Dream world (plot device)
Dream world is a used plot device in fictional works, most notably in science fiction and fantasy fiction. The use of a dream world creates a situation whereby a character is placed in a marvellous and unpredictable environment and must overcome several personal problems to leave it; the dream world commonly serves to teach some moral or religious lessons to the character experiencing it – a lesson that the other characters will be unaware of, but one that will influence decisions made regarding them. When the character is reintroduced into the real world, the question arises as to what constitutes reality due to the vivid recollection and experiences of the dream world. According to J. R. R. Tolkien, dream worlds contrast with fantasy worlds, in which the world has existence independent of the characters in it. However, other authors have used the dreaming process as a way of accessing a world which, within the context of the fiction, holds as much consistency and continuity as physical reality.
The use of "dream frames" to contain a fantasy world, so explain away its marvels, has been criticized and has become much less prevalent. A similar motif, Locus amoenus, is popular in medieval literature. A dream world is sometimes invoked in dream visions such as The Book of the Duchess and Piers Plowman. One of the best-known dream worlds is Wonderland from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as well as Looking-Glass Land from its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. Unlike many dream worlds, Carroll's logic is like that of actual dreams, with transitions and causality flexible. James Branch Cabell's Smirt and its two sequels taken together form an extended dream and most of their action takes place in a dream world; the action of The Bridge by Iain M. Banks and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson take place in dream worlds. Other fictional dream worlds include the Dreamlands of H. P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and The Neverending Story's world of Fantasia, which includes places like the Desert of Lost Dreams, the Sea of Possibilities and the Swamps of Sadness.
Dreamworlds, shared hallucinations and other alternate realities feature in a number of works by Philip K. Dick, such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik. Similar themes were explored for instance in The Circular Ruins. In The Wheel of Time book series, Tel'aran'rhiod is a dream world that exists in close proximity to the real world. Objects and physical locations that do not change in the real world have parallels in Tel'aran'rhiod. Ordinary people can slip into Tel'aran'rhiod, events that occur within this dream world have physical consequences. A person that dies in Tel'aran'rhiod will never wake up again, in several cases it is shown that physical injuries gained there persist to the waking world. Tel'aran'rhiod can be controlled similar to a lucid dream, several characters in the series can enter and manipulate Tel'aran'rhiod at will. Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui is a science fiction novel that involves entering dream worlds using technology. In the book, dream monitoring and intervention as a means of treating mental disorders is a developing new form of psychotherapy in the near future.
Unrest ensues when a new psychotherapy dream-analysis device is stolen, allowing the assailant to enter and manipulate people's dreams. In the feminist science fiction novel The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, the Kin of Ata maintain the real world through their dreaming, making the real world a form of dream. In the 1939 movie, Oz from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was altered from a fantasy world to a dream world of Dorothy's. In The Matrix and the rest of the humans live inside a dream world, their brains are hooked up to a computer network. However, some may argue that this is not a dream world, as it seems normal and indistinguishable from reality. In the 1980s, the Nightmare on Elm Street series of horror films introduced a dark dream realm inhabited by the supernatural serial killer Freddy Krueger. In the movie Sharkboy and Lavagirl the main characters enter a world dreamt up by a small boy in order to save the real world. Down Town is the land of nightmares. Dreamworlds appear in Total Recall and Vanilla Sky.
Paprika is an anime film adaptation of the 1993 novel of the same name, which involves entering and manipulating dream worlds using dream-analysis devices. The film Waking Life takes place entirely in a dream realm. In the 2010 film Inception, main characters create artificial, vivid dream worlds and bring others into the dream worlds and perform various things with their brains, without them knowing; this may ` Inception' and others. One of the earliest newspaper comic strips, recounting Little Nemo's adventures in Slumberland, had a dream world theme. Writer Neil Gaiman was tasked with re-imagining a Golden Age character, "The Sandman". In his version, the Sandman becomes Dream, the Lord of Dreams, the anthropomorphic personification of dreams. At the start of the series, Morpheus is held prisoner for 70 years. Morpheus escapes in the
Fictional country
A fictional country is a country, made up for fictional stories, does not exist in real life, or one that people believe in without proof. Sailors have always mistaken low clouds for land masses, in times this was given the name Dutch capes. Other fictional lands appear most as settings or subjects of myth, film, or video games, they may be used for technical reasons in actual reality for use in the development of specifications, such as the fictional country of Bookland, used to allow EAN "country" codes 978 and 979 to be used for ISBN numbers assigned to books, code 977 to be assigned for use for ISSN numbers on magazines and other periodicals. The ISO 3166 country code "ZZ" is reserved as a fictional country code. Fictional countries appear in stories of early science fiction; such countries form part of the normal Earth landscape although not located in a normal atlas. Similar tales took place on fictional planets. Jonathan Swift's protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, visited various strange places.
Edgar Rice Burroughs placed adventures of Tarzan in areas in Africa that, at the time, remained unknown to the West and to the East. Isolated islands with strange creatures and/or customs enjoyed great popularity in these authors' times. By the 19th century, when Western explorers had surveyed most of the Earth's surface, this option was lost to Western culture. Thereafter fictional utopian and dystopian societies tended to spring up on other planets or in space, whether in human colonies or in alien societies originating elsewhere. Fictional countries can be used in stories set in a distant future, with other political borders than today. Superhero and secret agent comics and some thrillers use fictional countries on Earth as backdrops. Most of these countries exist only for a single story, a TV-series episode or an issue of a comic book. There are notable exceptions, such as Qumar and Equatorial Kundu in The West Wing, Marvel Comics Latveria and DC Comics Qurac and Bialya. Fictional countries deliberately resemble or represent some real-world country or present a utopia or dystopia for commentary.
Variants of the country's name sometimes make it clear what country they have in mind. By using a fictional country instead of a real one, authors can exercise greater freedom in creating characters and settings, while at the same time presenting a vaguely familiar locale that readers can recognize. A fictional country leaves the author unburdened by the restraints of a real nation's actual history and culture, can thus allow for greater scope in plot construction and be exempt from criticism for vilifying an actual nation, political party, or people; the fictional "Tomania" serves as a setting for Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and skewers a régime infamous for religious bigotry, racism, diplomatic bullying, violations of civil liberties. Fictional countries are invented for the purpose of military training scenarios, e.g. the group of islands around Hawaii were assigned the names "Blueland" and "Orangeland" in the international maritime exercise, RIMPAC 98. Fictional countries have been created for polling purposes.
When polled in April 2004, 8% of British people believed that the country of Luvania would soon join the European Union. In the 1989 General Social Survey, U. S. respondents were asked to rate the social status of people of "Wisian" background, a fictional national heritage. While a majority of respondents said they could not place the Wisians in the U. S. social hierarchy, those who did ranked their status as quite low, giving an average of 4.12 on a 9-point scale, where 9 was the highest social standing. "Once you let the Wisians in, the neighborhood goes to pot," quipped Time Magazine. Countries from stories, legends, that some believe to exist, or to have existed at some point: Atlantis Aztlán El Dorado Lemuria Lyonesse Mu Ophir Shangri-La or Shambhala Bitnation Fictional African countries Fictional Asian countries Fictional city Fictional companies List of fictional companies Fictional geography Jennifer Government: NationStates List of fictional counties List of fictional countries List of fictional European countries List of fictional planets List of fictional U.
S. states List of fictional universes Proposed country Worldbuilding Alberto Manguel & Gianni Guadalupi: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, ISBN 0-15-626054-9 Brian Stableford: The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places. Simon & Schuster, 1999. ISBN 978-0684849584 Media related to Fictional countries at Wikimedia Commons
Occam's razor
Occam's razor is the problem-solving principle that states that "simpler solutions are more to be correct than complex ones." When presented with competing hypotheses to solve a problem, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions. The idea is attributed to English Franciscan friar William of Ockham, a scholastic philosopher and theologian. In science, Occam's razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models, rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models. In the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an large even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable; the term Occam's razor did not appear until a few centuries after William of Ockham's death in 1347.
Libert Froidmont, in his On Christian Philosophy of the Soul, takes credit for the phrase, speaking of "novacula occami". Ockham did not invent this principle, but the "razor"—and its association with him—may be due to the frequency and effectiveness with which he used it. Ockham stated the principle in various ways, but the most popular version, "Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity" was formulated by the Irish Franciscan philosopher John Punch in his 1639 commentary on the works of Duns Scotus; the origins of what has come to be known as Occam's razor are traceable to the works of earlier philosophers such as John Duns Scotus, Robert Grosseteste and Aristotle. Aristotle writes in his Posterior Analytics, "We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses." Ptolemy stated, "We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible."Phrases such as "It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer" and "A plurality is not to be posited without necessity" were commonplace in 13th-century scholastic writing.
Robert Grosseteste, in Commentary on the Posterior Analytics Books, declares: "That is better and more valuable which requires fewer, other circumstances being equal... For if one thing were demonstrated from many and another thing from fewer known premises, better, from fewer because it makes us know just as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it produces knowledge from fewer premises. In natural science, in moral science, in metaphysics the best is that which needs no premises and the better that which needs the fewer, other circumstances being equal."The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas states that "it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many." Aquinas uses this principle to construct an objection to God's existence, an objection that he in turn answers and refutes and through an argument based on causality. Hence, Aquinas acknowledges the principle that today is known as Occam's razor, but prefers causal explanations to other simple explanations.
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and theologian, an influential medieval philosopher and a nominalist. His popular fame as a great logician rests chiefly on the maxim attributed to him and known as Occam's razor; the term razor refers to distinguishing between two hypotheses either by "shaving away" unnecessary assumptions or cutting apart two similar conclusions. While it has been claimed that Occam's razor is not found in any of William's writings, one can cite statements such as Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, which occurs in his theological work on the Sentences of Peter Lombard; the precise words sometimes attributed to William of Ockham, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, are absent in his extant works. William of Ockham's contribution seems to restrict the operation of this principle in matters pertaining to miracles and God's power; this principle is sometimes phrased as Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. In his Summa Totius Logicae, i.
12, William of Ockham cites the principle of economy, Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora To quote Isaac Newton, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same cause
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopœia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. As such words are uncountable nouns, onomatopoeia refers to the property of such words. Common occurrences of words of the onomatopoeia process include animal noises such as "oink", "miaow", "roar" and "chirp". Onomatopoeia can differ between languages: it conforms to some extent to the broader linguistic system. Although in the English language the term onomatopœia means "the imitation of a sound", the compound word onomatopœia in the Greek language means "making or creating names". For words that imitate sounds, the term ὴχομιμητικό or echomimetic) is used; the word ὴχομιμητικό derives from "ὴχώ", meaning echo or sound, "μιμητικό", meaning mimetic or imitating. In the case of a frog croaking, the spelling may vary because different frog species around the world make different sounds: Ancient Greek brekekekex koax koax for marsh frogs; some other common English-language examples are hiccup, bang, beep and splash.
Machines and their sounds are often described with onomatopoeia: honk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, vroom or brum for the engine. In speaking of a mishap involving an audible arcing of electricity, the word "zap" is used. Human sounds sometimes provide instances of onomatopoeia, as. For animal sounds, words like quack, bark or woof, meow/miaow or purr and baa are used in English; some languages flexibly integrate onomatopoeic words into their structure. This may evolve into a new word, up to the point that the process is no longer recognized as onomatopoeia. One example is the English word "bleat" for sheep noise: in medieval times it was pronounced as "blairt", or "blet" with the vowel drawled, which more resembles a sheep noise than the modern pronunciation. An example of the opposite case is "cuckoo", due to continuous familiarity with the bird noise down the centuries, has kept the same pronunciation as in Anglo-Saxon times and its vowels have not changed as they have in the word furrow.
Verba dicendi are a method of integrating onomatopoeic ideophones into grammar. Sometimes, things are named from the sounds. In English, for example, there is the universal fastener, named for the sound it makes: the zip or zipper Many birds are named after their calls, such as the bobwhite quail, the weero, the morepork, the killdeer and jays, the cuckoo, the chiffchaff, the whooping crane, the whip-poor-will, the kookaburra. In Tamil and Malayalam, the word for crow is kaakaa; this practice is common in certain languages such as Māori, so in names of animals borrowed from these languages. Although a particular sound is heard by people of different cultures, it is expressed through the use of different consonant strings in different languages. For example, the snip of a pair of scissors is cri-cri in Italian, riqui-riqui in Spanish, terre-terre or treque-treque in Portuguese, krits-krits in modern Greek and katr-katr in Hindi; the "honk" of a car's horn is ba-ba in Mandarin, tut-tut in French, pu-pu in Japanese, bbang-bbang in Korean, bært-bært in Norwegian, fom-fom in Portuguese and bim-bim in Vietnamese.
An onomatopoeic effect can be produced in a phrase or word string with the help of alliteration and consonance alone, without using any onomatopoeic words. The most famous example is the phrase "furrow followed free" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; the words "followed" and "free" are not onomatopoeic in themselves, but in conjunction with "furrow" they reproduce the sound of ripples following in the wake of a speeding ship. Alliteration has been used in the line "as the surf surged up the sun swept shore...", to recreate the sound of breaking waves, in the poem "I, She and the Sea". Comic strips and comic books make extensive use of onomatopoeia. Popular culture historian Tim DeForest noted the impact of writer-artist Roy Crane, the creator of Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer: It was Crane who pioneered the use of onomatopoeic sound effects in comics, adding "bam," "pow" and "wham" to what had been an entirely visual vocabulary. Crane had fun with this, tossing in an occasional "ker-splash" or "lickety-wop" along with what would become the more standard effects.
Words as well as images became vehicles for carrying along his fast-paced storylines. In 2002, DC Comics introduced a villain named Onomatopoeia, an athlete, martial artist, weapons expert, who speaks pure sounds. Advertising uses onomatopoeia for mnemonic purposes, so that consumers will remember their products, as in Alka-Seltzer's "Plop, fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is!" jingle, recorded in two different versions by Sammy Davis, Jr. Rice Krispies and Rice Bubbles make a "sn
Red herring
A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentionally, as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies, or may be used in argumentation inadvertently; the term was popularized in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a kipper to divert hounds from chasing a hare. As an informal fallacy, the red herring falls into a broad class of relevance fallacies. Unlike the straw man, premised on a distortion of the other party's position, the red herring is a plausible, though irrelevant, diversionary tactic. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a red herring may be unintentional; the expression is used to assert that an argument is not relevant to the issue being discussed. For example, "I think. I recommend you support this because we are in a budget crisis, we do not want our salaries affected."
The second sentence, though used to support the first sentence, does not address that topic. In fiction and non-fiction a red herring may be intentionally used by the writer to plant a false clue that leads readers or audiences towards a false conclusion. For example, the character of Bishop Aringarosa in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is presented for most of the novel as if he is at the centre of the church's conspiracies, but is revealed to have been innocently duped by the true antagonist of the story; the character's name is a loose Italian translation of "red herring". A red herring is used in legal studies and exam problems to mislead and distract students from reaching a correct conclusion about a legal issue as a device that tests students' comprehension of underlying law and their ability to properly discern material factual circumstances. In a literal sense, there is no such fish as a "red herring"; this process makes the fish pungent smelling and, with strong enough brine, turns its flesh reddish.
In its literal sense as a cured kipper, the term can be dated to the mid-13th century, in the poem The Treatise by Walter of Bibbesworth: "He eteþ no ffyssh But heryng red."Prior to 2008, the figurative sense of "red herring" was thought to originate from a supposed technique of training young scent hounds. There are variations of the story, but according to one version, the pungent red herring would be dragged along a trail until a puppy learned to follow the scent; when the dog was being trained to follow the faint odour of a fox or a badger, the trainer would drag a red herring perpendicular to the animal's trail to confuse the dog. The dog learned to follow the original scent rather than the stronger scent. A variation of this story is given, without mention of its use in training, in The Macmillan Book of Proverbs and Famous Phrases, with the earliest use cited being from W. F. Butler's Life of Napier, published in 1849. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable gives the full phrase as "Drawing a red herring across the path", an idiom meaning "to divert attention from the main question by some side issue".
Another variation of the dog story is given by Robert Hendrickson who says escaping convicts used the pungent fish to throw off hounds in pursuit. According to a pair of articles by Professor Gerald Cohen and Robert Scott Ross published in Comments on Etymology, supported by etymologist Michael Quinion and accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary, the idiom did not originate from a hunting practice. Ross researched the origin of the story and found the earliest reference to using herrings for training animals was in a tract on horsemanship published in 1697 by Gerland Langbaine. Langbaine recommended a method of training horses by dragging the carcass of a cat or fox so that the horse would be accustomed to following the chaos of a hunting party, he says if a dead animal is not available, a red herring would do as a substitute. This recommendation was misunderstood by Nicholas Cox, published in the notes of another book around the same time, who said it should be used to train hounds. Either way, the herring was not used to distract the hounds or horses from a trail, rather to guide them along it.
The earliest reference to using herring for distracting hounds is an article published on 14 February 1807 by radical journalist William Cobbett in his polemical periodical Political Register. According to Cohen and Ross, accepted by the OED, this is the origin of the figurative meaning of red herring. In the piece, William Cobbett critiques the English press, which had mistakenly reported Napoleon's defeat. Cobbett recounted that he had once used a red herring to deflect hounds in pursuit of a hare, adding "It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring. Quinion concludes: "This story, extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen." Although Cobbett popularized the figurative usage, he was
Cliffhanger
A cliffhanger, or cliffhanger ending, is a plot device in fiction which features a main character in a precarious or difficult dilemma, or confronted with a shocking revelation at the end of an episode of serialized fiction. A cliffhanger is hoped to ensure the audience will return to see how the characters resolve the dilemma; some serials end with the caveat "To Be Continued…" or "The End?" In movie serials and television series, the following episode sometimes begins with a recap sequence. Cliffhangers were used as literary devices in several works of the medieval era; the Arabic literary work One Thousand and One Nights involves Scheherazade narrating a series of stories to King Shahryār for 1,001 nights, with each night ending on a cliffhanger in order to save herself from execution. Some medieval Chinese ballads like the Liu chih-yuan chu-kung-tiao ended each chapter on a cliffhanger to keep the audience in suspense. Cliffhangers appeared as an element of the Victorian serial novel that emerged in the 1840s, with many associating the form with Charles Dickens, a pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction.
By the 1860s it had become a staple part of the sensation serials, while the term itself originated with Thomas Hardy in 1873 when a protagonist from one of his serials, Henry Knight, was left hanging off a cliff. Cliffhangers became prominent with the serial publication of narrative fiction, pioneered by Charles Dickens. Printed episodically in magazines, Dickens’s cliffhangers triggered desperation in his readers. Writing in the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum captured the anticipation of those waiting for the next installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; the impact of Dickens' serial publications saw the cliffhanger become a staple part of the sensation serials by the 1860s. The term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with the serialised version of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left hanging off a cliff. Cliffhangers were popular from the 1910s through to the 1930s serials when nickelodeons and movie theaters filled the cultural niche primarily occupied by television.
During the 1910s, when Fort Lee, New Jersey was a center of film production, the cliffs facing New York and the Hudson River were used as film locations. The most notable of these films was The Perils of Pauline, a serial which helped popularize the term cliffhanger. In them, the serial would end leaving actress Pearl White's Pauline character hanging from a cliff. Cliffhangers are used in television series soap operas that end each episode on a cliffhanger. Prior to the early 1980s, season-ending cliffhangers were rare on U. S. television. The first such season-ender on U. S. TV was in the comedy send-up of soap operas Soap in 1978. Several Australian soap operas, which went off air over summer, such as Number 96, The Restless Years, Prisoner, ended each year with major and much publicized catastrophe, such as a character being shot in the final seconds of the year's closing episode. Cliffhangers are used in Japanese manga and anime. In contrast to American superhero comics, Japanese manga are much more written with cliffhangers with each volume or issue.
This is the case with shōnen manga those published by Weekly Shōnen Jump, such as Dragon Ball, Shaman King, One Piece. During its original run, Doctor Who was written in a serialised format that ended each episode within a serial on a cliffhanger. In the first few years of the show, the final episodes of each serial would have a cliffhanger that would lead into the next serial. Dragonfire Part One is notable for having a cliffhanger that involved The Doctor hanging from a cliff; this has been criticised by fans for being a pointless cliffhanger, but script editor Andrew Cartmel gave an explanation for the reasoning of it in an interview. Another British science fiction series, Blake's 7, employed end-of-season cliffhangers for each of the four seasons the series was on air, most notably for its final episode in 1981 in which the whole of the main cast are killed. Cliffhangers were rare on American television before 1980, as television networks preferred the flexibility of airing episodes in any order.
The phenomenal success of the 1980 "Who shot J. R.?" third season-ending cliffhanger of Dallas, the "Who Done It" fourth-season episode that solved the mystery, contributed to the cliffhanger becoming a common storytelling device on American television. Another notable cliffhanger was the "Moldavian Massacre" on Dynasty in 1985, which fueled speculation throughout the summer months regarding who lived or died when all the characters attended a wedding in the country of Moldavia, only to have revolutionaries topple the government and machine-gun the entire wedding party. Cliffhanger endings in films date back to the early 20th century, were prominently used in the movie serials of the 1930s, though these tended to be resolved with the next installment the following week. A longer term cliffhanger was employed in the Star Wars film series, in The Empire Strikes Back in which Darth Vader made a shock revelation to Luke Skywalker that he was his father, the life of Han Solo was in jeopardy after he was frozen and taken away by a bounty hunter.
These plotlines were left unresolved until the next film in the series three years later. The two main ways for cliffhangers to keep readers/viewers coming
