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A little over a century ago, it was discovered that Athanasius' Life of Antony echoes Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras in two different passages, and scholars have since debated the implications of this clear intertextual linkage. Building on these initial findings, the present article adduces a previously undiscovered third echo of the Porphyrian Life and argues that Athanasius deploys this intertext in order simultaneously to subvert Porphyry's idealized portraiture of Pythagoras and to elevate his own hagiographic protagonist Antony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article foregrounds two protagonists with Tourette Syndrome (TS) from contemporary Young Adult (YA) novels written by authors with TS. Grounded in the interdisciplinary field of cultural disability studies in education (CDSE), each protagonist is analyzed for (1) physical manifestations of TS (external depiction), (2) emotional reactions about having TS (internal depiction), and (3) the response of parents and family members, friends, acquaintances, and strangers (societal depiction). Both main characters navigate a world in which they are viewed as abnormal, frequently working through internalized feelings of freakery as they struggle to become more self-accepting during their adolescent years. Such depictions "engage with disability as an isolating, hurtful, and joyful experience" (Bolt 11), allowing for the complexities, tensions, contradictions, and general messiness of embodying TS. These depictions suggest that the authors seek to provide readers with an empathetic understanding of TS, while allowing the simultaneous contemplation of ways in which the embodiment of TS informs us about our culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, disability readings of J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K have engaged with the implications stemming from the protagonist's neurodiversity; however, this discourse can be expanded to account for his physical alterity. From birth, K is stigmatized for his cleft lip, a defining corporeal trait that aptly informs his "life and times." In response, this article argues, K develops a method for negotiating the ableist politics underscoring apartheid South Africa. He studies the body part for which he is stigmatized—mouths. Encountering a series of oral expressions, K gauges each to determine the extent of his participation within his war-torn milieu. Whereas his mother's smile conjures happiness and prompts engagement, the soldier's mocking grin is a threatening gesture from which K distances himself. This article suggests Coetzee's novel questions the state of personhood, asking not who is granted the dignities afforded to the liberal individual in apartheid South Africa, but what that individual must look like in order to experience affections such as compassion and respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the psychoanalytic exploration of motherhood in the film Qala (2022), analyzing the complex dynamics between the protagonist and her mother within a patriarchal framework. Topics include the portrayal of patriarchal motherhood as internalized through generational conflict, the influence of societal and familial expectations on women, and how the film critiques gendered norms within Indian society.

In The Spoils of Poynton Henry James draws on his dramatic experience to represent his protagonists in a spatial configuration enacting a gradation of allocated character space. Mona Brigstock occupies a paradoxical position—absent for much of the novel she initially dominates the mimetic onstage action as the central protagonists represent her speaking of for and about her. Shadowy undifferentiated figures suggest a larger world acting as an offstage chorus to the action. Mona shifts literally and diegetically further from the portrayed action over the course of the novel ultimately being absorbed by the chorus of her social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgender or non-binary (TGNB) people are often present as protagonists of pornographic material. This study is the first to consider TGNB people as critical consumers of sexually explicit material. The sample included 212 self-identified TGNB individuals: 47.2% trans man/transmasculine, 15.6% trans woman/transfeminine and 37.3% non-binary. The online questionnaire consisted of a sociodemographic data collection, multiple-choice questions about preferences and habits concerning pornography, and open-ended questions about the sensations experienced when watching pornography, opinions on the representation of TGNB people in pornography, and their experience in watching pornographic videos with cisgender or TGNB protagonists. The answers were analyzed using the qualitative method of thematic analysis. We identified four themes that appeared across the responses: 1) heteronormativity and cisnormativity in pornography: the need for deconstructing the current cis-het-patriarchial normative and binary system, which dominates pornography except for the ethical porn industry, 2) cisgender pornography compared to TGNB pornography, 3) pleasurable sensations (e.g., identification and empowerment) associated with TGNB pornography, and 4) negative sensations (e.g., objectification and dysphoria) associated with TGNB pornography. Results are discussed in light of the objectification framework and the minority stress model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "haunted house formula" is a central component in every Female Gothic narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, it revolves around a heroine trapped in a gloomy mansion, seeking to escape a male villain. This trope, which covertly explores feminine anxieties such as domestic confinement and familial oppression, recurs multiple times in Shirley Jackson's "house trilogy" as well, namely The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. However, as noted by many critics, while Female Gothic narratives usually conclude with the protagonist's successful escape and her marriage to the male hero, in Jackson's fiction, there is "no way out". Her protagonists remain confined within the domestic space. This essay explores Jackson's reappropriation of the haunted house trope as a symbol of the paranoia experienced by women in 1950s suburban America. The analysis begins by outlining the theme in traditional Female Gothic fiction, followed by an account of the sociohistorical context in which Jackson operated, without dismissing the significancy of her personal life experiences as well. Jackson's "house trilogy" will then be examined, paying particular attention to the ways in which the haunted house formula is subverted to function not as an escape narrative, but as a metaphor for modern women's inescapable confinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Night of the Living Dead (1968) to The Walking Dead (2010–2022), zombie media offers a consistent refrain, namely to avoid becoming a zombie. This refrain makes intuitive sense. Why would anyone welcome becoming a member of a roaming, mindless, and often violent undead horde symbolizing humanity's destruction? However, zombification has affirmative, emancipatory possibilities. In "Epidemiology," from Season 2 of the NBC sitcom Community (2009–2015), we see the zombie's affirmative and emancipatory potential. In this essay, I argue zombification enlivens Community by provoking the show to rethink its relationship to its nominal protagonist, Jeff Winger, and to itself as a piece of avant-garde comedy television produced during the "Golden Age of Television," what media scholars also call, "Peak" or "Prestige TV." In this episode, Community evolves its understanding of its central protagonist by shifting, in some respects, from a conventional and historically predictable character to a character far less conventional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

An analysis of some of the key issues raised, but left unresolved, by Beckett exposing the ways the (typically concealed) notion of identity is constructed and the non-concomitant representation(s) of surrogacy which develop from it in Malone Dies. Involved in both enterprises are fabrications of artifice, themselves very much vulnerable to differential inspiration, which are set over against, but apparently complicit with, a supposedly 'natural' continuity, with both subject to the presumed proximity of death. The coda of the novel, very much a 'codetta', demonstrates how imagined fact and imagined fiction can always be revised, but can never be made to cohere. Malone Dies is throughout seen either as (a) an investigation into whether the body can ever make up its mind when the mind can only partially accommodate the intrinsic shortcomings of the body, or as (b): a demonstration that what the notes for Film think of as 'merely structural and dramatic convenience' is very much subject to the inconvenient truth that there is always some 'deep common point of divergence' to which they can never be satisfactorily reduced; or as both in more or less equal measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies an ecocritical approach to the analysis of the nature/culture divide in Oscar Wilde's "The Young King" and "The Star-Child". These two tales contrast the realm of nature, embodied in the forest, and the realm of civilisation, represented by the city. Both stories focus on the protagonists' journey from wilderness to the city, where not only do they need to become civilised subjects, but they are expected to govern as kings. This physical journey is matched by an internal one since both characters simultaneously undergo a transition from an animal-like state to a human one. I argue that these tales' use of the nature/culture and animal/human dichotomies is closely connected to Wilde's reflections about the Victorian social class system included in The Soul of Man under Socialism. Class struggle is indeed a major preoccupation in traditional folktales, where protagonists tend to magically escape from an initial disadvantaged position. Applying an ecocritical perspective to "The Young King" and "The Star-Child" helps to illustrate how these two tales manage to question the legitimacy of the hierarchical social structure by blurring the lines that separate the civilised subject from the animal one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'El Callejón', arguably the finest restaurant in La Mancha's biggest city, Albacete, is a shrine both to bullfighting and Don Quixote. Points of connection between the two iconic images of Spain are limited, although both employ cruelty as an aesthetic device and have long been championed in La Mancha as matters of regional as well as national pride. To coincide with the 300-year centenary of the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, the writer José Martínez, 'Azorín', received a commission to write a series of newspaper chronicles in which he retraced the steps of Cervantes's protagonists. Journalist and writer Jorge Bustos completed a travelogue of the same route in 2015 to coincide with the fourth centenary celebrations for part two of the Quixote. My quixotic sally in summer 2022 came about by accident rather than design following a journalistic commission to cover what may turn out to have been the final comic bullfight to feature dwarfs in the Peninsula: the experience inadvertently inspired me to reflect on changing practices in and perceptions of Spain as viewed through the lens of arguably the first European novel and an archaic bloody spectacle (long known as the 'national fiesta'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the theoretical dimensions of Joanna Hogg's film The Souvenir (Part I), focusing on its distinctive narrative style and the concept of the implicit narrator. It explores how the film's painterly aesthetics and restricted point of view shape the depiction of its protagonist, Julie, contrasting different critical perspectives on the film's effectiveness and style.

Le présent article voudrait mettre en lumière les manières dont les personnages immigrés de Ben Jelloun et Mouloud Feraoun sont en rupture totale avec les espaces où ils se meuvent, que ce soit en terre africaine ou en France. Une analyse critique du malaise du pays d'origine révèle chez les protagonistes l'attrait du paradis français. Les mauvaises conditions de vie en France, accrues par l'exclusion du fait de leur altérité ramènent les protagonistes au point de départ. Au moyen d'une analyse des conditions de l'immigration et d'un éclairage des modalités du retour au pays natal, je proposerai dans cet article que la question de l'appropriation du territoire demeure une problématique non résolue pour le Nord-africain qui est obligé de se résoudre à l'errance. The purpose of this article is to highlight the ways in which Ben Jelloun and Mouloud Feraoun's immigrant characters are at complete odds with the spaces in which they live, whether in Africa or France. An analysis of the malaise of their home countries demonstrates the protagonists' longing for the paradise of France. Their poor living conditions in France, compounded by the exclusion they experience because of their otherness, bring the protagonists right back to where they started. By analysing the conditions of immigration and shedding light on the modalities of return to the protagonists' homeland, I suggest in this article that the question of territorial appropriation remains an unresolved issue for North Africans, who are forced to resort to wandering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on psychoanalytic and sociocultural theories of suicide and self-harm, this article argues that Hosna's suicide in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1969) and Aisha's self-harm in Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror (1994) delineate two psychological modes of the protagonists' coping with patriarchal oppression. While Aisha's self-harm is therapeutic and cathartic, Hosna's suicide is revolutionary on societal levels. Although both acts stem from the destructive patriarchal practice of forced marriage, they vary in their extremity and significance. While Aisha temporarily acts out her internal distress and communicates her discontent by cutting off her hair, Hosna's suicide embodies a feminist agenda based on self-esteem and resistance and threatens the sovereignty of the whole patriarchal structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Victorian period, the expansion of the domestic sphere into the garden afforded women greater agency within their own physical and psychological landscapes. The Pensionnat in Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) provides Lucy Snowe, the protagonist, with access to a forbidden avenue within the school garden, initially providing her with shelter and solitude. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this article reads the novel through the lens of the 'prospect–refuge' theory developed by the aesthetic geographer Jay Appleton, which considers people's emotional and psychological responses to their environment. It explores the symbolic uses of the garden space to convey the emotional landscape of characters as well as examining how Brontë positions her protagonist in the garden to allow Lucy freedoms not easily afforded within formal indoor settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the significance of incorporating rural young adult literature (YAL) into educational settings to better reflect the experiences of rural students. Topics include the challenges of defining and representing rural identities within literature and education, the personal backgrounds of the authors and their connections to rural communities, and the importance of providing rural students with literature that mirrors their own experiences and realities.

The article highlights the lack of representation of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) protagonists in children's literature and the need for more inclusive texts. Topics include the recent legislative changes requiring the inclusion of AAPI studies in school curricula, the author's personal and professional experiences advocating for diverse reading materials, and the proposal of integrating Asian American literature into classrooms to provide more inclusive educational experience.

The article examines how secondary English classrooms often neglect to include diverse perspectives, particularly Black girl-led science fiction, despite discussions about creating safe and welcoming spaces. Topics include the limitations of current curricula that often exclude science fiction with Black girl protagonists, the impact of this exclusion on students of color, and the application of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) to address these gaps.

Background. Establishing the cause of death when analysing burnt human remains is limiting due to thermal degradation. The heat generated by high combustion degrades the bone structure, definitively hiding the perimortem trauma in most cases, which is crucial for solving a court case. Case report. In November 2019, a completely burnt corpse was found inside a car set on fire near a location in Reggio Calabria, Italy. The corpse was subsequently subjected to an initial radiodiagnostic examination and an anthropological/medico-legal investigation, in order to confirm the biological profile of the unidentified subject, define the cause of death and assess the presence of perimortal lesions through macroscopic analysis of skull fragments subjected to fleshing. Conclusions. The soft tissue fleshing of the burnt skull fragments allowed the reconstruction of a partial calotte. Macroscopic analysis of the consolidated shell identified in the left fronto-parietal region a clear linear fracture, perimortal in nature, compatible with blunt trauma. Autopsy examination revealed the presence of carbonaceous residues within the larynx and especially the trachea, confirming antemortem combustion.The results of the autopsy examination and the anthropological analysis allowed us to state that the net linear fracture, perimortal in nature, caused the subject a complex encephalic trauma, resulting in loss of consciousness and subsequent death due to carbon monoxide inhalation. This result not only confirms the malicious hypothesis, but reveals a deliberate burning of the victim in order to conceal the evidence necessary to solve the forensic case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The article is part of the reflection on the scientific careers of Polish women in the 20th c., focusing particularly on the era of the Polish People's Republic. It examines the intellectual biography, scientific achievements, and subsequent stages of academic advancement of Anna Rynkowska (1903-1984), a Łódź historian, archivist, and popularizer of Łódź history. Rynkowska began her career in the Second Polish Republic at the Łódź branch of the Polish Free University and later at the University of Łódź, in the department headed by Natalia Gąsiorowska-Grabowska. In the 1950s, she decided to join the archival service. On the one hand, the protagonist of this piece was perceived as someone who owed her social advancement to the new system. On the other hand, it is important to note that her advancement began already in the interwar period. It was then that, despite her workingclass background and lack of financial support from her family, she finished gymnasium and graduate studies, and pursued her doctorate. Her life mirrored broader national and regional histories, as well as the changes in Polish science. The article presents findings from archival research, as well as first-hand sources, published memoires, and studies in the history of historiography, science, and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper analyses the acculturation strategies and their psychological outcomes as depicted in postcolonial narrative. For this purpose, John W. Berry's Acculturation Theory is applied to analyze the protagonists in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist as well An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa. It is a qualitative study that applies textual analysis technique to focus on the texts of the two selected novels. The research underscores the differential effects of these strategies in terms of their impact on cultural identity and emotional health by exploring Changez's movement from acculturation to acculturation and Feroza's journey from separation towards integration. Based on textual analysis of the selected novels, these results illustrate how societal and cultural expectations powerfully shaped character experiences thereby showing that creating supportive environments is essential for a successful acculturation process within multicultural settings; with mixed findings about adaptive coping strategies. Here we have an insight into developing post-colonial identities and the nuances of navigating across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the life of Samra Zafar’s as portrayed in her memoir A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose (2019). Though the society tries its best to confine Zafar’s life according to culturally prescribed boundaries, she breaks every convention, makes herself identifiable in everyone’s eyes and sticks to her own view-point. Initially she was, at some level, confused and didn’t know whether to fulfill her personal demands or cultural conventions, which were continuously forcing her to live according to them, but then, with the course of time, she realizes everything and subverts every norm which, for her, was unacceptable. Generally, this work, along with female’s right, also talks about intimate-partner abuse, but this paper discusses only those points where the protagonist becomes aware about her mistreatment and takes action. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) talks about females’ rights especially their involvement in outside affairs and is an important work in the history of feminist cause. Zafar’s memoir is analyzed through this lens. It is obvious that Friedan’s book elements are very similar with Zafar’s personal story; both of them discuss that how a woman can gain her autonomy and agency in a world where everyone is trying to put her back in the world of prison. Moreover, Zafar doesn’t gain an independent life for herself but also for others and becomes an inspiring soul, who tries her best to save others from the same situation. The outcomes, which are derived from this investigation, reveal the rebelliousness and enmity of protagonist towards society, where her education, employment and freedom of action or expression are of utmost significance for her, and she changes her fate with the aid of her intellective passions, especially education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speculative Black Feminist Epistemologies of Worldbuilding for XR is a methodology attempting to address space, the production of space, permission of space, the economy of space, and evading the confines of space by activating possible imaginaries in the development of XR (Extended Reality) environments. Through a praxis straddling academic and artist writing, the argument explores an experimental approach to Worldbuilding for XR by upending the role of Cartesian coordinates as the default measurement of 3D space. The possibilities afforded XR technologies allow for experimenting with unrestricted navigation of Black women's cartographic movements, which is impossible in real-world geography. The core proposition of the Black Feminist Episteme of Worldbuilding is the praxis of de-mapping. This praxis foregrounds fugitive movements and spaces by utilizing XR Worldbuilding affordances as a speculative container for reimagining navigation for identities under conditions of subjugation. Researching and speculating about the affordances of XR is a critical intervention attempting to counter mainstream development and deployment of immersive media technology dedicated to the pedagogical tasks of gaming, militarization, and other real-world training applications. The first move toward the praxis of de-mapping, an arrival, is acknowledging the material composition and operation of XR technology. The second move and the first departure explore intentional disorientation. The third move interrupts the linearity of departures and arrivals to establish mobility as a countercartographic methodology by referencing the female protagonists in the study by Octavia E. Butler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Literature & Humanities / Edebiyat ve Beşeri Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Ataturk University Coordinatorship of Scientific Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In "The Country of the Blind" (1904) H. G. Wells imagines a community of congenitally blind citizens who have fashioned an accessible built environment in which they thrive. As he revises that story thirty-five years later, he imagines that community obliterated due to its members' folly. In Wells's story, the blind have become the "normals," possessing the cultural capital to designate the sighted protagonist a lunatic who could be "cured" through surgical blinding. In 1904 that fantasy was tolerable, but in 1939 it appeared to parallel events in Nazi Germany, where, Wells suggests, the "deranged" and "defective" rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1895 novels Professor Hieronimus and its sequel På St. Jørgen [ At St. Jorgen's ], the Norwegian novelist Amalie Skram fictionalized her experience of incarceration in a Danish mental hospital. With a naturalist focus on hospital power structures, Skram has her patient-protagonist Else Kant interview fellow patients and question staff about institutional policy. Else's investigation lays the ground for the novels' decadence, highlighting her doctor's vindictiveness, introducing her to uncanny fellow patients, and escalating her panic and unreliability. Early passages about Else's painting and hallucinations further reveal Skram's interest in irrationality and decay. Skram's asylum fictions prove convincing specimens of the hybridity between naturalism and decadence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel "How to Do It" narrates the story of female college student Xu Jingjing's repeated setbacks and heartache in order to realize her career dream of taking root in the provincial capital, with the theme of the difficulty of college students' employment. The novel describes the pressure of power and capital on the bottom, and constructs a thick barrier in front of ordinary students from the bottom. How to break through becomes a test and challenge, but also a pain point. Adhering to faith and not violating moral principles means enduring more difficult tests, having more outstanding talents, being able to withstand more complex temptations, and living a dignified and valuable life. The novel repeatedly asks the question of "How to Do It" at the intersection of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and kindness and cruelty'. On the one side, there are thorns everywhere, It is difficult to move forward, and may even draw blood, but it achieves a stronger self while surmounting difficulties; on the other side, it is a smooth road, but it may be increasingly far away from the true self. The protagonist chooses to fight, grow, inspire and surpass, which is highly enlightening. With a heart towards the sunshine, you can dilute the mist and realize the noble value of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With this paper, we aim to look into the issue of identities among the immigrant population living in the West using an integrative multimodal approach. Although this topic has been in fashion for quite some time, most studies analyze either the political or mass-media discourse related to immigrants or reflect on how immigrants see themselves, on the basis of textual analysis of immigrants' narratives and interviews. Our study takes a different approach and analyzes a video recorded and published on YouTube, focusing not only on the text but also on by analyzing non-verbal manifestations of changing positions on the part of the narrator. In particular, we examine identities/positions that the main protagonist, a Moroccan immigrant named Omar, assumes in the course of the story. We show how one particular gesture (pointing), coupled with other verbal and non-verbal markers, can signal a change of identity/position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article links Samuel Richardson's final novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) to the twenty-first-century Proud Boys in order to examine seriously the implications of two often overlooked aspects of both: Grandison's virginity and the Proud Boys' "No Wanks" policy. This policy, which limits members' masturbation, can serve to elucidate the sexual politics of Grandison, as both the modern-day men's rights group and the eighteenth-century novel valorize male sexual restraint as a form of domestic dominance. This article argues that Grandison's idealization of male sexual restraint reinforces the portrait of male virility for which Richardson's earlier novels were criticized, rendering the virile male protagonist palatable to readers of the domestic novel's courtship plot. The valorization of restraint exhibited by Richardson's hero and the Proud Boys advances a sublimated understanding of male virility that works to solidify the fiction of sexual essentialism that still permeates our culture today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the protagonist "F" of Samuel Beckett's Ghost Trio (1976) relies equally on musical and non-musical listening while awaiting a mysterious female visitor, only his immersion in Beethoven's music has been deemed critically significant. In what is the first sustained account of the intra- and extra-diegetic importance of non-musical listening in Ghost Trio , I stage a mutually illuminating encounter between the teleplay and Proust, Beckett's 1931 study of À la recherche du temps perdu. F's ambient listening, with its distinctive inferential mechanics, emerges as Beckett's intertextual return to the Proustian motif of "indirect" perception that had engaged him as a young critic. My reading of Ghost Trio conversely re-appraises Beckett's critical engagement with the Recherche 's soundscape. I foreground his many allusions to non-musical listening across Proust and his marginal annotations in the novel—still a largely untapped resource in this regard—while establishing their relevance to a phase of Beckett's oeuvre where Proust's influence is believed to have dissipated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five types of emotional engagement with fiction may be identified in relation to the formal innovations of modernist novels. Two recent novels that owe their stylistic distinctiveness in part to the heritage of Joyce's Ulysses draw on these possibilities in very different ways: Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport and Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation. The former inventively develops the style of the "Penelope" episode at great length, inviting the reader to share the protagonist's dismay at several features of contemporary American culture, while the latter may be seen as the heir of the "Ithaca" episode, evoking an emotional response by indirect means rather than through a direct appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marjane Satrapi's 2003 graphic memoir Persepolis is a coming-of-age story set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. 19 years after its publication, at a time when we are witnessing increased cultural displacement across the globe, Persepolis's representation of an adolescence lived across and between cultures feels as insightful and provocative as ever. Satrapi explores Marjane's childhood development as she grows into adolescence and experiments with identities. In Persepolis, Marjane's coming-of-age does not result in her becoming comfortable or fixed in a particular identity (or identities) but represents Marjane's acceptance of her liminal and marginal status in the various cultures she occupies. Marjane is shown to be engaged in an ongoing journey through identity formations that does not end when the memoir does. In this essay, we consider the chapter titled 'The Cigarette' from Persepolis to explore how Satrapi develops a narrative style and an aesthetic for representing a liminal adolescent experience. Through her use of an episodic structure; simple, graphic repetition; and dialogic and multivocal encounters between the child and adult self and the protagonist and her mother, Satrapi shows the complex negotiations with 'the self' that characterise her coming-of-age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of liminality is fundamentally borrowed from anthropology to explore its application in literary and cultural studies, which remains largely understudied to this date. Liminality essentially signifies a state of in-betweenness characterised by significant factors, such as uncertainty, ambiguity, anxiety, loss of previous values, identity-crisis, isolation and dilemma. The present paper intends to investigate the tropes of liminality in the graphic novel as well as its application to understand the process of transformation of the protagonist as expressed through grids, gutters and panels by employing Victor Turner's 'Theory of Liminality'. Further, the later part is dedicated to explore the silhouettes of activism using Turner's concept of 'anti-structure', through the theme of vegetation visible throughout the novel. The present work not only attempts to trace the liminality of the protagonist in Gendry-Kim's Grass(2019) but also ventures into establishing the liminal status of the genre of graphic novel itself. The study, thus, presents us an opportunity to explore one of the aggressively silenced and traumatic histories of 'comfort women issue' through the lens of Gendry-Kim's recently published graphic novel Grass(2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friedrich Nietzsche is the protagonist of many novels, but for authors of biofictions of the German iconoclast, their Nietzsche is not supposed to be seen as the real Nietzsche. Following Nietzsche's method in Thus Spoke Zarathustra , which is an early and vitally important biofiction, authors of biofiction about Nietzsche use the life of the German philologist to give readers themselves. By analyzing and interpreting Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a biofiction, I show how authors of Nietzsche biofictions fictionalize and metaphorize, rather than represent, the life of Nietzsche in order to project into existence their own vision of life and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry James's "Paste" (1899) displays enormous complexity, if we consider the possibility of a "covert progression" or counter-narrative, in which the character of Mrs. Guy is not antagonist, but protagonist, and potentially an admirable example of the late-nineteenth-century "New Woman." James is sometimes associated with anti-feminist views; yet here he creates a bold and defiant alternative to subjugated femininity and to conventional Victorian sexual morality. Whether readers are meant to find this figure appealing, however, is ultimately left open, as is much in this short story, which explicitly highlights the difficulty of assessing "value" in either human or material terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on exploring depression through Georges Perec's "Un homme qui dort," particularly examining how the novella grapples with categorizing and confronting mental distress. Topics include the therapeutic potential of literature, Perec's text as an uncertain guide for readers facing similar situations, and the ambiguity surrounding the protagonist's experience, analyzed through close reading and discussion of narrative elements.

This study examined how commemorative journalism shapes collective memory by exploring 18 supplements and special projects commemorating Israel's 70th anniversary. The research questions focused on three central narrative characteristics of journalism: protagonists, plots, and narrators. Our examination revealed the ways in which those located at the fringes of the ethnic-national community were excluded from these journalistic narratives, conveying mostly a tale of Israeli strength, narrated mostly by Jewish men. We maintain that the current dominant memory version narrated by the supplements reflects a withdrawal from and rejection of recent, more critical journalistic readings of the Israeli past. This conscious return to older, hegemonic patterns of narration of the national past could be understood within the context of two central conditions, shaping the construction of Israeli reality over the past two decades: the growing dominance of the political Right and changes in Israel's media map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palestinian filmmakers are largely dependent on foreign funding for production and on foreign festivals for publicity. Making a Palestinian film can seem as "impossible" as remaining Palestinian amid fragmenting effects of occupation/war and peace accords. Against such pressures, Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir tells stories with protagonists, who, for foreign funders, can seem like "unruly subjects" for remaining Palestinian. As a consequence, her films themselves can seem like "unruly subjects" to industry film critics. Her films like twenty impossibles (ka'inana ashrun mustaheel, 2003), Salt of This Sea (Milh Hadha al-Bahr, 2008), When I Saw You (Lamma Shoftak, 2012), and Wajib (2017) tell stories about Palestinians debating each other (rather than Israelis via US negotiators) during key moments in Palestinian history, including the Nakba (1948), the Naksa (1967), the Oslo Accords (1993), and Al-Aqsa or second Intifada (2000–05). Jacir's protagonists refuse the limiting choices on offer. They demand to be recognized as Palestinian, as does Jacir as a Palestinian filmmaker against the efforts of Western industry critics, festivals, and funders to label her as an "Arab woman filmmaker," often carrying colonial assumptions of "oppressed" or "exceptional" women throughout Southwest Asia ("the Middle East"). Her films do more than offer a glimpse of everyday life to "humanize" Palestinians; they are "unruly subjects" that unsettle assumptions to reframe the debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian, this article responds to the polarization in current critical responses to empathy, which is framed either as key to intersubjective understanding and social cohesion, or as distracting and narcissistic. Examining the vegetal metamorphosis of the novel's protagonist Yeong-hye, the article argues two things: first, that the text's exploration of animality facilitates an evaluation of intra- and inter-species relationships which leads to a more nuanced account of empathy within a broader context of "feeling politics" (Berlant 111); and secondly, that an irresolvable tension between animality and vegetality persists throughout the novel, which tempers the claim (both within and beyond the text) that we can redeem our humanimality through an escape into vegetal subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attraverso l'analisi dell'inedito carteggio tra la direttrice di biblioteca svizzera Adriana Ramelli e la scrittrice italo-cubana Alba de Céspedes, il saggio propone un'inedita riflessione su due intellettuali protagoniste della seconda metà del Novecento che tessero nel tempo una forte e sincera amicizia. Rappresentanti della stessa generazione, donne coraggiose, fuori dagli schemi, il loro carteggio lascia emergere importanti riflessioni sull'essere donne, intellettuali, professioniste e personaggi pubblici in bilico tra passato e modernità, su quel "confine" spaziale e temporale che, come Gianna Pomata ha ben evidenziato, permette di raccontare con parole nuove la storia delle donne attraverso una cronologia dello stare al mondo diversa da quella maschile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]