FORMING APPROPRIATE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS: TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY OF LITERARY RESPONSE IN L2

The aim of this study is to look into the notion of literary reading and response in L2 by pre-service teachers in Malaysia in order to improve teacher education. The researchers will provide an outline of Reader Response theories and how they affect the learning of literature in L2 in this study. The researchers will go over their conceptual framework, which was developed based on past research. This conceptual framework will be developed in order to conduct in-depth research on pre-service teachers' perceptions of literary reading in L2 and to assist them in improving their practises in the classroom. Using the conceptual framework, based on Reader Response Theory, it allows researchers to explore what types of responses pre-service teachers have to literary texts while they are involved in the reading process. Hoping that the experience will aid in the improvement of teaching and learning.

Managing Fear in a Risk Society: Pretrauma and Extreme Future Scenarios in Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow

An example of near-future climate fiction, Nathaniel Rich’s 2013 novel Odds Against Tomorrow envisions a catastrophic, global warming-related flooding of the New York City area. Despite the novel’s (post)apocalyptic focus, a large part of it can be in fact perceived as preapocalyptic, inasmuch as it explores people’s traumatic responses to potential future disasters, even before they actually happen. The aim of the article is to analyze the novel’s depiction of the culture of fear, which has permeated the modern society as a consequence of it becoming what Ulrich Beck famously termed a “risk society.” In a risk society, human industrial and technological activity produces a series of hazards, including global risks such as anthropogenic climate change. In the novel, Rich shows how financial capitalism commodifies these risks by capitalizing on people’s fears and their need for some degree of risk management. Finally, the paper looks at the text as a cli-fi novel and thus as a literary response to the pretrauma caused by environmental risks.

Fictionalizing Nuclear Terrorism in US Nuclear Fiction: James Reich’s Bombshell

This paper studies the phenomenon of fictionalizing terrorism as a literary response to the violence paradigm within nuclear narrative from the perspective of nuclear awareness formation as a critical thinking product about the nuclear energy related issues within the Nuclear Anthropocene. Focusing on James Reich’s Bombshell (2013), the paper goes beyond literary critical analysis of exploring the ways of fictionalizing the sociopolitical and psychic motives and ideas behind an act of terrorism. The paper highlights the factual component of the literary figurations of terrorism and terrorist activities in nuclear fiction, which is regarded here not only as a factor of weakening the apocalyptic rhetoric of nuclear narrative by transforming its “fabulously textual” nature, but mainly as a trigger of shaping public awareness and knowledge management on nuclear history and nuclear industry with a view to considering the possible patters of nuclear terrorism within the contemporary nuclear agenda.

The Literary Response to the Holocaust and the Transformation of the Reader into a Messenger

“The greatest mitzvah,” Lily Lerner remembers what her mother taught her, “is to accompany a dead person to burial” (Lerner 1980, p. 35) [...]

Harry Potter and the Critical gaze: Autonomy pathways in literary response writing

Critical literacy studies require both textual reading and a knowledge of power dynamics in context. To achieve in critical literacy, learners need to work with different kinds of knowledge and integrate them. In this paper, I analyse how learners connect representations of social injustice from a popular literary text to issues of social justice in their broader cultural context. I investigate how different forms of knowledge came together in their response to a writing task. The empirical data comes from a critical literary course taught to Grade 8 learners in an English class in the southeastern United States. I offer an analysis of an exemplary essay submitted by a learner. In the analysis, I use concepts from the Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) dimension of Autonomy to show how the essay brought together information from the literary texts and from beyond to support interpretations of the characters' stances on the rights of elves. The analysis highlights how integration of knowledge drawn from imaginary and real contexts meets both the implicit and explicit critical literacy goals of the task. The findings offer a means for understanding how autonomy pathways can support teachers and learners in recognising and realising connections between texts and broader cultural discourses in ways that align with disciplinary literacy practices.

Recovering World-Welcoming Words: Language, Metaphysics, and the Voice of Nature

This article presents a theological–literary response to a concern in contemporary theory with heeding and articulating the speech of nonhuman things. Drawing from Rowan Williams’ metaphysics of poetic addition, I argue that an ‘ecotheological’ literary practice challenges us to become attentive and responsive to the language of the nonhuman, by creatively performing the co-mingling of nonhuman and human language. Drawing from Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenology of the voice, I propose a theological conception of language as a gift of hospitality to the voice of nonhuman things that is also a gift of poetic addition—a ‘saying more’ which, adding being to the world, also manifests its gift-like nature. In contrast to recent critical approaches, I argue for the qualified retrieval of ‘nature’ as a figure both literary and theological, a voice that gives voice to things and speaks by means of human literary production. Through a reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear, I show that the paradoxical and poetic ambiguities of the literary sense of ‘nature’ serve precisely to shed light on its suspect modern iteration, while at the same time taking us beyond critique to enable a cautious yet attentive retrieval of its poetic and symbolic scope.

The Domestication and Arabization of the Bard: Towards the Reception of Shakespeare in the Arab World

Since Najib al-Haddad and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s first Arabic versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet at the end of the 19th century, the reception of Shakespeare in the Arab world has gone through a process of adaptation, Arabization, and translation proper. We consider the process of Arabization / domestication of Shakespeare’s plays since Najib al-Haddad’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s adaptation of Hamlet, to the achievements of Khalīl Mutran and Muhammad Hamdi. We underline, as particular examples of Shakespeare’s appropriation, the literary response of Ali Ahmed Bakathir, Muhammad al-Maghut and Mamduh Udwan, with a particular stress on Khazal al-Majidi and his adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. All these writers reposition Shakespeare’s plays in an entirely different cultural space.