Tom 8 (2016): Zeszyt 1 (June 2016)

The article discusses Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Only God Forgives (2013), and focuses on questions of artistic representation and reception in relation to such cinematic elements as genre film, style, mise-en-scène, graphic violence and art experience. The arguments for the analyses are supported by John Dewey’s theory of art as experience where he claims that aesthetic experience is essentially infused with emotions that provide for a unifying quality cementing diverse constituent parts of the artwork. The article also takes into consideration Refn’s standpoint on the use of violence in art. While violence is a way of externalizing emotions, as Refn claims, it may not necessarily be the real experience viewers want to entertain; however, through an art experience, which is integral and complete as Dewey asserts, they are able to perceive and detect meanings that were “scattered and weakened in the material of other experiences”.

This paper will address the notion of desire in Ken N. Kamoche’s “Secondhand Wife” and Nuruddin Farah’s A Naked Needle; it will be centered on the idea of men’s and women’s sexual desire as caught between being controlled and willing to be free. Desire will be studied as being controlled by the tribe in Kenya and Somalia, which channels men’s and women’s desire into pre-made forms. These channels of desire approved by the tribe are contested in Kenya and Somalia by both men and women. Desire is then situated between collective manipulation and individual freedom. On the one hand, desire will be linked to the idea of power relations that is desire as a tool to establish and support the power of the tribe. Desire is no longer a matter of natural instinct and feeling but that of a constructed dialectic of power. On the other hand, desire under the tribe is also about a refusal of the tribal control of desire and a yearn for liberating desire, which manifests itself in different manners such as the refusal of restrictions on marriage with non-Muslims in Somalia, the rejection of arranged marriage for both men and women, or prostitution as the body avenging itself through itself.

The present paper describes a reader-response experiment focusing on the perception of the genre of the fantastic. It also proposes an update of the genre’s structuralist definition to better conform to contemporary cognitive research. Participants answered questions relating to the interpretation of events and important symbols in a Neil Gaiman short story and were also asked if they considered the story “fantasy” or “realistic fiction.” Tzvetan Todorov characterized the fantastic as a hesitation between the uncanny (realistic interpretation) and the marvelous (supernatural interpretation). Neil Gaiman, a popular contemporary author of genre fiction, has utilized this hesitation between psychological and supernatural explanations of his stories to great effect. The results show a consistently higher degree of enjoyment in readers who were aware of the dual interpretation and partook in the hesitation. This paper also introduces the concept of quantum cognition into literary theory and explains the benefit of using terminology from this discipline in a reader-response context. The findings of this study could be the first step towards a better understanding of the different ways in which readers cognitively approach the fantastic or genre in general.

Wings flapping in the dark, a scientist who is able to be present in two places at once as a result of an accident in the laboratory, and unknown creatures hiding in the shadows. This paper focuses on those works of English writer H.G. Wells (1866-1946) which create mystery by playing with human perception and the human senses. In these stories, the mysteries might have a real cause, or they might be a result of confusion. Either way, it certainly makes the characters question the reliability of their minds. They shudder with fear, and sometimes they are on the verge of losing their sanity. These phenomena are examined from the perspective of cognitive approaches. The analysis focuses on mental processing and how it influences the mental stability of the characters in question. One of the questions asked is what kinds of responses are elicited by these mysteries involving potentially misled senses.