Works Of Fiction Research Articles

“Repensar Portugal”: Almeida Garrett, Alexandre Herculano e Eduardo Lourenço

Almeida Garrett (1799-1854) and Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877) are the two main authors representing Romanticism in Portugal or, at least of the first generation, which is inevitably confused with the struggles for the implementation of Liberalism in the country. Contemporaries, they corresponded with each other and wrote fictional works, which aimed to consider the role of Portugal, as a national and also cultural body. In short, they reflected, through literary production, on the homeland situation after the French invasions (1807), the trauma of the flight from the Court to Brazil (1807), the Liberal Revolution (1820) and the Civil War (1828-1834) between absolutists and liberals, both of whom took sides with the constitutionalists and, finally, ended up in exile. Upon returning, Garrett and Herculano formed a group of intellectuals who aimed to reflect on the country's destiny, immersed in so many crises. Regarding his works, Eduardo Lourenço (1923-2020), honored in this year of his centenary of birth, wrote important texts, also in order to “rethink Portugal”, as he invented in the writings of the two 19th century writers ways of pondering the Portuguese political, religious and cultural situations. We therefore analyzed excerpts from four narratives by nineteenth-century authors: O Arco de Sant’Ana: crónica portuense (1845/1851) and Viagens na minha terra (1846), by Almeida Garrett; O Monge de Cister ou a época de D. João I (1848) and “O pároco da aldeia (1825)” (1851), by Alexandre Herculano. These are texts written in the Shandian narrative style, in which the narrators' digressions are what interest us most in this study. In addition to O labirinto da saudade (1978) and Mitologia da saudade seguido de Portugal como destino (1999), by Lourenço, we will dialogue, in our investigations, with the productions of Maria de Fátima Marinho (1999) and Sergio Paulo Rouanet (2007), among other authors.

Releituras da tradição: Pode um desejo imenso (2002), de Frederico Lourenço

Based on the perception of some affinities between the presuppositions of a poetics of postmodernism, as outlined by Linda Hutcheon (1991), and the novelistic plot of Pode um desejo imenso (2002), by the Portuguese writer Frederico Lourenço, we propose a reading of the fictional work in focus, observing the revisitations proposed by the author, sometimes from a classical heritage in the construction of characters that reinvigorate and rewrite the lines of a homoaffective relationship (in connection with the pederasty of Ancient Greece), sometimes from a literary camonian tradition, in which one of the protagonists tries to present a lecture on the homoerotic echoes in one of Camões' rhymes. In a kind of projection, Frederico Lourenço re-reads both the Platonic postulates and the Camões lyrical nuances, creating a story of a couple of characters who dare to say the name of the love that unites them.

Conceptual Metaphors in Psychotherapeutic Discourse (Using the Example of the Works of Art by Irwin Yalom and Ken Kesey)

Introduction. The article discusses the role and features of the conceptual metaphor in psychotherapeutic dis-course using the examples of fiction works by Irwin Yalom “The Schopenhauer Cure”, “Mommy and the Meaning of Life” and Ken Kesey “Over the Cuckoo's Nest” (translated by 2003 by D. Shepelev). The purpose of the article is to illustrate the metaphorical language of psychotherapeutic discourse (PD), involved in the fiction works. The widespread use of metaphor makes it possible to distinguish PD into an independent one. The relevance of linguistic analysis lies in expanding the language of discourses of helping professions.Methodology and sources. The article is based on the provisions of the theory of conceptual metaphor formulated by J. By Lakoff and M. Johnson. The methodological basis of the analysis are the works about PD and the metaphorical language of psychotherapy (I.V. Karasik, A.R. Markin, M.S. Grineva, E.V. Ermolaeva, etc.). Results and discussion. The article describes the characteristics of PD, describes the types of conceptual metaphors that are used in psychotherapeutic discourse based on the analysis of the fiction works. Among the main conceptual metaphors are the metaphors “dispute is war”, “time is money”, “psyche as a machine”, orientation metaphors, where UP is associated with the concept of mental health, well-being, altruism, strength, high status, rationality, and DOWN – with images of illness, failure, low social status, emotionality. Conclusion. The study shows the specifics of PD, primarily related to its metaphorical language. The examples of the conceptual metaphors highlighted by J. By Lakoff and M. Johnson illustrate the specific feature of PD of I. Yalom and K. Kesey.

#Blessed

This article explores the creative use of allusion as a literary device in the description of transactional sex relationships in the following selected literary texts; The Blessed Girl by Angela Makholwa (2018), Bare: #The Blesser Game by Jackie Phamotse (2017) and The Y in yOUR Man is Silent: Book 1 by Yvonne Maphosa (2019). The discovery of the dearth of literature on the portrayal of transactional sex relationships in fiction catalysed this article. Thus this article sought to explore the diverse creative ways in which allusion is employed to describe the relatively new phenomenon of transactional sex relationships. In this article, a qualitative desktop literary analysis was the methodology of choice. The article employed the critical lens of Lipstick Feminism which advances the use of make-up and sexual appeal as an empowerment tool for women without regarding how it sustains the commodification of transactional sex relationships. The significant finding of the study was that the creative use of allusion was crucial as they exemplify the blessee's lifestyle. The brand names are significant in shaping the blessee's archetype and image. In conclusion, allusion was effectively used in the selected works of fiction to describe the new phenomenon of transactional sex relationships.

Herman Bang og det sydøstlige Europa – med særligt henblik på Østrig

This article presents an in-depth account of the Danish writer Herman Bang’s preoccupation with southeastern Europe and, in particular, Austria. Visiting the various countries served as a source of artistic inspiration but also presented Bang with material which he, also being a prolific journalist, could utilise for writing articles for various Danish newspapers. These articles, a large selection of which are quoted in the present article, contain snapshots of picturesque sceneries and cultural sites as well as commentaries on political issues during a period when a number of countries under the Austrian-Hungarian Empire were in the process of gaining national independence. Furthermore, the present article has traced and documented the instances where Bang in his fictional work includes observations from his many journeys to the southeastern countries as well as Austria. The article concludes with the first bibliography listing Bang’s works which over the years have been translated from Danish to Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian and Romanian as well as texts published in Austria.

From Monsters to Mazes: Sociotechnical Imaginaries of AI Between Frankenstein and Kafka

The emergence of ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools (GenAI) capable of producing human-like texts sparked debates concerning whether we are at the dawn of a new age of writing and meaning-making. Rather than weighing in on the potential impact of GenAI, this paper engages with the implicit sociotechnical imaginaries underpinning reactions to GenAI. One particularly evocative source for sociotechnical imaginaries are fictional texts, which can shape our shared imagination of possible and probable futures. Accordingly, I analyze two seminal works of fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Planet eBooks, 1818) and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Echo Library, 1925). Frankenstein is regarded as an enduring myth that has shaped perceptions of artificial life. This paper sets out to explore the limitations of the ‘Frankensteinian sociotechnical imaginary’ by unpacking AI’s assumed modes of meaning-making along three axes: (1) agency, (2) relations, and (3) control. Within the Frankensteinian sociotechnical imaginary, AI is approached in anthropomorphic terms, emphasizing the struggle over control of meaning-making without reshaping its overarching logic. The Trial, in contrast, offers a lens that challenges common dichotomies underpinning the Frankenstein model: (1) highlighting the entanglement between AI and human intentionality in processes of meaning-making, (2) exploring human-AI relations as recursively shaped through the complementary tendency of humans and GenAI to generate and infer meaning, and (3) shifting the notion of control from a struggle over domination to an emphasis on how GenAI concurrently expands the available choices while limiting humans’ influence over patterns of meaning-making.

Юзовка – Сталино – Донецк: политизация национального вопроса в прозе о Донбассе советских писателей 1930–1980-х гг.

Donetsk is a young industrial city. This is captured in the history of its naming, reflective of the transformations of the politics of the two empires: Yuzovka – Stalino – Donetsk. There are few fictional works devoted to Donetsk in Soviet literature. It is local, regional literature, created by natives of the region from the 1930s to the 1980s. Donetsk’s art-journalistic metatext was formed along with the city transforming itself from a worker’s settlement into the capital of industrial Donbass. After October 1917 the city and metatext of Donetsk consistently “did not remember”, “did not see” its origins – Yuzovka – but was concentrated on the Soviet present of the region. The historically conditioned multinational of Yuzovka, under the pressure of Soviet policy and ideology, was transformed into an internationality based on the dominance of the Soviet (essentially Russian) man and his local kind: the Donbasovets. The aspirations to level out the national diversity of the region, to obscure the role of people with Ukrainian roots, and to replace it with the politicised internationalization in the fabric of the works have found their semantic and ideological limit. This limit intensified when the depersonalisation of national-cultural features of the city, region was artificially imposed and it manifested in speech, everyday realities, and the memorial culture of the common people.

Ethnocentric Solipsism and Rhetoric of Dehumanization: A Postcolonial Reading of Imperial Hubris in Selected Colonial Novels

Supremacist projections of the Self and reductive representations of the Other have been among the foremost colonial discursive practices. The same skewed representational predilection is manifest also in colonial fictional works. The article aims to unpack the colonial discursive pattern apropos characterization that is pervasive in the selected novels: James Grant’s First Love and Last Love (1868/ 2007), Louis Tracy's The Red Year (1907/ 2020), and E.M Foster’s A Passage to India (1924/ 2021). Two of the features of colonial rhetoric are focused in the study: the creation of uncanny characters and the concoction of eerie ambiance. To regulate the argument of the study, Michael Clarke’s (2013) identification of ethnocentric solipsism and imperialism has been invoked. His ideas guide the textual analysis, facilitate interpretation, and scaffold the argument. The analysis evidences that all three novels offer uncanny portrayals of the native characters, whereas the English are glorified. Moreover, an eerie ambiance has been discursively created to invoke a sense of exoticism and mystery. Both racial and civilizational fallacies have been used in these fictional narratives to depict the desired personae and setting. The article, therefore, posits that the peculiar art of characterization is marked by the imperial hubris and unwarranted solipsism.

Life After Lovelace: A Select Bibliography of Women in Computer Science

This bibliography provides a planning aid to librarians developing or strengthening collections with diverse books on women in computer science. It emphasizes print books published since 2012 focusing on histories, biographies, fictional and nonfiction works, and juvenile and children’s books. Subjects include pioneers in the field including Ada Lovelace, Katherine Johnson, Grace Hopper, and contemporary leaders.

The Cultural Work of Animal Narrators in the Contemporary Sub-Saharan African Novel

ABSTRACT: Over the early decades of the twenty-first century there has been a marked rise of works of African fiction recounted by first-person animal narrators—prompted by such historical vectors as the accelerating onrush of climate change (with the mass extinctions it promises to bring), the instrumentalization of animals and their reduction to the status of commodities under neoliberal capitalism, the rise of animal studies as an academic field with its promotion of an awareness of speciesism, and the continuing effort to culturally decolonize residual imperialist discourses that suppressed indigenous African modes of knowledge. This essay argues these animalnarrated works of fiction explore a wide range of thematic focuses but share a number of distinct commonalities as well: attention to the natural world or breakdown of the conceptual dichotomy between man-made and natural worlds, a desire to provide alternative perspectives on human society, a calling into question of humanity's age-old idealization of itself, and a revaluation of nonhuman animals.

THE LEADER OF THE MOVEMENT OF KAZAKHS OF THE STEPPE REGION IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LAND IN THE LATE XIX AND EARLY XX CENTURIES – MAMBETALI SERDALYULY (HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ASPECT)

The article discusses the stages of the formation of the civil personality and fighter path of Mambetali Serdalyulu, a prominent representative of the Alash National Democratic Movement, who raised the struggle of Kazakhs for land in the Steppe region to a new level in the late XIX-early XX centuries, and the life and work of the fighter for land in a historiographical aspect. In modern historiography, the socio – political history of the Akmola - Kokshetau region in this period and the XX century from this region. it should be noted that research works on the figures of the national liberation struggle in the first quarter are still rare. The main purpose of the article is to reveal in the historiographic aspect the main stages of the formation of a well-known figure of northern Kazakhstan. Mambetali Serdalin as a person, the essence of his socio-political activity. Mambetali Serdalyulu is mentioned in studies and journalistic articles about representatives of the Alash political movement. The personality of Mambetali Serdalyulu is known to the general public mainly only through works of fiction. These articles are autobiographical, their socio-political views and activities are revealed in detail and are not studied from the point of view of modern historical knowledge. These arguments indicate that the personality of such a socio-political figure as Mambetali Serdalyulu, who occupied a large place in the socio – political life of the Steppe region at the beginning of the twentieth century, was not an object of special study.

Indices of the Esoteric: Crime, Forensic Science, and Oral Culture

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the relationship between geography, epistemology, and genre in Nii Ayikwei Parkes's Tail of the Blue Bird (2009). More specifically, I will be discussing the perspectival modulation that both the novel and its protagonist undergo as a consequence of a simple journey into the Ghanaian provinces. Kayo Odamtten, a forensic pathologist, has been sent to investigate a suspected murder in the remote village of Sonokrom. Although he relies on standard forensic procedures when he first arrives in the village, Kayo is eventually forced to utilize other perspectives, other epistemologies, in order to solve the mystery. And as we shall see, this reorientation of the story also influences the novel at the level of discourse and genre, transforming a conventional work of detective fiction into something else altogether—something far more equivocal and difficult to categorize.

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man as Cultural Trauma Fiction

Abstract The sociological concept of cultural trauma provides a useful lens for understanding large-scale traumatic events and their literary legacies because this concept recognizes the historical, social, and cultural aspects of trauma rather than limiting its scope to the experiences of individuals or small collectives. The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 initiated widespread trauma through the spectacle of the planes colliding with the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Literature after 9/11 is both a product of cultural trauma and a means of exploring the profound effects of that trauma. Some 9/11 novels are part of a subgenre I call Cultural Trauma Fiction, which depicts and explores the effect of a large-scale traumatic event on a culture. Texts within this subgenre represent multiple identities and perspectives, engage with cultural concerns about memorializing the trauma, consider the ethics of representing that trauma through different media, and advance counternarratives that challenge dominant government or media narratives about the trauma. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man constitutes a work of Cultural Trauma Fiction in that its structure and narrative strategies move beyond the scope of the novel’s plot, offering insight into the cultural response to 9/11 and countering hegemonic narratives. Works of Cultural Trauma Fiction like Falling Man highlight the collective hidden transcript of traumatic events and challenge official narratives that oversimplify cultural traumas. Falling Man complicates and enriches the collective understanding of 9/11 by challenging, revising, and reconstructing its cultural narratives.

Writing to Control the Narrative: Charles Dickens, PTSD, and the Staplehurst Rail Crash

Abstract: Charles Dickens's involvement in the 9 June 1865 Staplehurst Rail Crash was a traumatic event that resonated with the author for the remainder of his life (which ended five years to the day of the accident). This article merges examinations of Dickens's symptoms of what is now termed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the Staplehurst Rail Crash, auxiliary personal events that may have contributed to his PTSD, and his position as a public figure who controlled his image and expressed himself through his fiction and nonfiction works. Combining these three means of understanding Dickens's PTSD provides further insight into how Dickens attempted to use his authorial identity and writing to control the trauma that haunted him.

Gender and Empire in Mozambican Fictions of Ngungunyane

Abstract: This article considers twenty-first-century Mozambican works of fiction that contest the foundational status of nineteenth-century Gazan emperor Ngungunyane (circa 1850–1906) to Mozambique's postcolonial nationalism as a symbolic representation of ongoing imperial patriarchy. A century after Ngungunyane's defeat by the Portuguese, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa published Ualalapi , widely read as a devastating critique of Mozambique's FRELIMO party's postcolonial politics as a continuation of Ngungunyane's bloody reign. A series of subsequent works respond to Ualalapi 's critique: Mia Couto's As areias do imperador trilogy, Khosa's As mulheres do imperador , and Paulina Chiziane's As andorinhas . These works deploy female protagonists and narrative experimentation to respond to Ngungunyane's famous final speech in Ualalapi . I argue that each of the contemporary works break the speech's imperial logic in different ways. Khosa, Couto, and Chiziane show that an excess of empire pervades contemporary rewritings of this history. These works draw on female voices and a constellation of anti-imperial communities of Black women—what philosopher María Lugones has theorized as a coalition and through Michelle M. Wright has analyzed through the dialogic—to break colonial-postcolonial continuities of power and imagine different futures in their wake.

Children and their environment in Estonian working-class literature at the turn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT The living environments of children in Estonian working-class literature are depicted in a way that would lead the reader to support certain political views and sympathize with the working classes. The political effect distinguishes the depictions of the children’s environments in working-class literature from naturalist descriptions, which, albeit still gruesome, are more neutral. It also sets it apart from the Soviet proletarian approach, in which Soviet propaganda was always at the forefront. This article analyses fictional works by Estonian working-class authors to demonstrate how children’s environments were used to promote the working-class movement that took hold in Europe in the beginning of the twentieth century and considers the intentions of these authors.

Epithets in Vasyl Shklyar’s language creation (lexicographic form of study based on the material of the work of fiction «Kharakternyk»)

Epithets in Vasyl Shklyar’s language creation (lexicographic form of study based on the material of the work of fiction «Kharakternyk»)

Magic Realism in Rabindra Sameer's Mrityuko Aayu

This article analyzes the novel Mrityuko Aayu in the light of Magic Realism. Applying magic realism is methodological approach for critical analysis of the novel in this article. It follows interpretive textual analysis. Free translation has been used while taking the citation from the novel. I have drawn the conclusion that the novel is a magic realist novel as it has introduced innovative style of narrating the story. The story begins from the death of the protagonist, but he is capable of seeing everything even after the death. It has blended mundane and supernatural, ordinary and extraordinary and real and fantastical elements in an unquestionable way. The novel's extracts are analyzed within five parameters that include fantastical elements, real world setting, incorporation of myth, meta-fiction and social/ political critique. Even after the death of the protagonist, the story moves ahead from the spirit's perspective. The spirit is capable of seeing, feeling and experiencing everything. The readers accept all such actions and happenings as normal without questioning the reliability of them and feel sorry for his painful and pathetic condition. Therefore, the writer is successful in using magic realism in the novel. It is hoped that this article will encourage researchers to study other works of fiction from the point of view of Magic Realism.

Специфика функционирования проксемной информативной текстовой структуры в романе Г. Джеймса «Женский портрет»

The article deals with the English text space. The purpose of the study is to identify the specific features of the proxemic informative text structure of H. James’s The Portrait of a Lady. A new concept of “proxemic informative text structure” is introduced into text theory as a segment of text architectonics that describes the spatial parameters nominated by proxemes. Proxemes are considered as nominations of spatial parameters of the text. The typology of textual proxemes is specified and the existing proxemes-spacenаmes, proxemes-verbs of movement, proxemes-placenames, proxemes-landscape units are supplemented with such types of proxemes as a metaphorical landscape unit, an interior proxeme and a distant proxeme. The metaphorical landscape unit means a metaphorically marked proxeme that nominates a landscape description in the text. An interior proxeme is understood as a nomination of the interior decoration of a house. The interior proxeme revealed in the novel is a socio-cultural interior proxeme, interpreted as a socio-cultural informative construct in which two societies intersect: French, namely Parisian, and Spanish. A distant proxeme, i.e. a distant literary placename is understood as a proxeme that nominates a plot-textual reference to a location in which the described events do not occur at the moment when they are mentioned. Socio-cultural toponym-landscape unit is understood as a landscape nomination reflecting the socio-cultural aspect of the location. For the first time, bi-kernel proxemes were identified, which are constructs of a set of kernels of the same type and constructs of a set of kernels of different types. The bi-kernel feature of proxemes is one of the parameters of the specific features of the proxeme informative text structure in the work of H. James. Socio-culturally marked proxemic units, aligning various European cultural markers in the plot-thematic matrix of a work of fiction, are revealed in the proxemic informative text structure of H. James’s The Portrait of a Lady.

Unfulfilled Future Perfect? Comics as a Site of Liberty in Post-Mao China

ABSTRACT This study examines the changing ideological landscape of post-Mao China through the prism of the science fiction work, The Three Courts, published in the late 1970s. This work and its comic adaptations are not landmark works of literary history and popular culture but rather a utopian fable addressing the profound issues of the reform. We demonstrate how the comic version received a temporary ideological license to support the popular liberty movement, which reflects the cooperation of officials and civil society in the face of the socialist faith crisis and how such collaboration broke down in 1979. By analyzing the two revisions made to this work, we argue that the comic can be seen as a site of liberty that contains radical political content, but its visual output has not been censored. Thus, before the new myth of post-socialism took shape, this text reveals the unfulfilled expectations of democratized reforms by pro-democratic knowledge elites and cultural bureaucrats standing among the ruins of Mao-era China.