Modern fiction

Objectives: In certain health care facilities, the staff commonly wear uniforms for dementia care. Wearing uniforms are often believed to improve the well-being of institutionalized people with dementia (PwD) by facilitating orientation and preserving hygiene. However, when studied more thoroughly, it appears that their use counters to person centeredness. This study aims to investigate the impact of wearing uniforms on the quality of life (QoL) of institutionalized PwD. Method: A natural experimental design was operated in 4 special care units (SCUs) in France. Two SCUs served as an experimental group (caregivers wearing street clothes except when performing hands-on physical care; N = 13) and 2 served as a comparison group (caregivers wearing uniforms; N = 14). The QoL of PwD was measured using the QoL-Alzheimer’s Disease scale, and focus groups were carried out with caregivers. Results: Overall and significantly enhanced QoL scores were observed for the experimental street clothi...

The dawn of the new millennium witnessed a lot of changes in human kind in the context of technology based global world. Yet the discrimination between men and women, economically and socially upgraded and oppressed exists. Women continued to suffer as the most disadvantaged group all over the world. Second-wave feminism was largely concerned with the end to discrimination and oppression. Black Feminism is the process of self-conscious struggle that empowers women. The black women's marginalization and oppression forced them to search for self-awareness and self-empowerment. Toni Morrison stresses that black women can never become fully empowered in a context of social injustice. In her works, Morrison has explored the experience and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society and longings for the search for cultural identity. The inability of male and female characters to form a sense of identity in her novels Sula and Tar Baby is knotted to the cultural trauma they experience which makes it impossible to shape a sense of self. This paper focuses on the dilemma of female figures in constructing their identities in a racist and sexist society. How the protagonists of the novels Tar Baby and Sula project their identities in the midst of racial and patriarchal society is discussed in detail.

Objectives: In certain health care facilities, the staff commonly wear uniforms for dementia care. Wearing uniforms are often believed to improve the well-being of institutionalized people with dementia (PwD) by facilitating orientation and preserving hygiene. However, when studied more thoroughly, it appears that their use counters to person centeredness. This study aims to investigate the impact of wearing uniforms on the quality of life (QoL) of institutionalized PwD. Method: A natural experimental design was operated in 4 special care units (SCUs) in France. Two SCUs served as an experimental group (caregivers wearing street clothes except when performing hands-on physical care; N = 13) and 2 served as a comparison group (caregivers wearing uniforms; N = 14). The QoL of PwD was measured using the QoL-Alzheimer’s Disease scale, and focus groups were carried out with caregivers. Results: Overall and significantly enhanced QoL scores were observed for the experimental street clothi...

Objectives: In certain health care facilities, the staff commonly wear uniforms for dementia care. Wearing uniforms are often believed to improve the well-being of institutionalized people with dementia (PwD) by facilitating orientation and preserving hygiene. However, when studied more thoroughly, it appears that their use counters to person centeredness. This study aims to investigate the impact of wearing uniforms on the quality of life (QoL) of institutionalized PwD. Method: A natural experimental design was operated in 4 special care units (SCUs) in France. Two SCUs served as an experimental group (caregivers wearing street clothes except when performing hands-on physical care; N = 13) and 2 served as a comparison group (caregivers wearing uniforms; N = 14). The QoL of PwD was measured using the QoL-Alzheimer’s Disease scale, and focus groups were carried out with caregivers. Results: Overall and significantly enhanced QoL scores were observed for the experimental street clothi...

With the help of Toni Morrison's novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Josiah Young questions several claims G. W. Leibniz makes in his Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil. Specifically, Young casts doubt on Leibniz's assertions that this world is the best of all possible ones; that God permits evil as a moral necessity; and that the victims of evil either deserve their misfortune or should endure it for "Goodness's" sake. God…takes care of the whole universe, whereof all the parts are connected; and one must thence infer that he has had innumerable considerations whose result made him deem it inadvisable to prevent certain evils. 1 Wonder what God had in mind. You must of did something. Don't run off nowhere now. 2

In this experiment, we investigated whether book covers can signal sub-genre information to knowledgeable readers. Self-identified science-fiction fans and mystery fans sorted 80 randomly selected book covers from each of those genres into groups of their own devising. The sorts were used to identify similarity among books, and that similarity structure was used to measure similarity among subjects. Cluster analysis was then used to find groups of subjects who sorted similarly. Linear models were demonstrated that group membership was related to the knowledge subjects reported about the genres. This pattern of results supports the view that book covers constitute an implicit signaling system between publishers and experienced readers of a fictional genre.

Morrison has the ability to dramatize realistic situations of the lives of the Black Americans and is capable of holding the attention of the readers to the compelling issues of racism and sexual politics. Her stories are amalgamations of historical, magical, supernatural and imaginative elements of the African Americans' lives. Her stories are gripping, emotional and often based on the oral traditions of the Black American folk narratives. So, in her works, rediscovering the history of African Americans and their cultural roots seem deeply touched. The works of Morrison tell a simple story but behind the simplicity lies grave and complex issues about black and white races that have close affinity with humanism Therefore, the paper explores the signs of humanism in Toni Morrison's selected novels.

This dissertation, composed of three volumes (I. Biography; II. Selection of texts; and III. Bibliographical catalog), aims to rescue the writer's personality of Jurandir Ferreira (1905-1997), bring him in to the cultural scenery context of Poços of Caldas, city he was born and lived most part of his life. This work was based in the field research developed between 1998 and 2005 (during the Scientific Initiation and part of the period of the Master's degree), an it was composed basically of three stages: 1.Studies of the writer's collection; 2. Organization of texts of and about him dispersed in periodical publication; and 3. Interviews with writers, friends and the author's family. The literature in the Watering Place of Poços delayed to cross the insipient manifestations of newspaper, due, mostly, the culture of entertainment that the casinos installed in the city. His first novel only appeared in 1948, with the edition of O céu entre montanhas, of Jurandir Ferreira. The author-included among the eighteen better short story of Brazil, edited by Bloch in 1968-published so far collections of stories, chronicles and poetries, besides a second novel and of the fiction Um ladrão de guarda-chuvas, in which he was awarded the Guimarães Rosa prize in 1994. From the collection of his work-eleven titles published in general by publishers from São Paulo, as Martins, Saraiva and Duas Cidades-the most important are the chronicles, written with soft and safe style, that composes a picture of a countryside village, their people, their habits and their transformations. When we reestablish the trajectory of Jurandir Ferreira's intellectual life, we realized that, parallel to writer's career, he fought to build an organic literary system in Poços de Caldas, and we could consider him, by his enormous effort, the main divulger of the modern literature in those mountainous regions.

She is the first black women to receive Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. Toni Morrison's original name is Chloe Anthony Wofford. She grew up in an American family that possessed an intensive love and appreciation for black culture. Morrison's novel characterized by visionary force and poetic import gives life to an essential aspect. She is pioneer in Black feminism. In her writings we see black women to love themselves, their race and their culture and not to trap in white superiority or white beauty standards. The present article attempts to examine major character's ways of forming self-concept in the face of racism. It also attempts to show that those black female characters of Toni who follow womanistic ideas manage to cope with their problems and eventually survive.

ALDO NEMESIO • Le ragioni della ricerca empirica sul testo CoSMo Comparative studies in modernism n. 4 • 2014 141 ALDO NEMESIO LE RAGIONI DELLA RICERCA EMPIRICA SUL TESTO La letteratura è stata spesso studiata in modo poco soddisfacente. Scriveva giustamente Bourdieu: Mi limiterò a chiedere per quali ragioni tanti critici, tanti scrittori e tanti filosofi sostengano con tanto compiacimento che l'esperienza dell'opera d'arte è ineffabile e si sottrae per definizione alla conoscenza razionale; per quale ragione si affrettino a proclamare, senza combattere, la sconfitta del sapere; da dove derivi loro questo bisogno così potente di svilire la conoscenza razionale, questa smania di affermare l'irriducibilità dell'opera d'arte o, con un termine più appropriato, la sua trascendenza 1 .

Women are perceived to be fragile and submissive, often remaining powerless both in real and virtual worlds. "Rape" remains an (ill)effective tool that is often been used to remind women of their fragility and their place in the society. The post effect of rape not just stops with physical injuries but also causes certain psychological effects such as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Schizophrenia, inferiority complex and etc. The paper aims to throw light on how rape is handled and sustained as a tool by those handful of corrupted perpetrators to suppress women. It also tries to prove how the assault suppresses a woman physically and emotionally with reference to the novel The Temple Bar Woman by Sujata Parashar. The androcentric notion of treating women powerless and silencing their voices through rape is mostly less debated. The paper tries to highlight the unnoticed tool of suppression, which is used to put woman in her place and also calls out to our society, to support her which is the need of the hour.

was born Chloe Anthony Wofford, the second of four children, to George and Ramah Wofford on February 18, 1931. Both of her parents came from sharecropping families who had moved North in pursuit of better living conditions in the early 1900s, and her father's family had faced a great deal of discrimination. Due to these bitter memories and the racial troubles he endured during his childhood, he maintained a strong distrust of whites throughout his lifetime.

The preservation of black traditional cultural values is the main fight of Toni Morrison, African-American female writer and the 1993 Literature Nobel Prize. In three of her novels, she presents black communities strongly influenced by Christian and puritan morals confronted with the great social changes, namely feminism and flapperdom which appear as a threat to the survival of black cultural values. In fact, in their outlaw and rebellious ways of living Morrison's female characters, referred to as flappers give vent to their desiderata regardless of the moral principles about woman. Consequently, they become pariahs and anti-models in the eyes of their respective communities and eventually undergo fatal sanctions. This article, through a socio-historical reading combined with a literary reading of the text aims at favoring a better understanding of the functioning of the social in the text as well as in America. RÉSUMÉ La sauvegarde des valeurs culturelles noires est le combat principal de Toni Morrison, Africaine-américaine, écrivaine et Prix Nobel de Littérature 1993. Dans trois de ses romans, elle représente des communautés noires fortement influencées par la morale chrétienne et puritaine confrontées aux grandes mutations sociales notamment le féminisme et la flapperdom qui apparaissent comme une menace pour la survie des valeurs culturelles noires. En effet, par leurs conduites rebelles et hors-la-loi, les personnages féminins de Morrison assimilés aux flappers donnent libre cours à leurs désidératas en foulant au pied les principes moraux relatifs à la femme. Par conséquent, ces personnages deviennent des parias et des anti-modèles aux yeux de leurs communautés respectives et en fin de compte, elles subissent des sanctions fatales. Cet article, à travers une lecture socio-historique associée à une lecture littéraire du texte vise une meilleure compréhension du fonctionnement du social aussi bien dans le texte qu'en Amérique.

Ok, this is won't be as complete if I had time to respond immediately. So sorry for this in advance. But she doesn't just leave to absent herself of guilt, to atone; she does so to individuate. This is important because individuation ITSELF can so arise a sense of guilt... amongst other negative feelings, Wolfe protagonists tend to strange their awareness of how delighted they were in feeling they were taking a stretch into a more fulfilling life, that wasn't as much about serving others' desires for them.

Saul Goodman, as seen in two television series, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, functions as a remarkable example of how characters can ascribe different accelerations to plots. Faster movement in discourse time tends to propel a rhythm of oscillation that marks a propensity of stories to force changes on a character, i.e., making him or her go through transformations. This rhythmic pattern produces a strong engagement with audiences and, generally speaking, is reserved for subjects or protagonists. During the original series, Walter White fulfilled this role while Goodman existed on a distinct plane – wherein discourse time seems atonal, uneventful, self-replicating. Helpers (Greimas’s term), or supporting characters, might exist on this plane. This article discusses how narration designs titular pulsations and supporting pulsations using Saul Goodman in both situations. Some nuances are also explored : in the Breaking Bad shared universe, titular pulsation tends to be associated with pain and suffering ; supporting pulsation, on the contrary, with Goodman’s sense of humour. Lastly, it is argued that both story progression and iteration are customarily situated together in discourse.

{Bailey A. Moskowitz, University of Virginia} In this paper, I will first
illuminate how Morrison’s writing suggests artistic expression as a way for individuals
to realize their identities. I will then investigate how other authors depict Morrison’s theory of self-realization, thereby exploring how the production and dissemination of
art can serve as both healing means of expression and as forces capable of isolating the artist.

Dopo una prima introduzione agli studi condotti sull'incipit da parte di critici ottocenteschi e novecenteschi, si riflette sull'importanza di questo tema nelle opere di Sciascia, dal romanzo, al romanzo storico, alla saggistica. Particolare attenzione viene rivolta anche all'uso delle citazioni in apertura dei suoi testi nonché al rapporto che l'autore intrattiene con il lettore.

The question of alienation has always been a pervasive theme in the history of modern thought, and it occupies a considerable place in contemporary work. Literature in general, and fiction in particular, raise this issue to reveal its influence on human beings and communities. Novelists have been trying to unravel its complexities and concomitant consequences. The paper aims to explore the experience of alienation through depicting the issue not as a purely racial reality, or something restricted to the colour of the skin or gender of the victim. It is rather presented as a distressing state which cripples the victims and makes them susceptible captives of the dominant forces. In the selected novels, Toni Morrison has delved deep into the experience of alienation through her male and female characters, showing the different forms of this experience. The present research investigates Morrison’s portrayal of the issue from an African-American prospect. References will be made to novel...

The question of alienation has always been a pervasive theme in the history of modern thought, and it occupies a considerable place in contemporary work. Literature in general, and fiction in particular, raise this issue to reveal its influence on human beings and communities. Novelists have been trying to unravel its complexities and concomitant consequences. The paper aims to explore the experience of alienation through depicting the issue not as a purely racial reality, or something restricted to the colour of the skin or gender of the victim. It is rather presented as a distressing state which cripples the victims and makes them susceptible captives of the dominant forces. In the selected novels, Toni Morrison has delved deep into the experience of alienation through her male and female characters, showing the different forms of this experience. The present research investigates Morrison's portrayal of the issue from an African-American prospect. References will be made to novels such as Tar Baby, Sula, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.

When a character is introduced in a narrative text, his/her aspect and personality are constructed by the reader on the basis both of information found in the text and of inferences actively produced by the readers. The first perception of a character is likely to change in the course of reading, as the reader encounters new information and activates relevant inferences: this changes in the state of the mind are components of reading pleasure. The type of the information given by the narrator depends on his/her priorities. Therefore, the reader receives information on the character and, at the same time, on the narrator's priorities. In the course of his/her act of reading, the reader activates, in his memory, material to be used in his concretization. In this way, s/he introduces new information; what is not explicitly described may be concretized differently by different readers. At the same time, the act of reading is very selective, removing information that is considered ir...

ARGARET ATWOOD has long been regarded as a major conttemporary writer, and her short fiction has found a niche in introductory college literature anthologies where it is often praised, especially for offering a Canadian counterpoint to an American point of view. Frequently anthologized, the story "Rape Fantasies," first published in The Fiddlehead and then in the Canadian collection Dancing Girls (1977), is included in the popular text, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Briefly, the story concerns a group of women co-workers who spend a lunch-hour break responding to a recent story in a women's magazine on the subject of rape. They tell one another stories of their own "fantasies" of sexual encounters with strange men, but the stories actually avoid depictions of violence and coercion. Instead, they are narratives about women who empathize with their assailants and who befriend the strange men they encounter, even if the men climb into their bathrooms uninvited. The narrator of the story, Estelle, offers commentary on the narratives, as well as providing her own stories of sexual encounter, eventually telling her stories to an unnamed man she has met at a bar after work. Traditional interpretations of "Rape Fantasies" emphasize the narrator's amusing anecdotes and point out the situational irony inherent in the story. For example, in one of the first critical essays, Lee Briscoe Thompson contrasts the "zaniness of the monologue" by the story's narrator Estelle with the more controlled "fine intuitions" of other Atwood fiction. Thompson argues that the story actually places men into the "circle of victimhood" and suggests that the men in the story are actually "failed rapists" who are "betrayed" by their own "gullibilities" (116). Thompson acknowledges that the story suggests failed communication between men and women, but also sees the stories told by the women as largely "unimaginative" (115). She actually includes "Rape Fantasies" in a group she

In Toni Morrison's novels names are traces that refer not only to the narrated events, but to history and myths as well. Morrison's writing is dialogically related to those African American authors who marked the paths of the emancipation struggle. She uses names as symbols, as magnets toward which many forgotten life fragments and conceiled meanings converge, thus inscribing her peculiar "signifying black difference" in the context of the African American tradition. Focusing on two of her novels-Song of Solomon and Paradise, both concerned with the significance as well as with the constraints of memory and history-I show the way in which names point to some of the most important conflicts internal to the black community, as well as to some precise historical events: the murder of Emmet Till, and the difficult migration of black people from the South, which brought some of them to seek refuge by building black towns in Oklahoma, once known as Boomer's Paradise.

The dawn of the new millennium witnessed a lot of changes in human kind in the context of technology based global world. Yet the discrimination between men and women, economically and socially upgraded and oppressed exists. Women continued to suffer as the most disadvantaged group all over the world. Second-wave feminism was largely concerned with the end to discrimination and oppression. Black Feminism is the process of self-conscious struggle that empowers women. The black women's marginalization and oppression forced them to search for self-awareness and self-empowerment. Toni Morrison stresses that black women can never become fully empowered in a context of social injustice. In her works, Morrison has explored the experience and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society and longings for the search for cultural identity. The inability of male and female characters to form a sense of identity in her novels Sula and Tar Baby is knotted to the cultural trauma they experience which makes it impossible to shape a sense of self. This paper focuses on the dilemma of female figures in constructing their identities in a racist and sexist society. How the protagonists of the novels Tar Baby and Sula project their identities in the midst of racial and patriarchal society is discussed in detail.

Identifying the self is an incessant quest among the African Americans. Why do they search for their genealogy? It is a question which is to be answered for the readers of the Toni Morison. A person is provided an existence in a society on the basis of belongingness to past but the blacks struggle to find repute in the American society where their past is erased at the cost of living in a new white world of America. The Africans feel strange to live with the whites with an inseparable weight of the pathetic begging past and their blackness which really make them subject to oddity in the white America.

People Beloved as a novel has the potential to be used in a multitude of ways in the twenty-first-century classroom. First, the novel must be recognized for its importance in examining multiculturism and intersectionality-the intersection of oppressions-within the pedagogical matrix. Educators, specifically those from non-oppressed groups, who take on Morrison's work, can take the opportunity to decenter dominant hegemonic institutions (of which they are a part) and its destructive assumptions and assertions regarding society. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks explores ways in which educators can approach their classrooms using a transcendent pedagogy that is rooted in combating, as well as acknowledging, racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and class analysis using the empowering lens of intersectional analysis. Even before integration, Black schools were already employing an intersectional approach in their teaching, "for black folks teaching-educating-was fundamentally political because it was rooted in antiracist struggle" (hooks 2). In many ways, Morrison's Beloved is perfectly situated to examine the unjustified assertion of dominance, power, and coercion in society against the marginalized, as well as its usage in the classroom (im)proper. The classroom, whether it is in a K-12 setting or college, has been a battleground between those protecting and absolving white hegemonic values and those challenging it. Many teachers, even today, are being fought and Miller 1

Identifying the self is an incessant quest among the African Americans. Why do they search for their genealogy? It is a question which is to be answered for the readers of the Toni Morison. A person is provided an existence in a society on the basis of belongingness to past but the blacks struggle to find repute in the American society where their past is erased at the cost of living in a new white world of America. The Africans feel strange to live with the whites with an inseparable weight of the pathetic begging past and their blackness which really make them subject to oddity in the white America. Three issues can be explored in the context of the search of identity by African Americans in America. One is, they are sick of their,' Black Skin, White Self', second is their love for Americanism which is, 'American Dream, Cultural Pariah', and the third is ' their unforgettable traumatic past'.

Linked to the metaphors Ariel, Calibán and Esu, the three concepts Negriceness, Negritude and Negriticeness are used in the study of Pecola Breedlove, Milkman Dead and Jadine Childs in Toni Morrison’s fiction. Pecola’s assimilationist identity is visible in her relation with negriceness and Ariel, as she allies herself to white values by wishing to have blue eyes; Milkman’s nationalist identity appears in his proximity to negritude and Calibán as he searches for his family’s ancestors in the Southern US; finally, Jadine’s catalyst identity happens in her alliance with negriticeness and Esu, as she mediates the human ties between the white Streets and the Black Childs.
Key-words: Negriceness; Negritude; Negriticeness; Identity; Culture.

Toni Morrison is an African-American novelist, born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, during the great depression. Her father George Wofford was a shipyard welder and her mother Ramah was a lady of high esteem in the society as a religious woman. They were perfect guides for their talented daughter Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison was the second of the four children of her parents. She didn't face the era of ruthless slavery as an African American but she obviously felt its resultant atmosphere in her teens. During the Harlem Renaissance (1920s and early 1930s) Jessie Fauset was the only female black author to publish three novels in America. After that Toni Morrison as an editor at Random House brought several black writers including Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, and Gayl Jones in the publishers' list. Fauste and Morrison both sought to create a canon of black literature. Identifying major internal confli cts probe into the issue of internal differences among the blacks. It shows the fat problem of internal disparity existing at various levels of social, racial and religious beliefs in them. Toni Morrison's novels The are full of subsequent details which speculate on the problem of mutual disagreement among the blacks over unimaginable issues in their day to day life. It delineates a map of internal or inner-self conflicts of the humdrum life of the Afro-Americans in the contemporary time.

Light is the brightness that adds magnanimity in life. It can empower the weakened, drowntrodden classes of the society. The place of women in society differs from culture to culture and from age to age. African Americans, in particular, depend exclusively on the oral tradition and folklore to preserve their thought because access to literacy was forbidden during slavery. The muted voice of the tale telling women, therefore need to be articulated for the sake of female survival and rewriting a history written by mainstream historians is an important enterprise to undertake for marginalized women in order to legitimize their discredited past and present. The present-day authors raise serious questions about African-American identity. Their works reexamine racism and slavery. This literature is within the framework of a larger American literature, but is also independent. As a result, new styles of storytelling and unique voices are created, which help to revitalize the larger literary world. This article portrays how the female characters in both the novels capture the darkness in the society and lighten them through their lives. As an African born American writer, Toni Morrison generates characters that resemble normal African-American people and are as prone to mistakes as the next person. Her heroine's work for visibility in a society in which blackness signifies invisibility. She speaks of her writing as 'archaeological explorations', one of her most important concerns being the rewriting of African-American history from an African-American female perspective.

The trilogy of Toni Morrison is set against the backdrop of slavery and Reconstruction of African-Americans. The historical scenario provides Morrison with a context to explore the emotional and psychological trauma particularly inflicted upon women of the society, thus reminding the contemporary reader the significance of past and its influence upon the present. In Paradise, physical and mental evasion of Mavis from domestic violence helps her to confront the situation confidently and bravely. The severe treatment of the woman by her family-members results in emotional breakdown leading towards confusion and nervousness. I investigate various ways in which evasion is registered, through the character of Mavis, which becomes a strategy to survive amid atypical circumstances. Essentially the paper argues my stance that in certain cases, events have to be evaded by the survivor, only then they can be decoded into non-traumatic experience making the survival probable amid nonconforming conditions.

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.

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.

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.

On 28 th August 2013 a news report came out in the online edition of a newspaper 1 about the racially inappropriate figure of "Black Pete" who is seen to accompany St. Nikolaus in the Dutch celebration of Christmas. The piece is curiously titled as "Black Pete: Tradition or Throwback to Slavery?" This points to the fact that the whole thing is being seen through the white gaze of the European, for whom supposedly slavery and tradition are distinct. It is an attempt to exorcise slavery from the white tradition to forget the horrors it brought for another race. But for a black writer, the tradition is rooted in the violence of the slavery era, in the narratives the subsequent generations heard from their parents or grandparents which became a part of the narrative they were creating themselves and giving a voice to erstwhile silenced attempts at self expression-ones that were not paid any heed to. Here, as I attempt to delineate Tony Morrison and her treatment of tradition in her novels, (especially The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby and Beloved) and her non-fictional writings, I will take into consideration memory, parent-child relationships, Names and her overall use of history and myths in consolidating her tradition in her writings and try to show how important a role the idea of tradition itself plays in these novels. As a parallel I would use a set of essays by Alice Walker and the novel "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko to show through walker that the importance of tradition in the black context finds resonance in other chief writers too (almost all black writers, but I choose Walker as a fellow female compatriot of Morrison) and through Silko's Native Indian narrative that in cultures other than the blacks which have been marginalised by the whites in the US, the path of resistance is to hold on to one's own traditions. For Morrison, tradition is the source of inspiration, and she moves above just her own racial past and goes on to identify with the Greeks as a source of inspiration and with whom the black art has lots in common.