Guest editorial: Playful literacies across ages and contexts: new horizons for pleasure, affect, and living texts

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educators observed increased student stress and disconnection in formal learning environments, whereas young people turned to playing, gaming and collaborative writing to cultivate connections during this upheaval. Using Thiel's previous theoretical work, Woodard and colleagues explore playful dramatizing, multimodal composing and science learning through one fourth-grade girl's video about food chains. [...]Beauchemin and Qin take up affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the inbetweenness among people, objects and material and discursive contexts. [...]in "Press Play,” community leader Karl André St-Victor describes how playful practices at Chalet Kent, a community youth center in Montréal, sustain strong senses of belonging and companionship among youth and center staff.

Between illusion and reality in the post-pandemic experience: Theatricalities of Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels on stage

This paper draws a critical analysis of the performance of Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels in post-pandemic experience. This is a play written by Femi Osofisan and directed by Adeyemi Oresanya, performed on the stage of the Pit-Theatre. It actually brings reflections of the undying past effects of corruption, oppression and social dysfunction from the military era to the new democratic dispensation in Nigeria to define compassion in order to revitalize humanity in post-pandemic. I argue that the fusion of illusionary reality of theatre in the nature of performance intertextuality is to evince the nature of man and how the myth of Esu implants the kernel of compassion in characters through dialogue—using songs and dances for aesthetic realization and sustainability. Besides, it examines indices of creative visions in the melting pot and departures between the playwright and the director in the nature of performance intertextuality. This researched paper is recommended for both students, teachers and practitioners of Performing/Theatre Arts to find importance of technological innovation in theatrical production as engendered in the COVID-19 experience. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Sprinkle lunacy over legs: A review of WoW workshop writing exercises

In the summer of 2021 I organized and facilitated a short series of three online workshops to launch the Ways of Writing in Art and Design Research Network (WoW). This article reviews the collaborative writing exercises I devised for the workshops, designed to explore potential approaches to writing in/on/about/beside/with art and design beyond the conventional academic essay and in relation to the condition and experience of living and working through the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. The article adheres to academic convention in its presentation and format, while gently pushing against academic orthodoxies in its playful execution, as the text is interwoven with anecdotal asides, subjectivity, description and metaphor. Alongside familiar staples of academic art writing, such as Barthes and Csikszentmihalyi, I draw on a broader range of resources that include poetry and song lyrics. Rather than set out to efficiently argue or prove a point or position, the writing takes a more meandering path (it is littered with the academically maligned word 'perhaps') that resembles the 'carrier bag' approach of the gatherer, rather than the target driven spear trajectory of the hunter. © 2022 Intellect Ltd Article. English language.

Intertextuality and ideology: Social actor's representation in handling of COVID-19 from China daily

As one of the major venues for articulating and disseminating national agendas and opinion discourse, national newspapers play a critical role in promulgating ideology. Underpinned by Intertextuality and Social Actor Theory, this study explores intertextual aspects of China Daily's reporting of COVID-19 to unearth hidden ideology behind texts. The analysis reveals diversified voices from multiple actors around the globe, with China's official leaders appearing most frequently. In the portrayal of social actors, some strategies like impersonalisation, and genericisation are utilised to add impersonal authority or power to an actor's activity, actant's engagement, and increase the trustworthiness of news. These reprsentational strategies belies a transformation in Chinese media discourse with a softer approach is used in wielding ideological intentions through journalistic practices of intertextuality. Our findings help to unravel how news texts draw on, echo, and bring together multiple intertextual resources realised in the forms of discourses. The circulations, dissemination and incorporation of these intertextual relations and practices construct specific understandings of ideology consolidation and public relations within the context of China and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. © The Author(s) 2023.

Sophisticated humor against COVID-19: The Polish case

The analysis undertaken in the article focuses on a group of memes selected from the database which drew on culture-specific references. Specifically, they embrace the memories of socialist times and call on references to comic films and easily recognized characters in order to bring out the re-discovered absurdity of the current COVID-19 situation. This material seems ideal to revisit Raskin's early notion of sophistication, which was broadly argued to derive from intertextuality as well complexity of references that function as sources of humor. In all the examples discussed we can observe the intertextual and metatextual elements, multiple levels and shifts in points of view and attitudes as well as the mutual relations of verbal to visual within the meme cycles. In order to identify specific mechanisms of sophisticated humor, we attempt to identify the visual or verbal triggers of overlap of the two worlds in question, and discuss comic mechanisms of sophistication, including attributions of desire, belief and intention (purpose) to characters or the narrator as commentators on events or situations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Making it internally persuasive: Analysis of the conspiratorial discourse on COVID-19

This study attempts to generate new insights into the wide spread online and offline conspiratorial discourse on COVID-19. Twofold analytical lens consisted of narrative interrelations framework and content analysis showed how the linguistic resources and conversational such as popular socio-religious discourses, hypothetical narratives, personal narratives, personal mental archives, and interpolated arguments are integrated in the interpretation of intertextual Bases such as Bill Gates' TED talk 2015 (26%);Nematullah Wali's predictions (32%);'End of Days' book by Sylvia Browne (14.9%);and 'The Eyes of Darkness' novel by Dean Koontz (22%) by which the conspiracists in Pakistan construct an internally persuasive discourse promoting conspiracy theories on COVID-19. Several linguistic resources such as mood, modality, topicalization, insinuation, and intertextuality emerged as the main tools of making the conspiracy theories internally persuasive.

Ideology and Intertextuality in Covid-19 Memes

The paper analyses the way in which Covid-19 memes were created during the first wave of the pandemic, paying particular attention to the intertextual links employed and to the ideology that is being put forward through those pieces of digital humour. The corpus for this analysis comprises 180 memes circulated on Facebook and Instagram in the period 13 March 2020 – 30 May 2020. The memes were first thematically categorized into several groups and the specifics of each group were reviewed. As people experienced more or less similar feelings when placed in isolation/under quarantine, these states are considered universal, and this particular study focuses on a sample of 54 quarantine/isolation-related memes circulated in the social media during the first wave of the pandemic. Using CDA and Multimodal Discourse Analysis the paper presents the main trends in their creation along with the established intertextual links and the ideas transmitted. Some of the conclusions reached are that memes employing images of celebrities or popular characters, be they international or local, are easier to decode, while the resort to culture-specific codes and images from movies might prove challenging and, to a big extent, depends on the background knowledge and interests of the recipients. © 2022, Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacau. All rights reserved.

Human Attitudes to Nature in Four Stories from TheDecameron2020

The Decameron 2020 started in Croatia as an online literary event in the time of the first quarantine caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and resulted in an e-book of fifty-two selected short stories. Its initiators and editors, Ana Cerovac, Vesna Kurilić and Antonija Mežnarić, recognized the peculiarity of the experience of living in the end times, as well as the potential for comparison of the e-book with Boccaccio's classic, and set up an online space where authors from Croatia and the region could (re)create or transform their experiences, or reflect upon them. This paper focuses on four stories from the collection in which nature is given special significance: Algernonova osveta (Algernon's Revenge) by Nataša Milić, Zaražena (Infected) by Sunčica Mamula, Redukcije (Reductions) by Ana Kutleša and 2030 by Radmila Rakas. It investigates the range of feelings and attitudes towards nature in the time of pandemic and quarantine, as reflected in these four stories. © 2022 Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu. All right reserved.

Elli Papakonstantinou: Oedipal Landscapes on the Digital and the Physical Stage

The essay discusses two recent productions of Elli Papakonstantinou and the ODC Ensemble, Traces of Antigone and Hotel “AntiOedipus,” as two illustrative examples of the new forms of digital performance created during and because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis is based on the concept of interstitiality, associated with the notion of fluidity and with the concept of intertextuality. The idea of deleuzian fluidity lies in the core of the director’s approach regarding both the artistic form and the ideological approach of gender. The intermedial fluidity of the artistic means used in both versions of each production, the physical and the digital, is associated with the fluidity of gender identities that are intertextually linked to the constitutive myths on the formation of the self and the performance of gender, the Oedipal narrative and the story of Antigone. © 2022 Lina Rosi.

The Blending of Bending: How We Engage with the World of Avatar: The Last Airbender through Memes

People often use memes to express their ideological stance on real world events. This study departs from a recent COVID-19-related meme which makes use of elements known from the animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) and Avatar: Legend of Korra (LOK), and asks how it came to be and how stance is conveyed through them. After acknowledging the impact of the series, conceptual blending theory is adopted to investigate the worldbuilding of the macrocosm in ATLA. This is identified as a correlative network, which acts as the blended space of multiple input spaces consisting of intertextual references. The world of ATLA then functions as a new input space which is updated with modern elements, resulting in the blend of LOK. Minor blends are identified in the hybrid animals that occupy the fictional world. Lastly, it is shown how the selection of a particular input element for participation in meme blends already conveys an ideological stance, rather than only emerging through readers’ eyes.

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

POLICING ANTI-GOVERNMENT PROTESTS DURING THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS IN POLAND: BETWEEN ESCALATED FORCE AND NEGOTIATED MANAGEMENT

Namen raziskave je z evalvacijo mehanizmov nadzora množic omogočiti vpogled v procese javne interakcije med policijo in protivladnimi protestniki v času krize zaradi koronavirusa na Poljskem. V članku obravnavamo raziskovalno vprašanje: kje na kontinuumu antinomičnih idealnih tipov stopnjevanja uporabe sile in upravljanja s pogajanjem leži model delovanja policije na protivladnih protestih, ki ga je razvila poljska policija med pandemijo Covid-19. Raziskava se umešča med študije o delovanju policije na protestih in izhaja iz medbesedilne kvalitativne analize izjav policije in poročanja v medijih. Raziskava kaže, da je bilo delovanje policije na protestih bližje stopnjevanju uporabe sile. Vseeno pa je šlo za hibridni model, za katerega je bila značilna kombinacija elementov sile in pogajanja. Kar zadeva varstvo pravice do svobode mirnega zbiranja in strpnost policije do kršenja javnega reda, je bila ta konkretna oblika policijskega nadzora blizu stopnjevanju uporabe sile. Komunikacija med policijo in udeleženci shoda, obseg in način aretacij so precej natančno odražali oba modela. Ena razsežnost, tj. obseg in narava uporabljene sile, pa je kazala na upravljanje s pogajanjem.Alternate :This research aims to give insight into the processes of public interaction between the police and antigovernment protesters during the Coronavirus Crisis in Poland by evaluating crowd control mechanisms. It addresses the research question: where does the model of anti-government protest policing developed by the Polish Police during the Covid-19pandemic lie on a continuum of antinomic ideal types of escalated force and negotiated management? The research is embedded in studies on protest policing and draws on an intertextual qualitative analysis of police statements and media news. It shows that the policing of protests was closer to escalated force. However, a hybrid model was involved that combined elements of coercion and negotiation. In terms of protecting the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and police tolerance for community disruption, this particular form of policing is close to escalated force. Still, the communication between the police and the assembly participants, the extent and manner of the arrests closely mirrored both models. One dimension, the extent and nature of the force used, indicated negotiated management.

"Didn't Japanese Internment Camps Happen in Japan, Not in America?" An Inquiry Project Challenging Hidden Stories in American History

Using the frameworks of literary understanding and difficult knowledge, this study examines sixth graders' responses to mixed-genre books about Japanese incarceration camps. Anti-Asian hate crimes can be documented back to the 1800s but have been recently exacerbated and increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kelly Yang, the Chinese American author of Front Desk, recently tweeted about two public incidents of racism related to the pandemic. On Apr 14, 2020, Yang noted that a couple of teenagers called her "Chinese virus" multiple times during her free online writing class through Instagram Live.

Recent Studies of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1999–2020)

This essay surveys criticism on Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, from 1999 until 2020. Work in this area has continued to expand over the past two decades along with broader establishment of the field of early modern women's writing. Shifting away from biographically centered analyses, recent scholarship has demonstrated the formal and stylistic innovation, rich intertextuality, and material history of Pembroke's writings, as well as Pembroke's literary influence and the creative significance of her editorial work. Pembroke's writings also foreground important issues related to form, genre, and textual transmission in the early modern context, including musical performance. The essay concludes by outlining some areas for further work. Pembroke's engagement with transnational networks warrants further exploration, as does the question of how Pembroke scholarship might further contribute to field-changing conversations about race in premodern studies. Digital scholarship has the potential to further illuminate the complex circulation and reception history of Pembroke's writings;future scholarly and pedagogical work on Pembroke will likely also be shaped by online tools and modalities expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent studies that have demonstrated how Pembroke's writings complicate established categories of gender, form, and authorial and editorial practice are also opening up important avenues for further study in relation to book history, the new formalism, and gender and queer studies. [M.H., K.L., C.D.] [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of English Literary Renaissance is the property of University of Chicago Press 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.)

How Twitter makes fun of Putin's communicative management of the coronavirus crisis

The paper shows how Russian netizens make use of social media in order to criticize political communication, political projects, and the political and economic elite including President Putin. Using the example of a video speech by Putin in which he compares fighting the pandemic with Slays' struggles with their medieval foes, the Polovtsians and Pechenegs, a multimodal discourse analysis of tweets referring to this comparison shows how Twitter is turned into a communicative platform for criticism. The critical stance, however, is predominantly conveyed playfully and relies on intertextuality, interdiscursivity and various forms of irony (e.g. based on the dissociative rendition of stylistic or discursive features and quotes). Furthermore, several Internet memes emerge which playfully refer to the historical comparison. In this way, Russian netizens combine the indirectness of irony, and the bisociation of meanings and contexts characterizing these strategies, with the technical affordances of social media, thus allowing for sampling or remixing but also mere enjoyment of multimodal content. In the context of the discourse, these resources are turned into a tool for protest. The analysis thus also contributes to the discussion of social media's role in the Russian media landscape.

Catching Ghosts and Consecrating the Forgotten: The Seen and Unseen in the Work of Diane Victor

Since pre-history, humankind has relied on archetypes and myths to describe the ineffable and has made use of fictional and mythological narratives to understand the meaning of life and death. Dying and death are topics reluctantly discussed in open society. Yet, the global COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the process of dying and death, and hence the survival of humankind. By embracing their finitude, humans attempt to create meaningful experiences in life and, therefore, attain “freedom towards death” (Heidegger, 1962: 311). This paper investigates how South African artist Diane Victor uses universally known myths and symbols of Christian iconography within a South African context to create meaning, as well as how she uses medium and exhibition sites to evoke intense emotions within viewers urging them to consider their finitude. By recognising how fragile and vulnerable life is, the artist captures the ephemeral in a poignant way. In this paper, I argue that Victor embraces the challenge of consecrating the forgotten or lost. Through incorporating religious icons, signs, and symbols in her work, Victor ‘catches ghosts’ of the ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ in, about, of and from South Africa. Her works are understood through a contemporary reading of religious (Christian) iconography and interpreted in the symbolic and fragile mediums of smoke, stain, ash, charcoal, light and shadow, emphasising the ephemerality and impermanence of the human condition. © 2021. Open Access/Author/s.

Corpora in applied linguistics: Broadening the agenda

[...]Marton Petyko and Lucia Busso (Aston University) reported on research into latent topic changes in the Operation Heron abusive letter series. [...]Sten Hansson and Ruth Page (University of Birmingham) presented their ongoing work utilising a corpus-assisted approach to examine blame avoidance in tweets from UK government departments and political figures. Focusing on nomination and predication strategies, this analysis uncovered shifts in discourses that are intertextually linked to events in the wider world that, Fitzgerald argued, provide rare insight into how students are impacted by the global education industry. First to present was Luke Collins (Lancaster University), who discussed the application of corpus methods to the investigation of voice-hearing.