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Illness narratives invite practitioners to understand how biomedical and traditional health information is incorporated, integrated, or otherwise internalized into a patient's own sense of self and social identity. Such narratives also reveal cultural values, underlying patterns in society, and the overall life context of the narrator. Most illness narratives have been examined from the perspective of European-derived genres and literary theory, even though theorists from other parts of the globe have developed locally relevant literary theories. Further, illness narratives typically examine only the experience of illness through acute or chronic suffering (and potential recovery). The advent of biomedical disease prevention methods like post- and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PEP and PrEP) for HIV, which require daily pill consumption or regular injections, complicates the notion of an illness narrative by including illness prevention in narrative accounts. This paper has two aims. First, we aim to rectify the Eurocentrism of existing illness narrative theory by incorporating insights from African literary theorists; second, we complicate the category by examining prevention narratives as a subset of illness narratives. We do this by investigating several narratives of HIV prevention from informants enrolled in an HIV prevention trial in Kenya and Uganda in 2022.

This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to examine the differences for students across language status. In our study, we sought to find the average levels of text length, cohesion, connectives, syntactic complexity, and word-level complexity in this sample across Grades 7-12 by sex, by English learner status, and for essays scoring above and below the median holistic score. Mean levels of variables by grade suggest a developmental progression with respect to text length, with the text length increasing with grade level, but the other variables in the model were fairly stable. Sex did not seem to affect the model in meaningful ways beyond the increased fluency of women writers. We saw text length and word level differences between initially designated and redesignated bilingual students compared to their English-only peers. Finally, we see that the model works better with our higher scoring essays and is less effective explaining the lower scoring essays.

Abstract: With the advent of ChatGPT and other large language models, the number of artificial texts we encounter on a daily basis is about to increase substantially. This essay asks how this new textual situation may influence what one can call the “standard expectation of unknown texts,” which has always included the assumption that any text is the work of a human being. As more and more artificial writing begins to circulate, the essay argues, this standard expectation will shift—first, from the immediate assumption of human authorship to, second, a creeping doubt: did a machine write this? In the wake of what Matthew Kirschenbaum has called the “textpocalypse,” however, this state cannot be permanent. The author suggests that after this second transitional period, one may suspend the question of origins and, third, take on a post-artificial stance. One would then focus only on what a text says, not on who wrote it; post-artificial writing would be read with an agnostic attitude about its origins. This essay explores the implications of such post-artificiality by looking back to the early days of text synthesis, considering the limitations of aesthetic Turing tests, and indulging in reasoned speculation about the future of literary and nonliterary text generation.

This article is a translation of one originally published in 1948 in Review of Documentation. The article examines the relationship between documents, broadly defined, and culture. More specifically, it examines the connections between experience, reason and the stability of documents as media technologies evolve over time.

This article examines what activism looks like in an age of “deep writing.” As alumni find their ways through multiple domains of life after graduation, what role does writing play in helping them orient themselves toward engagement with the world around them? This article reviews relevant literature, including some of the difficulties of defining activism, and then analyzes focus group data in which participants describe different kinds of activism and the roles that writing plays in them. Wayfinding provides a framework for understanding how alumni writers orient their understanding of their own writing practices.

There are few pirates in the Latin American cultural tradition even though piracy was a fundamental force shaping the trajectory of the colonial and post-colonial Americas. This essay traces the seeming impropriety of piracy in relation to a genealogy in which pirates are themselves figure of the improper, conduits for improper wars and markers of struggles over the proper relationship to property. Readings of a few key texts – Machado de Assis’ “Canção de Piratas” (1894), J. L. Borges’ “La viuda Ching, pirata” (1935), Alejo Moguillansky’s film El escarabajo de oro (2014), and Nuruddin Farrah’s Crossbones (2011) – take the textualizations of piracy as reflections on the carrying capacity of form.

Abstract: The Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS) convened its first meeting at the University of Chicago in March 2000. Since then, the historical literature on not only the Armenian Genocide, but also Ottoman Armenians more generally, has grown ever more sophisticated. This essay takes stock of the growing visibility of Armenians in Ottoman historiography over the last two decades, and other developments. In particular, it asks why historical scholarship on Armenians has yet to have a transformative effect on the frameworks used to study the Ottoman Empire's history? The essay first identifies a series of obstacles that have prevented Armenian and Ottoman studies scholarship from developing a shared set of questions. It then offers suggestions for more carefully addressing the underlying problematics of empire that can bridge this divide without inadvertently reproducing national or regional paradigms that have long left an imprint on Ottoman historiography.

This article scrutinizes the use of the silent gaze and its surrounding context in Costa Rican director Hilda Hidalgo's film adaptation (2009) of Gabriel García Márquez's Del amor y otros demonios ['Of Love and Other Demons'] (1994). Despite similarities in plot from novel to film, Hidalgo's frequent employment of the silent gaze among the female characters draws from the source text's lack of dialogue and occasional loose details to create a space for the voices and concerns of Latin American and Caribbean women not present in the novel. In this way, the technique reveals a richly feminist commentary that underscores women's unconscious desire for feminine influences, bonding experiences, unity and personal agency through the act of observing one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publications on gender and spirituality have been prominently featured in many journals indexed by various databases. This article employs bibliometric analysis to investigate publication trends on gender and spiritual issues in literary studies within the Scopus database. This research utilized the VOSviewer application to analyze keyword co-authorship, co-occurrence, and citations. The bibliographic data for this study were downloaded from the Scopus database on January 8, 2024, with a search restriction over the last ten years between 2014 and 2023, and under two fields: 1) social sciences and 2) arts and humanities. The results show that of the 34 eligible publications, there are four main highlights. First, the co-authorship of research publications is relatively low and is only undertaken by a few researchers. Second, the co-occurrence of keywords reveals three main research trends over these ten years: gender-based experiences and practices, gender-based concepts, and religion and spirituality. However, keywords related to literary criticism did not appear. Third, the number of citations for documents is uneven and is dominated only by certain authors, affiliations, and countries. Lastly, network visualization reveals limited interconnectivity between topics, such as gender spirituality and literature. These results conclude that interdisciplinary research in the field of literary criticism remains widely open to address existing research gaps and encourage researchers to collaborate on related topics.

I study the public library and the penny leaflet as two poles in the continuum between control and freedom of the reading practices of working class Chileans in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In what follows I sketch out two macro developments. First, the way in which, challenged by an expanded social imagination which has fully incorporated migration and transnational cultural processes within its horizon, political and critical imaginaries are forced to expand. New reterritorializing social practices, whatever their origins or structural causes, demand new ways of conceptualizing those processes. Some of the limits that are quickly reached in this impasse are those of the national political and critical research imaginations. The Nation-state and the social sciences it produced are challenged to comprehend, visibilize or invisibilize, the new social processes unleashed by globalization. Secondly, there is another crucial epochal tension between imagination as a way of social control and as a means of (potential) social transformation. The dynamics of visibility and invisibility affecting newly globalized Latino populations in the U.S. often times manifest as a contradiction or tension between two forms of such in/visibility: cultural citizenship and cultural consumption, difference and recognition on the one hand, and equality both political and economic, on the other. My contention is that Latino Studies must be a place to think these tensions as a way of intervening in the uncovering of the in/visibilization of the social dynamics involved.

The point of departure for these reflections is the status of “Hispanism” as an aesthetic mode (and possibly an elitist position or ideology in Philippine society) in a largely ignored debate within Philippine nationalist circles after World War II. In this instance, Dr. Blanco is thinking of the polemic between nationalist historian and poet Teodoro Agoncillo and Filipino national artist Nick Joaquin following the inauguration of a Philippine national republic formally recognized by the League of Nations. In this paper, he wants to focus on one, perhaps the key, manifestation of this “Hispanism” – Joaquin’s recovery of the baroque mode of representation, as a way of returning to the baroque aesthetic of catastrophe in various colonial works (particularly the Pasyon and the Balagtasan awit). By examining the scenography of Joaquin’s “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino,” he will turn to various aspects of Western baroque representation highlighted by Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, and Jose Antonio Maravall in order to highlight the relationship between colonial sovereignty and the onset of colonial modernity as the “disenchantment of the world.”

Bringing together Frankfurt School poetics and the history of Argentina and Borges's ongoing alterations to his poetic archive, this essay studies his minor poem "El truco" to understand how Borges's poetics strive to reimagine Argentine politics and the project of writing history.

The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside contains a unique archive of slash fan fiction and yaoi/boys' love (BL) manga. Slash and BL refer to fanmade or commercially published works of male homosexual erotica or romance historically made for the pleasure and consumption of women. These fandoms have been a minor subject of academic scholarship for years, though few archives or libraries are actively acquiring them. In this article, we explore the value and challenges associated with collecting materials containing taboo subject matter. We contextualize this process with an overview of the history of archival theory, the emergence of critical archive studies, and the intersection of niche fan communities with feminist and queer studies frameworks.

This essay rethinks the meanings of German, critique, and new to delineate the contours of German studies in the present historical moment. The discussion of the concept of “German” suggests an understanding of German studies as a discursive site for reflecting on the political and for making sense of community and belonging, while the discussion of “critique” suggests an approach that places German thought and literature in the pluriverse of thinking and imagination around the world. Finally, by tracing the morphing of the imperative of newness into singularity, the essay proposes to conceive of German studies in terms of a curated exhibition of the ideas, visions, images, and models of community associated with the designation “German.”

This essay explores the intentio operis in the use of transatlantic bridges that are sometimes real, other times rhetorical, and others imaginary that Alberto Ruy Sánchez draws between his country and Morocco. It also looks at the representation of Moroccan space and women, arguing that Ruy Sánchez falls into exoticizing Orientalism with tints of colonial nostalgia, particularly when portraying Moroccan women. Finally, it explores how the author creates his own precursors through the quotes and literary references in his five novels. Presenting himself as a reader of Arab erotic literature and Sufi sacred texts, Ruy Sánchez suggests that he is rewriting classic literary texts, thus creating his own literary lineage and diachronically situating his work within a literary tradition that remains on the margins of Mexican national coordinates to approach, instead, the canon of Arabic literature. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Este trabajo se desprende de una investigación más amplia de la obra Letras de la Nueva España (1948) de Alfonso Reyes, conjunto de siete ensayos, cuyo séptimo lugar corresponde a “La Era Crítica (XVIII y XIX)”. Proponemos un análisis de este ensayo, que se apoyará, en primera instancia, en presupuestos conceptuales del propio Reyes sobre sus conceptos de cultura y síntesis cultural presentes en sus ensayos-conferencias “Notas sobre la inteligencia americana” (1936) y “Posición de América” (1942), y lo observaremos a partir del concepto poscolonial que propone Ángel Rama, del intelectual de la ciudad letrada en su libro La ciudad Letrada (1998). Este contexto conceptual e histórico-cultural será la base para un análisis del discurso de algunos momentos del ensayo, desde las perspectivas de Teun Van Dijk (2000), Helena Calsamiglia y Amparo Tusón (1999), así como desde la teoría de la enunciación de Emile Benveniste (1971). Esto nos permitirá comprender el lugar que Letras de la Nueva España y el ensayo en cuestión ocupan en la obra de Reyes, y la forma en la que el autor se integra al quehacer cultural mexicano y latinoamericano a partir de, en este caso, su valoración de las letras mexicanas del periodo colonial.

In the early periods of Estonian literary poetry, rhyme was almost an integral aspect of verse. However, since the late 1950s, its significance in written poetry has gradually diminished, relegating it to a marginal position by the end of the 20th century. Contemporary acclaimed poetry collections of the 21st century predominantly feature free verse, while rhyme remains prominent in popular poetry styles like pop music lyrics, stage poetry, social media poetry, and hip-hop. Consequently, the theoretical discourse on rhyme has also resurfaced as a relevant issue. This article has two objectives. The first objective is to provide an overview of the language-based issues related to Estonian rhyme, previous approaches to rhyme, and the development of Estonian rhyming poetry from the 17th century to the present day. The second objective is to establish a new methodology for studying the formal structure of Estonian rhyme, analyzing it at the phonemic, prosodic, and word boundary levels. This methodology is applied to the statistical analysis of end-rhyme poetry by authors from various periods, ranging from the second half of the 19th century to contemporary popular poetry. The research reveals two different operational directions in poetry – on the one hand, the aspiration towards perfect rhyme, accurate in both phonemic and durational structure, and on the other hand, resistance to automation and the use of “worn-out” rhymes, employing all possible freedoms in rhyming techniques. It is noteworthy that in the popular poetry of the new era, strategies found in the poetry of the 19th century are being revived. Rap poetry, in particular, is rich in rhyming techniques, incorporating all previously established diversification strategies, from full rhymes to various modernist experiments.

This study, the first of its kind, closely examines Reinaldo Arenas's original Antes que anochezca manuscript, a text long shrouded in mystery; in the process, it reveals surprising redactions that were not included in some of the published versions of the autobiography. It provides contextualization and analysis of the collective process of both written and oral composition of Antes, as well as the editorial process carried out by Arenas and his "literary team" posthumously. The author also explores a multitude of relevant adjacent materials, in addition to a second Antes manuscript, edited by Dolores Koch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]