Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World (review)

This chapter recovers the aesthetic significance of a reader’s mediated relation to the objects and experiences represented in realist fiction. When George Eliot’s intrusive narrators in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch cue readers to form impressions that are as distinct as possible, they expose the indeterminacy that persists in the most concrete passages of literary description, alerting us to the limits of how much we can ever know about a fictional world. By drawing on the aesthetics of indeterminacy advanced by Edmund Burke, this chapter reveals that Eliot’s commitment to narratives of disillusionment exists in tension with a surprisingly Romantic aversion to finitude, and that literary realism enchants ordinary things by freeing them from the solidity and determinacy they possess in everyday life.

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The Fictional World of José Mauro de Vasconcelos

Kentucky Romance Quarterly ◽

10.1080/03648664.1975.9928088 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 22 (2) ◽

pp. 169-191

Author(s):

Malcolm Silverman

Keyword(s):

Fictional World

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The reality of fiction in a literary world: on an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris

Slovo ru Baltic accent ◽

10.5922/2225-5346-2020-1-6 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 101-107

Author(s):

Y. Domanskii

Keyword(s):

Physical Reality ◽

Literary Text ◽

Higher Order ◽

Fictional World ◽

Actual Reality ◽

The World ◽

The Way

Using an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, this article explores the idea that, in a literary text, a fictional world and the world of physical reality may interact to form such a reality that can paradoxically turn out to be more real than what we believe to be the actual reality. It is also shown that the fictional world realized in a literary text may bring the reader to certain conclusions about the world in which he or she lives. Thus, even if literature is incapable of affecting reality, it can change the way the latter is perceived. A fictional world is not just a reality — it is a reality of a higher order.

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Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room: Using feminist game design to look at and beyond the male gaze in Swift’s The Lady’s Dressing Room.

ABO Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830 ◽

10.5038/2157-7129.10.1.1193 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Melanie Holm

Keyword(s):

Undergraduate Students ◽

Game Design ◽

Literary Translation ◽

Game Playing ◽

Male Gaze ◽

Reading Practices ◽

Interactive Fiction ◽

Fictional World ◽

Dressing Room ◽

Digital Sphere

In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire, and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation, the multiple narrative-making experience of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and why Swift’s poem seemed an appropriate site for such experimentation. Crucial to game construction is a commitment to theories feminist game design that complement the poem’s own indictment of sexist determinism. With meditations on the affinity between poems and games, an examination of preceding experiments of literary translation into the ludic digital, details on game construction and local objectives, this article reflects on how digital mediation suggests a self-conscious mode of reading as a phenomenon of fictional world building. I don’t mean to suggest that this approach is necessarily appropriate for every poem or that every poem can be translated into the digital sphere in this way; rather, I want to share how the case of Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room suggests that the experience of translating a poem into Interactive Fiction can contribute to the formation of careful, detail-oriented reading practices in undergraduate readers. And poetry, if nothing else, is about the details.

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On the Monograph by E.A. Zachevskij “The Man who Lied while telling the Truth. Life and Work of Wolfgang Koeppen” (St. Petersburg, Kriega, 2019. 752 p.)

Studia Litterarum ◽

10.22455/2500-4247-2020-5-4-518-527 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (4) ◽

pp. 518-527

Author(s):

Tamara V. Kudryavtseva ◽

Alla A. Strelnikova

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

German Literature ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Fictional World ◽

Detailed Survey ◽

Literary Process ◽

History Of ◽

First Time

E.A. Zachevsky’s book is the first study about the Western German author Wolfgang Koeppen (1906–1996). For the first time in the national and international literary studies, the monograph offers a detailed survey of the writer’s life and work as well as defines his place and role in the 20th century German literature. The author analyzes philosophic views as well as the properties of his fictional world and highlights the key moments of his peculiar poetic manner. The book touches upon the main issues of the German literary process and integrates Koeppen’s work into this process which allows us to read the volume as a mini-history of 20th century German literature.

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When Both Utterances and Appearances are Deceptive: Deception in Multimodal Film Narrative

Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology - Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-56696-8_12 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 205-252

Author(s):

Marta Dynel

Keyword(s):

Philosophy Of Language ◽

Television Series ◽

Fictional World ◽

Extant Literature ◽

Multimodal Analysis ◽

American Television ◽

Theoretical Account ◽

The Status ◽

The One ◽

Withholding Information

AbstractThis article gives a comprehensive theoretical account of deception in multimodal film narrative in the light of the pragmatics of film discourse, the cognitive philosophy of film, multimodal analysis, studies of fictional narrative and – last but not least – the philosophy of lying and deception. Critically addressing the extant literature, a range or pertinent notions and issues are examined: multimodality, film narration and the status of the cinematic narrator, the pragmatics of film construction (notably, the characters’ communicative level and the one of the collective sender and the recipient), the fictional world and its truth, the recipient’s film engagement and make believing, as well as narrative unreliability. Previous accounts of deceptive films are revisited and three main types of film deception are proposed with regard to the two levels of communication on which it materialises, the characters’ level and the recipient’s level, as well as the intradiegetic and/or the extradiegetic narrator involved. This discussion is illustrated with multimodally transcribed examples of deception extracted from the American television seriesHouse.In the course of the analysis, attention is paid to how specific types of deception detailed in the philosophy of language (notably, lies, deceptive implicature, withholding information, covert ambiguity, and covert irrelevance) are deployed through multimodal means in the three types of film deception (extradiegetic deception, intradiegetic deception, and a combination of both when performed by both cinematic and intradiegetic narrators). Finally, inspired by the discussion of Hitchcock’s controversial lying flashback scene inStage Fright, as well as films relying on tacit intradiegetic, unreliable narrators (focalising characters) an attempt is made to answer the thorny question of when the extradiegetic (cinematic) narrator can perform lies (through mendacious multimodal assertions) addressed by the collective sender to the recipient, and not just only other forms of deception, as is commonly maintained.

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