Social Fiction Research Articles

Преломление традиции романа воспитания в романе В. Пелевина «Generation P»

The article is devoted to the analysis of the novel by V. Pelevin “Generation P” in the context of the tradition of Bildungsroman. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the writer’s novel “Generation P” is considered in the genre aspect. The aim of the work is to reveal the specificity of refraction of the tradition of Bildungsroman in “Generation P”. As a result of the study it is established, firstly, that, despite the priority of the study of Bildungsroman by Western researchers, the most important role in the study of its genre specifics, structural features, constitutive genre features, and the image of the protagonist belongs to M. M. Bakhtin. Secondly, V. Pelevin’s postmodern novel “Generation P”, combining elements of social fiction, satire, and philosophical novel, is created on the genre model of Bildungsroman, including all its main elements: the biographical principle of construction; the stage path of development of the protagonist seeking to find himself and his place in the world; the presence of “teachers” who guide the hero in his journey and supposedly help him find himself. At the same time, the writer modifies the tradition somewhat: his hero in the process of realizing true freedom, climbing the career ladder, realizes that he squanders his best qualities; playing with pre-texts and synthesis with Bildungsroman of inserted genres allows the writer to comprehend significant problems (loss of spirituality in modern consumer society; transformation of reality and man into simulacra).

Dinero y futuro en tiempos de cambio climático. Un abordaje sociológico e histórico de El ministerio del futuro, de Kim Stanley Robinson

Seeking to contribute to current research on the future imagination, the article explores a scientific fiction text, The Ministry of the Future (2020), by Kim Stanley Robinson. This novel has two singularities: it begins in July 2024, so it narrates an imminent future, prolonging concrete possibilities of our present, and it proposes, based on existing academic articles, a currency —carboncoin— for the ecological transition. This makes the novel a speculative science fiction of strategy, a notion explored in the article to understand this way of imagining the future. After presenting a series of sociological concepts for the study of money (with emphasis on Nigel Dodd’s concept of “social fiction”) and outlining a history of imagining the future of money, and arguing that, since 2008, we live in a conjuncture of currency transformation, the futurization of money present in the novel is analyzed. The characteristics and implications of the carboncoin, which rewards carbon capture, are explored, analyzing moments of its design and evolution in relation to banking institutions, the dollar, technologies and the dilemmas of its adoption. By putting the plot of the novel into dialogue with historical phenomena, theoretical positions, political discourses, social and technological processes, we try to support the hypothesis that the way of imagining the future in a current science fiction novel, which speculates on the future of money in times of climate change, can offer new possibilities for the social sciences to think about the future.

Who speaks for the university? Social fiction as a lens for reimagining higher education futures

Who speaks for the university? Social fiction as a lens for reimagining higher education futures

A Chat with Patricia Leavy on “RE/INVENTION: METHODS OF SOCIAL FICTION” BY PATRICIA LEAVY (2023)

Within this conversation, Patricia Leavy discusses her new book Re/Invention: Methods of Social Fiction. As a leading artful scholar, Leavy shines a light on the slippage between fiction and nonfiction, and the long history of merging scholarship with the literary arts. Within the paradigm of arts-based research, Leavy views social fiction as a method. She speaks about how crafting academic fiction allows for research to become both an act of discovery and a pathway toward personal healing. Christina Flemming is delighted to hear more about Leavy’s daily writing practice, her thoughts on writing as rewriting, and the metaphorical blender that is required to take one’s lived experiences and transform them into academic fiction. You can learn more about Re/Invention: Methods of Social Fiction via the Guilford Press website. To read more about Patricia Leavy, visit her website: https://patricialeavy.com/

Scripting Consenting Fictions in Sex Techology Imaginaries

This article examines how the intended and implied uses and users of emerging commercial sex technologies negotiate understandings of sexual consent as a social fiction articulated as contractual-yet-contingent autonomy and transactional access that is framed as a prerequisite obstacle to sexual gratification. To do so, I analyze the design and marketing of consent-recording applications and sex robots programmed to refuse consent. I draw on science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist and queer theory to investigate both how sexual consent is imaginatively scripted into digital technologies and how imagined digital technologies suggest that we approach and value sexual consent. My analysis foregrounds critical readings of the design imaginaries of promissory digital technologies—speculatively suggested through design and marketing materials—to situate them within cultural politics of consent and digital technology as they express desires for specific worldbuilding fantasies about gender and sex.

The Fluidity in Becoming Women: Being Both the Nightshade and Blackberry in Toni Morrisons Sula

Female identity and female relationship are the cores of Toni Morrisons novel Sula, as she declares in the forward what is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What are the risks of individualism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static, community? By creating troubled, or outlaw, women, Morrison challenges the binary thinking that women can either survive or perish depending on their subordination to males; instead, she argues women can be both evil and good by challenging the conventions scripted by patriarchy. Indeed, this empowerment originates and sustains itself from female relationships, like maternal relationships and womanly friendships. This article begins by employing Judith Butlers theory of performativity that gender is essence-lacking compelled social fiction, and then it pays particular attention to female characters and their intersected relationships. In this way, I argue that the troubled women in Sula provides alternative theatre space for females to practice peculiar performance, thus challenging the conventions set by patriarchy and finding the heterogeneous me-ness. The article concludes that becoming a woman is fluid, not static. Because it is constantly shaped by their intermittent female relationships in the conditioned space, there is possibility for modulating the conventional gender roles embodied in the society.

Gothic Fault-Lines in Anne Brontë’s Social Fiction: The Case of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë’s second novel, has always been the object of much scholarly attention, particularly as regards what was originally thought to be a structural flaw: the use of a frame narrative within which the story of Helen Huntingdon’s flight from a disastrous marriage is embedded. The frame narrator, Gilbert Markham, tells a traditional courtship tale which abruptly turns into Helen’s metanarrative of domestic horror. Recent scholarship has concerned itself with this split in discourse which suggests that Brontë does not challenge the conventional idea that discursive authority is masculine, making it therefore difficult to read her novel as feminist. Studies alternately focus on Brontë’s bold enterprise (the vindication in the metanarrative of a woman’s right to leave an abusive husband) or on the limitations generated by her decision to resort to a male frame narrator. This paper addresses the implications of the novel’s apparently flawed structure, notably exploring the uncertainty surrounding the improvement of Gilbert’s moral character after his reading of Helen’s diary. It contends that critical disagreement on whether or not The Tenant is a feminist novel and the embedded narrative the instrument of Gilbert’s reformation, originates, at least partially, in the generic tension at work within Brontë’s novel, and the presence of Gothic fault-lines. Anne Brontë appears unwilling to espouse realism and social criticism which, if fully embraced, might imply forgoing valued (and cherished) Gothic modes of storytelling. The uneasy co-existence of social realism and Gothic remnants (prominent in the choice of structure and modes of characterisation) may then lie at the heart of the novel’s multi-faceted ambiguity.

The secret art of pedagogical alchemy

This paper reveals secrets. Like their Renaissance counterparts, pedagogical alchemists often work in secret networks as they struggle against dominant forces. Pedagogical alchemists seek to transform assemblages of neoliberal education policies, shifting enactments of such policies from replication of systemic hierarchies and oppressions towards teacher and student experiences of joy, hope, and resistance. The secret art of pedagogical alchemy adopts critical praxis research method that amplifies epistemological insights arising from teacher experience. This paper utilizes performative autoethnography and social fiction to interrogate the influence of socio-political context on the labour of an 8th grade school-teacher. The secret art of pedagogical alchemy locates the experiences of a pedagogical alchemist whose 8th grade history class includes a unit of work on Renaissance alchemist Isabella Cortese. The experiences are framed by globalised, neo-liberal education policy assemblage. Like the writings of Renaissance alchemist, Isabella Cortese, the voice of the 8th grade history pedagogical alchemist is performed in quatrains that are written in iambic pentameter.

Review: Via Chicago, by J. E. Sumerau

Review: <i>Via Chicago</i>, by J. E. Sumerau

Joyce's Ulysses: Social Science, Fiction, and Reality: Ulysses, James Joyce

Joyce's Ulysses: Social Science, Fiction, and Reality: Ulysses, James Joyce

Representations of poverty and social inequality in the Costa Rican social fiction narratives of the 1940s Generation

En este artículo se analizan las representaciones de la pobreza y la desigualdad social en los textos narrativos (en particular las novelas) producidos por una parte de la llamada generación del 40: aquella que se interesa por representar en su literatura una perspectiva social y realista. Así pues, se analizan algunas novelas de tres destacados narradores ubicados por la historiografía literaria en esta generación: Adolfo Herrera García, con su novela Juan Varela; Carlos Luis Fallas, con sus novelas Mamita Yunai, Gentes y Gentecillas y Marcos Ramírez, y Fabián Dobles, con sus novelas Ese que llaman pueblo y El sitio de las abras.

Combining Dynamic Network Analysis and Cerebral Carryover Effect to Evaluate the Impacts of Reading Social Media Posts and Science Fiction in the Natural State on the Human Brain.

Social media has been associated with decreased attention, memory, and learning abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Dynamic function network connectivity (dFNC) analysis is suitable for uncovering dynamical brain activity. Besides, the effects of a cognitive task may persist for a while on the brain, even after the termination of the task, also known as the carryover effect. Consequently, we combined the dFNC analysis and cerebral carryover effects to study the brain dynamics of reading social media posts in the natural state and comparatively investigated the brain dynamics of reading science fiction on the smartphone. We performed functional MRI (fMRI) scans of all subjects at baseline and then assigned them a social media post or science fiction reading task. Immediately after, another fMRI scanning was performed for these subjects. We found that the change between dFNC states, the number of dFNC states, and the total distances increased after reading science fiction. Furthermore, the global, local, and nodal efficiencies of the deep-thinking state tended to increase after reading science fiction. On reading social media posts, the functional connectivity (FC) between the default mode network (DMN) and bilateral frontoparietal network (FPN) decreased, while the FC between DMN and visual network (VN) increased. Given the current evidence, we concluded that reading science fiction could substantially increase brain activity and network efficiency, while social media was related to abnormal FCs between DMN, VN, and FPN.

A Post-Truth: Existence of New Phenomena in Selected Short Stories of Munshi Premchand

Munshi Premchand (1880–1936) popularly known as Upanyas Samrat of Indian Literature was a pioneer of Hindi and Urdu social fiction. He is one of the most celebrated writers of the Indian subcontinent, and is regarded as well-known Hindi writer of early 20th century. His writings describe in realistic detail the political and social struggles in India of the early 20th century which has its relevance even today. His short stories mirrors the modern era and shows his farsightedness and well fitted to the contemporary world. The present paper will analyse the phenomena of post-truth and its relevance in the selected short stories of Munshi Premchand; Kafan, Nasha and Mandir Masjid. Post-truth is a political and a philosophical idea percolating down to the democratic fabric of our society. The word “Post-Truth” was declared as an international word of the year in 2016.The Oxford Dictionaries define “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Posttruth implies an assumed understanding of truth which is evident in selected stories of Munshi Premchand.

Multilingual policies as dystopia: From less to more desirable futures in education

In ‘Literature and Life’, Deleuze remarks that all literature manifests as delirium, and, as such, the destiny of literature is to play itself out between two poles that create and reflect life back to itself: what the human desires, and the constant changes life imposes onto us. Taking Deleuze’s statement as a point of departure concerning the power of social fiction, this article mobilizes the dystopian imagination as a tool to evaluate what language policies do as they channel human desire to shape linguistic practices. Specifically, this article explores the extent to which the literary dystopian lens can help us plot more desirable futures for multilingualism in education. Through a critical fabulation about India’s three-language policy’s effects in schools, we bear witness to this language policy’s disciplinarian action, which reinforces linguistic hierarchies and territorial disputes present in this nation’s history. Indeed, decisions on policies meant to assist linguistically minoritized students have often rested on complicated assumptions about what language means. These assumptions operate under liberal and neoliberal ideologies that commodify and narrow citizens’ linguistic choices, thereby framing one’s authority over language as something that exists outside the human mind. By approaching India’s three-language policy as a futuristically fabulated case study, we reflect on the potentiality of dystopian narratives to function as an analytical method and a critical lens to anticipate ethical problems in language policies’ design.

BOOK REVIEW

Leading methodologist and arts-based researcher, Patricia Leavy, pioneered the method of social fiction, fiction-based research, or fiction as a research practice. Her latest release, Candy Floss Collection, is a set of three previously published novels, which together form installation art. This definitive and beautifully rendered work is important for several reasons. First, it demonstrates the power of fiction as a research method. Second, it is a beautiful piece of art. Third, it centres on powerful content, telling important and often invisible stories about women’s lives, aspirations, relationships, and daily struggles. Finally, this collection is a well-crafted piece of public scholarship that is imminently accessible to audiences inside and outside of academia. Overall, Candy Floss Collection is a triumphant piece of art, an exemplar of fiction as research, a highly accessible piece of public scholarship, and an engaging read. This is a significant and even game-changing work and ought to be recognized as such.

A REVIEW OF INTO THE SEA

In this article, I review the social fiction novel, Into the Sea, by Ash Watson, and discuss the ways in which Watson uses fiction as sociological theory.

Writing and identity

Using a multidisciplinary approach to social justice teaching, this article explores the often invisible impact of double consciousness on adult English language learners in the United States and provides examples of classroom practice that invite students to reflect on its effects. The experience of double consciousness is examined as it relates to English language learner identities. A Critical Language Awareness (CLA) framework and identity-conscious teaching practices are explored to encourage student participation and reflection. This approach, demonstrated through examples used in writing classes, encourages the exploration of identity in the face of oppression by interrogating social constructions and fiction and nonfiction stories containing connected themes. Three classroom lessons and consequent writing are analyzed with a critical discourse lens to examine student responses and reflections on language and identity. Student writing demonstrates that encouraging English language classes to interrogate the language of institutionalized inequity and identity formation can illuminate potential influences of double consciousness, which can empower students to think critically about their identities and choose whether to take steps to mediate the ways in which they could be affected by double consciousness.

Утопія С. Подолинського та її відгомін в українській літературі

The article deals with the connections between S. Podolynsky and Ukrainian literature, namely his artistic, educational and non-fiction works, scientific studies that testify to the philosophical principles of that era, create an additional explanatory context for the literary process, and the influence of the scientist's ideas on art literature. The object of study was mainly the texts of the thinker, such as “Steam machine” and “Human work and its relation to the distribution of energy.” The relevance of the study is seen in the need for a comprehensive understanding of the so-called populism, which in its individual samples went beyond provinciality and intellectual limitations, attesting to the art of the next era. The defining feature is the cultural and historical method established in Ukrainian literary studies. The novelty of intelligence is to shift the focus to little-known figures and marginal genres of Ukrainian literature. Interest in the figure of S. Podolynsky, what grew over time in a separate direction of research, dates back to the periods of national revival in the 20th century. Historians and economists wrote the most about him. However, physicians, physicists, biogeochemists, ecologists from Ukraine and abroad have gradually joined. The grows of the number of researchers and, in particular, the diversification of the subject of research with the involvement of all new areas of science is evidenced by the underestimated true scale of the personality of the Ukrainian thinker over the decades. We consider it necessary to focus, firstly, the genre specificity of the work “Steam machine” in the context of that day attracts attention, secondly, on the search for the echo of the ideas of this scientist in Ukrainian literature of the 19th and the first third of the 20th century. It is argued that the ideas of S. Podolynsky, in particular the autotrophy of mankind, as well as compositional and genre innovations could have influenced on the formation of scientific and social science fiction in Ukrainian literature. From our point of view, the proposed problem has the prospect of further elaboration, in particular the hypothesis about the connection between the futurological forecasts of S. Podolynsky and the ideological and artistic content of the short story by Panas Myrny “Dream” and V. Vynnychenko’s novel “Sun Machine”.

СВОЕОБРАЗИЕ ПОСТРОЕНИЯ ФАНТАСТИЧЕСКОГО МИРА В РОМАНЕ «ОСТРОВ ПОГИБШИХ КОРАБЛЕЙ» А. Р. БЕЛЯЕВА

The article analyses an original approach to developing fantastic world in A. R. Belyaev’s novel “The Shipwreck Island”, which laid the foundation for domestic social fiction. It is shown that the novel is based on fantastic assumption of “impossible” (for Belyaev fantasy is a means to conduct social experiment impossible in reality). The authors’ attention is focused on analysing the Island chronotope, which plays the key role in developing the storyline and spatial-temporal relations and correlates with fairy islands and folkloric “kingdom of the dead”.

The public pursuit of closure: losses, fictions, and endings

PurposeThis paper raises the possibility that closure is a myth, both in the sense of a narrative guiding a quest and in the sense of a social fiction. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe paper examines parts played by public administration practice in quests with subtexts of death, love, and loss, and suggests that overlapping administrative and narrative fictions have their comforts and uses for grieving persons, for organizations, and for the social order.FindingsThe paper confesses ambivalence about the actual existence of closure in historical rather than fictional time.Originality/valueUsing the metaphor of “closing the books,” the paper situates particular public reckonings with human loss in the context of justice-seeking and other public sector companions of “closure,” but resists the narrative closure of the authoritative answer and the happy ending.