Works Of Fiction Research Articles

Konjunktiv II в немецких энантиосемичных синтаксических конструкциях

The article investigates enantiosemy as a linguistic phenomenon. It is understood here as a complex, multidimensional object, which is both a phenomenon that reflects a certain essence and a general linguistic category. Along with studies into enantiosemy at the phonetic, morphological, lexical, phraseological and phraseosyntactic levels, publications on enantiosemy at the syntactic level are of particular interest, since this research area is at the initial stage of development. Therefore, the purpose of this article was to study enantiosemic syntactic constructions. As the material the author used German-language works of fiction. The paper considers several enantiosemic syntactic constructions in the form of complex sentences with adverbial clauses of comparison with conjunctions als ob and als (with als wäre, als hätte, als würde). These constructions are characterized by the use of a predicate in Konjunktiv II. The asymmetry of the form and content of the syntactic constructions is investigated. Considering that enantiosemy is based on opposition, context plays an important role in the actualization of the opposite meaning. The author found that when determining the enantiosemic nature of the constructions under study, context is not always required. In addition, it is noted that in most cases the selected syntactic constructions are asymmetrical. According to the results of the study, some of the proposed schemes, which can help to identify such constructions in the German language, can be introduced into scholarly discourse. The analysis of enantiosemic syntactic constructions contributes to further research into German syntax and can be of use when translating German texts.

Cultural Background in Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road

In the present age, the world seems to be given very little place to women in terms of freedom and security. The second most populous India is the seventh biggest homey in the world which has matured frequent socio-political dilemma of its individual. Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road focuses on feminism and topics as disparate as political terrorism and cultural preservation. It is a multi-locational work of fiction that explores the identity of the protagonist. Mira while also discussing the challenges she faces as an immigrant. Although the story of this novel takes place in India; Indian culture is seen through the lens of western culture. Mira bid to transfer her observation from western literature to the legislative space. Her ideas represent a fusion of Indian and American culture. But this peace and tranquility of modern India is quickly overshadowed by the reputation of new urbanity and depraved governments. The destination of this commodity is to evaluate the issues related to the clash between women and culture.

A linked index for an oral Tamil folk epic: a case study

Some projects have a life of their own, and in this case study Ronnie Seagren presents the experience of a straightforward book indexing project that grew into its own saga, including editing and work with a hybrid publisher. She was asked to index an important medieval Tamil epic story that was both obscure and out of print. This republishing journey took two and a half years. The index had to meet the needs of several very different audiences: Tamil scholars, students comparing epic stories, and a general public just wanting to learn something about South Asian folk culture. Indexing a work of fiction poses specific indexing dilemmas. Working with a small hybrid publisher, where the author bore all of the costs of publishing, posed many more. The project was very specific, but it has implications for indexing both fiction and self-published books.

A Quantitative and Qualitative Exploration of Futuristic Narratives on TVTropes.org

This paper embarks on a methodical exploration of TVTropes.org, a comprehensive crowd-sourced wiki that documents storytelling conventions across various forms of media, with a special focus on representations of artificial intelligence and future scenarios. The study delineates the multifaceted nature of the platform, asserting that its offerings extend beyond mere television tropes, and explores its potent applicability for futurists and scholars. Through the strategic application of web scraping and data analysis, this research quantifies diverse aspects of science fiction media and the embedded tropes therein. The paper underscores the pivotal role of tropes in shaping societal perceptions and influencing discourse, particularly in the realm of futuristic thinking, using instances such as the impact of “The Terminator” franchise on military strategic thinking as a case study. Furthermore, the research engages in a quantitative analysis of trope density and frequency within science fiction works, offering a nuanced understanding and uncovering patterns in storytelling conventions. This study thus offers a foundational framework for understanding, categorizing, and analyzing the influential images of the future that permeate today’s media environment, thereby providing a valuable resource for futurists, researchers, and media scholars in their respective endeavors.

BIOGRAPHICAL TRUTH THROUGH THE PRISM OF METAFICTIONAL REPRESENTATION IN IAN WATSON’S CHEKHOV’S JOURNEY

This study aims to spotlight the postmodern tendency of metafiction in Ian Watson’s novel “Chekhov's Journey”. Metafiction is self-conscious in relation to language, literary form, and storytelling in fiction. This form of fiction accentuates its construct and reminds the readers to be aware of a fictional work. Ian Watson is a noteworthy science-fiction writer, and his famous novelsare ‘The Embedding’ (1973) and ‘The Jonah Kit’ (1975), which brought him prestigious awards, while in this study we will focus on his metafictional work ‘Chekhov’s Journey’. This novel exhibits the subject of postmodern metafiction. In this novel, a modern-day actor uses hypnosis to simulate Anton Chekhov's 1890 journey through Siberia. The method of study adopted the metafiction theories proposed by Patricia Waugh and Linda Hutcheon. It highlights Ian Watson’s texts that represent the elements of metafiction through the protagonists. Using various theories related to postmodern metafiction, the view of metafiction in the work is substantiated and explored. The postmodern perspective of metafiction is explored in Ian Watson’s text and analyzed with metafiction theories. The study results are compared and discussed with other studies and contemporary texts concerning metafiction. The findings show that metafiction is applicable in the given work of Ian Watson. He projects the aspects of metafiction in his work through his writing, especially narration, both fiction and reality.

Theoretical Insights of History, Morality, and Society as the Literary Trio of the Author-Reader Relationship.

This paper attempts to examine the relationship between the author and the reader by polarizing history, morality, and society as a selected triad of theoretical interpretation. The study mainly focuses on the theoretical insights of these relationships in order to give proper clues for delving deep into the technical and thematic peculiarities of different literary genres. Therefore, it follows a qualitative approach to some fictional works, particularly novels, to demonstrate how the authorial perspective intersects with the reader’s ability to grasp the latent textual messages projected by authors in the course of the plots. The relationship between the author and the reader will be limited to three related topics, namely, history, morality, and society. As for history, the study sheds light on the postcolonial attributes of literature to reveal the function of liberal humanism in bridging the gap between the colonized people and the colonizers. Morality, on the other hand, will be discussed to explore the relative view of morality by authors and how the reader might conceptualize it according to his/her cultural background. Lastly, the discussion of society will be limited to the social customs and norms approached by authors to deliver a comprehensive depiction of the social reality in which the reader lives his/her true life.

Vilifying apartheid perpetrators through narrative devices

Mandla Langa’s debut novel, Tenderness of Blood, received no critical review compared with his later works of fiction. To close this gap, I will provide critical analysis focussing on Langa’s use of narrative devices that function to generate meaning focussed on specific issues, themes, and topics vilifying apartheid perpetrators, which has been interpreted as Langa’s chosen means of overthrowing apartheid. These devices will be drawn from Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theories of the Dialogic Imagination. This entails narrational strategies of the extradiegetic and intradiegetic, respectively, deployed by the anonymous third-person narrator and Mkhonto, the protagonist. These strategies render the text as a multi-voiced polyphonic narrative that aims to accentuate the plight of Mkhonto in his opposition to South Africa’s apartheid injustices from two different and complementary narrative perspectives. In addition to the narrational strategies, there is an employment of devices such as times of narration in simultaneous, subsequent, and interpolated narration, which enable the situating of the story in time of its ‘presentness’ and moments of the action.Contribution: This article highlights the plight of, and challenges experienced by the characters, and is helpful in generating sympathy for the events, especially for Mkhonto and his people in the struggle to overthrow apartheid.

조선 후기 훼절소설 속 ‘복수의 남성성들’과 남성 젠더 실천의 다층성

In the late Joseon Dynasty, a group of novels called ‘Hwejeol Fiction(Stories about Men Breaking His Faith)’ appeared. They shared the narrative that the heterosexual sexuality of the male character is confirmed through tests. This narrative means the process of confirming the heterosexual sexuality of individual men and granting them membership in the homosocial communities. This work was examined the homosocial between mens through three works of Hwejeol Fiction: ‘Jibong-jeon’, ‘Oyuran-jeon’, and ‘Samseon-gi’.
 First, in ‘Jibong-jeon’, a dominant man who rejects heterosexual sexuality and has the potential to discord with homosocial standards appears as the main character. In this text, as the relationship between the dominant men is focused, the virtue of the public relationship between them is particularly emphasized to sustain the male bond. The dominant male protagonist never becomes profanity in the process, and is embraced into the community after the interruption.
 Next, in ‘Oyuran-jeon’, an immature man who pursues hegemonic masculinity appears. The narrative deals with the process of growing these immature men into true dominant men. He grows up with the help of men in private relationships such as family and friends, and in the process, a humorous episode in which they are shown there naked bodies. At the end of the narrative, they transforms into a being who embodies full hegemonic masculinity and lives happily as a member of the homosocial community.
 Lastly, ‘Samseon-gi’ is distinguished from the previous two types in that it shows the practice of a newly adjusted ‘alternative masculinity’ rather than actively incorporating into the homosociality by breaking personal beliefs. Here, women have much more active voices and self-awareness than in the previous two types. Since the gender practice of the male protagonist poses the greatest threat to the maintenance of male same-sex society, unlike other narratives, hostile forces that block him appear, showing explicit hostility toward the protagonist. In the end, the protagonist is not fully incorporated into the existing homosocial society but is incorporated into a different world.
 The fact that most of these narratives written in Chinese characters, have been mainly enjoyed between male readers. It suggests that the enjoyment of narratives itself can be an practice for male readers’ homosocial solidarity. The existence of a long-running these narratives clearly reveals that the concept of masculinity, which on the other hand seems to be a firm power, is only a fragile component that is constantly challenged, but it also has great implications today in that it also tells us how difficult and can have a great influence on the existing male model holding hegemony.

The rise (in the fall) of Cochin: Provincializing metropolitan spatiality in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

ABSTRACT Indian fiction and critical engagements with it have a metropolitan bias. The preference for representations of big cities such as Mumbai in fiction means that non-metropolitan (“provincial”) spaces in India face neglect, literary and otherwise. This article argues for provincializing Indian fiction by exploring non-metropolitan locations as imagined in works of fiction to unpack alternative spatialities. The example offered is Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. In most readings of the novel, Bombay (along with Moorish Spain) is highlighted as a metropolitan model for India. Cochin does not figure in these readings, passed over as if just a random background or setting for the characters to be launched into Mumbai. This article addresses Cochin’s marginalization through investigating the way the island city offers a provincial, alternative, non-metropolitan theorization of spatialities in Indian fiction. The larger objective is to make space for similarly marginalized non-European locales in the discourse of cosmopolitanism.

Роль и место татарской женщины в творчестве Наки Исанбета

The article presents an attempt to conduct a systematical study of the typology of female images in the works of Naki Isanbet, the Tatar scholar-encyclopedist, folklorist, critic, and classic of Tatar literature (1899–1992). Published and unpublished sources were used as the research material. Fiction, journalistic, and scientific texts of N. Isanbet have been analysed using the method of semantic analysis, historical and cultural, comparative methods. The author proves that the ideal of a woman of the Enlightenment epoch, i.e. the “mother of the nation”, dominates in the legacy of the scholar who was the classic of the Tatar literature as well. The images of a devoted spouse, a wise mother, a “mother of the nation” can be encountered in his works. The writer defends the ideas of equality of women and men, women’s active participation in public life, etc. in his works of fiction written in various genres throughout the twentieth century. The poetics of female images depends on the requirements of the genre. When developing the images, the writer relies on the traditions of the Tatar folklore and oriental poetry. In his creative legacy, the encyclopedic scholar immortalised dozens of names of the female contemporaries who made a significant contribution to the history of the Tatar people – teachers, actresses, writers, translators, public figures, etc.

Concept of «Mystery» and its Realization in the Works of J. Lippard and N. Buntline

Introduction. The article is devoted to the analysis of the linguistic means expressing the concept of «mystery» in the fictional works of J. Lippard and N. Buntline, the allocation of its socio-cultural component and the field model construction of lexical units representing this concept. The relevance of the research is due to the interest of modern linguistics in the study of the conceptual sphere of artistic works of the «urban mysteries» genre by American authors.Methodology and sources. The study was conducted within the framework of a linguistic and cultural approach using methods of description, comparison, interpretative analysis, conceptual analysis, the method of dictionary definitions analyzing, structural and semantic analysis, and the method of quantitative calculations. The illustrative material of the study consisted of more than 74 lexical units representing the «mystery» concept in the language, 45 of which were found in the analyzed works. The material was obtained by the method of directed sampling from the fictional works of American authors of the 19th century.Results and discussion. This article discusses and analyzes various interpretations of the concept of «mystery» by domestic and foreign scientists; defines the role of the concept in the work of fiction as a whole and in the analyzed novels of two authors J. lippard and N. Buntline; identifies the features of the linguistic implementation of the «mystery» concept; classifies the linguistic units of the concept according to their parts of speech, semantics and stylistic coloring; analyzes the writers’ linguistic pictures of the world and the conceptual sphere of their works, the illustrative zone of which reveals the reasons for the similarity not only of the storylines of the works, but also of their lexical content.Conclusion. The study made it possible to describe and illustrate the individual style of American authors of the 19th century through a system of expressive means that correlates the inner world of the writer with the artistic reality, the artistic world of the text created by the «poetic» language. The mental world can be interpreted in cognitive terminology as an individual poetic conceptual sphere, or the conceptual system of the author, consisting of a conceptual, objective, associative, figurative and symbolic layer of the concept. The study showed that the learning of the writer's linguistic picture of the world and the conceptual sphere of the work can be carried out using a field model, analyzing the LSF forming the «mystery» concept. The analyzed LSF is distinguished by a more specific vocabulary composition, the complication of the seme structure of words, the seme expansion and the restructuring of their hierarchy, which together form the artistic worldview of the authors.

Escaping Fiction

In this paper I argue that a norm of literary fiction is to compel the reader to form beliefs about the world as it is. It may seem wrong to suggest that the reason I believe p is because I imagined p, yet literary fiction can make this the case. I argue for an account grounded in indexed doxastic susceptibilities mapped between a fictional context and the particular properties of a reader, more specifically the susceptibilities in her beliefs, attitudes, and psychological states. Works of fiction can be about different things at the same time, some of which are fictive and some of which are factual. Since belief can be weak or strong, partial or complete, tenuous or robust, opaque or clear, there are susceptibilities throughout a doxastic set out of which new beliefs are formed. Skillful works of fiction exploit these susceptibilities and create new ones. This is an aesthetic achievement of such works: they take what should be a norm-violating practice of belief-formation on the basis of imaginative engagement and they make it so.

The Dark Side of Cultural Sensitivity

In their discussion of the interpretation of the literary work of fiction, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen explain that: “Literary appreciation is the appreciation of how a work interprets and develops the general themes which the reader identifies through the application of thematic concepts. […] The thematic concepts are, by themselves, vacuous. They cannot be separated from the way they are ‘anatomized’ in literature and other cultural discourses” (Lamarque and Olsen: 399). The subtle unravelling of the work’s thematic concepts relies on the context of its reception, with its idiosyncratic sensitivities and cultural sensibilities of that time and place. However, cultural sensitivity also has a dark side as it may occasionally ignite a sort of allergic reaction to a work, identifying it as a threat that must be eliminated. My paper examines the case of literary censorship in Israel. Three partially banned works of fiction reflect three aspects of the Israeli right-wing anxiety concerning the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict: The futility of sacrificing Israeli soldiers’ lives, the acknowledgement of the Palestinian perspective, and, fi nally, the possibility of deflecting the animosity between the two nations to a point of allowing for mutual love.

Marginalization of Women in Marriage: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors and That Long Silence

Marginalization in society is not confined to limitations of opportunities to grow independently and lack means of endurance. It refers to the creation of an environment in which the individual is made to feel pride even in slavery. Marginalization in the case of women is more pronounced as it is not limited to any caste, creed or religion. It is a universal phenomenon and marriage as an institution is one of the basic foundations on which the marginalization of women is culturally strengthened. Marriages are a pivotal part of every society. By conforming to the institution of marriage, two distinct minds take oaths to stick by each other’s side lifelong. But in reality, the institution of marriage replicates the other side of patriarchal domination which contributes to the peripheral status of women. They are subjected to inevitable suppression, subjugation, and oppression in the environs of the marital frame regardless of the renunciation and forsaking of individuality by the woman for the sake of family. They are the victim of sheer oppression and violence due to their vulnerable status from time immemorial. In this paper, an attempt has been made to bring forth the hardships of marital life and how it assists in the marginalization of women with reference to the works of Shashi Deshpande. Her works of fiction, The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) and That Long Silence (1988) aptly elucidate the issues of marital discord and disharmonious conjugal relationships which career-oriented women experience in their day-to-day existence. Women helplessly oscillate between traditional codes and modern aspirations, bearing the pangs of dead desires and unexpressed thoughts in public as well as domestic spheres. Characterization of women like Sarita and Jaya delineate the marginalization of women in a poignant and powerful manner.

Suppression of Memory as Totalitarian Strategy: A Critique of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police

In the contemporary world, activities of the people have been monitored and scrutinised by the ever strong vigilant governments. The Fascist governments, in particular, are changing the dynamics of the countries as well as the world by moulding and shaping the minds of people according to their objectives. The opponents of the state are silenced or liquidated. The present paper on renowned Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa’s science fiction work, The Memory Police (2019) has been done to highlight similar issues. The article is divided into three sections. The first section of the article examines how totalitarian regimes function, particularly by playing upon the minds and memories of its citizens. The paper also points out as how people engage with memory as a weapon of protest and as a near-sentient being are confronted with an iniquitous opposition whose main objective is to destroy it. The second section focuses how the psychological toll of forgetting is manifested in the physical world. For instance, when objects vanish from reality, they vanish from memory too, and vice versa. Finally, in the third section, analogies are drawn between the metaphoric cosmos of the novel and in the previously witnessed progressively hypernationalistic and dictatorial governments acquiring control over the world.

Literary futures: Harnessing fiction for futures work

Literary Futures is an approach to futures work that draws on foundational works of world literature and literary analysis to engage creatively in futures thinking. This paper details the Literary Futures method, from its conceptual development to its practical application in a series of workshops. Through an analysis of the experiences of over 130 Literary Futures workshop participants, we highlight the ways in which narrative and works of fiction can offer a generative and participatory approach to futures thinking that emphasises and enables agency, while also embracing felt engagement. The paper illustrates how character development and collaborative worldbuilding make the Literary Futures method a valuable decision-making tool for contributing to futures work across a range of policy and planning contexts. These features furthermore allow the Literary Futures method to enhance the wider futures thinking field, promoting a focus on social futures, complex human interactions, and relational and affective encounters.

Научная рецензия на книгу Н. Я. Эйдельмана «Твой XVIII век. Твой XIX век. Грань веков». СПб.: Азбука; Азбука-Аттикус, 2023. 800 с. (Non-Fiction. Большие книги)

In the reviewed book by Natan Yakovlevich Eidelman – a historian, literary critic, writer, publicist – the internal political life of Russia during the 18th and 19th centuries is widely presented. The book introduces readers to interesting events of Russian history, outstanding personalities, bright works of fiction, and fascinates with deep reflections on the development of Russian statehood, Russian free-thinking and the Russian intelligentsia.

‘A random assembly of geometric forms’: Thing Theory in J. G. Ballard's and Ray Bradbury's short stories

AbstractThing Theory is a relatively new field of research, developed largely by Bill Brown on the basis of an already existing new materialist movement with roots reaching back to Martin Heidegger's interrogation of the ontology of things in ‘Das Ding’. Focusing on the interconnectedness of objects, their modes of being and irreducible ‘thingness’, as well as the agency objects are shown to exert when freed from the constraints of a subject‐centred perspective, this article presents a reading of three short stories by J. G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury which showcase how such issues are navigated in narrative form. Of particular interest for this article is the subject–object relationship, and the notion of ‘thingness’ as developed in Thing Theory in relation to the unique role accorded to the environment and inanimate objects in J. G. Ballard's and Ray Bradbury's selected works of fiction. It will be shown that a common theme connecting these works is the presence of a confrontation with the external world as it exists outside the definitions imposed on it by human subjects.

AN ESSAY IN COMPARATIVE LITERARY ONOMASTICS BASED ON POLISH AND RUSSIAN BIBLIONYMS

The article deals with some Polish biblionyms which are translations of the titles of works of Russian and world fiction. The article also examines the Polish nominations of some characters of Russian and Western European literature. Polish biblionyms are compared with Russian originals and with equivalent Russian titles of works of foreign literature. The types of transformation that Russian original titles undergo when translating them into Polish, as well as the differences between Polish and Russian biblionyms, which are translations of the titles of the same works of foreign literature, are analyzed. Among the transformations extensions, transpositions, reductions, grammatical, derivational and syntactic transformations are distinguished. Several types of transformations can be represented in one Polish biblionym (for example, transposition and extension of the abbreviation into the phrase in the Polish translation of the title of I. Babel’s Конармия as Armia konna. Transformation may be due to the differences between the compared languages (for example, the usual, with some exeptions, postpositive place of the adjective attribute in Polish, in contrast to the Russian language, requires a transposition in Polish translations of such titles of A.S. Pushkin’s works as Медный всадник - Polish Jeździec miedziany, Каменный гость - Polish Gość kamienny, Пиковая дама - Polish Dama pikowa. The transformation may also depend on the intentions and preferences of the translator (in particular, the choice of one of the synonyms existing in the Polish language - cf. variants Dom z facjatą and Dom z attyką for the title of a story by A.P. Chekhov Дом с мезонином, or options Dół and Wykop for the title of A. Platonov’s work Котлован. In some cases, the Polish biblionyms reflect the translator’s desire to bring them closer to the title of the original (cf. the translation of A.P. Chekhov’s story title Мальчики as Malcy in the presence of a synonym chłopcy or the use of the Polish word identical to the Czech lexeme wojak and not żołnierz in the title of J. Hašek’s novel about the adventures of Schweik. The replacement of the title of the original or its transformation may be associated with the desire to reveal the content of the work (cf. the translation of the title of the play by A.N. Ostrovsky Доходное место as Łapownicy specifying the source of income for a number of characters - bribes) or give the biblionym a more generalized, symbolic character (cf. replacing the prepositional-case construction with the nominative case form in the title of A.P. Chekhov’s В овраге - Polish Wąwóz). Comparison of Polish biblionyms with Russian original and translated titles of literary works shows the need to compile a dictionary of similar biblionyms, focused on Russianspeaking students studying the Polish language.

ON CULTURAL LOSSES IN THE RECEPTIVE PROCESS OF THE CHINESE TRANSLATION OF YU.M. POLYAKOV’S NOVEL I PLANNED AN ESCAPE

The paper deals with the issue of cultural losses in the receptive process of Yu. M. Polyakov’s novel I Planned an Escape. Cultural differences and language barriers complicate translator’s work. Although there are many key cultural losses in the receptive process of the Chinese translation of the novel, the translation was generally successful. The reason for the success is the topical relevance, since great works of literature touch on issues that concern all of humanity, issues that know no boundaries. Secondly, the translator’s skill in preserving the idiosyncrasies of the original author while referring the reader to parallels in his native culture, as brilliantly demonstrated by Zhang Jianhua’s translation, can convey the hidden cultural meanings of a foreign-language work of fiction to the masses as much as possible. Thirdly, the Chinese reader, probably, is close to the type of hero who aspires to a happy and wealthy life, who manages to realize his desires, but never becomes truly happy. Everyone, even for a minute, if not for several minutes, has been or is becoming an Escapist.