Disobedience in the Courtroom: Iliad 18.497–508

This article aims to combine a literary and a detailed linguistic approach to the “trial scene” in the Shield of Achilles. Legal historians attempt to reconstruct a judicial system, encountering textual issues and incompatibilities. Ekphrasis is rarely mentioned, and writings on ekphrasis rarely treat the trial scene in detail when discussing the Shield. A close reading, underpinned by the theory of ekphrasis, is able to address these difficulties. This passage describes a series of alternative dispute solutions, rather than a coherent judicial process. This presentation argues that this makes the passage central to the poetics of the Shield, not an outlier.

Restricted vision: Censorship and cinematic resistance in Thailand

Film censorship screens the nation as a ‘way of seeing’ that is both fundamental to the art of governance and vulnerable to the flexibility of contemporary global images. In Thailand, this historically-conditioned regime arose in the geopolitics of the 1930 Film Act, the Motion Pictures and Video Act of 2008, and a coterminous regulation of visuality as a form of cultural governance. I pursue a close reading of two banned films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nontawat Numbenchapol, respectively, to illustrate the aesthetics of film censorship in light of the development of a national cinema, especially to consider the strategies that film-makers use to negotiate the governance of vision.

Exploring Ancient Networks

A small archive of texts from ancient Iraq is used to demonstrate an approach to network analysis in which traditional close reading and computational text analysis go hand-in-hand. The computational methods produce tables and graphs that link back to online editions of the primary material, enabling the user to check the results.

THE STRUGGLE OF WOMEN EXISTENCE IN “ISN’T IT ROMANTIC” NOVEL BY WENDY WESSERSTEIN

This study aimed to reveal the struggle of women to gain existence in the novel as a representation of social phenomena. The data source of this research was Isn't It Romantic drama by Wendy Wesserstein. This drama is about women who want to achieve their dreams without the participation of their parents. They want to live without any interference from their parents. To reveal the struggle for existence, the researcher uses the existentialism approach by Simone Beauvoir. Existentialists fight for the nature of human existence, especially for women who have been subordinated to the patriarchal system. The method used in this research is Descriptive qualitative method. The close reading data collection method is effective in tracing data relevant to research variables. The analysis method is carried out critically by using an existentialism approach. The researcher got three main analyses toward the novel, they are: independence over women, authority in making decisions, and lastly, the same existence as a human being.

Dostoevsky and the Word “Jew”: A Quantitative Analysis of F.M. Dostoevsky’s Greatest Novels

The relationship of F.M Dostoevsky with Jews attracted the attention of numerous scholars throughout the years, many of whom attempted to grapple with the views of the great writer and their origin. In this article we will attempt to show this relationship by analyzing six of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, written through the entirety of his career. We are analyzing these novels using Distant Reading in conjunction with Close Reading, tools that are commonly used in the field of digital humanities, which enabled us to show visually the extent of F.M. Dostoevsky’s engagement with this topic. The study poses two research questions: 1. To what extent did the writer use the more denigrating term “Zhid”? 2. Can we see a correlation between the writer’s portrayal of Jews with the definition of Anti-Semitism as it was known during his era? The obtained results show that there is clearly a correlation between the definition of anti-Semitism as it was understood at the time of Dostoevsky and the “Jew” as depicted in his novels, as the financial motif is paramount in the depiction of Jews as this is the central topic in 49% of the negative sentences in which the word “Jew” appears, with 59% of these sentences classified as stereotypes. The negative financial stereotype constitutes 32% of the entire corpus. In addition, we found the term “Zhid” is commonly used by the writer, a variation of which constitutes 75% of the total terms used to depict Jews.

Image and Word in Postmodern Poetry: Friederike Mayröcker’s BROTWOLKE

This article explores the interplay of visual arts and poetic images in postmodern poetry, focusing on the case of Friederike Mayröcker’s poem BROTWOLKE, nach Karla Woisnitza (1996) [BREADCLOUD, after Karla Woisnitza]. The article shows that BROTWOLKE belongs to a group of texts whose titles indicate an ekphrasis or an intermedial quality, but whose specific point of reference is absent. Rather than referencing to a specific painting, the poem thus showcases different aspects of the visual. Offering a close reading of the poem, the article explores Mayröcker’s special technique of image-writing and its dynamic effect on the reader. The article argues that the poem both “shows the word” and “writes the image.” It is shown that Mayröcker’s stream-of-consciousness is a process that refers to the act of writing in the first place and then to an inventory of texts and images that float the text as a stream of sense-data.

EXPERIENCES MADE OF WOOL: VISUAL AND VERBAL METAPHORICAL RECONCEPTUALIZATION IN ADOPTION AND FOSTER CARE NARRATIVES

This paper aims at exploring adoption and foster care discourse (AFD) so as to uncover the role of multimodal novel metaphor, and the resulting ad hoc concepts, in (re)addressing (AF) narratives. It specifically focuses on the picture book Speranza’s Sweater (Pusey and Mello, 2018), and the extended conceptual metaphor a life story (of a child [in adoption or foster care]) is a sweater, as well as the net of minor related metaphors. These are analysed following Romero and Soria’s (1997, 2005a, 2007, 2014 and 2016) as well as Forceville (1994, 2008)’s frameworks on, respectively, novel and multimodal metaphors. Dictionaries, thesauri, corpus-assisted tools, as well as close reading/viewing will inform the delineation of source and target domains. The paper illustrates and concludes the cognitive power of multimodal creative choices in relation to (AFD) to integrate children’s past, present, and future experiences, while strengthening their sense of identity and belonging.

FROM LINGUISTIC FEATURES TO CULTURAL PATTERNS

This article discusses the concept of reading and presents a method thatcombines distant and close reading, while drawing on insights fromcomputational humanities. Focusing on basic features in language, distantreading allows for the construction of new types of text. By close reading thesetexts, it is possible to analyse cultural patterns across individual texts. Thismethod of reading is illustrated by two cases stemming from a project basedon a corpus of 11,955 Danish sermons. The first case begins with a distantreading of gendered pronouns in the corpus. The second case begins with adistant reading of named agents.*