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Copyright of Annual Review of the Faculty of Philosophy / Godisnjak Filozofskog Fakulteta is the property of Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The essay examines briefly come significant works published between the 1950s and the first decade of the 21st century in order to show the endurance over time of a representation of the city of Naples inspired by a spatial typology that reduces verticality to a horizontal tangle and transforms historical conflict into the emergence of natural drives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels including The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Stranger's Child (2011), The Sparsholt Affair (2017), and The Line of Beauty (2004), with the latter winning the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He is widely celebrated for his distinctive style, his tragicomical explorations of English life in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and his introduction of richly imagined and humanely observed gay themes to mainstream literary fiction. His latest novel is Our Evenings (2024). Alan Hollinghurst spoke with Dominic Dean about Our Evenings, its themes, inspirations and treatment of social and political history; the role of buildings and material objects in his fiction; his style and formal innovations and influences; and his relationships with TV adaptations and with the literary academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toxicity and the Sacred: Literary and Missiological Perspectives on Ethical Contamination, tries to deal with two major issues which really revolve around two spiritual and moral concepts of our society that is degrading over time and the belief of toxicity in religious places, ethics, and discourse. Nowadays the sacred and the profane are not as clear as they used to be. The paper argues that this is the case in the digital age when even the sacred is not considered sacred anymore. To illustrate the problem of guarding spiritual integrity, the paper refers to contemporary authors such as Marilynne Robinson and Jonathan Franzen. For instance, the author in the novel Gilead mentions spiritual resistance to societal decay and encourages readers to develop such traits. The author in the other novel Purity evaluates the ethical consequences of media culture. The segue is also done with social media's role in moral contamination where anonymity endorses hostility and if Lincoln in the Bardo wouldn't have been written, George Saunders wouldn't have had such a topic to explore. Furthermore, the argument is fortified by Zadie Smith's Swing Time and Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys which demonstrate that the diversities in identities and disunity in society are among many other factors contributing to the deterioration of the common life and the spiritual one. Through these literary perspectives, the paper shows that missiology has to deal with these issues by enabling ethical clarity and spiritual resilience, and offering a space for redemption in the midst of contamination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to the emerging field of critical sleep studies, and developing an intervention situated at the intersection of the environmental and the medical humanities, this article considers a range of contemporary texts: Jenny Offill's realist novel Weather (2020), Karen Russell's Sleep Donation (2014), Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Hunting by Stars (2021) – three examples of the 'sleep-apocalypse' genre – Finegan Kruckemeyer's play Hibernation (2021), and the Perfect Sleep app by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne (2021). I show how these texts do not just simply reflect the negative effects that climate change has on sleep health, which are manifold, as scientific research evidences. Rather, cultural production arguably draws attention to structural parallels between the climate crisis and the so-called sleep crisis, namely, contemporary society's presumed widespread sleep deprivation and rise in sleep disorders. Both crises are the product of a capitalist system geared towards continuous extraction – and exhaustion – of resources, from the Earth and human bodies. Thus, in the texts considered, sleep is explored, on the one hand, as a casualty of the climate crisis and, on the other hand, as something whose value we need to reassess as part of our ongoing work to avert climate collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, narratology has yielded innovative views on how certain narratives create and convey meaning through embodied processes. Such 'embodied narratives' have increasingly been considered to reflect the way human perception itself functions: by drawing upon corporeal impressions before mental cognition, and physical sensation before language. This article suggests that Kim de l'Horizon's Blutbuch offers further productive insight regarding the nature and function of the embodied narrative. The novel – an auto-fictional tale that deals with non-binary identity – shot to fame in the winter of 2022 after winning prestigious literary awards in the German-speaking world; and it has been lauded, in particular, for the pride of place it offers to the author-narrator's embodied perspectives on gender identity. As this article will argue, however, Blutbuch also foregrounds a biopolitical worldview in which all boundaries – and not just those of gender – are seen as superfluous. In doing so, not only does the novel allows its author-narrator to create a narrative body that reappropriates for itself the agency that cisnormative discourse would traditionally deny it, but it also proposes an expanded understanding of the embodied narrative: one that conceives of such forms of writing as metaphors for the body itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key ideas are presented in this paper in a suddenly, it's a different story style, intended to reflect the contemporary role of fiction in relating to missionary work. Literature and missiology for our century carries on its purpose. Using three key texts: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the implications of whether literary narratives can engage with theological, ethical, and post-colonial challenges that today moot Christian missions are analysed. Based on literary theory, this study considers how fiction can help us to understand mission practice, offers alternative views of cultural encounters, faith and identity in the globalizing world. The contradiction and possibilities inherent in missionary work are aired as the paper contends that literature can also provide further insights into this area of human endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical discourse plays a vital role in enhancing literary comprehension. However, critical discourse research, spanning ancient to contemporary literature, frequently falls short by confining itself to narrow viewpoints, neglecting a comprehensive exploration of characteristics and commonalities. To bridge the critical discourse between ancient and modern literature, this study conducts an in-depth study of literary continuity by defining the structure and characteristics of discourse theory in ancient and contemporary literary criticism, comparing and analysing the common elements of the two, and exploring the future inspiration for the development of literary criticism from a unified perspective. In practical terms, literary criticism must innovate the critical discourse of contemporary literature while honouring the discourse framework of ancient literary criticism, and delving into the profound social meanings and values embedded within diverse works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The desacralization of Western social institutions and practices over the last few centuries, partly brought about by the conquests of science, has changed the functioning of society and individual thinking. The literary representation of Western societies in three contemporary French novels depicts a materialistic world that represses the spiritual dimension that forms part of the human condition. L'Anomalie (2020), an apocalyptic account of a cosmic crisis that confounds scientists and philosophers, illustrates Jean-Marc Ferry's "post-secular" perspective according to which recent scientific discoveries, far from solving the enigmas of the universe, are uncovering its thousand mysteries, rendering the idea of the supernatural less and less implausible. Jean Brun describes humankind's sense of alienation from the mystery of existence as an "ontological separation." Humans try to abolish this separation and conquer time and space through science. In Sérotonine (2019), medical science succeeds in keeping the depressed protagonist alive temporarily by regulating his hormones, but his emotional and spiritual crisis takes over in an individualistic world devoid of communal rites. Le Voyant d'Étampes (2021) traces the efforts of a failed academic to navigate a world governed by constantly changing normative rules prescribed and described by the social sciences. In societies where neither traditional religion nor the sciences provide solutions to existential crises, these contemporary novels turn to various forms of resacralization: love as secular spirituality, the subliminal nature of poetry, and the new doctrines of woke ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys recent Latin American artistic practices that privilege the fragment and embrace interdisciplinarity, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for a distinct way of being in contemporaneity. Coupled with the intervention of an active, emancipated reader/spectator, these practices produce objects, beings, communities, and events that alter what is experienced as "real". To describe this phenomenon, I propose the notion of the prosthetic condition, a non-ontological way of being proper to contemporaneity that affects entities that exist only conceptually, but that have the potential to operate as "real". By analysing two contemporary works – the creation of the prosthetic object in Mario Bellatin's Lecciones para una liebre muerta (2004); and the creation of a prosthetic being in Simón Hosie's la lavandera de Ciudad Bolívar (2008–2009) – I determine three main characteristics of entities affected by the prosthetic condition: they are artificial, come to fill a void, and produce real effects. The article concludes by considering the potential implications and effects of using the prosthetic condition as a tool to approach both contemporary artistic practices and relational ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores recent work of Zadie Smith ('The Embassy if Cambodia', 2013, and 'The Lazy River', 2019) and David Szalay (All That Man Is, 2016), as examples of BrexLit fiction, a term coined by Kristian Shaw to denote 'fictions that either directly respond or imaginatively allude, to Britain's exit from the EU'. In contrast to the nineteenth century state-of-the-nation novel, which drew upon the liberal-humanist resources of the novel to intervene in public debates, I contend that a significant strand of contemporary BrexLit reflects a crisis not simply within but rather of the public sphere. Accordingly, my case studies hit upon the limits of the liberal literary tradition and they do so precisely as a means to explore the deficiencies of the mainstream liberal response to populism. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's post-political thesis – the argument that the representative systems of European democracies have capitulated to a technocratic-centrist inertia based on the idea that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization – this essay claims that BrexLit offers a generic framework for thinking through an alternative agonistic imagination; a way of thinking and writing that offers a way for redeeming an illiberal politics for progressive rather than reactionary ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I aim to demonstrate how a contemporary novelist can write about extremism in the social media age and in the process engage with the literary consciousness of the past. Although several novelists have written about extremism in recent years – notably Kamila Shamsie in Home Fire (2017), Guy Gunaratne in In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) and John Wray in Godsend (2019) – few efforts have yet been made to show how it relates to the experience of life online. I argue that for a novelist wanting to explore extremism today the precursor it would be most valuable to revisit is Fyodor Dostoevsky. He perceived how in mid-nineteenth-century Russia the new mass medium of the newspaper was transforming consciousness and heightening radical sentiment, and explored this in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1871). Through a sustained engagement with these works, I interrogate the opportunities offered by entering into dialogue with him and consider how his most important narrative technique, polyphony, can be reimagined in the social media age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annual Review of the Faculty of Philosophy / Godisnjak Filozofskog Fakulteta is the property of Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nottingham French Studies is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article attends to recent examples of British estate literature, a literary form which extends across disparate genres and media. In general, estate literature attempts to correct pernicious prejudices about communities centred on the council estate, stereotypes which align classist, racist, and sexist rhetoric to marginalise this population. In addition to locating recent examples of estate literature – Caleb Femi's, Poor (2020), Anders Lustgarten's The Seven Acts of Mercy (2016), and Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) – amidst this socio-economic context, this paper also identifies the various formal features these works draw upon to generate a collective voice which at once rejects the othering of the council estate while also resisting the temptation to substitute one reductive group identity label for another. In these texts, often-surprising connections are formed on the grounds of the estate between people, objects, ideas, art, music – and fade as suddenly as they appear. The essay spans media studies, literary criticism, and sociology to argue that the networks conjured by estate literature are not only corrective but generative, inasmuch as they indicate that more affirmative configurations of these networks are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Literatura Mexicana is the property of Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas - UNAM and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iskolakultúra is the property of University of Szeged, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article is an attempt at a multi-layered analysis of the category of the „sensitive narrator", which Olga Tokarczuk coined in her Nobel speech. This concept has been widely discussed by literary critics, but it still calls for some kind of synthesis. The article seeks to answer the question whether the „sensitive narrator" can be considered a linguistic category or whether this concept should be treated as a metaphor referring to the duties of contemporary literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main issue analyzed in this research concerns how to implement intercultural didactic. The research methodology is descriptive-analytical. Using a researcher-made questionnaire as the main research tool, which includes 20 five-choice questions and whose validity has been measured and standardized, we will analyze with the effectiveness of intercultural didactics. Therefore, by randomly selecting 200 people from among the total population of undergraduate students in the field of French Language in Iranian universities and by dividing the population into two groups of 100 people (100 students in the experimental group, 100 students in the control group), we will examine the effect of this teaching method on improving students' pragmatic competence and interest in literary content. Therefore, the main goal of the research is to provide a practical method in order to connect more contemporary French and Iranian literature with French language didactic. Our hypothesis in this research, which is based on teaching foreign languages through literary texts, is that intercultural didactic can help students of French language undergraduates in Iranian universities to use the pragmatic competence in using speech acts related to the feeling of "sadness" and "loneliness" and will be effective and will increase their interest in literature. The results listed in Table 5- 3 show that all 20 items of the questionnaire have a strong correlation with their factors and therefore the questionnaire is standardized. In addition, the results of descriptive statistics (Table 5-4) indicate that after removing the possible effect of the pre-test, the experimental group (45.19) obtained a higher average than the control group (35.28) in improving pragmatic competence. Table 5-8 also shows the descriptive statistics of the two experimental groups and the proof of interest in literary content in the post-test. Based on this, the result was obtained that the experimental group (mean = 25.69) compared to the control group (mean = 18.15) obtained a higher mean in the post-test of interest in literary content. Based on the results of the t-test of two independent samples in Table 5-9 (p > .05, t = 9.78 (198)), the effect size index of the t-statistic is 9.78 equal to 0.571, which shows a large effect size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article deals with the dominant presence of feminine figures who choose to do nothing in recent Israeli literature. The article discusses this recurrent fantasy from a materialist perspective, arguing that it stems from changes in global capitalism’s forms of production and neoliberal ideology. To do so, the article discusses the works of Israeli author Michal Ben-Naftali in which just such a reclining protagonist takes center stage, and the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation written by the American author Ottessa Moshfegh, which follows a similar fantasy of “doing nothing.” In doing so, the article shows how recent dominant trends in Israeli literature should actually be understood from broad and global perspectives — the comparison of similar fantasies under ostensibly different cultural contexts serves as a form of historicizing. And, following, the article shows how the limits, contours, and contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are both expressed and repressed in Moshfegh’s and Ben-Naftali’s prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Anbar University for Languages & Literature / Magallat Gami'at Al-Anbar Li-Lugat Wa-al-Adabl is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article serves as an introduction to “Literatura ma głos” (The Voice of Literature), a special issue of Teksty Drugie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Alea: Estudos Neolatinos is the property of Programa da Pos-Graduacao em Letras Neolatinas Fac de Letras - UFRJ and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Alea: Estudos Neolatinos is the property of Programa da Pos-Graduacao em Letras Neolatinas Fac de Letras - UFRJ and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Perífrasis. Revista de Literatura, Teoría y Crítica is the property of Universidad de los Andes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The main issue analyzed in this research concerns how to implement intercultural didactic. The research methodology is descriptive-analytical. Using a researcher-made questionnaire as the main research tool, which includes 20 five-choice questions and whose validity has been measured and standardized, we will analyze with the effectiveness of intercultural didactics. Therefore, by randomly selecting 200 people from among the total population of undergraduate students in the field of French Language in Iranian universities and by dividing the population into two groups of 100 people (100 students in the experimental group, 100 students in the control group), we will examine the effect of this teaching method on improving students' pragmatic competence and interest in literary content. Therefore, the main goal of the research is to provide a practical method in order to connect more contemporary French and Iranian literature with French language didactic. Our hypothesis in this research, which is based on teaching foreign languages through literary texts, is that intercultural didactic can help students of French language undergraduates in Iranian universities to use the pragmatic competence in using speech acts related to the feeling of "sadness" and "loneliness" and will be effective and will increase their interest in literature. The results listed in Table 5- 3 show that all 20 items of the questionnaire have a strong correlation with their factors and therefore the questionnaire is standardized. In addition, the results of descriptive statistics (Table 5-4) indicate that after removing the possible effect of the pre-test, the experimental group (45.19) obtained a higher average than the control group (35.28) in improving pragmatic competence. Table 5-8 also shows the descriptive statistics of the two experimental groups and the proof of interest in literary content in the post-test. Based on this, the result was obtained that the experimental group (mean = 25.69) compared to the control group (mean = 18.15) obtained a higher mean in the post-test of interest in literary content. Based on the results of the t-test of two independent samples in Table 5-9 (p > .05, t = 9.78 (198)), the effect size index of the t-statistic is 9.78 equal to 0.571, which shows a large effect size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an organizer of book clubs, and as a radio editor who runs a literary podcast, the author discusses the possibilities of such endeavours in present-day Transylvania. The goal of these activities is to promote sophisticated literary texts in a widely accessible and understandable manner. This approach has been experimented with extensively in various forms and across age groups, ranging from adults to practically all age brackets: adult book clubs, events for children, operating a Bookstagram page, and a podcast, with a growing sense of professionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a dialogue with Imre József Balázs, Dóra Péczely, editor and literary therapist discusses the possibilities of approaching young readers through specific selections of literature. Four successful anthologies of both contemporary and classical literature, conceived by Dóra Péczely, had a thematic, but also generational approach to what young readers expect to enter the field of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In previous writings, the author discussed the extracurricular possibilities for fostering readership and some methodological characteristics to achieve positive results. This article presents the issue through the experience connected to a reading competition. Among the well-known methods for promoting readership, the approach of reading competitions is particularly appealing to children for several reasons. Firstly, children enjoy activities outside the school setting; they appreciate the opportunity to venture beyond the familiar school environment. Additionally, the voluntary nature of these activities is a key factor. Secondly, competition and rivalry are popular forms of utilizing and applying academic knowledge among students, especially when they can participate in teams. The reading competition is capable of satisfying both of these preferences. The author discusses the history of a reading competition organized annually in Marosvásárhely/ Târgu Mureş, at the local bookfair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Litera: Journal of Language, Literature & Culture Research is the property of Litera: Journal of Language, Literature & Culture Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Escritos is the property of Escritos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Itinerários - Revista de Literatura is the property of Itinerarios - Revista de Literatura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article is concerned with the legacy of modernism in twenty-first century literature. It asks: do contemporary experimental literatures signal a new literary epoch distinct from iterations of modernism, late modernism and postmodernism which preceded them? Or can these categories overlap in the twenty-first century novel? Tackling these questions, this article probes the critical underpinnings that structure the perceived or ignored operation of modernism in contemporary literary practice. In doing so, it subjects to scrutiny the literary critical practices of periodisation which have determined the description of twenty-first century fictional innovation as a new era of literary production (metamodernism, remodernism, post-postmodernism, postfiction). In turn, it indicates a frame of continuity and divergence that caters for the relations between the forms of modernism that have appeared over the last century, as well as the forms of modernism that will inevitably follow our current new modernisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I propose a 'literal' interpretation of Beckett's postwar theatre, which allows to give importance to an 'aesthetic of sound' in which a work of art finds its own sense in the fact that it is a linguistic game created by an author. After 1945, the author becomes unable to speak about the profound themes of the Western tradition, but can write plays in which there is the configuration of an aesthetic of the small talk, to be analyzed according to a hermeneutics of superficiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Perífrasis. Revista de Literatura, Teoría y Crítica is the property of Universidad de los Andes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Lengua y Literatura Catalana, Gallega y Vasca is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the media, the theme of the Holocaust has always been most powerfully illustrated visually, with images or videos depicting skeletal human beings on the verge of becoming twodimensional, almost transparent. In the remaining footage of WWII horrors, one can see that those Jews who were kept in Nazi prisoner camps, and who were lucky enough not to be gassed on arrival, still had to cope with the scarcity—or even total lack—of food, which would eventually turn them into living skeletons. In literature, the theme of the Holocaust has been approached differently, with writers constantly striving to find the best words and phrases to appropriately describe the bodily sensations of those for whom food had almost become an intangible item. This paper intends to show how Jodi Picoult’s novel The Storyteller (2013) manages to make its readers mentally visualise the horrors of the Holocaust through the close interconnectedness of (at least) two types of hunger: the physical hunger for food that might enable prisoners to survive another day, and the hunger for texts and stories, which nourish the mind and soul. The pursuit of justice, as well as the need for absolution from guilt, are other types of hunger that this paper analyses, with a view towards a more applied approach within the scope of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs feminist theory to explore the theme of fractured femininity in Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs. Through the three female characters in the novel, Kawakami highlights the scarring of womanhood in a contemporary, postmodern context. However, the concept of scarring follows Cixous's metaphor in which literature becomes a liberating and transformative act that vindicates the wounding of womanhood through the imposition of repressive ideals. This is shown as each of these women comes to represent the resilience of women in the face of conventional definitions of femininity. Natsuko's reluctant following of convention, Makiko's pursuit of feminine body ideals, and Midoriko's struggle with her biological self represent women's struggle to realize femininity in the 21st century. Ultimately, these women manage to sustain a level of empowerment by rejecting the socially constructed concept of femininity. Kawakami puts the concept of femininity to the test to prove that it is the result of nurture rather than nature, thus suggesting that constructing a feminine identity in a postmodern setting is much more complex than in theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Scripta is the property of Scripta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Adrian Duncan's second novel A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) marks a departure from 'typical' Irish topics such as national identity and religion. This he shares with a range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel's focus on architecture and engineering, which also looms large in Duncan's other novels Love Notes from a German Building Site and The Geometer Lobachevsky, is unique, as it leads to unusual reflections on the nature of material culture. This original approach to the novel form should be considered as part of the current international trend to integrate theoretical reflections on a wide range of topics, thus negotiating contemporary cultures of knowledge. The novel's international outlook moves away from 'typical' Irish topics of national identity and religion shared by a wider range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel is thus also a reflection on the collapse of old systems, be they political, social, or epistemological, and the existential uncertainty created by their demise. I argue in my paper that Duncan's novel addresses questions of knowledge formation that bear a striking resemblance to the Romantic novel as an open and generically hybrid form. I read it in a wider context as part of an ongoing experience of crisis: my overall thesis aims at describing the contemporary tendency to include abstract reflections that interrupt the narrative sequence as an expression of a fundamental crisis of knowledge. Today's mediascape represents the contemporary world in a state of severe emergency, whose symptoms, be they climate change, the rise of nationalism and the far right, ultimately lead to a fundamental experience of contingency. Novels like Duncan's can thus be seen as an expression of the crisis of the contemporary media ecology of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgressive aesthetics' unrestrained extremity has been problematised by post-Cold War capitalism, via their shared reliance upon unregulated desire. Amanda Filipacchi's Love Creeps reframes transgressive excess through limitation, accounting for transgression's contradictory position within twenty-first century capitalism. The novel's expression of transgressive aesthetics relies upon a fundamental paradox: constriction simultaneously intensifies textual depictions of sexual desire. This apparent incongruity informs the novel's response to the contradictions of contemporary capitalist culture. Initially, the article considers Filipacchi's depiction of desire within a transgressive aesthetic context – beginning with definitions of transgression, before considering how the novel's innovative use of limitation reformulates perversity and extremity to respond to twenty-first century capitalism. Love Creeps' decoupling of content from consequences, via the subversive potential it aligns with limitation, is then reconnected to twentieth century uses of transgressive aesthetics, establishing the intensity Filipacchi produces as a contemporary innovation of this legacy. I argue Filipacchi's counterintuitive use of limitation recalibrates transgressive aesthetics in a way that accounts for the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, presenting an extremity that is furthered by the very limitation that intuitively should diminish it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To frame this collection of essays, this introduction reviews existing research on sacrifice zones and related concepts, extractivist thinking and regenerative mindsets, and the presence of damaged settings in contemporary literature and literary history. To be more precise, it considers the affordances and limitations of notions such as the extractive zone, the contact zone, and the critical zone alongside attempts to articulate hopeful strategies of counter-extractivist reading and writing before identifying precursors of the sacrifice zone in the literary archive and briefly sketching recent shifts in mining and extraction technologies. To illustrate these points, the paper then turns to Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport and explains how this angry novel represents violated sites as well as settings of hope and resists the easy solutions of compromise aesthetics by summoning an indignant and anti-extractivist public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific laboratory is often construed as a space in which laboratory animals are sacrificed on the altar of biomedical progress. However, this understanding of nonhuman animals raises significant ethical concerns and appears complicit in the anthropocentric and colonial violence that creates sacrifice zones in Naomi Klein's sense. In this article, we argue that contemporary literature can work towards an imaginative and affective reframing of the lab, which is no longer seen as a sacrifice zone but as a contact zone—a space of relationality and entanglement across the human-nonhuman divide. To explore this shift, we offer close readings of two contemporary narratives that centre on the lab: Tania Hershman's short story 'Grounded' and Jeff VanderMeer's The Strange Bird. In both of these texts, animals refuse to be made data through sacrifice and instead affirm, if in a limited sense, their own autonomy and vitality. Literary experimentation on a stylistic level plays a key role in this process: our readings highlight how both narratives evoke embodied (and more specifically haptic) connectedness with animals by deploying literary strategies that deconstruct the visual language associated with scientific objectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Animal is viewed in traditional literature as a tool and symbol that shows the human attitude. In the new perspective, however, especially in Deleuze's view, the animal is no longer a tool in hands of humans but humans must submit themselves to the animal and get close to animality. Considering the new concept, this study used the ideas of such thinkers as Deleuze and other related postmodernist thinkers to examine the characters and features of Suvashoun novel from the perspective of animality. The main themes that this study discussed are animality, childhood, madness, humanity. Regarding animality, we see Suvashoun a dialectic, where antithesis appears in Yusuf's humanity. Madness and prison are means used for liberating man from his subjectivity in prison. That is why Zari takes her vow to the madhouse and distributes it among the prisoners. Desire and body, childhood and femininity, Kelo’s personality and MakMahon's poetry, and Dr. Abdollah Khan's mysticism leaves no room for human humanity of Yusuf. He should be the contemporary Siavash, whose head is innocently cut off in the bowl of his mythical innocence. Such a Suvashoun not only ensures the liberty of his soul but accomplishes the animality of Zari. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Changes to working life and retirement are reshaping temporalities of aging. This essay identifies a growing interest by women writers in the narrative possibilities these changes present. Examining the relation between narrative form, aging, and precarious work in Deborah Levy's The Cost of Living (2018) and Jenny Offill's Weather (2020), this essay argues that contemporary narratives of midlife aging offer evidence of new and different conceptions and representations of time, whereby time is shaped by the elongated precarity of care and work. The argument builds on work by Lauren Berlant (2011), Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), and Lisa Baraitser (2017) that claims that the challenges of the twenty-first century demand that we reimagine future time through the lens of endurance and finds a model for endurance in the time frames of maintenance and milling proposed in The Cost of Living and Weather. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]