Theory Of Fiction Research Articles

The puzzle of sports fandom

ABSTRACT Why do sports fans sometimes (often?) go crazy at sporting events and then afterwards proceed with their day as if nothing much happened? If something of genuine significance happened, something that warranted the emotional ups and downs the fan experienced during the game, why don’t its effects linger? These questions pose a version of the puzzle of sports fandom. Others have applied Kendall Walton’s theory of fiction to solve the puzzle, but Walton’s account of sports fandom fiction is unacceptably thin. Recent attempts by Nathan Wildman and Joseph Moore to address this thinness problem fail. We answer the thinness objection by explaining how sports fandom is a collaboratively authored fiction, constructed by fans, sponsors, players, teams, media commentators, and more. The stories of sports fandom fiction are passed to new generations of fans in a way more reminiscent of The Iliad or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Sports fandom fiction is more like folklore, and less like a novel.

Science Fiction in the Post-occupation Iraqi Short Story in English Translation

English translations of Arabic literary works have interacted with -and possibly influenced- the Western context of science fiction literature. This thesis investigates how the English translations of post-occupation Iraqi short stories possibly contributed to the evolution of the Western science fiction genre. The study seeks to explain the relationship between post-2003 Iraqi literary works -that are a diverse range of corpus- as well as the possible influence of their translations and their counterparts in Anglophone literary systems. The research particularly focuses on Iraq +100 and The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim. Blasim’s edited anthology, Iraq +100, is a prominent element in this study as it is analyzed to illustrate the interrelation between Arabic science fiction and Western traditions of this genre of fiction. As the roles of this edited anthology and short story collection are addressed and discussed in terms of the interaction between Anglophone and Arab literary systems, the study discusses the science fiction theories of Thomas Lombardo (2006) and Darko Suvin (2010). The primary objective of this study is to analyze the two selected books as they are introduced to the Western world and scrutinize how these books can be considered as a response to the evolution of the science fiction genre. Moreover, the translated works of post-occupation Iraqi short stories deal with the political and social impacts of the situation in Iraq after 2003. This thesis follows up by proposing that the anthologized English translations of these Arabic post-occupation Iraqi texts have contributed to the making of a dialogue between Arab and Western cultural and literary canons as well as traditions. The study also analyzes the short stories of the Iraqi writers, as illustrative of a specific expression of post-2003 Iraqi fiction that depicts the terror of violence in Iraq by delivering scenes of excessive violence in their texts. All in all, this study appears as an interdisciplinary work as it engages with translation studies, literary studies, history, and in a way, political science.

Assets As A Legal Subject In Efforts To Recover State Financial Losses In Corruption Crimes

Corruption is a problem that results in high financial and economic losses in Indonesia. UNCAC has launched recommendations for countries to make arrangements regarding Non-Conviction Based asset Forfeiture (NCB) since 2003 which aims to recover maximum state financial losses. This is based on the fact that the state losses recovered are not proportional to the state financial losses incurred due to corruption crimes. The research used is normative juridical with a statutory approach, conceptual approach, and comparison with other countries. The conception of assets as legal subjects in the NCB is based on the theory of legal fiction where assets in their position as legal subjects make them seem "guilty" when the way of use or the process of obtaining them is against the law. Assets in this case are considered to be able to perform a legal act that can be accounted for as happened in several cases in the United States, the Philippines, Thailand, not to mention Indonesia. Thus, because it focuses on the "fault" of the object, asset forfeiture can still be carried out even though the object or asset has changed hands. Legislation in Indonesia has actually adopted the concept of NCB, but it does not fulfill the basic essence of the concept where the goal is to recover state losses arising from corruption maximally and quickly. Therefore, laws governing asset forfeiture must be made specifically to accommodate this, one of which is through the bill on asset forfeiture.

Bentham, Iser, and the Necessity of Fiction

Despite the intense reception and critical discussion which Wolfgang Iser’s work on the reading process and the esthetics of reception (Rezeptionsästhetik) received throughout the 1970s and 80s in Anglo-American literary criticism, his later ambitious attempt to sketch out a “literary anthropology” with the help of a general theory of fiction was almost completely ignored outside of his immediate German context. This is especially lamentable from the perspective of law and literature approaches to legal and literary fiction since Iser’s argument for the anthropological “grounding” of fictions as acts of motivated and strategic “feigning” (fingieren) develops out of a careful analysis and assessment of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fiction. Iser’s discussion of Bentham does not only present a rare case of acknowledgement of Benthamian notions about fictions from the perspective of continental literary theory, it also illustrates the way in which the discussion of fiction in general may serve to foster a more robust interdisciplinary perspective in regard to legal and literary practices of storytelling and narration. 1 Since Iser’s theory of (literary) fiction has been perceived from rather different angles and with a diverging range of comprehension by Anglo-American and European audiences, respectively, the essay will first attempt to introduce and place Iser’s discussion of fiction and the imaginary within the larger disciplinary context and his overarching interest and investment in a literary anthropology. After a more general presentation of the various elements in his larger work, the paper will briefly look at the “anthropological” prospects which Iser had pursued from early on throughout his critical work, culminating in The Fictive and the Imaginary. The second half of the essay will then take a closer look at Iser’s particular interest in and detailed discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fiction, to reveal how Iser’s own anthropological project could derive a central impulse and trajectory from his intense reading of Bentham. In particular, I am interested in how Iser interprets Bentham’s use of legal fictions to project a general theory of fiction, and how Iser then uses the concept of necessity or “need” to gradually translate and transfer Bentham’s theoretical premises to match and support his own conceptualization of the fictive, the real and the imaginary. Iser’s particular understanding of “doing fiction,” I will conclude, might be of considerable value for the interdisciplinary engagement with legal and literary fictions.

Editors’ Introduction: Fictions in Law, Literature, and Philosophy

While several collections have been published recently from the perspective of common law focused specifically on jurisprudence and from the perspective of both literary theory and the philosophy of language, a more integrative approach that sharpens the underlying fundamental concept(s) by bringing together insights from legal theory/history, doctrinal legal scholarship, literary studies, and analytic philosophy has been missing so far. Not only has an examination of a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective been rare in research on fictions and fictionality, but also a decidedly integrative view of European and Anglo-American research approaches has been the exception. This special issue both addresses and seeks to bridge this research gap. In shedding light on the family resemblances and differences of “fiction(s)” in each of the aforementioned disciplines, we hope to identify blind spots and offer some fresh ideas with regard to a transdisciplinary theory of fiction(s) which considers their conceptual, functional, as well as historical characteristics. A particularly significant aspect of this project is that it fuses contributions from an anglophone law and literature perspective with contributions from European continental contexts, offering perspectives from related but also distinct legal and literary traditions.

Pleasures of Liminality

Since the comprehensive theorization of liminality and its attributes by the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner in the late 1960s and 1970s, the concept of liminality has been applied to more than the threshold experience of individuals. As liminality in general describes a state of transition, the concept has been expanded to include rather different spaces, genres, and conditions. In this article, I propose liminality as a threshold concept that might offer a new and different angle for looking at legal and literary fiction(s). Liminality might allow us to bridge the conceptual gaps between the disciplines with regard to the general use and function of fiction(s) and fictionality in law and in literature; it may thus prove to be valuable for interdisciplinary approaches in both fields. I will, however, not attempt to formulate a new theory of fiction, since in contrast to the numerous and not always successful attempts at defining fiction(s) and fictionality, I am not interested in locking down either phenomena in law and in literature, but rather in identifying and highlighting some common aspects. Liminality, I argue, lends itself profitably to the cross-disciplinary orientation of an approach which addresses both legal and literary perspectives. It appears to be particularly suited to bring out the functions of fictions and fictionality in both law and literature, which is ultimately to translate the merely imaginable into something conceivable.

Navigating the Pitfalls of Counterfactuality: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Legal Fictions

The introductory essay on legal fictionality engages with the practice of legal fictions from Roman Law to the twenty-first century, and with the attempts of legal scholarship to conceptualize this particular form of legal imagination. It will discuss the major questions established in the past, with a particular emphasis on the classical understanding of legal fictions as “untrue” or “counterfactual” assumptions—a dichotomy that has pervaded legal thinking for centuries. It will argue that the classical approach is outdated and in urgent need of revision, also demonstrating that theories of other disciplines are better equipped to adequately deal with the issue, from the early debates on truth to more recent positions, such as possible world theory and institutional theories of fictionality. The essay will mainly draw on analytic philosophy and literary theory, but will also invoke more recent legal scholarship that engages with inter- or transdisciplinary approaches. Authors include James, Bradley, Kelsen, Vaihinger, Cohen, Lewis, Meinong, Fuller, Neurath, Rescher, Habermas, Rorty, Glasersfeld, Goodman, Routley, Searle, Genette, Beardsley, Wolterstorff, Currie, Walton, Eco, Anderegg, Doležel and Pavel.

Медный лик древней Америки: репрезентация мезоамериканских цивилизаций в американском pulp-журнале Weird tales в межвоенный период

In the Interwar period different form of Ancient civilization had been one the most frequent theme in American popular culture. Lost Indian civilization wasn’t exception, but this is-sue is still poorly investigate in the popular culture’s field. The article examines, based on John Cavelti's theory of for-mular fiction and John Saler’s “imaginary worlds”, the repre-sentation of pre-Columbian civilizations in one of the most significant American pulp magazines, Weird tales, and the ways in which their heritage is appropriated by American popular culture. We come to conclusion that representation of pre-Colombian indian civilization was within the general nar-rative of the ancient (like Egypt and Babylon), but had differ-ence in tropes. This concerned attention to the phenomenon of sacrifices. Also, the authors were anxious about issues of race, since the racist view of Latin Americans was a constitu-tive stereotype for many Americans. To prevent this problem from interfering with the appropriation of the Indian ancient heritage as uniquely American, the writers excluded the in-termediary in the person of a modern resident of Mexico. Mexico was represented as a poor, unstable country, just an epigone of its magnificent ancestors.

To(o) Queer the Analyst: Lesbiana, Junguiana and Sudamericana. Towards Woven Onto-Epistemologies.

This is a two-part paper: in the first one, a personal story serves as a conceptual prism through which I address the issue of how a queer analyst can be a problem for analytical psychology; in the second, I present some readings and images-mostly from decolonial feminisms-that have been of interest to me lately in my path to queer Jungian psychology, that is, to de-essentialize and de-individualize its theory and practice. By borrowing (and altering) the title from Gloria Anzaldúa's (1991/2009a) essay "To(o) queer the writer", this paper explores some themes she has elaborated there on solidarity, theorization and ways of writing and reading from othered points of view. In dialogue with Donna Haraway's (2016) Staying with the Trouble and Ursula K. Le Guin's (1989/2000) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, together with the imagery of bags, weaving and string figures game, this paper aims to explore the potential of what I have called "woven onto-epistemologies". By imagining and developing this new condition of knowledge, other stories and theories in analytical psychology may have an opportunity to be told.

Toward a Science-Fictional Interpretational Method: Reading Three Borges Stories

ABSTRACT: This article reconsiders Samuel R. Delany's theory of science fiction as a form of language in order to develop the notion that science fiction is a method of making meaning and reading texts. Three stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph," "The Library of Babel," and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," are read as science fiction to demonstrate how the method functions. Borges's ambiguous relationship with science fiction during his lifetime is well-documented, but no previous study of Borges as a science-fiction writer exists in English. The notion of science fiction as a way of reading enables a reading that treats the elements of textual playfulness that make Borges's texts so beloved throughout literary studies as science fictional, because they encourage the reader to reconstruct an alternate world around the text and create a comprehensive theory of how that world works.

The Resistance Narrative in Arabic Science Fiction: Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (2014)

This paper aims to analyze the mode of resistance narrative in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (2014), which is read within the frame of Arabic Science Fiction. The study answers the following questions:(1) What are the Arabic Science Fiction tropes in Azem’s novel? (2) How does ASF subserve resistance narratives in Azem’s novel? (3)Why does Azem utilize the Dystopian Narrative for resistance narratives? The study examines the structure and themes of Azem’s The Book of Disappearance in terms of postcolonial and science fictional theories. The study’s methodology considers Kanafani’s resistance narrative, Morrison’s rememory, and Hochberg’s archival imagination in exploring the historical frame in Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. The analysis of Azem’s The Book of Disappearance interconnects the Palestinian resistance literature and the postcolonial writing to the ASF tropes and techniques. The alternative history closely examines the controversy between Israeli utopia and Palestinian dystopia. The study concludes that in Azem’s novel, the 1948 Nakba is recreated in the future through the imaginative incident of the Palestinian disappearance. As Palestinian novels often grapple with the complex question of identity in the face of displacement, occupation, and cultural pressures, Azem’s novel inspects the question of identity through a simulation of history in Alaa’s diary and through the gaze of Arial, the Israeli journalist. Azem’s novel confronts this trauma, giving voice to the pain and suffering of the Palestinian people through the Arabic Science Fiction frame of a dystopian narrative that dismantles the Zionist ideology and Israeli oppressive regime.

Storying Climatically Changed Worlds — Potentials and Pitfalls of Future Journalism

ABSTRACT This study explores the emerging phenomenon of future climate stories in journalism: stories where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) future scenario graphs are combined with storytelling using prior narration as a way to take the reader into climatically changed futures. By analysing five stories and interviewing the journalists behind them, the study aims to better understand narrative choices and potential challenges of such journalistic engagement with possible futures. Through perspectives of professional journalism, science fiction theory and social futures theory, the findings suggest that this journalistic form has the potential to engage readers on the topic of climate change, as it creates a close linkage between climate science and people’s experiences and emotions. By engaging with not only ecological, but also cultural and emotional tipping points, the use of prior narration in climate journalism may create cognitive estrangement similar to that of science fiction, which stimulates contemplation on the status quo and ultimately may have transformative potential.

Fanfiction as a carrier bag methodology of fiction

This paper provides a short introduction to fanfiction as an example of Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Through the analysis of the fanfiction drabble, this paper gives an initial outline of a methodology for the carrier bag theory, showing how the process of writing is supported by the community that surrounds fanfiction. As such, the writing and publishing of fanfiction can be seen as exemplary of a democratic, bottom-up method for creating the other stories, or life stories, in Le Guin’s and Haraway’s sense.

“Being God’s Wife” is No Easy Matter

This article studies Nandini Sahu’s short narrative fiction entitled, “Being God’s Wife,” which comes at the end of her story collection, Shedding the Metaphors (2023). This piece of selective biography makes the central figure in the story, Baba, a kind of prism through which he, his times, and his society are viewed. The article studies this story as a feminist document that contains Indianness. What is under focus here is a textual analysis of “Being God’s Wife.” What emerges through the textual analysis is that Sahu makes frequent use of the literary device called, “flashback.,” This gives her several advantages in the narration. The article shows the aptness of the title, “Being God’s Wife,” in which the wife is given barely three paragraphs. It is not just about the wife, but it is in fact about the godlike figure of Baba, her husband. This article analyzes the story with the help of theories of narrative fiction and the short story, given to us by scholars such as Claire Tomalin, Alice Hoffman, and James Stevens. The story reveals that when you love someone as much as the author loved her father, you expect them to be with you always, unfailingly. And, if that someone fails to be with you in your time of need, you begin to hate him for that time. The author seems to be somewhat like Sylvia Plath in her relationship with her father. She even mentions Plath’s poem, “Daddy,” in which the author is similar to the American poet and novelist.

Sense and Sententiae

This essay aims to rethink a rhetorical microgenre: the “sentence” or sententia, a brief maxim usually stating a moral principle. My aim is to show that rhetorical sentences entail more flexible cognitive and interpretive acts than has usually been recognized. I read the theory and practice of the sentence alongside that of legal maxims, arguing that these small forms can cast a useful light on each other. I focus in particular on literary characters who misuse sentences in ways that prompt inferences about them that go beyond anything they either could or would say themselves. The act of sentence-making entails a judgment that balances the content of the statement against the context in which it is made; that judgment has analogues in law, in both equitable interpretation and the theory of fictions; in literature, that legal hermeneutics is put to work for the construction of character, conscripting what cognitive science calls “mentalizing” for the projection of a kind of inwardness fashioned out of the materials of common opinion. The essay ends by arguing that connecting rhetorical sentences to legal maxims allows us to think seriously about the relationship between legal and literary fiction as it shapes Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

How do we regard fictional people? How do they regard us?

Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real individuals exist in the story's world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of Jane Eyre, even though Victoria is not mentioned in it? The experiments we report here find that when participants are prompted to consider the world of a fictional individual ("Consider the world of Jane Eyre . . ."), they are willing to say that a real individual (e.g., Queen Victoria) can exist in the same world. But when participants are prompted to consider the world of a real individual, they are less willing to say that a fictional individual can exist in that world. The asymmetry occurs when we ask participants both if a real person is in the character's world and if the person would appear there. However, the effect is subject to spatial and temporal constraints. When the person and the character share spatial and temporal settings, interchange is more likely to occur. These results shed light on the author's implicit contract with the reader, which can license the reader to augment a fictional world with features that the author only implicates as part of the work's background.

Prosthetic Grand Synthesis

Prosthetic Grand Synthesis

ЩОДО ПОТРЕБ ЗАСТОСУВАННЯ ТЕОРІЇ ПРАВОВОЇ ФІКЦІЇ ДЛЯ ВИЗНАЧЕННЯ ПОНЯТТЯ «КРИПТОВАЛЮТА»

The article is devoted to the legal analysis of the concept of cryptocurrency in the context of the need to harmonize its legal and economic characteristics. The economic content of cryptocurrencies has been studied, taking into account the fact that they were created specifically to perform economic functions — decentralized storage and circulation of value. It is substantiated that the presence of decentralized principles of cryptocurrency emission through mining and the existence of blockchain technologies and cryptographic algorithms do not allow the state to establish legal features of cryptocurrency through traditional legal forms of defining a certain subject as a means of payment. It was concluded that cryptocurrency couldn’t be defined as an intangible good, regulated by the Civil Code of Ukraine, because of the economic purpose of cryptocurrency as a means of circulation and preservation of value. It is proposed a legal approach to cryptocurrency, which would allow incorporating cryptocurrency into the national legal system and circulation operations, prevent shadow operations and the legalization of “dirty funds”. In this context, it is proposed to approach cryptocurrency as ejusdem generis, bringing the understanding of cryptocurrencies closer to other things. The possibility of recognizing of cryptocurrency as the right of claim characteristic of non-cash money is denied. Unlike electronic money, cryptocurrencies do not mediate the payment obligation and the right to demand. It was concluded that cryptocurrency should be defined, taking into account the theory of legal fiction, an interchangeable type of virtual asset in the form of an encrypted electronic record, the emission and accounting of which is performed decentralized on the basis of distributed ledger technology and cryptographic algorithms, which is an object of property rights and can perform circulation and accumulation functions.

Concept of consciousness transfer: creative and scientific research

The article analyzes the use of the consciousness transfer concept in the literature, cinema and science. Both techno-pessimism and techno-optimism are shown to be associated with the consciousness transfer idea. The main reasons for the desire of characters intention to use the consciousness transfer technology, which is also termed as breakdown phenomenon, are demonstrated through the example of the LitRPG subgenre and science fiction films. It is typical for novels and screen novels to demonstrate both positive and negative consequences of the consciousness transfer, but the attitude towards the possibility itself is predominantly positive. Unlike many science fiction theories, which are far from becoming reality, several major scientific projects are already working on the concept of the mind transfer. However, existing projects are far from implementing the consciousness transfer technology and are more often involved in solving particular problems associated with individual brain diseases, or exploring the social and humanitarian consequences of developing the virtual reality generally and the human presence in it particularly. It is concluded that for the modern literature and cinema, the concept of consciousness transfer has turned into a myth about the consciousness transfer, generated by the dream of the human mind omnipotence, combined with a pessimistic idea about the human morality and the human society unity. Furthermore, this myth also reflects a substantial part of the human life being already inside the digital reality.

Transgressive Automatons. Re-Visioning the Cyborg in Larissa Lai’s Rachel

The article aims to analyze the ways in which Larissa Lai, in her short story Rachel, appropriates and racializes the figure of the cyborg by re-visioning and retelling the story of one of the most iconic characters in the history of cinema, the android Rachael from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (and, by extension, her literary predecessor). Using postcolonial theory as well as theory of science fiction as the primary methodological frameworks, the article demonstrates how – by infusing the character of Rachael/Rachel with a hybrid identity – Lai engages in a discussion concerning race, belonging, and the power struggle between the central and the peripheral. This struggle, in turn, is embodied by the liminality of the cyborg, who may be interpreted as a metaphor for all that eludes (and actively rejects) the colonial Self–Other binary. This, in turn, highlights the tensions accompanying the intrusion of the peripheral into the hegemonic and allows for a more in-depth discussion of the processes concerning negotiation of identity. Moreover, the paper focuses on the way in which Lai constructs the metaphor of the Othered, racialized cyborg in order to deconstruct the notion of the cyborg perceived as a neutral (i.e. white) entity, writing against the hegemonic canon. In this way, the racialized cyborg stands as the symbol of transgression, rebellion and rejection of the center/periphery dichotomy, one which eschews the (neo)colonial binaries and becomes a source of anxiety for the hegemonic discourse.