European Journal of English Studies最新文献

{"title":"The relevance of virality to the present","authors":"Greta Olson","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148407","url":null,"abstract":"The current EJES issue on Going Viral could not be more pertinent. We are dealing with the ramifications of the continued war in Ukraine, new forms of fugitivity and migration, an impending energy crisis and other shortages during this and the coming winter, an ongoing climate crisis, and new threats to democracy. We as individuals and the globe struggle to make sense of what the COVID-19 pandemic means, how to live with its aftermath, if it is indeed over. We ask what an era that has been dominated by a virus means for the future.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"323 - 324"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45935318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute”: Donald Trump as patient zero and superspreader of Covid-19 cartoon logic","authors":"S. Polak, Anne Zwetsloot","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148401","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Donald Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and particularly around his own bout with the disease, the intersection of “traditional” themes and tropes – i.e. the representation and narration of communicable disease, presidential image-making, and the visual language of play and politics – come together in novel manners. We will argue that Trump’s employment of cartoon logic relies on his grotesquely exaggerated treatment of pre-existing norms, which generates speculation, innuendo, and in reaction an often cartoonesque meme production. Through an investigation of three case studies – the rumour that Trump would return into public view revealing a Superman shirt, Trump’s slapdash suggestion that imbibing disinfectant might cure Covid-19, and his treatment of face masks – we arrive at the conclusion that cartoon logic can generate online political constituencies. The memes’ visual rhetoric moves gradually from cartoonesque, narrative, and directly related to Trump’s body and person (as in the case of the Superman rumour), to more photographic and more directed at broader consumer behaviour, though still decidedly absurd (as in the case of the disinfectant claim), to acutely and directly politicising constituents’ everyday behaviour (as in the case of Trump’s masking and unmasking claims).","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"377 - 398"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41842237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kill is kiss: viral words bringing the end of rhetorical discourse in Pontypool","authors":"Seda Pekşen","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148404","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Bruce McDonald’s 2008 film Pontypool is based on Tony Burgess’s novel Pontypool Changes Everything (1998). In the film, certain words become viral and infect people, turning them into zombies. The audience experiences these events on the surface level as a sense of meaninglessness. Yet, on a deeper level, the film highlights the meaninglessness of everyday language and the urgent need to cleanse language of the medium through which the virus spreads – rhetorical discourse. This article explores the premise of the film in the antidote to viral words that it offers. A radical shift in the perception of language finds meaning not in words, but in feelings and experiences, thereby obviating rhetoric and creating posthuman freeplay. The essay elucidates this posthuman understanding of meaning as it is presented in a narrative that transcends a poststructuralist understanding of language.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"419 - 438"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42390133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capitalism and the politics of disease: then and now","authors":"Rahime ÇOKAY NEBİOĞLU","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148888","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article crystallises the links between capitalism and the politics of diseases. Capitalism is an economic and political system that depends not only on the production of capital, but also on the production of social relations. Just as it produces commodities, it reproduces and distributes new social relations by designating rivalries and alliances. Pandemic outbreaks are ideal conditions for capitalism to reinforce or reformulate these categories and put them into practice by naming and metaphorising diseases accordingly. The reconfiguration of capitalism brings about a shift in the typologies of enemies, the metaphors used to describe diseases, and the way diseases are confronted. This article aims to trace the shift in the politics of disease in two film productions dealing with pandemic outbreaks, Panic in the Streets (1950) and Covert One: The Hades Factor (2006), and in the mainstream media coverage of Covid-19 images in light of capitalism’s evolution from the Keynesian model to its contemporary understanding.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"339 - 357"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44777682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Slowing down earlier in the pandemic went Well – so why speed back up?","authors":"S. Boodts, Frederik Van Dam","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148424","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"325 - 328"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46485538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spread the word: mattertext as bio-art","authors":"Başak Ağın","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148403","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The recent material turn in the posthumanities has foregrounded the idea that agency is not unique to humans but is a shared capacity of all bodily natures of the planet. With this convolution – or rather the deconstruction – of the conventional ways of producing knowledge, the research methodologies at hand have experienced a turn towards a postqualitative mindset, which revolves around the idea of diffraction rather than reflection, and becoming-with the object of analysis, thus necessitating the involvement of the so-called knowing subject into their own research. Bridging the ontological gap between the observer and the observed, the posthumanist/new materialist theories underline the inextricable links between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and matter and text. Built on these premises, this article presents two vignettes enmeshed with the theoretical concepts from the posthumanities and thereby diffractively reads Laura Splan’s bio-artistic practices on SARS-CoV-2 as embodiments of what the author calls “mattertextuality.” Splan’s work creates conversations between the artistic and the scholarly, while the artist’s engagement with her own work enhances further dialogues with the author’s academic research on her coined term, “mattertext.”","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"439 - 461"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42023891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Going viral: chronotopes of disaster in film and media","authors":"Sotirios Bampatzimopoulos, G. Mademli","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148396","url":null,"abstract":"Modern Western thought has always had a propensity for crisis narratives. The anticipation (or self-fulfilment) of an abrupt breakthrough that leads to a paradigm shift in various domains of human experience has defined a broad spectrum of disciplines, discourses, and practices, which are based on the idea of linear progress and the necessity of a fundamental breach between the past and the present. The use of the crisis metaphor, with its medical rather than theological origins, has from the late seventeenth century forward been used to diagnose states of emergency, degeneration, and vanishment. It has gradually established itself as an “expression of a new sense of time which both indicated and intensified the end of an epoch” (Koselleck 2006, 358). The global outburst of Covid-19 in early 2020 more than strengthened the association of the biological with the political body. The outbreak also highlighted the need for humanities scholars to be vigilant and to sharpen existing hermeneutical tools in readings of an unprecedented phenomenon and related public interventions. More importantly, the emergence of Covid-19 has fostered a discussion of emergent subjectivities, which are newly imagined, while highlighting the relationship between the fragile and ephemeral and the time-sensitive and exigent. We take as a premise that a specific temporality unravelled during the pandemic crisis period. This period spans from late 2019, when the first news coverage of the virus in Wuhan, China, circulated throughout international media, to the spring of 2022, when most countries around the world lifted their coronavirus-related health measures, thus inaugurating the recovery phase. During this period, we detect a dynamic, dialectical understanding of time. On the one hand, during the early days of the pandemic, dominant discourse centred on the theme of the hiatus, the gap, the rapture of everyday normalcy, prompting people to examine the current moment through the comparison to radically different ways of being. On the other hand, and towards the latter part of the pandemic, the dominant message concerned the endorsement of an accelerated culture, constantly evolving through technological","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"329 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46770533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The dying city and the sick messiah: apocalypse and utopia in Neo Tokyo","authors":"Sotirios Triantafyllos","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148405","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s film Akira (1988) not simply as a touchstone of the 1980s cyberpunk genre dealing heavily with the themes of post-humanism, but as a metaphor for utopia’s demise and the death drive of a world in decline; as a cinematic text, it is paradigmatic of postmodernity’s cultural formations and utopianism’s fate in the age of late capitalism. In particular, by focusing on its setting (the city of Neo Tokyo), and by examining it both as a concrete space and as a metaphor, this article calls us to understand the urban landscape not as just another cyberpunk city embedded with the genre’s dystopian features and clichés, but as a space that undergoes numerous transformations from a modernist utopia to a post-modern hell-scape in its society’s effort to construct a better and just world. Finally, a significant part of the article focuses on the idea that a catastrophe is an opportunity for renewal. Thus, special attention is given to the representation of millenarianism in Akira, and Tetsuo – the story’s central antagonist – as a yonaoshi, a deity destined to bring the end of a corrupt society and usher in the birth of a new one.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"462 - 479"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43537407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender roles, parenthood, and the ethics of care in pandemic media narratives pre- and post-Covid-19","authors":"Raffaella Baccolini, Chiara Xausa","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2148400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148400","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Crises have always brought along transformations in gender identities, roles, and relations: while much has changed in Western culture regarding the role of women and notions of masculinity are also challenged, efforts to control female roles, bodies, and sexualities persist. For example, Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream has described the post-9/11 age as an era of reconstituted “traditional” manhood, redomesticated femininity and nuclear family “togetherness.” The question that lies at the basis of this paper is whether – and if so, how –science fiction cinema continues to respond to moments of crisis and vulnerability through the old myth of protective manhood and feminine weakness. By identifying two cases of insecurity – climate change and the coronavirus pandemic – we analyse a recent film (Bird Box, 2018) and two TV series on pandemic outbreaks from the US (Sweet Tooth, 2021) and Italy (Anna, 2021). All three works break new ground – though not devoid of limits – about family structures and parental care: while Bird Box proposes a reversal of gender roles, Anna elaborates on the notion of motherhood by presenting unconventional models of mothering; in Sweet Tooth, the ethics of care is extended to the relationship between humans, animals, and the endangered environment.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"399 - 418"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45893438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"We need to talk about gender: anti-feminist, anti-gender backlash all’italiana","authors":"Polina Shvanyukova","doi":"10.1080/13825577.2022.2091287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2091287","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper engages with the topic of anti-feminist, anti-gender backlash in contemporary Italy in three steps. Firstly, it reviews some recent research examining the various ramifications of anti-feminist and anti-gender discourse in the Italian context. The role that the Catholic Church has played in championing the crusade against gender, most visibly by fabricating the so-called ideologia del gender (gender ideology), is addressed extensively together with the analysis of a cluster of heterogeneous men’s groups involved in backlash efforts to endorse and spread anti-feminist sentiments. The focus then shifts to younger generations’ struggles with making sense of and negotiating their own gendered presence in the twenty-first century Italian postfeminist context. Finally, by directing attention to the still precarious and marginal status of Gender Studies as a disciplinary field in Italian academia, the paper seeks to re-assert the relevance of Gender Studies, and to enliven the debate on the full academic institutionalisation of the field in Italy.","PeriodicalId":43819,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of English Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"197 - 219"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59965331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}