Traditional Fiction Research Articles

Speculative Fiction South of the Mediterranean: A Literature of Crisis between Dystopian Anxieties and Utopian Alternatives

ABSTRACT Contemporary speculative fiction from the southern area of the Mediterranean is predominantly somber. It often describes worlds where political tyranny prevents the prospect of change, where the scars of the past keep cultures apart, and where technology is forced to harm nature and humanity because of the will of a minority in power. The emerging literary tradition of speculative fiction in this region has a rich history influenced by creative cultural and literary encounters, yet its ongoing contemporary development depicts a protracted sense of crisis rife with dystopian anxieties even as it remains open to occasional utopian alternatives. This article reviews the literary expressions of crisis in selected novels from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, where, in the last four decades, literary visions of a much-awaited cultural revival instead seek the reasons why change is still a distant prospect. While speculative literature often represents visions of the future, those from along the southern shores of the Mediterranean are laden with traumatic memories of the colonial past, the spleen of the postcolonial present, and the uncertainties of the future.

The Royal Treatment

The Royal Treatment

Criminally Fat: Reframing the homme fatal in Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943)

ABSTRACT The spectre of queer men features prominently in the traditions of both film noir and hard-boiled crime fiction. Like the femme fatale, these “deadly sissies” (Russo 70) are part of a much broader category of men whose nonconventional models of masculinity pose a threat to the detective figure and his representation of hegemonic masculinity. This article analyses the depiction of fat masculinities in Vera Caspary’s novel, Laura (1943), focusing on her notorious antagonist, Waldo Lydecker. By exploring what Christopher E. Forth describes as “the historical […] perceptions of fat males as weak, impulsive, and perverse” (387), this analysis suggests that Lydecker is the novel’s true fatal figure, whose masculinity undergoes a process of queering, not through his sexuality, but by articulating the developing association between fatness and femininity.

"Boyish as a Ganymede": Greek Love and the Erotic Experiment in Jude the Obscure

Abstract: This article demonstrates the importance of Jude the Obscure's Oxford setting to Thomas Hardy's project of writing a novel of maturation that refuses to conclude with successful reproduction. Linking the character of Sue Bridehead with Hardy's interest in writing about Greek love by Oxford graduates, I show how Jude's coupling with Sue incites intellectual exploration rather than the reducing development to the ends of reproductive marriage or professional achievement. To narrate the effect of Sue's tutelage, I show, Hardy derails the novel's teleological progression in favor of a pastoral mode made possible by spaces where the couple can safely practice non-marital sexuality. By way of conclusion, I position Jude at the start of a queer pastoral tradition in British fiction in which setting is formally significant because of its historical significance to the sustainability of sexually nonnormative lives.

From Cyberpunk to Afrofuturism: A Talk About American Science Fiction Movements

In this talk, I want to introduce some important current American science fiction movements to a Chinese audience. After establishing a baseline understanding of the popular science fiction tradition, I will briefly review the development of Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Solarpunk, and Afrofuturism (and indigenous futurisms), as well as their manifestations across all mediums. These science fiction movements revolve around ideas and discussions regarding technology and its role in the modern world. Finally, I will touch upon the current state of Chinese science fiction narratives based on my observations and share my interpretation of punk.

Never Die Alone: Donald Goines, Black Iconicity, and Série Noire

Abstract Depending on who you ask, Donald Goines is a pioneer of Black popular fiction or a purveyor of shoddy pulp. This duality is illustrative of an impasse between American intelligentsia and Goines’s folk readership. Goines wrote sixteen novels between 1971-74 that have remained in print for sixty years with sales in the millions. Yet Goines remains an understudied American author and unacknowledged in the transnational reach of his writing. This essay offers the first scholarly consideration of Donald Goines’s status as a transnational author. Specifically, I analyze Goines’s promotion and reception in America and France. I will focus on Goines’s two prime distributors: Holloway House Publishing, which debuted Goines’s novels as the premier works of its Black Experience Books imprint in the early 1970s, and Gallimard Publishing, which translated Goines’s work into French as part of its famed crime fiction imprint, Série Noire, in the 1990s and early 2000s. This transnational comparative approach draws on three archives: Holloway House’s promotional materials that endorse Goines as the unprecedented authentic authorial voice of American Blackness, an unexamined element of the Holloway House archive that promotes Goines as an internationally revered author, and the nearly unacknowledged materials of Goines’s French publisher Gallimard that situate Goines as an author of American noir. Holloway House’s shift in promotional tactics and Série Noire’s prioritization of Goines as an author of American noir has two telling implications. First, it exposes how the racially essentialist logic of Holloway House linked authorial experience and literary fiction to promote the “authentic” Black experience as tethered to criminality. Second, it situates Goines in an internationally recognized US tradition of crime fiction in a way still largely unacknowledged in the United States.

The conflicts among globalization, modernization and tradition in science fiction: The case of Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia

Science fiction takes many forms, including academic work that calls on readers to think about social and cultural problems. This paper takes a piece of science fiction, Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia, as an example and discusses the conflicts among globalization, modernization and tradition present in the text, thus highlighting the academic meaning of science fiction as a literary form.

Mythology, Cosmogonies, and Indian Science Fiction

This paper examines the cultural significance of the intersection between Indian mythology, cosmogonies, and science fiction. India has a rich history of diverse religious traditions and corresponding world views, many of which have influenced each other. The Hindu pantheon has included the Sun from early times. With the planets also gaining in importance after the rise of astrology, the need to predict their paths saw the development of astronomical observations and spherical trigonometry. These serve as examples of how scientific and religious ideas have interacted throughout Indian history. Despite a strong tradition of fiction in India, there is a lack of science fiction that combines elements of mythology and astronomy except in superficial ways. This paper explores the potential reasons for this gap and argues that an examination of this genre can offer insight into the ways in which science and religion are perceived and valued in contemporary Indian society. The paper also offers a commentary on the current state of Indian science fiction that blends mythology and astronomy

Garihma (to Care for)

Garihma (to Care for)

Mustafa Karim’s as a Fiction Writer: An Overview

Mustafa Karim is an epoch-making fiction writer of Urdu who, while maintaining the tradition of fiction, has also given new freshness to the eastern and western perspective of fiction. His fictions are excellent in terms of technical, artistic and thematic aspects, while the themes are East and West society, World War I and II, partition of India, migration problems, violence in religions, human tolerance, class division and psychology, problems of immigrants. , made the theme of sexual freedom and promiscuity. Most of his fiction depicts the life of immigrants and emigrants. Echoes of the past, consciousness and narrative style have been adopted in these legends. Every Short story is a manifestation of tragedy, sorrow, and suffering. This article gives a brief overview of his short stories.

Dirty Windows and Troublesome Things: The Problem of Object-Orientation in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie

This article investigates the representation of objects in La Jalousie (1957), a novel in the nouveau roman tradition written by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the ‘new novel’ sought to render the material world with objective clarity, and positioned itself against traditional fiction, with its reliance on metaphor, allegory, and other ‘projections,’ this article argues that such an aesthetic program is undercut by its own assumptions about the power of description and the primacy of the visual. In an analysis which hybridizes three separate strands of criticism—object-oriented ontology, Heideggerian phenomenology, and the models of ‘resonation’ proposed by Brian Massumi—I will argue that such a treatment of objects, with its exclusive reliance on visual description, measurement, and enumeration, ends up depriving objects of the vitality and dynamism that would justify such a fictional project in the first place. However, traces of this dynamism do survive the flattening sweep of Robbe-Grillet’s narration, and indeed offer from the cracks and fissures of the novel’s otherwise smoothly controlled style the possibility of an alternate ‘object-orientation’—one, I will argue, which suspends its cool optical detachment to allow, however briefly, the eruption of a messy, entangling register of touch.

Editorial: The function of stories in hostile asylum regimes

In this fictional story, a traveller from a distant land is welcomed at the end of a long journey. As part of his integration into his new home, he learns about the global project of the Population Redistribution Network. The story draws upon the tradition of utopian fiction in order to offer a glimpse of an alternative culture of immigration - one which works beyond borders and outside systems of immigration detention and deportation.

The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito

Reviewed by: The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito Erik R. Lofgren HIROMI ITO The Thorn Puller Trans. Jeffery Angles. Stone Bridge Press. 2022. 300 pages. HIROMI ITO'S AWARD-WINNING The Thorn Puller participates in the long tradition of autobiographical fiction (shishōsetsu, or "I-novel") wherein the author offers a meandering confession of their difficulties. Tribulations do seem to be Ito's watchword. She is part of the sandwich generation, stuck between caring for her own daughters, her spouse, and her ailing parents. This is complicated by the fact that she lives in California with her husband, with whom her relationship is rocky. Indeed, although the thorns of the title are metaphorical, her body has been pierced by a myriad of their sharp points, and there is little sign that the jizō—a guardian deity—devoted to removing those persistent irritations in the lives of the faithful will bring her any measure of the relief she craves. Working collaboratively with the author, Jeffrey Angles, a recognized poet in both English and Japanese, has done a wonderful job translating this work. Ito is a poet of some renown, and her novel is peppered with poetic interludes, a pattern familiar in classical Japanese prose narratives that deployed poems as a structuring device or to punctuate a moment. One of the most intriguing dimensions of Ito's work is the eclectic "borrowed voices"—modern and classical, mass and high, domestic and foreign—that comprise the narrative, although this is largely invisible in the translation. Thus, Angles's informative introduction deserves to be read prior to enjoying the novel for the insights he offers on the intertextual nature of the work. The chapters feel episodic, but a temporal progression eventually reveals itself, for there is a persistent sense of circularity occasioned by the protagonist's constant travel from the US to Japan and back again. The novel spirals toward [End Page 79] its conclusion: the resolute inevitability that is death, but such an ending would be too trite. It will come, but the novel stops before that point with no clear resolution, yet with a strong affirmation of life. The protagonist is so flawed that, one might conclude, nobody could ever accept her as a sympathetic character, yet she is. Perhaps we see in the superfluity of poor choices, bad hands, and unfortunate circumstances some hint of what a less comfortable life might be: there, but for the grace of God, go I. Ito sums everything up in one poignant utterance as she resignedly deals with her father's incontinence: "Sometimes I dare to imagine I'm an independent woman." Despite all the forces clamoring for her attention, she is, and that is both the strength and appeal of this novel. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

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.

Thanatology and terminal conditions in modern fiction and web literature: interdisciplinary discourse

The article analyzes the thanatological motive and terminal conditions in fiction and web literature in an interdisciplinary context. Features of the image of death and various mediocre conditions in the web literature on the example of the internet novel “The Age of Glory and Hope” by Yevhenii Litvak are considered. The textual analysis revealed that web literature is more distributed, so the image of clinical death, predagonism, agony, etc. in the text of internet works may have a broader and more diverse semantic load than traditional fiction. It was found that death as a concept is represented by the following interpretations: euthanatic killing of some heroes by others, senseless suicide for dramatic plot twists, fair punishment and self-sacrifice for others and just death for fun. All these variations perform their artistic function in the text, while based on certain medical principles, which is expressed in the descriptions symptoms elements of the terminal conditions and death.

A New Source for Philip Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence (1627)

Philip Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence is a lively tragicomedy licensed for performance in 1627. Its title situates the play among the works related to or featuring members of the Medici family through the reference to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, a title which was bestowed on Cosimo I by Pope Pius V in 1569. This corpus of plays, delineated by T. S. R. Boase and Lisa Hopkins, includes several dramatic texts, ranging from Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1593) to John Ford’s The Fancies, Chaste and Noble (1636), which closes the cycle of Medici-inspired plays.1 As Philip Edwards and Colin A. Gibson rightly argue, the main source of Massinger’s play is A Knack to Know a Knave (1592), whose language is echoed throughout.2 On the other hand, the tragicomedy also reveals some interest in Italian history, even though historical exactitude was not Massinger’s concern. Given the historical inaccuracy, Boase deems the Florentine setting of the play as ‘a world of complete fantasy’.3 Edwards and Gibson, instead, observe that Massinger conflated different phases of the Medici history, boldly treating ‘a traditional fiction as though it were comparatively recent European history (Cosimo I was Duke of Florence from 1537−74; Cosimo II from 1609−1621)’.4 Matthew Steggle sees the tragicomedy as a broad dramatization of the life of Cosimo I but does not corroborate his observation.5 As I argue, some textual evidence from the play may support this claim and demonstrate that Massinger relied on a historiographical source which has not been identified so far. Massinger’s choice to portray a specific phase of Medicean history was not fortuitous. He precisely selected the Medici ruler who could be the best mirror for the English monarchy in 1627: for King Charles I, who was in the first years of his reign when the play was performed, and his Queen Henrietta Maria, whose mother, Marie de’ Medici, belonged to the Italian dynasty protagonist of the tragicomedy. Massinger’s concerns for morality and decency, as well as his religious and political positions, must have driven his choice of Cosimo I as a model for the protagonist of his tragicomedy.

‘A Whole Other World than What I Live in’: Reading Chester Himes, on Campus and at the County Jail

This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position as prison writer turned detective writer, whose influence is clear not only in the usual suspects such as Walter Mosley but also in the Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, and in the urban fiction tradition from Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim on down through today’s Triple Crown books and others. I then look at how Himes’ work has been received by the college students and incarcerated people who each spring for the past 20 years have worked together in reading groups set at the local county jail in a project linked to a class I teach, in order to raise questions about genre, audience and pedagogy. The two groups of readers, who may come to see each other as one group over the series of meetings, often develop readings of Himes’ novel that push back against the analysis I present in the classroom.

John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years

John Dos Passos is a notoriously difficult writer to evaluate. His best-known works—namely, Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1937)—are massive and forbidding. Experimental novels without protagonists, fractured by avant-garde narrative techniques, these texts offer few of the satisfactions of traditional fiction and sometimes seem as disorienting as the onrushing modernity that stands as their central subject. And then there's the thorny issue of the author's politics. Throughout his life, Dos Passos made no secret of his shifting allegiances. As a young man, fully committed to Socialism, he publicly defended Sacco and Vanzetti, wrote for the New Masses, and in 1928 made the obligatory pilgrimage to see the Soviet experiment in action. As an old man, he contributed to the National Review and endorsed Barry Goldwater for president. Barry Goldwater. For this apostasy, critics have consigned most of Dos Passos’ post-U.S.A. writings to oblivion.Filled with fresh insights and new information, the eleven essays contained in Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling do full justice to this difficult writer's unique genius. In part, this volume seeks to cast new light on Dos Passos’ writing during the interwar period by decentering U.S.A., his masterpiece, and privileging Manhattan Transfer, as well as lesser-known works such as Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), In All Countries (1934) and The Garbage Man (1926). At the same time, the collection grapples with some big questions: What kind of writer is Dos Passos exactly? What is the relationship between his fiction and history? And to what extent do his political views shape his work?In response to the last of these questions, several of the contributors define Dos Passos as (to use his own term) a “chronicler”—a writer, in other words, committed to capturing what he called the “raw structure of history,” as opposed to imposing an abstract ideological agenda. Most of the chapters examine specific bits and pieces of this “raw structure,” everything from burial practices during the Great War to New York fashion customs in the 1920s, and consider their significance within Dos Passos’ allusion-saturated texts. The writer's relationship with Spain, both before and after the outbreak of war in 1936, emerges as a major focus as well.Coeditors Aaron Shaheen and Rosa María Bautista-Cordero have done an excellent job curating the collection—there isn't a single weak chapter—and with fewer than a dozen essays in a book of nearly 300 pages, each author has the room to fully develop an argument, a rare luxury in an edited volume. All the essays are well-written, dense in a good way, and mercifully free of theoretical opacity. Some are superb. These include Bautista-Cordero's important reevaluation of Adventures of a Young Man (1939), one of Dos Passos’ most maligned texts; Alberto Lena's illuminating comparison of Manhattan Transfer with King Vidor's silent film The Crowd; Lauro Iglesias Quandrado's meditation on the narratological “idiosyncrasies” displayed in Manhattan Transfer (his essay goes furthest in answering the big questions at the heart of this volume); Jessica E. Teague's detailed consideration of Dos Passos’ exposure to Soviet theater and his aborted ambitions as a playwright; and William Brevda's tour de force reading of straw hats and Arrow collars (exceptionally freighted signifiers, as it turns out) in Manhattan Transfer, the finest essay in the collection.My only disappointment: I wish the editors had included an essay on Three Soldiers (1921), an early milestone in Dos Passos’ development as a literary “chronicler” and one that would doubtless have yielded new meaning if addressed within the framework of this fine collection.

Speculative Semiotics

Abstract This paper introduces the notion of speculative semiotics as a scientific project within the larger umb- rella of speculative studies. The paper first provides a brief account of the projects of “nuclear semiotics” that investigated how to communicate across long periods of time. These efforts are then connected to the traditions of speculative design and design fiction, whose roots can be traced back to situationism and to Italian radical design. The synergy between semiotics and speculation is articulated around four main dimensions: communication with the future, communicating in the future, semiotics as a tool for speculation and speculation as an object of semiotics. To solidify its proposal, the paper presents a small semiotic speculation related to machine learning and image generation and an overview of the papers presented in this special issue. The conclusions reiterate the potential of this approach and outline a simple roadmap for the development of speculative semiotics.

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction