'I haven't seen you since (a specific date, a time, the weather)': Global identity and the reinscription of subjectivity in Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing.

Globalization provides an important means of understanding the new linguistic composition of the contemporary world, which is itself grounded in shifts in social reality and social relations. Such shifts impact models of selfhood and otherness as well as constructions of identity. This article considers how Brian Castro’s award-winning fictional autobiography Shanghai Dancing represents identity by concentrating on perceptual deixis and the text’s narration—that is, on pronouns of address and focalization. I use stylistic analysis to demonstrate that Castro uses language, particularly the referential positioning(s) of pronouns, to articulate an experimental poetics of subjectivity in the globalizing world. In doing so, he not only tests autobiographical boundaries but represents the contemporary formation of identity in the globalizing world as reflexive, variable, and relationally constructed

The “dissolving margins” of Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels: A cognitive approach to fictionality, authorial intentionality, and autofictional reading strategies

Using Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels as case study, this article presents a cognitive approach to fictionality and authorial intention using Text World Theory and Mind-Modelling. It investigates two forms of ontological distortion: readers’ (mis)classification of the novels’ genre (as autofiction or autobiography) and the problem posed by the author’s pseudonymic identity. The analysis has three parts: first, I conduct a Text World analysis of the novels’ syntactic/stylistic similarities to autobiography and, in doing so, reveal its ontological structure; second, I consider the ontological liminality of narration and the ways in which readers build an authorial mind-model of Ferrante; thirdly, I explore the assessment of critics and/as readers of the text’s fictionality and the impact of Ferrante’s pseudonym on perceptions of authorial intentionality and the authorial mind-model. Ultimately, I argue that a cognitive approach offers greatest insight into readers’ interpretations of authors and of fictionality

The Development and Use of Child Well-Being Indicators in the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect

Summarizes the conceptual framework and development of outcomes-based, measurable indicators focused on child safety, permanency, and well-being to help monitor the status of children in the child welfare system. Outlines recommended indicators

HERMES: Journal of Language and Communication Studies 41

Multimodality is a recent academic development, fuelling a surge of related research (Kress/van Leeuwen 1996; 2001; Baldry/Thibault 2006; Royce/Bowcher 2007). In parallel to this, the turn of the millennium has seen an increase in the inclusion of typography, graphics and illustration in fiction yet, with only a few exceptions (Gibbons forthcoming a; forthcoming b), printed literature has often been neglected in multimodal study. Focusing on the ‘imagetext novel’ VAS: An Opera in Flatland, written by Steve Tomasula and designed by Stephen Farrell (2002), this paper explores multimodal printed literature through cognitive-poetic analysis. The examination of visual elements is aided by theories from visual perception and multimodal research. This cognitive and perceptual methodology is strengthened through reflection upon recent findings from neuroscientific work on embodiment. In consequence, this paper presents a fresh approach to multimodality, an approach which not only attends to all modes of meaning-making equally, as well as collaboratively, but one which considers the cognitive and embodied aspects of a multimodal literary experience

Entropology and the end of nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting

In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss coins the term ‘entropology’, a lexical blend of ‘entropy’ and ‘anthropology’ signifying that the study of humankind is always, necessarily, the study of humankind’s transformative (disruptive, corrosive) impact. This article traces entropology as an aesthetic practice through Robert Smithson’s Earthwork, particularly the Spiral Jetty, and into twenty-first century ecoliterature. At the heart of the article is an analysis of Lance Olsen’s contemporary fiction Theories of Forgetting, focusing on the interconnected portrayals of human fragility and the environment. Theories of Forgetting embodies entropology both in its material poetics and as a thematic trope. By representing the entropological inseparability of the fates of humankind and the natural world, the novel casts contemporary human life paradoxically as both destructive and vulnerable. These affects subsequently require the characteristically metamodern renewal of historical thinking by bringing into focus the impact of humanity’s past and present actions on the future

The Multiple Dimensions of Child Abuse and Neglect: New Insights Into an Old Problem

Outlines the long-term health and cognitive effects and developmental delays that can result from child maltreatment. Makes a case for incorporating child well-being indicators into agencies' databases to monitor and address the needs of at-risk children

Interpreting Fictionality and Ontological Blurrings in and Between Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting and there’s no place like time

In this article, I explore the experiential texture of literary f ictionality and ontological blurrings, using Lance Olsen's multimodal works Theories of Forgetting and there's no place like time as case study texts. In doing so, I argue that while tropes such as recursive narrative structure and the intrusion of the author into fiction are typically postmodernist, Olsen repurposes them as part of a contemporary pursuit of the real. Contra to postmodernist sensibilities, the ontological distortions and metaleptic transgressions of Olsen's texts are primarily deployed as a means of reinvigorating our human sense of lived experience and the place of narratives within it. My analysis adopts a cognitive approach to fictionality, that is new in its combined use of Text World Theory and the metalanguage of the narrative interrelation framework. Such an approach is ideal for tracking ontological slippages and readers' resultant experiences, particularly in relation to the kind of blurred fictionality found in autofiction

Using life and abusing life in the trial of Ahmed Naji: Text World Theory, Adab, and the ethics of reading

This article undertakes a cognitive stylistic investigation of the trial of Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji, who was prosecuted – and subsequently imprisoned – for ‘disturbing public morals’ by depicting sexual content in his novel Istikhdam al-Haya [Using Life] (2014). The article presents a schematic model of the narrative roles, across narrative levels and text-world ontologies, mind-modelled by readers in literary experiences. This model forms the foundation of the analysis which is consequently able to map the interrelationships between the roles of enunciation and reception and to account for the complex array of ethical positions – relative to each narrative role – taken up by readers. The article offers a nuanced account of the ethics of reading which, by pioneering the application of cognitive stylistics to explore an Arabic cultural context, can also capture cultural difference. Ultimately, through situated analysis, this article uncovers the ideological forces involved in Ahmed Naji’s trial and the discriminatory practices therein

Media Handbook: Child Abuse & Neglect

Provides background and contextual information on child abuse and neglect cases and child welfare issues, lists of resources, advocacy organizations, and media contacts