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.

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.

The search for a sea of tranquility

Emily St John Mandel's best-selling novel, Station Eleven (2014), begins when an actor, playing King Lear onstage, collapses and dies. The pandemic plot emerges in the chapters about Olive's book tour, when she lectures to new audiences each day, telling them lively stories about the history of pandemics. In the Sea of Tranquility, Mandel travels through centuries and depicts human lives on the Moon, but her novel also relies on the power of personal narrative.

Suspect narratives: “Sinifying” an “Indianized” Japanese story

In 2013, the Malayalam film Drishyam, a suspenseful story of the cover up of an accidental murder, became a huge hit in India that inspired remakes in many regional languages including one in Hindi that, as with other recent Bollywood hits, traveled to China. This time, though, instead of screening the Hindi film in theaters, the narrative reached Chinese audiences with a Chinese language remake, titled Sheep Without A Shepherd《误杀》. The original film has been accused of lifting its story from a popular Japanese detective novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, which was also made into films in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This essay traces the many versions of the narrative to explore how comparing the Indian and Chinese films can recenter our understanding of global cinema and film circulation. When considering the many version of Drishyam, instead of focusing on tensions between center and periphery, we can examine both the anxieties and the creative power of cultural borrowing and the retelling of narratives in an increasingly inter-connected Asian film market

E. M. Forster - Shaping the Space of Culture Conference Report

The event was triggered off by the cancellation of the long awaited Forsterian convention that was to take place in Cambridge in April 2020 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Forster's death. Yet, as we all remember, in Spring 2020 we found ourselves locked down in our homes, trying to accommodate to, what we then thought, a temporary inconvenience. [...]in order to make up for the loss at least slightly and to address the desire expressed by several members of IEMFS to meet and share the ideas despite the circumstances and against the odds, the International E. M. Forster Society decided to hold a virtual conference devoted to the life and work of Forster. [...]the scholar stated that Rome, in its many disguises, is still a bridge between the past and the present;it keeps on influencing our world just as it once did when it comes to Forster, his life and oeuvre. [...]Attridge viewed Forster's doubts expressed, among others, in The Longest Journey, as a form of foreshadowing of the 21st-century universities, which are frequently referred to as 'echo-chambers' that ill-equip students for their later lives beyond the campus.