Schrodinger’s Narratives: Denis Diderot’s and Laurence Sterne’s Manipulations of Time and Space

This article proposes connections between literature and science through the relatively recent scientific concept of chaos. I examine Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and His Master to show how these authors contradict the scientific thinkers of their time by creating narrative structures that disrupt the normal flow of time and bend the typically absolute space between reader and fictional story. Though the physical books of Jacques and Tristram Shandy have a final page, the two authors leave it to their readers to finish the stories for themselves. The narrators of both novels interact with their readers, creating a space that allows their audience to fill in the narrator’s and author's blanks. In doing this, these texts become simultaneously complete and incomplete. Thus, a narrative styled similarly to the thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat is created. In this sense these novels can be perceived as precursors to scientific thought of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

An Unbreakable Bond

"An Unbreakable Bond" is the fictional story of Alice and her mother, and the everlasting bond between them made possible by the CNCT microchips. Their story is an exploration of a future in which surveillance plays a central role in human relationships by subverting our understanding of how we might communicate with those we love the most. The story of Alice and her mother will take us on a journey of a technological invasion into the closest relationships in our lives, into a world where individuals are both surveilling and being surveilled. It is also a story about an opaque ecosystem of public/private partnerships which begs the question: to whom do you turn to when something goes wrong?

Playful Metaphors for Narrative-Driven E-Learning

A team of e-learning specialists was assigned the mission to design and develop seven short e-learning modules for young learners on popular topics with a prime focus on social-emotional learning. However, these courses had to be produced on a limited budget, hosted in a Moodle platform, and be delivered for free in asynchronous only mode. Hence, a playful method of meaningful storyfication was applied in e-learning to captivate attention and spark interest. In each module, a fictional story or metaphorical challenge with playful elements was introduced where learners were invited to assist the story’s protagonists or become the heroes themselves by engaging with content. As the role of teachers is vital for the adoption of technology-based solutions in education, a mixed method evaluation was undertaken to assess the effectiveness of the method. Forty-two educators reviewed the courses, answered a questionnaire and participated in interviews. Results indicated that participants highly appreciated the narrative aspects, visual, and auditory elements rendering the e-learning courses effective for the target audience. This article can assist educators, distance education designers and developers to adopt a playful mindset and learn how to integrate practically storytelling elements into their classroom-based and online teaching.

I Will Tell You My History: Rewriting to Revolt in the Process of al-Tārīkh al-badīl (Allohistory)

In an epoch of revival of the historical novel, Arabic literature tries to provide its own response to the construction of al-tārīkh al-badīl, namely “alternative history” or, also, allohistory which, as a literary genre, was originally a branch of science fiction. By proposing the idea of a counter-narration, the search for historical alternatives becomes a matter of great importance and responsibility. What happens if the writer tries to construct an alternative point of view, a counter-narration in which “History” is transformed into an almost fictional story? Far from an act of betrayal, this can be interpreted as a restoration of iltizām whenever the narrative potential, or the “if” contained within the narrative, comes true. This article aims to present works where the authors wonder: “What would have happened if…?” This question opens space for literary alternatives to mainstream or official historical narratives.

Making New Land: An Intertidal Aesthetics

Making New Land is an essay in theory-fiction set in a near future, where the oceans have disappeared. In these devastated landscapes, a first person narrator investigates unsolved biological enigmas on Earth and on Mars. In the footsteps of a fictional group of Anarcho-botanists called Sea for Space, the story alternates a melancholic longing for the beauty of intertidal and coastal lifeforms with futuristic visions of new species engineered by humans as new companions. The scenario explores archetypal figures of plant-human coexistence: from the botanical gaze to a nostalgic longing for connection, and from the hubris of genetical engineering to the dream of a post-humanism communion with the vegetal. The fictional story is interwoven with scholarly references and a critical discussions of artistic and literary works dealing with the fauna, flora and mythologies of the seaside, which form the outlines of an 'Intertidal Aesthetics'.

The Language of Fiction

The Language of Fiction brings together new research on fiction from philosophy and linguistics. Fiction is a topic that has long been studied in philosophy. Yet recently there has been a surge of work on fictional discourse in the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. There has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. The Language of Fiction contains fourteen essays by leading scholars in both fields, as well as a substantial Introduction by the editors. The collection is organized in three parts, each with their own introduction. Part I, “Truth, reference, and imagination”, offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, “Storytelling”, deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, “Perspective shift”, zooms in on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, viz. the way we get access to the fictional characters’ inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see.

The Personality Structure of the Main Character in Marwah Mamduh’s Novel Na’am Ahwâkarya

This study aimed to describe the personality structure of the main character in Marwah Mamdouh’s novel Na'am Ahwaka using Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic approach. Marwah Mamdouh presented a fictional story that illustrated the personality structure form, namely the condition of the soul and the emotional outbursts experienced by the character. This research employed a qualitative descriptive method to express the personality structure forms of the main characters in the novel. The obtained research data as words, phrases, sentences, and discourse showed the personality structure of the main characters in the novel. The findings of the research were narratives that showed the structure of personality comprising, first, Id which was a part of the psychology; second, Ego which was the only area of the mind that had contact with the reality; third, Super Ego was the absorption of individuals from combined values and moral values that provide a boundary between the good and bad things. This study concluded that id dominated all the problems experienced by the main character in the novel.

EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT, BUT NOT TRANSPORTATION LEADS TO HIGHER EMPATHY AFTER READING A FICTIONAL STORY, IN MORE AGREEABLE PARTICIPANTS

Research from different disciplines points to a positive relationship between reading fiction and empathy. Some studies also focus on potential moderators of this relationship, such as individual personality differences and how the individual engages with the fictional text in terms of transportation. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether reading-induced affective empathy can be explained by personality traits, namely Agreeableness, and Emotional engagement, and Transportation. Participants were 132 undergraduate and graduate students, who read a short fictional story by J. Joyce and after that completed a set of questionnaires, containing measures of Big Five personality traits, Emotional engagement, Transportation and affective Empathy. Results show that there is a strong positive relationship between Agreeableness and story-induced Empathy and that this relationship can be partially explained by Emotional engagement. Transportation, on the other hand, did not show to be an important variable in the relationship of Agreeableness and story-induced Empathy, neither did it show to be a significant factor in this relationship when Emotional engagement was included. This study provides information for additional understanding of the relationship between reading fiction and empathy through the investigation of its mediators.

Tale and Parable: Theorizing Fictions in the Old English Boethius

Scholarship has often considered the concept of fiction a modern phenomenon. But the Old English Boethius teaches us that medieval people could certainly tell that a fictional story was a lie, although it was hard for them to explain why it was all right that it was a lie—this is the problem the Old English Boethius addresses for the first time in the history of the English language. In translating Boethius's sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, the ninth-century Old English Boethius offers explanatory comments on its source's narrative exempla drawn from classical myth. While some of these comments explain stories unfamiliar to early medieval English audiences, others consider how such “false stories” may be read and experienced by those properly prepared to encounter them. In so doing, the Old English Boethius must adopt and adapt a terminology for fiction that is unique in the extant corpus of Old English writing.

{ Epilogue }

The discourse of the picturesque reshaped how Americans understood their landscape, but it largely ended in the mid-1870s. The decline of the picturesque can be illustrated in two emblematic works: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque” and William Cullen Bryant’s enormous 1874 scenery book Picturesque America. Woolson’s fictional story is a satire of travel in which a young urban woman accompanies her grandfather to the countryside “in search of the picturesque” and instead only finds development. This story signals the shift in literary interest in rural subjects toward regionalism. Regionalism disavowed the earlier focus on picturesque landscapes, instead featuring distinctive regional dialects and cultural practices that reflected the newly created social sciences. Bryant’s Picturesque America was a Reconstruction-era project aimed at reconnecting the divided nation through a nonhierarchical unification under the sign of “picturesque.” Adding not only the West but also the South to the compendium of American scenery, Picturesque America imagined the entire nation as picturesque. In this formulation, the picturesque became synonymous with landscape in general. Although the picturesque lost its appeal as an authoritative discourse for shaping the American landscape in the latter third of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that the spaces that dominated American life in the twentieth century and beyond are owed almost entirely to the transformative project of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque.