevertheless, a new direction of contemporary prose is being traced recently in order to rethink/ reproblematize the past and the way it can be reflected in literature. A series of recent novels such as Bogdan Coșa’s How Close the Cold Rains Are (2020) and Mihai Duțescu’s Beech Sponges (2021), as well as others, give rise to a new aesthetic formula of the post-communist novel of transition through the ways in which they operate with realism. We therefore propose to investigate the recent history of the phenomenon of fictional representation of the Romanian transition in relation to similar phenomena in East-Central Europe, while also analyzing the specifics of “the realism of transition” (as we will call this new literary category, in the footsteps of Mihnea Bâlici). Keywords: the novel of transition, (semi-)peripheral literature, peripheral realism, post-communism, the realism of transition

Reframing AIDS Narratives: New Perspectives on AIDS in Positive and Voices

The present paper investigates the shift in fictional representation of AIDS as manifested in Michael Saag’s Positive: One Doctor’s Personal Encounters with Death, Life, and the US Healthcare System and Susan Ball’s Voices in the Band: A Doctor, Her Patients, and How the Outlook on AIDS Care Changed from Doomed to Hopeful. It explores how the two novels, through their fresh and vivid representation of the patients, redress relevant stereotypes through a semi-documentary, fictional revisiting of their winding routes. It also covers the ways both novels portray the very process of the disease contraction and treatment, and the patients’ attempts to cope with it in a balanced manner that invests the documentary as a strategy for braiding the scientific and the literary in the representational process. The overall purpose is not to normalize the disease but rather to help deconstruct the stereotypical image of it in mainstream media and revisit the negative historical, social, and religious associations of it through the selected novels. For this purpose, the "docu-literary" approach is used as an analytical and evaluative critical method to explore the representation of AIDS in the selected novels.

The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”

Abstract A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012) offer fictional representations of the therapeutic process. Each features a female patient who is victimized by a therapist who allows their own counter-transference to prevent the patient’s voice from emerging. Instead of healing, these transferences impose therapist-directed narratives on young women who need to tell their own stories of loss and confusion. After tracing Freud’s changing ideas on transference, this article presents literary examples of counter-transference gone awry. In a Country of Mothers features a therapist who believes her patient is the daughter she gave up for adoption and who uses her own counter-transference to propel a dangerous relationship between the two women; Dora: A Headcase offers a modern-day rewriting of Freud’s “Dora” case study by a teen who resists the counter-transference of her therapist by writing her own story. This examination of literary counter-transference problematizes the supposed neutrality of the therapist and stresses the importance of patient voice in psychotherapeutic healing.

Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)

Abstract This article examines how theatre works as a form of therapy using Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon. Both depict fictional representations of psychotherapy but also use concepts from narrative therapy as developed by White and Epston (1990), such as the audience as witnesses and creators of their own story. We argue that therapy-as-theatre exerts a pull on the audience, which invites them to empathize, identify and understand, and draws them into the “affective arrangement” of the plays as defined by Slaby, Mühlhoff, and Wüschner (2019). The two plays bring together the therapeutic and the theatrical both in terms of content and form: in Every Brilliant Thing, the performer explicitly re-enacts conversations with a counsellor and mimics the therapy setting by sharing with the audience their feelings concerning the suicide of their mother. Similarly, in An Octoroon, the playwright’s alter ego BJJ makes himself vulnerable to the audience. However, the play also confronts spectators with hard truths about the history and topicality of racism that they may not be prepared to hear. Within the specific time frame of the shows, similar to the frame of a psychotherapy session, the two plays create self-contained affective spaces where feelings and emotions circulate between performers, spectators and among audience members.

‘What’s a D and C between friends?’ Space, intimacy and the medicalisation of unmotherhood in modernist literature

This essay theorises what ‘unmotherhood’—or, living outside of motherhood—means within the specific context of ‘the modern’. Unmotherhood is an actively constructed state; it is explored through the parameters of agentive...

”Min tröst var att författa en egen artikel om svamparna”

“My Consolation was to Write my Own Article on Fungi”: Fictional Representations of the Relationship Between Fungi and Humans This article explores fictional representations of fungi, understanding them as a materialization of theoretical ideas about the entangled relationships between humans and the more-than-human, central to humanistic and philosophical thinkers within the nonhuman turn. The point of departure is the growing interest in fungi over the last decades, scientifically and, more recently, also in arts and culture. To frame the discussion historically, concepts from ethnomycology is used as a background, describing cultural tendencies and attitudes towards fungi in terms of mycophobia and mycophilia. The American HBO-series The Last of Us (2023) is discussed as an example of the contemporary boom, using Anna Tsing’s ideas on fungi as a representation of multi-species collaboration in the era of capitalist destruction. The story raises questions about individuality, represented by the human, as opposed to the collective fungus. The main focus of the article is, however, a Swedish context and two prose narratives in which fungi play a significant role, Agneta Pleijel’s historical novel Fungi. En roman om kärleken (Fungi. A Novel on Love, 1993) and Lars Jakobson’s fantastic story “Nians nät över trapetsen” (“The Nine Net over the Trapezius”, 2004). In the postapocalyptic world of The Last of Us, the fungus is a dangerous parasite portrayed with horror and ambivalence. In Pleijel’s and Jakobsons’s stories the lives of fungi are associated with harmony, even joy. In different ways, their human characters relate to fungi with love and reverence, and strive to fully understand their nature. Nevertheless, all three stories raise questions about interspecies entanglements. The wonders and horrors of symbiosis that they portray point towards the complex condition of the anthropocene and the limits of a mechanistic worldview.

Parallel Narratives: Trauma, Relationality, and Dissociation in Psychoanalysis and Realist Fiction

The reciprocal relationship between cultural trauma studies and psychoanalytic discourse on the one hand, and trauma studies and fictional representations of trauma on the other, has been commented on by scholars within the field of literary studies. What connects the representation of trauma in cultural trauma theory, trauma fiction, and psychoanalysis is that it is regarded as something that overwhelms an individual’s capacities for processing and functioning. However, while cultural trauma theory has come under scrutiny for prioritizing too narrow a view of trauma and its representations, the considerable critiques of and revisions to Freud’s theories, developed in the 1980/90s, have been mostly ignored by cultural trauma theorists. In this interdisciplinary article, we draw on relational psychoanalytic perspectives to demonstrate how relational revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, as well as views on dissociation, can offer new perspectives for approaching literary works of fiction, such as the realist novel, which engage with the subject of trauma outside of established trauma conventions. We demonstrate that trauma novels by Lisa Appignanesi and Aminatta Forna parallel these revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, allowing for a more pluralistic and nuanced representation of responses to trauma and suffering.

Textualisation of Sexual Harassment on the Cameroonian University Campus: Moone Nda’a’s La révolte de Mbazoua et autres nouvelles

ABSTRACT Fictional representations of African university campuses offer a rather dismal image of a world intended to train the intellectual elite of a rapidly developing continent. This is reflected in a statement from the Cameroonian scholar Jean-Marie Wounfa, who asserted: “Writers, for a long time, have put forward a discourse on the university that praises and preserves the mythical character of this institution of which the representation is abundantly watered at the spring of the collective unconscious.” But such a position fails to win unanimous support. Some consider the university to be a depraved institution. While such discourse may find a fertile ground in the novel, it becomes an interesting scriptural paradigm when the analytical medium shifts to the short story, a brief but dense literary genre inspired by reality. Such an image of the Cameroonian university campus can be seen in La révolte de Mbazoua (Mbazoua’s Rebellion) by Moone Nda’a, which describes the campus as a Kafkaesque world haunted by intimidation, rape, threatening behaviour, sectarianism and other ills that students and teachers must suffer. It also highlights the role of the imaginary in the struggle against this form of censorship that shackles the harmonious development of the African university campus.

REALITY AND REPRESENTATION: THE NONFICTION WRITING IN JOHN UPDIKE'S "MOROCCO

“Morocco” is one of John Updike’s short stories concerning family travel s. With the attempt to blur the gap between fiction and nonfiction, Updike experiments in “Morocco” with a new form of represented reality, which reveals a middle ground between the discourse and the depicted world. Through the portrayal of real historical events by juxtaposing the overt family travel narrative and the covert Cold War narrative, the short story mixes realistic travel writing into a fictional representation of Cold War writing. The Cold War writing, especially when represented through a backdrop of baseless fears, forms the covert narrative dynamics and integrates the narrative rupture in the whole overt family travel story where the unreliable narrative techniques in the tale, such as denarration, and disnarration, break upthe narrative progression and present various possibilities from the fissured narration. It turns out that the various overt narrative possibilities are restricted by the covert Cold War narrative, thus, the variety of overt narratives in “Morocco” is always constrained by the Cold War ideology. While the travel narrative is at variance with this particular reality, the underlying Cold War ideology, nevertheless, serves as the universal representation.

Mimesis and Mythos in Aristotelian Arabic Poetics

Abstract The Aristotelian sense of mimesis (i.e., fictional representation of an evoked world through plot and characters) continues to shape modern views of literature. The medieval Arabic reception of the concept of mimesis and its closely related concept of mythos (fable, story, or plot) through Aristotle’s Poetics reveals a different conception of literature—one that this article argues is not representational but analogical. While Aristotle sees mythos/plot as forming the main vehicle through which mimesis manifests itself in poetry, mythos (khurāfa) according to the philosophers of the Islamic world was irrelevant for the poetic. This is because they understood mythos not as “plot” but as referring, on the one hand, to the fictionality and fantasticness of poetic metaphor, which they deemed inessential for the success of poetry; on the other hand, they understood mythos as “story,” in which case they relegated to it a rhetorical function of persuasion rather than a poetic function of make-believe. Fundamentally, in both the poetic and the rhetorical, mimesis was understood as the expression of the comparable, not the representation of the likeness of an evoked world. This exposes an Arabic conception of “mimesis” that reflects a literature that seeks comparisons and demands the inference of similarities from the reader.

Fictional varieties of postcapitalism and imaginaries of systemic transformation: mapping alternatives in science fiction and making use of their heuristic potential

ABSTRACT This contribution proposes to explore different forms of postcapitalist futures that have been imagined in science fiction and analyze their reflexive potential. The field of studies on diverse economies, those economies often made less visible by the preeminent economic system, should also be concerned with fictional representations oriented towards the future. The article first emphasizes how science fiction can participate in the political imagination, precisely because of its capacities for problematization and exploration. The next step is to exploit a corpus of mainly literary works to show how science fiction can be an original and heuristic vector for the exploration of transformative socioeconomic possibilities. The worlds created in these works allow us to show what a variety of alternative and postcapitalist socioeconomic systems might look like. A typological matrix of postcapitalist futures is then proposed to highlight the hypotheses on which these visions are based and the inspirations they provide.

Between the secret state and the public sphere: the writer as intermediary

ABSTRACT This essay explores the unique roles played by writers as intermediaries between the secret state and the public sphere, providing an introduction to the special issue Writers in Intelligence. Though frequently remarked upon, the history, nature, and politics of this relationship remains under-studied. Some spies-turned-writers write in the hope of legitimizing a problematic role, others to own their own identities in a police state. For some, writing is an avenue for critique of a toxic security culture, while others have lent their skills to intelligence agencies as a form of patriotic duty. We examine how fictional representations of intelligence work have been both a boon and a hindrance to various secret services; and how exposing elements of intelligence work can occasionally lead to conspiracy rather than clarity.

Muslim Women Against a Backdrop of 1947: Facts and Fictions

This article presents the stories of women who became victims of the multidimensional impact of the Partition of India in 1947. It steers through the autobiographic and fictional representations that emerged from their lives. The article argues that in the historical fabric, the socio-economic and political threads of time are so closely interwoven that it is almost impossible to study them in isolation.