Theory Of Fiction Research Articles

O fantasma travesti: uma rapsódia queer

Este artigo apresenta uma análise crítica do romance O fantasma travesti (1988), de Sylvia Orthof, cuja forma e construção das personagens travam proximidades com o discurso da teoria queer no que se refere à desconstrução dos arquétipos binários de gênero e da performatividade enquanto dispositivo de criação de novas maneiras de se entender o corpo, o gênero e as sexualidades. Tendo como escopo teórico as contribuições de Butler (2015) e Louro (2001), propomos uma aproximação entre a teoria queer e a teoria da ficção com a finalidade de compreender o romance de Orthof enquanto um processo no qual a política da escrita, conceito sugerido por Rancière (1995), desempenha um papel importante na representação da personagem Ziriguidum. Criada sob a égide da paródia de gênero e sob a influência da narrativa fantástica, Ziriguidum é uma ode ao queer. A linguagem com a qual ela se constrói reverbera a ambiguidade e a inconstância que caracterizam a teoria queer, além de ilustrar a confusão pronominal que se instaura quando há a necessidade de se referir às pessoas trans.

Transtemporal and Transspatial Narrative in Philippe Claudel’s Monsieur Linh and his Child

Bu çalışmanın bütüncesi çağdaş Fransız romancı Philippe Claudel’in göç, sürgün, travma ve arkadaşlık temalarının işlendiği Bay Linh ve Torunu romanından oluşur. Adı geçen eser bebek torunu hariç ailesinin tamamını kaybeden yaşlı bir adamın dilini bile bilmediği bir yere göç etmesini ve burada yaşadıklarını konu edinir. Torunu için hayata tutunmaya devam eden Bay Linh’in yaşadıkları hikâye dışı üçüncü tekil anlatıcı tarafından aktarılır. Baş kahramanın yaşam izlencesinden yola çıkarak gerçek ve kurmaca ilişkisi romanda “gizlenen” ve “gösterilen” ikilisi üzerinden irdelenir. Anlatıcının romanın sonuna kadar anahtar ögelerden birini gizleyerek oluşturduğu beklenmedik son, okuyucunun bilincinde metnin yeniden anlamlandırma sürecine başlamasına zemin hazırlar. Bununla birlikte hikâye evreninin kesin olmayan zaman ve yer belirteçlerinden oluşturulduğu eser, olayların bir yere ya da bir zamana indirgenmeden ortak bir bilince hitap etmesine imkân sağlar. Karakter isimlerinin sınırlı kullanımı da bu durumu destekler. Söz konusu zamansal ve uzamsal çerçevenin belirsiz bırakılması anlatının zamanötesi ve uzamötesi bir yapıya bürünerek belirli bir kesimin değil ortak bir belleğin gerçekliğini yansıtan bir roman olarak değerlendirilmesini sağlar. Bu çalışmada Bay Linh ve Torunu romanının anlatı evrenine ışık tutmak ve roman kurgusunu ortaya koymak için eser, anlatıbilim, gerçeklik etkisi bakış açıları ve kurmaca kuramları ışığında ele alınır. Makalede anlatıcının güvenilmezliği, kurmacanın gerçeklik özelliği ve anlatının zamansal/uzamsal çerçevesinin anonimleşmesi konularının incelenmesi amaçlanır. Belirtilen ögelerin üzerinde durulduğu incelemede metod olarak “olası dünyalar” ve “gerçeklik etkisi” temel alınır. Nitel bir araştırma kapsamında yazılı dökümanların analizi yöntemi izlenerek yorumlayıcı bir çalışma ortaya konulur.

Intelligence chatbot for Indonesian law on electronic information and transaction

In the Law Fiction Theory, it is assumed that once the government enforces legal norms at that time, everyone is considered to know the law. So that someone’s ignorance of the law cannot free him from lawsuits. This condition led to the emergence of legal cases caused by a lack of public understanding of the law. This paper introduces a potential solution by providing chatbots platforms. We propose chatbots designed to provide information, for those who need information about applicable laws. Users can ask about anything about applicable legal documents. Furthermore, the bot performs a search according to requests related to legal documents. Various request commands are given so that bots can behave like humans and provide the information needed by users. The experimental results have shown that chatbot could recognize all of the questions from user and could answer correctly.

Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America. Douglas A. Guerra. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 253.

<i>Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America</i>. Douglas A. Guerra. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 253.

The Implied Fictional Narrator

AbstractThe role of the narrator in fiction has recently received renewed interest from scholars in philosophical aesthetics and narratology. Many of the contributions criticise how the term is used – both outside of narrative literature as well as within the field of fictional narrative literature. The central part of the attacks has been the ubiquity of fictional narrators, see e. g. Kania (2005), and pan-narrator theories have been dismissed, e. g. by Köppe and Stühring (2011). Yet, the fictional narrator has been a decisive tool within literary narratology for many years, in particular during the heyday of classical literary narratology. For scholars like Genette (1988) and Cohn (1999), the category of the fictional narrator was at the centre of theoretical debates about the demarcation of fiction and non-fiction. Arguably, theorising about the fictional narrator necessitates theorising about fiction in general. From this, it follows that any account on which the fictional narrator is built ideally would be a theory of fiction compatible with all types of fictional narrative media – not just narrative fiction like novels and short stories.In this vein, this paper applies a transmedial approach to the question of fictional narrators in different media based on the transmedial theory of fiction in terms of make-believe by Kendall Walton (1990). Although the article shares roughly the same theoretical point of departure as Köppe and Stühring, that is, an analytical-philosophical theory of fiction as make-believe, it offers a diametrically different solution. Building on the distinction between direct and indirect fictional truths as developed by Kendall Walton in his seminal theory of fiction as make-believe (1990), this paper proposes the fictional presence of a narrator in all fictional narratives. Importantly, ›presence‹ in terms of being part of a work of fiction needs to be understood as exactly that:fictionalpresence, meaning that the question of what counts as a fictional truth is of great importance. Here, the distinction between direct and indirect fictional truths is crucial since not every fictional narrative – not even every literary fictional narrative – makes it directly fictionally true that it is narrated. To exemplify: not every novel begins with words like »Call me Ishmael«, i. e., stating direct fictional truths about its narrator. Indirect, implied fictional truths can also be part of the generation of the fictional truth of a fictional narrator. Therefore, the paper argues that every fictional narrative makes it (at least indirectly) fictionally true that it is narrated.More specifically, the argument is made that any theory of fictional narrative that accepts fictional narrators in some cases (as e. g. suggested by proponents of the so-called optional narrator theory, such as Currie [2010]), has to accept fictional narrators in all cases of fictional narratives. The only other option is to remove the category of fictional narrators altogether. Since the category of the fictional narrator has proved to be extremely useful in the history of narratology, such removal would be unfortunate, however. Instead, a solution is suggested that emphasizes the active role of recipients in the generation of fictional truths, and in particular in the generation of implied fictional truths.Once the narratological category of the fictional narrator is understood in terms of fictional truth, the methodological consequences can be fully grasped: without the generation of fictional truths in a game of make-believe, there are no fictional narratives – and no fictional narrators. The fictionality of narratives depends entirely on the fact that they are used as props in a game of make-believe. If they are not used in this manner, they are nothing but black dots on paper, the oxidation of silver through light, or any other technical description of artefacts containing representations. Fictional narrators are always based on fictional truths, they are the result of a game of make-believe, and hence the only evidence for a fictional narrator is always merely fictional. If it is impossible to imagine that the fictional work is narrated, then the work is not a narrative.In the first part of the paper, common arguments for and against the fictional narrator are discussed, such as the analytical, realist, transmedial, and the so-called evidence argument; in addition, unreliable narration in fictional film will be an important part in the defence of the ubiquitous fictional narrator in fictional narrative. If the category of unreliable narration relies on the interplay of both author, narration, and reader, the question of unreliable narration within narrative fiction that is not traditionally verbal, such as fiction films, becomes highly problematic. Based on Walton’s theory of make-believe, part two of the paper presents a number of reasons why at least implied fictional narrators are necessary for the definition of fictional narrative in different media and discusses the methodological consequences of this theoretical choice.

At the Crossroads of Law and Literature; On the Role of Fiction in Jeremy Bentham’s Penal Theory

This interdisciplinary study offers an exploration of the polysemy of the term “fiction,” as a possible tool which could contribute to conceptualizing the links and exchanges between Law and Literature. The starting point is the theory of fictions developed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Although Bentham early expressed his distrust of legal, religious and political fictions, he acknowledged the interest of logical fictions in the constitution of knowledge. Later thinkers like Hans Vaihinger and Michel Foucault further elaborated on the heuristic value of fictions. Could literary fiction too constitute a heuristic tool? The hypothesis is tested by looking at the way Bentham’s penal theory was reflected in late eighteenth-century Gothic and Victorian literary works, as well as the way his Principles of Penal Law and Panopticon letters rely on literary devices and the production of numerous scenarios. Reading Bentham’s writings alongside Gothic and sensation literature—with works by William Godwin, Charles Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, and Wilkie Collins—makes it possible to map out the points at which penal theory and literary discourse meet.

Worlds, Objects, and Theories of Fiction

Worlds, Objects, and Theories of Fiction

Fictional Possibilities Grounded in Foundational Nominalism

David Armstrong in his A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility proposes that non-actual possibilities may be treated as fictions grounded in instantiated universals. In this paper, I first provide some objections to his theory. Then I make the case for Foundational Nominalism, the Armstrong inspired thesis that the whole of ontology supervenes on particulars described much as in the Quinean Nominalism that Armstrong rejected as an ontological ostrich. Finally, I argue that Foundational Nominalism permits a fictional theory of possibilities similar to Brian Skyrms’ Tractarian Nominalism.

Detective Fiction in a Post-Truth World: Eva Rossmann’s Patrioten

Detective fiction is known as a genre that is concerned with revealing truths, both in the fictional world of the text as well as in the society after which it is patterned. The current socio-political environment, however, has been described as an era of post-truth politics and political propaganda, in which truth is more often determined by the relative strength of its representation. While some contemporary crime novels continue to propagate a reassuring message of truth, select Austrian narratives reflect this new so-called post-truth world. Bringing together theories of detective fiction and post-truth discourse, this article demonstrates how Eva Rossmann’s 2017 crime novel Patrioten (Patriots) adapts the themes and structures of traditional detective narratives to expose a society in which certainty is determined less by objective facts than by their construction in the media and socio-political discourse. The analysis concludes that the novel’s thematic and formal innovations help to redefine the socio-critical potential of contemporary detective fiction by showing the imminent dangers of an unregulated post-truth society.

The comics as an example of fan culture

In this article I analyze the chosen examples of fan comics. In the first part of the article I describe the history of comics, how and by whom they were created. Then I show the comic’s role as part of Transmedia Storytelling. In the second part I introduce the term fan fiction and I describe the circumstances of the creation of this specific form of fan art. Moreover I write about the most important fan fiction theories. In the last part of the article I analyze 3 selected authors of comics who publish their works on social media platform Deviant Art. Also I describe their style, inspirations and references to original works. Fan comics are a very specific phenomenon. However the many possibilities given by this art is not used by the fans. There are no experiments with a form contrary to the fan fiction literature. On the other hand the selected comics are an exception. Maybe the authors are not very innovative. But the interesting thing is that they use humor and autobiographical themes in an unusual way.

Review

Review

ІРОНІЯ ТА ФАНТАСТИКА

The absence of a typology of irony in the theory of fiction stems from the fact that irony and fiction differently form and transform reality – fiction is a kind of fictional depiction of amazing worlds or phenomena. On the contrary, irony does not create worlds; in it, the subject comments on reality, adding another vision, a vision with a reassessment and deviation from what is said or presented. Irony can comment on the realities of different ontological status, that is, irony can relate to the real world and the fictional world, whether it is real or amazing. Fantasy transforms the world – it distorts, destroys or completes, or builds new worlds, and irony already adds a different vision to the ideas and views presented, regardless of whether they are real or fictional. The terminological and literary-theoretical aspects of the use of irony in works of literary fiction are discussed in the text. Dragan Stojanović’s book “Irony and Meaning” and the author’s terms “Ironical Focus” and “Meaning Pressure” are used as a theoretical starting point. After highlighting the touchpoints of irony and fiction and their special qualities and roles, is proposed a typology of the use of irony in fiction that separates ironic actions concerning the real world, the marvelous world and problematizing the relationship between the real and the marvelous world.

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? Nordic Ecocritical Approaches to Children’s Texts

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? Nordic Ecocritical Approaches to Children’s Texts Catherine Olver (bio) Goga, Nina, Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Bjørg Oddrun Hallås, Aslaug Nyrnes, editors. Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures: Nordic Dialogues. Palgrave, 2018. 299 pp. $119.99 pb. ISBN 9783319904979. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures revisits the connections between cultural constructions of “nature” and “child.” The collection asks to what extent texts use traditional tropes “to place the child in an idyllic and romantic relation to nature” (6) and whether they reflect and engage with contemporary environmental challenges. Along with the expected analyses of picture books and novels, Nina Goga, Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Bjørg Oddrun Hallås, and Aslaug Nyrnes’s collection features a chapter on picture-book apps and another on a television series, as well as a pleasing amount of attention to illustrated poetry from several traditions. It focuses on contemporary Nordic texts but also includes chapters on Ted Hughes, Catalan poetry, The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, and novels by Mordicai Gerstein, Philip Pullman, and David Almond. The reference to “cultures” in the title acknowledges the specificity of cultural links between nature and the child, such as the Nordic emphasis on children’s nature competence, while highlighting the need to compare different cultural concepts of nature if humanities scholars wish to facilitate international co-operation on environmental issues. Most chapters are written by scholars associated with the research group “Nature in Children’s Literature: Landscapes and Beings—Fostering Ecocitizens,” led by Nina Goga and based at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. This edited collection makes the group’s productive discussions available to the wider community of ecocritics and scholars working in young people’s texts and cultures. The volume is [End Page 215] usefully organized into sections on “Ethics and Aesthetics,” “Landscape,” “Vegetal,” “Animal,” and “Human.” Marianne Røskeland opens the section on “Ethics and Aesthetics” by tackling the dilemma that, on the one hand, the desire to master nature is a cause of our environmental problems, and on the other, that “[m]astering one’s surroundings is also central in any child’s development . . .” (28). Her reading of the Norwegian picture book Sånt Som Er (Things That Are) details how the book challenges the reader’s anthropocentric process of categorizing objects; Røskeland brings Wolfgang Iser’s “gaps” and “negation of expectations” (138) to bear on James J. Gibson’s “affordances” (119) through her argument that a child reader perceives possible ways of using natural objects depicted in the book according to their own personal interests and physical limitations. The root meaning of “aesthetics,” relating to perception, arises again in chapter 3 as Gunnar Karlsen considers what it means to appreciate nature aesthetically and why it matters for the development of ecocitizens. He argues for a moderate cognitive view which combines some knowledge of the natural world with the multisensory experience of being in it—though when reading, emotional responses matter more than multisensory experiences for readers to develop moral skills. Nina Goga’s chapter demonstrates how the aesthetics of the novel Ishavspirater (The Ice Sea Pirates) and its environmental ethics are bound together in plot and character development. She extends Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” to propose that the protagonist of The Ice Sea Pirates is “a hero collector; one who collects and gathers experiences through her travels and encounters . . .” (60), moving from inherited knowledge about interspecies ethics to the understanding that comes from experience. In the second section on “Landscape,” Aslaug Nyrnes and Ahmed Khateeb each return to Rousseau, partnering Émile with the contemporary texts Tonje Glimmerdal (Astrid the Unstoppable) by Maria Parr and Stian Hole’s Garmann Trilogy. Both chapters explore contemporary children’s growth in pastoral landscapes using Terry Gifford’s concept of the “post-pastoral,” which “successfully suggests a collapse of the human/nature divide while being aware of the problematics involved” (26). Kristin Ørjasæter continues the investigation of post-pastoral and anti-pastoral landscapes by jumping into the jungles of Svart elfenben [End Page 216] (Black Ivory) and Skriket fra jungelen: En filmroman...

Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish

In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate change, I argue that Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, Keri Hulme’s Stonefish, and Kiribati’s climate adaptation plan Migration with Dignity produce new models for imagining futurity. Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems historicize Pacific extinction narratives, Hulme’s short stories produce readers capable of recognizing the new reality of climate change, and Migration with Dignity, when read through science fiction theories of utopia and dystopia, critique Westphalian statehood. Together these works resist hegemonic narratives of Pacific futurelessness to produce the future as a terrain of contingent epistemological contest rather than a foreclosed prediction.

Sociology and Sisyphus: postcolonialism, anti-positivism, and modernist narrative in Patterson’s oeuvre

This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work contains crucial lessons for sociology in general. Patterson has coined striking concepts such as social death and human parasitism and made original historical interpretations such as the origins of freedom in the experiences of female slaves. Patterson has contributed to historical knowledge, social theory, and an alternative epistemology of interpretive social science. And through his fiction, he exemplifies an alternative understanding of the metier of the social scientist, in which literary-aesthetic sensuousness and lyrical pleasure are combined with analytic rigor. The first part of the article suggests that Patterson’s work represents an overlooked foundation for postcolonial sociology. Demonstrating this involves reconstructing Patterson’s early intellectual context and then tracing the interplay between fiction and social analysis in his work. The article then analyses Patterson’s fictional writing, arguing that it is a crucial part of his overall production of social knowledge. The article’s final section argues that Patterson’s work lays out a non-positivist foundation for historical sociology and sociology as a whole.

Singular Terms, Identity, and the Creation of Fictional Characters

Abstract How to interpret singular terms in fiction? In this paper, we address this semantic question from the perspective of the Artifactual Theory of Fiction (ATF). According to the ATF, fictional characters exist as abstract artifacts created by their author, and preserved through the existence of copies of an original work and a competent readership. We pretend that a well-suited semantics for the ATF can be defined with respect to a modal framework by means of Hintikka’s world lines semantics. The question of the interpretation of proper names is asked in relation to two inference rules, problematic when applied in intensional contexts: the Substitution of Identicals and Existential Generalization. The former fails because identity is contingent. The latter because proper names are not necessarily linked to well-identified individuals. This motivates a non-rigid interpretation of proper names in fiction, although cross-fictional reference (e.g. to real entities) is made possible by the interpretative efforts of the reader.

Imaging an Assisted Evolution: The Environmental Futurity of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama

ABSTRACT As the effects of climate change are felt with increasing violence along its multifarious front lines in the Global South, the futures of human and non-human life on the state-demarcated peripheral are cancelled out by both naturalising Euro-American discourse and the disavowal of what has been termed “climate colonialism”. Speculatively thinking with two photographs from South African visual activist Zanele Muholi’s series Somnyama Ngonyama (2012–ongoing), the article explores the theoretical landscape of the “anthropocene” through the prism of creative and academic work by Black, queer and indigenous practitioners whose works resists its homogenising narrative. Utilising bell hooks’ notion of the “oppositional gaze” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the article reflects on how Muholi’s seemingly exposing photography in turn exposes the depoliticisation of ecological neocolonialism. The science-fictional and resistant practices of the artist reimagine the agential capacity of queer Black bodies in relation to environmentally changed futures.

Wandering in and out of Place: Modes of Searching for the Past in Paris, Moscow, and St Petersburg

Wandering in and out of Place: Modes of Searching for the Past in Paris, Moscow, and St Petersburg

Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic. Julia F. Saville. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xii+307.

<i>Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic</i>. Julia F. Saville. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xii+307.

Jurisprudence of Person and Property; an Experience of Nepal

Persons are those natural and legal entity who or which can carry rights or duties. The word ‘person’ was derived from the Latin word ‘persona’ which means simply a mask. Gradually person was called for those who performed drama. Later, all the audience of the drama was referred as a person and gradually all the persons who were residing around the theater were called person and finally the person referred to capable natural person. Later, it was prolonged to legal persons as well. However all the natural person cannot be taken as complete person i.e. children, lunatic, bedridden, saint, intoxicated person etc; they are semi person. In contemporary time, there are two kinds of persons which are natural person and legal person. There is no double personality but there can be double capacities. Animals, idols, unorganized fund, riot group etc are not person because they cannot carry rights and duties. If trust alike mechanism is established for the benefit of them, it is a person. Personality begins with birth and ends with death. Under legal person, there are corporate sole and corporate aggregates which are recognized by fiction theory, purpose theory, concession theory, bracket theory, and realist theory. However, sanctity of person is applicable to natural person. Property is the gift for personality to lead their life and protect it. There are corporeal property and incorporeal property. Corporeal property includes moveable and immoveable property whereas incorporeal property refers to 'jura in repropria' and 'jura in re aliena'. 'Jura in re-propria' includes intellectual property whereas 'jura in re-aliena' includes securities (mortgage and lien), servitude, lease, trust. There are different concept of property under natural law theory, labour theory, metaphysical theory, state theory and sociological theory. Moreover, possession, prescription, agreement, inheritance, partition and ownership are the method of property acquisition. As person wants to hold property to support their livelihood and existence, sanctity of property is established for natural person not with legal person. However, there will be the legal guarantee of the property of legal person with the exception of public benefit principle. In fact, sanctity of property in created from sanctity of person from analogy. So sanctity of property along with sanctity of person is fundamental issues of natural law school. Yet, all philosophy directly or indirectly are relating to person and property. So, it is the central issues of jurisprudence. However, a right over property is not absolute rights because of the presence of doctrines i.e. Police Power, Taxation, Eminent Domain, Fine and Penalty, Compensation and Damages etc. International Human Rights Documents protects both sanctity of person and property.