everal recent studies on Borges have explored the many philosophical motifs that he employs in his short stories.1 This philosophical reading seems to be justified by a number of Borges’ own statements about both his biography and his work. For example, in the Preface to The Gold of the Tigers (1972), he refers to his “philosophical preoccupation” which he says “has been with [him] since [his] ...

In my thesis, I examine the discursive space of the detective fiction genre following Kasai Kiyoshi’s periodization in his two-volume seminal work Tantei shōsetsuron (The Theory of Detective Fiction, 1998). I investigate how Japanese detective fiction has developed in relation to Japan’s modernization, industrialization, nationalism, and globalization, specifically in the 1920s-30s, the 1950s-6...

One of the most intriguing elements of Mohamed Soueid's film My Heart Beats Only For Her (2008) is the ambiguous narrative that lies somewhere between fiction and documentary. In this film a man named Hassan tries to retrace the steps of his father Hatem Hatem, a Lebanese revolutionary in the 1970s, on a journey from Beirut to Hanoi to Dubai. Soueid combines and interrelates these two seemingly...

Trend of Pakistani English Fiction Since Partition to 1970; is a multidimensional effort to not only to highlight the prevalent themes and trends of the fiction , but also to bring into limelight those legends of Pakistani English Fiction, who can be considered the founders of English fiction in Pakistan. The phenomenon includes a lot of names, which are now completely forgotten or are taken fo...

Literary fiction has been credited with considerable power to improve attitudes toward outgroups. It was even argued that it has been an important factor behind the global decline of violence against various minorities in the last centuries. Could it also help to reduce the human-inflicted suffering of animals? To test this, we studied the attitude toward animal welfare of n = 921 (experimental...

Stephan Schaffrath, in his paper "The Methodology of Architectonic Truth-Finding in Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)," discusses how Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) negotiates the treacherous terrains that lie between positivism and nihilistic relativism by means of a truth-finding methodology. Schaffrath proposes that truth-finding methodology applies approximative, and t...

This article explores Andrei Tarkovskii’s conception of truth in Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) as part of his wider philosophical project concerning knowledge. The director’s epistemological views form a core dimension of his life and aesthetic as he strives towards what he considers a higher, spiritual ‘idea of knowing’. In his search for this idealised notion of truth, Tarkovskii uses the...