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The translation of early Iberian fiction into French had a transformative impact on the learning of vernacular languages and printing. This article explores the impact of Iberian fiction (1525–1550) on the French literary panorama of the mid-sixteenth century. It analyses how the translation of novelas sentimentales and libros de caballerías offered a laboratory for experimentation in three main areas. First, Iberian fiction provided an opportunity for translators to translate directly from Castilian. The translations of Iberian fiction were also an opportunity to promote the French vernacular through the adoption of roman typefaces for the printing of vernacular material. Finally, Iberian fiction translated into French played a key role in the development of book illustration. These innovations would have long-lasting consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how "knowledge" of China was presented for Victorian and Edwardian children in "The Boy's Own Paper" ("BOP") between 1879 and 1914. It considers how genre affects the representation of China in the "BOP" by comparing travel narratives and adventure stories. First, it focuses on non-fiction about China, examining the rhetorical strategies employed by the authors of travel narratives. The travellers express confidence in their ability to survey the land and present readers with the idea that China is abundant in resources awaiting British discovery. Second, the article discusses adventure stories about opium and piracy written during a period when the tension between the British and the Chinese was particularly fraught over these issues. While the authors of the adventure stories created a strong contrast between the Chinese as villains and the British as heroes, the "BOP" travel writers provide contradictory statements within their narratives, reflecting an ambivalence about China and the Chinese. However, because the "BOP" contributors sought to instil a sense of patriotism, to inspire their readers to serve the British Empire, both the non-fiction travel narratives and the fictional adventure stories related to China were published not only to entertain readers with exotic facts and thrilling stories, but more importantly, to persuade them of the necessity of British intervention.

This paper combines social fiction and academic analysis to envision hopeful futures for higher education. At the heart of the exploration is Phoebe Wagner's speculative fiction piece, "University, Speaking," which personifies a university grappling with environmental, political, and social change. Phoebe Wagner's first-person narrative highlights the power of collective voice, the importance of centering community, and the urgent need to cultivate resilience and adaptability. Through analysis of key themes, this paper connects Phoebe Wagner's fictional vision to contemporary research on the multi-faceted and complex challenges facing universities today. By integrating artistic and academic perspectives, this paper discusses new possibilities for universities navigating disruption and change.

Ackerman, Diane. One Hundred Names for Love. W. W. Norton, 2011. Cloth: $26.95. (NF) Aiken, Joan. The Monkey's Wedding. Small Beer Press, 2011. Cloth: $24.00. (F) Albright, Daniel. Evasions. Sylph [...]

The years of independence have changed various social, political, and literary realities in Kazakhstan, which has affected the thematic and stylistic expressions of Kazakh writers. Thus, research should identify the ideological, social, and thematic features of modern literary writing produced during the years of independence. In particular, social symbolism's role in transmitting national ideals should be scrutinized simply because such sentiments have various literature, cultural, and educational repercussions. Hence, this paper distinguishes the main issues and ideas revealed in post-independence fiction to give a diachronic analysis of the thematic scope of modern Kazakh literature. Following this, this study discusses the themes and topics found in post-independence Kazakh short fiction to shed light on how these texts can be used pedagogically.

The mysterious and unspoken secrets of life can be a source of fascination for young people. The bildungsroman quest for identity is often coupled with a protagonist's attempts to decode a range of secrets. Jamaica Kincaid's work of fiction, "Annie John" (1985), illustrates this journey. In this novel, the female protagonist's maturity and character development become possible only through her persistent efforts to decode the secrets of life. This paper discusses how, in a series of adventures, those secrets are embedded into Annie's story and how her coming-of-age mystery is ultimately resolved.

In Keiser's words, "each work depicts, in a knowingly ridiculous manner, a natural philosopher digging into brain matter in the hope of exposing the mechanisms that make the mind tick" (pp. 143-144). Keiser's focus is not on how the nerves and various brain structures appear during a dissection, which is straightforward and verifiable. Locke did not partake in the kinds of fictions Willis, Cavendish, and others were promoting about the nerve spirits. [Extracted from the article]

Chapter 3 focuses on Euhemerus of Messene, following recent scholarly interest in the topic (including Marek Winiarczyk's 2002 monograph, republished in 2013, when Whitmarsh's book first appeared). The book contains four previously unpublished studies: Chapter 2, "The Romance of Genre", Chapter 3, "Belief in Fiction: Euhemerus of Messene and the I Sacred Inscription i ", Chapter 11, "Lucianic Paratragedy", and Chapter 14, "Adventures of the Solymoi", preceded by a brief Introduction. Tim Whitmarsh's collection of essays has seen the light of day at a time when the academic world is again reconsidering "classicism" and modernity's relationship to the "classical.". [Extracted from the article]

Armand, Louis. Clair Obscur . Equus, 2011. Paper: C8.00. (F) Barone, Dennis. On the Bus: Selected Stories . Blaze VOX, 2012. Paper: $16.00. (F) Barzini, Chiara. Sister Stop Breathing . [...]

In this article we attempt to envision what utopian higher education could be given the realities that currently shape students' experiences. Postsecondary education is fraught with admissions that favor those with social, cultural, and economic capital; with course enrollment, class size, and instructor accessibility governed by bureaucratic labyrinths and austerity measures; and with major and career selection constrained by looming student debt. As higher education perpetually reproduces social stratification and increasingly mimics corporate practices, it is imperative to ask who and what higher education is for. Why do we continue to engage in it? Are there ways to salvage it from within, or does it require demolishing, clearing the rubble, and building from scratch? Can a utopian version of higher education exist at all if wider social relations endure? Using speculative fiction, this piece grapples with re-envisioning higher education as students' daily lives, and the world at large, remain within the confines of capitalist realism.

Representations of higher education in fiction-based sources contribute to forming public perceptions of academia, and so are a form of public pedagogy. Within popular culture representations, understandings of academics are constructed using particular tropes which build shared meanings of the profession. Conferences are one of these tropes and can thus be used as a focus to explore the construction of the academic profession in popular culture representations of higher education. This paper draws on a research project which explored representations of conferences in narrative fiction texts (novels, graphic novels, short stories). In this paper, we analyse references to conferences for what they teach us about the academic profession. The paper is based on analysis of 98 symbolic references to conferences from a sample of 23 fictional texts. Symbolic references are short references which serve as a shorthand to signal aspects of the academic profession, and in this paper, they have been analysed in terms of what they portray and where they position the reader. The paper argues that popular culture representations of academia are pedagogical, in that they show the profession to be desirable to others but encourage a disidentification with academics, reinforcing the exclusionary nature of the profession.

The paper describes an upper-division university course in Mars literature taught online since Fall 2013. The course readings comprise six novels relating to Mars. Authors include H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Phillip K. Dick, Greg Bear, and Kim Stanley Robinson. After an introduction, sections of the paper discuss course organization and syllabus, Americanist conceptual approaches, anti-colonialism, habitat sustainability, and pedagogical possibilities for future discussion of Mars literature. The paper argues for a fiction-based approach to understanding historical and potential future relationships with Mars and Mars science.

This paper reviews algorithmic or artificial intelligence (AI) bias in education technology, especially through the lenses of speculative fiction, speculative and liberatory design. It discusses the causes of the bias and reviews literature on various ways that algorithmic/AI bias manifests in education and in communities that are underrepresented in EdTech software development. While other recent work has responded to mainstream or private sector technology development, this review looks elsewhere where practitioners, artists, and activists engage underrepresented communities in brainstorming processes to identify and solve tough challenges. Their creative work includes films, toolkits, applications, prototypes and other physical artifacts, and other future-facing ideas that can provide guideposts for private sector development. Acknowledging the gaps in what has been studied, this paper proposes a different approach that includes speculative and liberatory design thinking, which can help developers better understand the educational and personal contexts of underrepresented groups. Early efforts to advocate for fairness and equity in AI and EdTech by groups such as the Algorithmic Justice League, the EdTech Equity Project, and EdSAFE AI Alliance is also explored.

This essay reconsiders literary engagements with the figure of the newsboy in terms of their own ambivalences, critiques, and calls for social reform. Taking Horatio Alger's dime novels as a primary case study, this piece explores Alger's sense that the growth of literary business relied too heavily on the exploitation of poverty conditions produced by and disseminated through the medium of popular print. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though modeled on the insistent factuality that had defined prefatory material in fiction a century earlier (what scholars have called the pseudofactual mode), the narrative frame of the found manuscript utilized in early American novels like Unca Eliza Winkfield's The Female American (1767) and Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel (1798) had long been recognized as a "fiction" in itself. Linking this trope to current debates over the "archive" and the "hermeneutics of suspicion" this essay argues that the endurance of the "found manuscript" convention can be traced to the interpretive methodologies of early American antiquarianism and the growing effort to find "among the papers" of the dead and the living a materially stable canon of American letters. Pointing to emerging archives both literally and figuratively, writers of historical fiction such as Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and John Neal were engaged with an ongoing recovery and reprinting of colonial documents that was coincident with the rise of American historical and antiquarian societies. In dramatizing antiquarian excavation and serendipitous "finds" while also conspicuously citing new histories based on such finds, historical fictions of the early nineteenth century registered the tension between perceiving old "papers" as a body of enduring source material and as a haphazard hoard of mutable ephemera that demanded imaginative reconstruction. Reading historical fictions as an outgrowth of antiquarian research also invites us to reevaluate the legacy of the pseudofactual, and its relationship with emergent discourses of fictionality, by questioning long-standing historicist approaches to early American fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) in dialogue with Édouard Glissant's concept of "opacity", an ethical and esthetic stance that values impeding comprehension. This novel's opacity arises from various limiting mechanisms – linguistic, translational, and formal – which both invite and inhibit interpretation, and in so doing open up a space in which readers can think with the text. Bringing The People of Paper and Glissant's thought together shows how Plascencia's text thickens and complicates readerly engagement, and so increases the esthetic purchase of the novel. The People of Paper both invites and deflects the idea that esthetic experience might offer a route to understanding the social or that it provides the foundation of a more ethical relation with others. In parallel, Plascencia's innovative use of the page and his invocation of an intertextual history of such innovation expands the scope of Glissant's theory, by incorporating the physical medium of the book and the workings of genre history as components of an opaque poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how a significant, but short-lived, episode in Scotland's educational history--the rise and decline of Socialist Sunday Schools (SSSs) in the first half of the twentieth century--provoked controversial debates about issues that continue to have relevance today. The first half of the paper explains the origins of SSSs, their links to adult political groups, the form and content of their meetings, and publications designed to advance their agenda. It also describes the criticisms they received from religious leaders and Conservative politicians, on the grounds that they undermined faith and preached revolution. This leads into the second part, which considers whether SSSs might be regarded as agencies of indoctrination, promoting a version of citizenship that sought to subvert existing institutions and disrupt the social order. It is argued that complete neutrality in educational systems is not possible and that a study of the SSS movement has considerable potential as an educational resource, particularly for teachers of history, politics and social studies.

Several authors have underlined the negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in several populations, including medical students, such as increases in anxiety, depression and burnout symptoms. Furthermore, previous studies showed that anxiety and depressive symptoms are positively associated with affective empathy and negatively associated with cognitive empathy. Given the adverse pandemic effects highlighted by several authors, the present study sought to determine whether medical students' empathy has been potentially impacted, with higher affective empathy and lower cognitive empathy score in the pandemic cohort compared to pre-pandemic cohorts. Medical students (n = 395) were recruited during the COVID-19 pandemic and completed the "Interpersonal Reactivity Index" (IRI) and the "Basic Empathy Scale" (BES). This cohort was then compared with two pre-pandemic cohorts (one used the BES [n = 1168], and the other used the IRI [n = 342]). Similar results were found on both scales: the pandemic cohort displayed significantly higher scores in affective empathy and personal distress (affective empathy domain) and, surprisingly, significant higher scores in cognitive empathy, fantasy, and perspective-taking (cognitive empathy domains). As stressed by previous studies, we posited that the higher scores in affective empathy, personal distress, and fantasy might indicate emotional difficulties. The paper concludes with the identification of empathy components that should be promoted in the curriculum of medical students.

This article is a reflection of the author's experiences teaching a course titled 'Women In Islam' [WIS] in an English Department at a medium, public, Masters granting, Liberal Arts university in the Midwestern United States. This paper argues for the importance of teaching WIS through a multi-genre, interdisciplinary, and global approach. The article refers to the following five teaching strategies: Thinking through History, The Lived Realities Lens, The Multi-Genre Approach, Fiction through a Global Lens, and Using VALUE rubrics as an Evaluation Tool