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3275.More information
This article offers an examination of the novel La seconda mezzanotte (2011) by Antonio Scurati. Classified by the author as a catastrophist sci-fi novel, this work is here defined and analyzed as one of the very first Italian examples of climate fiction (cli-fi), a narrative form especially popular in North America, closely related to anthropogenic climate change. The essay discusses some of the topoi that characterize Anglo-Saxon cli-fi, which are clearly present in The Second Midnight. Such recurring motifs will also be discussed, in particular, by highlighting some of the rhetorical tools adopted by Scurati, such as, for example, the effect of estrangement. Through such effects, the reader is spurred to adopt an uncomfortable, “oblique” and unusual gaze. This study highlights Antonio Scurati’s skill and originality in dealing with the causes and global effects of climate change. The author succeeds in making the reader perceive the spatial and temporal magnitude of global warming, which in 2072 Venice materializes dramatically in a Big Wave. The Second Midnight is a human comedy that expands across centuries and continents while narrating the events of a few men living in Nova Venezia in a specific year, 2092. Distant spaces, remote times, human and non-human corporealities converge in a new Venice, which is a piece of a hologram narrating other people’s stories.
Keywords: dystopia, climate-fiction, material ecocriticism, Venice, slow violence
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3276.More information
This article investigates one of the most important and erotically explicit early modern Spanish texts: Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499/1507). Highlighting the dynamics of the three sex acts depicted in the plot, it argues that intercourse can be read as a negotiation of the text’s main values: (courtly) love, honour, and money. While scholars have elaborated on the metaphor of the wheel of fortune in La Celestina, this article suggests that the wheel was more than a trope for life’s vicissitudes; it operated as a structural tool in the text, a metaphor rendered material via Ramón Llull’s (ca. 1232–1315) ars combinatoria. Applying the Catalan philosopher’s mnemonic device demonstrates how the text’s values are transferred from men to women and thereby shift their semantics. While the resulting inversions must have amused contemporary audiences, they also reveal the tensions of a transforming society.
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3277.More information
Francis Bacon’s and Margaret Cavendish’s ideal societies unexpectedly follow Thomas More’s Utopia in eliminating the exchange value of gold and replacing it with a knowledge economy. Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) similarly pursue new “light” and shun selfish profit, private trade, capital accumulation, and conspicuous consumption. Unlike More, they allow gold to retain its traditional decorative and symbolic functions, but its “use value” completely trumps its exchange value. Cavendish uses gold to construct and glorify her Blazing World and to forge astonishing defensive weapons, but it cannot be bought, sold, or even earned since it remains exclusively imperial. Bacon restricts gold to buying new “light” or knowledge and honouring thriving families with symbolic golden grape clusters, but like the Fathers of Salomon’s House, all three societies value only beneficial knowledge and the collaborative virtues taught by their new or improved religions to further universal peace and brotherhood.
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3278.More information
Bullying is a pressing issue that challenges educational and other social practitioners, as many students' schooling process is impeded, often significantly, as regards safety and physical and psychological health. This issue, which is widely discussed in the public sphere and is often debated by adults, also concerns youngsters. Here and elsewhere, measures have been implemented to reduce and prevent bullying in schools. How do high school students interpret the phenomenon of bullying when they are invited to discuss it among themselves in focus groups? What do they say and how do they talk about it? Through the theoretical framework of symbolic interactionism this article sheds light on the meanings that high school students attribute to bullying and on the emerging interactive dynamics that emerged during their discussions. The analysis of the discursive segments manifested a co-construction of meanings stimulated by the interactions students engaged in, and fed by different sources of knowledge that revealed, in a broader sense, students’ relationship to knowledge. In conclusion, we stress the important role of adults for mediating interactions that support the transformation of students’ cognitive capacities and enable them to understand the complexity of the problems with which they must deal.
Keywords: bullying, intimidation, symbolic interactionism, interactionnisme symbolique, focus group, focus group, meaning coconstruction, coconstruction de sens, student voices, voix de jeunes
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3279.More information
While media studies have frequently assessed the importance of representation, research in this area has often been siloed by institutional and methodological norms that define academics as “gender”, “race”, or “class” scholars, rather than inclusive scholars of all these and more. This paper thus responds to recent calls for more intersectional work by simultaneously addressing the overlapping representations of race, gender, and gamer identity, and their relation to Lorde’s concept of the mythical norm, in the popular webseries, The Guild (YouTube, 2007-2013). Via a detailed, inductive thematic analysis of the show’s two characters of color, Zaboo and Tinkerballa, we find a doubly problematic intersection between standard “gamer identity” tropes and gendered Asian/American stereotypes. The show forecloses on its potential to be truly diverse and reinforces the oppressive, marginalizing practices it tries to mock, suggesting that gaming culture will not change until we address its intersecting axes of power and exclusion. This research also demonstrates how the constructed identity of media audiences-- in this case, stereotypical “gamer” identity-- can exacerbate and reaffirm existing power disparities in representation. We suggest that media scholars remain attentive to the intersecting articulations of media consumer and individual identities in considering how representation can influence systems of inclusion and exclusion, as well as viewers’ lived outcomes.
Keywords: Representation, Intersectionality, Identity, Asian/American, Game Studies, Webseries
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3280.More information
Gilbert's kisceral argumentation is, roughly speaking, about arguing based on intuitions. In the forefront of such a (rhetorical) model are arguers and audiences, who resolve disagreements using kisceral arguments. Intuitions as reasons were more important in pre-modern law, when the law was not as explicit, precise, and determinate as today. Law influenced by religion or religious law was a typical example. In our much more secular modern era, intuitions are more or less subordinated to the (legal) logical mode of arguing. However, in tough legal cases, when logic "runs out," it is values that decide them. Not surprisingly, neuroscience and cognitive psychology have shown a strong connection between values and intuition.
Keywords: kisceral argumentation, intuition, pre-modern law, hardest cases, values