When life imitates art: Watchlist and the impossible pandemic

Oscar Wilde (1891/1909) declared that it is not Art that imitates Life but Life that imitates Art. What happens when an artistic work, pitched as "soft sci-fi”, predicts something both decidedly unpleasurable and, later, alarmingly prophetic? Such is the case with Watchlist (2020), a new Australian theatrical work written prior to COVID-19, which warns of impending environmental catastrophe and ends with the release of a zoonotic pathogen. The debut production in 2021 was performed amid the global reality of the continuing pandemic which rendered the play a prescient cultural artefact and complicated the audience reception of the work. This study expands from Wilde's concept of counter-mimesis into the theoretical frameworks of Hans Robert Jauss (1982) and Susan Bennett (1997), who provide an alternative to author-centric, practice-led research while laying the blueprint for a dialectical exchange between Life and Art. The dialectical exchange is then explored in the genre of science fiction more broadly, including both literature and franchise filmmaking. Through this analysis, the authors break down the binary of Life and Art, building from Jauss and Bennett, to demonstrate the advantages of this alternative critical vocabulary. © 2023, Australasian Association of Writing Programs. All rights reserved.

Writing and reading fiction behind the lines: Creative learning on the home front

The purpose of this paper is to investigate writing and reading that would engage postsecondary students under crisis conditions in which face-to-face peer and teachers' support might not be available. In this project, I am looking at how students can use writing and reading fiction to understand their own experiences in being locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting with a one-paragraph short story to a fully developed narrative with plot, characterization, theme, and narrative voice, writing assignments lead to a growing realization of how reflection and writing emerge from the body, the mind, and the imagination. Reading a novel, Deafening (2003), by Frances Itani, shows students how a writer links battle scenes from World War I to the flu epidemic on the home front. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved.

Bestsellers: Popular fiction since 1900

This book charts the publishing industry and bestselling fiction from 1900, featuring a comprehensive list of all bestselling fiction titles in the UK. This third edition includes a new introduction which features additional information on current trends in reading including the rise of Black, Asian and LGBTQIA+ publishing;the continuing importance of certain genres and up to date trends in publishing, bookselling, library borrowing and literacy. There are sections on writing for children, on the importance of audiobooks and book clubs, self- published bestsellers as well as many new entries to the present day including bestselling authors such as David Walliams, Peter James, George R R Martin and far less well known authors whose books s sell in their thousands. This is the essential guide to best-selling books, authors, genres, publishing and bookselling since 1900, providing a unique insight into more than a century of entertainment, and opening a window into the reading habits and social life of the British from the death of Queen Victoria to the Coronavirus Pandemic. © Clive Bloom 2002, 2008, 2021. All rights reserved.

Scandalous Dystopias: Hyping The Last of Us Part II and Cyberpunk 2077 During the Pandemic

This chapter explores how the COVID-19 pandemic scandalized two of 2020's most anticipated video games: The Last of Us Part II—a sequel to an older game that adapts zombie media like 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead—and Cyberpunk 2077, based on the cult tabletop roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2020, which adapted Dungeons & Dragons and William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. The pandemic exposed the risks of building hype by framing these games as adapting other media whose most appealing features they incorporated. Hyping them through their associations with prestigious earlier media increased their visibility but created unmanageable expectations. These discrepancies became increasingly apparent as the pandemic disrupted the games' carefully planned releases, giving birth in both cases to disastrous scandals. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The Great Indian Water Crisis: Sarnath Banerjee's Graphic Narrative All Quiet in Vikaspuri as an Acerbic Attestation of the Urban Water Crisis in India

Through a detailed analysis of the visual imagery as well as the verbal mode of narration, in Sarnath Banerjee's Graphic narrative All Quiet in Vikaspuri, the study suggests that the water-deprived, post-apocalyptic world that Banerjee reflects, is a spitting image of the Anthropogenic water crisis in India. Drawing theoretical insights from Madhav Gadgil, Ramachandra Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the paper attempts to suggest the "Great Indian Water Crisis" is fueled by "short-termism," increased corporate privatization of water, myopic government development policies and erection of dams and other capitalist structures. The paper also aims to uncover how sociopolitical "slow-violence" is rendered to the natural resources under the garb of "Vikas" (development) and privatization. By contriving the narrative around the quest for the river Saraswati, Banerjee draws attention to the ever-so-real issue of groundwater overextraction in India, leading to its dipping levels and in turn, depletion. Further, the paper argues that "intermediality" of graphic narration abets Banerjee to cater to "the representational challenges" of the Anthropocene.

Janna Thompson: Philosopher and Sleuth

Janna Thompson, feminist, social justice advocate, and internationally esteemed professor of philosophy, died on 24 June 2022, as a result of multiple brain tumours. [...]the importance of apologies for past wrongs: she observes that authorised apologies on behalf of communities have a range of notable features, but their main point is to "signal that a nation or organization repudiates injustices of the past and is committed to just dealings with groups that were persecuted or oppressed" (Thompson, "Apologising," 2020: 1041). [...]in accordance with her lifelong commitment to social justice, the novel explores the loss of human rights and the low social status blithely assigned to older people by institutions, governments, and culture. Along with the shocking and disproportionate Covid death rate among aged care residents, the epidemic highlighted the abuse of human rights with respect to residents' loss of liberty: they were locked up in their rooms, locked away from families and friends, and locked down in unsafe environments. In her pivotal essays, Sarah Holland-Batt, an award-winning poet, academic and aged care activist,3 has damned the Federal government's failure to prepare Australia's residential aged care facilities for Covid outbreaks (September, 2020), and has exposed the immorality of current Australian society: "We treat older people as a separate and subhuman class, frequently viewing them as a burden on their families, the community and the state" (May, 2020).

Prayer Had Broken Out: Pandemics, Capitalism, and Religious Extremism in Recent Apocalyptic Fiction

Recent apocalyptic fiction suggests that epidemics can catalyze religious fanaticism, highlighting disturbing parallels between capitalism and fundamentalism. In Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), a disaffected corporate scientist develops a pandemic that seeds a religious revival and causes blame to fall on a misrepresented sect of religious environmentalists. In Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), a flu that decimates the global population is interpreted as a purifying act of God. In Ling Ma's Severance (2018), following a deadly disease that originates in China, a former corporate product coordinator based in New York City who mass-markets Bibles falls into the clutches of a religious cult led by an ex-IT specialist and investor. Our analysis examines how religion has been subsumed within corporate capitalism as well as the broad appeal unscientific reactions to the coronavirus could ultimately have, particularly as there are more virus-related economic problems.

Chris Baker's Kokopu Dreams: A Prophetic View ofa Disrupted Post-Pandemic World

The global pandemic, with its multiple and far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink and rewrite the world we live in. Chris Baker's novel Kokopu Dreams (2000) sounds somehow prophetic today in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. His work could be labelled as "speculative fiction" and placed among the umbrella categories of magic realism, science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction. Set in Aotearoa New Zealand, the story focuses on the life of the few human survivors of a rapidlyspreading deadly illness caused by the rabbit calicivirus, illegally introduced into the country. The calicivirus has mutated and killed almost all the human population, who is now living in a land controlled by animals and spirits. The novel is also a template of transcultural writing, mixing Maori creation stories, Christian and Celtic mythologies, scientific issues and aspects of everyday life. Having grown up in a contact zone of different culture Baker is of Polynesian (Samoan), Anglo-Saxon and Celtic origin, but regards himself as a "Pacific" persoi he shares that multiplicity of belonging which is a typical condition in the Pacific region today. Baker deals with a physical and cultural collective trauma, and the process of re-signification of the ethos in a bi-cultural country made of people of mixed ancestry, European and Maori. The re-elaboration of the epidemic experience is therefore based on both a Western rational representation and an indigenous mythical one.

Touring in the time of COVID-19: digital maps and the virtual teaching of Palestinian travel writing

The employment of digital media and e-materials in the classroom in the time of Covid-19 in Palestine has generated much attention among scholars, researchers and teachers. One of these electronic resources is digital maps which have recently become enriching and transformative ways of learning in different educational and pedagogical settings in Palestinian academic institutions. The lack of physical mobility due to continued governmental enforcements of lockdown laws in the Palestinian Occupied Territories hindered many teachers, students and researchers in the field of national cartography and human geography, many of whom were faced with dire challenges in exploring local landscapes outlined in Palestinian travel writing. This article examines the vital role of using digital maps in teaching Palestinian cartographic fiction. While it notes the value of students' geographic practices in the field, it explores the benefits of using digital maps in the higher teaching of Palestinian literary cartography. The article, in particular, reflects on the development and re-construction of the meanings of students' subjectivity and nationalism in the light of their virtual performance, responses and imaginary relationship to "place” during the outbreak of Covid-19. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction

Though clearly begun before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book is mindful of other recent challenges to change the way we care for others in our communities, including the changing conditions of academic labor. In chapter 1, she asks us to think about the particular historical conditions, and transhistorical resources, of the kind of care communities that flourished before disease was the target of professionalized, medical advice. In an era when care and protest, politics and psychic survival have gone hand-in-hand, it is more urgent than ever to engage in broad conversation-including the longstanding, ongoing conversation about the politics of care within Black and Indigenous feminisms-with others who, from many different starting points, are all finding ways to follow through on Saidiya Hartman's oft-cited statement that "care is the antidote to violence" (In the Wake: A Salon in Honor of Christina Sharpe, 2017).

The "Cruel Absurdity” of Human Violence and Its Consequences A Vegan Studies Analysis of a Pandemic Novel

This article teases out what a Vegan Studies theoretical framework can offer a literary analysis of a selected pandemic novel, "The Fell” (2021), by Sarah Moss. Pandemic fiction accommodates texts from a wide range of genres, and these types of literary texts have seen a resurgence in the wake of the spread of the corona virus. While literary engagements with pandemics have often been relegated to the realms of dystopian science fiction, our current realities have shifted to such an extent that they can now comfortably be read alongside more realistic fictional representations of contemporary societies. The causal relationships between anthropocentric abuse of the environment in general and of animals in particular, and pandemics have been energetically contested in the media and in scholarly disciplinary fields ranging from Virology to Critical Animal Studies. The argument that I will develop is that Vegan Studies is a theoretical rubric with unique and salient generative capacity and that it allows for the emergence of fresh and necessary insights when we start unpacking how to make sense of pandemics through fiction. I will use Moss's novel to anchor and illustrate my argument in favour of the value of Vegan Studies in these discussions © 2022 Jessica Murray

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.

Reading Kazuo Ishiguro in Times of Crisis

International crises are central to Kazuo Ishiguro's work. This introduction situates Ishiguro alongside contemporary global emergencies, including the COVD-19 pandemic, climate change, and reactions to emancipatory movements. It suggests that Ishiguro's work interrogates ‘crisis' by confronting his characters with both individual and collective crises, a theme explored in Catherine Charlwood's essay here. It shows how Ishiguro's work indirectly relates to the vast health crisis of COVID-19, which Sebastian Groes explores in his essay on empathy, (robot) ethics, digital well-being, and inequality. Connected to the pandemic, the introduction traces how Ishiguro's writing evidences growing concern for the climate crisis. The politics of migration are a key theme in Ishiguro: here Dominic Dean explores their longstanding and dangerous relationship with conspiracy theories, while Ivan Stacy, Melinda Dabis and Richard Robinson all connect Ishiguro to anxieties over resurgent nationalisms, cosmopolitan internationalisms, and complex transnationalisms. This introduction sets out how the essays in this Special Issue collectively explore the ethical difficulties in Ishiguro's crisis narratives, their refusals of easily satisfying resolutions, and their implicit critique of crisis frameworks for understanding political and historical problems. Sharply distinct from passivity or disinterest, Ishiguro's work elicits an attitude of humility against apparently perpetual, end-dominated crises. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Health Warnings: Reading Kazuo Ishiguro in Times of Crisis

This essay rereads Kazuo Ishiguro's depiction of the relationship between health, care and socio-economic inequality against the backdrop of our present time of crisis in which the COVID-19 pandemic features centrally. The pandemic has directly and indirectly laid bare and exacerbated various international crises and injustices that are shaping the structure of feeling of our times. Although Ishiguro's work does not (yet) address or represent the pandemic directly, the oeuvre is interesting for the ways it frames and responds to the many societal crises that characterise the early twenty-first century – and which the pandemic revealed and intensified. This essay explores specifically the ways in which Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) thinks about health, well-being and care in contemporary society, and how it depicts our own troubled empathetic relationship to institutions like the NHS and its workers. It will proceed to explore how Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) considers a new kind of crisis, namely, the interrelation of digital inequality and digital well-being, a problem the COVID-19 crisis intensified and accelerated. It concludes with an analysis of Ishiguro's call for a new social contract that is rooted in a new attitude towards others and the world that is open and dialogic.

Matter Poetics, Melange and the Lichenised Posthuman - How Artists and Writers Present Visions of an Interconnected Life Between Man and Non-Human Others in the Age of the Anthropocene

A microsœpic being changing the socioeconomic stmcture of societies worldwide is forcing us to confront our porosity. Covid-19 permeating and altering the bodies of so many begs the question - have we ever been individuals? Matter Poetics, Melange and the Ticheuised Poathumau interrogates the ways in which our entangled existence is presented within science fiction media, using Frank Herbert's seminal work Dune [1965) and the fictional mind-altering drug Melange to fi-anie a discursive speculation surrounding the holobiotic existence of all Earthlings. Alternative theories surrounding symbiosis, taxonomy, mortality and consciousness expansion are sketched, calling for a reconsideration of what constitutes "the human" in such perilous times for the planet. The text examines literature, film, conceptual art and philosophical meditations. Tlie mycelial practices of Jae Rliim Lee and Jordon Belson, the posthuman ideologies of Drew Milne, Donna Haraway and Lynn Margulis, and Alex Garland'y Annihilation (2018) are explored;thoughts and arguments, like matter, arc scattered amorphously. Covid-19 restructuring the way we live our lives has made many more of us realise the fragility of the human condition. Science fiction is and always has been intertwined with our realities- can such speculations help us escape our dystopian reality by facilitating a re-evaluation of our inextricable connection to the natural world? © 2022 Intellect Ltd Visual Essay. English language.

"Better than the Original": Restorying Dracula to Reset Learning

Like many teachers around the world, in fall 2021, Faughey found that over the course of the pandemic students had become isolated and seemed to be lacking some of the classroom social skills on which he used to rely. At this time, they were all still wearing masks, and students and their families were suffering from COVID- 19. A number of his students were also struggling with anxiety and depression. Therefore, as a teacher who is also a classroom researcher interested in restorative literacy practices, it was particularly important for him to think of the restorative potential of the curriculum and pedagogy. As Maisha T. Winn and colleagues attest, a restorative approach requires "extraordinary (com) passion, patience, and, above all, commitment to shaping their curriculum to meet students' needs where they are, with love, and without judgment". He needed to find a way to authentically invite students into the curriculum, while simultaneously changing aspects of the curriculum in order to meet the needs of the students.

Time traveling forward and backward: multimodal speculation as racial literacy

Amid a pandemic, protests (on masking and mattering), and presidential campaigns in 2020, adults and young folx alike were wading through an exhaustive socio-political milieu, that called for speculation. In this study, students had the opportunity to practice their writing and analytical skills while developing their racial literacy – the processes of understanding the effects of race in daily living – through their encounters with speculative fiction texts. This article examines the multimodal productions of two young women of Color, Carmen and Imani. Through their explorations of various speculative texts, it becomes clear how racial literacy can also be rooted in the act of time traveling that speculation affords folx of Color. In other words, by playing with temporal registers—or time traveling—these students of Color demonstrated the unending expansiveness of racial literacy. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE) is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Web Robinson, vivre le télétravail extrême par identification narrative

En 2014, le « Web Robinson » Gauthier Toulemonde partait 40 jours télétravailler sur une île déserte, physiquement isolé mais virtuellement connecté à une communauté immergée dans ses aventures. Cet article mobilise ce cas extrême et semi-fictionnel pour comprendre les mécanismes d'identification narrative ayant permis à ses lecteurs-auditeurs-spectateurs de vivre par procuration les paradoxes de l'autonomie asservie et de l'hyperconnexion solitaire inhérents au télétravail, puis de devenir les auteurs de leurs propres récits durant la crise de la Covid-19.Alternate abstract: In 2014, the "Web Robinson" Gauthier Toulemonde spent 40 days teleworking on a desert island, physically isolated but virtually connected to a community immersed in his adventures. This article uses this extreme and semi-fictional case to understand the mechanisms of narrative identification that allowed his readers-listeners-viewers to experience the paradoxes of enslaved autonomy and solitary hyperconnection inherent to telecommuting, and to become the authors of their own narratives during the Covid-19 crisis.

Impact of ICT in Education: An Analysis

One day in the month of November, 2019, the world received a major setback when it understood that a new pandemic called COVID-19, or the Novel Coronavirus had taken over to create havoc among the people. It was first started in a wet market of a small province in China. After that it has spread all over the world like a bonfire. Many countries got under its grip, namely USA, South Korea, and Italy where the situation was totally out of control. During the last two years, India suffered huge loss due to COVID-19 in terms of life, property, and other assets. India is the second largest most populous country with 130 crores was highly affected due to COVID-19. Out of all the aspects, education was the worst affected sector. There was no option left but to implement e-learning as a methodology of teaching and learning. It has emerged as one of the major sources of business, like e-commerce, learning methodology, and e-learning. E-learning is a methodology of teaching and learning where the teacher teaches using multimedia, and the learner learns using the digital mode of education. This mode of teaching and learning has indeed brought a revolution in the education process because neither the teacher nor the student needs to be together in one place. There are numerous subjects which can be taught online, ranging from technical to non-technical subjects. Literature is an imitation of fiction or non-fiction. Online could be the best mode of instruction for literature students. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to make an analysis of the implications of e-learning in education, and its implementation to teach literature by the teachers. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.