Fictional Sources Research Articles

Fiction and Instruction

Fiction and Instruction Markku Lehtimäki (bio) In his important and thought-provoking essay, Richard Walsh presents his rhetorical version of fictionality as a resource integral to direct communication, arguing that fictionality is a specific use of discourse and part of the pragmatics of communication. I find Walsh’s presentation in many ways helpful [End Page 489] in its careful and wide-ranging consideration of the merits of the rhetoric of fictionality, although his tone is occasionally quite polemic and his theoretical discussion might benefit from concrete literary examples. My response to his target essay consists of two parts: first, I try to read his model of rhetoric of fictionality in relation to the established paradigm of the rhetorical theory of narrative; and second, I aim to test his idea of fiction’s communicative and informative value in the light of recent environmental fiction and its combination of mimetic and didactic—or entertaining and instructive—aspects. At the outset, it may be interesting to note Walsh’s critical departure from the tradition of the rhetorical criticism represented by the Chicago School. More than that, it may be surprising to realize that he all but dismisses that tradition as yet another version of a representational approach to fictionality, one which focuses on the products of the communicative process, not, he argues, on the communicative act itself. Doing this, Walsh also reads the pioneering work of Wayne C. Booth as a representative of an intra-fictional communication model, which dissociates fictive discourse from its contexts in the real world (Walsh, “Fictionality as Rhetoric” 412). But the narratological version of the communication model—with fictional agents in hierarchical relationships to each other—was developed by Seymour Chatman (whose “canonical diagram” Walsh refers to in a footnote [422n5]). In this structuralistically informed model there is no room for real authors and real readers, but instead the communication proceeds in a virtual world of imaginary beings and textual agents. Rather surprisingly, Walsh argues that James Phelan’s way of adapting and expanding Chatman’s narratological version of the communication model ultimately also falls back into a representational model of fiction, that is, into intra-fictionality (422). However, in Phelan’s recent work, that intrafictional communication model between narrators and narratees is actually expanded to include real authors and implied authors as their streamlined versions outside the fictional frame as well as actual and authorial audiences (see Phelan, Somebody Telling 25–29). Indeed, the previously water-tight structuralist frame gradually breaks down in Phelan’s more flexible model, which suggests that narrative is not a structure but an action. Still, Walsh’s return to Plato is most refreshing in our age of neo-Aristotelian poetics, that is, the governing narratological tradition, which foregrounds the mimetic aspects of narratives, including characters, actions, and objects in the represented fictional realm. Walsh is also careful to stress [End Page 490] that Plato’s diegesis, according to which the poet speaks in his own person, is a fundamentally different concept from Gérard Genette’s diégèse, which refers to the represented diegetic world (403). In this Platonic vein, Walsh also constructed one of his best known, and most polemic, theses according to which in narrative fiction the narrator is either a represented character or the author—there is no room for intermediate figures such as Genette’s infamous extradiegetic–heterodiegetic narrator, not to mention the darling of the rhetorical theory of narrative, the implied author (see Walsh, Rhetoric 69–85). As mentioned, I regard Walsh’s recuperation of Plato’s distinction and his return to the author as a source of fiction’s communicative act and intent an important and welcome move, and a helpful way of using Occam’s razor in the narratological field where an intra-fictional technical concept begets an intra-fictional technical concept. That said, one wonders whether Walsh, otherwise a most jovial person, is also somewhat Platonic in another sense, willing to bar the fellow theorists from his ideal republic of fictionality because their highly developed, and sometimes Homeric, theories of narrative and fiction do not correspond to his version (although he does reflect that under certain circumstances “it is futile to legislate...

Experiment with Textual Materiality: Page, Author, and Medium in the Works of Steve Tomasula, Michael Martone, and Eduardo Kac

Books' new forms and distribution channels have radically changed how we envision writing and reading, allowing us to see more clearly the textual elements that we tend to take for granted—how books exist in the world, how they are authored, framed, presented, produced, and packaged. As part of these textual developments, numerous experimental works have played with signifying techniques and with textual formats—narrative and plot structures, voice, syntax, print, and orthography—inviting readers to reconsider the ways in which they envision and relate to textuality. Other works have placed materiality at the forefront of the experiment. Many of the authors who participate in this literary research have manipulated the stability of the page, the notion of authorship, and the fictional and poetic medium. In this article, I investigate the configuration of the page, the source and distribution of fiction, and the medium of delivery of the work in order to add an interpretive layer to the current frameworks that guide our understanding of experimental literature. More specifically, in the works of Steve Tomasula, Michael Martone, and Eduardo Kac, the physical realities leading to material and embodied reading practices allow readers to engage in an affirmative mode of experimental politics. What emerges out of these experiments with the physical qualities of literature is a mode of creation that does not provoke a mere momentary evasion of dominant ideology but fosters instead a political practice through its material existence.

ОБРАЗОТВОРЧІ РИСИ КОЗАКА-ХАРАКТЕРНИКА — ГЕРОЯ РОМАНУ Ю. МУШКЕТИКА «ПОГОНЯ»

The subject of the study is the interpretation of the folklore image of an outstanding Cossack character in the historical novel at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries. The appeal of this genre at the present stage to fictional sources and techniques, including myth, parables, fairy tales, fiction, games, compilations, violations of space-time linearity, etc., is a problematic field of wider research. The aim of the article is to determine functioning peculiarities of outstanding Cossack’s image in the artistic world of novel “Chase” by Y. Mushketyk. Results of the Study allowed to claim that in his novel “Chase” (1997) Y. Mushketyk modelled history in accordance to the modern tradition. The artist took the historical era of the Ruins as the basis of his story and led further narration on the principle of road, no wonder that at first sight the novel can be taken as an adventure novel. Pointing out the heredity of generations of outstanding Cossacks, the author prepares readers for perception of the hero, whose unusual abilities he reveals diversely throughout the work. Depicting a colorful portrait of Cossack Semen Belokobylka like a chimerical appearance of Cossack Mamai, Y. Mushketyk gives the novel “Chase” signs of a chimerical genre. According to the genre of road novel Y. Mushketyk reveals unusual abilities of the Cossack in lots of episodes of his journey. With the help of first person singular narration (“I-narration”), the artist transfers his feelings and emotions in extremely difficult conditions. Y. Mushketik gives the Cossack a good sense of humor as a part of his lifestyle. Liveliness gives the Cossack the power to continue the journey and complete the mission to rescue his brethren. In the reflections of outstanding Cossack, the author expresses the idea of the unity of Ukraine and Ukrainians, touches the problem of sense of living, giving the novel features of philosophical genre, significance and relevance of the present. The practical significance of the research results is the ability to form a model for the transformation of the folklore image into a literary one, extending the material of the study to other works of this genre and period.

Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950 by Amanda J. Zink

Reviewed by: Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950 by Amanda J. Zink Kylie M. Gower Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950. By Amanda J. Zink. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. ix + 329 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth. This work attempts to pull from popular fictional sources of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as novels, magazine articles, and the like, in order to prove how domesticity in the West further reasserted racial divides among Native, Mexican, and Anglo-Americans. Drawing on Great Plains authors such as Edna Ferber, Willa Cather, Elinore Cowan Stone, and Evelyn Hunt Raymond, Zink dissects the heroines of their fictionalized novels to show “the ways white women colonized western women of color by creating characters who brought ‘the right ways of living’ to the Other women in their western adventures” (3). Though Zink puts forth compelling arguments in her book, she assumes the reader is familiar with all the sources being critiqued, making for a more difficult read when one has to do further research while simultaneously dissecting the narrative to understand the argument the author is making. The book is compiled into four thematic chapters, each addressing the evolution of domesticity in American print culture. Material presented within these chapters proves relevant to the author’s argument. Pulling from various scholars who have studied the key novels that form the foundation for her writing, Zink further reasserts her point that “white writers sometimes drew characters that use domesticity to colonize American Indian and Mexican American women, as if to enable and legitimize their own public activities” (2). The author seems to say that these primarily female authors directly instilled an air of racism into [End Page 215] their novels as a result of their fiendish outlook on multicultural races. This book uses sources that are mostly based in Oklahoma, which contains a sizable percentage of the Native population in the Great Plains. As a result, Zink makes use of essential archival sources located in this region to lay claim to her work. This book adds to the historiography of American print culture in that it evaluates how biases are interpreted and intertwined in fictional manuscripts. The premise is sound, but the intended audience is those who are knowledgeable in earlier American literature, such as graduate students or scholars in the field. Ultimately, Zink’s book provides an exciting insight into domesticity and how that in turn further affected racial divides in the Great Plains between 1850 and 1950. Kylie M. Gower History and American Studies University of Wyoming Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

From fear to anxiety in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Jean Delumeau, in his seminal history of fear (Fear in the West, first published in 1978) points to the social configurations of fear in early modern societies: a nobleman was by definition fearless, while people of the “Vulgar sort” (Montaigne, “Of fear”) were taxed with being excessively fearful and cowardly. Fear, “a servile and base passion” (Coeffeteau, A Table of Human Passions, 1620) was thus determined by its traditional reverse, bravery, and placed within that dialectic frame. That social opposition structures most early modern discourses about fear and informs a vision of fear as being characteristic of the popular masses, while bravery is associated with aristocratic individuality, desire for fame and heroism. Bearing in mind this dominant discourse, I would like to look at the ways in which Shakespearean drama undermines this social framework by staging humble representations of acts of bravery, while at the same time using fear as a fundamental basis for the modern subject, no longer a defect but as a defining trait of humankind. Fear becomes a source of fiction on the Shakespearean stage. Key words:

Rethinking the Diegetic/Nondiegetic Distinction in the Film Musical

Abstract This paper exposes problems with the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction as a means of describing film-musical numbers. Tracing the use of these terms from Plato to present-day cinema studies, the author identifies a divergence of meaning between scholarship on film musicals and that directed toward non-musical films. Film-musical scholars’ idiosyncratic use of these terms not only poses obstacles to effective scholarly dialogues across film genres but also leads to logical problems when the standard criteria for diegetic status are combined with the realism criterion presupposed by most scholars of film musicals. As an alternative means of describing differences between film-musical numbers, the author proposes two scalar concepts. One tracks the number’s degree of realism in terms of its dramatic context, performers’ skill levels and preparation, identification of a fictional source for its accompaniment, and visual effects. The other measures the performance’s degree of formality and intended function. At the formal end of the spectrum, there are numbers with a strict separation of performers and audience members, where the performance is intended primarily for aesthetic appreciation or entertainment. On the other end are spontaneous performances that are intended primarily for communicative or expressive purposes, which often have no fictional audience aside from the performers. In between these extremes lie communal performances, in which audience members tend to become performers in the course of the number. Such songs and dances are intended as much for community building or cheering loved ones as for aesthetic appreciation or entertainment.

Lu Xun’s Research of Chinese Ancient Novels (1) ― Focusing on his Annotated Compilation of Ancient Fiction, Selection of Fictional Romances from the Tang and Song Period and Old Sources of Fiction

Lu Xun’s Research of Chinese Ancient Novels (1) ― Focusing on his Annotated Compilation of Ancient Fiction, Selection of Fictional Romances from the Tang and Song Period and Old Sources of Fiction

Fiction into religion: imagination, other worlds, and play in the formation of community

Research into religions founded upon explicitly fictional sources is a recent development in the study of religion. Such research is social scientific in orientation and emphasises: the persuasive power of shared narratives among subcultural groups; the ‘cognitive’ methodological turn that has gained ground since the 1980s regarding the origin and function of religion; and the individualistic and affective ways that elements from traditional religion, popular culture, and a wide range of social artefacts and phenomena are used to create new religions and personal spiritualities. In certain cases, exposure to, prolonged immersion in, and social vindication of highly affective narratives (science-fiction novels and films that are sensuous and have tangible impact in experiential terms) may trigger the formation of a religion. This article examines the Church of All Worlds, which is a fiction-inspired religion founded by Tim Zell (b. 1942) and Lance Christie (1944–2010), two students at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, in April 1962. Zell and Christie read Robert A. Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (London: New English Library, 1961 [1987]), and initiated a ‘real world’ version of the fictional Church, founded by Martian-raised Valentine Michael Smith in the novel. Identification with Stranger’s characters, and lifestyle choices designed to recreate the social milieu of the novel, reinforced and made ‘real’ this initially fiction-based religion, which is now over 50 years old, has a vibrant print and online presence, and braches (called Nests) in countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, and Australia.

Hansen, Julie and Rogachevskii, Andrei (eds) Punishment as a Crime? Perspectives on Prison Experience in Russian Culture (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 538 successful scholarly experiment in a new and original field, it offers the reader valuable and intriguing insights into the cult of celebrity and glamour in its many manifestations within contemporary Russian society. UCL SSEES Ruta Skriptaite Hansen, Julie and Rogachevskii, Andrei (eds). Punishment as a Crime? Perspectives on Prison Experience in Russian Culture. Uppsala Studies on Eastern Europe, 5. Uppsala Universiteit, Uppsala, 2014. 193 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. SEK262.00. This edited collection includes papers delivered at an interdisciplinary workshopheldinUppsalainAugust2012,althoughtheword‘interdisciplinary’ which was part of the workshop title was for some reason omitted from the title of the collection. The word ‘eclectic’ might also have been used, and there is no explanation in the Introduction of the rather odd title. What does it mean? Igor Sutyagin has the phrase as a subheading (p. 37) but the following paragraphs, while not explaining it, do contain the following suggestive statement: ‘Criminal culture and the socio-cultural environment of the Russian penitentiary system can be likened to a sort of poison which is dangerous for any society willing to reconcile itself to it’ (p. 38). This is spot-on. The authors of the various chapters are mostly scholars of Russian language and literature, though Kragh is an economic historian, and Sutyagin is a physicist turned security consultant. The overall field of enquiry is that of cultural studies. The Introduction makes it clear that the book ‘does not claim to provide definitive answers or a comprehensive overview of the Russian prison system. Rather,itaimstooffernewperspectivesonthephenomenonofprisonexperience in Russia and beyond, drawing on factual and fictional source material’ (p. 9). By ‘beyond’ is meant the United Kingdom, since in his final chapter Andrei Rogatchevski compares and contrasts the fictionalized prison experiences of the National Bolshevik leader, Eduard Limonov (convicted of firearms offences), with those of Lord Archer, the Conservative politician (convicted of perjury). As it happens, the subjects of this unlikely pairing are near-contemporaries. For this reviewer, whose own discipline is Russian and Soviet law and legal history, the most interesting chapter is that by the well-known former prisoner IgorSutyagin,entitled‘RussianPrisonCultureToday:AParticipant-Observer’s View’ (pp. 19–42). Between October 1999 and July 2010 he was detained pretrial and then served his sentence in seven pre-trial detention centres (SIZOs, REVIEWS 539 investigative isolators) and four penal colonies (IKs, correctional colonies). The chapter is full of fascinating and horrifying first-hand detail and observations. Sutyagin is thoroughly pessimistic as to the possibility of genuine reform. In the second chapter, Martin Kragh focuses on the phenomenon of forced labour under Stalin, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and illuminates his topic with full-colour graphs and a wealth of statistical information. He concludes by noting that Stalin’s repressive machinery became increasingly costly and inefficient, and as soon as he was dead his disciples in the Politburo began to dismantle it. In the second section of the book, ‘Reactions and Representations’, Sarah Young, of UCL SSEES, returns to the tsarist period for comparisons, in her case conducting an intelligent comparison of Fedor Dostoevskii’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1861), Vlas Doroshevich’s Sakhalin (1897), Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (1954–73) and Andrei Siniavsky’s A Voice from the Chorus (1973). Andrea Gullotta explores the phenomenon of ‘Gulag humour’; while Helena Goscilo examines Vladimir Putin’s favourite rock band, Liube, and post-Soviet Russia’s ‘quirky answer to Jailhouse Rock’ — the 1957 vehicle for Elvis Presley: Igor Matvienko and Dmitrii Zolotukhin’s Zona Liube (1994). Goscilo perceptively explores this characteristically Russian musical expression, and ‘Liube’s flirtation with crime as imidzh’ (p. 115). Part three of the book is entitled ‘Comparative Dimensions’. It contains two chapters. The first, by Inessa Medzhibovskaya, is entitled ‘Punishment and the Human Condition: Hannah Arendt, Leo Tolstoy, and Lessons from Life, Philosophy and Literature’, and attempts a wide-ranging, erudite and eclectic exploration of the theme of confinement in no less than twelve Russian and Western thinkers — I will not list them — tracing a connection between the experience of confinement and storytelling as a way of making sense of it. I have already mentioned Andrei Rogatchevski’s (his...

Desfiar e fiar a Aritmética da Boneca Emília: práticas no ensino de Matemática na obra de Monteiro Lobato

Este artigo objetiva investigar possíveis relações entre história e literatura. Para isso, analisamos como práticas de ensino de aritmética se manifestam explicitamente na obra ficcional A Aritmética da Emília, do escritor brasileiro Monteiro Lobato (1882 – 1948), e a que rastros de outras práticas culturais o referido livro pode remeter, com base no contexto de ensino de matemática compreendido entre 1920 e 1940. Para tanto, nossa opção de análise segue a intertextualidade entre alguns documentos da época, como A Aritmética da Emília (1935, 1ª edição; 1939, 2ª edição; 1942, 3ª edição; 1944, 4ª edição), Emília no país da Gramática e Aritmética da Emília (1947); outras obras de Lobato; livros didáticos de aritmética da época; legislação sobre ensino; cartas entre Lobato e Anísio Teixeira; revistas sobre ensino; textos sobre educação daquela época; livros de literatura infantil. Temos por referenciais básicos Luiz Costa Lima e Carlo Guinzburg. A escrita aqui elaborada produz um modo de fazer História a partir de uma fonte ficcional, assumindo uma forma discursiva que se aproxima do modo poético, literário e artístico. Concluímos que A Aritmética da Emília reúne em si contradições filosóficas e pedagógicas daquela época, confrontando a tradição didática do ensino conservador com o movimento renovador da Escola Nova, oscilando o caráter inovador de sua proposta pedagógica e recaindo nas práticas professorais de sua contemporaneidade.

Reading Collage Drama as Documentary Drama: Trash Archives and Dissensus in Charles L. Mee’s Lives of the Artists

ABSTRACT: Theatre scholarship tends to link the term “documentary theatre” (positively or pejoratively) with the methods and professional ethics of journalists, social scientists, or historians. However, documentary theatre, from the 1920s to the present, has had more in common than is often assumed with avant-garde practices such as collage, assemblage, and bricolage. This article uses the biographical plays of Charles L. Mee, whose cut-and-paste dramaturgy combines textual fragments from factual and fictional sources, to argue for a more expansive definition of the term documentary theatre – one encompassing works that dissent from conventional thinking about how evidence is identified, collected, organized, and explained. This argument focuses upon Mee’s play about disabled “outsider” artist James Castle, soot and spit, and draws upon Jacques Rancière’s writing about panechastic teaching and dissensual art.

Meaning Deferral, Jungian Symbolism, and the Quest for V. in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

In Pynchon's second novel, after having fallen in a complex net of uncertain signification, protagonist Oedipa Maas finally realizes that she should escape categorical binary thinking. This article contends that Oedipa's portrait is also informed by Jungian symbolism—an underestimated source of Pynchon's fiction—and by the author's literary quest for V., two factors that merge in the novel with other interpretations to develop a dense search for meaning that eventually announces the coming of social change.

Clinical empathy and narrative competence: the relevance of reading talmudic legends as literary fiction.

The “curative potential” in almost any clinical setting depends on a caregiver establishing and maintaining an empathic connection with patients so as to achieve “narrative competence” in discerning and acting in accord with their preferences and best interests. The “narrative medicine” model of shared “close reading of literature and reflective writing” among clinicians as a means of fostering a capacity for clinical empathy has gained validation with recent empirical studies demonstrating the enhancement of theory of mind (ToM), broadly conceived as empathy, in readers of literary fiction. Talmudic legends, like that of Rabbi Judah’s death, are under-appreciated, relevant sources of literary fiction for these efforts. The limitations of narrative medicine are readily counterbalanced by simultaneously practiced attention to traditional bioethical principles, including—especially—beneficence, non-maleficence, and autonomy.

To read what was never written: the licentiousness of history in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls

Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie (2006. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions) incorporates a variety of both historical and fictional sources into its sexually explicit narrative of three women recounting their troubled pasts. Many of these sources are represented through adaptation and pastiche. This article examines Moore and Gebbie’s strategy of mimicking rather than merely alluding to the intertexts that shape the narrative of Lost Girls. Further, since many of their sources are showcased through the metafictional technique of mise en abyme, I argue that the mimicry of the comic draws attention to the dangers involved in processes of interpretation. The reader of Lost Girls is self-reflexively interpellated by the comic as a reader of history, adaptation and pornography, and as such is prompted to address a series of related distinctions that often shape processes of value-assessment: between the factual and the fictional, the authentic and the forged, and the literary and the obscene.

Using the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s “Irish Immigrant Letters Home” to Teach Nineteenth-Century Irish Immigrant History

AS ANY FACULTY MEMBER who teaches American immigration history knows well, Irish Catholic famine-era immigrants command enormous attention in both the popular media and in scholarly literature. Popular and documentary films, popular and scholarly histories, as well as a host of memoirs and novels all tell various facets of their immigrant story; the Irish, it seems, are everywhere. Consequently, many students arrive in our classrooms with some understanding—sometimes even what they think is a reasonably comprehensive understanding—of the Irish Catholic immigrant experience. Yet as we, their teachers, quickly discover, their knowledge is often limited and romanticized, having been shaped more by popular and sometimes even fictional sources, as well as the values of a popularized Irish ethnic pride derived from a cultivated American Catholic identity, than by a more nuanced, historically based knowledge of these immigrants and their experiences in Ireland and America. As teachers, then, our first and primary task is to deconstruct the understandings students bring with them and substitute a richer, more complicated picture of this immigrant experience. To do that, I, like probably most other history faculty, rely heavily on the use of primary sources. Over nearly ten years of teaching immigration and ethnic history at two different institutions—a liberal arts college in the Northeast and now a large state university in the South—I have confirmed that when teaching immigration and ethnic history—topics that rely heavily on analyzing personal experience as well as broad demographic trends and policies—first-person accounts are one of best tools available to reach students and encourage them to think deeply about the past. Indeed, in reading immigrants’ own words, students gain invaluable opportunities to consider how individuals perceived of their circumstances in both their old and new worlds. Yet much to my surprise and chagrin, when I first designed my course about a decade ago, I found a relative paucity of readily accessible primary sources written by nineteenth-century Irish immigrants either in print or on

Learning misinformation from fictional sources: Understanding the contributions of transportation and item-specific processing

People often pick up incorrect information about the world from movies, novels and other fictional sources. The question asked here is whether such sources are a particularly potent source of misinformation. On the one hand, story-reading involves transportation into a fictional world, with a possible reduction in access to one's prior knowledge (likely reducing the chances that the reader will notice errors). On the other hand, stories encourage relational processing as readers create mental models, decreasing the likelihood that they will encode and remember more peripheral details like erroneous facts. To test these ideas, we examined suggestibility after readers were exposed to misleading references embedded in stories and lists that were matched on a number of dimensions. In two experiments, suggestibility was greater following exposure to misinformation in a list of sentences rather than a coherent story, even though the story was rated as more engaging than the list. Furthermore, processing the story with an item-specific processing task (inserting missing letters) increased later suggestibility, whereas this task had no impact on suggestibility when misinformation was presented within a list. The type of processing used when reading a text affects suggestibility more than engagement with the text.

The Institution of Polygamy in the Chinese Imperial Palace

This study examines Chinese imperial polygamy under two aspects, as institution and actual practice. Institution refers to its existence as a set of rules and expectations, practice to the actual ways in which imperial people carried out polygamy as recorded in both historical and fictional sources. The key to the institutionalization of polygamy had to do with the idea that a ruler did not engage in polygamy because he wanted to, but because he had to in order to fulfill his role as Son of Heaven. He was obligated to extend the patriline and was as if following a hallowed directive. Practice had to do with what rules and expectations could not control or predict, including how a man justified his role as polygamist, his polygamous transgressions, and how he dealt with the main challenge to polygamous harmony, women's jealousy and rivalry.

Metaphoric Blending in Science Fiction

The argument presented in this paper is that metaphor is used in every variety of science fiction discourse to realize two very important functions derived of the register’s ontological juxtaposition of factitiousness and fictitiousness: to bring literary imagery to life (1), to cognize patterns of thought (2). The paper aims at disclosing metaphoric blending as interaction, integration and mixture of conceptual and image metaphors, in other words – as convergence of metaphorical thought and metaphorical imagination. To achieve this objective, different science fiction sources have been selected and the method of case study has been applied for the analysis of the data. The investigation has revealed that science fiction is at large motivated by the conceptual metaphor Change is motion/movement referring to human evolution and science, and its variations (Change is forward motion, Scientific/technological change is progress, Scientific/technological change is destruction, Scientific/technological progress is emotional regress, etc.), the brief, formulaic utterances of which demonstrate immense generative power going far beyond concepts, extending into a large variety of complex image metaphoric associations on any idea or activity expressible in language and aiming at revealing new aspects of life through creative means. Hence, the present investigation is a case study that focuses on the typicality of interrelatedness of metaphor as a phenomenon of language and metaphor as a phenomenon of thought. My assertion will be that the latter dichotomy is not only an important peculiarity that offers useful insights into the study of metaphor but also testifies to broad cultural transformations as part of the cognitive revolution of our information age.

WRITING ABOUT WAR: MAKING SENSE OF THE ABSURD IN MILETA PRODANOVIĆ'S NOVEL <em>PLEŠI, ČUDOVIŠTE, NA MOJU NEŽNU MUZIKU (DANCE, YOU MONSTER, TO MY SOFT MUSIC</em>)

In the narrative of a mass conflict, the human experience of its effects may be subsumed into the rationalizing contours of history, or they may fall completely outside our comprehension. This article examines the intertextual strategies employed in Prodanovic's novel about the war in former Yugoslavia. The text conveys the reality of the conflict by relating it through events and characters located in prior media constructions. The historical, documentary, mythic, and fictional sources focus on the signifying systems which drag the war into the horizon of expectations of those who were not there, closing the gap between reality and representation, life and art.

The Self and Other Things: Goethe the Collector

This article considers Goethe as both practitioner and theorist of the art of collecting. Drawing on biographical, historical, critical, and fictional sources, it explores how acquiring objects establishes a nexus of telling relationships among the object, the collector, the collection, other observers (real or fictitious), and between all of these and the external world. Producing at once a body of knowledge and a source of aesthetic contemplation, collecting figures prominently in Goethe’s epistolary novella, Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1799), a rich exposition of collecting practices and their multiple meanings, and a text which can be seen obliquely to illuminate many of its author’s later writings.