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Copyright of Al-Adab / Al-ādāb is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Dariyāft is the property of National University of Modern Languages and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Scripta is the property of Scripta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Hedges and boosters are two important sources of linguistic devices to express tentative evaluations and to mitigate solidarity with readers. Men and women have different tendencies of using these linguistic devices. Women are usually considered to follow a personal and polite style whereas men are more competitive and assertive. Hence, gender-preferential features of women and men are one of the prerequisites of understanding the functions of hedges and boosters. One relatively neglected aspect of gender-based studies of these linguistic devices is fiction. In this paper, we explored male and female English writers' use of hedges and boosters in HUM19UK Corpus, a corpus of 19th century British fiction. We calculated a statistically significant overuse in the deployment of hedges and boosters by female writers in the 19th century, which is an indication of a new writing style adapted by the female writers in that era. However, the most common items of hedges and boosters were identical in both corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the cultural image of child and adolescent labour performed in the People's Republic of Poland in the years 1948–1989 as was presented in the literary fiction addressed to the young people. During the Stalinist period, literature officially condemned child labour on individual farms, but affirmed the labour of adolescent workers in state industry and construction. After the 1956 Thaw, the subject matter of labour was receding into the background, for several reasons. Nevertheless, the post-1956 youth literature also featured labour-related themes: community works, school cooperatives, work in family crafts, tutoring, and shady trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authors create fictional characters; that is a "creationist locution". Artefactualism takes such statements very seriously and holds that fictional characters are abstract artefacts, i.e., entities that are both created and abstract. Anti-creationists, by contrast, deny that we need to postulate such doubtful entities to explain creationist locutions. In this paper, I present this debate in the form of a paradox, which organises the many existing theories of creationist locutions in a single logical space. This new way of framing the problem displays the crucial role of so-called "linking principles". In general, it seems that fictionality entails nonexistence, while creation entails existence. This is why "fictional creatures" are puzzling. I further argue that to create means to invent and to realise, and finally, that fictional characters are invented but not created, contra artefactualism. I thus advocate for a new kind of anti-creationism about fictional characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of fictional objects is a familiar one, the topic of fictional properties less so. But it deserves its own place in the philosophy of fiction, if only because fictional properties have such a prominent role to play in science fiction and fantasy. What, then, are fictional properties and how does their apparent unreality relate to the unreality of fictional objects? The present paper explores these questions in the light of familiar debates about the nature of fictional objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will depart from the premise that with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as its flagship author, exemplar and editorial adviser, Heinemann Educational Books, which aimed to represent Africa and Africans through its African Writers Series (AWS) had a tendency to privilege and prioritise realist literary expressions coming out of Africa. This, combined with the fact that the series was published by an educational company looking for a way to market its product in an environment that did not yet have a place for African writers when it was first launched, might also be regarded as having fostered a tendency within the publishing house to treat the works submitted to it more as socio-historical documents than as works of literary fiction and to lead to their framing in anthropological terms. The paper will investigate the precise terms in which this takes place in two case studies of some of the archival material relating to Heinemann's interest in representing Northern Nigeria and Nigerians in the early years of the series, and it will investigate the consequences and implications of a drive towards producing a series that could be marketed as representative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into humour in Indigenous Australian fiction is strikingly rare, even when compared to studies on humour in traditional Indigenous societies. As a consequence, when channelled through fictional prose, Indigenous humour rarely "receives any echo" (Bergson). One case in point is Gayle Kennedy's novel Me, Antman & Fleabag (2007). Kennedy's text, despite being marketed as humorous and winning the prestigious 2006 David Unaipon Award, has attracted a handful of minuscule reviews. The paper discusses distinctive "elastic polarity" of humour (Boskin) in Kennedy's text, which simultaneously denies and affirms. By analysing the way in which her narrative debunks social and racial stereotypes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, the paper argues that her double-edged humour produces a site of cultural negotiations necessary for understanding complexities of contemporary Indigeneities and contemporary Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Korunk is the property of Korunk and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Dokuz Eylul University Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences is the property of Dokuz Eylul University Graduate School of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Nick Bostrom's "simulation argument" purports to show that if it is possible to create and run a vast number of computer simulations indistinguishable from the reality we are living in, then it is highly probable that we are already living in a computer simulation. However, the simulation argument requires a modification to escape the undermining implications of the scepticism it implies, as argued by Birch. The present paper shows that, even if the modified simulation argument is valid, still it is unsound since it relies on the indistinguishability assumption that even in principle cannot be tested. To account for the unsoundness of the simulation argument, the present paper draws on John Woods' theory of fiction, to expose structural similarities between general fiction and the simulation argument. Though the simulation argument is unsound, it seems persuasive, because the argument immerses the reader in a fictive world with the help of tacit assumptions, leveraging just enough common sense to remain compelling while covering over an untestable premise. Simultaneously with the critique of Bostrom's argument, Chalmers' argument for the matrix hypothesis is assessed on similar criteria. In either case, both arguments rely on an accumulation of assumptions, both implicit and explicit, hiding the premises that are untestable in principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present selected results of a probing research investigation that focused on the degree of reception and interpretation of selected literary texts in which the multilateral view of the Shoah or Holocaust is thematized. The respondents of the research were pupils of all grades of the Czech lower-secondary school. After an introduction in which we present the research methodology and briefly outline the potential of artistic narratives that contain a multilateral view of the defined events, we present the results of the research investigation. A multilateral perspective not only on the phenomenon of the Shoah or the Holocaust can develop students´ ability to critically evaluate information and can hone their argumentation skills. Finally, these works prevent a schematic view of defined events, which can lead to the prevention of forming hasty opinions or making unfounded or unreasoned judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of labour relations plays a central and often underestimated role in Kafka's fiction. In this paper, possible reasons for this lack of critical attention are considered, especially in Marxist-oriented criticism: thereafter, the main occurrences of this theme are analysed, firstly in Kafka's texts in general, and then in the novel that mainly deals with it, The Man Who Disappeared, which was written in 1912-1913. A distinction is also attempted, within Kafka's idea of work, between "ordinary work" and "extraordinary work". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fictionality and fictional experiences are ubiquitous in people's everyday lives in the forms of movies, novels, video games, pretense and role playing, and digital technology use. Despite this ubiquity, though, the field of cognitive science has traditionally been dominated by a focus on the real world. Based on the limited understanding from previous research on questions regarding fictional information and the cognitive processes for distinguishing reality from fiction, we argue for the need for a comprehensive and systematic account that reflects on related phenomena, such as narrative comprehension or imagination embedded into general theories of cognition. This is important as incorporating cognitive processing of fictional events into memory theory reshapes the conceptual map of human memory. In this paper, we highlight future challenges for the cognitive studies of fictionality on conceptual, neurological, and computational levels. Taking on these challenges requires an interdisciplinary approach between fields like developmental psychology, philosophy, and the study of narrative comprehension. Our aim is to build on such interdisciplinarity and provide conclusions on the ways in which new theoretical frameworks of fiction cognition can aid understanding human behaviors in a wide range of aspects of people's daily lives, media consumption habits, and digital encounters. Our account also has the potential to inform technological innovations related to training intelligent digital systems to distinguish fact and fiction in the source material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex relationship between ethics and literature by applying the perspective of everyday aesthetics, a branch of philosophy. Focusing on Francesco Piccolo's fiction work, Moments of Unnoticed Happiness (2012), we argue that the protagonist adopts an Aristotelian-based ethical stance, viewing happiness as a path to well-being and finding significance in life. Additionally, the character embraces an aesthetic attitude toward the nuances of daily existence, aligning with the theoretical framework of everyday aesthetics. This framework expands the scope of aesthetic experiences beyond traditional art domains, emphasizing a transformative shift in perception. We use these concepts to illustrate how engaging with the ordinary enhances personal well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the novels published in the course of the nineties, Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), Never Far from Nowhere (1996), and Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Andrea Levy (1956-2019), a British writer of Jamaican origin, focuses on the experiences of British-born daughters of firstgeneration Caribbean immigrants in Britain. This paper will examine how Levy's young protagonists struggle to come to terms with their highly hybridized identities, which resist reductive racial categories of 'white' and 'black.' Experiencing racial bias on the one hand and confronting silences about their Jamaican heritage on the other, Levy's protagonists often find themselves in liminal spaces and are constantly compelled to negotiate private (Jamaican) and more public (British) spheres of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research article analyzes two collections of flash fiction including Fullblood Arabian (2014) and The Teeth of the Comb and Other Stories (2017) written by Osama Alomar, a Syrian refugee author. Guided by the theoretical framework of necropolitics as proposed by Achille Mbembe, this article investigates the constant presence of death and its multifaceted role in the wake of the Syrian civil war as portrayed in Alomar's selected collections of flash fiction. The article attempts to study how death becomes an instrument in the civil war, widely used, manipulated, and exploited by various actors during the conflict-ridden period, each employing it differently. Although the selected collections of flash fiction demonstrate that death takes on many forms and performs multiple functions in the backdrop of the Syrian civil war, this research article narrows its scope to the analysis of how death is used as a political pawn and a political statement. At the outset of this research, it is postulated that the ruling Syrian regime transforms death and its fear into an instrument to intimidate and subdue Syrian civilian characters, thereby downplaying death as merely a political pawn. On the contrary, death also emerges as a political statement of the Syrian civilian characters as they begin to embrace death as a form of political activism to bring about social and political change in Syria. Invoking Catherine Belsey's textual analysis method, some flash fiction stories from the selected collections are analyzed to study how the ruling Syrian regime and civilian characters reconfigure death in the wake of the Syrian civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the modular fiction of Ken Liu, a renowned author and translator of speculative fiction. Liu's work often features East Asian or Asian American protagonists and draws on Chinese history and culture for storytelling. The author argues that focusing solely on the Chinese elements in Liu's fiction limits the appreciation of his unique storytelling method and modular production within Chinese material and literary culture. The article also explores the concept of modularity in Chinese art and literature, highlighting the dynamic nature of modules and the agency of practitioners in manipulating them. Additionally, the article briefly introduces the recurring theme of love as self-sacrifice in Liu's writing, influenced by his personal experiences. It analyzes examples from Liu's work, including his award-winning collection "The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories," and discusses his involvement in writing a Star Wars book. The article emphasizes the globalized nature of Liu's fiction and cautions against reducing it to a fixed pattern based solely on his Chinese heritage. [Extracted from the article]

The study of imagination has always had a significant role in the study of art and aesthetics. And imagination plays a central role in Ricoeur's philosophical system; a subject that has received less attention. It was Ricoeur's goal to bring the productive aspect of imagination back to the main text of philosophy, by presenting a critical reading of the history of philosophy. By using Emanuel Kant's imagination analysis, Ricoeur revived the various dimensions of imagination in the field of perception, to achieve a comprehensive theory of productive imagination. This paper attempts to address the importance of painting as a work of art and its relevance to reality, by studying the path taken by Ricoeur to present a theory of productive imagination. In this regard, explaining the role of Iconic Augmentation, which is one of the latent characteristics of the productive aspect of imagination, better defines the action present in the image and the dialectical position of language and image. Ultimately, painting, as a fictional work that its idea's reference is not merely a representation, becomes more real as its imaginativeness increases. The result is a new approach to describe the nature of painting as a work of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Imaginations Journal is the property of Imaginations Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Letras (Lima) is the property of Letras, Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Humanas. Universidad Nacional Mayor De San Marcos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the poetics of Margita Figuli's (1909 - 1995) early fiction - it provides interpretation and comparison of her prose works Mámivý dúšok ([Intoxicating sip] published in 1935 in a magazine) and Pokušenie ([Temptation] published in 1934 in a magazine and in 1937 as a book). Both texts are built on the contradiction between male and female characters, their inner conflict, tension between desire (or emotion) and rational reasoning, carnality and eroticism, and the problem of distance and contact that leads to disillusionment. The composition of both novellas is enriched by the alternation of dialogical passages with narrative ones, the inclusion of dream motifs, ideas and memories as a form of escape from reality, and the use of a framing principle that makes the actual inner events fit into a recurrent and universal natural cycle. The paper attempts to identify the elements through which M. Figuli, at this stage in her career, drew on the poetics of modernism (Slovak modernism and the so-called second wave modernism) and the elements through which she anticipated the onset of naturism as a specific style that brought innovation into Slovak literary fiction at that time. In this way, the article accentuates poetological continuity in Slovak literature of the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Literatura y Lingüística is the property of Universidad Catolica Cardenal Raul Silva Henriquez and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The brief reference to the Cartesian vortex in Moby-Dick has already been discussed in numerous specialized articles, usually in terms of the history of ideas, e.g. in two articles by D. C. Leonard (1979; 1980). By itself, a vortex is an appropriate image for being immersed, obsessed, absorbed, and blended into objectivity, but the paper will focus on another, non-Cartesian vortex, which was emerging in the 1850s as the so-called vortex theory of matter. The point of this "hydrokinetic theory of matter" was that it was a "unitary continuum theory" of a "Universal Plenum," conceived initially on the basis of Herman von Helmholtz's work on hydrodynamics. In 1859, the German physicist demonstrated mathematically that stable vortex rings could exist indefinitely in a (theoretical) continuous elastic fluid, rather like the remarkably stable smoke rings blown by guns or as a smoking trick. For a time, the vortex atom was recognized as a very promising idea on the cutting edge of science. In literary fiction, the vortex atom translated into curious imagery of a claustrophobic universal plenum, matter and soul combined, organized by intermeshing vortices, and leaving no possible room for a hovering freedom in empty space. In a universe based on the vortex theory of matter, a subject is not in a vortex, but is itself a vortex, continuously meshing with other vortices, in a basket-like, tightly knit lattice that comprises everything. Melville's imagery related to matter and vortices seems to be one of the early instances of the simultaneous fascination and dismay provoked by the vortex theory of matter in the second half of the nineteenth century, not among scientists, but among the non-scientific general audience. The article focuses on Clarel, comparing three different images of the vortex with imagery from contemporary popular scientific articles. Additional examples from Moby- Dick, Pierre, and Billy Budd are discussed as contexts illustrating the variety of meaning attached by Melville to the vortex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper analyses a transmedia universe featuring a web series revolving around interpersonal relations and gender issues, which was then expanded using a musical podcast and a live concert. The project aims to discover production and narrative development strategies that define a native transmedia production, and how it might be expanded to build stories around complex and multidimensional contemporary themes. An analysis model is proposed to identify the fundamental structural characteristics of the transmedia universe. The research is initially powered by a qualitative approach to ethnographic fieldwork by means of participant observation, and subsequently, the analysis of the interrelationship between the elements that make up the transmedia system. The results show the planning behind constructing transmedia storytelling that intertwines fiction and reality to assist in understanding complex and multidimensional topics such as gender identity or intergenerational relations. The conclusions show that the type of transmedia construction being presented and the position of the audio in that universe is motivated by reinforcing the creation of content that is covered in fiction, but with particular relevance in the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that Sentiment analysis often undertaken in a marketing context can be applied to scientific writing. Topics include the public by scientists involved in the discovery of the double helix as the structure of DNA; and Compilations of essays or papers that reflect the chronology of the table's development are found to show a trend in sentiment or mood determined .