Unnatural Temporalities and Projected Places in Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2

Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2 (1967) belongs to his first period of play writing. In this phase, his works exhibit experimental, remote, impossible narrative/fictional worlds that are overwhelmingly abstract, exhibiting “abrupt shifts of focus and tone” (Wetzsteon 1984, 4). Shepard’s unusual theatrical literary cartography is commensurate with his depiction of unnatural temporalities, in that, although the stage is bare, with almost no props, the postmodernist/metatheatrical conflated timelines and projected (impossible) places in the characters’ imagination mutually reflect and inflect each other. Employing Jan Alber’s reading strategies in his theorization of unnatural narratology and Barbara Piatti’s concept of projected places, this essay proposes a synthetic approach so as to naturalize the unnatural narratives and storyworlds in Shepard’s play.

Beauty be not caused. It is. Pedagogical reflections on beauty experience through books and pictures

As Emily Dickinson suggests, beauty be not caused. It is. It is up to us finding traces of it even in the most unexpected and difficult contexts. During pandemic fragile time, looking for the beauty in our environments is a pedagogical imperative and necessary to surviving fear and loneliness. It becomes important the immersion in stories as strategic way to experience the beauty through fictional worlds. Stories, in fact, are “mind’s Flight Simulator” (Oatley), through the fiction “we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end” (Gottschall). It is possible, through the stories, safely experiment the unheimliche, taking the beauty even if in isolation and immobility. From this perspective, the article focus on the educational potential of reading as strategic way to embrace the beauty, researching beauty between lines and in the depth of the imagines. It is also a crucial opportunity to have access to the potential of unheimliche and the resulting “Collateral beauty”

Literary Geographies in Balzac and Proust

Literary geography is one of the core aspects of the study of the novel, both in its realist and post-realist incarnations. Literary geography is not just about connecting place-names to locations on the map; literary geographers also explore how spaces interact in fictional worlds and the imaginary of physical space as seen through the lens of characters' perceptions. The tools of literary cartography and geographical analysis can be particularly useful in seeing how places relate to one another and how characters are associated with specific places. This Element explores the literary geographies of Balzac and Proust as exemplary of realist and post-realist traditions of place-making in novelistic spaces. The central concern of this Element is how literary cartography, or the mapping of place-names, can contribute to our understanding of place-making in the novel.

Metaleptic Rewriting as Sham Authorial Justice in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds

In Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a postmodernist novel avant la lettre, literary entities rewrite literary texts, including those in which they exist and I argue that they do so through metaleptic rewriting and in pursuit of different types of authorial justice, all of which are infelicitous. The novel’s intense self-reflexivity and intricate metafictional games create a foundation that is too fluid to sustain the weight of a heavy concept such as justice. Thus, myriad fictional worlds filled with authors wishing to impose what they deem to be fair in their own literary universe interact, intersect and overlap, allowing their justice-motivated characters to metaleptically transgress their ontological levels in order to undo the wrongs of their authors. Yet, in a novel that promotes itself as ‘a self-evident sham’, such attempts are mocked at every step and the quest for fairness is replaced by the thirst for authorial power.

Narrative Language and Possible Worlds in Postmodern Fiction. A Borderline Study of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time

"Narrative Language and Possible Worlds in Postmodern Fiction. A Borderline Study of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time. The present paper is a study of more traditional hermeneutics combined with a tinge of possible world modality, with the purpose of creating a thorough picture of narrative worlds and balancing it against the possible world system, with practical applications onto postmodern fiction, in Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time. The article focuses on exposing narrative language, worlds and characters, viewing them through Seymour Chatman’s perspective and slightly counterbalancing this approach with the possible world semantics system (as envisioned by Kripke, Lewis, Nolan, Putnam) for a diverse understanding of the inner structure and functioning of narrative text and fictional worlds. Keywords: possible worlds, possible-world semantics, narrative worlds, fictional worlds, narrative language, fiction, postmodern fiction, fictional characters "

Geografia romanului românesc (1933-1947): arealul național

This article analyzes the ways in which the Romanian novel published between 1933-1947 represents cities, towns, peripheries and villages in the fictional worlds. It asserts the democratization of the narrative universe through the novel of the periphery and discusses the birth of the touristic novel, in which characters often spend time in new areas for relaxation. It also challenges the idea of spatial atomization, since the geographical preferences of the authors are usually centralized and gentrified. Almost only subgenre novels and ethnical minority authors are responsible for the democratization of the national geography of the Romanian novel in 1933-1947.

Precaritate și cosmopolitism în romanul românesc (1845-1947): muncă, hrană, sănătate, îmbrăcăminte, mondenitate

The present study dwells on an archive that includes around 85% of the Romanian production of novel from 1845 to 1947 and analyzes the social aspects of daily life in the fictional worlds of realist novels published in this timespan. From work conditions to the rights of employees, from hunger to bountifulness, from modesty to display, two different hemispheres seem to co-exist: a rustical and narrow one of the rural, liminal spaces, and a cosmopolitan and broad one of cities and mobility. Without a doubt, besides this spatial influence over daily life, an even more important one, that sometimes is complementary to the first and sometimes it overarches it is social class. In the mirrored image of the realist Romanian novel until 1947, there is nothing more consequential for individual and collective characters than class, and the differences between classes are closely linked to all dimensions of daily life described in our article.

Eyes and speech in English, Finnish and Czech children’s literature

This study explores cross-linguistically, in English, Czech and Finnish, eye-behaviour that occurs in children’s fiction in the vicinity of character speech. We explore how authentic eye behaviour, as an important part of non-verbal communication, is rendered in fictional worlds. While there are more similarities than differences across the languages in the characteristics and narrative functions of fictional eye-behaviour, the linguistic encoding differs substantially due to typological differences between the languages. The same semantic roles are often expressed by divergent syntactic means. The divergence is reflected primarily in the relative weight of different word-order principles, the different means of indicating simultaneity, as well as the role of inflection in Finnish and Czech.

Geografia romanului românesc (1933-1947): străinătatea

This article analyzes the ways in which the Romanian novel published between 1933-1947 represents foreign cities, towns, peripheries, and villages in the fictional worlds. It asserts the democratization of the narrative universe through the planetary perspective of the novels and discusses the birth of the Global South imagery. The search was conducted on a corpus of 700 novels in the MDRR archive. The data is disposed through quantifying recurrences (the number of novels in which a city appears) and occurrences (the number of times a city appears) of foreign cities. This article deals with representations of Europe and the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia in the 1933-1947 Romanian novel. It separates three main categories (main cities, consolidation cities, and secondary cities) and shows the planetary distribution of space within the Romanian novel.

‘I don’t have a skull… Or bones’: Minor Characters in Disney Animation

This article explores the place of minor characters in Disney’s animated features. More specifically, it proposes that Disney’s minor characters mark an aesthetic rupture by breaking with the mode of hyperrealism that has come to be associated with the studio’s feature-length films. Drawing on character theory within literary studies and on research into animated film performance, the article suggests that the inherent ‘flatness’ of Disney’s minor characters and the ‘figurativeness’ of their performance styles contrasts with the characterizations and aesthetic style of the leading figures. The tendency of Disney’s minor characters to stretch and squash in an exaggerated fashion is also reminiscent of the flexible, plasmatic style of the studio’s early cartoons. In addition to exploring the aesthetic peculiarity of minor characters, this article also suggests that these figures play an important role in fleshing out the depicted fictional worlds of Disney’s movies. By drawing attention to alternative viewpoints and storylines, as well as to the broader narrative universe, minor characters add detail, nuance and complexity to the animated films in which they appear. Ultimately, this article proposes that these characters make the fairy-tale-like worlds of Disney animation more expansive and believable as fictional spaces.