ABSTRACT This article focuses how Amitav Ghosh uses history against fiction and how he represents reality against fiction. In the nineteenth century, literature and history were considered branches of the same tree of learning, a tree which sought to interpret experience for the purpose of guiding and elevating man. Then came the separation that resulted in the distinct disciplines of literary and historical studies today, despite the fact that the realist novel shared many similar beliefs about the possibility of writing factually about observable reality. Fiction about history is called historiographic metafiction. This article eplains how Amitav Ghosh uses history with in fiction in the novel The Hungry Tide.
Nevertheless, literary journalists, usually, omit the explicit projection of the authorial subjectivity through the use of fictional point of view to ensure a sense of historical objectivity. They overcome the borderlines between public events and their intersubjective experiences by approaching “public fact through a frank, obtrusive, liberated assertion of their private consciousness” (Hellmann, “Postmodern Journalism” 52). In other words, literary journalists indulge themselves in an intersubjective experience of narrating public historical facts from an individual perspective that problematizes the dichotomy between the public and private, between the historical and the personal, and consequently between the journalistic and the literary. The autobiographical trope can be traced in The Armies as the narrative opens a window of intersection between a highly intersubjective experience and reporting a historical event. Through the formal division of the book into two parts, Mailer seeks to establish an inquiry about the status of genres traditionally polarized as fiction and history, literature and journalism, novel and history.
The Kite Runner is a book written as fiction yet possibly read as reality; some readers might even question the veracity of the events narrated throughout the story before realizing its categorization as a novel. This comes exclusively due to the story’s evident partial factual basis, even when said facts only reside in the Afghan and American history cited in the book. But how different can readers truly interpret the text? Knowledge of the novel’s internal and external context can help a reader understand more about the book, and hence possibly even find new hidden meaning in passages that were before just fiction; however, the writer’s understanding of his readers might also help him guide said audience towards a specific message. Is the book more than it seeks to feign?
This study is posing a re-reading of The Enchantress of Florence, the fictional fantasy created by the most controversial and talked-about novelist of the present, Salman Rushdie. This work makes a clear suggestion that its author worked really hard to assume an in-depth knowledge about the past politics of both the hemispheres. The unusual inclusion of a bibliography at the end of the novel points towards this direction. Such a great span of effort necessitates the adoption of a different style too. Various themes and seemingly incomprehensible logics have to be made acceptable to the reader.
Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.
Undoubtedly, Poe shaped the genre of detective fiction - although he preferred to call them “tales of ratiocination” – with the introduction of Detective C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin was one of the first characters of his kind to use analytical and cognitive skills to solve unsolvable mysteries. The use of observation to make deductions necessary to crack the case became so influential, a new genre was born. However, I agree with Van Leer’s statement and find it noteworthy to mention that although Poe was the pioneer of this new genre, his own short stories involving Dupin do not entirely conform to our expectations of what is involved in the genre of detective fiction. To demonstrate how Poe’s short stories both comply with the general anticipations
There is a complication on British distinctiveness of Joseph Conrad, his work was an extremely big part of British literary history. The novella Heart of Darkness has not only been able to transform the development of British Literature but also allowed the world to start questioning Imperialism. The writing style used by Conrad was able to accomplish a transformation in British Literature History. He contributed to the professional novel writing by creating a winding, repetitive and indirect structure of narrative structures. His location of adjectives made his prose difficult to understand but he applied perseverance and after a short period of time, however people realized that characteristics like the use of awkward language and grammar is not showing that someone struggling to understand the English language, but the
Q1- Speculative fiction texts frequently have a clear political critique at their center, offering warnings about the present and the future. How can dystopian fiction go beyond warning to testimony? Use texts by both American or European and Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) authors to explore how dystopian fiction can be a medium for testimony or bearing witness, as well as criticism. Are there aspects of dystopian speculative fiction that make it particularly appropriate for testimony? Focus your analysis on three or four novels, though feel free to reference other books from your list.
2). Therefore, dystopia gives the illusion of a highly moral and perfect society that could exist in real life which is a feature of speculative fictional writing. According to P.L. Thomas’ book Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres (2013), speculative fiction is a fiction that “deals all too often with a dark future that is looked upon as both a representation of current society and as a lived possibility” (Thomas 108). Moreover, speculative fiction was defined in comparison to science fiction which is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative frame- work alternative to the author’s empirical environment”.
In Foe, as in Robinson Crusoe, we encounter a first person narrative. In both books, the voice that we read is the voice of the main character. This is really important for the study of truth because it involves more than just a narrative: “the way in which a story is told affects our understanding of what that story is; the rhetorical features of historical narration restrict some interpretations of the narrated events and enable others. As Dorrit Cohn reminds us, however, historical narratives are “subject to judgments of truth and falsity,” while fictional narratives are “immune to such judgments” The use of a first person narrative is often used in science-fictions, fantastic and fantasy and also heroic novels. This technique is employed when the reader can doubt the narrator’s integrity.