A cold war text for the COVID generation

Not only do the early pandemic fads of sourdough baking and mushroom foraging make the narrator's frontier-style life now seem less removed from reality, the loneliness, uncertainty, and subdued terror that form the backdrop of her daily routine perhaps for the first time will be relatable to students. [...]their loneliness begets deeper woes: the most recently released Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2023) issued by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shares that almost half of high school students in 2021 reported "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness," a significant increase from prepandemic times. In a variation of an American Association of Teachers of German sponsored public graffiti event created by my colleague several years ago to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, I will repeat her prompt: "Which walls hold you back?" Key to her question was the understanding of a "wall" as any kind of social, physical, or mental impediment that prevented students from fully realizing their goals. In particular, the moment at which the narrator encounters the wall is jarring;a comparison of the literary versus cinematic description of this event offers students the opportunity to consider the power and/or limits of the written word.

A Garden of Marvels: Tales of Wonder from Early Medieval China by Robert Ford Campany (review)

The category of zhiguai (accounts of the strange) texts is diverse, encompassing a wide variety of anecdotes, historical records, memoirs, letters, temple inscriptions, and biographies, among others, that recount encounters with sacred, ordinary, and apotropaic objects, shapeshifting animals, ghosts, demons, local gods, and numinous beings such as Daoist transcendents or the Buddha, Buddhist practitioners, deities and supernatural creatures;visits to otherworldly places such as the court of judgment in the afterlife, hidden villages of immortals or enlightened beings à la James Hilton's Shangri-la or the Tibetan mythical kingdom of Shambhala, or even heaven or hell;and unaccountable phenomena such as bizarre dreams, premonitions, and miraculous occurrences, including surviving entombment and the return from death (xxviii). Mordicai Gerstein's children's book Carolinda Clatter (2005), with its description of a giant's sleeping body becoming a mountain with forests, caves, and waterfalls, mirrors the cosmogonic myth of Pangu, whose body parts become the world in item 85 (58 and 59). The eerie feel of the scene in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew (1955), where Digory Kirke enters the Garden to pluck an apple from the Tree of Knowledge to protect Narnia, is highly reminiscent of item 47 (35), where uninvited intruders eat their fill of otherworldly fruit from a remote orchard but are admonished by an unseen voice in midair to drop the fruit they intended to take with them.

HEALING THROUGH LITERATURE, ART, AND GOATS

For many students, whether they want to admit it or not, school is a welcoming place. They get to see their friends, partake in extracurricular activities, step into leadership positions that build confidence and organizational skills, and support one another. They often even have fun. However, when the 2021-2022 school year began, the anxiety and loneliness that many students had felt while quarantined for the previous year and half followed them. Masks were still mandated, and the threat of catching COVID-19 had many students keeping their distance from others. Contact tracing had everyone in the building recounting where they'd been and with whom they had been in contact. Furthering the anxiety and isolation was the ban on clubs meeting in person, live theater and musical performances being relegated to streaming only, and cancellation of many traditional school events.

EXPRESIONES LITERARIAS SOBRE LA PANDEMIA POR COVID-19: IRRUPCIONES DE LA OTREDAD EN "THE WUHAN I KNOW" (LAURA GAO) Y "YOU CLAP FOR ME NOW" (DARREN SMITH)

The crisis uncovered profound changes in human and social interactions, among them, the processes of oppression and segregation towards immigrants and ethnic minorities were accentuated. Based on the relationship between otherness/pandemic, this paper proposes the analysis of two texts: "You Clap for Me Now", a poem by Darren Smith, and "The Wuhan I know", a graphic memoir by Laura Gao. Sin embargo, encontramos antecedentes que analizan este género desde su estatuto como representación social y simbólica de las epidemias. En el mismo sentido, Cynthia Davis (2002), en "Contagion as Metaphor", señala la textura simbólica de la literatura de epidemias: plagas, virus y pestes se enriquecen de significados y se convierten en construcciones textuales metafóricas de un estado de crisis social.

The invisible lockdown: reflections on disability during the time of the Coronavirus pandemic

In this autoethnography, BW and I explore the various ways in which my experiences of lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic are not altogether different from my everyday experiences as a visually impaired person. Further, we make sense of my experience that, notwithstanding the social world's expression of feelings about lockdown and social distancing, my own reactions to disability-imposed lockdown remain unrecognized, invalidated and unseen. Making sense of these experiences of invisibility is essential, since it is only when our experiences are truly contemplated by others that we can have the hope of being fully known. In this paper, my co-author and I explain the various ways in which my experiences of lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic are not altogether different from my everyday experiences as a visually impaired person;I provide examples to illustrate that there are anxiety-provoking challenges lurking outside my home;Yet, giving in to these anxieties and being confined to my home is too painful to give in to;While my everyday experiences are, too some extent, what the world is experiencing at the current moment with social distancing and lockdown, my feelings about disability-imposed lockdown remain unrecognized, invalidated and unseen;It is important to voice and make known these realities, For it is only when our experiences are truly seen—when we are completely known—that we can move towards self-acceptance.

Journeying to the Underworld: Ghosts and Grief in Autobiographical Writing

Still in the midst of the COVID- 19 pandemic, many had spent months flip-flopping between inperson and online classes since Mar 2020. Schaufele felt that their learning had become stale, claustrophobic, and strained, forced as they were to communicate through pixel and sound. To complicate matters, their students and staff had suffered a difficult and personal loss during the intervening summer months. Several of his students were still very much grieving the death of a fellow student. Now, as they were back together in person for the 2021-22 academic year, a palpable feeling of loss pervaded their classroom and school community. Because grief and its associated losses had emerged so strongly during this semester (and throughout the pandemic more generally), he sought to open up a space where they might explore and "shar[e] emotions surrounding grief in ethical ways". The experience of grief can be profoundly personal and uniquely connected to a person's memories.

Introduction: The Art of Adaptation in Film and Video Games

Dennis Cutchins (2018) Studying the transformative journey of content from one genre or medium to another is of interest to academics, members of the public who are avid consumers of media, and practitioners of adaptation—and we are all practitioners, whether delivering a message by email originally intended to be spoken, or adapting a book (like S. A. Corey’s science fiction novel Leviathan Wakes) into a television series (like Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby’s The Expanse) into a video game (like The Expanse: A Telltale Series). Thomas (2021b) also discusses Star Wars video games as part of a wide-ranging interview with acclaimed game designer Ryan Kaufman, who is currently VP of Narrative at mobile game studio Jam City, and former Creative Director at Telltale Games. (2020) study three texts relating to Finnish forests—the film Tale of a Forest (2012), the book Tale of a Forest (2013), and a series of short documentaries called Tales from the Forest (2013)—with a focus on how each works as an environmentally conscious narrative. The film, for instance, presents images of primeval Finnish forests (which can be considered nostalgic and escapist, but still promote awareness about ecological issues), while the book and documentary series take alternative approaches, such as discussing contemporary forestry practices in an attempt to educate audiences.

Writing While Uniting: Composing Memoirs during a Global Pandemic

Incorporating digital tools, including Microsoft Teams and Forms, Nearpod, and virtual conferences, revitalized students' understanding of narrative writing skills.

The Disease Called Fear: Reading Narayan Ganguly's Short Story "Pushkara"

The fatal shadow of an all-pervasive epidemic may have become a distant memory for our generation because modern medicine and therapy have progressed and our longevity is blessed. Along came Corona virus and the proverbial world of our knowledge went through chaos. We witnessed a new threat along with the microscopic virus- the banality of posttruths. This fear rapidly gets transmitted into the psychology of everyone. And how that fear can infiltrate the common judgement of populace, is the focus of this paper through reading Bengali novelist Narayan Gangopadhyay's short story, Pushkara. The story is set against the cholera epidemic in rural Bengal, where a priest prepares for a midnight Kali Puja at the cremation ground to ward off the evil of Cholera. The offal offered at the altar is consumed by a local vagrant woman, but the intoxicated and hyper tensed priest and his acolytes assume the woman in the dark to be the corporeal form of the goddess itself. Out of abject psychosis, a divine myth is born. Death and disease mark our existence as Susan Sontag called our duality as realm of night and realm of well-being. To attain the realm of well-being, we are often seen to give in to sad repercussions to mete out our existential dread. This essay will show how that fear is no less powerful than the disease itself.

A Journal of the Plague Year by Terayama Shūji in Collaboration with Kishida Rio: "Contagious Magic" for a Time of Epidemic

Terayama Sh ūji (1935-1983), a leading figure in the Japanese avant-garde theatre movement, founded his theatre troupe Tenjo Sajiki (The Peanut Gallery) in 1967. Terayama and company member/collaborating writer Kishida Rio (1946-2003) scripted Ekibyo ryūkoki (A Journal of the Plague Year) in 1975 as the last of three plays created for a European audience. Inspired by Daniel Defoe's fictional memoir of the same title, the play deals with isolation, denial, rage, and the many coping strategies ofa community confronting a deadly epidemic. The play shows how words are a powerful contagion, and by infecting the imagination and memory, they are as much a plague as any disease. Although written and produced in 1975, with ideas from a 1772 fictional memoir about a 1665 plague in London, Terayama and Kishida's A Journal of the Plague Year is a play for our times. It is hauntingly prescient, offering a shocking and often comical reflection of our own lives during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Colleen Lanki is a theatre artist based in Vancouver, Canada. She is the artistic director of the dance-theatre company TomoeArts and is currently completing her PhD at the University of British Columbia researching the work of Kishida Rio. She has been working in Tokyo with former members of Kishida 's theatre company, and conducting readings ofnew translations of Kishida's plays in both Japan and Canada. She directed the English language premiere of A Journal of the Plague Year in June 2021, with a team of eighteen performers and designers, entirely online using Zoom. Tsuneda Keiko has been working as a professional translator in Japan for over 25 years, winning the prestigious Yoshiko Yuasa Award for Theatre Translation and Adaptation in 2001. She trained as an actor at the Bungakuza Fuzoku Engeki Kenkyūjo (Literary Theatre Company Research Institute), worked with Noda Hideki's company Yume-no-Yūminsha (The Dream Wanderers) on several productions, and became a lead actor in Kisaragi Koharu 's group NOISE. Tsuneda has translated hundreds of American, British, and Canadian plays for the Japanese stage, including those by Brad Birch, Beth Henley, David Mamet, Caryl Churchill, Alan Bennett and Tomson Highway. She has translated the scripts for major musicals such as Mary Poppins, Billy Elliot, Chicago and Urinetown. Working from Japanese into English, Tsuneda has co-translated Kishida Rio's Itojigoku (Thread Hell), produced in Honolulu in 2013, and Hasegawa Shin's Kutsukake Tokijiro produced at The Flea Theater in New York in 2011, both with Colleen Lanki. She is also a part-time lecturerfor the Theatre Department of the Nihon University College of Art.

New Zealand’s ANZAC nurses: marketizing the great war for a 21st-century fit

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to demonstrate how a historical event packaged as an iconic heritage cultural brand can be marketized and modified over time to ensure brand longevity and continued emotional commitment and loyalty through the leverage of stories and associations more closely aligned with modern-day audiences. The authors do this through examining the marketization of the New Zealand World War 1 (WWI) nurse to today’s audiences. The periods of study are WWI (1914–1918) and then the modern day. The New Zealand Army Nursing Service (NZANS) during WWI has previously had little attention as a key actor in the Australia and New Zealand Army Corp (ANZAC), Today ANZAC is held as pivotal in the birth of New Zealand’s perception of nationhood and as an iconic heritage cultural brand. The history and legend of the ANZAC plays an important role in New Zealand culture and is fundamental to the “Anzac Spirit”, a signifier of what it means to be a New Zealander.Design/methodology/approachA historical case study method is used. The primary source of data is 1914–1918, and includes contemporaneous articles, and personal writings: diaries, letters and published memoirs. More contemporary works form the basis for discussion of marketization as it relates to the NZANS. The article first presents conceptual framing, then the development of the Anzac brand and the history of the NZANS and its role in WWI before turning to discussion on the marketization of this nursing service to today’s audiences and as part of the ANZAC/Anzac brand.FindingsToday the story of the WWI NZANS nurse, previously seldom heard, has been co-opted and is becoming increasingly merged as an integral part of the Anzac story. The history of the NZANS during WWI has a great deal of agency today as part of that story, serving many functions within it and providing a valuable lever for marketization.Originality/valueTo date, there is a scarcity of marketing analysis that examines the marketization of history. By focusing on New Zealand WWI nursing as a contributor to the Anzac story, the authors contribute to the understanding of how marketers package and contemporize history for appeal to audiences through both sustaining and reworking cultural branding.

Pacific Relationalities in a Critical Digital Space: The Wellington Southerlies as a Leadership Experience

Understanding, articulating and managing relationality, the state of being related, is a central feature of research, teaching and other people-centred matters in the Pacific. Although various groups in this diverse region, Indigenous and otherwise, bring their own concepts and protocols to relationships, physical, social and spiritual connection are salient. Connection is most visible between people but also extends to other entities, including land. Recent events have accelerated the significance of connections constructed in virtual space, such as through conference calls augmented to facilitate presentation and discussion. This phenomenon, relatively new in Pacific academic practice, re-draws attention to relationality in a novel context. In this article we look at one such initiative through the lens of relational leadership to understand the role of leadership in the deliberate curation of a virtual space. The setting is the inaugural Wellington Southerlies virtual "tok stori." This event, attended by over 90 students and academics from across the region, is discussed through the experiences of four of the events' instigators who were also active during the session as co-presenters, chair and "Hautohu Matua" or advisor. The discussion examines how the experience of Pacific orality affected our (re)framing of leadership in a digital space. Our learning points to ways relationality may be invoked, enabled and shaped by dialogic, relational leadership in virtual spaces so as to mediate limitations and construct new possibilities in a world where technology is fast affecting the ways we gather information and communicate one with another.