“A Kind of Magic”: Emotions, Imagination, Language – A Reading of Sartre

This paper maintains that Sartre’s concept of magic has to be considered as a full-fledged and quite technical phenomenological concept. Such concept (a) describes a very specific way in which one is able to be conscious-of-something and (b) reveals some structural features of consciousness and its mode of existence. Moreover (c) the “magical” cluster emotions-imagination-language also appears to be the existential matrix, as it were, from which fictions are generated: starting from the most original fiction of all, namely the constitutive fiction upon which each individual existence is built, i.e. the fiction of one’s own essence.

Moving up and down in real space

The paper focuses on the role of the Swedish spatial particles upp ‘up’ and ner ‘down’ to signal the endpoint-of-motion in the description of motion situations and is based on Swedish original fiction texts and their translations into English, German, French and Finnish. Frequently the endpoint is marked with a locative preposition such as på ‘on’ or i ‘in’, and then a particle is required to signal change-of-place. In German and Finnish, the particle is often zero translated and change-of-place is indicated by case. The particle is often zero translated also in French, a V(erb)-framed language. This leads to contrasts at the conceptual level since verticality is not expressed. The result points to radical intra-typological differences between S(atellite)-framed languages in the expression of Path depending on general morpho-syntactic differences. Another important conclusion is that several different classes of motion verbs must be distinguished even in S-languages to describe the expression of change-of-place.

German Lexical Units Containing the Suffixoid -Weise and their Equivalents in the Bulgarian Language

Our research interest was provoked by a group of lexical units typical of the German language, containing the productive suffix -weise. These words represent an open system, the representatives of which show a high frequency of use, and nuance the sentence meaning in a distinctive way. The present comparative study between the two unrelated languages, based on a corpus of excerpts from the original fiction and published translated texts from and into German, aims to identify and analyze possible options for precise bilateral translation of the respective lexical items. The analysis made is extremely useful and necessary to overcome the difficulties identified in the course of teaching German as a foreign language, and contributes to the formulation of clear concepts for achieving accurate equivalent translation.

Erotiskās prozas fenomens Latvijā un pasaulē

The present paper “The Phenomenon of Erotic Fiction in Latvian and World Literature” is devoted to the fiction genre acquiring immense popularity in Western literature while having attracted only fragmentary attention in Latvian literary scholarship, namely the erotic fiction, which is currently among those genres of literature most widely read among Latvian readers and therefore titled as somewhat phenomenal. The first part of the paper provides insight into the history of the erotic world literature and the most common division of the genre into the three basic categories; this part also provides a short overview of the erotic aspects in the Latvian original fiction during the 20th century. It has been possible to decide that the erotic prose has had only a limited representation in Latvian literature, mainly due to historical and socio-political factors, because the common tendency was to euphemise the said aspects, which were often met with an open reproach of the more Puritan part of the society. Erotic aspects in poetry and prose somewhat flourished during the epoch of Decadence (the first decade of the 20th century) and after that, only during the turn of the 20th/21st centuries when the prohibitions invoked by the Soviet censorship were lifted. Nevertheless, even during these periods, the more free approach resulted in only a few prose works of this kind or else episodes in works of other genres. The conclusive part of the paper is devoted to four novels by currently the most popular author of erotic romance in Latvian literature, Karīna Račko, inviting at the same time the discussion about the reasons for the popularity of these novels which might proceed from their common structural characteristics. It is possible to observe that the novel’s structures are notably similar to the basic plotlines of fairy-tales that the readers recognise on an archetypal level. Consequently, this makes it possible to view these novels as a sort of fairy-tales for modern grown-ups whose attraction is multiplied by the fact that the texts include specific aspects of visualisation that make it possible for the readers to identify closely with the characters.

براہوئی افسانوی ادب ٹی مٹ و بدل

Brahui is one of the oldest languages of the world. It fiction literature can be traced back to the folk to the folk lures of the olden times. The story is to be found in this oral tradition the translations of fiction from the other languages into Brahui and those of Brahui fiction into the other languages started from 1956. Gul Bangulzai, Taj Raisani, Anwer Roman, Dr Abdur Rehman Brahui, Sosen Brahui, Nader Shahwani, Khadim lehri and many others translated fiction from foreign languages into Brahui. The aim of this research article is to trace the origin and derelafment of translations of fiction into Brahui language. The area has been virtually ignored by the research scholars and no scholar has yet not of this area is by no means lesser than original fiction. Therefore, the researcher felt this important area and attempted to fil the research gap in this ongoing research study.

‘The Books to the Illiterate?’: Romani Publishing Activities in the Soviet Union, 1927–1938

As one of the projects of the Soviet cultural revolution, the Gypsy project was notable for its unusual success in creating a new literary language and active book publishing. Among its achievements are both original fiction, textbooks and manuals in various fields of knowledge and technics. For instance, the elementary school was almost fully provided with necessary books in Romani. It is noteworthy that Roma women played an active role in the creation of new literature and proved to be not only translators, but also authors of original works in several genres. As the most hardworking author, N. Pankovo, who was distinguished by incredible productivity, should be noted. This project was regularly supported by the state, which allowed the distribution of books at reasonable prices. This project was stopped in 1938, which overwhelmed the narrow group of writers and activists, though it did not lead to fatal personal repressions against them.

Gaming the Heart of Darkness

The history of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been one of adaptation and change. The enduring story is based upon Conrad’s experiences in the Congo in the 1890s and was published as a novella in 1902. Since then, the story has been criticised for racism by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and relocated to Vietnam by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now, influencing computer games such as Far Cry 2 and Spec Ops: The Line. In examining the adaptations of Heart of Darkness, we can consider how the story evolves from the passive reading of post-colonial narratives through to the active participation in morally ambiguous decisions and virtual war crimes through digital games: examining Conrad’s story as it has been adapted for other mediums provides a unique lens in which to view storytelling and retelling within the context of how we interpret the world. This paper compares the source material to its adaptations, considering the blending of historical fact and original fiction, the distortion of the original story for the purpose of creating new meaning, and reflects on whether interactivity impacts upon the feeling of immersion and sense of responsibility in audiences of different narratives.

Fifty shades of exploitation: Fan labor and Fifty Shades of Grey

This exploration of the debates that have taken place in fandom over the ethics of pulling fan fiction and publishing it as original work draws on the notion of the fannish gift economy, which postulates that gifts such as fan fiction and fan art have value in the fannish community because they are designed to create and cement its social structure. Tension exists between fans who subscribe to the notion of a fannish gift economy and those who exploit fandom by using it to sell their pulled-to-publish works. An examination of E. L. James's 2012 Fifty Shades trilogy (comprising the books Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed), which began as Twilight fan fiction, in addition to Twilight fan art sold through sites such as Redbubble and Etsy, demonstrates a tension between the two modes of fan expression: sale of artworks appears to be an acceptable practice in fandom, but the commercial sale of fan fic, even when marketed as original fiction, is widely contested.

The mediation of fandom in Karin Giphart's Maak me blij

The plot of the Dutch novel Maak me blij (Make me happy) (2005) by Karin Giphart draws from the culture of online fan communities. It describes the life of a lesbian in her late 20s, Ziggy, who has a terminally ill mother. Ziggy is an active fan who writes and reads femmeslash fan fiction—that is, lesbian interpretations of characters from mainstream series such as Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). By providing through Ziggy a personal view of fan communities and the genres that flourish there, Maak me blij connects the romantic motives of original lesbian fiction with its underground sister, fan fiction. The novel draws from various source texts and illustrates how fans interpret texts within a wider literary landscape. I use the concept of intermediality to analyze how Maak me blij mediates different types of original fiction (lesbian romances, science fiction) and fan fiction (femmeslash, Star Trek fan fiction) to establish new views on fandom and its construction of gender and intimacy. These motives are not only apparent within the text itself but also within the character of Ziggy as a fan writer with her own original alien characters.