Utopian View of the World: Modern Studies. Review: Utopian Discourse in Russian Culture of the Late 19th – 21st Century. Literature. Painting. Cinema. Monograph. Moscow, Flinta Publ., 2021, 281 p. (in Russ.)

The author analyzes the monograph “Utopian discourse in Russian culture of the late 19th – 21st century. Literature. Painting. Cinema”. The review determines the position of this book in modern science of projective models of the future. A key aspect is the continuity of previous studies on the category of utopia, and above all, B. F. Egorov, whose memory the book is dedicated to. The transition of modern art beyond the utopian genre is noticed. This confirms the appropriateness of the discursive technique. The author emphasizes the relevance of the traditional conversation about environmental problems and expresses bewilderment at the disregard by Western philologists of Russian fiction and scientific literature. As an unquestionable advantage of the monograph, its modern anthropological approach to the psychological details of private narrative utopias is noted.

Nursing Theory Makes a Practice Turn in the 21st Century

The author assumes that practice became prominent in nursing theory in the first two decades of the 21st century. The end of the last century saw a burgeoning of literature on what is known as grand theories, their implementation, and evaluation. The era of healthcare quality research began when the Institute of Medicine issued a report on building a safer health system. At this time, the 21st-century literature in nursing took a distinct turn toward practice, influencing nursing theory. The movement to individualize care acted to further this influence. The nurse and patient relationship is the source of data for knowledge development. Established research approaches such as grounded theory and new approaches such as story theory were being used to create nursing theory from practice. Grand theory work moved to the development of instruments to measure the effects of theory in practice, such as that of Watson and Roy. The middle-range theories were developed and seen as closer to and easier to use in practice. The evidence-based practice movement also contributed to the role of theory in practice. These knowledge developments led to nurses having expanded roles in nursing.

Biodeterioration of Glass-Based Historical Building Materials: An Overview of the Heritage Literature from the 21st Century

The main goal of this work was to review the 21st century literature (2000 to 2021) regarding the biological colonisation and biodeterioration of glass-based historical building materials, particularly stained glass and glazed tiles. One of the main objectives of this work was to list and systematize the glass-colonising microorganisms identified on stained glass and glazed tiles. Biodiversity data indicate that fungi and bacteria are the main colonisers of stained-glass windows. Glazed tiles are mainly colonised by microalgae and cyanobacteria. Several studies have identified microorganisms on stained glass, but fewer studies have been published concerning glazed tiles. The analysis of colonised samples is a vital mechanism to understand biodeterioration, particularly for identifying the colonising organisms and deterioration patterns on real samples. However, the complexity of the analysis of materials with high biodiversity makes it very hard to determine which microorganism is responsible for the biodeteriogenic action. The authors compared deterioration patterns described in case studies with laboratory-based colonisation experiments, showing that many deterioration patterns and corrosion products are similar. A working group should develop guidelines or standards for laboratory experiments on fungi, bacteria, cyanobacteria, and algae on stained glass and glazed tiles.

PSYCHOLOGICAL STATE OF INDIVIDUALS IN SEEKING THE SELF: A CRITICAL STUDY OF 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE

In psychology, personality crisis is the inability in adolescents to establish ego identification. The psychologist Erikson coined the term. Identity unity vs. function ambiguity is the stage of psycho-social growth in which identity conflicts arise. Psychological literary criticism had its base in the psychoanalytical thoughts put forward by Sigmund Freud. After Freud, some theories by Neo-Freudians such as Jung and Adler also became a part of it. Critics, who choose Psychological literary criticism, champion one particular psychological theory and apply it to works of all the authors. Considering this, Fromm's Humanistic Psychoanalysis has a lot of scope to be used as a theory for Psychological literary criticism. The current study aims to fill this gap in the psychological literature, linking Maslow’s theory to contemporary theory and research on personality and well-being.

Cumulative Stressors and Adolescent Substance Use: A Review of 21st-Century Literature

The aim of this review is to assess empirical studies from the last 2 decades that have examined the association between cumulative stressors and adolescent substance use. Cumulative stressors were measured in these studies with adverse childhood experiences or adolescent stressful life events inventories. The 109 articles meeting the eligibility criteria that emerged from the review demonstrated a consistent, yet modest, association between cumulative stressors and adolescent substance use. Of note, several studies found that the associations were moderated or mediated by genetic factors related to cortisol regulation, intrapersonal factors such as low self-control, or interpersonal factors such as peer substance use. The review’s findings thus suggest that efforts to reduce the effects of cumulative stressors on substance use could gainfully identify and target these risk moderators and mediators.

LGBTQ Psychology

LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) psychology is a loosely organized subfield of psychology. The field emerged, principally in the United States, in the late 1960s in concert with the de-pathologization of adult homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Over the decade of the 1970s, psychologists stopped researching adult lesbians and gay men as a psychiatric category and initiated new research on relationships, parenting, and the prejudice experienced by this stigmatized group. The HIV/AIDS epidemic lead this subfield to grow rapidly, to focus on men, to gain far wider engagement from mainstream psychologists, and to make health outcomes central to LGBTQ psychology’s raison d’etre. The 1990s were described as a period of “coming of age” as the field began to address bisexuality more directly, to internationalize, and to become more central to strategies in the United States to use psychological evidence to support the civil rights of minorities in court cases. The development of transgender-affirmative psychologies, a literature on the particular psychological issues of LGBTQ people of color in the United States, and an emphasis on the rights of same-gender couples to legal recognition of their relationships were new and prominent themes in the 21st-century literature. This subfield of psychology has been characterized by its historical emergence in the United States, a relative lack of attention to children, an urge to affirm under-represented groups by researching them, and a frustration that descriptive research does not always bring about the desired social transformations that motivate it.

Semiotics

Semiotics refers to an intellectual tradition that deals with processes of making and interpreting meaning in all kinds of text, in all modes. However, semiotics was never integrated into mainstream disciplinary structures. Because of this marginal status semiotic tendencies flourished outside and between the major disciplines. As a discipline semiotics seems small, vulnerable and out-of-date. But as a broad intellectual tradition semiotics can be seen as a meta-theory which encompasses literary theory. This second perspective makes semiotics more useful for literary readers, and hence is emphasized in this chapter. Semiotics’ value is enhanced when it is seen as a complex, heterogeneous field with fuzzy boundaries and productive entanglements with literary objects and theories. “Semiotics” comes from Greek semeion (sign, omen, or trace), something that points towards important, often hidden meanings. Signs in this sense go beyond words and verbal media. This scope gives “semiotics” a radically disruptive quality. Western culture in the modern era has been based on the primacy of words as carriers of all meaning and thought. Semiotics is the site of a radical challenge to this dominance. Semiotics sees signs and meanings everywhere, in every mode, not just in words. The changing media of literature in the present and past raise many semiotic issues for literary theory. Poetry always carried meanings through sound as well as words. Drama needs to be performed. Film and multimedia carry the role of print fiction in new contexts. In the multimedia 21st century, literature has gone beyond writing, and its theories need a semiotic dimension. Semiotics has a divided history, with two founding fathers. Peirce emphasized complexity and flow, and Saussure emphasized structure. Before 1960 structuralism dominated, but by the end of the 20th century post-structuralism prevailed. Semiotics went underground, but left traces everywhere of the intellectual revolution it participated in. It helped to trigger the turn to meaning across the social sciences and celebrated the irreducible complexity and diversity of forms and meanings in literature and life in the modern world.

Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is a Greek term whose etymological meaning is “to speak out” or “to show in full.” Debates on ekphrasis go back to classical antiquity and Homer’s lines on Hephaestos making Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of the epic The Iliad (8th century bce). Ekphrasis was considered a mode of speaking capable of bringing absent things before the listener’s inner eye by aiming at enargeia, a vivid quality of language producing evidentia (evidence) and rousing emotions through lively, precise, and detailed verbal descriptions. Over the centuries, the term underwent a considerable narrowing-down of its original meaning and eventually, during the Second Sophistic, came to designate the description of works of art. However, ancient ekphrasis, in the broader sense of detailed and lively description, had a rich afterlife throughout the Middle Ages (e.g., in Geoffrey Chaucer), the Renaissance (e.g., in Shakespeare), Neoclassicism (in Joseph Addison’s essays and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s “Laocoön”), and even into the Romantic Age (e.g., in William Wordsworth and George Gordon Byron). In its narrower sense as verbal representation/evocation of or response to a work of art or visual object, it is a ubiquitous phenomenon in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century literature, be it poetry or narrative fiction. Many modernist, postmodernist, and post-postmodernist literary texts are replete with ekphrases, but these ekphrases very often question any mimetic or illusionist aesthetic and no longer exclusively follow the paragonal model: instead of competing with one another, ekphrastic word-image configurations are more adequately described as intermedial constellations and collaborations. As a pertinent feature of 20th- and 21st-century poetry and narrative fiction—examples are novels by Julian Barnes, Antonia Susan Byatt, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, or Donna Tartt—ekphrasis has also attracted the attention of literary scholars and theoreticians of culture. Due to the many attempts to conceptualize and theorize ekphrasis, any attempt to give a simple definition will not suffice. In the 1980s and 1990s scholars such as Murray Krieger, William John Thomas Mitchell, and James Heffernan theorized ekphrasis: while Krieger saw ekphrasis as a symptom of the semiotic desire for the natural sign and Mitchell discussed ekphrasis within a paragonal framework of socio-cultural power relations, Heffernan defined ekphrasis as the verbal representation of visual representation. Included among the seminal concepts and definitions of ekphrasis in the early 21st century are approaches from phenomenology and cognitive poetics or new reception aesthetics, the digital humanities, postcolonial and transcultural studies, and the environmental humanities. By going beyond questions of representation that have dominated ekphrastic criticism for a long time, functions of ekphrasis, in particular socio-cultural and ethical functions, have gained new attention.