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Throughout its serial run, Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836–7), was repurposed hundreds of times by the provincial press. From acting as innocuous filler material to making strategic political statements, provincial newspaper editors evoked, excerpted and adapted Pickwick as quickly as Dickens was penning the instalments, showing a keen responsiveness to political topicalities relevant to their reading communities. This article contends that these types of journalistic re-use benefit from being read collectively as a form of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as 'the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms'. It argues that these remediations are vital to understanding the politics of the provincial press because they became one method through which provincial newspapers articulated a localised response to the national political debates that raged following the 1832 Reform Act. As well as reflecting the political priorities of specific communities, these remediations nuance our understanding of Pickwick 's popularity by drawing attention to aspects of its construction that lent themselves to re-use. While explicit engagement with party politics is conspicuously absent from Pickwick , provincial editors capitalised upon this generality and imbued their re-workings of the serial with a partisanship that Dickens himself avoided, while using his name to substantiate and authorise their own pieces. In this respect, these remediations invite us to place Pickwick at the heart of political debate in the papers, by foregrounding the close relationship between newspaper politics, serial literature, and provincial identity in the 1830s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is an introduction to and analysis of the article “Literary criticism must be scientific”, presented here for the first time in English translation. The original was published by Lotman in 1967 in the journal Voprosy Literatury. The article by Lotman is a part of a wider debate, started in 1963, that saw structuralists and their opponents dispute the validity and heuristic value of structuralist methodology in literary criticism. The aim of the introduction is to explore Lotman’s engagements with his intellectual context as they emerge in his 1967 article. The first part of the paper discusses the wider context of the debate, and explores the positions of the opponents of structuralism and the ways in which Lotman relates to them. The second part of the paper analyses how Lotman and his structuralist colleagues related to the official Soviet ideology, the diamat. In both cases, it will be seen how Lotman engaged certain aspects of his opponents’ ideas, as well as the official ideology, in order to further his goal of reconciling structuralism and historicism.

The present paper is an introduction to and analysis of the article "Literary criticism must be scientific", presented here for the first time in English translation. The original was published by Lotman in 1967 in the journal Voprosy Literatury. The article by Lotman is a part of a wider debate, started in 1963, that saw structuralists and their opponents dispute the validity and heuristic value of structuralist methodology in literary criticism. The aim of the introduction is to explore Lotman's engagements with his intellectual context as they emerge in his 1967 article. The first part of the paper discusses the wider context of the debate, and explores the positions of the opponents of structuralism and the ways in which Lotman relates to them. The second part of the paper analyses how Lotman and his structuralist colleagues related to the official Soviet ideology, the diamat. In both cases, it will be seen how Lotman engaged certain aspects of his opponents' ideas, as well as the official ideology, in order to further his goal of reconciling structuralism and historicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intricate and tricky case of semantic analysis, especially of the enigmatic realm of nouns, the red thread of linguistics and literary exploration. This academic research explores the rich sphere of Russian literature in-depth to determine connections between function and the embodiment of theme through proper names. This research is aiming at studying the role of proper nouns in the literary masterpieces by focusing on the ideas of character development, thematic cohesiveness, and the narrative flow. This papers deals with profound significance of proper nouns as linguistics pointers that take you beyond their literal meaning to different levels of connotative value. It takes most of its ideas from the late linguistics and literary critique. This research gets down to serious business by cherry-picking and analysing a set of Russian masterpieces. An intensive method of semantic analysis was used by the study to properly identify and categorize all the structural features of proper nouns. Also, it conducts an examination of the usage of language by these instrumentalities so as to discover their common features and themes which lead to the invention of the main narrative. The results of this study add to our comprehension of proper noun semantics in Russian literature and provide us with a stepping-stone to broader discussions on the linguistic theory and literary studies. This cognitive effort exceeds the linguistic borders, as it takes into consideration the cultural and historical value of the proper nouns being presented. The report shows why it is necessary to reconsider the theoretical design to account for the distinctive linguistic and particular cultural features of the Russian literary heritage. This research is a step toward unravelling noun semantics' mystery and adds to the already existing linguistic aesthetics and cultural semiotics debates.

Transparency in reporting is essential to scientific progress. No report should be considered complete without a full account of uncertainties, including those due to natural variation and measurement and model error and those incurred by handling problematic data, such as outliers. We randomly selected 132 papers published in 2019 from a list of 100 scientific journals to characterize the current state of uncertainty reporting in ecosystem studies. Each paper was evaluated for the extent to which it reported measures of uncertainty in any of four topic areas common to ecosystem studies: vegetation, soils, precipitation, and surface water. We found that most papers reported a minority of the uncertainty sources we deemed relevant. Papers on surface water reported the highest fraction of uncertainty sources (averaging 47% ± 5%), followed by soils (45% ± 4%), vegetation (32% ± 4%), and precipitation (21% ± 8%). A greater fraction of relevant uncertainty sources were reported when the topics were the primary focus of the paper (44% ± 3%) than when they were not (32% ± 4%). Sampling error—the uncertainty in replicate measurements—was the source most commonly reported in studies of vegetation (84%), soil mass (56%), and surface water (76% of papers). The source of measurement error most often reported was chemical analysis, with 41% of papers on surface water and 75% of papers on precipitation reporting this source, if applicable. In contrast, only 1 of 12 papers reporting chemistry of vegetation provided information on analytical uncertainty. Fewer papers reported what methods were used for handling missing or unusable data and observations below detection limits, but it was difficult to judge whether these sources were relevant if they were not mentioned. Finally, we found that a minority of the papers made all (21%) or some (an additional 21%) of their data available in online repositories, after correcting for a failure rate of 13% of the links. Clearly, there is room for improving the completeness and transparency of scientific reporting in ecosystem studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement of technology and series of curriculum reform, teachers are challenged to recalibrate their teaching methodology and delivery of instruction. Teachers may adopt ways to improve the quality of instruction everyday. In order to achieve this goal, teachers may opt to use variety of instructional methods and techniques such as developing research-based instructional materials that will aid the current teaching-instruction modality. In this context, this paper aimed to develop an instructional material in Literary Criticism and Teaching of Literature to enhance instruction in these fields. The content of the proposed IM was based from CMO 30 s. 2004 to align with the expected competency based standards for education students specializing English and Literature. There were 100 English majors used as respondents for the need assessment, grouped as follows: 57 freshmen, 33 sophomore and 10 juniors. These respondents noted that "learning is best achieved in the presence of sample output exercises reflected in the handouts (WM 1.29)" and "handouts promote the habit of self-individualized learning (WM 1.38)", lastly, "teaching the theories requires textbooks and references (WM 1.49)". All the responses fall in the interpretation of strongly agree. Three experts in the field evaluated the content validity of the two instructional materials: The Lectures on Discourse and Teaching of Literature. The instructional materials were evaluated on the following criteria: content, organization, effectivity and preference. The Lectures on Discourse was rated 4.30 while the Teaching of Literature was rated 4.28 both with an interpretation of very satisfactory, recommended for utilization if corrections are typographical in nature; then editors can correct them and return it to the writer then re-submit again the IM for further evaluation. Meanwhile, there were four selected stories used as specimen-texts for this study. The first layer of criticism used content thematic approach to identify the content, which discussed the cultural issues of the texts and the second layer used symptomatic reading to examine the deeper meaning. The actual experience of the respondents in doing the literary analysis provided the insight in establishing the chronology and suggested content of the lecture notes. The actual output from the literary analysis served as sample models in the exercises part. Homi Bhabha's (1994) postcolonial framework established the concept of postcolonial symptoms while Francis Johnson's (1975) framework established the framing of the instructional material. At the end of this attempt, this paper hoped that it may open up a series of literary studies to other perspectives and multidisciplinary approaches and develop instructional materials generated from the exercises made by the students to serve as additional reference in appreciating literature and criticism particularly for a student-directed group environment.

Have we been teaching reading well? Close reading has been the signature practice in literary studies. More recently, however, postcritique has polemically revised this traditional mode of teaching reading. This essay proposes the initial framework for a novel arts-based pedagogy based on Spoken-Word Song, bridging critical literary interpretation and teacher-student co-created artistic performance. Spoken-Word Song is here cast as a privileged means for allowing university students to become intellectually and emotionally invested in poetry, following precepts of the affective turn in the humanities. Moving from theory to practice, this paper will contextualize Spoken-Word Song within three domains before describing the practical steps of my pedagogy: (1) its relevance to contemporary literary theory; (2) a brief overview of the American Spoken-Word Song; and (3) Spoken Word pedagogies currently practiced in the American educational system.

In "Anti-Oedipus," Deleuze and Guattari saw the difficulty of disentangling the question of Spinoza and, later, of Reich from the very limit of a system of representation by which they mean Oedipus. As "A Thousand Plateaus" would emphasize later, this limit brings out the question of the desire for democracy ('democracies are majorities'). It desires Oedipus. In "What Is Philosophy?", the limit question (Oedipus) gave way to the concept of a people to come. Fifty years since its publication, "Anti-Oedipus" remains a relevant text (apropos of its 'strategic adversary' identified by Foucault) against the background of the social pathology of neofascism, populist politics, and the rise of the alt-right and neoconservative movements in recent years. The paper tries to locate this inflexion point where the desire for democracy modulates into the bi-univocal plasticity of Oedipal desire whose dangers people already seem to know. They have unmasked Oedipus' double impasse and have escaped it. They no longer desire fascism; they desire fascists, neocons, and right-leaning mob rousers. Fifty years since its publication, "Anti-Oedipus" confronts a type of people who have learned to behave like the enemies of capitalism, too careful not to overload desire and destroy its bi-univocality, its great balancing act on the Body without organs. Incidentally, in 'Postscript on the Societies of Control,' Deleuze spoke about a people who know how to 'surf' replacing the 'older sports.' This applies to people who could become either schizoidal or regress to its more familiar inversion, the simulacra of Oedipus.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, only 23 Queer literary works have been published for children and adolescents in Hebrew. This paper examines the characteristics of these works in light of the ambivalent and controversial status of the LGBTQ+ community in Israel. The findings show that the few works that have been published and that present same-sex families or LGBTQ+ characters, and the manner in which Queer themes are presented in those texts, are in line with how these issues are perceived and addressed by Israeli society. Moreover, this article divides the Queer Israeli literature for children and youth into three categories: implied Queer literature that hides the Queer existence through the allegoric genre; Queer-phobic literature that seemingly presents the Queer family but in actual fact promotes homophobic stereotypes; and Queer literature that places the LGBTQ+ character or family in the center of the story without passing judgment or criticism.

Fairy tales have been an essential ingredient in children's literature. Canonical fairy tales passed down from generation to generation not only enrich children's imagination but connote significant values typical of the community. However, as time passes, contemporary writers often challenge these traditional values when they work on the same topic. This changing face is evidenced by Emma Donoghue's rewriting of classical tales. Based on my teaching of Donoghue's story 'The Tale of the Bird' alongside Andersen's 'Thumbelina' at a university in Hong Kong, this paper discusses the ever-evolving cultural values and the benefit of reading Donoghue via Andersen or vice versa in the literature class and beyond.

With the challenges and revolutionary changes in the world, it is essential that the sources of social power direct the communities towards the right path that leads to a brighter future, especially when it comes to young adults. Young adults represent a critical social group that needs special attention. Therefore, the present paper tackles one of the fascinating literary genres to young adults; young adult science fiction. The paper attempts to investigate how the social themes of order and chaos are delivered to young adults in young adult science fiction through conducting a critical stylistic analysis of certain extracts in selected young adult science fiction novels. The linguistic tool employed for the critical stylistic analysis is negation for its prevalent use in the discourse, in general, and for its textual effectiveness in rendering hidden ideologies, whether intended or unconscious.

This paper undertakes, through the prism of linguistic (stylistic) analysis, a reading of the ideological discourse in Festus Iyayi's novels- "Violence, The Contract", and "Heroes", with the broad aim of establishing the nexus between literature and ideology, through the instrumentation of language, for societal transformation. The paper explores the symbiotic relationship between language and literature and how the former is used in the study and understanding of the latter. Attempt is made to identify the patterns of use of language with reference to the purpose of commenting on quality, the exegesis and interpretative meanings of the text. The scaffold upon which our analysis is anchored is the Marxist literary criticism based on socialist and dialectical theories. It is the contention of the Marxist theorists that literary works are a reflection of the social institutions from which they originate. Terry Eagleton has affirmed that Marxist criticism "is not merely sociology of literature" but paying attention to its forms, style and meaning with a view to grasping those forms, style and meaning "as the products of a particular history. In all, four major literary tools-narrative technique, lexical choice, dialogue and authorial comments are deployed as indices for our analytical framework, using the Critical Discourse Analysis. What is apparent is that no success can be achieved in the reading and understanding of a literacy text without a manifest use of language.

Current day literary criticisms written in world englishes often seem to be a little hard to comprehend for readers because of critics' tendency to use too much decorative language with too many theoretical views, jargons, and references of different sorts just to stick to an assumed standard of scholarly writing. This paper, based on a generalized study though, considers that assumed standard hyper elitist, which is affecting the easy entrance of a considerable portion of literary audience into the literary realm where the popularity in the form of reader-friendliness and comprehensibility of literary criticisms are compromised, and thoughts of some creditable thinkers remain unnoticed only because those promising thoughts apparently fail to be expressed in that supposed standard of language. Keeping the purpose of literary criticisms in mind, this paper places forth a seemingly valid question whether this sophisticated way of expressing is really mandatory or not, as the word 'standard' itself is subjected to be modified when needed, and the postmodern approach to the literary regime really tends to unsettle the frame of any standardization and deny the distinctions between 'high' and 'low'. Thus, speculated implications of the paper included that the accessibility of greater number of audience into the arena of literary criticisms might be more liberally considered by established but elitist critics, while the stress of synthesized elitism in writing criticisms might also be mitigated for neophytes among critics.

A literary criticism of the books "The Female Man" by Joanna Russ and "The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women" by Sally Gearhart is presented. The books explore feminism, confidence in women and a vision of women's friendship. The books were presented at the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Panel on Science Fiction and Ageing in Oakland, California in 2012.

The article explores the relationship between comics and journalism. Particular focus is given to the interpretation of world events and experience through the medium. Additional topics discussed include graphic journalism and observational cartooning, the work of the cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the book "Qu'est-ce que la literature," by Jean-Paul Sartre.

This essay attends to features of the paratexts (covers, title pages, dedications, chapter headings) and the bibliographic texts (paper, typefaces, print layout) of Ernest Hemingway’s 1924 in our time. Drawing on the work of Gerard Genette, Jerome McGann, George Bornstein, and Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that these features sometimes produce “hermeneutic effects,” reinforcing or otherwise contributing to the development of theme in Hemingway’s prose vignettes, and that they sometimes produce “positional effects,” providing information about the kind of book Hemingway produces, the kind of readership it seeks, the kind of distinction it offers its readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how evangelical teachers' religious identities influence their interpretation and teaching of texts in high school English Language Arts classrooms. Further, this paper examines how evangelical teachers make choices about how to balance the demands of their religious and teacher identities as they interact with texts in their own classrooms. Design/methodology/approach: Using Derridean deconstruction of the concept of ethical decision-making, the author uses critical discourse analysis to examine a conversation between two evangelical teachers as they talk about the tensions they feel as they teach "The Crucible" with their high school-aged students. Findings: The findings show evangelical teachers' religious and teaching identities were in tension across three themes: literary analytic frameworks, authorial intent and eternal truths and evangelism and fellowship. Originality/value: By highlighting how evangelical teachers' religious and teaching identities influence their classroom decisions, teaching practices and textual interpretations, this study offers another pathway through which teacher educators and researchers might examine the connection between teachers' religious and teaching identities with the intent to invite more complexity into literary analysis.

The paper intends to reread Jamaica Kincaid's short story, 'Girl' (1978) and provide new insights into its understanding. It aims to analyse the poetic qualities, word choice, and structure of the text that are left not fully discussed by recent scholarship. The structure as well as the poetic language of 'Girl' make it an unconventional piece of writing falling between two literary categories and so hard to classify. 'Girl' apparently violates rules and transgresses conventions by being both poetic and going beyond the traditional fictional structure of a short story. The paper argues that 'Girl' is an unconventional piece of literature that crosses the borders of a short story to poetry. First, it obviously lacks the traditional structure to be classified as a short story. Second, the text embraces several poetic techniques which reveal it as poetry written in prose. Therefore, the paper purports to carefully consider the poetic techniques and rhetorical devices found in 'Girl' and make it much closer to a prose poem than a short story. The story depicts a pre-adolescent female being dictated by the instructions of a sharp-tongued mother who teaches her how to become a lady--both in the private setting of the house as well as in public--in contrast to what it is like for a woman growing up in Antigua. The paper's considerations of Kincaid's depictions of mother, daughter, and their relationship illuminate the poetic traits found including repetition, sound devices and word choice. The paper's interpretation of 'Girl' reveals its poetic nature for being a thoroughly repetitive and alliterative piece. The text's repetitive quality does not only stimulate the reader's intellectual appreciation of the text's thematic notions and meanings but also promotes an overall unifying effect.

"Tess of the D'Urbevilles" is a tragic monumental work of Thomas Hardy, an English writer of critical realism.The paper will analyze "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" through character's personalities, its social background and the old traditional religion. The paper introduces the causes of Tess's tragic fate which is influenced by personalities of main characters, hypocritical moral, unjust law, depression of capitalism. Tess is just one of the victims who are suffering sorrows. Through Tess, we can see female's low status at the same time, which shows that we should develop a habit of economic independence and spirit of revolt.

The article contains a general substantiation of theoretical and applied literary criticism as a course of study within the framework of higher philological education, which is focused on the critical and analytical examination of literary texts from the point of view of the argumentation system, linguistic and compositional features presented in them, and at the same time on the assimilation of the genre “rules” of the final qualification work. The relevance of this discipline is determined by the need to bridge the gap between the teaching of fundamental aspects of the literary criticism and the development of practical skills in analyzing not only artistic, but also scholar and critical-literary text, as well as the increasing applied importance of philology in the modern world. The directions of coordination of various perspectives of work with a literary text, taking into account the achievements of related fields of knowledge: linguistic stylistics, rhetoric and academic writing, are outlined. The methodological pluralism underlying the course makes it possible to correlate historical and scientific retrospective and current state of literary studies; principles of immanent and contextual analysis; specialized and interdisciplinary approaches. The clarification of the constitutive components of qualification research is achieved indirectly, through the analysis and convincing interpretation of the precedent text for literary criticism, which implies the differentiation of manifest and conceptual levels, typical and unique features in it. The combination of different kinds of collective and individual assignments during the course development, on the one hand, forms the primary professional competences, and on the other hand, motivates students to scientific reflection and self-representation, because in literary studies, with its hermeneutic and axiological components, the supporting role of intuition, the personality of a scholar is not only included in the cognitive process, but also cannot completely excluded from the results obtained.

One of the most critical problems of the Linguistics of text is the structure study of the literary text, principles of its organization following the rules of the compositions that suggest splitting the linguistic work into the interconnected parts. In this regard, it is necessary to research the individual compositional and significant elements of the text and their role in forming the whole work. The paper focuses on revealing structural and syntactic properties of the author's digressions, namely, detecting such concepts as integration/non-integration of the author's digressions in the English literary prose. Integrated and non-integrated types of author's digressions into the academic space of the text have been distinguished based on interpretative-textual and compositional analysis. The analysis of the text-forming function of the author's digression contributed to defining the features of the cohesion of the literary text and included in its elements. The analysis results show that the author's digressions can be both integrated and non-integrated. Non-integration of the author's digression lies in their composition-semantic independence, and integrated author's digressions are the ones that the author weaves into the text with different types of cohesion. This research promotes the studies of the cognitive aspect of the author's digression in the different genres literary texts of English and American prose.

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The main goal of this paper is to depict the struggle for cultural existence in "Rabbit Proof Fence." It also reflects the cultural conflict represented in the three aboriginal girls' characters which is due to their rejection and resistance for the colonialists' culture. Besides, the paper presents the cognitive analysis of the cultural struggle and resistance in Molly's character, and it tackles the cultural resistance in "Rabbit Proof Fence" from a postcolonial point of view. Additionally, the semiotic dimension, which is based on a socio-cultural basis, is introduced in this paper.

Purpose: In an era when engagement in public spaces and places is increasingly regulated and constrained, we argue for the use of literary analytic tools to enable younger generations to critically examine and reenvision everyday spatialities (Rogers, 2016; Rogers et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to consider how spatial analyses of contemporary young adult literature enrich interrogations of the spaces and places youth must navigate, and the consequences of participation for different bodies across those spheres. Design/methodology/approach: In a graduate seminar of teachers and writers, we examined literary texts through a combined framework of feminist cultural geography, mobilities and critical mobilities studies. In this paper, we interweave our own spatial analyses of two selected works of young adult fiction with the reflections of our graduate student participants to explore our spatial framework and its potential to enhance critical approaches to literature instruction. Findings: We argue that spatial literary analysis may equip teachers and students with tools to critically examine the spaces and places of everyday life and creatively reenvision what it means to be an engaged citizen in uncertain and troubling times. Originality/value: While we have engaged in this work for several years, we found that in light of the global pandemic, coupled with the recent antiracist demonstrations, a spatial approach to literary study emerges as a potentially even more relevant and powerful component of literature instruction.