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The present article examines the imitation of the bibliographic codes and peritexts of printed books in numerous Finnish juvenilia manuscript books from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. These meticulously crafted books by Helka Hiisku (1912-1962), Elina Vaara (1903-1980), Katri Vala (1901-1944) and Yrjö Koskelainen (1885-1951) were probably not intended to be printed or published in the traditional sense but have most likely circulated among an extremely limited readership of friends and family. An investigation of the imitation of printed books in relation to content, pseudonyms and the publisher's peritext, such as illustration, book covers, title pages and typography, shows how thoroughly the concept of the book determined writing in the first half of the 20th century. Handmade books might have been a hobby activity but they also demonstrate how aware budding writers were of the bibliographical code and peritexts of the printed book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among literary-theoretical concepts, mimesis has one of the longest histories, dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In the twentieth century, discussion of mimesis resulted in a number of highly influential contributions, including Eric Auerbach's Mimesis and Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative. In this article, we use Ricoeur's tripartite model of mimesis as a catalyst for a dialogue between unnatural and cognitive approaches to narrative. In the first part, we argue that, as a form of simulation (and not just passive imitation), mimesis is best conceptualized in terms of readers' mental modeling of narrative texts. We build on work in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics to show how readers understand narrative by building situation models derived from their everyday, embodied experience. However, as unnatural narratology emphasizes, not all narratives are consistent with real-world experience. Thus, in the second part of the essay, we examine and discuss the strategies through which readers can accommodate physical and logical impossibilities in narrative by adapting their situation models. In the final part of the article, we turn to D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, a prototypically "unnatural" novel in that the protagonist's experience is caused by future events rather than by past ones. Our discussion of this novel shows situation models and interpretive strategies at work, exemplifying our claims and grounding them in a textual example. Through this combination of cognitive models and unnatural theory, we develop a framework for understanding mimesis that moves beyond dichotomies between "natural" and "unnatural" stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last 50 years, descendants of Maghrebians who immigrated to France (beurs) have received French citizenship. Their societal position is paradoxical: French citizens by birth and soil, they live in French society; however, for many French de souche, they are still considered immigrants. Although the French government has a policy of assimilation, many beurs do not participate in the French way of life. They live in the projects, their children go to sub-standard schools, and beur youth unemployment rate is at least double that for the French population as a whole. Their practice of Islam alienates them further. However, while the anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim party is gaining in numbers, beur culture is increasingly a part of French culture: Arabic words have made their way into French, beur music is popular, and there is a strong beur presence in film. In this article, I will explore the portrayal of mixed-ethnicity couples in two films, Il reste du jambon (Anne Depetrini, 2010) and Mohamed Dubois (Ernesto Ona, 2012). These films reflect a growing preoccupation with mixed couples and their conflicts, and are paradigmatic of the process of assimilation of Arabs into French culture. In the first, a beur doctor,  Djalil (Ramzy Bedia) integrates and wins a blond, middle-class French reporter; in the second, Arnaud, the son of a rich French banker renounces his French identity, and adopts an Arab heritage to win a beur policewoman. Although both are French productions, the principal beur roles may be seen as breaking through the French stereotypes of Muslims/Arabs and therefore as counter-narratives of the nation, which, according to Homi Bhabha, ‘continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual – [and] disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities’. I suggest, however, that while the beur ‘essentialist identity’ is challenged in the films, there are strains of neo-colonialism, with its accompanying ambivalence toward the beur characters, who are subject to mimicry, which consistently maintains the position of the dominant French film-consuming culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first printed grammar of the Italian vernacular, Fortunio's Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua (1516) responded to a need for guidance in imitating Tuscan authors of the Trecento, in line with the doctrine whose most authoritative proponent was Pietro Bembo. The Regole emerged on the fringes of the cultural mainstream. Fortunio conceived the work in Venice but he came to be suspected of treachery against that state. The structure of the Regole does not follow slavishly that of the Regulae grammaticales used to teach Latin. Fortunio owes much to the work of Bembo, but he does not follow him in every respect. The Regole appeared in a relatively minor centre, Ancona, where shortly afterwards Fortunio died violently. The nature of the Regole, and indeed its very existence, did not meet with universal approval. However, it was reprinted frequently in the Cinquecento and had a formative influence on the early study of Italian grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a criticism of the work of English writer Edward Dannreuther. He mentions Dannreuther's borrowings from the works of poet Algernon Swinburne as a form of literary imitation, Swinburne's critical perspective, and Dannreuther's literary and aesthetic style as influenced by Swinburne.

An experiment with 212 students (100 men, 112 women; M age=18.3 years, SD=0.9) was carried out to compare the effect of four techniques used by mediators on the number of agreements contracted by negotiators. Under experimental conditions, mediators were asked either to rephrase (reformulate) negotiators' words or to imitate them or to show active listening behavior, or finally, to use a free technique. More agreements were reached in the active listening condition than in both free and rephrase conditions. Furthermore, mediators in the active listening condition were perceived, by the negotiators, as more efficient than mediators using other techniques, although there was no significant difference observed between the active listening and imitation conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Erving Goffman's sociology has enjoyed great popularity and is cited often, the career of his work has been largely confined to other scholars reaping, adapting, and utilizing his concepts. Goffman was opposed to science that just reproduces and orders concepts, and opposed to his students using his concepts as easy tools. Instead, he recommended they train their own horses: While there is much to use in Goffman's work, there is little scholarship that continues the genius of his practical approach. As valuable as Goffman's categories are, his collection practice and his analytical scheme may be even more valuable. On the one hand, they offer an intricate framework for research that is as open as it is directed; on the other hand, they allow researchers to argue freedom from the ever more imposing bad imitations of natural scientific method that threaten to overgrow the social sciences. Together, they allow Goffmanesque work without merely parroting his concepts. This article attempts to outline Goffman's eclectic way of collecting material and his technique for fashioning this material into analyses, reordering this material around different metaphors that make Goffman's contribution distinct. I call Goffman's practical research a flaneur approach, and outline it. The paper then makes an argument for its continuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Johannine scholarship is divided on whether the mimetic imperative in John 13:15 calls for a literal replication of the footwashing or is a general reference to humble (loving) service. My argument is that for the author mimesis involves primarily the creative, truthful, bodily articulation of the idea and attitude that lie behind the original act rather than its exact replication. The Johannine concept of mimesis is a hermeneutical process that involves both the understanding of the original act and a resulting mimetic act that creatively but faithfully articulates this understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A remarkable fact about William Shakespeare's The Tempest is that characters do not always see or hear the same thing. But while this estrangement of knowledge thins out the boundaries between character and environment to recognizably great dramatic effect, the aporetic energies underlying that estrangement are not yet fully understood. This article explores their significance by examining the connections between The Tempest and Michel de Montaigne's An Apologie of Raymond Sebond (long suspected to be related). It proposes a new verbal parallel between the play and the essay but does not confine its argument to such a criterion. Rather, it is a case study in the Renaissance practice of imitation that works from a number of aspects—shared matrices of thought and feeling, similar metaphors, networks of texts—to reconstruct the presence of a locus classicus of Renaissance skepticism in Shakespeare's late play. Along the way, it triangulates these works with a discussion of King Lear and examines the presence of Vergil and the possible presence of Seneca. It argues that Shakespeare used Montaigne's essay to make his island epistemologically strange and that this sensitive use of a philosophical source is notable for being so deeply dramatically embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to a article "Combating plagiarism in scientific research" by S. Ramasesha published in a 2014 issue of the periodical.