Introduction

The introduction reimagines the historical narrative of rivalry between increasingly specialized cultures of medicine and the arts in the Romantic period as instead a period of mutual exchange. This familiar history is belied by the historical movement of the terms “autopsy” and “verve,” which traveled in opposite directions between medical and literary fields during the height of the British Romantic period. The crossing of “autopsy” and “verve” between fields introduces the book’s principal concerns: how shared concepts and critical practices were exchanged between letters and medicine, how new structures of thought crossed between biological and textual concerns, and how tropes of organicity, disease, and treatment in Romantic texts reveal the diagnostic practices that bridged literary and medical cultures. Through a study of the great developments in the history of medicine in this period, and the “metapothecaries” like Samuel Taylor Coleridge who considered literature and medicine through a shared ontology, the chapter argues that Romantic literature develops the notion of protocols of diagnosis—the idea that the same protocols of critical interpretation can be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand works of fiction and poetry. Outlining four protocols of diagnosis that the rest of the book will elaborate, the chapter concludes by linking these four formulations to modern methodologies of critical reading, exploring the resonance of this history to contemporary reflections on the history of what has come to be called “symptomatic reading.”

Rebellion as a learning experience in the light of narrations of adults participating in protests. Selected issues

The aim of this article is to show the learning potential of participation in protests in the narratives of several adults. Participation in rebellions is seen as a specific learning experience here. What is the relationship between experience and learning on the example of participation in rebellions? The author analyses this relationship, inter alia, on the example of critical practices described by Usher. This article is a part of a broader research project on learning mechanisms of adults participating in various forms of rebellion. The study is concerned with answering the questions: what and how do protesters learn? what are the social and cultural mechanisms of their learning? In this research project a biographical perspective was used. Within it, the biography is understood in a processual way. The biographical method focuses on the subjective level of experience in the socio-cultural and institutional context. The empirical material was analysed by searching for similarities and differences in rebels’ narratives. The results of the study are above all the identification of learning outcomes and identity-building processes.

Iran's “Self-Deprecating Modernity”: Toward Decolonizing Collective Self-Critique

Extant studies of Iranian nationalism accentuate the self-aggrandizing side of Iranian modernity, mainly achieved through, and informing, a process of otherizing certain non-Persians/Iranians, particularly the Arabs. I argue that equally important to understanding Iranian modernity is its lesser recognized, shameful and self-demeaning face, as manifested through a simultaneous 19th-century discourse, which I call “self-deprecating modernity.” This was an often self-ridiculing and shame-inducing, sometimes satirical, discourse featuring an emotion-driven and self-Orientalizing framework that developed out of many mid-nineteenth-century Iranian modernists’ obsessions with Europe's gaze; with self-surveillance; and with the perceived humiliation of Iranians through the ridiculing laughter of Other (especially European) nations at Iran's and Iranians’ expense. To explore this discourse, I re-examine the works of three pre-constitutionalist thinkers and writers within the broader sociopolitical context of late Qajar Iran, surveying their perspectives on shame, embarrassment, and ridiculing laughter, and showing how they were significantly informed by, while also helping to form, self-deprecating modernity. Given the strong, self-colonizing presumptions of this discourse, I conclude the article with a stress on the importance of re-exploring collective self-critical practices in modern Iranian history, culture, and literature with an eye toward decolonizing self-criticism.

The Places of Early Modern Criticism

What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts requires that one think about various kinds of place—material, textual, geographical—and the practices particular to those places. It also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume place criticism in Britain, France, the Low Countries, Italy, and the New World; in letters, sermons, pictures, poems, plays, treatises, manuals, discourses, defences, and manuscript miscellanies; in philosophy, theology, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and poetics; in workshops, theatres, studios, galleries, private houses, city halls, salons, and bedchambers. They explore the hybrid genres, disciplines, modes of thought, lexicons, identities, and practices that emerge when criticism connects or moves between different places. They examine the operations of imagination, empathy, and analogy by which artists might imagine themselves in their characters’ places, or poets and painters, readers, viewers, or audience members might critically and creatively swap places. They interrogate, in various ways, the relationship between the places of learned humanist excavation, the passing of individual judgement, and the gaining of social experience. Often taking polemic as its subject matter, The Places of Early Modern Criticism also argues polemically for the necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.

Multimodal texts in support of linguistic and critical thinking development in English for specific purposes

In light of widespread recognition of the need to explore new forms of literacy brought by the contemporary semiotic world, this study explores the potential Critical Thinking (CT) may offer in developing learners’ critical literacy in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) context enhanced with the use of technology. Drawing on research in critical pedagogy that highlights the importance of raising learners’ critical awareness through language, I explore how critical practices of identifying and negotiating the expression of personal opinion in multimodal texts, in an English for the Media context particularly sensitive to issues of criticality, can enhance the development of multimodal literacy. This development is informed by Design-Based Research (DBR) (McKenney & Reeves, 2013), in which iteration and refinement of an intervention designed around these practices leads to the development of principles deriving from the evolution of the design.

Dis/organising visibilities: Governmentalisation and counter-transparency

This paper situates organisational transparency in an agonistic space that is shaped by the interplay of ‘mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth’ and critical practices that come from below in a movement of ‘not being governed like that and at that cost’ (Foucault, 2003: 265). This positioning involves an understanding of transparency as a practice that is historically contingent and multiple, and thus negotiable and contested. By illustrating the entanglement of ‘power through transparency’ and ‘counter-transparency’ with reference to the example of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, the paper contributes to the critique of transparency and to debates on the use of Foucauldian concepts in post-panoptic contexts of organising. By introducing the notion of ‘counter-transparency’, the paper expands the conceptual vocabulary for understanding the politics and ethics of managing and organising visibility.

The ‘New Paradigm' of the Sociology of Childhood

This chapter aims at developing a critique of the so-called “New Paradigm” of the sociology of childhood, which was developed in British sociological schools between the 1960s and 1980s. The New Paradigm represented a substantial challenge to mainstream sociology of childhood and from this basis, Childhood Studies were capable of producing influential thinking about childhood and practices involving childhood. The main idea of this chapter is that the New Paradigm cannot constitute an adequate theoretical basis for ensuring the fulfilment of children's lives in terms of freedom and social justice. Its central point, that childhood is socially constructed, is not articulated coherently and is internally inconsistent. Italian alternative pedagogical practices are used to provide a concrete backdrop for the theoretical objections raised against the New Paradigm. These alternative critical practices commonly assert that theory cannot be separated from practice and that ideals of social justice for children are based on the struggles of marginalised communities.

Critical practices in conducting electrochemical conversion of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural

The electrochemical conversion of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) into high value-added chemicals have attracted much attention. Owing to the complexity of the electrochemical process, there are many faulty operations and misleading results...