Dystopian necropolitics in Arnau Sanz Martínez's Un fantasma and the admonitory role of contagion narratives in the COVID-19 era

This article analyses the dystopian necropolitics depicted in Un fantasma, which depicts a fictional viral pandemic that gives rise to a brutal military regime, and considers how such a dystopian depiction of pandemics can aid in understanding lived realities with COVID-19 and what these may mean for future social pacts following the global pandemic. Written in 2019 before the onset of COVID-19, the comic enables an analysis of extant social anxieties that existed prior to the pandemic as depicted in Un fantasma, as well as a comparison of this dystopia with what actually came to pass. By engaging with the history of contagion narratives, and also with scholars of dystopia studies, and necropolitics, this article argues that fears of rising authoritarianism that predated the COVID-19 pandemic remain relevant (and in some cases have been augmented) since its outbreak. The comic is an admonitory work;Sanz Martínez's imagining of what might come to pass in a worldwide pandemic reminds readers what they must strive to prevent during the pandemic in which they are actively living. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics 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.)

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.

Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture by Lorenzo Servitje (review)

Set in the twenty-first century, The Last Man was an apocalyptic story of a pandemic spreading around the world, causing the near elimination of the human population, almost literally to the last person standing. The links between public health and military medicine at this time are well-known and exemplified by Edmund Parkes's Manual of Practical Hygiene (1864). The claim that such literature had a "broader reach” in spreading the martial metaphor in medicine is questionable, without more evidence of impact.

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).

Co-Realizing COVID Co-Teaching Concerns: Recognizing Present Challenges to Student Equity in Remote Education

When the COVID-19 pandemic began to affect in-person schooling, teachers around the world expressed a balance of optimism for new possibilities in instruction along with trepidation at the challenges which lay ahead. Shortly after March 2020 and into the 2021 school year, even 2022 for some, remote instruction became the norm for many educators. As the pandemic persisted, the optimism teachers first exhibited began to wane considerably as several challenges to student access arose. These issues (e.g., Internet connectivity, crowded living spaces becoming workspaces, children and adults simultaneously working at home, etc.) pose significant threats to equity in education, and they ironically become troublesome in courses whose objectives include analyzing and discussing inequity in education. This article presents a modified retelling of an endof-course discussion between a graduate student and his adviser after they spent a semester co-teaching in a remote setting. The dialogue includes positive moments of instruction as well as recognized challenges to equity. The article concludes with suggestions for further research on synchronous remote instruction.

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.

Brothers or Fools

Justin A. Joyce introduces the eighth volume of James Baldwin Review with a discussion of the US Supreme Court, the misdirected uproar over Critical Race Theory, a survey of canonical dystopian novels, and the symbolism of masking during COVID-19.

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).

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.

Opening spatial hinges with mindful writing practice: negotiating Philip Pullman's secret commonwealth

This article enquires how ‘spatial hinges' between author Philip Pullman's series The Book of Dust and different sites are unexpected and elusive, but may opened by mindfulness. Natalie Goldberg's mindful writing practice techniques are used as an interpretative instrument to measure this hinging together of parallel worlds. The research data amalgamates interviews with Oxford fantasy tour guides conducted before COVID 19 restrictions with writing sprints about Lockdown walks in both a local park and on a guided tour of ‘Philip Pullman's Oxford'. The data reveals how a secret commonwealth of elves and fairies infuse the parks with otherworldly, unexpected and exaggerated bucolic awakenings and intersubjectivity, exposing ancient mythical places, including a holloway. On a tour of Oxford, the imaginative storytelling techniques of the guide include impromptu flights of fancy and tilted perspectives that contribute to an atmosphere of unlikeliness, suggestive of Pullman's texts. In addition, an experience of getting lost or ‘de-touring', leads to unexpected encounters with the affective mystical presence of Pullman's novels. The findings conclude that mindfulness may create a state of attunement to the reverberations of the opening of spatial hinges, allowing stories to reveal themselves spontaneously.

Introduction: Form and Medium: a Forum on Fiction

Alternate :You are viewing a machine translation of selected content from our databases. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace human translation. Show full disclaimerNeither ProQuest nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the translations. The translations are automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. PROQUEST AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the translations is subject to all use restrictions contained in your Electronic Products License Agreement and by using the translation functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against ProQuest or its licensors for your use of the translation functionality and any output derived there from. Hide full disclaimerThis is the second issue of Novel to draw from papers originally accepted by the Society for Novel Studies conference that was due to take place in April 2020 but was one of the early casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some additional essays that address our themes. We selected essays that spoke to a fundamental question for scholars of the novel: how and why do we still recognize a textual entity made familiar by the term novel when novels have been so generative of other forms of discourse?

"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.

On the relation between the crude oil market and pandemic Covid-19

PurposeThe crude oil market has experienced an unprecedented overreaction in the first half of the pandemic year 2020. This study aims to show the performance of the global crude oil market amid Covid-19 and spillover relations with other asset classes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ various pandemic outbreak indicators to show the overreaction of the crude oil market due to Covid-19 infection. The analysis also presents market connectedness and spillover relations between the crude oil market and other asset classes.FindingsOne of the essential findings the authors report is that the crude oil market remains more responsive to pandemic fake news. The shock of the global pandemic panic index and pandemic sentiment index appears to be more promising. It has also been noticed that the energy trader's sentiment (OVX and OIV) was measured at a too high level within the Covid-19 outbreak. Volatility spillover analysis shows that crude oil and other market are closely connected, and the total connectedness index directs on average 35% contribution from spillover. During the initial growth of the infection, other macroeconomic and political events remained to favor the market. The second phase amidst the pandemic outbreak harms the global crude oil market. The authors find that infectious diseases increase investor panic and anxiety.Practical implicationsThe crude oil investors' sentiment index OVX indicates fear and panic due to infectious diseases and lack of hedge funds to protect energy investments. The unparalleled overreaction of the investors gauged in OVX indicates market participants have paid an excessive put option (protection) premium over the contagious outbreak of the infectious disease.Originality/valueThe empirical model and result reported amid Covid-19 are novel in terms of employing a news-based index of the pandemic, which are based on the content analysis and text search using natural processing language with the aid of computer algorithms.

Salón de belleza versus ‘dispositivo de la persona': cuerpo, enfermedad y sexualidad

En Viajes virales (2012), la escritora Lina Meruane elabora una lectura crítica acerca del corpus literario sobre el SIDA producido en el auge de la epidemia en Latinoamérica. En este libro, Meruane destaca como una de las obras fundamentales sobre este tema la novela Salón de belleza (1994), de Mario Bellatin, que —al poner la enfermedad en discurso— delata el exterminio de la comunidad homosexual latinoamericana, que comprendería el gay pobre afeminado. Narrada en primera persona por el protagonista, un peluquero travesti, la novela gira en torno de este personaje que, en la ausencia de políticas de Estado, convierte a su salón de belleza en un ‘moridero' para acoger a los cuerpos de hombres enfermos y abandonados que, acometidos por una enfermedad contagiosa asociada de forma latente a la homosexualidad y al SIDA, ya no se adecuan a la categoría de persona humana, digna de derechos básicos. Suponiendo un "sujeto de la consciencia” apartado de su cuerpo, conforme ha teorizado Esposito (2009, 2011), la categoría de la persona es valorada en discursos jurídicos, filosóficos y políticos y —sobre todo— sustenta las reivindicaciones de los derechos humanos, contradictoriamente, tan en boga en la contemporaneidad. A la luz de esas ideas, el objetivo de este trabajo es analizar cómo la novela Salón de belleza, al enfocar el cuerpo enfermo y sexualmente disidente, problematiza la eficacia de la categoría de la persona como garantía de derechos, así se revela un dispositivo de exclusión de los cuerpos a servicio de la biopolítica que regula la muerte y separa biológicamente —a partir de la enfermedad, del género y de la sexualidad— a los que merecen vivir de los que merecen morir.Alternate : In Viajes virales (2012), Lina Meruane provides a critical reading of the literary corpus on AIDS, produced at the height of the epidemic in Latin America. In this book, the author highlights the novel Salón de belleza (1994), by Mario Bellatin, as one of the fundamental works on this theme, in which the writing of the disease denounces the extermination of the Latin American homosexual community, which would include the poor effeminate gay. The novel revolves around a cross-dresser hairdresser who, in the absence of public policies, converts his beauty salon into a ‘moridero' to shelter the abandoned bodies of sick men who, affected by a contagious disease indirectly associated with homosexuality and AIDS, no longer fit into the category of human person, worthy of basic rights. In turn, assuming a "universal” and "disembodied” individual, the dispositif of the person, as theorized by Roberto Esposito (2009, 2011), has become the key concept that sustains human rights claims, contradictorily, so popular in contemporaneity. In light of these ideas, the aim of this paper is to analyze how Salón de belleza, by focusing on the sick and sexually dissident body, problematizes the effectiveness of the dispositif of the person to guarantee rights, revealing itself, in reality, as a biopolitical apparatus of exclusion and control of bodies: separating biologically-based on health condition, gender and sexuality- who deserves to live and who must die.Alternate : Em Viajes virales (2012), Lina Meruane elabora uma leitura crítica acerca do corpus literário sobre a Aids produzido no auge da epidemia na América Latina. Neste livro, a autora destaca a novela Salón de belleza (1994), de Mario Bellatin, como uma das obras fundamentais sobre este tema, na qual a doença posta em discurso delata o extermínio da comunidade homossexual latino-americana, que compreenderia o gay pobre afeminado. A novela gira em torno de um cabeleireiro travesti que, na ausência de políticas públicas, converte o seu salão de beleza em um ‘moridero' para acolher os corpos abandonados de homens doentes que, acometidos por uma doença contagiosa associada indiretamente à homossexualidade e à aids, não mais se adequam à categoria de pessoa humana, digna de direitos básicos. Por seu turno, p essupondo um indivíduo "universal” e "descorporificado”, a categoria de pessoa, conforme teorizou Roberto Esposito (2009, 2011), tornou-se o conceito-chave que sustenta as reivindicações dos direitos humanos, contraditoriamente, tão em voga na contemporaneidade. À luz dessas ideias, o objetivo deste trabalho é analisar de que modo Salón de belleza, ao pôr em foco o corpo doente e sexualmente dissidente, problematiza a eficácia da categoria de pessoa como garantidora de direitos, revelando-se, em realidade, um dispositivo biopolítico de exclusão e controle dos corpos: separando biologicamente -a partir da doença, do gênero e da sexualidade- quem merece viver e quem deve morrer.

Teaching Mary Wollstonecraft's Travelogue of Historical Trauma

I teach Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in an undergraduate English literature course on "Survival Narratives of the Eighteenth Century" at the University of California, Davis. The aim of this course is to show how significant perilous voyages were to the ways in which writers in eighteenth-century Britain imagined and interpreted their world. The course draws from the burst of new scholarship on rethinking the traditional "rise of the novel" narrative in imperial, oceanic, and global contexts and develops interpretive frameworks for the eighteenth century's changing relationship to commerce and exploration. Wollstonecraft's travelogue is the final text in a syllabus that begins with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and continues with Phillis Wheatley's poetry about ocean voyages and Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Wollstonecraft's account of traveling in Scandinavia, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, is more concerned with the survival of the human species than the survival of the individual. But reading Wollstonecraft's travelogue in a course on survival narratives primes students to understand how the material conditions of reading and writing-often taking place under extreme circumstances-shaped the literature being produced in the eighteenth century. In this essay, I describe a metacognitive exercise in which students reflected on Wollstonecraft's meditation on survival in an era of environmental catastrophe with their own "travelogues" written from where they logged into the Zoom classroom. With classes online at the time due to COVID-19, many of my students drew on this lesson to discuss how a moment of crisis shaped their skills and experiences as writers.

The Gaskell Society of Japan

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, our thirty-third Annual Conference was held on Zoom on 9 October under the general convenorship of Keiko Kiriyama, Associate Professor of Doshisha University. [...]to note among our productive and energetic activities of 2021 is the launch of the Joint Conference of the Academic Societies for Nineteenth-Century British Authors in Japan. [...]we will organise the joint Conference once every eight years while having regular conferences in the other seven years.

Blindness, Excrement, and Abjection in the Theatre: ASTR Presidential Address, 30 October 2021

As most of my human contact became restricted to the Zoom screen in spring 2020, I discovered a serious limit to my capacity for looking. I also began finding it difficult to read. A ten-month headache taught me to stop taking ibuprofen and learn to manage tensions around my eyes and head as well as to shift roughly half of my reading to screenreaders and audio books. The need to restructure my own practices of seeing refocused my interest in theatre's engagement of the senses at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed people's ability to smell, prompted them to hoard toilet paper, and created a U.S. boom in bidet purchases. These personal and cultural developments coincided with revived metaphors of blindness on the pandemic stage. This article begins with a brief discussion of The Blind, an “immersive audio/visual meditation journey” that Here Arts Center produced in 2021, and then centers on Blindness, the “socially distanced sound installation” produced by the Donmar Warehouse in 2020 followed by an international tour. I wonder at the reiteration of blindness as a tragic trope, seemingly unaffected by progress in disability rights, equity, and inclusion. I wonder at the appeal of wielding any contagious illness as metaphor during a global pandemic. My analysis turns particularly upon the relation between blindness and excrement in José Saramago's novel Blindness and the effect of cleansing the theatrical installation of any shit as well as the even more surprising choice to eliminate the voices of the blind characters. A detour through medieval French farces that link blindness and excrement reveals submerged tropes at play in these performative responses to fear of diminished capacity and diminished control—everything that individuals and societies cast out in order to maintain what we call health, whether literal or metaphorical.

"Driven by and Blinded by Our Desperation": Religious Exploitation of Vulnerable Women in Amma Darko's Not without Flowers

As a feminist writer for social justice, Amma Darko exposes various instances of religious exploitation in Ghanaian society in the novel Not without Flowers. This study adds to the corpus of literature that critiques the androcentric organisation of patriarchal African societies, in which patriarchal and religious ideologies are used to institutionalise gender inequality. My argument in this paper is that the fear and anxiety surrounding mental illness, HIV and Aids, or other illnesses provide a fertile ground for religious exploitation and oppression of vulnerable women, as represented in Darko's novel. My study offers an analysis of how Darko uses her literary work to challenge deeply engrained and culturally sanctioned patriarchal and religious hierarchies of gender-based dominance and cultural valorisation. The main objectives of this article are to explore the religious exploitation and/or stigmatisation of vulnerable women, the human rights violations that occur in religious institutions, as well as how mental illness is considered to be caused by a spiritual force or demonic possession in the selected text.