Designing interpretive communities toward justice: indexicality in classroom discourse

Purpose This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality. Findings The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community. Originality/value This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.

VOCES Y OTREDAD. DE LAS CARTAS DESDE MI CELDA A BÉCQUER Y LAS BRUJAS

La crítica especializada ha relacionado las leyendas de las cartas Desde mi celda de Bécquer con la insistencia por parte del autor en la búsqueda y recuperación del folclore y de las tradiciones populares. No obstante, el acercamiento a las mismas exige una doble lectura. La riqueza polifónica muestra que, al Bécquer folclorista, habría de añadírsele su faceta de lector afamado, imprescindible en su configuración como narrador de historias. El escritor sevillano mira al pueblo, recoge y bebe de la tradición, pero la filtra a través del prisma del movimiento gótico, de los ecos que aún permanecían en la literatura y que se atisbaban en las últimas manifestaciones de las narraciones románticas y en la incipiente narrativa realista. El largometraje recientemente estrenado Bécquer y las brujas ahonda en esta riqueza polifónica de una figura, construida desde la más pura otredad: la de la bruja. Abstract: Literary scholarship has credited the legends collected in Bécquer’s letters Desde mi celda for the writer’s interest in the research and recovery of folklore and popular traditions. However, when approaching these traditional stories, another perspective is possible: Bécquer’s polyphonic narrations are rooted in his wide readings, from which he draws the material of his stories. The Sevillian writer observes and grasps the people’s cultural traditions, but through the filter of the Gothic, the echoes of the last romantic prose and the emerging realist narrative. The newly released film Bécquer y las brujas highlights the richness of his compositions, based on the purest otherness: the figure of the witch.

Critical Future Studies and Age: attending to future imaginings of age and ageing

This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring management and control. This paper has two parts: the first considers the importance of the future to contemporary ageist stereotypes. The second seeks potential counter representations in speculative fiction. We argue that an age-aware CFS can allow us not only to imagine newfutures but also to reflect critically on the shape and consequences of contemporary modes of relations of power.

Times and masks in texts by and about Emiliyan Stanev

The article explores the masks Emiliyan Stanev uses to participate in the literary life of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. It also analyzes the attitude of literary scholarship towards the writer’s various manifestations. It comes to the conclusion that in order to defend his literary existence and to ensure literary publicity for his texts, the author had to simultaneously perform several – in certain cases mutually exclusive – social roles.

Royal Counsel in Tudor England, 1485–1603

Royal counsel in Tudor England has been a central historiographical theme for over twenty years. This review offers a critical assessment of the state of the field. It appraises historical and literary scholarship on both the theory and practice of royal counsel. Among other themes, it discusses the concepts of evil counsel and arcana imperii. The review concludes by suggesting priorities for future enquiry, including the need to think more carefully about which areas of English government still required royal decision-making, and therefore counsel, in this period. The article also charts the rise of conciliar ‘government under the king but not by the king’ and shows that Tudor counsel often happened the wrong way around: the monarch advised the privy council on the direction of state policy. It calls for a new administrative history in early modern studies, with a renewed focus on institutions and their procedures, to complement existing strengths in the fields of political culture and political thought.

GASTRONOMICAL CODE AS ELEMENT OF EVERYDAY LIFE POETICS IN DRAMA TEXTS (ANTON CHEKHOV’S THREE SISTERS AND BETH HENLEY’S CRIMES OF THE HEART)

The paper sets out to explore the functions of food discourse in the plays Three Sisters by Anton Chekhovand Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley. Based on the critically established continuity between the two plays, the paperlooks at the ways the dramatists capitalize on food imagery to achieve their artistic goals. It seemed logical to discuss thealimentary practices within the framework of everyday life studies, moved to the forefront of literary scholarship by theanthropological turn in the humanities. Enhanced by semiotic approach, this perspective enables one to understand foodproducts and consumption manners as performing a variety of functions in each play. Most obviously, they are instrumentalin creating the illusion of «everydayness» vital for new drama. Then, for Chekhov, food comes to epitomize thespiritless materiality of contemporary life, while in Henley’s play it is predominantly used, in accordance with the play’sfeminist agenda, as a grotesque substitute for the lack of human affection. Relying upon the fundamental cultural distinctionbetween everyday and non-everyday makes it possible to compare representations of festive occasions in the twoplays seen through the gastronomical lens of «eating together». Despite substantial differences, the emphases on alimentarypractices in the plays serve to realize the inexhaustible dramatic potential inherent in the minutiae of quotidian life.

Angus Fletcher’s Other Literary Darwinism

Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's thera­peutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that iden­tifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and un­derstanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice in his stylistic blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuro­science to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher’s chains of rea­soning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletch­er’s book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher’s rhetor­ical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher’s book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers.

Coda

The coda extends the relationship between nineteenth-century techniques of medico-literary exegesis to reading practices in the present day. The four mobile protocols discussed in the book—dissective reading, the postmortem, free indirect style, and semiological diagnostics—offer a new portrait of the cultural interchange between Romantic literary and medical fields. They also set the stage for contemporary reading practices, especially symptomatic reading. The coda argues that the much-maligned practice of symptomatic reading might be rehabilitated through a reconsideration of the history of its origins in Romantic protocols of diagnosis, which anticipate present-day debates in literary analysis about the ethics of critique. In dialogue with the medical and health humanities, the coda offers an optimistic reconsideration of symptomatic reading as a rich, transhistorical instance of how literary scholarship might draw on and inform the medical sciences.

Between Form and Content: Narrative Typology, Metafiction and Ideology in The Thousand and One Nights

With few exceptions, narrative theory does not ordinarily consider the self-reflexive capacity of The Thousand and One Nights beyond its canonical instance of framing, and Arabic literary scholarship does not ordinarily engage with its narratological aspects. This article proposes a narratological approach for a systematic breakdown of story cycles through abstraction, partly by making use of computer programming language, in order to demonstrate the narrative typology in the Nights. It argues that repetitions, transpositions, substitutions, and reversals testify to tensions between the overt ideology of the text and the counter discourse that unsettles this logic, concealed in its poetics. The article thereby aims to bring some of the core concepts of narrative theory into dialogue with the Nights scholarship, and to contribute to a theoretical conversation about ideological critique in narrative analysis, particularly within the pre-modern storytelling tradition.

Shen Congwen's Idealized Ethnic

This article investigates the underexamined ethnic motifs of the modern literary master Shen Congwen's 沈從文 fictional creations. In the field of Chinese literary scholarship, Shen is widely recognized as a leading figure of the May Fourth “native soil” literary tradition and is usually labeled as a “regionalist” writer. Yet as an ethnically hybrid author, Shen's ethnographically inspired, mythologizing accounts of indigenous non-Han tribes place him in a long tradition of searching for moral truths in borderland societies in Chinese literary and cultural history. The article argues that ethnicity is an important motif that runs throughout the early Shen Congwen's literary oeuvre, particularly in the Miao-themed stories that he crafted in the 1920s and 1930s. Shen idealizes non-Han peoples, particularly the Miao in southern China's borderland, as the ultimate source of moral courage and aesthetic perfection in his vision of a wholesome China. Through his ethnically themed novellas and short stories, Shen is both heir to and questions the Confucian tradition of locating a civilizational “other” in the non-Sinitic/non-Han border regions. The article further reveals how Shen embodies contradictory motifs with regard to ethnicity in China: on the one hand, he romanticizes the Miao as moral agents living freely in a timeless society, governed only by divine powers and unruly passions. On the other hand, Shen laments the historical discrimination experienced by the Miao and assumes a sober voice as he calls for ethnic equality. Simultaneously lyrical and political, Shen's ethnically themed works are significant for forming new scholarly understandings of both May Fourth literature and the broader discourse of ethnicity, which underpins the very notion of Chineseness in modern China.