The state of the British garden: Mike Bartlett’s Albion and its Chekhovian scions

Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017) is a highly sophisticated and illuminating instance of the diversity and complexity of adaptation. Although declaring no explicit relationship to informing source texts, amongst myriad intertextual allusions Albion manifests an engagement with Chekhov’s drama that abundantly affords adaptation’s pleasures. As well as deploying the principal hallmarks and strategies of Chekhovian dramaturgy, Bartlett reconfigures in Brexit Britain scenarios, characters and relationships from The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. Moreover, demonstrating the thoroughness with which the English have appropriated and naturalized Chekhov, Bartlett implicitly challenges cardinal assumptions of that domestic tradition, through his nuanced subversion of both the ‘country-house’ and ‘state-of-the-nation’ play. Consequently, he reveals adaptation as a richly dialogic process, in which source and adapted texts shed light on each other. The politics of dramatic form(s) and of cultural adaptation and appropriation, to which Bartlett’s revision of a preeminent part of English dramatic heritage points, deftly parallel, and function as an analogue for, the conservative heritage enterprise that Albion portrays. Highlighting the longstanding association of the countryside and landscape with English cultural identity, the protagonist’s project of restoring an historic country garden to its former grandeur is laden with especial significance at this contemporary moment of national crisis.

The concept and the name of Isolating Gender Violence

In December 2020, the Catalan Parliament approved by unanimity the world’s first legislation of the concept of Isolating Gender Violence (IGV); in 2021, several parliaments are developing their own legislations. The elaboration of this concept and later this name has been a long and dialogic process among diverse scientists, policymakers, governments, parliaments, victims, survivors, social organizations and citizens. Since 2016, CREA (Community of Research on Excellence for All) has developed a process of elaborating the concept of IGV oriented to obtain the scientific, policy and social impact required to make a key contribution to overcoming gender violence. This process was simultaneous to the elaboration by the same researchers of the criteria of policy and societal impact of the EU’s scientific programme of research (Horizon Europe). This paper presents this dialogic research conducted to get the concept and the name IGV and the consequences of this concept along scientific, policy and social impact. The results show that the key for getting the name and the impacts of this scientific robust concept has been three of the main characteristics of the present EU research program Horizon Europe: the priority of social impact, the co-creation of knowledge between scientists and citizens and sustainability.

Norm-Critical Comics and the Comics Pedagogy of Lynda Barry

This article contextualizes the use of comics for norm-critique by considering the field of comics pedagogy, and in particular the pedagogical comics of Lynda Barry. Barry’s comics pedagogy, described in her works What It Is (2008) and Syllabus (2014), is inspired by the spontaneous drawing exercises of Ivan Burnetti, and rooted in her theory of the image as an embodied, living experience. I moreover discuss the parallel developments of norm-critical pedagogy and feminist comics in Sweden in order to explore comics as a medium for questioning the norms of gender and identity in visual media. The article shows how many contemporary Swedish graphic novels lend themselves to a norm-critical approach that challenges conventional representations of gender and identity through an aesthetics of play and surprise, in part by way of the influence of Barry’s pedagogical works in Swedish comics publications and comics curricula. Rather than mainstreaming or institutionalizing norm-critique, contemporary feminist comics actively involve the reader in a dialogic process of challenging and reimagining dominant norms of representation.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the aims and scope of the book and outlines its methodology. It triangulates the ‘dialogue’ of the title with medieval literary practices and theories of dialogue, in particular the tenzone, and with literary and linguistic theories of dialogism (Mikhail M. Bakhtin) and performative speech (John L. Austin). This Introduction provides an extensive definition of the tenzone and a summary of the critical problems surrounding this mode of writing, with particular reference to Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica. It introduces the importance of these dialogic process for our understanding of Dante and medieval Italian literature, including the works of Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, and Guido Cavalcanti.

Pidgin Poetics in Oceania

English is the main language of writing among Indigenous writers of Oceania for a number of reasons. The various textual appropriations and ways in which language of writing and language of the culture have been infused together to produce texts do reveal a dialogic process at work. It is impossible to avoid the linguistic features of written texts as they are constructed in Oceania. Writers in Oceania are free to choose the language of their texts without any interference. In this way, they make readers aware of the cultural truth that these writers are representing in their writings. Metonymy as a poetic device and cultural truth as a thematic in Indigenous writings capture the interests of many of the older and younger generations of Pacific writers. Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. Some of the best poetry published across Oceania by generations of Pacific writers reveals extensive use of metonymy as a device to convey cultural truth. Poetry is written from the intimate knowledge of poets, embedded in the society in which they find inspiration. Bill Ashcroft and coauthors state: “the tropes of the post-colonial text may be fruitfully read as metonymy, language variance itself in such a text is far more profoundly metonym” because nuances in language can represent a whole cultural text. Syntactic fusion is one among different strategies of appropriation in postcolonial writing such as glossing, untranslated words, interlanguage, code-switching, and vernacular transcription.

Analisis Sistem Pemikiran Gender Berbasis Keagamaan di Pesantren Jawa Timur

This research concentrates on the religious-based gender framework within the pesantren education system by which pesantren has an institutional vision to empower women and naturally participates in developing gender discourse with Islamic religious nuance. This research was conducted in East Java by taking the site of Pesantren Nurul Islam Antirogo, Pesantren Al-Falah Karangharjo Jember, and Pesantren Annuqayah Guluk-Guluk Sumenep. This research found that those pesantrens carried out reconstruction through theological-philosophical awareness that was designed from the dialogic process of re-interpretative religious normative texts with reality. The emergence of this awareness led the pesantren to direct their education system to feel egalitarian, non-discriminatory, and non-subordinate towards women inside and outside the pesantren. The axiology of the pesantren education system leads to the normative value of the unity of humanity. The realization of the education system ends up on peace values whether in the cultural, social, or even religious domains.

Krithi: Cows at the Beach

Intercultural creative practice is a topic that has attracted a lot of recent scholarly attention. As improvising musicians from very different cultures and traditions, we decided to analyse a recent collaborative performance that we were involved in to unpack the ways that we were interacting through music. As performers, we were interested primarily in the ways that such an analysis would help us to work more effectively in intercultural situations, but we also wanted to understand the synergies and dissonances that exist between improvising cultures more broadly. For the essay we adopt the musical form of a krithi, a Carnatic compositional form that allows for joint statements and improvised exchanges. Through this dialogic process, we propose improvisation as a kind of negotiation that occurs between musicians, and between musicians and their culture, highlighting some of the specific challenges and rewards that we faced.

DIALOGISM AS A PRINCIPLE OF MODERN EDUCATION

Becoming a person is a fundamentally dialogic process. That is why at least two people are always involved in it. In their intersubjective interaction, meaning is created. A multifaceted dialogue with culture reveals unity in the diversity of aspects of a human's personality. Dialogue in this sense is a specific activity aimed to state the meanings and values. The idea of “communication” was enshrined in the teachings and concepts that emerged in the early XXth century. A significant impetus for its development was philosophy of K. Jaspers. Especially popular problem of "communication" has become in the philosophical teachings of the last decades of the last century. Of these, the concept of K.-O. Apel and Y. Habermas are on the first place. Education involves the change of all subjects involved in the process of teaching. A new system of education is impossible without the transition from a subject-objective approach to a subjectsubjective approach. This approach is possible only on the basis of an appropriate educational philosophy, the main principle of which is dialogism.