Реальность вымысла в художественном мире: об одном фрагменте из «Соляриса» Станислава Лема

Transgressive Women, Transworld Women

I propose a methodology of literary study to be used in a wide range of disciplines and genres. While there have been numerous applications of postcolonial theory to the analysis of texts produced before, during, and after colonization, this transnational feminist methodology (TFM) is updated or reinvented to include discussions of the psychological and material ramifications of neocolonialism and neo-imperialism, especially about the immigrant experience—in particular, the perspective of children of immigrants living in diasporic communities. The work’s focus on postcolonial feminism is complicated by looking at gender, race, trans-nationality, and other identity factors that shape the work of writers of marginalized identities living in the Western world from an intersectional perspective.In this work I have identified a methodology that has been used but isn’t very well defined. TFM is still in the process of being theorized and continues to evolve as seen in mostly interdisciplinary feminist academic journals. It is currently a fluid theory and there hasn’t been a clear understanding of how TFM can be used in the study of literary and cultural texts. But now, looking back nearly twenty-five years later, it seems that TFM has mostly been taken up in social studies, especially women’s studies, and not as much in literary studies and cultural studies. It seems then, then the main divide in TFM approaches has to do with practical applications in the real world vs. theoretical application, as with the study of literary and cultural production, a divide I hope to problematize in this dissertation as not mutually exclusive. Yet the urgency of applying TFM to cultural productions and literary texts not only is useful but it’s important and becoming even more urgent the longer it takes to become canonized. We need to talk about how it can be applied and how it can be used and analyze how artists are actually using it both as driving the work of cultural producers but also in the analysis of cultural production. TFM can be a framework for interpreting artistic creations, but to do that, we need to delineate some of the basic principles of this emerging methodology. For example, in addition to form, many cultural producers/artists who use TFM in their work or whose work lends itself to TFM analysis engage with adaptation. Often, creators engage or talk back to the Western literary canon, as is the case in this dissertation with Forushande talking back to

Kundera's characters have always struggled both with images and identities they have constructed for themselves and that others have constructed for them. Since Milan Kundera's emigration to France, much of his fiction has explored such struggles through dialogical split between youthful characters who live in the fragile world of lyrical self-expression and definition, and cynical narrator, literary representative of the author, who resides in world of political realities and external definition of individuals. As readers have become used to Kundera's technique of self disclosing narrative, many have quite naturally associated the Kundera who inhabits his fiction with the writer himself. Nesmrtelnost (Immortality, 1991) does not accept such familiarity between reader and author; the novel seems to shake finger at those who confuse writer with the image created through his or her work. This is accomplished by implicating the falsity of human perception in both seemingly real and visibly fictional worlds through the juxtaposition of the plausible against the artificial and by drawing attention to our subjectivity in reference to early formalist polemics. Self-disclosing narratives such as those employed by Kundera function by making what is normally covert, overt. Fiction becomes game between author and reader. Immortality plays with the reader's perceptions by creating three tiered fictional world which consists of what appear to be three possible worlds. The first, the world of the self disclosing narrator, Milan Kundera, is the highly believable and recognizable world of contemporary Paris. It is this world that seems to guide the reader through the text. The second, the world of the characters, is avowedly artificial, though it is born out of familiar elements brought from the first world. Immorality's third possible world is the amorphous realm of the immortals where the likes of Hemmingway and Goethe meet to discuss their fates, i.e., images of them constructed out of popular opinion. The novel's narrator gains our trust as readers, and then shocks us by allowing the three tiers to collide, thus drawing attention to the artificiality of all fictional worlds, as well as the frailty of our perceptions in the actual world. Kundera's narrators typically provide background material regarding pertinent historical and literary information. In the case of Immortality, the novel is peppered with myriad allusions to twentieth-century literary polemics, in particular certain ideas of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Shklovsky sought to combat nineteenth-century Positivism and the often quoted and, to be fair, misquoted, ideas of Potebnya's is thinking in images.3 In the fictional world of Immortality, characters think and view literature and the world around them in terms of images. The narration, however, is constructed in terms of Shklovsky's ideals for art as propounded in Art as Device. Shklovsky's argument, briefly stated, is that the habitual way of thinking is to make the unfamiliar as easily digestible as possible. Normally our perceptions are automatic, which is way of saying that they are minimal... Since perception is usually too automatic, art develops variety of techniques to impede perception, or at least to call attention to themselves.4 It is in this study that Shklovsky identified series of literary devices that shaped the way generation of scholars read literature and writers composed fiction. Such devices are employed in Immortality in self-conscious manner. These techniques include: ostranenie (defamiliarization), a device by which phenomenon is taken out of its conventional context so that it may once again be seen, not merely recognized; zatrudnennaia forma (defacilitation), any device that forces the reader or listener to follow the text with an intense conscious effort and to wonder about its meaning..., and (lastly) obnazhennie priema (laying bare the device). …

The degree of comprehensibility of any art creation depends on its perception as a coherent whole. It is one of the axioms of hermeneutics. Nonetheless, the internal links of a fictional text can be divided into two different types by similarity and by contrast. This fact allows for an analogy that is due to the fiction world being somewhat similar to the real world, i.e., arranged quite in line with the doctrine of the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles. This philosopher thought the complex unity of the cosmos to be organized by two opposite powers - Love (φιλία) and Feud (νέικος). A modern physicist would call them the forces of attraction and repulsion. The analogs of “love” attraction and “hostile” repulsion are a symbolic representation and a tension of opposite values in a fiction world. When drawing the above analogy, one should take into account the fact that the art world, unlike the real one, has a purely intentional character, that is, all its objects and the connections between them are mediated by the consciousness and value-based intention of the author, the protagonist, and the reader. These opposing powers of “Love” and “Feud” may also be called the integral and differential axes of the value-semantic structure coordinates of the fiction cosmos. It is in these coordinates that the aesthetic event and the comprehensive participation of the reader take place. The paper provides a number of analyses of various works and fragments of fiction to substantiate the above-formulated thesis.

Various scholars have made claims about literature’s potential to evoke empathy and self-reflection, which would eventually lead to more pro-social behav­ior. But is it indeed the case that a seemingly idle pass-time activity like literary reading can do all that? And if so, how can we explain such an influence? Would the effects be particular to unique literary text qualities or to other aspects that literary texts share with other genres (e. g., narrativity)? Empirical research is necessary to answer these questions. This article presents an overview of empirical studies investigating the relationship between reading and empathy, and reading and self-reflection. We reveal those questions in the research that are not addressed as of yet, and synthesize the available approaches to literary effects. Based on theory as well as empirical work, a multi-factor model of literary reading is constructed.With regard to reading and empathy, the metaphor of the moral laboratory (cf. Hakemulder 2000) comes close to a concise summary of the research and theory. Being absorbed in a narrative can stimulate empathic imagination. Readers go along with the author/narrator in a (fictional) thought-experiment, imagining how it would be to be in the shoes of a particular character, with certain motives, under certain circumstances, meeting with certain events. That would explain why narrativity can result in a broadening of readers’ consciousness, in particular so that it encompasses fellow human beings. Fictionality might stimulate readers to consider the narrative they read as a thought experiment, creating distance between them and the events, allowing them to experiment more freely with taking the position of a character different from themselves, also in moral respects. Literary features, like gaps and ambiguous characterization, may stimulate readers to make more mental inferences, thus training their theory of mind. However, apart from literature possibly being able to train basic cognitive ability, we have little indication for the importance ofRegarding self-reflection, while there is no convincing evidence that literary texts are generally more thought-provoking than non-literary texts (either narrative or expository), there is tentative indication for a relation between reading literary texts and self-reflection. However, as was the case for the studies on empathy, there is a lack of systematic comparisons between literary narratives and non-literary narratives. There are some suggestions regarding the processes that can lead to self-reflection. Empirical and theoretical work indicates that the combination of experiencing narrative and aesthetic emotions tends to trigger self-reflection. Personal and reading experience may influence narrative and aesthetic emotions.By proposing a multi-factor model of literary reading, we hope to give an impulse to current reader response research, which too often conflates narrativity, fictionality and literariness. The multi-factor model of literary reading contains (our simplified versions of) two theoretical positions within the field of reader response studies on underlying processes that lead to empathy and reflection: the idea of reading literature as a form of role-taking proposed by Oatley (e. g., 1994; 1999) and the idea of defamiliarization through deviating textual and narrative features proposed by Miall and Kuiken (1994; 1999). We argue that these positions are in fact complementary. While the role-taking concept seems most adequate to explain empathic responses, the defamiliarization concept seems most adequate in explaining reflective responses. The discussion of these two theoretical explanations leads to the construction of a theoret­ical framework (and model) that offers useful suggestions which texts could be considered to have which effects on empathy and reflection.In our multi-factor model of literary reading, an important addition to the previously mentioned theories is the concept »stillness«. We borrow this term from the Canadian author Yann Martel (2009), who suggests reading certain literary texts will help to stimulate self-contemplation (and appreciation for art), moments that are especially valuable in times that life seems to be racing by, and we are enveloped by work and a multitude of other activities. Other literary authors have proposed similar ideas. Stillness is related to, or overlaps with the more commonly used term »aesthetic distance«, an attitude of detachment, allowing for contemplation to take place (cf. Cupchik 2001). Stillness, we propose, allows a space in which slow thinking (Kahneman 2011) can take place. Stillness is not reflection itself, but a precondition for reflection. In our model, stillness is an empty space or time that is created as a result of reading processes: the slowing down of readers’ perceptions of the fictional world, caused by defamiliarization. Our multi-factor model suggests that while role-taking can take place for all types of narratives, literary and fictional narratives may evoke the type of aesthetic distance (stillness) that leads to a suspension of judgment, adding to a stronger experience of role-taking and narrative empathy.

The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America is one representative of a series of highly popular, bestselling, creative non-fiction books that critique the Bush presidency. In his book, Frank Rich aims to unveil “the administration’s insidious efforts to blur the boundary between its reality and actual reality” (163, emphasis mine). This essay engages the book as a literary text and performs close readings to discuss the textual dynamics within Rich’s narrative project. More specifically, it will look at complexities and contradictions in the authentication strategies the text employs and at Rich’s attempts to tell a ‘true’ and credible narrative of the Bush administration’s deceit.

Cultural relevance of validation during mathematical modeling and word problem-solving: Reconceptualizing validation as an integration of possible fictional worlds

This chapter describes how technology, progressing rapidly, and especially computer technology has become an indispensable detail in daily life. The act of playing games starting to become virtual has emerged as a progress. In these early years, when the line between place and space has started to become thinner and people began to recognize the lines of flight between the real world and the virtual world, the movie “Tron” made an attempt to explain this possibility of transitivity. 28 years after the first movie, the sequel “Tron Legacy” emphasizes that this possibility still exists. The individual, in this sea of possibilities, comes and goes between place and space and becomes distant to their temporal context, digitalized and goes through deterritorialization. The narrative of the fictional world, the game world in this fictional world, the real world and the game field in the real world will be discussed in terms of transmedia, and some assumptions will be put forward through people and therefore, the deterritorialization of the media.

For Merleau-Ponty and Maldiney, the world of the pictorial image is “an almost crazy world” and a world of “confused sensations”. However, it is not only an illusory and chimeric world, cut off from the real world. Indeed, far from distancing us from the real world, this craziness and this confusion bring us back to it. The objective of this essay is therefore to question the relationship between pictorial art and the real (not fictional or imaginary) world. Certainly, the pictorial work of art makes us return “to the things themselves”, because it establishes a conversion of the gaze and a metamorphosis of the visible. But one can ask if this conversion of the gaze does not reverse the movement of phenomenological “reduction” as described by Edmund Husserl, since it plunges us into the very heart of the world and does not imply any abstention or abstraction. For Maldiney as for Merleau-Ponty, painting reveals our original being-in-the-world, so that it will be necessary to elucidate what it means exactly. Moreover, we will investigate the role of style and rhythm as well as the role of color and the line in order to describe more precisely the connection between the world and the work of art, between continuity and discontinuity. Finally, we will propose another meaning of the word “image” in order to highlight the ethical function of the image thus understood.

Chapter 7 - Science and Art in Collaboration—The Mindship Method

Each author happily writes about himself, about the difficulties encountered in writing, about literature, - we read in Roland Duhamel's book “The Poet in the Mirror: About Metaliterature” (Dichter im Spiegel: Über Metaliteratur) [Duhamel, 2001]. This is also the case with German-speaking Georgian migrant author Givi Margvelashvili. In a 2009 German-language novel, Givi Margvelashvili in his book “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” (“Der Kantakt, Aus den Lese-Lebenserfahrungen eines Stadtschreibers”), in parallel with his account of his life, experiences and work, shows the mystery of literary fiction and invites the reader into a metafictional game. Literary critic Patricia Waugh, who plays a special role in the study of metafiction, believes metafictional texts are those that deliberately refer to themselves as an artificial creation in order to raise questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. According to her concept, metafictional texts are created by an infinite linguistic game with the world, reality, fiction, narrative [Waugh, 1984]. In the present article we will try to review the novel “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” by Givi Margvelashvili, the main motives, elements or narrative techniques, characteristic of the metafictional literature, which show the metafictional nature of The Kantakt.It should be noted from the very beginning that Givi Margvelashvili's novel “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” is based on the artistic reality of the German writer Kurt Tucholsky’s - “Rheinsberg - A Picture Book for Lovers” (“Rheinsberg - Ein Bilderbuch für Verliebte”). The Kantakt is an intertextual game with a pretext. The latter appears in the work as a book in a book, which is one of the most common motifs in metafictional literature. Because Tucholsky’s work is often found in the Kantakt, the readers cannot forget it, therefore they constantly think about it, and even compare the pheno-text with the pretext. Naturally, there are many passages in the Kantakt in which we recognize intertextual metafiction.An important metafictional event in the novel is the transformation of the main character of the work - the first "City Writer" of the German city of Rheinsberg into a "reader" character. From the "real" world of the "City Writer" - from the second layer of the novel to the fictional world of the book - the first layer (the same as his own consciousness), the "transition" into the imaginary world blurs the line between "reality" and fiction. This is where one of the techniques of metafictional literature comes into play - metalepsis.The metafictionality of the novel is evidenced by the characters in the first layer, who are aware of their fictional existence. The aim of the "reader" is for the main characters of Kurt Tucholsky’s work to realize their fictional essence too. Because of this, he leaves a message to Claire and Wolf, which is written on a blank sheet of the same book the characters belong to: “This is your mirror-book. It accurately describes how you live through readers: everything you think, say and do here, you think, say and do in your reading-life” [Margvelashvili, 2009:461). In the work, the characters are presented as reading-creatures, whose lives depend on the reader and their imagination. The function of the characters also becomes a subject of discussion in the novel: "The characters in the book are committed to reflect the lives of real people, to serve people as a kind of reading-mirror" [Margvelashvili, 2009:200], - we read in Margvelashvili's novel.Based on the fragments of the life and memoirs of the "City Writer” scattered within the work, which coincide with the life and memoirs of Givi Margvelashvili, we can argue about the biographical auto-reflexivity in the work, which is also one of the forms of metafiction. It should also be noted that there are signs of autofiction in the Kantakt.In the Kantakt, as in most metafictional texts, the character, the reader, and the author are repeatedly thematized, as well as the act of writing, narrating, and reading. The language games in the novel also have a metafictional meaning. Auto-reflexive phrases and words reveal the fictional world of the book, through which often even a parallel is drawn between the fictional and the real world. Linguistic issues, including phonology, morphology, syntax, etc., are thematized and discussed in the Kantakt as a metafictional novel.Based on these and other examples discussed in the article, we can conclude that Givi Margvelashvili's “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” is a metafictional novel, revealing the fictitiousness of this work as well as other literary texts in general, primarily the pre-text of “Rheinsberg - A Picture Book for Lovers”.

Proper names are considered within the framework of the macrotext on the example of the texts of modern authors. The role of poetonymsis revealed when working with the image of a hero: naming as an indicator of social status, self-perception of a name, a name in communicative situations, etc. Currently, there is an increase in interest in the study of onomastics, including literary onomastics. A work of art is a special area of the functioning of proper names: here the words correspond not only with the real world, but also with the created reality; not only with modern discourse, but also with the language of the work itself. In the text, onymic units establish associative links. Proper names are an important component in the system of means of artistic expression. There are not so many works devoted to the study of the language of modern prose. In the scientific literature, the proper name’s role in works of fiction has not been fully studied. The subject of this study is proper names in a literary text. The object is the proper names of a literary text in modern prose. The theoretical and methodological basis was the work of domestic and foreign linguists. In the analysis of practical material, a descriptive method was used, systematization of onomastic units was carried out, as well as a generalization regarding the binding role of these linguistic elements in a literary text. The name is the bearer of a certain meaning, which reflects the conceptual intent of the author. It has been established that the choice of proper names in an artwork is determined by the context and is subject to the author’s intention. Proper names play a particularly important role in the structure of a literary text, serving as a key for expressing the author’s creative individuality, principles, beliefs and attitude to the real world. If the writer successfully chooses a name for his hero, then such a name acquires a certain semantic and stylistic load and deepens the emotional and artistic impression of both this image and the whole work as a whole.

This paper explores a stylistic approach to translating literary texts from Arabic into English and vice versa. It is held that in order to be in a position to render literary texts effectively and accurately, one needs to: (1) analyze and describe varieties of language, (2) identify and discern all important aesthetic aspects of text in order to interpret and appreciate texts properly, (3) activate processes and experiences of reading along with one’s intuitive responses to the text, and (4) activate all aspects of knowledge stored in one’s mind on language, text-typological demands, generic conventions, sociological roles of participants in the real world and in text, cultural environment and so on. Through the analysis of authentic data, it argues that by adopting a comprehensive stylistic approach, translators, as special text readers, can easily derive a better understanding and appreciation of texts, in particular literary texts. The data analysis demonstrates that literary translators, in addition to possessing other types of competences, need to develop first an analytical and evaluating competence that enables them to analyze and appreciate stylistic features, and second transferring/translating competence that enables them to prioritize the competing elements with a minimum loss.

The article deals with the problem of study of the theory of deixis in a literary text. Besides that it has its own linguistic characteristics due to the fact that the author uses various ways of indicating objects in the real world, which can be both concrete and abstract. The study of the theory of deixis in quotation of a literary text requires careful consideration of various contextual authorial and linguistic factors that influence the use and meaning of deictic expression in the literary text. The investigation employs a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from linguistics, semiotics, and cognitive science to unravel the complexities of deixis. It investigates how deixis operates across different languages and cultures, shedding light on universal principles and language-specific variations. The study also explores the pragmatic functions of deixis in communication, elucidating how speakers utilize deictic expressions to convey reference, spatial relations, and temporal distinctions. Additionally, the research delves into the cognitive aspects of deixis, examining how individuals process and interpret deictic elements in real-time communication. It addresses the challenges posed by deixis in cross-cultural communication and explores strategies for resolving potential misunderstandings arising from contextual dependencies. The linguistic features under scrutiny include personal, spatial, and temporal deixis, as well as the distinctions between deixis in spoken and written discourse. The study incorporates both theoretical analyses and practical applications, offering valuable insights for linguists, language educators, and communication scholars.

Рассматривается проблема функционирования пространства и времени в художественном тексте. Выделяются и описываются пространственные и временные параметры в плане их роли в организации того или иного художественного текста. Обосновывается мысль о том, что пространство и время как смыслообразующие понятия значимы в исследовании формирования художественного текста того или иного автора, выясняются грамматические, лексические, семантические особенности идиостиля определенного писателя. Подчеркивается, что пространство и время выступают во взаимосвязи и взаимодействии в художественном тексте, как и в окружающей действительности. Отмечается, что художественный текст отображает реальный мир в соответствии с пространственно-временной ориентированностью в том или ином обществе. Особое внимание уделено характеристике категории пространства и времени. The paper examines the problem of space and time functioning in literary texts. Spatial and temporal parameters are identified and described in terms of their role in organizing literary texts. The study substantiates the idea that space and time as meaning-forming concepts are significant in investigating the formation of a particular author’s literary text, revealing grammatical, lexical, and semantic features of a specific writer’s idiostyle. It is emphasized that space and time function in interconnection and interaction within literary texts, as they do in surrounding reality. It is noted that literary texts reflect the real world in accordance with spatio-temporal orientation in a given society. Special attention is paid to characterizing the categories of space and time.