Kazuo Ishiguro and the Service Economy

In her article, "Kazuo Ishiguro and the Service Economy,” Kate Montague argues that Kazuo Ishiguro's novels enact a poetics of work for the present moment—not just at the level of narrative but also in the kind of language used to describe the service economies his characters are doomed to inhabit. In his best-known novels, a clinical, bureaucratic, and even glorifying lexicon of "donations,” "completions,” "substitutions,” and "lifting” is betrayed by the reality of work grounded in horror. In Ishiguro's worlds, which are very much our own, the out-sourcing of reproductive and domestic labor is enabled by a larger system in which state technologies as well as linguistic forms mark certain bodies as readily exploitable and disposable. Looking comparatively between dystopian literary form and recent critical work on the service and care industries, the article shows how the tension between a euphemistic language of service and a social logic of mass death speaks to our own moment and to a crisis of care that, after years of austerity and now a global pandemic, defines the present.

Cooperative Learning of Italian Literature in the Post-Pandemic Era

Der Beitrag analysiert, wie kooperatives Lernen im Literaturunterricht eingesetzt werden kann, insbesondere in der italienischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Es werden die Ergebnisse von Gruppenaktivitäten vorgestellt, die im Oktober 2022 von Studenten der Fakultät für Philologie der "Babes-Bolyai"-Universität Cluj-Napoca mit Spezialisierung auf Italienisch A und B durchgeführt wurden. Es handelt sich um Studenten, die den Kurs Italienische Literatur II in italienischer Sprache besuchen. Die Teilnehmer kehrten erst im Frühjahr 2022, im zweiten Semester ihres ersten Studienjahres auf Universitätsebene, an die Universität zurück (Präsenzveranstaltungen). Während der Covid-19-Pandemie verbrachten sie mehr als ein Jahr in der Hochschule (mit Online-Schule). Nachdem sie in Gruppen von 3 bis 4 Studenten eine kooperative Aktivität im Praktikum durchgeführt hatten, die sich auf das Studium der italienischen Literatur konzentrierte, erhielten sie einen anonymen Fragebogen, um ihre Meinung zum kooperativen Lernen von Fremdsprachen und Literaturen zu äußern. Der Fragebogen enthielt 7 Fragen, mit denen die Lehrkraft überprüfen wollte, ob die Schüler das kooperative Lernen für effektiver hielten als die klassischen Methoden zum Erlernen von Fremdsprachen und Literaturen in der Zeit nach der Pandemie und inwieweit die kooperative Aktivität ihre Neugier auf die italienische Literatur anregte, insbesondere auf die Lektüre des Romans, der während des Praktikums untersucht wurde.Alternate :The paper analyses how cooperative learning can be used in teaching literature, specifically 19th century Italian literature. It presents the results of group activities carried out in October 2022 by students from the Faculty of Letters of the "Babes-Bolyai" University of Cluj-Napoca, with specialisation in Italian A and B. These are students attending the Italian Literature II course, taught in Italian. The participants returned to university (face-to-face didactic activities) only in the spring of 2022, in the second semester of their first year of study at a university level. They spent more than one year of high school during the Covid-19 pandemic (with online school). After having carried out a cooperative activity in the practical course that focused on the study of Italian literature, in groups of 3-4 students, they were given an anonymous questionnaire to express their views on cooperative learning of foreign languages and literatures. The questionnaire contained 7 questions in which the teacher wanted to check whether the students found cooperative learning more effective than the classical methods of learning foreign languages and literatures in the post-pandemic period and how the cooperative activity stimulated their curiosity for Italian literature, especially for reading the novel studied during the practical course.

DO AMOR E OUTRAS MORTES: RELENDO ROMEU E JULIETA EM TEMPOS DE PANDEMIA

O artigo propoe uma releitura a luz da pandemia da covid-19 da peça Romeu e Julieta, de William Shakespeare, escrita entre 1591 e 1595. Contextualiza-se a peça a partir da bibliografia que historiciza os impactos da pandemia da peste bubônica no século XVI, destacando a nascente política sanitaria que recomendava restrições de circulaçao, com controle do Estado, e os impactos que ela causou na vida social, económica e política. A partir disso, sustenta-se a ideia de que a peça pode ser lida como uma crítica social cínica.Alternate :The article proposes a reinterpretation in the light of the covid-19 pandemic of the play Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, written between 1591 and 1595. The piece is contextualized from the bibliography that historicizes the impacts of the bubonic plague pandemic in the 16 th century, highlighting the nascent health policy that recommended circulation restrictions, with State control, and the impacts it caused on social, economic and political aspects of human life. The article sustains the idea that the play can be read as a cynical social criticism is supported.

Teaching Indigenous Film through an Indigenous Epistemic Lens

Since the institution implemented a mandatory lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic, I felt that teaching primarily with visual media would ease students' transition to the mandatory remote learning environment, and I introduced filmic narratives aimed to promote hózhę or restoration and healing through decoloniality. Because students are required to write about Indigenous creatives and their work, I assign chapters from Gregory Younging's Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples (2018). The context reports serve as an introduction to the upcoming film we will screen, and I require students to engage in light research for their preparation. Students are expected to integrate and synthesize reading assignments with the films just screened, and I pose questions for small and large group discussion.

Teaching Nontheatrical and Useful Media

Teaching nontheatrical film and useful media poses a number of challenges for instructors and students alike. Because these subjects lie at the limits of conventional disciplinary historiographies-organized around aesthetics, artistic movements, entertainment industries, national cinemas, etc.- they receive little attention in most introductory film and media textbooks. [...]while many nontheatrical films have become easier to access online, their availability remains decentralized and often outside of traditional (state/government) institutions. By illustrating how she incorporates these overlooked film histories into her survey course "International Cinema to I960," Goldman effectively demonstrates how doing so can complicate histories of documentary film, contextualize national cinemas and film movements within broader histories, and reveal the ways in which film was enmeshed in colonial discourses and imperial power. [...]she shows how paying attention to amateur and student films enables one to diversify what often amounts to a "greatest hits" survey of feature films, addressing the marginalization of specific groups within the commercial film industry as well as the film canon. Tayara, a film studies undergraduate at Seattle University and a student in SchultzFigueroa's course "Film 8c Science," applied film-studies concepts in the development of a virtual reality tool for analyzing the possible habitability of distant planets while working for VR Ulysses, a software startup founded within the Astrobiology Program of the University of Washington.

The Complete History of the Black Death, 2nd edn ( Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021 ), pp. 1058, £ 143, hardback, ISBN: 9781783275168

[...]it is impossible to master everything in such a considerable mass of documentation on a global scale (covering Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia): this poses a real challenge, according to the author’s own introduction! With J.F.D. Shrewsbury on the Bubonic plague in the British Isles (1971), or the documentary trails produced by Philip Ziegler (1969) or Rosemary Horrox (1994), David Herlihy (1965–91), Élisabeth Carpentier (1963) and M. Livi Bacci for Italy (1978), Marie-Hélène Congourdeau for the Byzantine territory (1988–98) or Michael Dols (1974–82) and Mohammed Melhaoui (Paris, 2005, not cited) for the Arabic world (Egypt and North Africa) provide a base of capital data. The main purpose is to trace the outbreak and spread of the pandemic: its origin, its modes of diffusion, the epidemic progress, in order to better understand the epidemiological mechanism, its nature, and to evaluate its incidence of lethality and mortality. While the first evidence from the genetic examination of dental pulp dates the origins of the plague back to around 5,100–4,900 years ago in Sweden (p. 98), the emergence of research in palaeobiology, in particular on DNA (Hinnebusch, 2002–17, Bos, Holmes, Callaway, in Nature, 2011, Wagner, Lancet, 2014), has provided a very supportive context for knowledge renewal: a ‘molecular history’ (McCormick, 2007) is open!

Energy-Efficient Scheduling in Job Shop Manufacturing Systems: A Literature Review

Energy efficiency has become a major concern for manufacturing companies not only due to environmental concerns and stringent regulations, but also due to large and incremental energy costs. Energy-efficient scheduling can be effective at improving energy efficiency and thus reducing energy consumption and associated costs, as well as pollutant emissions. This work reviews recent literature on energy-efficient scheduling in job shop manufacturing systems, with a particular focus on metaheuristics. We review 172 papers published between 2013 and 2022, by analyzing the shop floor type, the energy efficiency strategy, the objective function(s), the newly added problem feature(s), and the solution approach(es). We also report on the existing data sets and make them available to the research community. The paper is concluded by pointing out potential directions for future research, namely developing integrated scheduling approaches for interconnected problems, fast metaheuristic methods to respond to dynamic scheduling problems, and hybrid metaheuristic and big data methods for cyber-physical production systems.

Editorial Preface: Engaging Kamau Brathwaite

[...]unlike the print versions, it exists as a living document, forever subject to additions, merges, deletions, and other edits.1 In addition to the first group of collaborators that initiated the project, I have also worked with other scholars and students to edit the entries, publish a static PDF version, and add new entries over time. The Brathwaite Effect, sx salon 27, Feb. 2018. Since Brathwaite's passing, there have been calls for tributes and essays to be gathered for special issues and collections. [...]Brathwaite and his work may be engaged on/from multiple dimensions as relevant to contemporary conversations about race, region, rhythm, and representation. Rachel Mordecai discusses the openings Brathwaite's writings offer for complex discussions of gender in a contemporary classroom;Kim Evelyn reflects on her turn to Brathwaite to cohere and animate students in an online course during the COVID-19 pandemic;and Bedour Alagraa situates the "bridges" and "breaks" of Brathwaite's critical theory as foundational to a course on Caribbean thought.

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xiv + 349 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $30.00. ISBN: 978-1-469-65366-2

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership chronicles an often overlooked period in the affordable housing literature to show how the shift from racially exclusive housing policies in the 1940s and 1950s (where it was nearly impossible for Blacks to buy high-appreciating homes using low-cost and low-risk federally insured mortgages) to a regime of more inclusive policies in the late 1960s and 1970s laid the foundation for Blacks to lose massive housing wealth decades later during the 2007–2009 Great Recession. [...]instead of finding ways to increase the supply of public housing, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) adopted federal housing policies, which continue to this day, that depend on public-private ventures (like Housing Choice vouchers) to house the poor. [...]the book's greatest contribution to the affordable-housing literature is Taylor's blistering account of Nixon administration decisions that forever ceded control of federal housing policies to private mortgage bankers, real estate agents, home builders, speculators, and appraisers (a cabal I label the real estate industrial complex, or REIC).

Social Attitudes towards the Phenomenon of Corruption in Poland

Purpose: The paper explains to what extent selected sociodemographic, psychographic and economic factors differentiate attitudes of Poles towards corruption. Design/Methodology/Approach: The results come from an empirical study based on a representative sample of adult Poles conducted by computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI). The subject of statistical analysis were the following three complementary issues, the scale of corruption in the opinion and common experience of Poles, moral attitudes of Poles towards the phenomenon of corruption and sociodemographic predictors of the corruption phenomenon. Additionally, we measured the scale of corruption in the opinion and common experience of Poles. At the stage of data analysis, multi-dimensional modeling with the use of optimal scaling (CATREG) was selected and descriptive and inductive statistics were used. Findings: The regression model for qualitative variables revealed an increased consent to the phenomenon of corruption in such groups as, age (the youngest respondents 18-24), occupation (industrial workers and craftsmen, school and university students, office workers) and political self-identification on the left-right scale. The greatest tolerance towards corruption - according to their declarations - have far right-wing and left-wing people, as well as those without specific views. The remaining components of the model, such as place of residence (voivodship), marital status and total crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, are of secondary importance. Practical implications: The results of the research made possible to make two other important conclusions. Firstly, according to Poles, the phenomenon of corruption has significantly decreased over the last few years. The respondents estimated that it is now much smaller than in 2017. Secondly, we compared the obtained results with other global studies. Originality value: We noticed that there is a gap between the opinions of experts (Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index) and the opinions of ordinary people about the size and dynamics of corruption in Poland. We have given plausible explanations for these phenomena. This is the first study of this type conducted in Poland since 2017 (not including the Transparency International's Corruption Barometer, which, however, pursued different goals).

Spatial Analysis for Landscape Changes: A Bibliometric Review

The main aim of this study is to analyze from a bibliometric point of view the research trend in spatial analysis for landscape changes using the records published in the Web of Science database in the last twenty years. Several parameters such as documents published per year, sources of documents, number of citations as well as VOSviewer software and GIS are used for the analysis of different metrics such as the number of citations, co-authorship network, and keyword occurrences. Analysis of the number of papers, their keywords, and authorships countries shows the research trend in the specific topics of the spatial analysis for landscape changes and consequently can constitute a benchmark for researchers who approach this research topic.

Southeast Asia. Negotiating governance on non-traditional security in Southeast Asia and beyond By Mely Caballero-Anthony, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 319. Notes, Bibliography, Index

[...]a few years ago, NTS looked to be a rather mundane field of study, particularly in East Asia and Southeast Asia, where traditional security perspectives have overly dominated academic debates as a result of long-standing territorial disputes and a strict attachment to Westphalian norms of noninterference and respect for national sovereignty. Security governance processes are examined in detail in a number of NTS crises that have confronted the region, namely health (chap. 3), environmental security (chap. 4), migration (chap. 5), humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations (chap. 6), nuclear energy (chap. 7) and food security (chap. 8). [...]the book seems primarily to focus on less contentious NTS arenas while it would have been interesting to see whether security governance processes are also surfacing in areas such as terrorism and maritime security, which generally speaking are more sensitive to individual sovereignty.

Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry

Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry, by Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells is reviewed.

A bibliometric analysis of Serials Review from 1991 to 2020

The study's objectives were to identify the document type, publishing trends, authorship patterns of research, most prolific authors, countries and keywords, top citied articles, and country collaboration of published articles in Serials Review (SR) through bibliometric measures from 1991-2020. The data was retrieved from the Scopus database and analyzed through VOSviewer, Microsoft excel, and Biblioshiny. The result found that most of the studies were published in the form of empirical (1785) with total citation (4998) during 1991-2020. Publications were increased from 2002 to 2004, but after 2014 the publications ratio decreased. A single authorship pattern was shown by most of the publications. Blythe, K published 70 publications from 19912020, while Collins had 194 citations against only 30 publications. The article titled "The access/impact problem and the green and gold roads to open access" having 223 citations. The countries' collaboration was shown that the USA and Canada were having 20 research collaborations during 1991-20. Academic libraries, open access, and electronic resources were the most used keywords by the authors. It can be beneficial for readers to understand highly cited journals, the most prolific authors and the bibliographic coupling of institutions. It is also helpful for and editorial team of SR for further developments.

From the Editor's Desk

Edward Ousselin, Editor in Chief [End Page 13] The French Review Book Series How to Do Things with Style: Essays in Honor of Joan DeJean Edited by Amy S. Wyngaard and Roland Racevskis A Publication of the American Association of Teachers of French ISBN 978-1-7339360-5-7 This third volume in the French Review Book Series can be ordered online (price: $50.00) through the AATF Store: <https://frenchteachers.org/store>. [...]how do we, as teachers, go beyond the traditional representation of France as un vieux pays that is predominantly white, Catholic (or laïque), and linguistically homogeneous? The scope of the Book Series covers most of the rubrics of the French Review: Literature, Film, Society and Culture, Linguistics, Focus on the Classroom, Professional Issues.

Editorial

Library value during COVID-19 and beyond: shifting, pivoting, and moving forward In June 2020, Christopher Cox, Dean of Libraries at Clemson University, predicted the significant ways academic libraries will shift in terms of collections, services, spaces, and operations as a result of the pandemic. Instead of returning to normal, librarians will be returning to a “new normal” -- one where in-person classes and service interactions may be impossible or no longer preferred, where collections in physical format may be a barrier to access, and where collaborative study is shunned in favor of social distancing in buildings that can only safely house half the people they used to. The pivot to online learning and remote services provided academic, research, and public libraries with myriad opportunities to demonstrate our value to the academy and our communities.