Modern fiction

In this paper we explore the perception of Borges’ The Garden of the Forking Paths by American, Hungarian and Italian university students, with the aim of seeing: affective reaction, appreciation of text properties, meaning assignment, perception of the protagonist and the author and attitudes toward those from other cultures. Borges’ text was appropriate to disclose common ways of understanding practiced by these so-called ‘naïve’ (not expert) readers. The story is a brand of modern fiction which eschews traditional psychological elements, a de-personalized kind of narration. All the same, these readers tended to personalize the characters and action in the story. Our findings indicate that, regardless of their culture, readers try to shape their reading experience toward producing a simultaneous understanding of their inner and external worlds while interpolating a realistic frame into a (post)modern narrative.

L'articolo intende introdurre il lettore alla ricerca empirica negli studi letterari. L’esito della lettura di un testo consiste nella costruzione di un insieme di informazioni organizzate in modo coerente, grazie all’intervento di competenze di tipo linguistico e di tipo enciclopedico. Il lettore costruisce una rappresentazione mentale complessa, nella quale inserisce anche informazioni che non sono presenti nella superficie del testo, ma che la sua esperienza ritiene necessarie. In questo modo vengono concretizzate le parti indeterminate del testo letto. Un testo funziona sulla base di una fortissima cooperazione del soggetto che legge. In particolare la funzione estetico-emotiva richiede l’attivazione di ricordi personali coinvolgenti nella memoria del lettore. Queste considerazioni portano a un mutamento dell’oggetto e degli strumenti della ricerca (non più la lettura diretta del testo analizzato, ma l’osservazione di come il testo funziona con lettori diversi) e anche la necessità di una cooperazione interdisciplinare, in grado di coinvolgere gli studiosi di letteratura, gli psicologi e gli esperti di statistica. Gli studi letterari ci offrono secoli di esperienza nell’analisi di testi, la psicologia ci offre conoscenze e metodi per studiare i processi mentali dei lettori e la statistica ci permette di trarre conclusioni dall’osservazione di un numero elevato di comportamenti di lettura.

In this dissertation, the focus will be on the representation of rape and rape culture within contemporary fiction; the aim of this is to discover how prevalent rape and rape culture is within this particular area. The thesis is split into three chapters, the first of which discusses the depictions of male rape and gender shifts in contemporary fiction, focusing on Lisbeth Salander as a rapist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The second chapter follows on from this, discussing the portrayal of victims of rape within contemporary fiction; and the last chapter debates whether or not a perpetuating rape culture means that women cannot be as sexually experimental as they wish to be. The aim of the dissertation is to focus on how authors depict rape, and whether or not this depiction is perpetuating rape culture, or simply addressing the issue within fiction. The introduction is a larger part of the dissertation, setting up exactly what rape and rape culture is, and how rape myths prevail in modern western society. There are certain areas that the dissertation has not addressed, such as race, because they are such complex issues that merely by giving them a single chapter within the dissertation would not be enough. The dissertation’s main purpose, and main area of focus, is to illustrate the perpetuating rape culture in western societies through gender inequality.

Hope is a perennial spring that waters and nurses the tree of life. Elements of chance and fate may play havoc and cause turbulence, but hope heals all wounds and, with the passage of time, soothes ruffled emotions. The very purpose of literature is to rekindle hope in the bleakness and absurdity of human existence. In fact the majority of modern fiction grapples with social ostracism and psychological trauma. A reoccurring theme in modern fiction is that the spark of life and light at the end of the tunnel drives the characters to crawl through misery and marginalization. The hope most often driving these characters is the prospect of redemption and the promise of an entirely different future. Two emblematic works from modern fiction, James Joyce's fictional work Ulysses and Bucket's absurd drama Waiting for Godot, aim at a trivialization of the everyday struggle of common human beings. But the rendition of these struggles in artistic form transcends those caricatures and brings them to new heights of meaningfulness. Keeping this meaningfulness as a focus, I highlight the element of 'hope' in the first seven novels of Toni Morrison, Morrison, the first black woman Nobel Laureate, scavenged the mutilated lives of 'niggers' and sketched them with savage truthfulness in her scrape book. She generated a gallery of pitch dark portraits of the blacks in her writings. Women were given larger than life roles in Morrison's novels and they play for the good of the black community. Reconciliation, deliverance, safe haven, and love are distinct synonyms of hope and are some of the oft repeated themes in Morrison's works. In almost all her novels, she portrays the struggle of blacks to adapt to the white ways of life. In the process, many of her characters withered away. But still she persisted with her experimental envisioning of the life of blacks as they invariably live as a minority in the white world. In the process of her writing, she evolved a unique black identity for both black men and women.