Humanistic Themes in Science Fiction: An Interview With David A. Kyle

This article reviews how science fiction writers have employed a popular and specialized literary medium in order to offer creative insights into human behavior and social structures. David A. Kyle is introduced to readers as a science fiction writer, publisher, cofounder of Gnome Press, historian of the science fiction field, and an avid promoter of science fiction. Kyle offers candid insights related to how science fiction has encouraged a serious exploration of psychological, philosophical, educational, and sociological questions. His fundamental premise is that science fiction allows us to explore what it means to be human in a technological and scientifically oriented society. The article concludes with a summary of how literary figures, social scientists (psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, etc.), and teachers have also successfully used works of science fiction and literary criticism for various purposes.     

Sartre and Ricoeur on Productive Imagination

Commenting on Jean‐Paul Sartre's theory of imagination, Paul Ricoeur argues that Sartre fails to address the productive nature of imaginative acts. According to Ricoeur, Sartre's examples show that he thinks of imagination in mimetic terms, neglecting its innovative and creative dimensions. Imagination, Ricoeur continues, manifests itself most clearly in fiction, wherein new meaning is created. By using fiction as the paradigm of imaginative activity, Ricoeur is able to argue against Sartre that the essence of imagination lies not in its ability to reproduce absent objects, but rather in the ability to transform reality through creative acts. Motivated by the intuition that Sartre the writer could not have forgotten to address such crucial dimensions of imagination, I examine Sartre's philosophical and literary work, showing that not only does he develop a notion of productive imagination, he also puts this notion to work by articulating the relationship between imagination, narrative, and identity formation, well before Ricoeur advanced his narrative‐identity theory. I argue that Sartre, like Ricoeur and MacIntyre, another representative of narrative‐theory whose criticism of Sartre I address in this essay, views imagination and narrativity as necessary conditions for the formation of a coherent and meaningful sense of self.     

From empire to democracy: effects of social progress on Turkish writers

What is the effect of a society's culture on the creative writers living there? Few cultures have had such a event as Ataturk's 1920 revolution that changed Turkey from a monarchy ruled by sultans into a republic. How would such a dramatic shift in a country's history be reflected in the accomplishments and characteristics of its writers? In this study, the authors investigated 948 eminent Turkish writers. Variables of gender, era, type of writing, education level, profession, and winning an award were all analyzed. The type of writing (fiction, poetry, plays, or nonfiction) and the era in which the writing was produced were both predictive of whether an author won a literary award. Before 1920, fiction writers received more awards than poets; after 1920, poets received more awards. In addition, professional writers were more likely to win awards than were professional politicians. Reasons for these findings are discussed with an emphasis on cultural and historical influences.     

From Empire to Democracy: Effects of Social Progress on Turkish Writers

What is the effect of a society's culture on the creative writers living there? Few cultures have had such a event as Ataturk's 1920 revolution that changed Turkey from a monarchy ruled by sultans into a republic. How would such a dramatic shift in a country's history be reflected in the accomplishments and characteristics of its writers? In this study, the authors investigated 948 eminent Turkish writers. Variables of gender, era, type of writing, education level, profession, and winning an award were all analyzed. The type of writing (fiction, poetry, plays, or nonfiction) and the era in which the writing was produced were both predictive of whether an author won a literary award. Before 1920, fiction writers received more awards than poets; after 1920, poets received more awards. In addition, professional writers were more likely to win awards than were professional politicians. Reasons for these findings are discussed with an emphasis on cultural and historical influences.     

The Bitter-Sweet Labor of Emoting: The Linguistic Comparison of Writers and Physicists

ABSTRACT: In this exploratory archival study, the motivation of writers of fiction and physicists was examined by studying word usage as a clue to unconscious motivators of their work. The hypothesis was that artists make art to deal with issues in their own lives, thus relying on emotions, particularly negative emotions (markers of presence of issues), to govern their work. Consequently, it was predicted that distinguished writers of fiction, as compared to distinguished physicists, would use more emotion-related words when discussing their work, particularly negative emotion-related words. Interviews conducted with 9 physicists were matched to the interviews with 9 writers, and analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001). Writers used significantly more emotion-related words, in particular more negative-emotion words, including the greater use of anger-related, anxiety-related, and depression or sadness-related words. Almost identical results were obtained when the 9 physicists were compared to the nonmatched, larger sample of 124 writers. The study implies differences of inner preoccupation (relating to work) between creative people oriented towards literary art and physical science.     

Reasoning to what is true in fiction

The paper discusses the principle by which we reason to what is true in fiction. The focus is David Lewis's article Truth in Fiction (1978) which proposes an analysis in terms of counterfactuals and possible worlds. It is argued thatLewis's account is inadequate in detail and also in principle in that it conflicts radically with basic and familiar tenets of literary criticism. Literary critical reasoning about fiction concerns not the discovery of facts in possible worlds but the recovery of meanings in interpretative frameworks. The model theoretic approach fails to account for common literary or rhetorical devices like unreliable narration, connotation and point of view. And in explaining indeterminacy of content in terms of truth-value gaps it gives too simplistic an account of critical reasoning about character motivation and thematic development. A more adequate account of content-indeterminacy can be provided through a comparison of the interpretation of fiction with the interpretation of human action. A broader motif in the paper is the underlying tension between what is required for the logic of fiction and what is required for the aesthetics of fiction.     

Cognitive style and literary regression A study of student writers1

Forty undergraduates, from either beginning or advanced writing classes, and classified as either abstract or concrete thinkers from responses to the “This I Believe” test, provided two works of prose fiction, which were coded for the use of regression techniques. As predicted, abstract thinkers with advanced training were most likely to employ regression. The relations among abstract cognitive style, creative writing training, and literary regression are discussed.     

Fan fiction and early Christian apocrypha

This article applies insights from the study of contemporary fan fiction to the early Christian Jesus tradition, in particular to so-called apocryphal literature. Both fan fiction and the apocrypha are representative of hypertextual literary practices where authors rewrite already existing narrative universes. In modern-day fandom, fan fiction is used for myth maintenance, for social and cultural identification and criticism, and for sharing interpretations of the shared narrative universe within the fan community. The article introduces the reader to fan fiction and fan fiction studies and discusses how these modern phenomena may shed heuristic light on the literary strategies and functions of early Christian apocrypha.     

Literature and Thought Experiments

Like works of literature, thought experiments present fictional narratives that prompt reflection in their readers. Because of these and other similarities, a number of philosophers have argued for a strong analogy between works of literary fiction and thought experiments, some going so far as to say that works of literary fiction are a species of thought experiment. These arguments are often used in defending a cognitivist position with regard to literature: thought experiments produce knowledge, so works of literary fiction can too. This article concedes that works of literary fiction can be put to use in thought experiments, but not in a way that is helpful to the cognitivist. In particular, it draws three disanalogies in the ways we engage critically with thought experiments and with literary fictions. First, we use thought experiments to make arguments; second, we read thought experiments in strongly allegorical terms; and third, the terms of criticism we apply to thought experiments and to works of literature differ. Although these disanalogies present problems for the cognitivist position, they also give us a sharper picture of the distinctive educative potential of works of literary fiction.     

The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers

Although many studies (e.g., Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1989; Ludwig, 1995) have demonstrated that creative writers are prone to suffer from mental illness, this relationship has not been truly examined in depth. Is this finding true of all writers? In Study One, 1,629 writers were analyzed for signs of mental illness. Female poets were found to be significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness than female fiction writers or male writers of any type. Study Two extended the analysis to 520 eminent women (poets, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, visual artists, politicians, and actresses), and again found the poets to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness. This early finding has been dubbed “the Sylvia Plath effect,” and implications and possibilities for future research are discussed.     

Poland translated: the post-communist generation of writers

This article is concerned with writing in Poland since the collapse of Communism. It focuses mainly on the generation of Polish writers who made their debut around the time of the collapse of Communism and whose work has since begun to appear in English translation. It considers the changing focus of the post-Communist generation of writers, asks how the translations of their work represent Poland to the world and what these works might indicate about changes within contemporary Polish literary and political culture. In particular the article looks at recent fiction from Polish Women Writers and themes in recent writing including the ideas of Poland as Post-Communist, Post-nationalist, Post-Jewish and Post-German.     

‘What the Devil a Woman Lives for After 30’: The Late Careers of Late Eighteenth-Century British Women Writers

This article begins to consider the late careers of late eighteenth-century English women writers. It provides a brief review of some of the eighteenth-century attitudes toward aging women and focuses specifically on the aging female writer. Surveying the available literature on this topic, the author demonstrates the need for a more thorough investigation of aging, gender, literary output, and reception among the first generations of professional women writers in Great Britain. This article concludes with a consideration of Hester Lynch Piozzi and some of her writing from her late years.     

Four Factors That May Predict the Emergence of Creative Writing: A Proposed Model

Factors that may predict that a child will become a creative writer as an adult are explored. Two areas of research are reviewed: studies documenting the incidence of mood disorders in adult creative writers and retrospective studies examining the childhoods of creative writers. The first body of research shows a clear correlation between creative writing and mood disorders. The second shows that children who later become creative writers experience an atypical amount of stress. It is suggested here that these 2 findings are related, because stress in childhood is associated with mental illness in adulthood. Stress cannot however be a necessary condition for becoming a creative writer because not all creative writers experienced stress in childhood. Nor can it be a sufficient condition since most children who experience stress do not become writers. It is argued that, along with the stress that many writers experience as children, 3 factors may be associated with creative writing ability: growing up in an enriched and child-centered family (which can co-exist with stress), having high verbal ability, and having an unusually rich imaginative life. These latter 3 factors may mediate against stress and foster resilience in these children and allow them to grow up to become writers.     

Jung, the trickster writer, or what literary research can do for the clinician

This paper aims to show how literary scholarship can contribute to clinical debates by offering different methods of reading and interpreting works by Jung. Firstly, as texts form much of the means by which Jungian ideas are transmitted and worked upon, literary research offers methods of examining the way we read for authority and orthodoxy. Secondly, it is invaluable to look at the way in which Jung actually wrote. Jung portrays a dynamic psyche in action in his writings. His works are not only about a creative archetypal psyche, they enact and perform this creativity in the way in which he uses words. The rich playfulness demonstrated in The Collected Works is an example of a writer as a mythmaker of the psyche, one who absorbs unconscious creative energies into his writing in ways that dissolve modernity's cultural boundaries of science and art. In addition, the aesthetic component in Jung's writing is not a decoration of his ideas. Rather, his 'literary' qualities are themselves forms of argument about the fragile state of modern subjectivity. Using his essays on 'Synchronicity', and the 'Trickster', the paper will show these works to be responses to three related crises that still face clinicians and scholars today: the problematic role of the hero myth as an individuation narrative, the nature of 'science', and the crisis of western modernity itself in desperate need of psychic healing. The paper will show that where writing on synchronicity aims to individuate science by adding a 'feminine' Eros to its Logos biases, the Trickster essay is designed to ameliorate modernity by providing frameworks to make visible marginal or excluded material. In these works Jung tries to rejuvenate the modern world by re-connecting traditional symbolic systems with the psyche through myth as a language of psychic relating.     

NEGATION IN BORGES'S 'THE SECRET MIRACLE': WRITING THE SHOAH

The author presents a psychoanalytic reading of Borges's 'The secret miracle' (1943), a short story about the Shoah, for which Freud's concept of negation (Verneinen) and recent psychoanalytic approaches to symbolisation and the functions of fiction form the theoretical background. She argues that the effects of negation, present in literary fiction, become forcefully magnified in the fiction of the Shoah, because of its specific inversion of the relations between life and art. This magnification increases the perplexing effect that is characteristic of Borges's heterotopies. The story is read as a metaphor of transformative processes that closely follow Freud's dual conceptualisation of negation as a defence and as allowing the repressed a way into consciousness. This study illuminates the conservation of the relations between external and internal realities as a basic difference between negation and related concepts such as disavowal (Verleugnung), and repression, in relation to creative imagination. The author relates the story's perplexing effect to its subversion of fundamental axioms such as temporality, questioning the existence of sense itself and suggests that the malaise the story produces may stem from the way in which its narrative structure negates time, the fabric from which narratives and life are woven.     

文学小说阅读影响社会认知的心理机制

摘要：文学小说阅读可以提高个体社会认知能力,但其中具体心理机制有待探索。本文通过梳理以往研究,从文学小说的社会性和文学性两个视角入手,结合模拟理论,精加工似然模型和叙事传输理论讨论了文学小说阅读影响社会认知的心理机制,并在此基础上初步构建了文学小说影响社会认知的动机-情感-认知加工策略框架。文学小说的社会性会增强读者对故事的情感卷入（叙事传输理论）,并引发读者对故事内容进行心理模拟（模拟理论）;文学小说的文学性同样能够增强读者对故事的情感卷入（叙事传输理论）,同时促使读者在动机层面愿意耗费更多认知资源去理解故事内容（精加工似然模型）,进而促进心理模拟。未来需要更多实证研究来检验这一框架的解释力,完善其边界条件,寻找脑机制层面的证据。     

Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before,during, and after reading

Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these emotions can in turn influence a person's experience of the narrative. Lastly, emotions experienced during reading may have consequences after closing the covers of a book. This article reviews the current state of empirical research for each of these stages, providing a snapshot of what is known about the interaction between emotions and literary narrative fiction. With this, we can begin to sketch the outlines of what remains to be discovered.     

What we look for in poetry

A chain of events was triggered on the nights of April 23 and 24, 1915, in Constantinople, Turkey, that would end, approximately six years later, with death or forced deportation of more than two and a half million Armenians from their historical homeland in Central and Eastern Turkey. During those two nights over two hundred Armenian writers, historians, translators, poets, journalists, editors, and political leaders were arrested in their homes, taken to the central police station, and never seen again.

The shock of the genocide not only nearly destroyed a nation, together with its articulate literary, political, and cultural leaders, but also paralyzed the creative abilities of its survivors. With their writers, poets, and political leaders lost, their symbolic vocabulary shattered, the Armenians have been unable to distill from the genocide a transcendent wisdom and to present to all cultures the fruits of that distillation via new poetry, art, theater, film, literature, and philosophy, hi the words of V. Oshagan, a modern writer on Armenian and American themes

Seventy years after the event, the Genocide has still not been tackled by any author of note. The Armenians have not recovered from the trauma and with nothing forgotten and nothing forgiven, the Genocide is still continuing. As long as the Turk is identified with the principle of evil in the Armenian imagination, and as long as the Turkish government refuses to admit its guilt and make amends to the victims, the Genocide will continue and will prevent the Armenians from producing any work of art from the theme.

Slowly, over the past two decades, powerful works have emerged that convey to the world, through poetry and myth, the true stupefaction of that horrendous time period. Among these works is the 1980 short story, “Uncle Toros,” by the Armenian writer Mooshegh Galshoyan. With insight and intuition, he portrayed the life of one eighty-year-old victim of the genocide. Old Uncle Toros's recurring nightmare of that event, as vividly told by Galshoyan, allows one to enter the Armenian trauma, to step into the unconscious life of a genocide victim. –A. Chutjian     

More than Words: Applying the Discipline of Literary Creative Writing to the Practice of Reflective Writing in Health Care Education

This paper examines definitions and uses of reflective and creative writing in health care education classrooms and professional development settings. A review of articles related to writing in health care reveals that when teaching narrative competence is the goal, creative writing may produce the best outcomes. Ultimately, the paper describes the importance of defining literary creative writing as a distinct form of writing and recommends scholars interested in using literary creative writing to teach narrative competence study pedagogy of the field.