Stimulating Non-Fiction Writing!

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Hughes-Evans ◽  
Simon Brownhill
Keyword(s):  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Non Fiction

scholarly journals ‘A Marriage of Freud and Euclid’: Psychotic Epistemology in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Samuel Francis
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Scientific Status ◽  
Contemporary Status ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theories

The writings of J.G. Ballard respond to the sciences in multiple ways; as such his (early) writing may productively be discussed as science fiction. However, the theoretical discipline to which he publicly signalled most allegiance, psychoanalysis, is one whose status in relation to science is highly contested and complex. In the 1960s Ballard signalled publicly in his non-fiction writing a belief in psychoanalysis as a science, a position in keeping with psychoanalysis’ contemporary status as the predominant psychological paradigm. Various early Ballard stories enact psychoanalytic theories, while the novel usually read as his serious debut, The Drowned World, aligns itself allusively with an oft-cited depiction by Freud of the revelatory and paradigm-changing nature of the psychoanalytic project. Ballard’s enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis in his early 1960s fiction mutated into a fascinatingly delirious vision in some of his most experimental work of the late 1960s and early 1970s of a fusion of psychoanalysis with the mathematical sciences. This paper explores how this ‘Marriage of Freud and Euclid’ is played out in its most systematic form in The Atrocity Exhibition and its successor Crash. By his late career Ballard was acknowledging problems raised over psychoanalysis’ scientific status in the positivist critique of Karl Popper and the work of various combatants in the ‘Freud Wars’ of the 1990s; Ballard at this stage seemed to move towards agreement with interpretations of Freud as a literary or philosophical figure. However, despite making pronouncements reflecting changes in dominant cultural appraisals of Freud, Ballard continued in his later writings to extrapolate the fictive and interpretative possibilities of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas. This article attempts to develop a deeper understanding of Ballard’s ‘scientific’ deployment of psychoanalysis in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash within the context of a more fully culturally-situated understanding of psychoanalysis’ relationship to science, and thereby to create new possibilities for understanding the meanings of Ballard’s writing within culture at large.

scholarly journals ‘Weird and fantastic realism’: Science and Stories in the Work of Grant Allen

2021 ◽  
pp. 140-154
Author(s):  
Beth Mills
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Formal Training ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Professional Science ◽  
Economic Necessity ◽  
Fantastic Realism ◽  
Grant Allen

Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a well-known populariser of natural history who was widely recognised for his extensive knowledge of science and his ability to refashion complex ideas for general audiences. But his status as a popular writer, coupled with a lack of formal training, placed him at the margins of professional science and impeded his serious scientific ambitions. Although Allen tended to portray fiction-writing as an economic necessity, both contemporary and recent critics have noted stylistic innovations that place him within germinal popular genres of the fin de siècle. This paper aims to show that Allen’s contributions to late-Victorian popular literature derive in part from his negotiation of fiction and non-fiction genres. Focusing particularly on his experiments with the short story, it considers how and to what extent he distinguished scientific from literary writing, while revealing his views on plausibility in fiction to be more complex than is typically recognised. Little-studied reviews of Allen’s popular fiction suggest the wider contemporary impact of his experimentations. That critics recognised his style as unconventional endorses a reappraisal of his place within developments in late-Victorian popular literature.

Investigations of an anti-semiote: Stanisław Lem’s semiotic ideas in light of semiotic functionalism of Jerzy Pelc

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarosław Boruszewski
Keyword(s):  
Critical Approach ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Independent Form ◽  
Positive Statements ◽  
Typological Approach ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Stanislaw Lem ◽  
Main Components

Abstract At the turn of 1960s and 1970s, Stanisław Lem devoted some of his non-fiction writing to a discussion and considerations of semiotics. Most of them were expressions of a critical approach mainly directed against structuralism. However, Lem also formulated some positive statements although they were not developed systematically. The article offers an analysis of Lem’s semiotic ideas from the perspective of semiotic functionalism of Jerzy Pelc, mainly considering its two main components: contextualism and typological approach. Special attention is paid to the latter because both Pelc and Lem proposed some original solutions in this respect. What is meant here is the multidimensional typology of symbolic uses of signs developed by Pelc and Lem’s multidimensional typology of the situations of the reception of texts. Although they are independent form each other, these proposals show some convergence both in their ways of construction and roles they are supposed to perform. Henceforth, one can say that Lem was a crypto-functionalist.

scholarly journals In Dialogue with Writing. Clare Boylan’s Non-Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 42-53
Author(s):  
Giovanna Tallone
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Interesting Insight ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Kate O'brien ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Newspaper Articles

In 1993 Clare Boylan edited a collection of essays by diverse writers on the act of writing entitled The Agony and the Ego. The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored. Here, Boylan takes the double stance of an outsider, as a critic, and of an insider, as a writer, and her concern with other writers’ work highlights her own preoccupation with writing and creativity, thus providing an interesting insight into her own fiction too. Besides writing seven novels and three collections of short stories, Clare Boylan also produced personal, autobiographical and critical pieces in a variety of essays and newspaper articles. She also showed a rigorous stance as editor in the thorough and engaging Literary Companion to Cats (1994). In particular, Boylan’s non-fiction work includes essays on Kate O’Brien and Molly Keane, as well as an introduction to Maeve Brennan’s posthumous novella The Visitor. Her critical work shows rigorous attention to texts and imagery, but also patterns of affinities with the writers she takes into account. The purpose of this essay is to analyse samples of Clare Boylan’s critical work vis-à-vis her own fiction. Significant cross-references can be identified which cast new perspectives on her literary work.

Translingualism and transculturalism beyond fiction works (based on articles and book reviews by Olga Grushin)

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 273-279
Author(s):  
Ekaterina S. Lebedeva ◽  
◽  
Zoya G. Proshina
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
American Author ◽  
Creative Writings ◽  
Individual Style

The article discusses the literary creative works of the Russian-American author Olga Grushin in the framework of translingual and transcultural transformations typical of this author and her language. The author’s individual style has been influenced by two cultures — Russian, the home culture in which the author has grown and which she absorbed, and American culture in which Olga Grushin succeeded as a writer and whose language she uses in her creative writings. The goal of our research is to analyze linguistic features of Grushin’s short essays and book reviews written for international magazines. The research revealed that translingual and transcultural changes that the author has undergone are reflected not only in her fiction but also in other genres where the author’s creativity and imagination might be somewhat restricted. Grushin’s translingualism is evident on the lexical level, embracing words borrowed from Russian. The author introduces them into her English text in many ways. The syntax of her book reviews and essays is definitely different from that of her novels but its cultural traces and author’s individual features are retained: complex sentences with a variety of coordinate and subordinate clauses, numerous homogeneous parts of the sentence, participial phrases, attributes, and abundance of parallel constructions are typical of Grushin’s non-fiction writing. The structure of her language reveals the tradition of Russian classics, the love for expressive syntax that facilitates the author in creating a certain image and brings in thoughts and feelings shared by the author.

Patient teacher: The complexity of in-betweenness in the teaching profession

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 219-236
Author(s):  
G. H. Greer
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Teacher Burnout ◽  
Teaching Profession ◽  
Educational Settings ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Canadian North ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Open Dialogue

Using theory and analysis, I story my experience of being in-between ill and well as a teacher. First, I employ the work of Turner (1991), Massumi (2002) and Butler (2002) to define in-betweenness. Then I develop a tool for exploring the values of in-betweenness. Finally, I conduct discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003) on a small archive of non-fiction writing on teacher burnout in the Canadian north. I discover three possible values of in-betweenness in educational settings: (1) validation of diversity, (2) support of open dialogue and (3) development of self-reflection.

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