Theory Of Fiction Research Articles

Genre at Earth Magnitude: A Theory of Climate Fiction

Abstract: What critics and publishers now call climate fiction is a growing genre that captures significant critical attention. This essay theorizes the relation between two of the genre's features, one formal and one political, in the scale frame they address: the planetary scale of climate, or what many scientists call the Earth system. The archive that articulates these features consists of a popular, digital discourse about climate fiction, much of which appeared since Hurricane Sandy. Instead of looking at individual works or narrating their history, I read this popular "metagenre" to draw out its implicit theory of the genre. According to the metagenre, climate fiction's abstract features consist of a didactic purpose and a normative form. Climate fiction's purpose, whatever its social effects, is ultimately to contribute to planetary climate stability. Second, the genre's definitive form is (or should be) extrapolative realism. Extrapolative realist narrative builds on scientific consensus to imagine plausible futures. The striking thing about climate fiction is that its purpose and form exist in a contradictory or inversely proportional relationship. If the genre fulfills its goal by contributing to the equilibrium of the climate, then its verisimilitude will diminish. If the climate continues to destabilize, then the genre's realism will have been vindicated at the expense of its purpose. Climate fiction is unique because it promises extrapolative realism in the content of individual novels and films but does so in the constitutive and paradoxical presence of a goal that would prevent such future climates from materializing. The point of analyzing climate fiction's constitutive paradox between purpose and realism is not to revel in irony, leave the final word to ideology critique, or dismiss the popular aesthetics of climate fiction. Rather, this paradox can be generalized to the worldview or grand narrative of the Anthropocene: the contradiction between climate fiction's purpose and form sheds light on a more general temporal structure bound up with technocracy and scientific legitimation.

404 Utopia Not Found: Cyberpunk Avatars in Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis

AbstractScience fiction criticism has long attended the relationship between form and utopian thought. However, increased study of Latin American narratives has allowed for a return to foundational science fiction theories with renewed perspective. While critics have recognized the tendency of Latin American science fiction to slip between genres, a trend termed the “slipstream phenomenon,” there has been little analysis of its impact on utopian imagination. As a result, we miss one of the region's most unique contributions to broader science fiction traditions. In response, this article locates Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis (2018) within the legacies of cyberpunk and argues that the novel uses slipstream to establish and dismantle a series of classic utopian horizons by shifting its genre identity. In doing so, this work identifies a turn in recent Latin American science fiction that metacritically questions the ability of science fiction form itself to imagine a utopian horizon beyond global capitalism.

Tarrying with Trauma While Improvising Gender in Who Do You Think You Are?

Alice Munro’s 1978 collection of linked stories, Who Do You Think You Are? enacts what Lorraine York calls Munro’s theory of fiction as “tarrying with difficult emotions and knowledges.” Judith Butler’s seminal 1988 theory of gender performativity postulated that improvising gender incurs obvious and covert social punishments, but that performing gender includes the possibility of innovation. Rose, the protagonist, succumbs to and contests norms imposed on women in the southwestern Ontario township of Huron County during the 1940s to 1970s. This thesis explores Rose surviving punitive social conventions in her cultural context which are contiguous with trauma. For Rose, failure to conform is what Jack Halberstam defines as “queer failure”: it is a triumph of personal authenticity over gender essentialism and an acceptance of human imperfection. In the journey towards self-knowledge, Rose’s surviving trauma and defying gender scripts cause the “sticky affects” of shame and humiliation identified by Amelia DeFalco; the feeling that women are not afforded hope; and, in stressful situations, emotional dissociation and emotional economies, as identified by DeFalco and York. Rose’s marriage fails because of a sadomasochistic power struggle. Rose tarries with disconnection from others and from self; however, she innovates gender and subverts the intergenerational cycle of victimvictimizer by achieving a sense of community and strengthening personal authenticity, which Margaret Atwood says is, for “Munro’s women,” “an essential element, like air.”

British Formalist Aesthetics and Its Literary Writing Practice

British Formalist Aesthetics and Its Literary Writing Practice

Feminized Worldmaking: Margaret Cavendish's Theory of Fiction in A Blazing World

Feminized Worldmaking: Margaret Cavendish's Theory of Fiction in A Blazing World

Restorying the Sport Performance Masterplot: Jaclyn Gilbert’s Late Air

Sport and exercise studies (SES) scholars have begun harnessing the power of fictional discourse to communicate research. However, they have not yet considered how generic fictions may serve as an interlocutor for athlete/coach/fan negotiation of SES-identified (and potentially harmful) concepts such as the performance storyline, nor have they duly considered the role generic fictions play in interpellating readers to a sporting narrative habitus. I use Jaclyn Gilbert’s novel Late Air as a case study to demonstrate how a rhetorical and socio-formal approach to fiction can serve as a vital resource for identifying, critiquing, and restorying away from the performance masterplot in athletics, particularly when directed towards athletes, coaches, and consumers of sport media. Fiction as thought experiment allows for these readers to mediate their engagement with represented “truths” of fictional worlds relevant to their own life. Fiction writers use a wide range of resources, including narration, characterization, and plotting to conduct these experiments. My inquiry is one that seeks a synthesis between sport studies and narrative theories of fiction that will result in each field contributing to the other. This article represents one case study and concludes with ideas for future collaboration.

Sources of information and the influence of misinformation on COVID-19 vaccine uptake hesitancy among frontline workers in Tanzania: evidences from Dar es Salaam and Dodoma

PurposeThis study aims to assess the sources of COVID-19 information respondents relied for COVID-19 pandemic information access and use, forms of misinformation and their influence on COVID-19 vaccine uptake hesitancy among frontline workers.Design/methodology/approachA Google Form developed questionnaire, distributed conveniently through link shared through WhatsApp groups was used to collect data from frontline workers from Dar es Salaam and Dodoma cities. Analysis was done using a binary regression analysis.FindingsIt was found that it was not the source that mattered for one to be hesitancy or not on COVID-19 vaccination, but the extent to which the information the source channels was manipulated or false.Research limitations/implicationsRelying only Google Form questionnaire sent through a link on WhatsApp may have compromised the quality of information gathered and the quality of conclusion. Another study may have conducted through researcher administered questionnaire to a bigger sample to increase conclusion reliability and validity.Practical implicationsThis study urges that to increase the COVID-19 vaccine uptake, it is important to ensure that the quality of information from the revealed dependable sources is checked to avoid possible consequential disquiet resulting from misinformation.Originality/valueAs the world is striving toward combating the COVID-19 or at least lessening its effects, this paper is of its own kind, using the theory of informative fictions to guide the assessment of the sources of information and the extent to which they influence misinformation on COVID-19 vaccine uptake hesitancy.

Travelling Girlhood: Feminist Discourses as Narrative Resources for the American Adaptation of the Norwegian High-School Drama <i>SKAM</i>

In the American adaptation of the Norwegian youth drama <em>SKAM</em> (2015-2017), the translation of feminist discourse informing the plot shifts the conflict from a social, political, and democratic level to a question of liberation from within. This shift – from the familiarized interrelational conflict of filmic melodrama to a conflict within the protagonist’s inner landscape – comes with some interconnected dramaturgical implications that change the invited audience’s opportunities to make sense of the plot at the same time as they complicate the interpretation process. Drawing particularly on theories of melodrama and youth fiction, our analysis indicates that the conflict level might particularly problematize the issue of engagement when the medium is filmic.

Web Walking, the Landscape Pattern and Place-story Diagrams in Performance

In this article we (artist-researchers Crab & Bee) describe a process of tracking minerals and strands of significance through three contrasting landscapes (Llaneirwg/St Mellons in the Cardiff suburbs, the Hemmerdon mine between Plymouth and Dartmoor, and the Seaton River in Cornwall) using a performative and hyper-sensitized web walking. The paper explains the plotting of these strands onto a geographical pattern, grounded by what anthropologist Gilbert Simondon has described as beacons of immersive orientation or ‘privileged points’ and, at the same time, onto an emergent pattern of stories that unevenly connects the three sites. We then describe how we drew on such connective strands, stories and patterns to create a diagram for a performance, Webs, Nets and a Carrier Bag, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, in September 2021, as part of celebrations for the launch of Making routes: journeys in performance 2010 – 2020 (Triarchy Press). The article recounts the mapping of the three sites, and how we could draw on ideas from Ursula le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the Lessons in Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis and the Arachnean web making of Fernand Deligny to help us make a performance container and draw a diagram in performance using colour-coded costumes, ribbons, and totemic objects to indicate the interlacing of the three storylines. We describe performance materials passing from body to body in observable and demonstrable patterns, and how attention is given to the diagramming of transcorporeality; how through the monstrous hybrid assemblages of these place-tales and by ‘being there’ – with water, limestone, tungsten, tin, copper, kaolin and arsenic – patterns are absorbed and passed on through performing bodies.

Gender and Generation: Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux and the Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir

ABSTRACT Simone de Beauvoir’s novella La Femme rompue tells the tale of Monique, who is abandoned by her husband after twenty-two years of marriage. In a didactic style, Beauvoir represents Monique as a caricature of a woman dependent on a man. Several decades later, Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux published texts that explore the motif of a woman being abandoned by a man: Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono and Ernaux’s Passion simple. In this article, I examine these two texts and the ways in which they offer a riposte to Beauvoir’s novella. Reading their work through theories of diary fiction, I argue that these two writers depict women who are able to move beyond a narrative of abandonment and, in so doing, they stretch the boundaries of this genre to offer new approaches to the representation of female subjectivity.

Recent Thackeray Studies: 2009–2022

ABSTRACT Thackeray’s presence in recent scholarship, on present-day syllabi, and on present-day nightstands still pales in comparison to his popularity in the Victorian period and to the relative investments we have in Dickens, Eliot, and other Victorians. But the last twelve or so years nevertheless feel like something of a Thackeray resurgence, at least in scholarship. This article reviews here more than twenty-five pieces of scholarship, a fifth of what we might typically see on Dickens in the same period, but that scholarship includes some exciting, insightful, and transformative thinking, particularly about genre and prose style. Reasons innumerable weigh against a revival of Thackeray’s popularity, foremost of which may simply be the length of his mature work, which can be too difficult to balance with other texts on syllabi sensitive to the attention spans and extracurricular demands of many students. As it happens, inattention, interruption, productive reverie, and distraction are the preeminent virtues that Nicholas Dames ascribes to Thackeray’s fiction and Victorian theories of fiction in “Distraction’s Negative Liberty: Thackeray and Attention,” from The Physiology of the Novel (2007), which is unquestionably one of the most perceptive, ingenious, and influential accounts of Thackeray in the past twenty-five years.

INDIAN-AMERICANS IDENTITY IN “THIS BLESSED HOUSE” SHORT STORY

This research discusses the identity of indian immigrants especially the main characters, Sanjeev and Twinkle, in the short story “This Blessed House” by Jhumpa Lahiri. The theory used in this research is cultural studies theory by Stuart Hall and combining with character and characterization theory of fiction. This research focuses on the habits of an indian immgirants who lived in Connecticut, the United states, and also the factors that made the main characters have different identity. The husband has a stable identity and trying to maintain Indian culture while his wife acting like an American. As Twinkle shows that she loses her origin identity, which is indian, because she does not preserve her identity strongly and Sanjeev succeeds to carry his Indian identity to their household because Sanjeev has a strong Indian culture. Compared to Twinkle, Sanjeev was more recently living in America. So Twinkle has been exposed to American culture longer than Sanjeev.

The place and role of the sign of property separation of an entrepreneurial company in theories about the essence of a legal entity

Doctrinal approaches to understanding the place and role of the sign of property separation of an entrepreneurial company in the context of the main provisions of the theory of fiction and the theory of reality of a legal entity as a participant in civil circulation are analyzed. It was concluded that the existence of a significant number of scientific approaches that reveal the essence of individual features of an entrepreneurial company as a legal entity only contribute to the further development of doctries about the legal nature of this legal phenomenon and outline not only the general model of a legal entity, but also its varieties with additional features highlighted. Such a variety is a business partnership, which, as a type of phenomenon in relation to a generic (legal entity), has its own characteristics that do not replace (fully correspond to) the general characteristics of a legal entity. One of these features is property separation, which is recognized as mandatory both by the supporters of the theory of fiction and the supporters of the theory of the real existence of a legal entity as a participant in civil circulation.&#x0D; It is noted that the feature of property separation is the main one for a legal entity, as it allows to ensure the guarantees of its creditors, to limit the possibility of abuse by the participants (founders) of such an organization, who could use the construction of a legal entity for the purpose of evading responsibility. However, this sign is not the only one.&#x0D; The approach based on which the theory of fiction most accurately reveals the property separation feature and its place in the system of features of a legal entity is substantiated, defining it as one of the two key essentially forming features of a legal entity.

Robert Stanton's Structuralism in Andrea Hirata's Novel the Dreamer and Paulo Coelho's Novel the Alchemist

This study aims to describe the comparison between the facts of the story based on the structural analysis of Robert Stanton in Andrea Hirata's novel Sang Pe dreamer and Paulo Coelho's Sang Alchemist novel. This research is a qualitative descriptive study. In collecting data, this research uses a documentation study method by using reading and note-taking techniques. The data obtained were analyzed using structuralism theory according to Robert Stanton's fictional theory, then concluded with a comparative literature approach. The results of this study indicate that there are differences and similarities in the facts of the story contained in Andrea Hirata's novel The Dreamer and Paulo Coelho's Sang Pe dreamer. The similarity is that the facts of the story contained in the two novels are equally related to reveal the same theme of the story. The difference between the two novels is the concept of characterization, plot, and setting. This difference is strongly influenced by the authors' backgrounds and very different cultures.

Jeremy Bentham’s Social Ontology: Fictionality, Factuality and Language Critique

In terms of the distinction between relationalist and substantialist philosophies of science opened up by American pragmatist thinkers like Dewey and Bentley, Bentham’s social ontology is relationalist and anti-substantialist. When the ontology is combined with his emphasis on ordinary language as the basis of social reality, it is seen to have thematic connections to later developments in social science such as social constructionism, social phenomenology, ethnomethodology and, due to its intent to critically question-received fictions, to neo-Marxian and other concerns about objectivation and reification. Also, by re-reading Bentham’s theory of fictions as a theory of vernacular language habits, it can be shown to have empirical relevance for the sociology of language.

‘This object really touched me’: using Le Guin’s carrier bag theory to explore stories of the self on an international professional doctorate development programme

ABSTRACT This piece reflects on an innovative introductory workshop for an international professional doctorate development project based on Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’. In the session academic supervisors from four participating countries shared stories about their own experiences of doing a doctorate using a bag of everyday objects which reminded them of their time as students. The exercise gave the group an opportunity to begin to get to know each other and to appreciate the complexity and challenge that completing a doctorate whilst working and balancing other personal and family responsibilities entails. Drawing on humanist pedagogical approaches which value the inner world of the learner and taking inspiration from previous arts based approaches to identity work for education students and practitioners the piece argues for the importance of making space for story-telling about the self from the outset of professional doctorate programmes.

The Fictional Road Not Taken: A Weak Anti-realist Theory of Fiction

AbstractNathan Salmon has defended what might be called “weak modal anti-realism”—the view that possible-object names can refer to possible objects that neither exist nor are otherwise real. But rather than adopting a similar view in the fictional case, he instead defends fictional creationism—the view that fictional characters are existent but abstract entities created by authors of fiction. In this paper, I first argue that if weak modal antirealism is defensible then weak fictional antirealism is defensible as well. Second, I argue that there is no reason to prefer fictional creationism over weak fictional antirealism but there is very good reason to prefer the latter over the former. And third, I defend weak fictional antirealism against the charge that it cannot provide a satisfactory account of statements that prima facie involve reference to or quantification over fictional characters.

Drone fiction, empathy gap and the reader: Mohsin Hamid’s short story Terminator: Attack of the Drone (2011)

ABSTRACT This article contends that the analysis of drone fiction from the perspective of Reader-Response Theory yields valuable insights into the configuration of this newly emerging genre and constitutes a neo Reader-Response theoretical paradigm. Drawing on insights from Reader-Response Theory and drone fiction critical approaches, this study delineates how Mohsin Hamid’s short story Terminator: Attack of the Drone (2011) prompts readers to affectively engage in the process of reconstructing this text and empathise with the drone victims. By conducting a textual analysis of the narrative strategies and literary devices, this article demonstrates that how this narrative simultaneously exploits the notion of ‘empathy gap’, inherent in the drone fiction theory, and the propositions of Reader-Response theory related to ‘gaps’ to unpack the ongoing dehumanisation of certain races and communities in contemporary milieu. I contend that this short text evokes empathy of readers and encourages them to reconfigure the humanity of the drone victims. Hence, Hamid’s drone fiction acts as an aesthetic conduit which invokes readers to become active participants in the process of deciphering the social, racial, political and humanitarian repercussions of unprecedented drone warfare and to recognise the socio-political epistemology of ‘being human’ under drone warfare.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Tracking Meat of the Sand

Abstract This article explores the skilled arts of tracking and gathering as methods for noticing and theorizing multispecies landscapes in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Tracking is typically used to describe a practice of following animals, usually for hunting, whereas gathering primarily refers to the collection of plant and fungal materials. The author presents a case in which these terms have been scrambled during long-term ethnographic field research. The author and his interlocutors tracked the Kalahari desert truffle, an experience that demonstrates how aspects of tracking extend to gathering, but also how the practices are attentive to the movements of landscapes more broadly. This form of tracking attends to multiple spatial and temporal movements that include nonanimals and other nonhumans. It represents a way of noticing the assemblages of more-than-human relations that make up landscapes. These convergences, first identified through tracking, are then explored through the more distributed analytic of gathering. Inspired by Ursula LeGuin’s call to describe stories of gatherers and collectives in her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the article argues that thinking tracking through the gathering analytic helps articulate a “carrier bag approach” for understanding landscapes through the gatherings of relations with which they emerge.