Fictional Space Research Articles

The (Re)imagined Shades of Alice Gray: The Counter-Memory of a Woman-as-Witch in Stacey Halls’ <i>The Familiars</i> (2019)

Historical fiction is a way of dealing with painful pasts and traumatic events as counter-memories. Long-forgotten events are (re)created in a safe space in historical fiction. Set in seventeenth-century Lancashire, in her modern historical fiction The Familiars (2019), Stacey Halls narrates Alice Gray’s painful past as a woman-as-witch into existence. Halls achieves it by (re)imagining Alice Gray’s plight within the historical context of the Pendle Hill witch-hunt in 1612 Lancashire. Not only does Halls give Alice her historical voice back, but she sets the historical record straight by counter-memorialising Alice Gray as a woman-as-witch, i.e., a seventeenth-century woman othered and presumed to practise witchcraft, in this instance, merely for being an impoverished unmarried woman and a midwife. In this way, Halls’s narrative invites us to empathise with Alice’s plight, to understand the injustices she faced, and to appreciate her resilience. Besides, (re)creating Alice’s witchcraft story, Halls fleshes out her heart-wrenching emotional turmoil. Moving away from the cold historical recorded facts, Halls interweaves Alice’s troubled personal past as an abused young woman and a grieving and loving stepmother with the unfortunate contemporary events of the Pendle Hill witch hunt. As a result, we are offered a more than plausible (re)imagined rationale for Alice’s witch hunt predicament and acquittal, which cannot be found or is even hinted at in the historical records. Thus, Halls culturally endows Alice’s seventeenth-century marginalised historical counterpart with a contemporary gender-empowered mnemonic (re)imagined counter-memory. Moreover, Hall’s active remembering of Alice Gray politically (re)contextualises and (re)frames this woman-as-witch of the Pendle Hill witch hunt of 1612 previously wanting. Also, the (re)imagined counter-memory of Alice Gray challenges the dominant historical narrative and underscores historical fiction’s power in reshaping our understanding of the past. Ultimately, Halls endears and humanises this woman-as-witch of Pendle Hill and provides us with the many shades of Alice Gray.

The ‘Shakespearean’ roots of Stendhal’s forests

The ecopoetic approach examines the suggestive power of the forest as a major setting in Stendhal's last completed fictions, written in 1838 and 1839. By identifying the progressive layers in the construction of such an object, this analysis will reveal the intimate relationship between the author and the image of the forest, and how this personal construction intertwines with his own Shakespearean imagination. What particular suggestive power does the forest possess under the novelist's pen? How can we understand the use of this natural space in fiction, and where do we draw the line between the possible referential function of the place and its poetic power, which paradoxically only becomes apparent to the reader of the novel when the author's own imagination is taken into account?

‘The ghost I expected to see’: Vernon Lee, the Gothic, and the Spectrality of Perception

Vernon Lee considered the conventional ghost story to be in rather bad taste and, in her own Gothic fiction, evoked ghosts that are never directly apprehended, but are perceived as agential bodies nonetheless. The distinctive ghosts that Lee creates haunt by exploiting the mechanisms of perception that she studied and theorised throughout her career. I analyse Lee’s depictions of perception in three stories, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, ‘Amour Dure’, and ‘The Image’, through the lens of philosopher Alva Noë’s theory of perception as ‘a kind of skilful bodily activity’. Noë argues that we make sense of the world by using our sensorimotor knowledge – ‘a knowledge of the way sensory stimulation varies as a function of movement’. Lee’s ghosts draw on this sensorimotor knowledge of characters and readers, allowing her to convey a potentiality for agency without depicting unambiguously supernatural events. Using mirror neuron studies and cognitive readings of how works of art transport their audiences into virtual environments, I argue that this sensorimotor engagement builds up a cognisance of Lee’s haunting figures as agential bodies that occupy space, acted upon by the material world and, in turn, acting upon it. Lee used these ghosts to adopt speculative perspectives on perception and cognition more broadly, such as questioning the stability and reliability of perception, and suggesting a loss of identity involved in all acts of perception. These perspectives are excluded from her studies and essays but are explored in the fictional space that the Gothic opens up; in her gothic stories, Lee exploits the uncanny aspects of cognition, suggesting and experimenting with queerer and more speculative theories than the objective studies she also pursued could accommodate.

Марсианские хроники «прекрасной эпохи»

The French literature from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that can be classified as “space fiction” centered on missions to Mars and making contact with Martians. The topic’s appeal stems from scientific findings of the time (particularly the so-called Martian canals) as well as the traditional symbolism of the Roman god who gave the Red Planet its name. All authors who wrote about Mars during the “Belle Époque” were inspired, to varying degrees, by the writings of the eminent astronomer Camille Flammarion (both scientific and fictional). The article delves into the specifics of how Joseph Rosnyaîné, André Laurie, Georges Le Faure, Henry de Graffigny, Arnould Galopin, Gustave Le Rouge, and Jean de La Hire interpret the Martian theme in their works. It is demonstrated that the use of traditional materials for popular novels is mixed with a desire to update popular literature’s narrative strategies. Thus, The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System by Le Faure and Graffigny, written between 1888-1896, contrasts the “intergalactic” theme, which was novel in French literature, with its archaic interpretation. The tendency to mix genres, to combine the “merveilleux-scientifique” (scientific marvelous) with Gothic and vampire literature approaches, as well as to augment the story with the occult component, increases. The so-called “martian duology” by G. Le Rouge, which lays the foundation for the poetics of horror – so vital to the 20th-century popular reading – is among the most significant literary works. The modernist bent is particularly evident in J. de La Hire’s 1911 book The Mystery of the Fifteen, which foresaw the rise of the superman hero, a new type of hero for the popular novel (however, this hero did not gain popularity in France).

The Concept of Contamination in Transuniverse Relations: Napoleon in a Fictional World

Richard J. Gerrig revisited one of the most persistent myths of literary theory, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” to point out that, contrary to what the English poet believed, our natural proclivity is not to disbelieve, but to believe that everything is true, even fiction. He reversed Coleridge’s concept and revealed that the real effort on the part of the reader is the “construction of disbelief” when one reads fiction; we do not need to willingly suspend disbelief since we naturally believe. But then what happens when one reads a novel in which real historical figures such as Napoleon are mentioned, or even used as characters? The best way to answer this question is to adopt similar conclusions as the ones reached by Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction regarding authors who project themselves into their fiction, metalepsis of the author in other words: “the supposedly absolute reality of the author becomes just another level of fiction, and the real world retreats to a further remove.” Thus, when authors enter their fiction, they become fictional themselves and reality is dissolved within fiction. I argue in this article that when a real person enters a fictional space, she or he is contaminated by its ontological environment, that is to say fiction.

Linguistic and Extralinguistic Characteristics of the Processes of Terminologization and Determinologization

The article examines the linguistic and extralinguistic characteristics of the processes of terminologization and determinologization, the peculiarities of the use of terms in professional language. The greatest influence of linguistic and extralinguistic factors on the development and change of the language as a whole. While extralinguistic factors depend on a certain historical period, linguistic factors constantly act in the same way and continuously. The political and social phenomena that took place in the last century formed the basis of the changes that arose in the lexical system of the Kazakh language, which set the task of responding quickly and adequately to the new needs of society. Most of the terms came out of special use and began to be mastered in the general literary language, and some words of a general nature began to be used in terminological meaning. Thus, we see that due to the loss of terms of their terminality and their transition to the sphere of universal interests, a person is mobilized in a priority position in the sphere of professional and socio-political, economic interests and depends on the new modern processes in question. This circumstance has had the greatest impact on the linguistic space of mass media, fiction and speech discourse, which is the most active medium for the use of words of a universal nature. The beginning of use in a different environment has a significant impact on the terminological meaning of linguistic unity and, therefore, serves as the basis for the formation of new patterns of development of these units. The analysis and description of these separately determine the relevance of the issue received in the paper as an object. The relevance of the study of terminology, terminological processes, etc. is due to the special rate of increase in the flow of scientific and industrial information.

MODES OF CORPOREALITY AND SPIRIT IN THE VIRTUAL SPACE OF JANUSZ LEON WIŚNIEWSKI’S 'S TALE «IN SEARCH OF THE MOST IMPORTANT»

The purpose. The article deals with the features of corporeality and spiritual modes in Janusz Leon Wiśniewski’s fairy tale «In search of the most important», which is a synthesis of scientific, philosophical and religious principles. Attention is focused on understanding the concepts of virtual corporeality and virtual space in fiction, parallels between the simulation of the world of the Polish author's fairy tale and the world of the computer game-quest are drawn. The structural features of the fairy tale and the means of characterization of the main characters are determined. Research methods. The research used a system of historical, hermeneutic and structural methods. The author relies on the theoretical-empirical scientific method, uses the methodology of literary cognitivism, which is determined by the specifics of literary research. Research results. The research makes it possible to reveal the features of corporeality in the virtual space, which can be defined as a simulacrum, an artificial construct with an avatar soul. The virtual space itself is imagined as a model of the universe with its special inhabitants. The design of the book, made in the style of net art, complements the visually artistic virtual space and creates the illusion of the reality of virtual bodies. The main character is looking for the meaning of life, the most important thing for her, not in basic reality, but in virtual space, but she understands that the identity she needs is in the real world, where she turns from the thought of a girl into a real girl. Originality of the study consists in an attempt to consider the secondary virtual reality created by the writer in the artistic world, not in the digital one, to trace the peculiarities of its modeling, to investigate the problem of the expressive and pictorial possibilities of the artistic word in combination with the corresponding illustrative material. The practical significance of the article lies in the possibility of using the research results in scientific researches and courses related to the study of Polish literature, the virtualization of space in fiction, the study of modes of physicality in real and virtual spaces.

Mourning mothers and wars that never end: reading Nasim Marashi’s Haras (Pruning) in the shadow of the Iran-Iraq war

ABSTRACT The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), which the Iranian government frames as a ‘Sacred Defense’, occupies a large space in contemporary Persian fiction, sometimes in surprising ways. This article focuses on the 2017 novel Haras (Pruning) by Nasim Marashi (Nasīm Marʿashī), which despite being shaped entirely by the context of the Iran-Iraq War rarely treats the experience of living through it. The article explores how Haras builds on previous works that use the war not as a focal point, like conventional war literature, but a point of departure to explore different stories about post-war Iran, intricately connected to, yet far beyond, the war with Iraq. The article postulates that by using the war with Iraq to call attention to the loss of people, homes, and the environment, Haras uses the war to innovatively challenge the messaging of the Islamic Republic.

Autor und Subjekt im lyrischen Gedicht: Rezension und Neukonzeption einer Theorie der lyrischen Persona

Autor und Subjekt im lyrischen Gedicht: Rezension und Neukonzeption einer Theorie der lyrischen Persona

Blade Runner’s Replicant Humanity: Self-Discovery and Moral Formation in a World of Simulation

In the postapocalyptic world of Blade Runner, replicants become the medium and content of a life-changing revelation: human existence has become an enslaving simulation. Humans and replicants are confronted with the challenge of (re)defining the human. The Blade Runner movies enact this (re)definition through the arcs of two key characters: Rachael and Officer K. Transcending externally imposed enslavement, these replicants venture into the indeterminate future, choosing to serve a good that includes and empowers others to struggle for their own liberation. The Blade Runner movies can be interpreted as an apology for moral formation by means of the production of grounding and redefining fictional spaces and content. To combat the global dynamics of dehumanization and ecological destruction they have generated and to which they have themselves become victim, humans must create fictional spaces in which they can remember and imagine authentic living. The desire to become human and act as a genuinely human and humane person forms the necessary precondition for and that which sustains the lifelong self-formation process that is human existence.

The Urban Essential Solitude of the Hunger Character: A Blanchotian Reading of PAUL Auster’s Moon Palace

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze Paul Auster’s Moon Palace through the lens of philosopher and critic Maurice Blanchot, whose literary theory provides a theoretical frame to study this novel as a fictionalization of the construction of the literary space. Paul Auster’s influence of Maurice Blanchot’s poetics starts with Auster’s experience as a translator of some of Blanchot’s texts, a job that contributes to the influence French literature has in Auster’s work. I argue that Paul Auster’s Moon Palace fictionalizes Maurice Blanchot’s literary theory by introducing a central character, Marco Fogg, who implicitly performs the role of character-author and progressively transforms himself and his own world into a fictional one. In order to accomplish this task, Auster leads his central character to different stages of inspiration and creation comparable to the ones defined by Blanchot in his theorization of the literary space. Whereas most of the critics point at isolation and hunger as a rebellious behavior provoked by the existential crisis of the character, I analyze them as creative stages in the protagonist’s fictional transformation. By introducing this creative process in his fiction, Auster creates a particular Austerian metafiction in which characters become the protagonists, creators and readers of their own urban fictional space.

Phenomenological Narratives: Exploring Space and Identity in Fiction

Phenomenological Narratives: Exploring Space and Identity in Fiction

The Uncanny Box: Nostalgia and TV Culture in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) may be read as an extended meditation on the universal desire to return – to a putative golden age or lost paradise – and the eerie effects that are produced when this desire is realized. More specifically, the show explores the prevalent desire amongst TV audiences to continually “return” to beloved fictional spaces and characters. Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of the uncanny, as well as film and media studies, the article explores the theme of returning within the show’s fictional and meta-fictional cosmos (the characters’ and viewers’ dream of going back) in relation to Lynch’s highly critical portrayal of the medium of television. In Lynch’s cinematic aesthetics of the uncanny, television (associated with consumerism, the nuclear family, and mindless repetition) is portrayed as a malign influence, providing faux nostalgia devoid of meaning or experiential value. Given that most of the returns in Twin Peaks: The Return always turn out to be unhomely, I suggest that Lynch’s take on TV culture may be read as a general commentary on the social and political nightmares created by a fetishization of the (real or fictional) past.

Spatial Narrative in the Cinematographic Body Environment

Due to the experimental interface of cinematographic space fiction that produces temporal and spatial intervals, architectural design can be explored via time-body-space relationships. In this study, Eskihisar Coastline/Turkey has been selected as an urban coastline, due to its potential as a public space where the body can be observed, much like all public spaces. It is being examined with an experimental surface exploration developed with the relations between fragments of spatial intervals within the context of the movement-body experience in cinematographic spatial fiction. So cinematographic spatial fiction is a spatial narrative displayed based on the time-body-space fragments. The study has explored cinematographic fiction as an architectural design approach through the notions of time-body-space shared between the disciplines of cinema and architecture. The research methodology is qualitative; coherent to the case-study. The experimental phases consisted of the fragmentation of video recording, the multiple exposure experiment, and the “kinesphere” experiment phases that visualized the inter-surface connection codes of Eskihisar Coastline/Turkey as an urban coastline. Rudolf Laban’s “kinesphere” approach, which questions the direction of bodily movement in relation to the limbs, is developed as a controllable, definable template for measuring the interval of body movement. This approach is handled the movement intervals over the proportions of the body as a measurable parameter through a geometric design approach. As a result, the surface articulations determined through the spatial intervals of experience produced urban furniture images. Cinematographic spatial fiction offers a geometry-based reading interval developed from the ratio-proportion of the body to the production intervals presented to the architectural design in the context of time-space through the produced urban furniture image. The interface designed in this study is expected to offer a solution proposal that can be developed from the body scale for the urban furniture needed in public spaces in the cities of the future.

Spatial Organization Approaches at the First-Year Design Studio

The space, that the raw material of design studio contents in disciplines related to spatial design, is a delimited space in the simplest terms. The totality of relations created in this delimited volume is associated with certain organizational form, such as central, linear, clustered, gridal and radial. This study aimed to investigate those organizational forms based on student process outputs of 17 students, completed the Design Studio-I course during the 2022-2023 Fall Semester at the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Fenerbahce University. Also it is aimed to created a space fiction by using basic design elements and to reveal student approaches in this process. The study was designed with qualitative research method and content analysis was used as the data collection technique. In this direction, the process stages and outputs performed by the students for the given problem in the studio environments were analyzed. As a result of the analyzes, the form analysis of the two-dimensional photo frames by using the design elements and the transformation process of this analysis into the space organization has been revealed. Thus, an application for the way of benefiting from design elements in the process of space organization has been showed.

Surreal Virtual Spaces Created in Cinema with Metaverse. Avatar: The Way of Water

The metaverse was first expressed in Neal Stephenson’s science fantasy novel “Snowcrash” as the idea of a three-dimensional virtual world, in which both visual and social content are designed by the inhabitants themselves. Metaverse, which means the other universe, is presented as a three-dimensional graphic virtual world in the computer environment in Stephenson’s novel. Cinema has started to use this technology in the design of spaces by quickly integrating with the metaverse technology. In this context, the surreal understanding of art, which manifests itself in the art of painting, has also taken its place in the space designs in the cinema with the technological developments in the film industry. In this study, the definition of intersemiotics is used to express the transactions such as space and theme between paintings and films in the art universe. The concept of intertextuality, which indicates the exchange between at least two literary texts, expresses the transactions of an art discipline with other art disciplines in the recent period, with the adaptation of the concept of intertextuality to other art branches. When the concept is adapted to cinema, the comparative processes of cinema with other art disciplines are evaluated in the context of intersemiotics. In this context, the re-creation of the fictional space of the thought created by virtual reality together with the surreal movement in the cinema is evaluated through the film “Avatar: The Way of Water”.

Exilul unui scriitor în peisaj marin: depre criză, agonie și poate altă soartă

The text reveals an aspect of the theoretical-didactic concept of „exile of literature/literature in exile”. It is important to specify that, in this conceptual instance, the didactic aspect of studying Romanian literature in high school regarding the life and work of writers is also built. One of them is represented by Virgil Tănase, who is a prominent personality of the Romanian diaspora in the French cultural space, with an exceptional journalistic and professional activity: prose writer, playwright, director, journalist and professor in prestigious institutions in France, doctor in sociology and in the semiology of arts and letters. In literature, Virgil Tănase assumes the Romanian oneirism formula as a compensatory fictional space. The confessions of the writer, made on the occasion of some interviews, include the discourse on literature and the status of the artist in the era of Nationalist Socialism, and, at the same time, direct metatextually towards the identification of an assumed literary „interiority”. In today’s society, when it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate values from surrogates, Virgil Tănase formulates a final exhortation for the creators of literature, that of continuing to write authentically, regardless of time or space. Prolific writer, Virgil Tănase will forever remain an integrative spirit, having the aspiration and vocation to capture everything: the era in which he lives, the spirit of the world from which he comes, the human soul.

Invisible, aesthetic, and enrolled listeners across storytelling modalities: Immersive preference as situated player type

Immersive storytelling includes narrative experiences that take place in the public spaces of theaters, theme parks, museums, and historical reenactment sites; on tabletops, where role-playing games are collaboratively played; in fictional spaces superimposed on the real world during a live-action role-playing (larping) event; and in hybrid, asynchronous, and transmediated spaces that blend the digital, the virtual, and the real. Understood as a kind of boundary object, a player typology can incorporate multiple perspectives and heterogeneous sources of information, producing ‘ideal types’, which provide a framework for observation and discussion across immersive modalities. This paper offers a typology of situated immersive preference, in which narrative immersion and embodied immersion are understood to vary independently of one another. Along the vertical axis listener-players of immersive storytelling experiences are classified as narratively attached, narratively detached, or narratively opposed. Across the horizontal axis of embodied engagement, listener-players are classified as invisible, aesthetic, or enrolled. Nine ideal types emerge at the intersection of these narrative and embodied preferences. Why someone might fit into one category rather than another reflects comfort rather than personality. Situated immersive types are understood to be fluid and temporary configurations. The degree to which players are willing to engage and are comfortable with what they are being asked to do may differ dramatically from experience to experience and from day to day, and even during a single session, reflecting how they feel at a given moment, which is affected by who they are with and how they are perceived and treated by others. This framework for understanding immersive preferences calls for the design of more widely inclusive story worlds.

War on the Posthuman: Narrative as Resistance and the Reinvention of the Self in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Within a world of grand narratives, testimonies from the margins carry the potential to rewrite history. Through an examination of Kazuo Ishiguro’s renowned novel Never Let Me Go, which places an emphasis on the posthuman subject, this paper approaches the documentation of one’s experiences as a revolutionary act. The memoir kept by the cloned protagonist Kathy H. not only sheds light on the inhuman practices exercised by the state, but it also provides a fictional space for the self to be perpetuated. When one’s fate is decided beforehand, when the potential of identity development is confined, the documentation of one’s experiences constitutes a subversive act that allows the subject to regain control over their self-realization. This is portrayed through the interplay between the narrating, the experiencing, and the narrated self, whose interdependence can be translated into the fluidity of identity. The physical body is complemented and sometimes even replaced by the textual body, while the self is liberated within the ongoing process of becoming offered by the imaginative and reconstructing act of autobiographical narration. Ultimately, the preservation of one’s memories constitutes an act of agency that illuminates the dark, silenced side of history.

The Kurdish memory in the fictional space of Jean Dost /religious memory.

The Kurdish memory in the fictional space of Jean Dost /religious memory.