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References to the Terminator films are central to Western imaginaries of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). The puzzle of whether references to the Terminator franchise have featured in the United States' international regulatory discourse on these technologies nevertheless remains underexplored. Bringing the growing study of AI narratives into a greater dialogue with the International Relations literature on popular culture and world politics, this article unpacks the repository of different stories told about intelligent machines in the first two Terminator films. Through an interpretivist analysis of this material, we examine whether these AI narratives have featured in the US written contributions to the international regulatory debates on LAWS at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in the period between 2014 and 2022. Our analysis highlights how hopeful stories about what we coin 'machine guardians' have been mirrored in these statements: LAWS development has been presented as a means of protecting humans from physical harm, enacting the commands of human decision makers and using force with superhuman levels of accuracy. This suggests that, contrary to existing interpretations, the various stories told about intelligent machines in the Terminator franchise can be mobilised to both support and oppose the possible regulation of these technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the death of Suphi Kaner by suicide in 1963, an incident that overlaps with the rapid growth of the domestic film industry in Turkey. Kaner's tragic death is discussed in popular literature solely in relation to his alcohol addiction, his possible depression, and his inability to cope with sudden stardom, leaving almost unmentioned the key role of the boycott call of the Producers Association against him. In 1963, the power struggle between the producers and the star actors was very visible. Within the framework of this power struggle, producers made a boycott statement about Kaner, for allegedly interrupting the shooting of a film. I approach the chain of events that concluded with Kaner's suicide as an early example of labour disputes in Turkish cinema. This case demonstrates that the scope of labour disputes in film industries encompasses even star actors who are often considered as a privileged class. I argue that Kaner's suicide could have been avoided by fairer employment conditions, and if the Producers Association had not called for the boycott. To examine the case, I make use of a variety of historical texts including memoirs, auto-biographies, news pieces, interviews, and commentaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Randomized experiments allow for consistent estimation of the average treatment effect based on the difference in mean outcomes without strong modeling assumptions. Appropriate use of pretreatment covariates can further improve the estimation efficiency. Missingness in covariates is nevertheless common in practice, and raises an important question: should we adjust for covariates subject to missingness, and if so, how? The unadjusted difference in means is always unbiased. The complete-covariate analysis adjusts for all completely observed covariates, and is asymptotically more efficient than the difference in means if at least one completely observed covariate is predictive of the outcome. Then what is the additional gain of adjusting for covariates subject to missingness? To reconcile the conflicting recommendations in the literature, we analyze and compare five strategies for handling missing covariates in randomized experiments under the design-based framework, and recommend the missingness-indicator method, as a known but not so popular strategy in the literature, due to its multiple advantages. First, it removes the dependence of the regression-adjusted estimators on the imputed values for the missing covariates. Second, it does not require modeling the missingness mechanism, and yields consistent estimators even when the missingness mechanism is related to the missing covariates and unobservable potential outcomes. Third, it ensures large-sample efficiency over the complete-covariate analysis and the analysis based on only the imputed covariates. Lastly, it is easy to implement via least squares. We also propose modifications to it based on asymptotic and finite sample considerations. Importantly, our theory views randomization as the basis for inference, and does not impose any modeling assumptions on the data-generating process or missingness mechanism. for this article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary trope of the shark has been exploited as a symbol of monstrosity in classic Western literature, from the great sea novels by Herman Melville, Jules Verne, and Ernest Hemingway to Peter Benchley's iconic Jaws. However, the demonisation of sharks in Western literature stands in sharp contrast to the cultural reverence and nuanced literary trope of the shark in Hawaiian narrative traditions such as moʻolelo (myths and legends) and 'ōlelo no'eau (proverbs and poetical sayings). This paper examines the reciprocal associations between sharks and humans in Hawaiian culture in two novels set in contemporary Hawai'i, Kiana Davenport's Shark Dialogues (1994) and Kawai Strong Washburn's Sharks in the Time of Saviors (2020). These novels resist Western cultural hegemony by portraying sharks according to indigenous Hawaiian epistemologies and narrative traditions as ʻaumākua (ancestral guardians) and symbols of deep, oceanic genealogies. The analysis of the shark trope in Washburn's and Davenport's novels draws on the ethnographic studies by Martha Beckwith, Mary Kawena Pukui and Noelani Puniwai; traditional folktales and legends; as well as Oceanic cultural critics Epeli Hau'ofa and Albert Wendt. Considering the alarming 70% decline in sharks since the 1970s and the ensuing collapse of oceanic ecosystems, it is time to rethink the portrayal of sharks as monsters in Western literature and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article recommends Texas high school English teachers to select All the Preth· Ho,·ses (McCarthy, 1992), the critically acclaimed, best-selling novel by Cormac McCarthy, as a reading option for students. Set in rural Texas and Mexico. All the Prem' Horses provides an engaging reading experience that would likely connect to the lives o fmany Texas high school students. [n addition to the rural setting and bilingual dialogues, the novel offers relatable teenage characters with diverse cultural. socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds similar to the diverse student populations in Texas schools. The novel also addresses developmentally appropriate themes including independence, identity, and career. Likewise, students w·ith various reading levels will be able to comprehend the text. The present article discusses how A// the Pretty Horses is an example of a relevant, accessible. and high-interest text for adolescents. In addition, the article provides high school teachers with suggestions for meaningful literacy activities that correspond to Boardman and colleagues' (2008) five central components of adolescent literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper is related to my doctoral research, in which I examine the textual characteristics of literature popular among high school students. The basis of this examination is formed by the literature of the field from the past decades. My paper also includes a review of research in the field. Furthermore, I demonstrate where the caesura lies that 126 separates today's high school generation from previous generations, and I also answer what the basis of this division might be. I present previous studies conducted in Hungary, and I also address the lack of data regarding research focusing on young people, particularly Hungarian youth in Transylvania. I outline the methodology and the questions that any new research must ask if it is curious about what and how the high school generation reads. I also endeavour to present contemporary methods through which these reading habits can be analysed and compared with those of previous generations. Finally, I propose that any new research should not only be preoccupied with the analysis of reading habits but also the comparative analysis of the works read, which is the focus of my doctoral research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tao Te Ching (TTC) is one of the most-translated texts next to the Bible. More than just a Chinese religiophilosophical classic that only deserves scholarly translations, the TTC and its ever-growing acceptance as popular literature deserves more attention within the realm of translation studies both domestically and abroad. Despite knowing no Chinese, Ursula K. Le Guin, the legendary literary icon, published her popular yet gender-conscious TTC translation as a nonscholar in 1997. The present study traces her lineage of TTC interpretation across cultural boundaries to arrive at the overlooked implications of a TTC "translation" by a world-renowned translator" who knows no Chinese, exploring her special case among myriad TTC translations in a renewed trend of Lao Tz studies (laoxue ) that no longer sees historically and culturally significant or "serious" texts only through scholarly lenses, but also from the viewpoint of non-scholarly or "popular" literature. This is achieved by positing Le Guin's unique case within the context of interpretive genealogy in the international extension of the Chinese study of laoxue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular culture and folklore constitute integral components of a nation's literature, offering a rich tapestry of diversity. Within Iran's folklore, heroic tales hold significant importance, with some narratives enduring through generations. Among these, the stories of Beber Bayan and the battle between Borzou and Fouladvand stand out as renowned heroic sagas, often depicted in poetic form and found in numerous Naqqāli scrolls. The former recounts Rostam's legendary encounter with a fearsome dragon in India during his youth, while the latter narrates the epic clash between Borzou and Fouladvand, marking the inception of the elaborate Borzouname narratives. This article presents findings from field research examining two oral renditions of the tales of Beber Bayan and the battle between Borzou and Fouladvand as narrated by a Kurdish storyteller. These narratives exhibit notable divergences from the versions found in traditional scrolls. The research outcomes indicate that the Kurdish oral retelling of these stories showcases and more simple and straightforward expression compared to their Persian counterparts. The narrator selectively excludes minor characters and less significant details in the written Persian sources, resulting in a more engaging and captivating narrative for the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her article "The Female Best-Friend Novel: Narration and the Reconsideration of the Political Act," Neta Stahl argues that twentieth- and twenty-first-century women novelists borrowed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century best-friend narrative, reintroducing it for the purpose of challenging the very concept of the political act, namely, what modern, liberal society considers as a political action and what stands behind it. The article focuses on four novels written by novelists from four different countries: the American novelist Toni Morrison's Sula (1973); the Israeli novelist Ronit Matalon's Sarah, Sarah (2000); the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale: Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (Book 3 of The Neapolitan Novels: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2013); and the British novelist Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016). It demonstrates that in these novels, the political act is reconsidered, against the gaze of the best-friend and against the role of a supposedly female 'prince charming'. Further, Stahl argues that the modern female best-friend novel is not a 'female counterpart' to the male best-friend novel, but rather a new take on a female literary tradition associated with a genre that is often dismissed by the intellectual elite as popular literature, thanks to its use of low-brow devices borrowed from the nineteenth-century novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the serialised novels and stories in the two leading Estonian daily newspapers, Päewaleht and Postimees, the majority of which were translations. The approach, combining book and translation history, is driven by the two issues debated in the media in 1900–1940: the desire to distance from the dominant German and Russian cultural influences and search for a new orientation; the categories of literature serialised in newspapers including the proportion of popular literature (genres like mystery, thrillers, romance, etc.) and the concern of intellectuals about its growth. The study uses the years 1906–1911 and 1928–1933 as a sample for content analysis of the feuilleton sections of the two newspapers in order to examine the changes in source literatures and the category of literature. The results demonstrate that German literature still dominated the serialised fiction translations at the beginning of the century, although many other literatures were used as sources. In the independent Republic of Estonia, in the 1920s and 1930s, Anglo-American literature occupied the leading position in accordance with the general cultural orientation. Still, German had not become marginal, and the range of other source literatures was quite diverse. The proportion of popular literature, mystery novels, and romance above all, started to increase in Päewaleht since 1906, becoming dominant in the 1920s and 1930s. Postimees also started to include some mystery and thriller novels in the selection, but in general, remained true to its preference for literary fiction. Thus, the agency of the Editors-in-Chief and editorial boards can be seen in the choice of works. The overall abundance of translated popular fiction in the book market and periodicals caused the protests of writers and educational circles that culminated with the suggestion to introduce a translation tax, which was, however, abandoned.

The article discusses a book titled "A History of Cyber Literary Criticism in China" by Youquan Ouyang. The book explores the development and evolution of internet literature in China, as well as the emergence of cyber literary criticism as a popular area of research. It is divided into two parts, with the first part focusing on the history and evolution of Chinese internet literature, and the second part delving into the analysis of essential areas such as conceptual change and functional transitions. The book aims to fill an academic gap and provide a comprehensive understanding of the field. However, it also highlights the challenges and lack of consensus in defining and understanding Chinese internet literature. [Extracted from the article]

The proposed study delves into the depiction of an imaginary doctor in mass humor during the late 19th century and in Chekhov’s early work. Its aim is to provide an explanation for Chekhov’s innovative humor, which stands out in comparison to that of his contemporaries. The work’s scientific novelty lies in the clarification of the concept of “speech mask in literature”. This refers to a hybrid of two languages, one inherent to the hero and the other appropriated from someone else, presented in a dialogic manner. Chekhov’s contemporaries such as Leikin, Amfiteatrov, and Shcheglov created simplistic comic scenarios in their works. The intentions of these authors were aimed solely at entertaining and distracting readers from their daily worries. Chekhov takes a complex stance on mass humor. On one hand, he must adhere to its demands in order to publish his stories in magazines. On the other hand, he subverts existing conventions by complicating his heroes’ speech characteristics through a speech mask. Chekhov not only entertains his readers, but also provides depictions of provincial customs and various social types. The image of the doctor in Chekhov’s mature works is ambivalent and only indirectly related to the imaginary doctor from his humorous pieces.

Whereas the intellectual labour of re-memorialising what has come to be understood as the "living archive of Ntongela Masilela" hinges on the broad corpus that he churned out as he steadily carved out the contours of the New African Movement, we hereby submit that there is at base an historico-biographical method from which analysis of contemporary memoirs continue to benefit. We aver here that this train of thought was already methodically signposted by Masilela in a series of his writings over the decades which in essence is the central organising motif of his archival work. Using this method, we are able to critique some of the recent writings which either employed Masilela's (our own inference) method and those with fractures as a consequence of the failure of the historico-biographical method to the extent that these emerge as pop literature created along the same inclinations as pop culture (read music) which come as goes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zhuangzi often is portrayed as a kind of ethical relativist. This popular reading has been challenged by Philip Ivanhoe, who argues that Zhuangzi is not a relativist but rather that Zhuangzi articulates a normative theory of benignity. In this paper we argue against Ivanhoe's interpretation. We further argue that Zhuangzi is an ethical nihilist, who rejects all ethical positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic researchers' choices about research projects to pursue are an important mechanism in societal allocation of research effort. It is unclear whether researchers' criteria for project choice align with those articulated by policy scholars and philosophers. Many potential criteria for project choice are commonly discussed in scholarly and popular literature, but they have been little studied on the individual level. I review and catalog such potential criteria and then empirically explore researcher motivations for project choice through factor analysis of survey data from 409 authors of research articles in major public administration and public policy journals. I find empirical support for personal gain, societal importance, and intellectual interest as research motivations. These motivations do not neatly align with proposed ideal criteria for scientific choice. Thus, such criteria must be translated to speak to researchers' personal interests to achieve expression in individual scientific choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the literature on popular liberalism in nineteenth-century Mexico and the shortcomings of two interpretations: popular liberalism as an alternative to elite liberalism, and popular liberalism as a strategy to ultimately pursue non-liberal ends. It argues that both interpretations tend to overstate the distance between the liberal elite and its popular supporters because of an unexamined, dichotomous conception of liberalism and the people (generally Indigenous and non-Indigenous peasants) as opposites. It draws its examples from studies of local politics and sides with the interpretation of 'liberalism tout court ' as the best available option to avoid reifications of liberalism and the popular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, avant-garde writers collectively drew narrative experience from classical literary traditions, thus completing the transformation of aesthetic style. This first stems from the creative anxiety brought about by the popularity of popular literature and the reception of avant-garde literature in the literary structure. The binary confrontation between popular imagination and elite reality forces avant-garde writers to sharply tilt their creative concepts and aesthetic characteristics of their texts towards the traditional Chinese popular literature. Pioneer writers attempt to reinterpret the narrative resources of Ming and Qing dynasty romance novels, focusing on shaping the basic elements of both popular literary legends and the narrative logic of serious literature' s contemplation of human fate. By adopting a literary style of " serious on the outside and popular on the inside", rationally drawing on the literary experience of "blending elegance and vulgarity", and abandoning the social efficacy of preaching and persuading in Ming and Qing novels, we transcend the bleak and bleak emotions of the times in "new realistic novels", and thus complete the inheritance and transformation of the traditional world sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the serialised novels and stories in the two leading Estonian daily newspapers, Päewaleht and Postimees, the majority of which were translations. The approach, combining book and translation history, is driven by the two issues debated in the media in 1900-1940: the desire to distance from the dominant German and Russian cultural influences and search for a new orientation; the categories of literature serialised in newspapers including the proportion of popular literature (genres like mystery, thrillers, romance, etc.) and the concern of intellectuals about its growth. The study uses the years 1906-1911 and 1928-1933 as a sample for content analysis of the feuilleton sections of the two newspapers in order to examine the changes in source literatures and the category of literature. The results demonstrate that German literature still dominated the serialised fiction translations at the beginning of the century, although many other literatures were used as sources. In the independent Republic of Estonia, in the 1920s and 1930s, AngloAmerican literature occupied the leading position in accordance with the general cultural orientation. Still, German had not become marginal, and the range of other source literatures was quite diverse. The proportion of popular literature, mystery novels, and romance above all, started to increase in Päewaleht since 1906, becoming dominant in the 1920s and 1930s. Postimees also started to include some mystery and thriller novels in the selection, but in general, remained true to its preference for literary fiction. Thus, the agency of the Editors-in-Chief and editorial boards can be seen in the choice of works. The overall abundance of translated popular fiction in the book market and periodicals caused the protests of writers and educational circles that culminated with the suggestion to introduce a translation tax, which was, however, abandoned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to present the basic context of literary research on popular literature in Slovakia, following studies by Věra Brožová (2008) and Jiří Hrabal (2022), looking specifically at the forms of 19th century Robinsonades, including Czech Robinsonades reprinted in Slovakia from the late 18th century through the 19th century. With the exception of a single edition of Pavel Šulc's adaptation, we know of no adaptations of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in the Czech context to have been published in Slovak editions; this is surprising considering the popularity of the theme and rich history of Czech adaptations, and we believe that further investigation is required. This study therefore distinguishes between the 'Robinsonade' and 'folk Robinsonade', with respect to the different motivations for adapting Defoe's work in the context of Slovakian popular literature: that is, between the Robinsonade as a line started by the Czech translation of J. Campe's German adaptation Robinson der Jüngere (and subsequent adaptations by V. Kramerius's and others; the 'Czech Story' follows, for example, the aforementioned study by Hrabal), and various other works that draw instead on the success of Defoe's novel to create adventure stories based on the Robinson theme. The heroes of these stories -- Berthold, Ildegert, Spelhofen, and Engelbrecht -- are known from both Czech and Slovak editions. The results of this comparison, together with an examination of the factors that may have caused these changes at all investigated levels, are formulated as manifestations of specific forms of inter-literary reception, namely 'retellings' with omission and expansion (Robinson der Jüngere), and -- as examples of the 'folk Robinsonade' -- adaptation (Berthold), plagiarism (Ildegert), interliterary allusion (Spelhofen), and allusion (Engelbrecht). Changes in form are found to be directly proportional to the degree of application of the poetics of popular literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is part of the PhD thesis „Development of Interest in the Folklore of Bihor". The work aims to give a comprehensive and faithful picture of how the interest in the folklore of Bihor developed. Besides all, it tends to contribute to the history of Romanian folklore. The lack of a synthesis work in this field suggested the research, even though the Bihor region has benefited from the early attention of Romanian and foreign scholars and researchers, who have also focused on Bihor folklore in their works. Familia is an Encyclopedic journal of culture and literature founded in 1865 in Pest by the publicist and writer Iosif Vulcan. From 1880 to 1906 the magazine was printed in Oradea, becoming an important messenger of Romanian culture, publishing works by great personalities of Romanian literature. Șezătoarea was the most important Romanian popular literature and folklore publication. Its name was both a symbol and a battle flag for promoting folk creation. Șezătoarea's contribution to the collection, printing, and study of folklore is a reality of high national prestige, all the more so as the pages of the magazine have brought together folklorists from all the regions inhabited by Romanians and folklorists from abroad, friends of our nation. Artur Gorovei, the remarkable folklorist from Fălticeni, initiated and maintained the fire of this hearth for more than 37 years (1892 - 1929). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study centers on a valuable specimen of the early vernacular Chinese novel, San Sui pingyao zhuan, to explore dynamic possibilities at the formative stage of the Chinese novel. Close inspection of the physical aspects of the extant edition of the work suggests it is a reprint bearing traces of multiple earlier editions. The analysis of the obscure chuanqi play Si xi ji shows that the story tradition of "Three Sui quelling the rebels" already existed in the mid-sixteenth century. San Sui pingyao zhuan shares much common ground with early zaju drama, fifteenthcentury cihua (chantefables), and pinghua (historical novels). Linking this novel with other early examples of popular literature that preceded or were contemporaneous with it, my study deepens our understanding of the formation of the early vernacular novel as well as the world of popular literature in which the novel was situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the quality of democracy undermined or enhanced by party-system fragmentation? Addressing this question would help us better assess normative claims about electoral reforms. Yet, doing so is difficult because of endogeneity issues: party systems are endogenous to many other dynamics in a polity. We overcome this problem by putting forward an instrument for the number of parties in a system, based on the level of fragmentation added by parties that narrowly make it to parliament. We then test the effect of party-system fragmentation on the quality of democracy, drawing upon an extensive battery of outcomes. Against previous literature, we find that a higher number of parties leads to more fractionalized governments, but has no impact on other democratic outcomes. Subsample analyses suggest that fragmentation may have some effect in contexts of very high polarization, but we find no effect in other theoretically meaningful subsamples. Our results indicate that party-system fragmentation may have fewer normative implications than previously assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares criminal cases from the period of the Counter-Reformation (1545-1648) in which the officials responsible for the jurisdiction of the University of Salamanca acted to correct aspects of its members' daily life in relation to morality and good customs in instances in which the latter incurred in scandal. The study of the cases preserved among the documentary funds of the Scholastic Audience section of the University Archive (ausa) provides us with some snippets of the everyday life of a privileged population, including not only students, but also teachers and doctors, that did not always comply with the provisions of the Council of Trent. Some critical considerations are also collected that allow us to question the image of a guild immersed in picaresque as well as in backwardness and Catholic dogmatism, as it is sometimes caricaturized both in specialized and popular literature on the Early Modern Age. The article portrays the institution as diverse and socially and culturally rich as were its members, who ranged from illustrious figures such as fray Luis de León to hundreds of anonymous students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construct Love has been the subject matter of voluminous popular literature and has attracted extensive scholarly attention for many decades. Yet, there is a dearth of studies that examine the scope and breadth of the intellectual structure of modern scholarship on this ubiquitous topic. The current study reports on a bibliometric content analysis of 1,562 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the field of psychology from 2012-2021. The most prominent investigatory topics identified, in rank order, were: Theory/Models, Brand love (marketing), Cultural factors, LBGTQ, Measures/Scales, Religion/Spirituality, Neurophysiology, Therapeutic issues, Mother love, Love styles, and Social media. Interestingly, several topical areas received scant investigatory attention (less than 1% of dataset), i.e., infidelity, divorce, falling-in love, sibling love, love of pets, suicide, loneliness, and cognitive styles. These findings a) offer a panorama on the state of contemporary scholarship regarding the subject matter of love, b) present a framework as a basis for the study of evolving research trends, and c) provide a tapestry in conceptually describing the essence of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos del CILHA is the property of Universidad Nacional de Cuyo 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 abstract 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 abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The purpose of the article is to draw attention to Italian riddles of the Renaissance. This publishing and literary genre has been studied especially from ethnological or literary perspectives. What is completely lacking, however, are studies that deal with how this literature was produced, how it circulated and who printed it. These perspectives are highly relevant: they make us realise that such texts were not only produced by the likes of Cervantes, Bembo or Shakespeare, but that riddles were often written, performed and printed by men who are now forgotten, sometimes not fully literate and often not from elites. The intention here is to place these writings in a methodological and historiographical framework that may lead to more in-depth study in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ad Limina. Revista de investigacion del Camino de Santiag y las peregrinaciones is the property of AD LIMINA Turismo de Galicia SA de Xestion do Plan Xacobeo 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 abstract 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 abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Expectation is one of the most important themes of strange songs. These songs include important themes of human life, work and suffering, and at the same time, they have a long-standing connection with love and enamored of love. Popular literature is a science for recognizing people's conventions and beliefs, which includes myth, beliefs, tales, and songs. Folk songs are considered an important part of oral literature due to the protection of the cultural-national identity and the transmission of the feelings and opinions of our ancestors. In Mazandarani's poems, there are themes such as hidden expectation, which is rooted in the culture and daily life of the people of this country, but it has not been addressed so far. This research, with a descriptive-analytical method, aims to investigate the concept of expectation in Mazandaran popular literature couplets. By studying more than 1000 couplets of Mazandarani, 310 couplets, i.e. about 31%, have been seen within the expectation. Based on the library and field research findings, it can be said that songs with the concept of waiting in general, and waiting for the lover to return in particular have the highest frequency. Besides, the lover waits for spring to come and the flowers to bloom in order to see the lover, however, the lover waits for the return of the beloved from military service, while the family members wait for their loved ones to return to the city and the country. Finally, the hardworking farmer waits for the harvest and also the end of grief. In such a context, stories, the suffering of exile and reaching peace and freedom have a special place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to a poetry collection, The Roses, by Georgy Ivanov. The purpose is to analyze the meaning of its title. The genesis of the image of the rose is revealed. Having considered the evolution of the rose as a poetic concept in Russian poetry of the 18th-20th centuries, we found that the concept of the rose and cross was borrowed from medieval Europe, the poetic rhyme 'rose and frost' and the pair 'rose and nightingale,' which came from Eastern poetry, were very popular in Russian literature. The last two semantic complexes are actualized in the poetry of Georgy Ivanov. The transformation of the original meanings was caused by the change in the political situation in Russia after the October Revolution (1917). Emigration transformed Ivanov's poetic world, splitting it into two parts: the beautiful past, preserved only in memory but becoming more and more ghostly, and the present, which the poet did not want to accept. Therefore, Ivanov's texts actualize the tragic connotations originally inherent in the rose as a poetic symbol but are traditionally balanced by the meanings associated with the images of youth, beauty, blossoming, and love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconstructions of the Brontë sisters as exceptional women, worthy of empathy and admiration by twenty-first-century readers, increasingly rely on the entanglements of the sisters' literary ambitions and limiting contemporary gender roles. By relying on visual and topical appeals in the form of graphic novels and detective stories, neo-Victorian adaptations of the Brontës further broaden the dimension of biofiction (and vice versa). As instances of popular literature, Isabel Greenberg's graphic novel Glass Town (2020) and Bella Ellis's (aka Rowan Coleman's) Brontë Sisters Mystery Series (2019-) present creative approaches to and engagements with the Brontës, indicating that for a contemporary readership, interest in the authors as protofeminist characters proves to be just as important as interest in their literary oeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Meet Me at the Lighthouse" by Dana Gioia is a collection of poems that offers an enjoyable reading experience, which is a rarity in contemporary poetry. The book is divided into five parts, covering various themes such as aging, travel, memory, and translations. Gioia's poems evoke a sense of nostalgia and loss, with references to the past and vanished empires. The collection also pays tribute to the poet's great-grandfather and his Mexican heritage. Overall, the poems are accessible and relatable, appealing to a wide range of readers. [Extracted from the article]

Survival causal effect estimation based on right-censored data is of key interest in both survival analysis and causal inference. Propensity score weighting is one of the most popular methods in the literature. However, since it involves the inverse of propensity score estimates, its practical performance may be very unstable, especially when the covariate overlap is limited between treatment and control groups. To address this problem, a covariate balancing method is developed in this paper to estimate the counterfactual survival function. The proposed method is nonparametric and balances covariates in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) via weights that are counterparts of inverse propensity scores. The uniform rate of convergence for the proposed estimator is shown to be the same as that for the classical Kaplan–Meier estimator. The appealing practical performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by a simulation study as well as two real data applications to study the causal effect of smoking on survival time of stroke patients and that of endotoxin on survival time for female patients with lung cancer respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language is deeply intertwined with culture, and understanding the cultural nuances embedded in words and phrases is crucial for effective communication. Bilingual dictionaries play an important role in bridging the linguistic and cultural gap between languages. This paper examines the inclusion and representation of cultural information in bilingual lexicography, with a particular focus on Chinese-English dictionary compilation. It emphasizes the need to provide not only the meaning and usage of words and phrases (the what), but also the cultural nuances and the background behind them (the why). Furthermore, the presentation of cultural information in bilingual dictionaries requires the exploration of different methods and techniques. In this context, the paper explores the concepts of defamiliarization and foregrounding as means of emphasizing cultural aspects through explanatory notes, cultural annotations, examples from literature or popular culture, and other relevant resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper seeks to critically analyze the contemporary notion of enjoyment and its ideological hegemonic functioning within contemporary popular culture. The present critique will employ and elaborate upon Todd McGowan’s idea of a cultural turn in terms of a commandment to enjoy in association with Robert Pfaller and Zizek’s notion of ‘interpassivity’. All three of the theorists mentioned above are highly influenced by the thought of Jacques Lacan and his reworking of Freudian analysis of the human self and culture. I will argue that the capitalist commandment to enjoy is the direct cause of the condition of interpassivity underlying the operative function of popular culture. This is a state beyond passivity where even passive enjoyment is fetishistically relegated to the objects of desire. The more we move towards interactive and popular modes of narrative and symbolic mediation the more we become unaware of our passivity of response. My argument does not criticize the digital media alone but also the function of popular works of Literature and how they engender this particular form of enjoyment by presenting and propagating clichéd and watered down images of cultural types which attempt at not moral standardization but rather the dissipation of socio-political anxiety for the sake of the smooth functioning of the capitalistic apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lukyanova's book was published in 2023. The author is a journalist who studies Russian literature and its history, and reviews it in a rather unique way. The purpose of the review is to determine what genre Lukyanova's book can be classified as, and to find out what its uniqueness is manifested in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some organizations come to represent their communities while others remain footnotes of history? While ethnopolitics exist worldwide, there is no consensus about which organizations "rise to the top" to become the standard bearers for their communities and causes. In the developing world, the answer is often presumed to be the willingness to use violence, exercising territorial control, or securing support from external actors like foreign states. This article tests these assumptions using the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior (MAROB) dataset, and finds that contrary to much of the policy literature and popular news media, the factors which predict ethnopolitical organizational dominance are instead the provision of social services, incorporating a gender inclusive ideology, and maintaining clear and consolidated leadership in the form of a single individual. These findings have clear policy implications for both domestic and international engagement with ethnopolitical groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an attempt to discuss a new, rapidly evolving literary phenomenon, namely the m/m (male/male) novel. The author poses questions: What traditional genre categories can describe this phenomenon? What narrative tools does this literature apply? How does this novel relate to traditional patriarchal romance? And how does it refer to gay literature and the theory and practice of the LGBTQ+ movement? To answer these questions, the researcher analyzes m/m novels from two perspectives. Firstly, in relation to the "traditional" popular romance, and secondly, in relation to gay literature. In her analysis, the author uses concepts from literary genre studies, memory studies, and queer theory. The article reconstructs the brief history of the genre's emergence and highlights the change it introduces in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of the article is the specificity of a medical thriller based on the novel Dancing with Bones (Танці з кістками) (2022) by Andriy Semyankiv. The study points out the specific features of a medical thriller and their reflection in Semyankiv's literary work. This novel has its own specificity due to the local political and economic contexts of Ukraine. It fully reflects the features of the genre, while at the same time not being a literary cliché. The author also tries to analyse the peculiarities of the phenomena of fear and anxiety, which are the basis of the content of this medical thriller. In an original way, the writer indicates the connection between these feelings and biocontrol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data science deals with the discovery of information from large volumes of data. The data studied by scientists in the humanities include large textual corpora. An important objective is to study the ideas and expectations of a society regarding specific concepts, like "freedom" or "democracy," both for today's society and even more for societies of the past. Studying the meaning of words using large corpora requires efficient systems for text analysis, so-called distant reading systems. Making such systems efficient calls for a specification of the necessary functionality and clear expectations regarding typical work loads. But this currently is unclear, and there is no benchmark to evaluate distant reading systems. In this article, we propose such a benchmark, with the following innovations: As a first step, we collect and structure various information needs of the target users. We then formalize the notion of word context to facilitate the analysis of specific concepts. Using this notion, we formulate queries in line with the information needs of users. Finally, based on this, we propose concrete benchmark queries. To demonstrate the benefit of our benchmark, we conduct an evaluation, with two objectives. First, we aim at insights regarding the content of different corpora, i.e., whether and how their size and nature (e.g., popular and broad literature or specific expert literature) affect results. Second, we benchmark different data management technologies. This has allowed us to identify performance bottlenecks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overparameterization is a serious concern for multivariate mixture models as it can lead to model overfitting and, as a result, mixture order underestimation. Parsimonious modelling is one of the most effective remedies in this context. In Gaussian mixture models, the majority of parameters is associated with covariance matrices and parsimonious models based on factor analysers and spectral decomposition of dispersion parameters are the most popular in literature. Some drawbacks of these models include the lack of flexibility in imposing different covariance structures for individual components and limitations in modelling compact clusters. Recently introduced conditional mixture models provide substantial flexibility in addressing these concerns. The components of such mixtures are formulated as a product of conditional distributions with univariate Gaussian densities being the primary choice. However, the presence of heavy tails or skewness in any dimension can lead to fitting problems. We propose a flexible model that is free of the above‐mentioned limitations and name it a contaminated transformation conditional mixture model and demonstrate on a series of simulation studies that it can effectively account for skewness and heavy tails. Applications to real‐life data sets show good results and highlight the promise of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a supplement to sermonizing, the use of images has been crucial to growing the lay Buddhist following in Japan since at least the tenth century. While it may be the case that Buddhist images, much more so than texts, have historically been better able to draw in popular audiences through their accessible means of communication, the emergence of contemporary literate audiences meant new modes of accessibility. This article explores both the textual and illustrative histories of a modern illustrated hagiography on the medieval Shingon Buddhist monk Kakuban 覺鑁 (1095–1143). By tracing earlier vernacular approaches to Kakuban's narrative that emerged throughout the evolution of this hagiography, it becomes clear that images were merely auxiliary in their appeal to modern Japanese readers and that such an appeal had been a consideration for generations of Buddhist compilers. This example draws attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between otherwise traditionally distinct functions of text and image in Japanese Buddhist hagiography, but also common conceptual divisions between lay and monastic experiences and popular and elite reading practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to give a brief overview of productivity analysis, starting with general concepts, its importance and a brief historical excursion and then focusing on various productivity indexes. We also start from very simple productivity indexes to more sophisticated, such as Malmquist Productivity Indexes, which are among the most popular in academic literature these days. A special attention is on the contributions to this literature from Rolf Färe and Shawna Grosskopf (and their many co-authors), and some of the related works they have inspired.A brief discussion of likely perspectives for the area is also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depending on who you ask, Donald Goines is a pioneer of Black popular fiction or a purveyor of shoddy pulp. This duality is illustrative of an impasse between American intelligentsia and Goines's folk readership. Goines wrote sixteen novels between 1971-74 that have remained in print for sixty years with sales in the millions. Yet Goines remains an understudied American author and unacknowledged in the transnational reach of his writing. This essay offers the first scholarly consideration of Donald Goines's status as a transnational author. Specifically, I analyze Goines's promotion and reception in America and France. I will focus on Goines's two prime distributors: Holloway House Publishing, which debuted Goines's novels as the premier works of its Black Experience Books imprint in the early 1970s, and Gallimard Publishing, which translated Goines's work into French as part of its famed crime fiction imprint, Série Noire, in the 1990s and early 2000s. This transnational comparative approach draws on three archives: Holloway House's promotional materials that endorse Goines as the unprecedented authentic authorial voice of American Blackness, an unexamined element of the Holloway House archive that promotes Goines as an internationally revered author, and the nearly unacknowledged materials of Goines's French publisher Gallimard that situate Goines as an author of American noir. Holloway House's shift in promotional tactics and Série Noire's prioritization of Goines as an author of American noir has two telling implications. First, it exposes how the racially essentialist logic of Holloway House linked authorial experience and literary fiction to promote the "authentic" Black experience as tethered to criminality. Second, it situates Goines in an internationally recognized US tradition of crime fiction in a way still largely unacknowledged in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mediterranea - Ricerche Storiche is the property of Mediterranea-Ricerche Storiche 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 abstract 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 abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Faced with the exaltation of sight as a perfect divine creation, so evident in the Uso de los antojos (1623) by Daza de Valdés, and faced with the satirical–burlesque tone of popular literature, dogmatic theology considered it inappropriate to praise a sense that deviated human understanding and made it difficult to comprehend the sacramental mysteries in depth. Through different fragments of literature produced in seventeenth-century Seville, we will see how the Church constructed, parallel to the scientific and popular discourses, a catechetical rhetoric that sought to deny physical sight and any device intended to enhance or restore it. The idea was to promote a knowledge of God guided by faith, allegorized as a blindfolded woman. Thus, we will see how the glasses and the blindfold capitalized two discourses that could feed back on each other and at the same time evidence the porosity of baroque literature towards the new advances in physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates largely unexplored aspects of the postwar Japanese media industry by tracing the cross-media developments that bloomed from a single poem written by an elementary school girl. Tomo Fusako, a poor elementary school student, wrote the poem "Outage" in 1951 as part of her schoolwork. Tomo's teacher, Bessho Yasoji, selected Tomo's work to be published in an original poetry journal featuring children's writing. Her poems and essays were eventually reprinted in magazines, collected volumes, and even published in textbooks. In 1958, Fujimoto Giichi, an unknown university student at the time, adapted "Outage" into a radio drama and stage play. These works were then further adapted for TV dramas. Children's essays and poems made for attractive content for the publishing industry and the emerging fields of commercial radio and television media. Fujimoto himself became a famous television host, though it impeded his literary career. Examining Tomo and Fujimoto's relationship with literary production and media adaptation reveals a cultural world far removed from the literary establishment's (that is, the bundan's) view of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Internacional de Educación para la Justicia Social is the property of Universidad Autonoma de Madrid 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 abstract 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 abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article compares corporal punishment in nineteenth-century fiction with corporal punishment in the fictional recreation of the nineteenth century in twentieth-century film and television. It locates in the literature of the actual nineteenth century two creative impulses influencing the dramatic representation of Victorian schooling in modern adaptations. One is the evocation of schools in Victorian works of fiction, which became television and film adaptations. Another impulse is the subversive and covert flagellation literature of the fin de siècle. Both the respectable and the illicit literatures adduce core elements of corporal punishment: the formation of tableaux of bodies; the importance of access to the body; the subversion of what should be an act of correction because the subversion becomes permanent; and the way the restorative becomes aberrant. This article proposes that the popular culture of the twentieth century made overt what had been covert in the nineteenth century. Surveying period drama on British television and film using the 1971 adaptation of Tom Brown's School Days as a focal point, this article proposes the fusion of the overt and covert of the preceding century. Close readings of popular culture productions show, as do the reactions of contemporary viewers, that they presented corporal punishment which subverted rather than chastised and which perverted rather than restored. These twentieth-century evocations of the previous century were contiguous with debate on the use and abolition of corporal punishment in modern schools. This article weaves together the past and the present, suggesting that classic works made by modern interpreters evoked the past in ways that subverted the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]