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The genre of science fiction has often been hostile to readers who are not white, middle class, heterosexual men. Though the genre has historically ignored Dark Others; however, they are never completely omitted from the story, as they are often characterized as the creature, the alien, or the monster. In this way, the futuristic windows and mirrors available to Black women and girls are often cracked, tiny, or shattered. The primary objective of this paper, then, is to further conversations about the need for diverse books and genres in schools by focusing on the science fiction reading histories of Black women and highlighting the features that draw Black women to the genre. The reading histories of Black women can provide further data that showcases the need for new mythologies, ones that center Dark Others prospering in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Olympica , the lost manuscript wherein Descartes described his famous three dreams, he wrote that on the night of Saint Martin in 1619 he felt asleep in a state of enthusiasm. He interpreted the dreams that ensued as the divine revelation of the principles of a new and admirable science. I here propose that the Olympica were a literary fiction devised by Descartes to legitimize his arrival on the philosophical scene by proposing the principles of a new science. The function of dreams as the best way to reach true wisdom is in line with a long philosophical tradition. This paper offers an attempt to understand the Cartesian enthusiasm in its context, that is, before the criticism of enthusiasm as something incompatible with reason became widespread and when it was still linked to the Platonic theory of furor – poetic and divine – the state that allows the subject access to the truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably, the first work of Canadian fiction in English to depict Ukrainians was Ralph Connor's The Foreigner, a Tale of Saskatchewan, published in 1909. Since then, some of Canada's major writers, including Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Morley Callaghan, Sinclair Ross, and W. O. Mitchell have depicted Ukrainians in their works. Gabrielle Roy, writing in French, also created Ukrainian characters. Beginning at least in 1954 with the publication of Vera Lysenko's Yellow Boots, writers of Ukrainian origin began to break through into the pantheon of CanLit. The publication of works by writers of Ukrainian origin increased dramatically following the adoption of Multiculturalism and the resultant infusion of government funding into the "culture industry." This article considers the depiction of the Ukrainian immigrant in two plays—Paper Wheat, written by a collective, and Gwen Pharis Ringwood's A Fine Coloured Easter Egg; in several novels—Frederick Philip Grove's Fruits of the Earth, Arthur G. Storey's Prairie Harvest, and Vera Lysenko's Yellow Boots; and in Gabrielle Roy's short story "The Well of Dunrea." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major drive of human communication is the recognition of intention. This is one of the major contributions of Paul Grice to the development of pragmatics. However, studies in Relevance Theory have elaborated this claim to incorporate the internal psycho-cognitive mechanisms associated with Grice's claim. Sperber and Wilson in many of their publications espoused the course of investigating the natural proceedings of human language and assert that the core principle of communication is relevance. This theoretic framework is based on the network of the principles of cognition, communication, and comprehension. In this paper, it is discovered that relevance is not just a property of spoken language but also of written aspect of language. Since the intention of every writer is to communicate to an audience, and to communicate means to be understood, this paper examines how the property of relevance is construed in fictional narrative and how, by means of invented conversation between and among fictional characters, the authorial intention is made perceptible to the reader. The theory is applied to Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease, drawing analysis from selected conversations in the novel. It is realised that the conclusive maximization of relevance from the novel, on the part of the reader, is dependent on the explication of the cognitive transaction of relevance among the characters. This explication is made possible by means of authorial mediacy in the construction of context upon which the reader anchors his cognitive hypothesis toward the comprehension of the narrative conversations. In general, it is discovered that the interconnection of spectra of narratives as the design of the narrator is only relevant to the reader if the blending of those separate events toward the holistic understanding of the novel yields a positive cognitive effect. On the other hand the major goal of a writer of fiction is to reproduce a natural conversational prototype based on relevance, with the intention that readers will be effortlessly guided toward his authorial intention in order to draw conclusions that matter to them. The analysis from the novel therefore, provides details of how the reader processes and comprehends the conversation between characters and the novel as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many educators in adult, community and higher education contexts are concerned with fostering reflective learning amongst their students. This paper explores the concept of critical reflection and considers how engaging with fiction may be an innovative pedagogical approach to support critical learning opportunities. Drawing upon interviews with fiction writers, ways in which critical reflection may be encouraged in connection to reading and writing fiction are taken up by exploring three different thematic areas that relate to a Habermasian framework of knowledge constitutive approaches to learning. These different areas can be categorised as (a) technical-rational, (b) humanistic and (c) critical or emancipatory. The first of these considers critical reflection as a way to develop technical capacities as a creative writer. The next section takes up a humanistic framework to explore the value of individual and collective learning opportunities to enhance personal growth and critical reflection. The third area of discussion considers a deeper critical or emancipatory framework of learning through critical reflection which may lead to social change. The paper concludes by considering the value of arts-informed adult education approaches, such as those related to fiction writing, to enhance the development of critical reflection amongst adult learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of recent philosophical argument concerning the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.Design/methodology/approach A critical view of the literature.Findings A consensus that had emerged that defined fiction in terms of the imagination, and imagination in terms of its functional role, has recently been questioned.Research limitations/implications The overview was written by a contributor to the field, and so may be considered partial.Practical implications There might be some implications regarding the ways books are classified.Originality/value The paper is not original, in that it puts forward points made elsewhere, however it is a completely up-to-date review of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a reading of Chang-rae Lee's novel A Gesture Life, which emphasizes the theme of transnational adoption from Korea as a displaced continuation of the comfort women issue. The essay seeks to draw attention to some of the ideological structures surrounding adoption. In the novel, the unreliable narrator Hata's unresolved relation to Kkutaeh - a Korean comfort woman - is displaced and repeated in his unresolved relation to his adopted daughter, Sunny. The paper suggests that we understand the relation between Kkutaeh and Sunny in terms of Žižek's notion of ideology. The adopted daughter (Sunny), in this perspective, is a sublime object of ideology that conceals the traumatic kernel of the symbolic order (Kkutaeh). Through an interpretation of the novel A Gesture Life, the essay seeks to draw attention to some of the specific ideologies surrounding transnational adoption from Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Marie Cardinal's autobiographical novel The Words to Say It (1975), I explore how a somatic disturbance mysteriously located in utero represents an ‘après‐coup’, a second time experience of ‘what is already there’. The titles of both the book and this paper suggest that words hold a transformative power – an emotional re‐education for the fragmented subject. The ‘Thing’ refers on the one hand to the author's distressing illness: her continuous menstrual bleeding, for which there is no medical explanation. In order not to succumb to her ‘madness’, Marie decides to start psychoanalysis. From being utterly prostrated in darkness, Marie painfully remembers, repeats and reconstructs a piece of her early history (a ‘truth’) she had forgotten. Eventually, as the flow of words replaces the flow of blood, Marie ‘learns to name her ghost’ and is rewarded with a new sense of ‘self’. On the other hand, the ‘thing’ refers to the Freudian concept of thing‐presentation and word‐presentation. It concerns the processes by which an unconscious ‘thing’ which couldn't be symbolized becomes conscious once represented in words. The paper is inspired by French psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes a critical appraisal of the prospects for fictionalist inquiry in psychology, which runs contrary to the traditional dissociation between fiction and knowledge-laden discourse. Following a review of the contested boundary between fiction and nonfiction, a portrait of essential aspects of fiction emerges, which includes authorial warrant, imaginative prescription, and performative engagement . The paper then proceeds to outline fictionalism as a philosophical approach, with reference to early and more modern variants of the position. This leads to a little discussed epistemic position called the fictional stance , which is then developed and applied to various psychological domains including the psychology of fiction, the fictional constructions of psychology, and the narrative study of lives. The viewpoint that emerges sees the epistemic value of fictional thinking in the unique access it provides to intuitive powers of the psychological imagination and to non-conceptual understandings of psychological life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is dedicated to the issue of the adequacy of self-translations of Vladimir Nabokov’s small forms of fiction. Different types of transformations of short-story titles in the creative work of the bilingual writer were chosen as the object of the research. The article is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach, uniting aspects of linguistic, literary and cultural studies in the investigation of the self-translation phenomenon, an approach that provides for scientifically-grounded conclusions. The authors of the paper build a typology of structural and semantic changes reflecting the features of Nabokov’s interpretations of his own texts. Contrastive comparative, structural, intertextual and cognitive methods were employed as the main research methods. This complex approach to text analysis used in the paper permits an expansion of the idea of the semantics and poetics of separate texts as well as a collection of stories as a whole. The authors pay special attention to investigation of the following types of correlation between the original title and its equivalent: semantic specification, semantic narrowing, semantic broadening and modulation. The authors note that Nabokov in many cases does not follow his own principles of “literality”. The specializing character of correlation between the original text and the translation is predetermined by the author’s aspiration to convey the exact sense and to emphasize separate connotative shades of meaning, while devices of modulation and semantic broadening perform the function of an author’s comment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L iterature and F ine A rts Kuzmic, Tatiana. Adulterous Nations: Family Politics and National Anxiety in the European Novel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. xvi + 229 pp. $34.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8101-3397-6. Reyfman, Irina. How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks. Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. ix + 237 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-299-30830-8. Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. Edited and translated by Kirsten Lodge. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2017. 184 pp. $12.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-5448-13223. Panova, Lada. Mnimoe sirotstvo: Khlebnikov i Kharms v kontekste russkogo i evropeiskogo modernizma. Issledovaniia kul'tury. Moscow: Izdatel'skii dom Vysshei shkoly ekonomiki, 2017. 608 pp. R601.00. ISBN 978-5-7598-1509-9. Kharms, Daniil. Russian Absurd: Selected Writings. Northwestern World Classics. Translated by Alex Cigale. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017. xxv + 254 pp. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8101-3457-7. Berlina, Alexandra, ed. and trans. Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. x + 399 pp. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-5013-1037-9. Sandler, Stephanie, Margarita Krimmel, Oleg Novikov, and Maria Khotimsky, eds. Ol'ga Sedakova: Stikhi, Smysly, Prochteniia. Sbornik nauchnykh statei. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017. 552 pp. R585.00. ISBN 978-5-4448-0611-1. Frolova-Walker, Marina. Stalin's Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. xi + 369 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-300-20884-9. Mazierska, Ewa, Matilda Mroz, and Elżbieta Ostrowska, eds. The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia: Between Pain and Pleasure. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 272 pp. £75.00. ISBN 978-1-4744-0514-0. Beumers, Birgit, ed. A Companion to Russian Cinema. Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. xvi + 656 pp. $195.00. ISBN 978-1-118-41276-3. H istory North, Michael. The Baltic: A History. Translated by Kenneth Kronenberg. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. xi + 427 pp. $22.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-674-97083-0. Antonov, Sergei. Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Harvard Historical Studies 187. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. x + 387 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-674-97148-6. Remy, Johannes. Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russian from the 1840s to the 1870s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. x + 344 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-4875-0046-7. Schedrin, Vassilli. Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850-1917. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. xi + 292 pp. $49.99. ISBN 978-0-8143-4043-4. Stockdale, Melissa Kirschke. Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 284 pp. $99.99. ISBN 978-1-107-09386-7 House, John M. Wolfhounds and Polar Bears: The American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, 1918-1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. xviii + 243 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1889-5. Horowitz, Brian. The Russian-Jewish Tradition: Intellectuals, Historians, Revolutionaries. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2017. 292 pp. $82.00. ISBN 978-1-6181-1556-0. Brenton, Tony, ed. Was Revolution Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xx + 364 pp. $17.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-19-065891-5. Saburova, Tat'iana, and Ben Eklof. Druzhba, sem'ia, revoliutsiia: Nikolai Charushin i pokolenie narodnikov 1870-kh godov. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016. 444 pp. $23.00. ISBN 978-5-4448-0558-9. Baberowski, Jörg. Scorched Earth: Stalin's Reign of Terror. The Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes. Translated by Steven Gilbert, Ivo Komljen, and Samantha Jeanne Taber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. xii + 500 pp. $40.00. ISBN 978-0-300-13698-2. Holmes, Larry E. Stalin's World War II Evacuations: Triumphs and Troubles in Kirov. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. xiv + 231 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-7006-2395-2. Glantz, David M., with Mary Elizabeth Glantz. The Battle for Belorussia: The Red Army's Forgotten Campaign of October 1943-April 1944. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. xxvi + 760 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-7006-23299-7. Dumitru, Diana. The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xvii + 268 pp. $99.99. ISBN 978-1-107-13196-5. Hrynevych, Vladyslav, and Paul Robert Magocsi, eds. Babyn Yar: History and Memory. Kiev: Dukh i Litera, 2016. 328 pp. Hrn200.00. ISBN 978-966-378-470-0. Heftrich, Urs, Robert Jacobs, Bettina Kaibach, and Karoline Thaidigsmann, eds. Images of Rupture between East and West: The Perception of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Media. Beiträge zur Neueren Literaturgeschichte Band 347. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. 547 pp. €68.00. ISBN 978-3-8253-6548-6. Lovell, Stephen. Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 272 pp. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-198-72526-8. Miller, Chris. The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR. The New Cold War History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xx + 244 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-3017-5. Service, Robert. The End of the Cold War, 1985-1991. London: Macmillan, 2015. 562 pp. £35.00. ISBN 978-0-230-74808-8. S ocial S ciences, C ontemporary R ussia, and O ther Schulmeister-André, Irina. Internationale strafgerichtsbarkeit unter sowjetischem Einfluss: Der Beitrag der UdSSR zum Nürnberger Hauptkriegsverbrecherprozess. Studies in International and European Criminal Law and Procedure 27. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2016. 580 pp. €107.90. ISBN 978-3-428-14867-7. Burgess, John P. Holy Rus': The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. xiv + 264 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-300-22224-1. Kurilla, Ivan, and Victoria I. Zhuravleva, eds. Russian/Soviet Studies in the United States, Amerikanistika in Russia: Mutual Representations in Academic Projects. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. xix + 286 pp. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-4895-1798-0. Marchenia, P. P., and S. Iu. Razin, eds. Rossiiskaia mnogopartiinost' i rossiiskie krizisy XX-XXI vv: Sbornik nauchnykh statei i materialov kruglykh stolov. Narod i vlast' v rossiiskoi smute. Narod i vlast': Istoriia Rossii i ee fal'sifikatsii, Vol. 6. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Ippolitova, 2016. 948 pp. ISBN 978-5-90363-102-5. Reisinger, William M., and Bryon J. Moraski. The Regional Roots of Russia's Political Regime. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. xii + 268 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-472-13018-4. Tönsmann, Susanne. What Is Citizenship For? Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2017. 218 pp. €49.00. ISBN 978-3-8305-3595-9. Gabowitsch, Mischa. Protest in Putin's Russia. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. 300 pp. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-7456-9625-6. Trenin, Dmitri. Should We Fear Russia? Cambridge: Polity, 2016. 144 pp. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-5095-1090-0. Raikhel, Eugene. Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic. Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. xiv + 232 pp. $26.95 (paper). ISBN 978-105017-0313-3. Pallot, Judith, and Elena Katz. Waiting at the Prison Gate: Women, Identity and the Russian Penal System. London: I. B. Tauris, 2017. xx + 252 pp. $110.00. ISBN 978-1-78453-660-2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the 2004 Spanish fictional novel by Andrés Barba, Ahora tocad música de baile, one of the first cultural texts dealing entirely with Alzheimer's disease to appear in Spain. It argues that the significance of Barba's fictional novel rests on two important issues: the ethics of representation of violence against vulnerable subjects and the ethics of care. The paper analyses how these two issues allow Barba to create a story in which the verbal and physical abuse to which the person living with Alzheimer's disease is subjected places the reader, on the one hand, as voyeur/witness of the abuse; and, on the other, as interpreter, and ultimately judge, of the fine line that separates euthanasia, assisted suicide and murder. The open ending of the novel defers all ethical and moral judgement to the reader. It examines how the novel offers a monolithic perspective about Alzheimer's disease, in which care is presented as a burden. In fact, this study shows that the novel's multi-layered structure and polyphonic nature places the emphasis on stigmas, stereotypes and negative metaphors around Alzheimer's disease, as found in contemporary social discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study examines the etiology of the Evil theme in the children's literature of the late 20th -- early 21st century from the sociocultural perspective. The paper outlines some of the sociocultural effects of the children's horror literature, feeding on infantilism as an emerging subculture. The study's particular emphasis is meant on key focus areas of the children's literature, like genre peculiarities and stylistics, which need to be "sanitized", upon the authors's point of view. The governing role of the State in the regulation of the publishing industry is given special consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 financial crisis and its global repercussions engendered an outpouring of film and fiction, documentary and popular economics books as well as mainstream media representation and discussion. Yet, amid such overt creative efforts to portray and critique economic inequality, literary scholars seem at a loss on how to incorporate this momentum in the English department. Caught in a difficult catch-22, English studies are faced with a need to respond critically to cultural production that engages with economics, yet are facing pressure from the neoliberal university's funding cuts and undermining of the critical thinking skills, ethics, imagination and imaginary that make up humanities disciplines. As a way out of the circular and disjointed efforts of literary critics and scholars from across the humanities to defend our disciplines, this paper looks to social science critics of neoliberal capitalism for their deployment of literature and the imagination in thinking alternative economies. Their methods of using literary fiction and their own creative writing to intervene in critique and propose alternatives suggest meaningful and inspirational uses of literature that English academics tend to miss or dismiss. My aim is to consider how we as academics and as citizens might engage our imaginations to think economics and our institutions differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish series production between 1990 and 2010 (from the analogue switch-off to deregulation and the arrival of new TV channels and platforms) stands out for a large number of "based-on-real-events" dramas. These include historical events, traumatic events of little historical import and biographical accounts of eminent figures. This paper analyses the veracity of archival footage and other media resources (press, radio) included in these series and the way in which they used. A quantitative and qualitative analysis, combined with an extensive literature review, shows that some of the apparently real historical footage and images integrated into these series are in actual fact fake. The viewer's possible confusion in decoding these images would suggest that the use of archival material in fictional drama brings it closer to genres traditionally considered non-fiction. Finally, the inclusion of real (and fake) archival footage in audio-visual accounts of past events appears to fulfil an ideological function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I often tell my students that the only thing that is not controversial in philosophy is that everything else in it is controversial. While this might be a bit of an exaggeration, it does contain a kernel of truth, as many exaggerations do: philosophy is a highly contentious discipline. So it is remarkable the extent to which there is agreement in the philosophy of religion amongst theists, agnostics, and atheists alike that John Mackie's argument for atheism is either invalid or unsound. As a result, the focus has entirely shifted from the logical problem of evil to the so-called evidential one. But I think that this is a mistake, not necessarily because I think Mackie's argument is sound, but rather because I reject an assumption made by apparently all parties to the debate, which is that there is only one logical problem of evil. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to defend a deductive argument that God* does not exist. As far as I can tell, the basic idea of this argument is a novel one: while Mackie's argument (and much of the discussion that occurs in its wake) has a more or less consequentialist framework, mine has a deontological one. The evil of which I will speak is that of our having been thrown into the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to unpick and examine a number of related claims for the role of the arts or, more specifically, the creative arts, in educational research. It considers and evaluates ways in which artistic creativity might itself be thought of as either based on research or itself a form of inquiry which might claim to be research. Such claims are entirely plausible, though they perhaps force artistic creativity into a particular mould that not all artists would appreciate. Artistic work may also constitute data conveying information about a particular setting or the events from which they were produced, signs and symbols for the observer or researcher to interpret. The claim that art might be used to represent educational practice, policy or experience receives the fullest treatment, and this requires consideration of both the general claim (which runs counter to the ambitions of many artists, choreographers and musicians) and more particular claims for, for example research‐based narrative fiction, which is treated somewhat sceptically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author's first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reappraises Thomas Mofolo's Chaka as a novel that covertly subverts the biblical and colonial notions of sin, salvation, and backwardness that were part of the colonialist enterprise's ideological corpus in Africa—the so called "civilizing mission"—and very astutely deconstructs, and then reconstructs, the character of Chaka into a messianic figure whose ultimate death (and betrayal) at the hands of his own attracts the kind of sympathy that is reserved only for fallen heroes and, consequently, prophets. While a number of critics have looked at some of the biblical implications of Mofolo's fictionalized rendering of the Zulu cultural and historical universe under king Chaka, it is only somewhat hesitantly that Chaka has been read assertively as an anticolonial and resistance novel that, by attributing to Chaka a trajectory and destiny that closely mirror those of Jesus Christ, has sought to subvert the missionary ethos of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From literary fiction to planning and policy visions, narratives frame, question, and shape the future and our possibilities to act upon it. This paper approaches the question of narrated agency in future narratives through the lens of the New York waterfront, explored here as a site for enacting and critiquing the possibility to act towards the future. Who is described as having the possibility to act at the waterfront, and to what extent is the water seen as a force in its own right? This essay addresses these questions by examining two key texts imagining a future New York City: the New York Comprehensive Waterfront Plan Vision 2020 (2011) and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 (2017). It argues that both texts gesture towards an acknowledgement of possible agency of the water, while continuing to reiterate an instrumental relationship with the environment that focuses on processes of appropriation, distribution and production. Ultimately, this essay considers the implications for the implied readers' agency, and for their possibilities to take meaningful action to interact with, and make changes in, their relationship with the water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the stylistic means Behn employs to convey frenzied states of emotion in her prose narratives, and compares her writing to that of other authors of romance and amatory fiction in the period. Behn's attitude to both libertine indulgence and psychomachia is equivocal, varying from text to text. Passion is at once a token of sublime sensibility and a (self-)destructive infatuation. The language of emotions in her narratives is not gendered: male and female characters alike indulge in emotional and behavioural excess. Her hyperbolic, breathless style and inchoate syntax seem to simulate the characters' lack of passion control, but are ultimately exposed as consummate artifice. The real and the fake are inextricably intertwined. She occasionally punctuates her eroticised descriptions with humour, but also links sexual, religious and colonial desire, and voyeuristic pleasure by means of a highly sensuous style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the term Dear, an address used by writers in personal letters, conference papers, or manifestos. It notes that the formal structure does not alter between instances regarded as real and those regarded as fiction. It states that formal structure remains independent of the distinction, otherwise it could never give itself to all the instances of address.

This paper aims to analyse the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) regime's desire to control the public discourse about violence in GDR (German Democratic Republic) football and its wilful downplay as a non-political matter. The TV film Abseits (Offside), episode of the very popular series Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort (The Prosecutor has the Floor) presented by state prosecutor Dr. Peter Przybilski and broadcast in prime time on DDR1 in December 1981, shall serve as example of this ideologized fiction building. Violence in GDR football was represented as a societal problem caused by adolescents and young adults with excessive alcohol consumption or psychological predisposition. Abseits/Offside confronts its audience with a filmic narrative centred around a non-football specific Rowdytum resulting of a love rivalry. Violence only erupts on the fringes of the stadium and Abseits (Offside) at least offers a fictional ellipsis and euphemism of reality in GDR football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freedom of artistic creation includes the liberty to disseminate artistic works. The protection of the artistic expression is related with the possibility of distinguishing fiction and reality. This paper studies the possibilities and limits of the art as a protected speech in Spain, taking into account the examples of France, Germany and the European Court of Human Rights [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally agreed that Galician crime fiction began in 1984, when Carlos G. Reigosa's Crime en Compostela was published. Since then, different authors have explored the genre with varying success. One of the best-known writers of Galician crime fiction is Diego Ameixeiras, who published eleven novels between 2004 (Baixo mínimos) and 2018 (A crueldade de abril). This paper will focus on Ameixeiras's works, in particular Baixo mínimos and A noite enriba (2015). The distance between their dates of publication will allow us to highlight through their differences in structure and style the clear evolution in Ameixeiras's narrative production from parody to social critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In this paper, we provide a concise overview of the researches that address the search and selection of adult literature, with special emphasis on the search for yet unknown material, especially in the online environment. Methodotogy/approach: We performed a comparative critical review of the available literature. We reviewed researches by domestic and foreign authors, especially in the field of library and information science. Results: In the studies, the search for literature is highlighted as a strongly context-related process where the combination of the readers' searching skills, their knowledge, personal and affective factors, and well-functioning interaction with the system results in a more or less successful literary book selection. The basic functions of literature are to provoke a certain state of mind in the reader or to communicate the author's view, judgment. A good fiction search system should also include these aspects tailored to individual types of readers. In order to create more appropriate systems for literature readers, we need additional, both qualitative and extensive evaluation user studies. Research limitations: Only researches addressing the search for adult literature were included in the analysis of information retrieval behavior. We have not considered studies on the search for non-fiction, nor studies on the search for fiction for children. The review was limited to sources published in English, Italian and Slovenian language. Originality/practical implications: By reviewing the research areas and research methods used, we determined the coverage of researches that address the issue of finding and selecting literature for adults. In this context we identified yet unexplored gaps and developed substantive and methodological guidelines for further work. At the same time, we offered a theoretical basis for the further development of the recommended literature portal Dobreknjige.si and other consulting services for literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to draw the reader's attention to the physiognomic skills of Anne Brontë as manifested in her neglected novel Agnes Grey. This is an aspect of character depiction that has merited critical attention in the works of her sister Charlotte. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Czech appropriation of the literary genre splatterpunk, political correctness, or more precisely the lack of it, occupies a prominent place. Fascination with so-called 'incorrectness' can be understood to be a special case of what Richard Burt identifies as 'the fetish of censorship' with writers drawing from the appeal of such 'forbidden' topics as racial and gender stereotypes. This paper examines the ways in which the criticism of correctness plays out in different forms of paratexts, such as ads, reviews, and interviews with writers. The analysis of Czech splatterpunk novels and short stories reveals what is actually understood as 'incorrect' in terms of literary fiction, and how those texts, featuring primarily white masculine heroes with indestructible bodies, lend themselves to different kinds of readings: from sharp political satire to self-reflective spectacular grotesque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper dedicated to the issue of the memory and the novel in the 18th century aims at questioning the memoir-novels, as a privileged form of the fiction during the first half of the century. The memoir-novel is indeed based on memories of a hero-narrator reminiscing about his past love life. As memory and imagination are strongly linked in the thought of the 17th and 18th century, the question of their relationship is particularly relevant in the novels by Antoine Prévost, insofar as his heroes claim to produce a pathetic effect and seduce their interlocutor/reader. Our reflection takes as an example La Jeunesse du Commandeur (1741) -- a kind of "reverse story" to that of the Chevalier Des Grieux -- where memory and imagination are put at the service of a burlesque treatment of passion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metalinguistic, the work of Sérgio Sant'Anna is characterized by a fictionalization of the writing itself, offering protagonism to the literary language. In "Um discurso sobre o método", a 1989 short story, published in A senhorita Simpson, that protagonism brings a fundamental question for Brazilian literature: the representation of the poor, and the ways of aesthetically adressing social distances. This paper seeks to analyze how such process occurs, investigating both the narrative formulation and the disputes evidenced by it, reading Sant'Anna's writing as a stage for the clashes that conform fiction and the reproduction of the real, which are also present in the Brazilian literary field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of Dubravka Ugrešić's novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1997) revolves around three core motifs: the problem of memory and remembering, the experience of temporality, and the notion of exile, developed in relation to the dichotomy of fact versus fiction. While most theoretical approaches to the novel focus on the motif of exile in the context of dominant ideological patterns of the new national states formed after the breakup of Yugoslavia, this paper represents a shift in interpretative focus to the problem of memory and the experience of temporality in the perspective of the dynamics of history and fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Congolese-born French writer Alain Mabanckou is the architect and creative entrepreneur of a world literature project that unmakes the Francophone African novel into a world literature text and recalibrates the relations between literary traditions in the category of world literature. The undisciplined intertextuality of Mabanckou's Verre cassé [ Broken Glass ], the novel that propelled him onto the global literary marketplace, serves as a good example of the new geopolitics of literature that the writer envisions. These are horizontal geopolitics, along the lines of what Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o theorized, albeit in utopian fashion, as "globalectics," meaning a horizontal way of doing and reading world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her introduction to Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories, Margaret Atwood identifies a parallel between the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and Munro's narrative practices: that the "denial of either/or classifying logic and an acceptance of both-at-once mystery" essential to the Incarnation seem parallel to the way in which Munro's stories "resolve themselves--or fail to resolve themselves." Atwood's insight encourages an examination of the narrative engagement with Christianity found in a wide range of Munro's stories. This paper does so in "The Love of a Good Woman" (1998), a test case for understanding the possibilities of incarnational imagination in Munro's fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looked at the nature of sourcing stories in the press coverage of the anti-sugar debate and the supermarket industry in the UK. The research design was a mixed-method study founded in an interpretivist epistemology. Content analysis has been conducted on 454 articles from national and regional press and this analysis provided an answer on who influences the news agenda. Qualitative interviews with journalists explored what sources journalists use when selecting and sourcing stories. The findings show that NGOs are regularly used as a source for stories in the British press, while the news agenda is largely driven by the self-interest of journalists, which corresponds with agenda of the NGO Action on Sugar. Journalists also largely rely on contacts when sourcing stories, but NGOs are present in the mind of journalists when deciding how to source stories. In addition, views of journalists correspond with views of NGOs on the role and position of the business in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexity, difference, and potential excitement of the current cultural scene in Morocco and its expression in fictional form highlights the Moroccan novel in Arabic khuṣūṣiyyah. These were remarks made by Roger Allen in a 2011 article entitled 'Rewriting Literary History: The Case of Moroccan Fiction in Arabic.' The widespread presence of the Moroccan novel in Arabic commands an analysis that underlines the growing argument that such a genre deserves further serious scholarly inquiry. This paper takes Allen as a point of departure and seeks an appreciation of the Moroccan novel in Arabic; it is meant to add to the repertoire of Arabic literature, contributing, one hopes, to a framework from which other scholars can expand any discussion of the development of modern Moroccan novel. Its main purpose is to emphasise that the Moroccan novel in Arabic is the result of a combination of two influences, the Western modern novel and the pre-modern historical and contextual attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a crucial skill needed to empathize with others cannot be trained by reading fiction: the skill of reading the evidence for the other person's state of mind and, thus, empathically getting their mental state right. While the evidence for a fictional character's mental state is merely propositional, the evidence for a person's mental state in a typical real-life situation is often experiential. Because the kind of evidence is different, the skill does not carry over. If reading fiction has a positive impact on our empathic skills in real life, as some empirical evidence suggests, it cannot be because we practice the relevant skill in the context of fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 'Against fictional realism' Anthony Everett argues that fictional realism leads to indeterminate identity. He concludes that we should reject fictional realism. Everett's paper and much of the ensuing literature does not discuss what exactly fictional characters are. This is a mistake. I argue that some versions of abstract creationism about fictional characters lead to indeterminate identity, and that some versions of Platonism about fictional characters lead only to indeterminate reference. In doing so I show that Everett's argument poses a more pressing problem for abstract creationism than for Platonism. The general lesson is that fictional realists should think more about the ontology of fictional characters in order to discern whether they are committed to indeterminate identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often, part of the fictional content of a narrative is not stated explicitly. Interpreters are frequently concerned with establishing this content. In doing so, they sometimes argue that, fictionally, something is the case because under that interpretation, the aesthetic merit of the work would be greater than under an alternative interpretation. The move from what would be of greater aesthetic merit to what is (fictionally) the case raises questions regarding the argumentative force of such arguments: How exactly do the premises of arguments from aesthetic merit to fictional content (for short: Afams) establish their conclusions? This paper spells out four ways to reconstruct the argumentative structure of Afams: In Section ii, we analyze two possibilities to establish Afams as deductive arguments; Section iii is concerned with a reconstruction based on a constructivist picture of literature and literary interpretation; and in Section iv, we look at a nondeductive reconstruction of Afams in accordance with an intentionalist framework. While we conclude that all four reconstructions can account for the argumentative force of Afams, the ultimate acceptability of each reconstruction rests on the readers' commitment to background assumptions concerning the theory of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Works of fiction are alleged to differ from works of nonfiction in instructing their audience to imagine their content. Indeed, works of fiction have been defined in terms of this feature: they are works that mandate us to imagine their content. This paper examines this definition of works of fiction, focusing on the nature of the activity that ensues in response to reading or watching fiction. Investigating how imaginings function in other contexts, I show, first, that they presuppose a cognitive infrastructure encompassing at least one additional kind of mental state, whose role is to determine, to some degree, truth in an imaginary world. I then discuss the implications for the definition of fiction, showing that the definition should be refined to accommodate the structure that imagining presupposes: a work counts as fiction just in case it mandates us, not only to imagine, but to engage in a more complex mental activity, an activity that in addition to imagining, involves positing a backdrop for our imaginings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Journey and Writing or life belong to the current concentration camp literature which is intended to bear witness to the history that humanity has gone through. We will try, in this paper, to demonstrate how Jorge Semprun uses literary artifice in order to relate his experience of the holocaust in a particular vision where fiction and testimony come together and harmonize to convey the unspeakable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to contribute to existing scholarship examining the contemporary French workplace novel by offering a critical reading of Nathalie Kuperman's 2010 novel Nous étions des êtres vivants. In my article, I respond to prior articles addressing the novel as a dissection of political discourse and an entry within the growing corpus of French 'sociological' fiction on work by analysing the novel's metaphors of 'jeu(x) and jouer' ('play(s)' and 'gambling'). I argue that the novel accomplishes its axiological task of opposition to neoliberalism and reactionary discourses on work by deploying a leitmotiv of 'jeux'/'jouer' as a rhetorical strategy. By juxtaposing the novel's representation of work, play, competition, and the 'game of corporate business' in the neoliberal workforce with the radical political philosophies of work and play as avenues for emancipation that were popular in France's past revolts, I bring into relief the historical and ideological criticisms that this 'morality play' set in the metonymic space of a corporate office suggests. In doing so, I show how Kuperman's work invokes radical psychological, pedagogical, and philosophical theories of liberation by representing work and/as play, and more crucially, play at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I believe that in the 21st century we should consider a planetary literature along with national and regional literary texts as part of our reading paths. Such a combination can help in the nurturing of knowledgeable and worthy world citizens. Foreign writers are included in the programme for higher studies but not all students select literary studies; besides by then readers have already developed their taste and some might fail to have affective affinities with foreign writers. .I am here including readers of the academic world and other people but who will constitute a part of the population of a country, represent its educational level and have a say in its destiny. In this paper I go briefly into the history of comparative literature. One of the objectives of including it into university programmes was to familiarize students with other cultures. However, it was still Euro centred. I am taking up the rationale underlying the focus on literary fiction. I draw from Gayatri C. Spivak who puts aside the former comparative literature of mid 1970s for the stronger and deeper New Comparative Literature and then moves to Planetarity. The world has changed since 1970s when the first wave of Comparative literature appeared. Today most countries of the world have diasporic populations. Hence reading a planetary literature through diasporic perspectives can lead people to become cosmopolitans and responsible citizens of the 21st century. Substansive reading of fiction across borders can help in developing skills to understand each other and develop feelings of empathy on Planet Earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the relationship between authenticity and fictionality, and 'true' and 'false' memory in Herta Müller's works. There is no doubt about the relativity and context‐dependency of memory. Nevertheless, Müller's novels, stories, and essays display, as I shall outline in the following, a convincing modus of ascertaining the truth through fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural and institutional centralism has characterized the development of rural and liminal regions of Mexico, entailing a prolonged and generalized neglect towards historiographic narration of the Northern region. The reconstruction of its social dimension has been picked up through the work of local historians; among a few, Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo (1950-2013) stands out thanks to his literary work, in which his historiographic research is conveyed through microhistory-related fiction. Thus, this research paper suggests an approximation to the Mexican Northwest microhistory between the end of the revolutionary conflicts and the rise of neoliberal politics, following the trace marked by Elizondo's coral novel Narcedalia piedrotas (1993) and reconstructing the relation existing between historical context and literary narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the issue of the personification of death in British fantastic fiction based on an analysis of two novels, Pratchett’s Mort and Lee’s Death’s Master. Common features are located and discussed, drawing parallels between the two representations of death. These parallels are found on several levels, specifically the appearance and personality of death, purpose and origin, the realm of death, sexuality and gender, tiredness and the substitution of death [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their introduction to the volume on ecological crisis in Latin American culture, Mark Anderson states that contemporary representations of the environment in Latin American culture activate the trope of crisis and depletion. The fictions of Brazilian author Ana Paula Maia take up the theme of ecological crisis via the representation of wastelands inhabited by subjects who are reduced to their bare lives. Maia's novels not only suggest a rethinking of the environmental imaginary in Brazilian fiction that runs counter to the idealized vision of nature present in much of Brazil's literary tradition, but also delineate a reexamination of the relationship between human, and their lived landscapes, as well as between human and non-human beings. Maia's fictional texts employ the imaginary of environmental crisis to probe into the role that late capitalism plays in the construction of the human/ecosphere/non-human interface. Her novels suggest both an exploitative relation and, at the same time, destabilize the binary between the human and the non-human that justifies this exploitation. This paper examines how Ana Paula Maia's two novels, De gados e homens (2014) and Enterre seus mortos (2018), employ the trope of ecological exigency to broach the slow violence implied in extractive capitalism and its effects on land, humans and non-human animals. Both novels bring to the fore the imbrication of economic exploitation of both human and non-humans and environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to present two adventures of Lesbian separatism - one excavated in the scope of literature and composed of ideas and letters, the other embodied in the concrete experience of women, composed of earth, seeds and gardening tools. Discussing the relevance of fiction to the imagination of anti-patriarchal and anticapitalist life alternatives, the text proposes to think about lesbian utopias in the company of ecofeminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the formal intermediality relationship between the videogame Remember Me, and the novel Les furtifs, by Alain Damasio. The two fictions work on the same configuration of ecumenal relations (that is to say the technical and symbolic relations which unite an individual to his environment and to others) - the same inhabiting - according to their own media specificities and a homologous tensioning of dystopian and eutopian discourse. This gives rise to a critique of contemporary inhabiting within an algorithmic society punctuated by the surveillance and presence of social enclaves, as well as an alternative inhabiting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The representation of women in the written texts of the Victorian Era has received a great deal of attention and critics have analysed different strategies used for the description of women in novels. This paper looks at a particular device employed by the Victorian novelist Mary Braddon in the representation of women, namely, the use of conceptual metaphors. Women and metaphors alike are at once meditational and relational. A woman serves to mediate between man and man, man and Nature, man and Spirit. The research deals with repeated metaphors presenting women in the guise of foods, animals, babies, parts of the body, members of the aristocracy and supernatural creatures. Bearing in mind the social force of metaphor in our understanding of the world and of ourselves as well as the important role language plays as a channel through which ideas and beliefs are transmitted and perpetuated, the present study attempts to offer a preliminary exploration of how images of women are transmitted and perpetuated by the Victorian novelist Mary Braddon through linguistic metaphors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research on Homi Bhabha's theory of mimicry in postcolonial literature is no longer new. However, in Malay literature, the application of mimicry in order to analyse such fiction is still rare. This paper seeks to utilise the conceptual framework of Homi K. Bhabha's colonial mimicry in order to explain the portrayal of the Malay characters in Tun Tuah and eventually analyse the characters' strength in terms of their Malayness in critical situations or crises. The conceptual framework have been explicated into three major parts for the analysis of the novels in terms of; a) contesting colonisation, b) metonymy of presence, and c) resisting colonialist discourse. Excerpts from the novels will be extracted and presented for analysis under each part of the conceptual framework as mentioned above. A close reading of Tun Tuah will be applied as methodology to explore how the strong Malay characters could be divided into either those who mimic the people of the West, those who truly fit the Malay identity as being conservative Malays or those having both Western values while also holding onto the Malay identity. This study then explains the findings from the analysis on how the Malay characters thrive towards success in the novel Tun Tuah, in the three processes of colonial mimicry. It is found that the final process of colonial mimicry, resisting colonialist discourse displays how the Malay characters in Tun Tuah, particularly Tun Tuah himself, Tun Perak and Sultan Alauddin Riayat Shah's strategies for economical and life success consists of them challenging the colonialists' way of life, while focusing on the Malay traditions and Islamic beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]