Search

This study reports on the comparison of the students’ achievement and their attitudes towards the use of paper-pen peer-correction and wiki-based peer-correction within English language lessons and CLIL Social Science lessons at the higher secondary school in Prague. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were utilized to gather information. The data suggests that students made considerable use of wikis and showed higher degrees of motivation in wiki-based peer-correction during English language lessons than in CLIL Social Science lessons. In both cases wikis not only contributed to developing students’ writing skills, but also helped students recognize the importance of collaboration.

The paper reconstructs a crucial moment in the history of literary studies: the transference of formal sociology, as developed by Georg Simmel around 1900, into literary studies by his pupil, the young Georg Lukács. First, formal sociology will be explained in order to outline the ways in which Lukács adapts it. Then the formal method Lukács developed will be illustrated using the drama as an example. Finally, the paper will analyze Caroline Levine’s highly acclaimed study Forms (2015) in the context of the history of the formal method outlined, and briefly discuss the impasse in which this method currently finds itself.

The paper deals with the translation of the film adaptation of the literary work Das Blaue Licht (‘The Blue Light’), primarily intended for child recipients. The aim of this paper is to present a conceptual framework to describe specific aspects of communication-translation (translating children’s and youth literature, aspects of age and the projection of ideas in a different mode of adaptation), and subsequently provide a comprehensive evaluation related to the optimality of the chosen translation procedures and strategies in the Slovak dubbed version of the above-mentioned audiovisual work. The focus is on how the semantic and expressive function of the original is preserved, taking into account the way linguistic reality is depicted in communication with the child recipient.

Crescent (2003) is an example of the kind of Arab-American literature that has emerged noticeably in the early years of the 21st century. It signifies a hypothesis that culinary practice is an essential cultural component for diasporic figures to define their identities, especially in a multi-cultural society. These figures embrace such component to strategically define themselves and assert their belonging and affiliation to their original homelands. This paper, as such, examines the extent to which Arab-American characters in the novel, namely Sirine and Han, consider culinary practice as a key tool to understanding their identity, locate themselves in a multi-cultural society, and re-discover their true belonging. The study of this novel shows that culinary practices, as indicated in the narratives, deconstruct Arab-American identity through various dimensions, including memory, nostalgia, hybridity, and essentialism. In addition to employing critical and analytical approaches to the novel, this paper relies on a socio-cultural conceptual framework based on perspectives of prominent critics and theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Brinda Mehta, Dallen Timothy, and Stuart Hall, to name a few.

The paper presents the idea of the chronotope in the novel Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, with special attention paid to idyllic time and space. The research is mainly based on the theory of chronotopes according to Mikhail Bakhtin, who distinguishes various types and motifs within this notion. The author presents here the features of an idyllic chronotope, among them vast descriptions of nature and its connection with human life, as well as the destruction of an idyll, unhappy love and the motif of a road or path, which seems to be one of the most significant motifs in the work. The paper also presents the importance of coincidence and the sudden decisions of characters in the process of constructing the whole story of Gabriel and Bathsheba.

This paper addresses the issue of posthuman bodies in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go against the background of organ transplants and prosthetic surgery. The novel posits a number of questions about what qualifies a human being and/or what distinguishes a human being from a clone, suggesting that art, perhaps, might be a discriminating factor. Further, it also raises questions about the kind of regulation should be applied to organs “donations,” especially when they are not voluntary, but part of a programmed response inscribed in someone’s DNA. Accordingly, the last section of the paper will investigate the social impact of the exploitation of the clones and the medico-legal issues pertaining to it.

The present paper concentrates on the foundational and conceptual basis of the interdisciplinary endeavor of Law and Literature and contributes to an interdisciplinary concept of text. The concept of text must be considered as one of the basic concepts which lie at the heart of both involved disciplines. By departing from a concept of text inspired by literary studies (Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and others) the paper sets out to sketch the characteristics of a concept of text for Law and Literature and suggests adopting practice theories and social semiotics for this purpose. The French group Oudropo,, ‒ a group of mainly legal scholars who playfully deconstruct existing legal documents ‒ serves as a very successful, and rare, example of law as literature and illustrates convincingly the practical application of an interdisciplinary concept of text.

This paper explores the historical background and application of the concept halvemål in Norwegian linguistics, with particular regard to the disciplines of dialectology and onomasiology. The concept occurs in numerous studies and serves as an apt illustration of how a folk notion may evolve into a recognized scientific term. The paper gives a detailed account of the employment of the term, and shows that its signification differs noticeably in different scholarly contexts. The study further indicates that the concept has been considered “quasi-scientific” by several scholars, possibly because of its background as a lay explanation.

As any other area of human lives, current state of foreign language education has been greatly influenced by the latest developments in the modern information communication technologies. The paper focuses specifically on the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI), which includes a wide range of technologies and methods, such as machine learning, adaptive learning, natural language processing, data mining, crowdsourcing, neural networks or an algorithm, into foreign language learning and teaching. First, the paper is concerned with changes brought to foreign language education specifically through the application of AI-powered tools and discusses ICALL (intelligent computer assisted language learning) as a subset of CALL. Second, it summarizes eight types of AI-powered tools for foreign language education and related results of the existing research, however scarce it is. Third, it discusses the frame for effective preparation of foreign language teachers in order to integrate AI-powered tools into their teaching to make it easier, less time-consuming and more effective. The author argues for reconsideration of the existing frames of requirements for CALL teachers., [KEGA 001TTU-4/2019]

The aim of this paper is to offer a representation on how cognitive poetics can be used to analyse Lucian Blaga’s poetry. With the help of digital instruments designed for corpus linguistics, concordances of the term ‘fire’ are identified and classified, giving this cognitive process a material form, together with a hermeneutical perspective. Furthermore, an example of how the similarity in minds’ activity of a group, community, or culture regarding metaphors are englobed in a pattern, can also be remarked in this paper.

This study is informed by the observation of some dangerous threats to faith’s missionary and human developmental goals as well as Salvationist stance. The alarm has been sounded that fanaticism of any colour at all is not only inimical to the raison detre of faith’s cardinal objectives but more tellingly, constitutes a serious endangerment of humanity, particularly the Nigerian enterprise. Deploying exemplifications from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2006) in an eclectic combination of a body of qualitative instances drawn from the Islamic and the Christian faiths the paper underscores the danger inherent in bigoted faith both to faith itself and to the society. The paper urges the painstaking reification/inculcation of the principles of tolerance and patriotism in children in their formative years through literary creativity, the precepts of inter and intra religious tolerance respecting the West African sub-regional stance for secular imperatives and egalitarian. This is to enthrone lasting peace in the African sub continent and the world a piece.

Activities and questions to assess knowledge in English for medical purposes were designed to incorporate terminology, academic vocabulary and grammar items in computer-based tests for bachelor students in Dentistry at Medical University - Varna. During the two-semester study course identification of key words, core lexical patterns, specific collocations and emphasis on their recurrent use were the selected strategies for student retention of specialized language and improved learning outcomes. Medical terms as single-word lexical units with straightforward definitions are easy to learn compared to collocations and multi-word terms including polysemous adjectives. In the present paper we concentrate on the process of formation of structures containing attributive adjectives which can be quite a problematic and error-generating area for second language learners. The aim of the on-going research study is to extract current lists of the sub-technical vocabulary and the terminological units in specialized medical domains as linguistic resources. The collection of assessment materials into a test bank for specific educational purposes is a customizable electronic resource, imported into the University platform to facilitate the process of compilation and creation of new tests. By implementing corpus linguistic tools into test design, the instructor aims at providing an authentic e-assessment environment based on the idea of key words in context, concordances, and lexical patterns as per the contents of the selected textbooks and teaching materials during the course. The paper highlights some strategic issues about creating test resources in EMP such as the adherence to a set of selected linguistic items and grammatical structures based on their frequency in the domain.

Pronunciation plays an indisputable role in communication; even more so in communication between native and non-native speakers of English. The goals for pronunciation teaching have shifted from accent-free or native-like pronunciation to comprehensibility and teaching practices aimed at non-native English learners vary and are often based on teachers’ opinions rather than research findings. The paper aims to present the current topics in twenty selected research papers dealing with pronunciation teaching (teaching practices in the English language classrooms, selected segmental and suprasegmental features). The analysed papers indicate that a teacher’s good theoretical background can raise students’ awareness and the overall performance of pronunciation phenomena, whether at the segmental or the suprasegmental level. Students may benefit from different strategies applied to pronunciation learning, but traditional teaching methods are still prevalent in the contemporary English language classroom. The contribution presents partial results of the research project KEGA 001TTU-4/2019.

This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

Relevance of the problem under study is explained by the beginning of a new stage in the development of Russian volunteer movement in the field of preservation of cultural monuments, which coincided with the rise of research interest in volunteering in general. The objective of this paper consists in comprehensive analysis of the modern history of restoration voluntary movement in Russia, examination of evolvement of public voluntary practices in the field of protection of the architectural heritage of the country in the context of general cultural, socio-economic, political processes that have taken place in Russia over the past decades, which have determined the specific organizational forms, content and activities of voluntary activists. The leading approach to the study of this problem is the historical method, as well as methodological principles of historicism, scientificity, objectivity, as well as sociality, integrity and fundamentality, involving the study of the historical process of volunteering in the totality of facts and sources in their logical and chronological sequence. The paper describes the main forms of volunteer practices for monument preservation, gives an overview of volunteer initiatives, as well as the efforts of charitable foundations and public organizations aimed at rescuing the cultural heritage of the country, identifies the development trajectories of restoration volunteering, and also specifies the key trends, based on which the tendency to professionalization and gradual expansion of the scope of voluntary work has been revealed. Materials of the paper can be useful not only for scientists, engaged in research of problems of social history of our country, but also for specialists from social sphere, organizers of work with youth, and also students of socio-humanitarian and pedagogical profiles.

Aesthetic theory, as reflected in both contemporary cognitive (Patrick Colm Hogan) and more traditional structuralist criticism (H.G. Widdowson), points to the dynamics between familiarity and surprise as the driving force behind the pleasure we derive from reading fiction. This paper explains how Neil Gaiman’s works, particularly his novel Neverwhere, utilize genre expectations and reinvent mythologies in order to captivate audiences in the current age of unprecedented access to information and a rather superficial intertextuality. The paper draws on Brian Attebery’s analyses of the literature of the fantastic to place Gaiman within the context of both modernist and postmodernist legacies, while proposing that his works could be best understood as representative of the current cultural paradigm, sometimes labelled as the pseudo-modern or post-postmodernism. The discussion of the shifting paradigm is used as a backdrop for the scrutiny of the devices employed in Gaiman’s writing: the pre-modern focus on storytelling, prototypicality, modernist “mythic principle”, postmodernist textual strategies, and utilization of current technologies and mass-communication media.

This paper attempts to evaluate the legacy of James Joyce’s avant-gardism for the literary experimentation of Mark Amerika, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Mark Z. Danielewski, three contemporary American writers and artists, working a hundred years after the first of Joyce’s crucial four “shocks of the new” shook the foundations of fiction. In doing so, the paper attempts to bridge the divide between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde as defined by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger, and regarded disparagingly by critics like Robert Hughes. Positing a threefold legacy of Joyce’s “revolution of the word” in its treatment of writing as trace, forgery, and idiom, the paper discusses Amerika’s Grammatron, Goldsmith’s uncreative writing, and Danielewski’s House of Leaves as continuing in and expanding on the achievements of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This they achieve by pursuing what Marjorie Perloff has termed “differential poetics” and N. Katherine Hayles has rethought as “Assemblage” – two poetic strategies dominant at the beginning of the 21st century.

The given article is dedicated to consideration of military euphemisms used by the English language print media to describe various conflict-ridden actions in the course of military developments across the globe. Significance of the given research is stipulated by the vivid interest to the matters of euphemy penetrated into all areas of activity, especially in mass media language style. The aim of this paper is to examine the concept and the essence of euphemy and to reveal various military-political euphemisms widely used in press. Methods used to study the subject of the given paper were as follows: theoretical literature study within the given theme, a descriptive method, followed by the method of sampling euphemisms from Anglophone print media. The main result of the present study appears to be the finding, that euphemization presents a significant process of enormous importance in communication. The usage of euphemistical examples in the contemporary English-speaking press, namely, the New York Times, the Sun, the Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post served as the main data for the given research.

This paper focuses on Mrs Gaskell’s treatment of the erring girl in Lizzie Leigh (1850) and Ruth (1853) and the new elements that she introduces which brand the treatment as different. Contrary to her Victorian contemporaries, Mrs Gaskell stresses the role of religion, the use of biblical quotations on the treatment of the sinner, and the role of motherhood. The paper also shows how Mrs Gaskell makes the illegitimate child an incentive towards repentance and hope of reclamation. Through her motherly love and devotion to her child, a mother rises and grows in character and faith. Moreover, the paper demonstrates Mrs Gaskell’s condemnation of the falsity of the traditional taxonomy of “illegitimate” or “fallen”, and her assertion that social value lies in the inherent properties within the individual. It also highlights how she makes forgiveness for the sinner a duty which society has to fulfil, and maintains that if the charitable and the kind are forced “to lie” because of the existing social and moral attitudes, then it is imperative that they should be changed so that “lies” are unnecessary. It concludes by investigating the stormy reception and the controversy it created among readers.

In a context where post-colonial translation has emerged as a strong interface between post-colonial studies and translation studies, the present paper examines the case of Salman Rushdie as a post-colonial translator. Drawing on concepts and ideas put forth by the two above-mentioned paradigms, the paper will argue that the strategies used by Rushdie in his attempts to write about the importance of redressing the balance of power and of resisting Orientalising practices are similar to those used by translators of post-colonial literature. The writing of post-colonial literature becomes an act of (re)translation, while translating post-colonial literature should aim at resisting domestication and at creating a target text that remains ‘foreign’ enough for the reader. While there is no doubt that through its post-colonial and global concerns Rushdie’s entire work fits this frame, the analysis will focus only on two works, Midnight’s Children and Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, since they seem to bracket Rushdie’s efforts in this respect.

The following paper revolves around the concept of thanatos, whose name comes from the personification of death in the Greek mythology. In other words, the objective of this paper is to analyze the main forms and symbols regarding the theme of death in several poems of Lucian Blaga and Dylan Thomas and try to explain how, despite the fact that they come from different cultural environments and have different sources of inspiration and literary purposes regarding the aim of their works, their poetical works present several resemblances in terms of meaning in relation to the theme of death, as approached in the 20th century modern poetry.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the vanguardist poetical universe of Ilarie Voronca, focusing on the construction of corporeal representations. The poetics of corporeality is associated with the concept of “crisis”, the latter being reverberated in the vanguard lyrical works as an effect of the historical and social context of the 20th century, which is the First World War. As a result, the consequences of this context bring to the vanguard writers poetical substance, which encapsulates the body and the disease, these two being transposed into several eerie, radical and shocking images in Ilarie Voronca’s poetics. This paper is going to demonstrate the existence of several corporeal representations in Ilarie Voronca’s poems, which are mainly represented by the vulnerable body , viewed as a limit and as the diseased/the suffering , proving that the crisis of corporeality is the effect of the historical conflagration at the beginning of the 20th century.

The present paper is focused on the metaphor of the disease in Lucian Blaga’s poetical works and aphorisms. The stylistic approach is built on Indrieș’s notion of the semantic field and on Blaga’s cultural definition of the metaphor as a way of compromising for the inability to perceive and describe the outer world. The metaphor of the disease combines the physical and the spiritual and transcends some of Blaga’s fundamental poetical themes such as death, sacredness, creative drive, and love. The paper follows two main coordinates in discussing this metaphor: positive to negative connotations (and what context triggers them) and, respectively, disease as a means of reaching divinity or becoming a sinner.

This paper examines the appropriation of the pedestrian theme from Jane Austen’s famous novelPride and Prejudice(1813) in Jo Baker’s rewritingLongbourn(2013). First, it analyses walking in Austen’s novel, where it appears as a mild but harmless form of female rebellion and emancipated courtship in a coherent pastoral landscape. Subsequently, it moves on toLongbourn, which, by focusing on the walking of the servants who remain marginal in Austen’s pretext, recasts this pedestrian theme as a mode of intersectional critique and subjectivises and fragments the topography ofPride and Prejudice. The paper scrutinises how Baker depicts the differences in and limits of pedestrian mobility in Georgian society under the influence of dominant ideologies of race, gender and class and finally eradicates these inequalities by constructing a female character who transgresses the boundaries that Austen’s protagonist Elizabeth Bennet always leaves intact.

This paper synthesizes interrelated postulations from the systemic conflict and intergroup conflict theorizations to glean the societal conflict conceptual framework. The paper employs this conceptual framework to appraise the validity of the societal characterization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the peace diplomacy era. Accordingly, the analysis uses the ‘structured, focused comparison’ qualitative method to investigate attitudinal and behavioral aspects of five cases of intercommunal violence within the Palestinian-Israeli context. The observed cumulative evidence indicates that the unresolved conflict has been exhibiting the conceptual properties of societal conflict throughout more than 25 years since the introduction of the Middle East peace process in 1991. Overall, the study explores the social, psychological, and political aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, accentuates the societal underpinnings of intercommunal violence, and provides basis for perceiving the limited success of peace diplomacy.

This paper deals with the British dystopian novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, in which human clones are forced to donate their organs in an alternate reality set in 1990s England. Through the characters of the novel, various manifestations of suffering are examined from the viewpoint of existentialism. The whole concept of donation might be understood as a metaphorical expression for human life, as well as the omnipresent consciousness of its finitude. Ishiguro has prepared the ground for disturbing discussion where two ostensibly different groups of people – clones, whose only purpose is to donate their vital organs, and “normal people” as the recipients – suddenly appear to be indistinguishable in terms of mortality and the general experience of human existence. This paper focuses on the concept of existential anguish in the context of the novel’s story. Using an unobtrusive science fiction narrative, Never Let Me Go encourages readers to contemplate the essence, meaning and purpose of human life, and it quietly points to topics that are usually treated as highly sensitive: the inevitability of death and apparent absurdity of human existence.

The modern world, in which we live, is regarded as the period of postmodernism. In this period it is hard to perceive the reality in a right way. So are Harold Pinter’s plays. Mostly they are somewhere between reality and absurdity. Based on his writings, he is considered to be, one of the first postmodernist authors. The simplicity of the dialogues makes the feeling that the play is easy to understand, but after reading/watching all the relationships between the characters you feel a bit confused. Nothing is real, and exactly this is the reality of their world, not to be real. And not only the relationships but the characters themselves do not know who they are in reality and it is hard for them to identify their own personality. As it has been already mentioned above, in Pinter’s plays, we can easily find the elements of postmodernism. In the given papers this idea will be expressed depending on the play “The Homecoming”, where Pinter presents us so-called “family”, the group of people, and shows us their emptiness from the family relationships. Even relationships between father and sons, and wife and husband are not real. All this are presented with the very simple language and this is also the essential characteristic of the postmodern world, also the difficulty of understanding each other, and almost meaningless words. Pinter uses other forms of communication such as pauses and silences, in a manner typical of postmodernism. There should be also noted that “the homecoming” the title itself, makes the reader/audience confused, the expectation about perceiving the title at the beginning does not coincide the perception of it in the ending part. The aim of this paper is to highlight the key elements of postmodernism in Harold Pinter’s play “The Homecoming” and to show us once again, that Pinter’s works are really important in our postmodern world.

The author of this paper lays out a system of hermeneutics based on the idea of morbidity aimed at checking the commitment (or the lack thereof) of individual subjects to Victorian ethics. The system stems from Thomas Carlyle’s political agenda based on his concept of “hero worship”. The system is then deployed in order to probe into the purported morbidity of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. According to the author of this paper, the character of Marlow represents a curious mixture of the heroic archetype proposed by Carlyle, combined with new critical standpoints from other philosophical programmes (specifically Nietzsche’s) proposed at the end of the nineteenth century. Firstly, the author of this paper tackles the prototype of the hero (a sort of medium between reality and Divine Truth) Thomas Carlyle posited in his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). The author of this paper then describes how Marlow shares some of the hero’s features (most notably social responsibility and work ethic), but fails to embody the main trait of Carlyle’s “great men”, namely, their ability to recognize Divine Truth. Indeed, rather than asserting the existence of the Truth, Marlow’s narrative reveals the existence of multiple truths, thus creating a sort of politically morbid revision of Carlyle’s formula.

The implications of the colonialist discourse, which suggested that the colonized is a person “whose historical, physical, and metaphysical geography begins with European memory” (Thiong’o, 2009), urged postcolonial writers to correct these views by addressing the issues from their own perspectives. The themes of history and communal/national past thus play a prominent role in postcolonial literature as they are inevitably interwoven with the concept of communal identity. In Petals of Blood (1977), the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explores the implications of social change as brought about by the political and economic development during the post-independence period. This paper seeks to examine the crucial relation between personal and communal/national history and relate it to the writer’s views of principal legacies of colonialism. As Thiong’o states: “My interest in the past is because of the present and there is no way to discuss the future or present separate from the past” (Thiong’o, 1975). Clearly, the grasping of the past and one’s identification with it seems fundamental in discussing national development. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s narratives are always situated in the realm of political and historical context, blending fiction with fact, this paper also aims to elaborate on the implications of his vision.

The paper concentrates on the problem of developing imagination understood as human trait and virtue. To realize the challenge educators have to face huge difficulties as a tendency to flatter the world and its inhabitants dominates and becomes more and more powerful. A musical fairy tale is presented as a valuable and effective school practice. From one side it refers to perennial human custom of listening, telling, and creating stories, fables, and sagas. They may base on real life or refer to imaginary situations. Thus creation may have various realizations, depending on personal knowledge, skills, life experience, cognitive horizon, individual interests and virtues. From the other side the idea of the fairy tale shown in the paper refers to the music and its uncountable possibilities of describing the world. Everything depends only on one’s imagination. The last part of the paper presents the effects of students’ work on musical fairy tales. Those students apart of being instrumentalists and vocalists of the Music Academy of Lodz, Poland plan to become music teachers in compulsory general education.

The aim of the paper is to make an attempt of theoretical synthesis connected with the idea of reception studies. It presents major aspects which are crucial for understanding the reception studies, especially for the reception of antiquity in Victorian literature (for instance chosen critical approaches to literature, contemporary tools for conducting the research like intertextuality). The paper also presents definitions of classics, classical tradition and reception and tries to explain why Victorian times and literature are a perfect research material to examine the reception of antiquity.

Continuous improvement of the teaching process requires teachers to constantly think, analyse and evaluate their own work and try to improve its quality. The paper deals with the introduction of quality management in the teaching process, since one way of improving the quality of education is to build a quality management system at primary schools, focusing exclusively on schools with Hungarian language of instruction. The paper includes the climate survey of the school class aiming at verifying the current state of the social climate of the class in the subject of Slovak language and Slovak literature. When teaching this subject at the primary level of education, attention has to be paid to the fact that pupils in the first year of primary school with Hungarian language of instruction come with different linguistic and speech competences.

The present paper aims to present significant results stemming from the FACS (Full Access to Cultural Spaces) project, launched in 2014 by the University of Macerata and concluded in 2016. In particular, this paper reports on stages one and two of the FACS project which aimed first to explore the state of the art of universal access services across a large variety of museums in Italy and nine other EU countries. Based on the first stage, an analysis of some of the most significant data obtained from a questionnaire sent out to over 1,200 European museums will be presented, with a special focus on multilingual devices and access services for the sensory impaired. The first stage was followed by an eye-tracking study on an Italian museum, Turin’s Museo Nazionale del Cinema (National Cinema Museum), aimed at evaluating visitors’ experience, attitudes and patterns of fruition through a test with a portable eye tracker (Tobii Pro Glasses 2, 50 Hz). Based on this second stage, the fruition of information panels by museum visitors at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema will be explored, specifically focusing on reading patterns and behaviours.

The People’s Republic of China and Japan have been at odds with each other for over a century. Their modern relationship was shaped by imperialism, territorial disputes, and two wars. With the end of the bipolar power structure of the Cold War, both nations are vying for regional leadership. The unresolved territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diàoyú Islands (Senkaku shotō 尖閣諸島/ Diàoyúdǎo jí qí fùshǔ dǎoyǔ 钓岛及其附属岛屿) in the East China Sea serves as a constant catalyst for clashes between both powers and seems to be pushing towards a violent eruption. Thus, this paper assesses the risk of an interstate war between China and Japan in the twenty-first century. By employing the Steps to War theory, each step nations usually take before engaging in war, it will be analysed in order to see how far the brewing Sino-Japanese conflict has developed. This paper aims at answering the questions of the current risk of war, whether there is a palpable shift towards conflict escalation during the twenty-first century, and if so, identifying the main drivers for this development and ascertaining whether threats to stability are currently increasing or decreasing.

In this day and age a continuous flow of ideas and culture takes place, which is part of the globalisation process. These exchanges influence the development of a transcultural literature. Murakami Haruki is not only a transcultural writer, but one of the most popular and internationally acclaimed authors of contemporary Japanese literature who has changed the literary scene in Japan since the publication of his debut novel Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing). Murakami has experimented with postmodern expressions and eventually developed his own writing style, which integrates elements of Western cultures into his works. This paper focuses on the author’s transcultural strategy, which is often reflected in his choice of the setting and time frame, the frequent mentioning of cultural consumer goods and linguistic features such as the utilisation of loanwords. In particular, references to music and literature play a major role in Murakami’s publications. This paper analyses how and to what extent transculturality influences the characters, their actions, and the storyline on the basis of the short story “Nemuri” (Sleep) published in 1989. In the process it is concluded that, above all, these references underpin aspects such as the search for identity, the escape into ‘another world’, and the rejection of societal norms and values.

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) is nowadays remembered as one of the most outspoken female writers and playwrights of the mid-seventeenth-century; one who openly promoted women’s right to education and public displays of creativity. Thus she paved the way for other female artists, such as her near contemporary, Aphra Behn. Although in her times seen as a harmless curiosity rather than a paragon to emulate, Cavendish managed to publish her plays along with more philosophical texts. Thanks to the re-discovery of female artists by feminist revisionism, her drama is now treated as a valuable source of knowledge on the values and norms of her class, gender, and, more generally, English society in the seventeenth century. Cavendish’s two-partite play Bell in Campo (1662) is a fantasy on the world where women can fight united not only against misogyny but also against an actual enemy. While the two plays seem to be focused on the valiant Lady Victoria and her female “Noble Heroicks”, Bell in Campo likewise offers an odd subplot featuring two widows and their lives without their beloved husbands. In the secular discourse of the seventeenth century, widowhood has been seen as either liberating – as when the woman became the sole owner of her husband’s estate and goods, or regained her own, and thus more independent – or degrading – when she became the not-so-welcomed burden on her children’s shoulders and pockets. Other studies on widowhood likewise state its symbolic function, showing women as the bearers of memory, predominantly of the husband and his virtues, and often attending to the spouse’s site of memory. While discussing the cultural history of properly performed widowhood, seen as the final (st)age of a woman’s life, and taking into account Cavendish’s remarkable biography, the present paper offers a close study of her propositions for appropriate widowhood and its positioning in contrast to other states of womankind as presented in Bell in Campo. It will likewise take into account the more or less sublimated evidence for gerontophobia, particularly in relation to women, as shown in Cavendish’s play and seventeenth century culture. The research for this paper was supported by a grant of the National Science Centre, Poland, project number 2014/13/B/H52/00488, “Embodied sites of memory? Investigations into the definitions and representations of old age and ageing in English drama between 1660 and 1750”

Inspired by the fact that there are as many as five different Polish translations of Gunnar Ekelöf’s poem Absentia animi (Non serviam, 1945), this paper aims to present and discuss several criteria that may be helpful to identify, describe and evaluate conditions, tendencies and strategies concerning Polish translations of Swedish poetry. The most crucial of the presented criteria, that may be used in order to ascertain what kind of poetry has been translated from Swedish into Polish so far, is the translator’s attitude to literary canons. It is based on Jerzy Jarniewicz’s distinction between two possible attitudes, i. e. ‘ambassador’ and ‘legislator’, which stand for respectively transferring the established canon from the source-language literature, and creating a new one that can influence the target-language literature. The other criteria discussed refer to the following questions: the affiliation of the translated text with either the source-language literature or the target-language literature (1), the possibility of evaluation of poetry translation (2), and the concept of untranslatability (3). All of the mentioned criteria can help to analyze the specific strategies applied in the translation process. The paper is to be seen as an introduction to a larger ongoing research conducted by the author.

“Food can be studied from the viewpoint of many disciplines” (Mennell, Murcott, and Otterloo 1992: 35), however it is rarely used to identify regionality above nation states. Talking about East Asian food or an East Asian culinary sphere however does imply this regionality. By means of ingredients used, this paper is therefore testing four Asian nations for membership in this potential culinary region. While distinctive local taste preferences are not denied, this paper draws on diverse evidence to argue for common patterns pointing towards an East Asian culinary region. In doing so, it does not define the region exclusively but rather limits its scope for feasibility, inviting future research to expand on its findings.

Summary This essay develops an approach to a phenomenology of shame by taking recourse to different notions of shame found in various humanistic disciplines and in the history of phenomenology. The first part of this paper analyzes some of the central ideas on the nature of shame to be found in cultural anthropology, pedagogy, history and psychoanalysis. The second part discusses the phenomenological theories of shame proposed by Sartre and Levinas. Since their approaches are opposite to each other in crucial respects, the third part of this paper returns to the analyses of shame undertaken in the first part in order to resolve this apparent conflict and advance a coherent theory of shame. The essay’s final thesis is that shame is neither fundamentally destructive nor fundamentally constructive but that it can assume both guises. While it can threaten the subject up to the point of destruction triggering it in aggressive defensive mechanisms, it can also contribute to the development of the subject into a fully free individual capable of acknowledging and answering to others.

In recent years the simulation argument, namely, the idea that our reality is a kind of computer-generated simulation developed for hidden purposes, has acquired some credit and has been appropriated by the conspiracy culture, especially in the works of David Icke, author of paranoid bestsellers and known for his pseudo-theory about Reptilian aliens who secretly rule our world. To understand the reasons for the success of such an implausible pseudo-theory, it is necessary to analyze its genealogy inside popular culture. The methodological proposal underlying this paper is that the analysis of conspiracy theories and pseudo-scientific beliefs can benefit from the contribution of the history of ideas, which traditionally focuses on the reconstruction of the genealogy and the metamorphosis of unit-ideas over time and through different cultural levels. In this way, it is possible to shed light on the background and the peculiar rationality behind these pseudo-theories. The paper highlights New Age appropriation mechanisms of the theories of physicist David Bohm and neuropsychiatrist Karl Pribram (holographic principle), in particular through the pseudoscientific works of the McKenna Brothers (The Invisibile Landscape, 1975) and Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe, 1991) as well as the impact of some sci-fi works based on the simulation argument, especially Philip K. Dick’s novels and The Matrix movie (1999), in exposing the paranoid and conspiracy implications of this argument. The paper also highlights the role of pseudo-scientific concepts as a characteristic aspect of contemporary superconspiracies, which in the age of rationalization and disenchantment seek to embrace a patina of science in order to be better accepted by the public. Wider application of this perspective to other cases of pseudo-scientific beliefs and contemporary conspiracy theories (e.g. flat Earth or chemtrails) could provide useful suggestions on the most effective way of counteracting them.

In the context of Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, this paper analyzes Robert Coover’s depiction of different versions of “reality” as manifested in his short story “Stick Man”. The paper argues that through the depiction of transworld characters oscillating between different ontological levels and modes of representation, Coover treats the relation between fiction and reality, deals, in the context of some post-structuralist theories, with a question of representation connected especially with the relation between language and reality, parodies celebrity culture, mass media manipulation of the audience and consumerism as important aspects of contemporary (American) culture, and points out the replacement of the representation by “simulation” in the contemporary technologically advanced world.

Phonological awareness is considered a key phenomenon having crucial position among abilities and processes which are important and responsible for the development of reading and writing (initial literacy). The paper deals with the significance and level of development of selected cognitive functions of a child in relation to the abilities of phonological awareness. The child’s current cognitive development is a predictor for certain level of phonological awareness. The paper is focused on a description of speech perception, language, oral vocabulary and phonological memory of children in preschool age. It is an output of the research project VEGA no. 1/0637/16 Development of a Diagnostic Tool to Assess the Level of Phonemic Awareness of Children in Preschool Age.

This article presents an innovative approach to teaching English tenses, more precisely to teaching the grammar of questions and negative sentences. It describes, analyses and compares the innovative top-down approach with the traditional methods. It introduces the reader to the theoretical concept of the English predicate structure, on which the new approach is based. Consequently, the paper explains how the theoretical approach may be beneficial in practice, i.e. in English language teaching. Compared to the traditional methods, the paper shows that the grammar of questions and negatives of all tenses can be explained using three simple rules. Finally, the paper lists the advantages and disadvantages of the new method and suggests suitable target students.

Humanity has long been haunted by the notions of Armageddon and the coming of a Golden Age. While the English Romantic poets like Shelley saw hopes of a new millennium in poems like “Queen Mab” and “The Revolt of Islam”, others like Blake developed their own unique “cosmology” in their longer poems that were nevertheless coloured with their vision of redemption and damnation. Even Hollywood movies, like The Book of Eli (2010), rehearse this theme of salvation in the face of imminent annihilation time and again. Keeping with such trends, this paper would like to trace this line of apocalyptic vision and subsequent hopes of renewal with reference to William Golding’s debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and his Pincher Martin (1956). While in the former, a group of young school boys indulge in violence, firstly for survival, and then for its own sake, in the latter, a lonely, shipwrecked survivor of a torpedoed destroyer clings to his own hard, rock-like ego that subsequently is a hurdle for his salvation and redemption, as he is motivated by a lust for life that makes him exist in a different moral and physical dimension. In Lord of the Flies, the entire action takes place with nuclear warfare presumably as its backdrop, while Pincher Martin has long been interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War and the resultant fear of annihilation from nuclear fallout (this applies to Golding’s debut novel as well). Thus, this paper would argue how Golding weaves his own vision of social, spiritual, and metaphysical dissolution, and hopes for redemption, if any, through these two novels.

This theoretical review paper investigates the role of first language (L1) in the mainstream scholarship of second/foreign (L2/FL) language education in the context of language learning, teaching, and bilingual education. The term ‘mainstream’ refers here to the scholarship that is not informed by sociocultural theory in general and Vygotskian sociocultural theory in particular. The paper later explains a Vygotskian perspective on the use of L1 in L2/FL language education and discusses how the perspective may help content teachers in (a) employing L1 in teaching L2/FL content and (b) helping L2/FL students to become self-regulative users of the target language.

Over the last centuries women have fought for their rights. On the pages of literature appeared hundreds of heroines who wanted to change the world. Poniatowska and Orzeszkowa - two women from distant cultures and times - created outstanding literary characters. The novel of Elena Poniatowska, published in 1969, was the chronicle of 20th century in Mexico, which included documentary material about Jesusa Palancares and her story about the revolution in 1910. The work is the epic of the folk hero closed in the labyrinth of solitude and attempt to determine his own character. Jesusa will be compared with Marta, the main character of Eliza Orzeszkowa’s novel, which was published in 1873 and is dedicated to the social rights of women. This contribution aims to discuss the literary techniques and topics in works of the important women-writers in Poland and Mexico. This paper analyses the novels not through feminism, but through the study of culture and politics. In the comparative analysis of Marta and Hasta no verte Jesús mío the paper shows similarities and diversities in the texts, considering differences in national identity and similar social-political situation as a bridge between the cultures.

This paper shows that the experimental group who are exposed to DVD Video Lesson that uses code switching language has an average mean score in the pretest of 1.56, and this increased to an average mean of 3.50 in the posttest. The control group that uses DVD Video Lesson that uses purely English language got an average mean of 1.06 in the pretest and increased to 1.53 in the posttest. Based on the results of the performance posttest taken by the two groups, the experimental group has a dramatic increase in scores from the pretest to posttest. Although both groups had increased in their performance scores from pretest to posttest, the experimental group (code switching language) performs well in the posttest than the control group. As revealed in this findings , there is a significant difference in the posttest scores between the experimental group who are exposed to DVD lesson that uses code switching as a medium of instruction and the control group who are exposed to DVD lesson that uses English. The students who are exposed to the Video Lesson that uses code switching perform well than those students who are exposed in DVD video lesson that uses purely English language. DVD Video lesson that uses code switching as a medium of instruction in teaching social dance is the useful approach in teaching Grade 10 Special Program in the Art students. The language used (code switching) is the powerful medium of instruction that enhances the learning outcomes of the students to perform well. This paper could be an eye opener to the Department of Education to inculcate the used of first language/local language or MTB-MLE, not only in Grade I to III but all level in K to 12 programs, since education is a key factor for building a better nation.

This paper, from the perspective of language learning as a meaning-making process, presents a critical review of the existing research on how pre-use, in-use, and post-use evaluation has investigated the relationship between English language teaching textbooks’ content and learners’ academic literacy development. The paper shows that previous research on these three types of evaluation examined English language teaching textbooks’ effect on English learners’ academic literacy development in an unprincipled and macro way. The research gap identified in these previous studies calls for an improved textbook evaluation framework that integrates a principled learning theory while simultaneously emphasizing macro-constructs (e.g., context) and micro-linguistic features needed for academic literacy development. To this end, this paper proposes a framework informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics-related constructs (e.g., genre, register, meta-meanings, and lexico-grammar system) to optimize the evaluation of English language teaching textbook content.

This paper introduces the results of a two-stage analysis of one Japanese mainstream and one women’s pornographic film from the Internet, asking whether any differences between the gender representations of both sexes can be observed, and whether these differences correspond to the films’ Western counterparts. In the first stage, the films are being analysed regarding their correspondence to characteristics of mainstream pornography and, respectively, criteria of women’s pornography, which were developed through Western feminists’ debates. The detailed case studies of the two films that were selected as examples deal with their general and sexual contents, aesthetic elements, dialogues, and the appearance of the characters. In the second stage, the gender roles are being examined. The analysis firstly confirms that both films correspond to their Western counterparts and that they contain substantial differences concerning contents, aesthetic elements, dialogues, and the quality of the displayed relationship of the characters. Secondly, the paper shows that the gender representations in the mainstream pornographic film stick to conventional gender roles related to this genre, with an emphasis on male-centered sexual practices, which are linked to the female body’s objectification. By contrast, the women’s pornographic film features-besides female-friendly sexual practices-non-sexual aspects of the relationship between the characters and introduces an alternative male role model.

This paper presents an attempt to critically investigate the literary work of Japanese artist Kusama Yayoi (b. 1929). It takes as its object two of Kusama’s early prose texts and, by reading them through a feminist account of identity as fetishism, shows that the two novels presented in this paper-Kurisutofā danshō kutsu (1984) and Rijin kāten no shūjin (1984)-can be understood as a critical engagement with a potentially non-normative feminine self and, in a broader sense, as a negotiation of the state of being a woman in a patriarchal/androcentric society. These features can be traced back to her 1960s sculptural work and her Infinity Net Paintings. By not only situating Kusama’s literary work in a socio-historical context but also demonstrating that it constitutes an intertextual continuum with the rest of her artistic oeuvre, this paper offers an understanding of Kusama’s work besides the dominant narrative of her mental illness and lays the ground for further investigations into her literary texts.