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Writing can give us all greater joy. Does that sentence make sense in the academic world? Writing rarely receives the academic attention it deserves. Its value in conveying information, ideas, and argument is obvious, but do we neglect the positive contribution that the quality of writing can add to academic papers? This essay argues that too much academic writing loses impact by striving too hard for 'impossible objectivity'. Arguments need emotion too, provided by stories and words used well, which benefits writers and readers. This essay suggests reasons for giving greater attention to the way we write: from personal fulfilment, through to persuasive power, to writing's ability to make connections. Writing has the potential to be a source of joy and inspiration not just a necessary chore that goes with the job. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates an empirical analysis of the visual order of membership categories in a way consistent with both an early ethnomethodological research interest and recent arguments in membership categorization analysis. Early ethnomethodological studies have highlighted that we can infer and understand the membership categories of observed people about whom we have no information in advance, even without talking to them. Recent membership categorization analysts have argued the methodological importance of using video data. Given this, fictional films serve as video data to advance the investigation into the visual order of membership categories since audiences do not know the fictional characters' information in advance and cannot talk to them. We analyze how potential audiences understand fictional characters' membership categories and how production crew members organize the visual and conversational order of membership categories. The analysis illustrates that our practical inferences of fictional characters' membership categories are based on conversations among characters and visually available information. Such visually available information includes environments and lighting, as well as characters' clothes, body orientations, facial expressions, and physical distance from each other. In other words, production crew members of fictional films design the visual and conversational order for remote audiences by arranging visually available information and fictional characters' conversations. The findings provide insights into the "possible correctness" and "defeasibility" of membership categorization practices. Particularly regarding fictional characters' membership categories, production crew members can employ the "possible correctness" and "defeasibility" of categorization practices to mislead audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responses to the pernicious influences of mainstream pornography on its viewers fall into two main sorts: regulation and education. Pornography has long been a core topic in analytic feminist philosophy, but it has largely focused on issues around regulation, in particular with trying to undermine arguments against regulation on the grounds that pornography should count as protected speech. Here I instead look at some ways that philosophy can contribute to an education‐based approach, in particular to what has been called an 'education to address pornography's influence'. I first argue that philosophical considerations can help to motivate this kind of overall approach to countering pornography's influence, but the main contribution of the paper is to contend that such considerations can also contribute to shaping the kind of content and messaging that such an education should have. I discuss two related issues, focusing on pornographic films. The first concerns the status of pornographic films as fiction; it is misleading and unhelpful to tell teenagers and young adults that pornography is 'just fiction', as is sometimes proposed, but it is not clear what more effective and accurate message might be offered instead. The second concerns the ways that pornographic films often present the people (and in particular the women) who perform in them as ideals or archetypes when it comes to what kinds of sexual acts people typically choose and enjoy, which I argue is a neglected form of objectification. I briefly evaluate some suggestive examples of proposed messaging, targeted at teens and young adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of European Public Service Media (PSM) in the commissioning and scheduling of local series over the past three decades. With a comparative approach between the main European television markets (Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain), the schedules of 30 seasons of 25 general-interest channels have been analysed to explore how the changes in the markets have altered the role of public channels as promoters of domestic fiction and local culture. The study shows a clear division along a Northern European axis with a large, uninterrupted commissioning of locally produced fiction, while Southern European public corporations have had a lower, more erratic approach. Despite this difference, all European PSM organisations analysed have maintained and increased the volume of local series titles during the last decade despite the appearance of portfolio DTT channels and transnational SVOD services, in contrast to commercial corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Muslim writing, both in the US and in England, is witnessing the emergence of woman-centered fiction that puts Islam front and center. "Halal fiction," coined by Farial Ghazoul to refer to a new mode of writing advocating a theologically-conceived and ideologically-established worldview, has been used to describe the works penned by Leila Aboulela (The Translator and Minaret) and Umm Zakiyyah (If I Should Speak trilogy). Both writers have drawn praise from certain segments of the Muslim population, and attracted a robust readership. However, the critical reception of these works remains divided: a group of scholars celebrate the subversive politics of halal fiction that presents Islam as a source of empowerment for women while others express reservations about the way halal fiction validates a skewed image of the Muslim woman aligned with patriarchal norms of gender identity. This paper focuses on the thematic, critical, and aesthetic challenges of halal fiction. It argues that rather than affirming individual agency as a significant component of self-actualization, halal fiction appears to endorse a type of womanhood based on consensual subordination, and voluntary withdrawal from the world. Furthermore, halal fiction reveals a divergence in the utilization of the novel itself, largely because of that genre's strong association with secularism and dialogism. This all suggests that there is a visible discrepancy between the alleged politics of the work (Islam as a redeeming code of ethics) and its effective politics of representation (Islam as a limiting and even authoritarian ideology). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to reflect on how genres overlap in the construction of narratives and take part in the conformation of a myth of the political imaginary: the myth of Evita Perón. We seek to discuss what the accounts of fiction and history in the representation of reality are made up of. This paper is divided into four parts: historicity effect; imaginary; autofiction -- the construction of the self; and representations of Evita. The first two parts present theoretical propositions and the last two will discuss literary representations of Eva Perón, referring to some Argentinean works. We conclude that the manner in which a text is narrated creates the effect of historicity, straddling the fiction and historical genres, and converging in the imaginary. Furthermore, we accept that it is impossible to cover the whole phenomenon of the configuration of the evitista imaginary. However, it is possible to offer some contribution to the studies on this theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of extracting and analyzing character networks from works of fiction, such as novels and movies, has been the object of a number of recent publications. However, only a very few of them focus on graphic novels, and even fewer on European graphic novels. In this paper, we focus on Thorgal, a bande dessinée, i.e. a comic of the French-Belgian tradition. We manually annotate all the volumes of this series, in order to constitute a corpus allowing us to extract its character network. We perform a descriptive analysis of the network structure and compare it to real-world and fictional social networks. We also study the effect of character filtering over the network structure. Finally, we leverage complex network analysis tools to answer two research questions from the literature, related to the similarity between Thorgal and the Saga of Icelanders; and to the position of women in the series. Our data and source code are both publicly available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Torrey Peters' debut novel Detransition, Baby from 2021, a Women's Prize for Fiction nominee, problematizes gender norms by telling the story of three main characters: Reese, a trans woman, Ames, who de-transitioned to live as a man again, and Katrina, a Chinese and Jewish cis woman who is also Ames' lover and boss. Ames and Katrina are expecting a child and are testing the possibilities of having a non-conventional family together with Reese. Parenthood is, thus, the central theme of the novel which structures also the sections of book into the time before the conception and the weeks after it. By doing so, the temporal framework of the novel queers the linearity of heteronormative life courses on the form as well as the content level. Therefore, the interplay of form and content invites to critically investigate how the concept of trans time that challenges linearity and normative conformity (Halberstam, 2005) may provide useful insights into trans aging and the life course through this literary representation. Following, contemporary feminist theorists' commitments to negotiate what makes "life more livable for those whose gender presentation, identity, or bodily experience have been judged abnormal, nonexistent, or impossible" (Karhu, 2022, 304–305), this paper aims at carrying out a critical feminist literary analysis of trans aging, queer life courses and the thereof related gendered norms in Peters' novel. By relying predominantly on feminist poststructuralist theories (Butler 2004) and cultural aging studies (Maierhofer, 2019), it is the aim to challenge normativity and limited social norms through this critical literary reading. • Analysis of representation of trans aging in Peters' Detransition, Baby (2021) • Trans aging and the life course as a juxtaposition of conformity and queer temporalities • cultural ideals of trans gender as having no future • queer temporalities and trans time as useful discursive tools to challenge capitalist notions of the life course [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypertext has been described as embodying Roland Barthes' ideal text. This paper considers that association, and the relationship of each to literary theory's historical privileging of authorial intention over reader interpretation. Firstly it outlines the rise and fall of authorial intention in literary theory, culminating in Roland Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author. Secondly, it challenges the relationship between anti-intentionalism and hypertext in three ways: by exploring hypertext as a dialectical situation, which places the reader in dialogue with the author; by challenging Barthes' galaxy of signifiers as an embodiment of links; and finally, by establishing a disciplinary emphasis on hermeneutics as intrinsically readerly in nature. The paper concludes by considering whether an intentionalist approach might in fact be the best fit for hypertext fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of fictional models is extensive and rewarding in modern science. This fact captured the attention of philosophers of science, who are focusing on questions such as the following: is it possible for a fictional model to be explanatory? And, if so, in virtue of what is such a fictional model explanatory? In this paper, I discuss these questions in relation to the realism vs. anti-realism debate in philosophy of science. I focus on work developed by Alisa Bokulich who has argued for the explanatory role played by fictional models, claiming that it can be accommodated by realism in ‘a broad sense’. To this end, Bokulich introduced what she called ‘an eikonic conception’ of explanation, as opposed to the so-called ‘ontic’ conception. This move, Bokulich claims, allows non-causal explanations to be acceptable to a modified version, as opposed to a ‘naïve’ brand of realism. Roughly, a fictional model can capture aspects of reality if it manages to act as a proxy for a theory targeting a physical system. As Bokulich explains with the example of James Clerk Maxwell’s use of mechanical models, this is due to structural correspondences between a model and a theory at a certain level of abstraction. However, Bokulich does not explain how the model grasps reality. In this paper, I fill this missing piece of the puzzle. While I agree with Bokulich on the explanatory function of fictional models, I shall invoke her reading of Maxwell’s work to draw a different conclusion. Specifically, I argue that structural correspondences at various levels form what I call ‘a ladder of abstractions’ which connects aspects of a target system to the corresponding depths of descriptions. Modifying in these terms the scope of ‘representing a system’, I suggest that Bokulich’s proposed modification of realism is obviated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fiction has the potential to bring the climate crisis into the imagination and help readers understand and respond to climate change. From speculative 'cli-fi' to contemporary eco fiction, literary responses to climate change vary greatly and continue to evolve. Despite the ongoing popularity of speculative climate change fiction, climate change increasingly appears in realist genres, and in stories dealing with everyday domestic situations. Realist climate change stories come with both opportunities and challenges. The short story cycle form is particularly well-positioned to address such challenges through its capacity to create a sense of community, defamiliarise climate change discourse, generate ecological enchantment, and conceal overtly didactic messages. The short story cycle is a sustainable form because it is cyclical, iterative, and incomplete, in a way reminiscent of the natural environment. Using Richard Powers' short story cycle, The Overstory (2018), as a case study, this paper examines how realist expressions of climate change in fiction might be supported by the unique characteristics of the short story cycle form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are surrounded by narratives about digitalization – in media, in white papers, in policies and in academic discourse. This article aims to dissect policy narratives to unveil the dominant stories associated with digitalization and open a dialogue on their consequences. The empirical material includes policy documents on digitalization at the European Union, national and sub-national levels focusing on the Swedish context. The article argues that these documents not only produce narratives of digitalization that reveal a certain orientation towards reality but also become tangible constructs. Further, despite their neutral language, they should be considered part of the problem formulation. The analysis is carried out by identifying the dominant and taken-for-granted stories, and the results show that digitalization, often portrayed as a modern and innovative concept, is frequently narrated in line with rather traditional perceptions of industrialized modernity. The results indicate that digitalization is trapped in an unambiguous and cramped dramaturgy, and if policies are enacted in the same way in practice, we will face a rather un-resilient digital modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches the poetic work of a contemporary Japanese poet, Keijirô Suga, from its resonances with the discussions of ecocriticism. It proposes the critical operator of ecocritical fiction that in the gesture of the interpretative reading of the poems and the theoretical reflection allows to identify these resonances. The journey finds temporary spaces configurations around the future, the landscape and the relationship between the human and the non-human. Thus, the article contributes to the field of knowledge of contemporary Japanese poetry and ecocriticism. Finally, contemplating the theoretical reflection, we expose an ethical position distanced from certain environmentalist positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British volunteers fought on both sides of the First Carlist War (1833-1840), the dynastic struggle between the liberal factions that championed Isabella II and the reactionary forces that supported Don Carlos's claim to the Spanish throne. Despite British intervention, the conflict did not arouse as much interest in Britain as the Peninsular War (1808-1814), but it served as the setting for several English literary works that reconstructed it from different perspectives. These fictional texts include George Ryder's Los Arcos (1845), Frederick Hardman's The Student of Salamanca (1845-1846), and Edward Augustus Milman's The Wayside Cross; or, the Raid of Gomez (1847). This paper analyses these texts focusing on their representations of Spain and the First Carlist War and shows that they mostly ignore British intervention in the conflict and perpetuate the romantic image of Spain that had emerged in Britain during the Peninsular War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Theory of mind (TOM) refers to a set of abilities which enables understanding of mental states including beliefs, emotions and intentions of self and others. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of different reading patterns including frequency of reading fiction and genre preference on TOM performance. It also aims to compare the accuracy of TOM performance under explicit goal directed and non-directed reading conditions. To achieve this objective, a sample of 72 Indian college students were randomly allocated to two groups and were evaluated on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) and the Short Story Task (SST). The two groups differed with respect to task instructions aimed at mobilizing different manner of engagement (goal directed and nondirected) with the prose in the SST. The individual reading habits and preferences of all the participants were recorded by a self report questionnaire. Scores on the novel SST showed significant positive correlation with RMET scores. No significant difference in TOM performance with respect to the different engagement styles was found, indicating that TOM abilities function continuously and equally effectively when being used in goal directed and nondirected conditions. Notably, participants who reported to prefer literary fiction performed significantly better on the SST task than the participants who prefer popular fiction. This positive link between literary fiction and TOM has important implications in clinical and developmental fields and necessitates further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the particularities of rewriting in Irish contemporary fiction through an analysis of Colm Tóibín’s House of Names (2017) within a theoretical framework of narrative ethics, this paper argues that a function of cultural healing is actualized both within the retold story of the Oresteia and in the context of civil war violence to which the novel responds. Drawing on the work of Hanna Meretoja and Dorothy J. Hale, it suggests that a source of potential ethical power is revealed through the reworking of the ancient tragedy using the structures and techniques of the contemporary novel. Traces of differing worldviews or even ways of constructing cognitive and affective complexity determine a constant oscillation between original and rewritten that creates a space of epistemological uncertainty. Valorised through the meta-ethical affect of unverifiability conceptualised by Hale, this effect is also read in light of Meretoja’s understanding of a narrative-bound sense of possibility and the challenges that both contemporary and ancient understandings of hope or catastrophe pose to its ethically valuable expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With this paper, we intend to contribute to the debate concerning Hobbes' conception of the person of the State. To be more precise, we shall argue that the philosopher's notion of the State draws influence from what classic rhetoricians called prosopopoeia. Although this similarity has been identified by some contemporary interpreters, its chief characteristics remain underexplored. This viewpoint will allow us, on the one hand, to delve into the creative role of Hobbesian representatives in the process of actively conforming the person of the State; on the other, it will enable a novel understanding of the enemies of the State as personifications or allegories conjured up by rebellious agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to propose a relationship between literature and Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics. The concept of necropolitics serves as a key to understanding how, in countries that share a colonial past, literature can problematize the forms that terror assumes in contemporaneity. The paper suggests that literature, situated on the threshold between fiction and reality, problematizes the imagination and the representations produced by the colonial occupation that underlie necropolitics. Therefore, it reconstructs the genealogy of the concept created by Mbembe and the constellation of concepts in which it gravitates to, at last, suggest a reading of the Brazilian novel Rremembranças da menina de rua morta nua, by Valêncio Xavier. The novel, published in 2006, allows us to glimpse the decisive role of fiction in face of facts, inseparable of the colonialist fabulations, and the new relationships between facts and fiction in the civilization of the image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tableau, an art form originating from theatres and the visual arts, is also a literary phenomenon. Literary tableaux are short scenic interruptions or pictorial compositions arresting the narrative flow and serving as highlighted moments where time stands still. Either they are scenes of intense emotion, or they occur at a crucial point in the plot. This paper distinguishes between two modes of writing that are at work in literary tableaux, which I will call absorption and contemplation. Absorption is a mode of writing and reading related to formal realism. In his theory about tableaux, Denis Diderot advocates for a realist art and literature that can create the illusion of a close relationship between the work of art and the reader/beholder. Focusing on the 18thcentury English writer Henry Fielding, this paper provides a close reading of selected scenes from the novel Tom Jones, arguing that Fielding created his own tableaux of contemplation. These instances are metafictional moments in which the narrator interrupts the narrative to converse with the reader about an event or a character in the novel. Often, they contain references to classical art and are a mix of epic, tragic and comic elements. Fielding's tableaux explicitly present their own fictionality, consulting with the reader about the difference between art and life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both adults' habits-of-thought and their understanding of children's stories shape how adults interpret children's participation in conversations. In the light of the requests on children's rights that follow from the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) this paper stresses the relevance of authorities having semiotically informed knowledge on children's meaning-making within conversations with adults. In Article 12, the CRC stipulates the right of children to participate in and to be heard about decisions that affect their everyday lives. According to the same Article, however, these rights can be restrained, based on the authority's judgements of the child's age and maturity. Sociological studies have highlighted the importance of adopting the child's perspective in judging matters that concern her. The present paper further suggests that narrow conceptualization of the sign can help one to observe different levels of meaning in adults' and children's conversations better. Although Paul Ricoeur did not investigate children's narratives per se, his theory of narratives and narrativity offers a phenomenological approach to development that allows for better theoretical discriminations of narrative as a semiotic resource, and can thus assist adults in truly listening to children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the historical romantic novel The Island (2005) by contemporary British writer Victoria Hislop (b. 1959) in the context of literary tourism. Hislop set her novel on Crete, depicting the tragic and a long-time silenced part of Greek history connected with the leper colony on the island of Spinalonga in the years 1903 to 1957. Hislop's novel became an international bestseller and turned the island, together with the Elounda Gulf and town Agios Nikolaos, into one of the most popular tourist areas in Crete. Focusing on the effect of the novel on the place, the paper predominantly discusses the presentation of the setting from a perspective of literary tourism studies, addressing the psychological impact of a literary travel on the tourist-protagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper’s assumption is that fiction and the cinema’s adaptation of the same work are different experiences. Thus, there is no point to make a comparison between them. In order to prove it, the paper analyses both: the 2011th Man Booker Prize winner (The Sense of an Ending) by Julian Barnes, and the film which adapted the novel in 2017, under the same title, and directed by Ritesh Batra. 'The Sense of an Ending' is a complicated novel; it’s considered under the 'stream of consciousness', as most of its events take place in the unreliable narrator's memory, who happen to be the main character. Hence, adopting methods & tools from structuralism narratives and film studies, this study investigates the distance between the film and the original novel, to highlight the similarities and differences between both works. One clear finding is that factors such as different foundations, artistic specific rules, and horizon of expectations, prove it clearly that we are talking about two different experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dailycommunication today is predominantly digital, but contemporary novels continue to be interested in paper letters. Why? What do letters, written on paper, offer to the novel in the twenty-first century? This essay explores the material letter's contemporary value as metaphor, reading as a case study Ian McEwan's The Children Act.McEwan's novel dramatizes a conflict between religion andthe secular law, which is an example of the type of dispute that Jean-Francois Lyotard identifies in The Differend: a dispute that is unresolvable because the process for regulating it is unable to register the wrong that one side suffers. In their different modes, these two texts consider intractable conflict and the ethics of its regulation, the workings of which are analyzed here through the suggestive correspondences between the dynamics of Lyotard's differend and those of letters. These correspondences derive, this essay argues, from the letter's material properties, which underlie its ability to function as metaphor. The letter's temporal structure of delay and the silences and instability that delay produces, in particular, have productive affinities with the workings of the differend. These correspondences help to delineate the conflicts of The Children Act and to reveal the value of the letter as metaphor more generally. This case study presents an example of the letter as a metaphorical resource, whose possibilities are distinct from those of digital communications and whose flexibility and nuance help to account for contemporary novels' continued interest in the letter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Horse and Morse in Mesopotamia: The Story of Anzacs in Asia (Burke 1927) memorializes the service of various units in that theatre during World War I. It is uncharacteristic of the standard unit history genre in that it adopts the format of so-called soldiers' books. These, key examples of which are The Anzac Book (Bean 1916) and Australia in Palestine (Gullett and Barrett 1919), consist chiefly of contributions from service personnel themselves, and thus are informed to varying degrees by the pre-war populist imperialism espoused in boys' weekly papers and adventure novels by Henty and others. In its self-proclaimed role as 'memory book' of the Mesopotamian veterans' 'great adventure', With Horse and Morse is characterized by the same mix of residual imperial and emergent nationalist discourses to which its predecessor works had subscribed. However, that emergent nationalism in turn has its roots in an earlier discourse of comradeship long upheld in popular boys' papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the role of fiction in Hobbes's system of philosophy has come under growing pressure. This is most clearly reflected in various attempts to dismiss the characterization of Hobbes's state as a person by fiction or even as a person at all. This paper argues against this trend by demonstrating that Hobbes employs fiction in a more consistent and more fundamental way than has been previously recognized. In particular, the paper argues that Hobbes uses fiction to refer to both a peculiar set of mental operations and the 'things' they originate, and that he attributes fiction, as process and as product of that process, key cognitive and world-making functions. Chief amongst the latter, the article argues, is the enactment of the people as a representational fiction. This requires the creation of an intersubjectively shared imaginary encouraging individuals to think themselves and act from their position as citizens, identifying with a collective whose unified will the state – and it only – expresses and enacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a detailed new analysis of the conception, composition, publication, and immediate reception of John William Polidori's influential story, 'The Vampyre' (1819), first attributed to Lord Byron. Polidori was instrumental in publishing the tale – and did so with a certain guile as part of a larger literary strategy. Yet he nevertheless fell victim to the duplicity of the publisher Henry Colburn. Polidori was consequently vilified by the Byron circle, which ultimately wrecked his career as a writer. What emerges from this close attention to publication is that the text is unlikely to have been written in 1816 at the Villa Diodati, alongside Frankenstein, but two and a half years later. This therefore challenges its significance as a supposed portrait of Byron, and allows Byron's own contribution to vampire fiction ('A Fragment') to be re-evaluated. The paper also examines the pieces published alongside 'The Vampyre' on its first appearance, suggesting the likely authors of these supplementary texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I review developments in discussions of fiction and emotion over the last decade concerning both the descriptive question of how to classify fiction-directed emotions and the normative question of how to evaluate those emotions. Although many advances have been made on these topics, a mistaken assumption is still common: that we must hold either that fiction-directed emotions are (empirically or normatively) the same as other emotions, or that they are different. I argue that we should reject this dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the play called Pantomime by Derek Walcott (1978) according to Greimas’s actantial model. The play problematizes issues of identity and validity of the binary oppositions such as master/slave and white/black through employing the master and slave stereotypes animated in the work called Robinson Crusoe. There are two characters named Trewe (S1), and Jackson (S2) in the play. S1, who is a retired English actor, sees his culture as superior to the native culture. S2, who is the servant of S1, has an inferiority complex as he is black. One day, S1, who runs a small hotel in Tobago and wants to entertain his guests at his hotel, wants to prepare a performance of the novel called Robinson Crusoe with Jackson. Interestingly enough, their performance does not reflect the binary oppositions based on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized as in Robinson Crusoe. On the contrary, it openly reverses the roles performed by the colonizer and the colonized after a constant role-shifting by S1 and S2. At the end of the play, S2 asks for a raise from his employer S1 and this might be thought as a possibility for creating a world which is free from binary oppositions, and for starting a new sort of relationship based on an employee and an employer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caroline Lee Hentz's novella Fatal Cosmetic (1839) and Rebekah Hyneman's serial novella The Fatal Cosmetic (1853) are harbingers of American sensation fiction, though for more than a century and a half they were doomed to oblivion. Although different in style and characterization, both novelists aimed at propagating social and political agendas. This paper examines the development of this genre's key elements from earlier conformist ones to their later comprehensive materialization. Moreover, it examines the possible mythological and historical sources Hyneman's novella draws on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning about research ethics and research integrity is greatly facilitated by case studies, which illuminate, ground and personalise abstract questions. This paper argues that fiction can provide similar learning experiences, incarnating ethical dilemmas through a medium that is highly accessible yet sophisticated in its depictions of how researchers behave. Examples of fictional illustrations are given to illustrate various themes such as animal experimentation, exploitation of the vulnerable, researcher bias and research fraud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tells a story of one student teacher's experiences as she considers the choice of fiction texts studied by young secondary learners of English, and how those texts are taught. Based on a series of interviews carried out in the South-West of England and Wales, the narrative provides a perspective on the limitations of current curricula offered by schools that feel bound by a restrictive assessment and inspection regime. It concludes that such curricula can stifle effective teaching and learning, and so teacher educators have a duty to provide new entrants to the profession with a range of perspectives, opportunities and experiences. Through so doing, we promote the fictionalisation of data as a valid, robust approach to educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a statistical overview of bibliodiversity in the Latvian book market—a small language market in terms of the number of Latvian language users and home for people from varied ethnic and national backgrounds. Diversity of the book output during 1991–2020 is analysed in terms of languages and general categories in which books are published, shares of literary genres in fiction publishing, shares of original and translated fiction titles, languages from which fiction titles are translated, as well as the background of fiction authors who have been translated and published in Latvia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a reception history approach to argue that Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory should be considered a modernist text. The intense but varied affective responses of readers, along with the mythic status they attribute to the work, reveal that the novel has long been read both within and as a response to a modernist framework. Furthermore, reader responses all point to the same tension within the novel: the collision of a traditional and specific religious creed, Catholicism, with the thematic uncertainty and fragmentation of literary modernism. This tension is Greene's contribution to the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how representations of the Holocaust – what is labeled Holocaust institutionalization – have been critiqued and even condemned in literary texts. Rather than exploring the Holocaust, and the corollaries of memory, identity, Second Generation inherited trauma, and other concerns, this body of literature considers the integrity, decency and purpose of Holocaust projects. Mainly it looks at the way aspects of Holocaust institutionalization are morally suspect, exploitive and counter to meaningful engagement with Holocaust history in the writings of Mordecai Richler. Then, as a counterpoint it examines Hope by Shalom Auslander and Nathan Englander's 2012 short story, 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,' which traffic in moral inquiries into assumptions about Holocaust institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends the cognitive value of literary fiction by showing how Paul Ricoeur's account of narrative understanding emphasizes the productive and creative elements of fictional discourse and defends its referential capacity insofar as fiction reshapes reality according to some universal aspect. Central to this analysis is Ricoeur's retrieval of Aristotelian mimesis and mythos and their convergence in the notion of emplotment. This paper also supplements and specifies further Ricoeur's account by retrieving an Aristotelian concept disregarded by Riceour, namely, synesis (understanding). Although Ricoeur connects narrative understanding to the intelligibility of praxis and in turn phronêsis, as opposed to theoretical knowledge (theōria or epistēmē), he overlooks Aristotle's discussion of synesis. This paper then clarifies how the fictional truth of narrative understanding remains related to, and yet distinct from, both theoretical discourse (science) and praxis (politics). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, primarily, explores the extent to which Fred Khumalo's novel, Bitches' Brew, can be considered a jazz novel by looking at both its subject matter and form. It argues that the transgressive power of Khumalo's novel lies in its use of epistolary form as a narrative strategy that is akin to a jazz solo, marked as it is by a dialogical narrative that is similar to the call and response pattern that bears an affinity to a jazz performance. In terms of the subject matter, the central thrust of the argument is that the over-arching predominance of sex and violence in the text threatens to overshadow the musicality of the text, even as masculinity and misogyny are considered as the other side of the coin of jazz. In its exploration of the jazz and gender interface, this paper highlights how the phallocratic logic that informs and dominates the novel is indicative of the fact that Khumalo may have 'pushed the envelope' too far in his representation of masculinity and misogyny in jazz culture in his writing of this work. That Khumalo's novel fails to interrogate the relationship between jazz and black masculinity, but rather endorses and valorises it, serves to reinforce the stereotype of misogyny in jazz culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on information sharing by drawing on the reader-response theory developed by Louise Rosenblatt. To this end, information sharing is approached by examining how bloggers communicate their reading experiences of fiction and non-fiction books. Design/methodology/approach: The conceptual framework is based on the differentiation between efferent and aesthetic reading stances specified by Rosenblatt. The efferent stance directs attention to what is to be extracted from reading for instrumental purposes such as task performance. The aesthetic stance focuses on what is being lived through during the reading event. Rosenblatt's framework was elaborated by specifying eight categories of efferent reading and six categories of aesthetic reading. The ways in which bloggers communicate their responses to such readings were examined by scrutinising a sample of 300 posts from two book blogs. Findings: The bloggers mainly articulated responses to efferent reading by sharing information about the content of the reviewed books, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Responses to aesthetic reading were mainly articulated by describing how the bloggers experienced the narrative, what kind immersive experiences they had and what kind of emotions were felt during the reading process. Research limitations/implications: As the study is explorative in nature and focusses on a sample of blog posts, the findings cannot be generalised to depict how people share their responses to efferent and aesthetic reading in social media forums. Originality/value: The paper pioneers by examining the potential of Rosenblatt's theory in the study of sharing information about reading experiences in book blogs. The findings demonstrate that the categories of efferent and aesthetic reading can be elaborated further for the needs of information behaviour research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early years science curriculum in England requires teachers to incorporate scientific enquiry in their classrooms. However, teachers perceive science teaching to be challenging because of their lack of subject knowledge. This paper aims to develop an understanding of science as an enquiry rich subject rather than a plethora of scientific knowledge. In this paper, I will present a model of Enquiry Based Learning (EBL) that can be introduced in early years teaching and learning practices. This presentation of the EBL model will then lead to a discussion on the benefits of using children's stories to scaffold the process of scientific enquiry. Finally, I will present three example scenarios from the stories of Curious George, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Wizard of Oz, to support early year practitioners to include scientific enquiry practices as an integral part of their day-to-day planning and delivery of lessons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is based on a general statement on the importance of minority literature in the background of the opposition center - periphery. It emphasizes the viability of cultural efforts of minorities and mentions the specific conditions and forms of their literary realizations. Emphasis is placed on space-time of the Slovaks in Hungary during the turbulent 20th century. The aim of the paper is to point out the personality of Pavol Kondač (1931-2019), whose direct founding cultural-literary effort is still significant in the life of this national minority. The methodological starting point is the presentation of significant novels by this person: the author of the first Slovak novel in Hungary. In the background of the concretized cultural memory of nationality, he emphasizes his texts, in which he follows the tortuous fate of a simple, but also socially significant Slovak in the given chronotope. He focuses not only on the individual but also on the nationality as a whole. He presents various events, attributes, features and aspects which in one way or another (i.e. complexly) influenced the narrower or broader community in the given coordinates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the so far unnoticed relation between Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and the life and works of Spanish novelist Francisco Umbral. In spite of having written numerous texts on canonical Spanish authors, Umbral actually paid limited attention to Cervantes. The purpose of the paper is to establish the few yet significant affinities that Umbral expressed towards Cervantes and the main character of his novel. In order to demonstrate this complex link, the paper compares the character of Alonso Quijano to Umbral as a public figure himself. In both cases, there is a constant negotiation between fact and fiction, which leads us to problematize, according to Ian Watt, the concept of "myth" as a paradigm of modern individualism. The second part of the paper examines the metaphors of history that Umbral discovers throughout his reading of Don Quixote. Finally, the third section reflects on the similarities between Quijano and Umbral as both heroes and polemicists. Conclusions show that Umbral's interpretation is symptomatic of a shared perspective of Miguel de Cervantes' novel among late 20th century Spanish writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colm Tóibín's novella The Testament of Mary (2013) offers a provocative re‐imagining of the Virgin Mary's life 20 years after the crucifixion of her son Jesus. Drawing on Richard Kearney's notion of anatheism or a 'return to God after God', I use the fictive space opened up in Tóibín's version of the Gospel as a spur to understanding the way in which faith may be conceived of as wager within both fiction and psychoanalysis. Discussing how the reception of the artistic message requires the same spirit of hospitality as does the encounter with alterity within the psychoanalytic relationship, I argue that in both cases we are faced with an existential moment of choice that requires a whole‐hearted willingness to engage with otherness. The implications of Tóibín's story for psychoanalytic work are then explored with reference to developmental processes outlined by Winnicott (1971) in his paper 'The use of an object'. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the significance of testimony within psychoanalytic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore the art of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) as an impressionist writer by focusing on one of his novels, Under Western Eyes (1911) as a psychological novel. In order to understand Conrad's motives and style to write this novel one should start with a sound beginning by looking at his concept of narrative fiction and recurring themes in the novel. The points that are highlighted in the paper are the concept of betrayal and its reasons and results for the characters, and the absence of a father as a driving force. Also, such philosophical issues and questions as 'who sees what?', seeing versus understanding and the impossibility of free will be explored in this article. This study argues that Joseph Conrad as a novelist uses impressionism as a tool to capture and convey the psychological principles concerning human consciousness in the aforementioned novel; in this sense, this article is also an attempt to contribute to the scholarship on Conrad's narrative fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a project drawing together an artist working on creative GIS, a geomatics scholar, an NGO leader, a rural geographer and soil scientist, an environmental geochemist, and a political geographer. With a shared interest in the social and physical processes affecting people's lives in Malawi, and the possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration, the team engaged in practice-based mapping of our data sources and respective methodologies. The project relates to two sites in Malawi: Tikondwe Freedom Gardens and the Likangala River. The paper details our practices as we shared, debated, and repurposed our data as a means of situating these practices and data. Using paper and pen, whiteboard, PowerPoint, and web-design software, we note here our effort to map a 'space of experimentation' highlighting, and reflecting on, our diverse disciplinary orientations, training, instrumentation, recording, and reporting procedures, as well as bodily practices that enable and give animation to these factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, James Edwin Mahon (2019) argues that literary artworks—novels in particular—never lie because they do not assert. In this discussion note, I reject Mahon's conclusion that novels never lie. I argue that a central premiss in his argument—that novels do not contain assertions—is false. Mahon's account underdetermines the content of literary works; novels have rich layers of content and can contain what I call 'profound' assertions, and 'background' assertions. I submit that Mahon therefore fails to establish that novels never lie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last few decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from novels (e.g., Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter) to films (e.g., Star Wars and Avatar), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece and Naruto), and TV series (e.g., Star Trek and Game of Thrones), and they date as far back as ancient literature (e.g., the Cyclops Islands in The Odyssey , 850 BCE). Why such a success? Why so much attention devoted to non-existent worlds? In this paper, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt our preferences for exploration, which have evolved in humans and nonhuman animals alike, to propel individuals toward new environments and new sources of reward. Humans would find imaginary worlds very attractive for the very same reasons, and under the same circumstances, as they are lured by unfamiliar environments in real life. After reviewing research on exploratory preferences in behavioral ecology, environmental esthetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary and developmental psychology, we focus on the sources of their variability across time and space, which we argue can account for the variability of the cultural preference for imaginary worlds. This hypothesis can, therefore, explain the way imaginary worlds evolved culturally, their shape and content, their recent striking success, and their distribution across time and populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a descriptive case study of the Mobeybou materials, a kit of tangible and digital tools aimed at offering young children opportunities to read, create and share intercultural stories. The tools comprise a set of story apps that present interactive, multimodal and intercultural stories for children to make meanings with, a digital manipulative (DM) and a storyMaker (a digital replication of the DM) that offer the possibility for embodied, collaborative and creative construction of stories by the children themselves. After presenting the materials, we describe how they evolved as an interface of convergence of several complementary theories. By doing this, our major intention is to contribute to the understanding that the design of tools and technologies aimed at creating meaningful and inclusive opportunities for digital story telling in troubled times is a complex, demanding endeavour, but can also be a powerful tool to address the complexities of the troubled times we are living in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As defined by Georg G. Iggers and promoted by Hayden White, the postmodern challenge of historiography calls into question the objective enquiry and truth value of history writing. Many works of fiction have embodied this trend, embracing the challenge by exploring objectivity and the retrievability of the past. In contemporary Canadian literature, such cases are also to be found. The novel Weird Sister (1999) by Kate Pullinger thematizes history and history writing, utilizes Gothic elements, and employs the elements of historiographic metafiction, e.g. as characterized by Linda Hutcheon. The book features characters representing the so‐called silent voices whose testimony had remained lost in the official historical record. This paper aims to show that the depiction of the impossibility of uncovering the truth about the past represents a significant contribution by contemporary fiction authors to the postmodern challenge of historiography, with Pullinger’s novel emerging as a notable contribution to this discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E. L. Doctorow became world-famous primarily for his novel Ragtime (1975), which references a distinct style of playing the piano that had a profound impact on the development of jazz. Music also plays a principal role in a number of the author’s other works. This paper explores the role of music in one of his later novels, City of God (2000), with a focus on selected scenes in which music is represented. From the viewpoint of different modes of music in literature, namely the thematization of music, the sound layer and the musicalization of fiction, this contribution examines the emotions elicited in the protagonists in the scenes in question, as well as the atmosphere that the music creates or accentuates. It also takes into account which musical instruments are employed, including the symbolic meaning that one of them, the violin, carries. Furthermore, an investigation is presented as to what extent musical elements from other novels by E. L. Doctorow can be found, and in which respects this novel is unique. In City of God, the lyrics of jazz tunes emerge throughout the novel, thus the importance of this motif is discussed in detail along with the attention devoted to other major manifestations of music in this literary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simply put, hyperreality is used to denote something that does not yet exist in the sense of being undeniably demonstrable. According to Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), hyperreality is a state where reality has been replaced by simulacra, meaning that what is real and what is fictional is indistinguishable. Equally, hyperreality starts as soon as one replaces the question of 'if by 'when'. Therein, in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, it becomes quite difficult to establish whether or not Grace Marks is innocent, pure and wrongly accused of the horrible murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Likewise, Grace's memory (which, strangely enough, is referred to in terms of its absence rather than its presence since she is supposedly suffering from amnesia) is some sort of virtual reality, an entire world in itself, where Grace can appear to be anything she wants to be. By constantly overlapping the Canadian landscape, Grace's subconscious enables a window into the world within, one of the past, the present and the future, some sort of interface between three different psychological entities with their corresponding and symbolic representations of the landscape. The present paper looks into the novel from behind the lens of the Canadian landscape (although scarce in occurrences) as a metonymy of hyperreal mindscapes: doubly displaced both geographically (she is an Irish immigrant), and mentally (she seems to be manifesting a form of multiple personality disorder), Grace simultaneously exists in hyperreal mindscapes, mimicking and replicating, stating and questioning, challenging readers who are left adrift in a textual world where the boundaries between reality and representation become blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]