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Prior research suggests that reading and viewing fiction (compared with expository nonfiction) may enhance social cognition. The purpose of this research was threefold: we tested whether this effect (here operationalized as persons vs, objects) extended to writing, we contrasted the effect of fictionality (real vs. imaginary) versus social content, and we delved into mechanism by examining the degree to which any effects found were mediated by the linguistic content of the writings that participants produced. Results confirmed that writing about persons versus objects has a similar effect as reading or viewing. At the same time, we found no effect of fictionality. Importantly, the person/object manipulation had a direct effect on both social and nonsocial language in the writings produced, with person-focused texts relying more on emotional language and object-focused texts containing more analytical and causal language. Writing about persons had an indirect effect on social cognition via emotional content, which did not depend on fictionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significantly increasing research efforts, the psychological effects of reading fiction remain under debate. We present two preregistered meta-analyses synthesizing cognitive effects and correlates of reading fiction. In Meta-Analysis 1 (371 effect sizes/70 experiments), reading fiction led to significant small-sized cognitive benefits, g = 0.14, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.06, 0.21]. This effect of fiction reading was moderated by the comparison group (effects were greater when reading fiction was compared with watching fiction or reading nothing than when reading fiction was compared with reading nonfiction) and the outcome variable (significant effects emerged for empathy and mentalizing only). In Meta-Analysis 2 (559 effect sizes/114 studies reporting correlations), lifetime exposure to print fiction was linked with significant small-sized cognitive benefits, r =.16, 95% CI [0.13, 0.19]. This effect was moderated by outcome variable (effects were greatest for verbal abilities, followed by general cognitive abilities and empathy/mentalizing/outgroup judgments), fictionality of the print material (greater effects were found for fiction than nonfiction), publication status (published work exhibited greater effects than unpublished work), type of assessment measure (larger effects emerged when neither the outcome nor print exposure were assessed via self-report, than when either the outcome or print exposure were assessed via self-report), participant group (community samples showed greater effects than student samples), study design (greater effects were found for correlational than for experimental designs), and percentage of female participants (via a negative relationship with cognitive benefits). Together, these meta-analyses provide robust evidence for a small-sized positive relationship between reading fiction and cognitive benefits. Public Significance Statement: This research project suggests that people who read a lot of fiction have better cognitive skills than people who read little or no fiction. These benefits are small in size across various cognitive skills, but of medium size for verbal and general cognitive abilities, for example, intelligence. Importantly, there is a stronger association between reading fiction and cognitive skills than between reading nonfiction and those skills. However, whether the benefits are caused by reading fiction or by one or more other variables remains to be determined through future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious fictionalism is a philosophical theory that aims to provide an alternative to the metaphysically realistic (theistic or God-centred) view of the nature of religious discourse. Religious fictionalism argues that being an atheist is compatible with a certain kind of personal religiousness because it is possible to understand traditional religious discourse as a useful fiction. In the first part of my presentation, I will outline the central ideas of religious fictionalism. After that, I highlight some key problems associated with it. These have to do with the "make-believe" attitude of the fictionalist account of faith and the problems linked with personal integrity. In the last part of the article, I will turn to metaphysical and epistemic presuppositions that play a central role in religious fictionalism. I will deal with these issues in the light of Bas van Fraassen's empiricist views on science, secularism and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely agreed that living kidney donation is permitted but living kidney sales are not. Call this the Received View. One way to support the Received View is to appeal to a particular understanding of the conditions under which living kidney transplantation is permissible. It is often claimed that donors must act altruistically, without the expectation of payment and for the sake of another. Call this the Altruism Requirement. On the conventional interpretation, the Altruism Requirement is a moral fact. It states a legitimate constraint on permissible transplantation and is accepted on the basis of cogent argument. The present paper offers an alternative interpretation. I suggest the Altruism Requirement is a moral fiction—a kind of motivated falsehood. It is false that transplantation requires altruism. But the Requirement serves a purpose. Accepting it allows kidney donation but not kidney sale. It, in short, rationalizes the Received View. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This bibliography details women's history articles that have appeared in the Indiana Magazine of History during its 120 years of publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the prominence of subterranean settings and imagery within crime fiction, this article critically examines the genre's representation of the subterranean. Influenced by scholarly work on the subterranean, I focus on the writing of one prominent crime novelist, Ian Rankin, and his Edinburgh-set John Rebus detective novels. From a relational standpoint, two issues are focused on: subterranean place (namely the attachment of meaning to the subterranean, the power relations that run through the subterranean, and the underground's connections to the aboveground) and subterranean time (notably the role of the subterranean in shaping the relationship between the past and the present). Traversing Edinburgh's basements and graves, as well as hell and the underworld, I demonstrate that Rankin uses subterranean place and time to accentuate some of the hidden harms, inequalities and injustices of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development as presented in the MDGs/SDGs is a well-planned step-by-step enterprise. If we dig deeper into the development debate, it is clear that the dilemma of eradicating poverty and achieving sustainable development is still unsolved, despite all efforts. Thus, development seems to be fictional in the sense of an unreachable utopia. Against this background, it is helpful to connect the development debate with utopian studies. We learn from utopian studies that there are not only fictional utopias as a vision of a just world, which may never be realised. There are also lived utopias that unpack alternative approaches to overcoming inequality or meeting ecological challenges, and which can be realised at least within a limited space. This applies to concepts from in the Global South, such as swaraj, buen vivir and ubuntu, or ecovillages and solidarity economies that present themselves as models for alternative development. As lived utopias, they follow future practice in a defined area in which the desired future becomes part of the present. These concepts are new models in the critical development debate. They are particularly successful in communities that share a common vision and common values. At the same time, there are doubts whether these models may be realised at the national or global. With regard to the fictional character of development goals, it is obvious that we still lack a feasible global strategy with a vision for the future that is attractive enough to gain global support and that can really be accomplished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of the null hypothesis for fiction and logical indiscipline. The author argues that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is not based on semantics, and that fictive statements can be true or false depending on the world. The article also addresses the problem of logical inconsistency that arises when treating fiction and non-fiction the same. The author proposes a skeptical solution, suggesting that the breakdown of inferences outside of fiction is the issue, not the null hypothesis. The article clarifies semantic assumptions and defends the null hypothesis, while also discussing the Semantic Non-Holism Hypothesis (SNH) which argues that fiction does not require special linguistic or ontological structures. The text explores the problem of logical indiscipline in both fiction and non-fiction discourse, and suggests that logical discipline should be imposed on fictional discourse. However, this poses a challenge for positions that consider fiction to be both true and false. The article provides examples of how combining fictional truths with non-fictional statements can lead to false conclusions. It concludes that while there is a distinction between fiction and non-fiction, it is not a semantic one, and it is not the responsibility of speakers to know what is fiction and what is not. [Extracted from the article]

Organisation theory began to be appreciated in the 1960s when it became clear that neither economics nor psychology could explain the phenomena of organising purely in the language of economics, whereas these phenomena were becoming more and more central to the functioning of modern society. Enterprises and organised institutions were becoming increasingly complex and their activities could not be explained by a combination of economic laws and psychological observations. The machine metaphor that used to dominate before was now replaced by an organic metaphor that seemed complex enough to capture the complexity of the phenomenon itself. But the practices of organising outgrew even this metaphor and it became evident that we need even more complex ways to account for what organisations do. One of the propositions for how to live up to the living complexity is the language of fiction. Narrative knowledge and narrative form are good ways to an incisive insight into concrete and lived organisational experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWhile several collections have been published recently from the perspective of common law focused specifically on jurisprudence and from the perspective of both literary theory and the philosophy of language, a more integrative approach that sharpens the underlying fundamental concept(s) by bringing together insights from legal theory/history, doctrinal legal scholarship, literary studies, and analytic philosophy has been missing so far. Not only has an examination of a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective been rare in research on fictions and fictionality, but also a decidedly integrative view of European and Anglo-American research approaches has been the exception. This special issue both addresses and seeks to bridge this research gap. In shedding light on the family resemblances and differences of “fiction(s)” in each of the aforementioned disciplines, we hope to identify blind spots and offer some fresh ideas with regard to a transdisciplinary theory of fiction(s) which considers their conceptual, functional, as well as historical characteristics. A particularly significant aspect of this project is that it fuses contributions from an anglophone law and literature perspective with contributions from European continental contexts, offering perspectives from related but also distinct legal and literary traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractSince the comprehensive theorization of liminality and its attributes by the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner in the late 1960s and 1970s, the concept of liminality has been applied to more than the threshold experience of individuals. As liminality in general describes a state of transition, the concept has been expanded to include rather different spaces, genres, and conditions. In this article, I propose liminality as a threshold concept that might offer a new and different angle for looking at legal and literary fiction(s). Liminality might allow us to bridge the conceptual gaps between the disciplines with regard to the general use and function of fiction(s) and fictionality in law and in literature; it may thus prove to be valuable for interdisciplinary approaches in both fields. I will, however, not attempt to formulate a new theory of fiction, since in contrast to the numerous and not always successful attempts at defining fiction(s) and fictionality, I am not interested in locking down either phenomena in law and in literature, but rather in identifying and highlighting some common aspects. Liminality, I argue, lends itself profitably to the cross-disciplinary orientation of an approach which addresses both legal and literary perspectives. It appears to be particularly suited to bring out the functions of fictions and fictionality in both law and literature, which is ultimately to translate the merely imaginable into something conceivable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe topic of aspect perception was central to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late work. But legal commentators have not explored the topic in any depth, despite their eagerness to borrow from other parts of Wittgenstein’s writing. This article first aims to introduce legally oriented readers to some of the central issues in Wittgenstein’s work on aspect perception and some of the central debates in the commentary on this work. Wittgenstein described aspect perception as a complex yet fundamental human capacity underlying a variety of perceptual and interpersonal phenomena. His work on the topic hinted at its implications for our experiences of fictionality and legal practice, but Wittgenstein did not articulate those implications in any detail. This article thus also seeks to outline, in a bit more detail, a few of the implications of Wittgenstein’s work on aspect perception for our understanding of fictionality, legal practice, and the relations between these two domains of activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractSince the late twentieth century, fiction, once primarily connected to the arts, has gradually become a much-debated topic in a wide range of research fields and disciplines including law and philosophy. However, as many different disciplines are now increasingly thematizing fiction and various usages of the term “fiction” exist, there is danger of mixing up the different definitions of this term, making it difficult to compare the approaches. In order to enable a comparison between “fiction” in those disciplines which this special issue focusses on, this article discusses fiction from a literary studies perspective. The aim is to unfold what it means for a literary text to be considered fiction and by doing so, elaborate on the peculiarities of fiction in the literary field. To facilitate the comparison, some essential distinctions that have become established in German scholarship require explanation first. The differentiation between fictionality as a potential property of texts and fictivity as a potential property of objects within fiction is rarely found in Anglo-American discussions of fictionality in literature but has become a central distinction in German discussions. By distinguishing between these two levels of fiction, it also becomes clear why reality does not necessarily function as fiction’s opposite—an assumption that can still be found frequently, especially in the everyday usage of the term “fiction.” Furthermore, this article will show that literary fictions do not even have to include invented characters, actions, and events, because the crucial point lies in the specific communicative stance authors of fiction demand from their readers. Hence, simply defining fiction as texts or other media that deal with invented characters, actions, or events would be inaccurate according to recent, pragmatic approaches in literary studies that clearly dominate the contemporary discourse on fiction. From the perspective of pragmatic approaches, what constitutes fiction is a very intricate question and cannot be answered by merely focusing on textual or semantic properties. That fiction cannot be determined through the content level will be demonstrated by evaluating the four most prominent and plausible accounts of fiction. After briefly discussing the pros and cons of these major accounts, I will focus on why this article favors John R. Searle’s approach to fiction, which emphasizes the pretense aspect as the peculiarity of fiction-making in communicative terms. The introduction concludes with a discussion of two core licenses that follow from the pretense strategy for authors of fiction, namely the license to choose any mode of presentation for their fictional story (communicative freedom), and secondly, the license to depict any topic and content they want (ontological freedom). Due to its clarificatory purpose, this essay does not offer a new understanding or even approach to fiction. Instead, it provides an overview of the core ideas regarding literary fiction for a readership that might come from various disciplines, albeit the special focus is on law as this issue’s central one. The article is deliberately written as a concise introduction to major approaches to fiction and fictionality in the field of literary studies or literary theory with a focus on the discussion in German scholarship in comparison to Anglo-American scholarship. This is meant to pave the way for the more detailed interdisciplinary and international discourse and discussion which make up the main bulk of the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the depiction of letters, epigraphs, and other texts in Iamblichus’ fragmentary Babyloniaka, primarily preserved by the ninth-century writer Photius in his Bibliotheca, and argues that they act as evidence for the novel’s own cultural and literary positioning. These texts, while superficially unconventional in their form and mode of transmission, in practice reiterate traditional anxieties about written texts found throughout Greek literary history. As such, this paper argues that these embedded texts act as mirrors to the novel’s own framing as a self-proclaimed Babylonian fiction constructed through imperial Greek linguistic and literary models. By considering the hitherto neglected depictions of letters and other texts within Photius’ summary of the Babyloniaka, this approach sheds new light on the literary allusivity and cultural framing of the now-lost novel and its later reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name (2004) and its unique contributions to the discourse of the old African diaspora consciousness. It examines how Okpewho harnesses the extraordinary element of existential tensions as a significant strategy to reconnect the old African diaspora to their ancestral community in Africa. Showing how this novel is similar, different and transcendent to other old African diaspora narratives, I argue in this piece that Okpewho's mastery and use of the Ifá divinity that functioned as a reminder, an emotional therapy and a tour guide to reconnect the old African diaspora to their African ancestry, is a critical way to underscore the "Nigerianness" of such a contemporary neo-slave narrative. Okpewho is an important African diaspora writer whose works have been largely ignored and by interpreting his creative ingenuity as regards the old/new African diasporic experiences, I bring a fresh contribution to the discourse of African literature in the diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By viewing the Troubles in Northern Ireland through the lens of dystopia, the 2018 novel Milkman provides insight into how the genre of dystopian fiction may be changing as it moves into the twenty-first century. Milkman's innovative depiction of 1970s Belfast strikes many as totalitarian, and the novel shares central features with other dystopian novels: an oppressive society with no room for individualism, a protagonist that challenges it, and a plot that hinges on an unfair trial. At the same time, it makes several interesting adaptations. It is more interested in the ways a noncombatant community embraces dystopian practices in a dysfunctional attempt to cope with chaos than in the ways a totalitarian state uses them strategically to maintain power. Secondly, the historical setting should be recognized as a significant innovation in the genre because it spurs reexamination of assumptions about how dystopias relate to the present. Finally, the novel opens consideration of how a society could move past dystopia, which until now has been little explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates how Olga Tokarczuk inscribes diverse religious traditions in her novels and creates new theological ideas to offer readers literary tools for exercising their imagination. In this way, Tokarczuk's prose exposes the arbitrariness of religiously legitimized worldviews and destabilizes the existing cultural imaginary. An analysis of Tokarczuk's methods for constructing beliefs, rituals and metaphysical frameworks of the world that consolidate the communities she describes allows us to perceive her writing as postsecular. Each of her published works of fiction is briefly presented in chronological order, providing an insight into both the continuities and transformations of her approach to contemporary fiction. Juxtaposing these analyses with Tokarczuk's views on the social role of literature presented in her essays and self-commentaries and the concept of the "tender narrator" from her Nobel lecture, allow us to identify the political and ethical motivations for such a creative strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with Elaine Feeney, an accomplished Irish writer known for her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction works. She reflects on the formation of writers, the influence of childhood experiences, the complexity of Irish identity, and her journey from poetry to long-form fiction, highlighting the interplay between personal experiences and literary expression.

This essay offers a transgeneric reading of Graham Greene's 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear, first tracing the emergence of spy fiction from invasion fiction at the end of the nineteenth century and then establishing William Le Queux's influence on the culture of espionage in Britain as well as in British spy fiction. Following on from this genealogy of genre, it interrogates the novel's protagonist's claim that "[t]he world has been remade by William Le Queux" in the context of the dual histories of espionage in Britain and the spy in British fiction, while attending to the novel's own reception of those histories. Focusing on the significance of the novel's intertextual and paratextual evidence in an interpretation of the novel's unconventional narrative strategies, the essay examines hybrid modes of reading the novel, as well as reading in the novel as a way of parsing its entangled narrative modes, levels, and discourses. Greene encourages transgeneric reading as a possible resolution to the epistemological uncertainty readers experience at the novel's close due to its troubling of genre expectations, its allusiveness, and, ultimately, its eschewal of narrative closure. At the same time, the essay proposes that, in attending in spy fiction to what is read and how it is read, we might better appreciate the challenges presented by the rehabilitation of a genre that also requires disentangling the many hierarchies of modernist cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the importance of representation in fiction books, to ensure all children and young people can see themselves reflected in what they read. Much of this work has focused, importantly, on increasing ethnic representation, yet there has been much less exploration of the representation of other minority experiences, such as those of neurodivergent young people, and how these are perceived by neurodivergent young people themselves. This article provides new insights into neurodivergent young people's perceptions of representation of neurodivergence in fiction books (and other text types) based on semi‐structured interviews with 16 neurodivergent young people (aged 14 to 17 year olds) from 2 high schools in Scotland. Using an inductive data‐driven thematic analysis process, three themes were identified: (1) representation of neurodivergence should be complex, realistic, and positive; (2) representation of neurodivergence should be normalised; (3) representation of neurodivergence beyond books is important. Each of these themes is explored in detail, followed by implications for future research, practice and the publishing of Young Adult fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As state-of-art technology can create artificial images that are indistinguishable from real ones, it is urgent to understand whether believing that a picture is real or not has some import over affective phenomena such as sexual arousal. Thus, in two pre-registered online studies, we tested whether 60 images depicting models in underwear elicited higher self-reported sexual arousal when believed to be (N = 57) or presented as (N = 108) real photographs as opposed to artificially generated. In both cases, Realness correlated with significantly higher scores on self-reported sexual arousal. Consistently with the literature on downregulation of emotional response to fictional works, our result indicates that sexual images that are perceived to be fake are less arousing than those believed to portray real people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecomaternalism remains the dominant narrative concerning the role of families in climate politics. The centrality of ecomaternalist narratives to intersectional constructions of race, gender, heteronormativity, and nature means that interrogating and disrupting these dominant representations of families is a crucial task of ecofeminist, postcolonial, and queer political theory. This article explores other ways to narrate familial politics that might challenge rather than reproduce dominant power relations. Examining three Africanfuturist short stories by Nnedi Okorafor (“Spider the Artist”), Tlotlo Tsamaase (“Virtual Snapshots”), and Terh Agbedeh (“Mango Republic”), set in Nigeria and Botswana, I argue that they draw our attention to transformations within cyborg, digitized, and utopian families and social structures, as well as the potential for violence within the heteronormative patriarchal family. They narrate alternative discourses about families in crisis, families as threat, and families as ruination that are rarely articulated in climate politics. In these stories, the family is not the solution to climate politics, but a social relation that will (and should) change as the climatic and social context changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the fraught relationship between the terms 'fiction', 'creativity', 'literature' and 'testimony' in Holocaust and trauma studies. It argues that the main challenge in reading witness literature is to read testimony as both factual and potentially fictional at the same time when no metatextual corroboration is available. This anxiety of testimony originates in some key texts in Holocaust and trauma studies: I analyse for the first time the repercussions of fictional passages in Primo Levi's If This is a Man (1947), The Truce (1963) and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After (1985). These sections in no way attenuate the veracity of the overall narratives of survival. Rather than presenting the fictional as fact in bad faith, these books demonstrate the importance of creativity in responding to historical events, particularly when there are no existing historical narratives to present an alternative view. They also emphasise the current critical dichotomy in Holocaust and trauma studies between what Sara Guyer terms the 'non-representational character' of literature from 'the representational character of testimony'. If we attempt to think beyond this binary between fictional literature and books about witnessing, it is possible to reflect on how fiction itself can operate as a form of testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machery et al.’s 2004 x-phi project has been widely criticised for ambiguities contained in the expression ‘talk about’. Interestingly, although ‘about’ plays a prominent part in the debate, aboutness has not been a topic. This paper discusses this aspect. Alas, it must thereby add a further ambiguity to the list, the ambiguity between aboutness and reference, and thus also between subject matter and referent. It explains the distinction between intra-categorical aboutness which makes no ontological demands, and cross-categorical reference which requires the referent to exist. It then analyses the 4-fold embedding contained in Machery et al.’s study and shows how the aboutness-reference distinction bears on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the literary representation of contemporary urban vernaculars (CUV) in fiction. It focuses specifically on four Swedish novels published in the last ten years, whose narratives are set in the urban and increasingly multilingual, migrant-rich and class-stratified peripheral areas of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The analysis centers on how they are situated in these urban peripheries, using written representations of spoken, non-standard Swedish CUV as symbolic resources to give authenticity to the narratives. We examine the distinctive linguistic features that are employed to evoke the imagination of CUV, and how these are used to build the fictional characters and to create certain recognizable social personas and practices. We also discuss the linguistic features that are available but are not exploited to represent the fictional characters’ ways of speaking, and possible reasons why this is so. Finally, we examine how the novels exploit contrasts between registers, particularly between CUV and adult second-language speaker styles and between CUV and standard Swedish, and with what effects. The findings are discussed in the context of the broader social discourses about language, migration, CUV and adult second-language speakers in present-day Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existential analyses of Murakami's fiction have dealt mostly with identity issues during adolescence and adulthood. This article presents a different existential conceptualization by examining how Yalom's four ultimate life concerns—isolation, meaninglessness, freedom, and death ─ are embodied in the life of some of Haruki Murakami's fictional protagonists. In this work, I will also bring standard diagnostic nomenclature and psychoanalytic conceptualizations into dialog with the existential tradition, by demonstrating how certain mental conditions, which are considered by clinicians as forms of psychopathology, can also be interpreted as modes of existence in an alienated reality, and as non‐conformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When engaging with magic, we are moved by seemingly impossible events that contradict what we believe to be possible in the real world. We are surprised, curious, and baffled when we cannot explain how the magic we are witnessing is possible. We generally understand the events to be illusions. But how is it possible to be moved by something we know to be unreal? This problem is related to the paradox of fiction in aesthetics. Here, we introduce the problem in the domain of theatrical magic, discuss possible solutions, and present a tentative account that allows us to accommodate inconsistent, seemingly incompatible beliefs at different representational levels in the viewers' mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé: La crise climatique devient de plus en plus souvent le sujet des œuvres de fiction, non seulement dans l'aire culturelle anglo‐saxonne. Le présent article soumet à l'analyse un exemple de fiction climatique postcoloniale francophone, à savoir La fantastique Odyssée de l'Algérien Chérif Arbouz, dans le but de reconstruire la vision du futur y proposée. L'étude des procédés littéraires engagés par l'auteur tels que le héros collectif, l'étendue spatiale et temporelle de l'intrigue, l'insertion des passages essayistiques et scientifiques, démontre que l'écrivain arrive à représenter habilement la crise climatique et ses conséquences, à avertir les lecteurs des dangers y liés, de même qu'à faire partie du débat mondial concernant le futur de notre planète. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we think of a person engaged in the act of reading literary fiction, the mental image that readily comes to mind is one of focused concentration. In our current information age, such a form of reading seems especially necessary, and often lacking. This causes a change in how we read, often described in terms of close reading versus hyperreading. Literary reading is typically associated with the former; screen‐based reading of information texts with the latter. Accounts of attention and distraction in reading research are often informed by a binary way of thinking. Literary reading, while often aligned with close reading, also involves selection, strategic allocation of attention informed by textual cues, condensation, and mind‐wandering. It never occurs in a state of continuous attention: we combine different modes, triggered by both textual and readerly characteristics. A challenge for literary studies in the present media landscape is to determine more precisely when readers read with close attention and when they skim, or what they skip. This article presents a theoretical contribution to studies of literary reading in the form of a literature review and a framework for attentional modulation. Education might benefit from a more sophisticated concept of such attentional modulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fictional entertainment can serve as a vivid and easily comprehensible source of knowledge, but only if audiences are able to tell its kernel of truth apart from fantasy. In this article, we use the lens of social epistemology to develop a theoretical framework of knowledge acquisition and verification practices for fictional entertainment that integrates various extant lines of work on entertainment education, perceived realism, information processing, credibility assessment, and verification strategies. To flesh out the conceptual model derived from top-down theoretical integration, we use an inductive, bottom-up approach to theory building, assisted by qualitative research. The resulting model describes knowledge acquisition from fiction as an essentially social process characterized by a combination of epistemic trust and epistemic vigilance toward fictional content and sources, in which credibility is assessed via social knowledge sharing and verification practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jordan Alexander Stein's book, "When Novels Were Books," explores the relationship between the material qualities of books and the experience of character in Anglophone novels. Stein argues that the size, shape, and organization of a book can have a profound impact on readers' perceptions of character and their own sense of self. The book's argument is of interest to those studying book history and material texts, as it highlights the importance of considering the material aspects of literature. Stein's thesis challenges the notion of authenticity in literature and invites readers to question their own artificiality. [Extracted from the article]

International studies have established that reading for enjoyment is linked to higher reading outcomes however there are local variations of the relationship and nuances associated with gender and economic contours. The aim of this study was to examine 318 Australian Year 3 (7 to 8-year-olds) boys' and girls' self-reported enjoyment for reading, reading frequency, and achievement on national reading tests. Findings showed that students who indicated higher levels of enjoyment for fiction and non-fiction, and who read more frequently, indicated higher reading achievement. Students attending schools in higher demographic communities tended to attain higher reading scores. An unexpected and significant finding was that fiction was the most favoured reading genre for boys and that more girls had higher levels of enjoyment for non-fiction than boys. These findings challenge the long-standing myth that boy's prefer non-fiction. The study demonstrates the importance of promoting reading enjoyment – particularly fiction – early in students' schooling trajectory, with special consideration for boys and students from economically marginalised communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses four recent works of scholarship that challenge traditional ideas about the novel and its role in literature. The authors argue for new approaches to understanding novels, moving away from the dominance of realism and exploring different perspectives. Scott Black suggests centering the history of fiction around romance instead of the realist novel, while Wendy Anne Lee examines the concept of insensibility in eighteenth-century fiction. Anna Kornbluh rethinks realism as an abstract modeling of social space, and Elaine Freedgood challenges the paradigm of realism in Victorian novels. These works contribute to a broader debate within novel studies and invite readers to reconsider their understanding of the novel. [Extracted from the article]

This research considers the representation of cultural deracination in Mohamed Al 'Ali 'Ar'Ar's novel Mā lā Tadhruhū al-Riyāḥ. The book engages with the discourse of colonial mimicry bringing to the surface the bitter ramifications of asymmetrical construction of the colonized's identity. In his depiction of the "mimic man" in colonial Algeria, Ar'Ar calls for his readers to probe into the experience of his protagonist, al-Bashir, whose dazzlement of the colonizers' power brings him under France's "mission civilisatrice." Following a Conradian journey to Paris, as a soldier in the French army, al-Bashir has to face a civilizational shock. In placing the novel in conversation with Bhabha's mimicry, the research traces how the text interrogates the implications of colonial mimicry on a character entirely fraught with futility and lack of certainty that stem from his self-immersion in Ngũgĩan "cultural Parrotry." Correspondingly, the protagonist experiences cultural depersonalization, which inevitably leads him to undergo an "identity shift" in order to abolish stigmatization. The study thus follows al-Bashir's rebellious metamorphosis from being the metonymically Westernized similar-but-not-quite "interpreter" to being the "civilized master." Interestingly, the article concludes that the protagonist's name change accelerates his mimetic conversion to produce a blurred copy of the colonizer: "al-Bashir-turned-Jacques" emerges as a fully-fledged oppressor whose subjugation of his fellow countrymen is hard to ignore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sami Tchak is renowned for his novels that skillfully blend elements of literature and research, creating a fictionalized portrayal of both worlds. While commentators have examined various aspects of Tchak's work, none have explored the connection between literature and social sciences in his novels through their shared element, the book. This article demonstrates how his novel Le continent du Tout et du presque Rien (2021) aims to dismantle the assumed boundaries between form and content, reality and fiction, scientific discourse and literary expression. Through the fictionalization of ethnology books and African novels, it challenges preconceived notions, revealing the scientific elements within literary discourse and the literary aspects within scientific discourse. The novel combines a genealogical approach, addressing the Other through the lens of ethnology's influence on Africa's perception, with a genetic approach, aligning itself with the African literary canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the recent growth of popular interest in fungi across commerce, design, wellness, fiction, and film. Focusing on the ways that fungi are said to take the form of distributed networks, we argue that it is primarily through aesthetics that fungi are marshaled to address ecological and capitalist crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The miniseries When They See Us constitutes an example of how a based-on-real-events fiction work can add to its poetic role the ability to participate in shaping democracy. Although journalism is not its central issue, this Netflix series makes a representation of the press in which it shows how the media failed in fulfilling its democratic role and tries to make amends for it. By analyzing 21 scenes dedicated to the media from a narrative perspective, this paper shows how the series represents the press' failure in acting as watchdog during this case. Moreover, it also shows how this representation of the press turns the series into a watchdog itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory of mind (ToM) is a crucial skill in navigating and functioning in the social world. Significant ToM impairment was consistently found in bipolar disorder; it can be both a state and trait marker of the disorder. However, most of the ToM tests are not sensitive enough to detect subtle individual differences, which would be necessary for an individualized treatment plan. The Short Story Task (SST) is a new way to sensitively assess individual differences in ToM performance. The aim of the study was to test the feasibility of SST in patients with bipolar disorder. 31 persons (11 male, 20 female) with bipolar I disorder and 31 healthy individuals (15 males and 16 females) as a control group were recruited. SST was used to evaluate ToM performance. The SST uses a Hemingway novel, in which the patient is presented with a realistic social situation, where the motivations of the characters and the underlying relationships of events are not explicitly described. In the explicit mental state reasoning questions the CG (M = 8.06) had significantly higher (p < 0.001) scores than the persons with bipolar I disorder (M = 5.03). There was no ceiling effect for explicit ToM scores in either group. Participants in CG (M = 8.03) also significantly outperformed (p = 0.006) the BG participants (M = 6.55) in the comprehension questions. The spontaneous mental state inference question was performed equally (M = 0.23) in both groups. Group assignment (t = −3.503, p < 0.001), comprehension score (t = 2.864, p = 0.006), and spontaneous mentalization (t = 2.846, p = 0.006) significantly predicted the explicit ToM performance. Overall, we found that the Short Story Task is a promising tool for measuring ToM in patients with bipolar disorder without ceiling effect. Primarily explicit ToM was found to be deficient, which corresponds well with the ToM literature in bipolar disorder. Contrary to our hypothesis we could not detect impairment in spontaneous ToM and found that patients living with bipolar disorder also showed deficits in comprehension. The lack of assessment of neurocognitive skills is a significant limitation of the current study. • Theory of Mind (ToM) impairment was consistently found in bipolar disorder. • Short Story Task (SST) is a new way to sensitively assess individual differences in ToM performance. • Short Story Task seems a suitable tool for measuring explicit ToM in patients with bipolar disorder without ceiling effect. • Comprehension scores together with spontaneous use of mental state inferences predicts explicit ToM in bipolar disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the popularity achieved by several Italian cultural objects in the United States during the aftermath of World War Two has been largely acknowledged, the meanings these artefacts took on in their new cultural context are yet to be understood. To unravel the complex, multi-layered processes of cultural translation at play in transatlantic transfers at the onset of the Cold War, this article explores the U.S.-American reception of Italian culture from the vantage point of translated fiction. Retracing the public discourse around new Italian books in the United States means to recognize the emergence of a new framing narrative, that of a novel Renaissance taking place in Italy after the end of the Fascist period. Understanding the concept of a new Renaissance from a transnational perspective, at a time in which the public discourse was being reorganized across all media in response to the new geopolitical order, allows us to identify the politics of newly translated Italian fiction in the U.S. I argue that, through its framing, Italian fiction was made an ally in the cultural Cold War, coming to represent Western democracy, freedom, and creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]