Difficulties with telling the truth in non-fictive narratives and the issue of fictionalization

The purpose of this paper is to discuss difficulties with telling the truth in non-fictive narratives (e.g. trauma stories, rape narratives, asylum-seekers’ narratives). In order to do that I analyze, among others, various discourse fictionalization strategies, such as emplotment, narrative substances (Nss), vague predicates, and approximate references. I argue that these strategies are conditioned by the very nature of language, and therefore are present in all types of statements – literary as well as scientific. Referring to the concept of alethic pluralism, I also discuss how it is possible that the use of fictionalization techniques in non-fictive stories does not necessarily transform them into fiction.

Transforming Community: Women’s Rape Narratives and Gower’s Confessio Amantis

Despite its reputation as socially and politically conservative, John Gower’s fourteenth-century Confessio Amantis highlights sexual violence against women as a central cultural injustice and presents women’s rape narratives as a potentially powerful force for social and political change. This essay focuses on three of Gower’s tales in which women tell their own rape narratives with dramatic and lasting consequences: Mundus and Paulina, Tarquin and Lucrece, and Tereus and Philomena. In all three instances, these women’s narratives of suffering are socially transformative precisely because they threaten the masculine chivalric ideal. For Gower, rape is a direct result of the cultural belief that aristocratic men can and should force the less powerful to submit to their desires for total political and sexual control. Far from trivializing rape or fetishizing women’s suffering, Gower repeatedly argues that rapes are violent acts against entire communities and that women’s rape narratives have the potential to transform and reform those very communities.

Rape, Victimization, and Agency in Fang Siqi’s Paradise of First Love

This article undertakes a feminist analysis of rape in the semi-autobiographical novel Fang Siqi’s Paradise of First Love (“房思琪的初恋乐园” / “Fang Siqi de chulian leyuan”) by Taiwanese author Lin Yihan (林奕含). For Siqi, the traumatic experience of rape intertwines with a discourse of love, interpreted as an effort to disavow victimization and claim agency. A major strength of the novel is the way depictions of personal tragedies are accompanied by lucid exposures of rape as a decidedly social act, which shifts the conventional focus of rape narratives from victims to perpetrators and, in so doing, interrogates the victim-blaming culture and places the responsibility on both social factors and individual perpetrators. In the end, the novel identifies women’s bonding and collective resistance as an effective site for hope and agency.

Calling #TimesUp on the TV period drama rape narrative

This article explores the rape plotlines in Poldark (2015–), Outlander (2014–) and Banished (2015), which mostly take place prior to #MeToo and offer a pre-watershed insight into a time when rape could still be romanticised and eroticised in a way which might not, or at least should not, be possible after October 2017. However, these plots opened up conversations about consent, rape myths and rape fantasy and hence form part of the dialogue and increasingly public awareness about sexual violence which made #MeToo possible in the first place. How fans respond to rape narratives pre- and post-#MeToo is also considered.