Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2009"

Children’s environmental literature: from ecocriticism to ecopedagogy

Abstract: Beginning with a review of ecocriticism’s scholarly and activist origins and development through the related fields of eco-composition, ecofeminist literary criticism, and environmental justice literary studies, this essay discusses children’s environmental literature from the intersecting standpoints of animal studies, environmental justice, and ecofeminist literary criticism. From that intersectional standpoint, the essay raises three central questions for examining children’s environmental literature, and offers six boundary conditions for an ecopedagogy of children’s environmental literature.

Theory, post-theory, and aetonormative theory

Abstract: Heterology, or discourse on the Other, encompasses a number of theories dealing with unequal power positions in real life as well as in literature. While feminist theory has made us aware of male authors creating women characters as the Other, and while postcolonial theory reveals alterity in the images of ethnicity, a heterological approach to juvenile literature examines the power balance between the adult author and the implied young audience. This balance is most tangibly manifested in the relationship between the ostensibly adult narrative voice and the child focalizing character and its perception of the fictive world. In other words, the way the adult narrator narrates the child reveals the degree of alterity — yet degree only, since alterity is by definition inevitable in writing for children. Indeed, nowhere else are the power structures as visible as in children’s literature, the refined instrument that has been for centuries used to educate, socialize and oppress a particular social group. In this respect, children’s literature is a unique art and communication form, deliberately created by those in power for the powerless. However, there are other factors besides age-related cognitive discrepancy in childrenh’s literature, which may both enhance and diminish the effect of power imbalance. The present article will look into strategies of alterity in classical and contemporary texts for young readers and consider the synergy of their impact on our perception. Among such strategies, there is the use of specific genres (fantasy, adventure, dystopia), settings (Robinsonnade, Orientalism), and characters (superheroes, anti-heroes, animals, monsters), as well as narrative devices such as voice, focalization and subjectivity. The concepts of norm and normativity are central to heterological studies, and in the case of children’s literature, the focus lies on adult normativity. Contemporary children’s literature has cautiously started subverting its own oppressive function, as it can describe situations in which the established power structures are interrogated. Queer theory and carnival theory prove especially helpful in investigating these issues.

Questions of identity and otherness in Irish writing for young people

Abstract: Towards the end of the 20th century there was a mini-boom within Ireland in writing and publishing for young people, lasting approximately ten years. Then, at a time when Ireland’s prosperity increased remarkably, there was a decline in publications designed for a young audience. This shift can be explained by several factors: the small size of the market, lack of adequate state support for publishing, the globalization of the book industry and competition from publishers outside Ireland. The latter has resulted in the publication of some of Ireland’s best writers and illustrators abroad. Regarded by some commentators as a neo-colonization of Ireland, this leads to questions about how the ensuing lack of literature, with a particular focus on depictions of ‘Irishness’, might affect young people living in Ireland (including a considerable number not of ethnic Irish background). I propose an examination of these issues, a consideration of what might make literature particularly ‘Irish’, especially in a changing Ireland, and whether the perceived response to market forces is, in fact, a form of neo-colonization.

Toward a literary environmental ethics: a reflection on eco-criticism

Abstract: In the present era of globalization, discussing the relations between man and nature as well as the environment has become a cutting-edge theoretical topic for almost all humanities scholars. In this respect, the rise of eco-criticism in the English-speaking world takes the initiative of intervening from a literary critical perspective. Partly due to introduction and translation from the West, and partly from China’s own ecological resources, eco-criticism has also risen in China and quickly flourished. Actually, the relation between man and nature has long been a theme not only in Western literature but also in Chinese literature, and Tao Yuanming’s creation of the “Peach Blossom Spring” as a Chinese version of Utopia serves as a particularly notable example. The present article, after some critical review and reflection of the positive aspects of eco-criticism, tries to deconstruct from a postmodern eco-critical perspective the exclusiveness of the “people-oriented” ethics dominated in current Chinese ideology, and at the same time, questions the nature-earth-centric mode of thinking advocated by the eco-critics. To the author, it is necessary to construct a sort of postmodern environmental ethics characterized by harmoniousness with differences reserved in the present era rather than raise another binary opposition between man and nature.

Naples 2008, or, the waste land: trash, citizenship, and an ethic of narration

Abstract: After having been systematically disfigured by building developers for decades, in the last 15 years Naples has been over-polluted and unable to manage the problem of waste dumping sites. The latest and most blatant outcome of this situation is the world-infamous image of a beautiful and ancient city literally swallowed by its own trash. But behind this shocking TV-picture lies a structural condition in which ecological devastation, politics and business are tightly interlaced. Environmental ruin is here in fact just another face of a deeper political failure, which can be labeled a crisis of citizenship, also caused by the rise of the so-called “ecomafia.” This essay questions whether and how ecological culture and ecocriticism in particular can provide the population with critical instruments necessary to develop their own “strategy of survival” both environmental and political. After reflecting on the philosophical implications of the idea of waste, it considers whether projects of environmental education based on narrations about territorial issues can be implemented as forms of a “narrative re-inhabitation”: a task intended to sharpen people’s ecological and political awareness starting from their “locatedness,” to restore social hope and to envision long-term community projects. In this framework, the eco-cultural retrieval and invention of locally embedded stories and of place-identity is both an expression of civil disobedience toward a corrupted power and a means of political resilience.

Poetic wolves and environmental imagination: representations of wolf in recent Chinese literature

Abstract: During the last decade or so, the literary writings that portray the lives of the wolves and their relationship with the humans sprouted and prospered in China. These wolf writings all give very vivid and appealing portraits of wolves, their wild existence, their character, their relationship with men, and their role in the ecosystem. They have shaped our understanding of and attitudes towards animals and nature, which is of great value to the ongoing building of ecological civilization in China as well as in the world. In general, the Chinese wolf literature has inevitably been influenced and inspired by the long and rich traditions of the wolf myths and literature in the West, particularly those works of Jack London, Rudyard Kipling and other Western writers since the end of the 19th century. With due attention paid to the influence of the Western wolf literature, this essay will mainly analyze the three most important Chinese wolf novels—The Wolf Child, Remembering Wolves and The Wolf Totem, both separately and with reference to one another. It argues that the representations of wolves in them subvert the stereotypical hostile images of wolf in traditional Chinese culture, bring about fresh reflections on the cultural and spiritual symptoms of (post)modernity and globalization, and finally lead to a growing ecological consciousness and the call for balance between humans and nonhumans.

Aesthetics of surface, ephemeral, re-enchantment and mimetic approaches in digital literature: How authors and readers deal with the potential instability of the electronic device

Abstract: Whenever the program of a work, created by an artist, is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, the digital device may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, readers do not know what they should consider as part of the artist’s intentionality, and what they should ascribe to the unexpected changes made by the reading device of their personal computer. Critics who are in keeping with a hermeneutic approach may ascribe certain processes, actually caused by the machine, to the artist’s creativity. What is more, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the “digital” artist is given four options when dealing with the potential instability of the electronic device, which will be described in this article by close readings of The Dreamlife of letters by Brian Kim Stefans, Revenances by Gregory Chatonsky and La Serie des U by Philippe Bootz.

Creative nonfiction in electronic media: new wine in new bottles?

Abstract: Moving text into e-space has thus far taken as many steps backward as it has forward, largely because the paradigm of the printed book has served as a blinder that keeps us from seeing possible new ways of writing—something nowhere more obvious than in nonfiction. After looking at a few examples of such failures of imagination, including an internet-only scholarly publication that fails to take advantage of virtual textuality, this essay first notes some nonfictional genres and modes after which it looks the relations between fiction and nonfiction as literary forms. Next, it suggests new methods of argumentation made possible by computer-based textuality. The largest part of this essay then explores three new forms: the blog as the electronic translation of the journal, the hypertext essay, and the Ulmerian mystory.

What (cyber)reading for the (cyber)classroom

Abstract: In the present paper, we take as a starting point the debate on the relationships between the changes in writing supports and the changes in reading rituals, defending the need to pluralize the models and functions of literary reading so as to be able to approach different typologies of literary digital texts. Firstly, after revising and situating in a historical context the different types of reading rituals that the print text has developed, we reflect upon the type of reading that the academia is implicitly demanding in this new context through its use of ICCT and the design of learning sites. Secondly, we discuss how our readers, the students, are adjusting to the new digital literature and how can the teacher guide them through this permanently morphing scenario. We argue about the need to develop functional models for digital literary readings, and in the final section of the paper, we offer several reading strategies that can help teachers and students build a bridge between print and digital literary texts.

Translation and reconstruction of a wonderland: Alice’s Adventures in China

Abstract: Focusing on the linguistic, logical as well as literary values of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the article studies certain issues in this classical piece of verbal art from a translational perspective in China, with special reference to Yuen Ren Chao’s translation in 1922, which highlights an array of points and helps bring a seemingly comic book under the academic limelight, directing our attention to semiotic issues in terms of metalinguistic foregrounding, witty humor, sensible malapropism, meaningful nonsense, and logical absurdity, etc. that defy translation on different levels of linguistic presentation. In view of Chao’s erudition in philosophy, mathematics, and linguistics, it discusses his expertise in reconstructing a wonderland in the Chinese context and concludes that many of the subtle yet highly logical and metalinguisitc features in Alice can make themselves more acutely felt from a cross-linguistic perspective.

In and out of otherness: being and not-being in children's literature

Abstract: This paper suggests that the ultimate ‘otherness’ of children’s literature is not of ‘wildness’ in its many manifestations, nor difference, nor ethnic heritage, nor even imaginative distinctiveness, although there exist telling examples of all of these. Rather, it is the incipient otherness of non-being. Paradoxically, growth into beingness, into subjectivity and identity, is progressively and ever more insistently stalked by this otherness of non-being — of non-being a child by growing up and out of ‘childhood’, of the potential nonbeingness of loved others, but most of all, and most deeply and most profoundly, of knowledge of the inevitable non-being of self. That is, the ultimate other of children’s literature, and indeed of life, is the otherness of death. This paper begins an exploration of these ideas by referring to three well-known children’s plays, one that spans a century and has become a cultural icon and two that are the works of one of the best writers of our day. The complex and sensual genre of plays for theatre — itself somewhat of an other in critical discussions of children’s literature — offers a particularly acute focus for such a study: theatre involves writers and producers, actors and audiences, in aesthetic and kinesthetic conventions that are at once corporate and intimate, physical and intellectual, visual and aural. The plays for discussion are Peter Pan or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up by J. M. Barrie, and Wild Girl, Wild Boy and Skellig, The Play both by David Almond.

Thoreau and urbanature: from Walden to ecocriticism

Abstract: The concept of urbanature is a valuable new idea in ecocritical studies. Urbanature claims that urban life and nature are not as distinct as we have long supposed. Hawks and owls are nesting throughout Central Park and Manhattan at the same time that Western environmentalists are flying thousands of miles in jumbo-jets in an effort to “get back” to a version of nature they claim cannot be found in cities. Thoreau helps us to understand this conflict in the way he links an understanding of the nonhuman world with a wider appreciation of the concept of wildness. This essay will examine the hermit of Walden Pond in biographical detail and will also reveal the continuing impact of his works on students, teachers, and naturalists, especially that group of literary scholars known as ecocritics. Thoreau’s writings deliver a message of intellectual optimism but also of environmental warning. He also offers us a framework that can help us to determine the formal outlines of the ecocriticism we will practice in the coming decades.

Hyper texts: avant-gardism in contemporary Egyptian narratives

Abstract: Egyptian narratives have undergone transformations due to ex/changes between cyber and book-bound texts. The publication of popular autobiographical narrative weblogs has aroused inquiries as to their literary status. This requires an examination of their reading processes as compared to avant-garde narratives in Arabic in order to verify the impact of media crossings and digitalization in promoting the hyper quality that subverts linearity in dominant discourse.

The dynamics of incompletion: multilingual manuscript genetics and digital philology

Abstract: To examine the dynamics of incompletion that characterizes many writings by twentieth century authors, the following essay investigates the possibilities to visualize (1) switches, (2) shuffles and (3) shifts in modern multilingual manuscripts with digital philological tools. (1) Jerome McGann’s notions of the bibliographical and the linguistic codes were originally not coined in relation to manuscript studies, but they can be applied to a particular form of “code switching” between an image-based and a text-based approach. (2) Another phenomenon that typically marks the writing process of literary texts is the practice of shuffling textual segments when their definitive position has not yet been fixed. (3) Finally, transtextual shifts in multilingual manuscripts are not only limited to intertextual references, but often have a language-related dimension as well.

Traduction et Altérité

Abstract: This article proposes a critical reading of two narratives written by the well-known author Tomi Ungerer and an analysis of their multiple versions in three languages, French, English and German In the first case, the text is an autobiography of the author’s childhood during the Second World War Written first in French, three subsequent versions were produced by the author in German, English and French again for a children’s book publisher In the case of the second text, written and illustrated by the author, the original language is unclear but the French and German versions are very close The English version, on the contrary is surprisingly moralistic Our analysis of the different approaches to translation invite a reflexion on the notions of ethnocentricism, alterity and identity, as well as on language contact and hybridity

From analogue to hypermedia texts in hispanic literatures

Abstract: Internet is not just communication and information, it is also culture. Internet is a global space which allows for what is local. This brings about what we might call glocalization, a fact which justifies considering digital literature taking into account only those works which have been conceived of and written in Spanish. Some of the characteristics attributable to digital literature—collective experimentation and the rupture of narrative linearity—are exemplified in literary stories from the collective and experimental Hispanic novel. In addition, we can avail of certain instances of pioneer digital literary works written in Spanish, in which a number of specific qualities can be found to be based on the texts’ virtual nature itself. In the present study, an original approach to these works is presented in relation to three reading pathways: linear, helicoid and rhizomatic.

The destruction of the idyll in the Mao era

Abstract: The portrayal of rural family life in To Live (Huozhe) accords with Bahktin’s analysis of the idyllic chronotope. The cyclical rhythm of human life is connected, literally and figuratively, to the natural environment through agricultural labour. However, the cyclical fabric essential to this chronotope is challenged throughout the narration by the Chinese desire for industrialization and modernization. Even though the idyllic chronotope decomposes throughout, the novel remains a sympathetic depiction of Chinese agricultural life from the pre-civil war period until the Cultural Revolution. It is rich with Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist voices that give this incarnation of the Chinese idyll a uniquely Chinese character. In the novel, the human cycles determining the chronotope of the idyll are broken—families are driven from the homes of their ancestors and parents bury their children. The novel demonstrates how this disruption is the result of a desire to sweep away the traditional psychology of the idyll in the name of modernization and industrialization. Presented in frame-narrative at a distance of 10 years, the disintegrating idyllic chronotope is located in a past moment accessible to the imagination and yet divorced from the present. This narrative crisis is symptomatic of the ecological crisis that faces China and the world; it is also of key importance to the inter-chronotopic dialogue of a modern reader and the text, for it places this idyllic world at a distance, allowing a modern reader to access the text despite the gulf that separates the reader’s chronotope from the idyll’s. China, a land rich in ancient and modern voices that celebrate the unity of man and nature, is a fertile field for the ecocritic’s own labour, and these voices must be tilled and harvested in order to assist China and the world through the ecological crisis we face.

Life and love: Thoreau’s life philosophy on man and nature in the age of industrialization

Abstract: Henry David Thoreau, who was ignored and dismissed by his contemporaries, now has become a global figure as the saint and pioneer of environmental protection. This study intends to explore Thoreau’s life philosophy on man and nature encountering the industrial civilization, which he believed caused the life alienation of nature and human beings. In his reflection on industrial civilization, Thoreau inquired into the rationality of science and technology, recognized the exploitation of life under the guidance of rationality and objected to the material culture in which people’s lives were eroded and degraded. Beneath his fierce critiques, there is a great concern about the existence and development of the whole universal life. He tried to find an ideal solution to the crises of natural ecology and spiritual ecology of human beings. His critiques on industrial civilization and his cosmological beliefs of life are still enlightenment for the alienated people of today. The author thinks that Chinese people could also gain some revelation from Thoreau’s life philosophy. Firstly, it stimulates us to rediscover and reinterpret the Chinese classics, which have been ignored in China in the past 100 years, and to find our own eco-wisdom; Secondly, it forces us to reflect on China’s development of modernization.

Gary Snyder’s poetic homage to Native American and East Asian cultures

Abstract: This essay explores some essential aspects of Native American thinking and culture, including its commonality with traditional East Asian thinking and culture, as these are described, analyzed and above all poetically expressed by the American eco-poet and essayist Gary Snyder. The key themes addressed here are those of the natives’ closeness to place (earth, land) versus the abstracted “location” of the white majority or (more generally) of the forces of colonization, driven by globalized capitalism; historical versus trans-historical (or pre-historic) time; rational-dualistic thinking versus an immanent earthly thinking that breaks down dualities while seeing the larger picture; a transcendent Judeo-Christian religion versus communal-immanent tribal religions; and an “educational” system based on teacher–student oppositions versus one grounded in an oral-narrative tradition that is indistinguishable from the community itself.

Sheridan Le Fanu, the supernatural and the sounds of the Irish countryman

Abstract: Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer in the Gothic tradition, an innovator of the genre of the supernatural tale, and master story-teller, whose use of language we examine here; his use of the core linguistic features of words, syntax and sounds for literary expression and his use of narrative and dialogue and of the registers (speech and written styles) and dialects of his speech community for a sense of realism and authenticity. We also examine the difference between written and the spoken language, and the way Le Fanu imparted to the written word the features of the Irish oral story-telling tradition.

Narratological interplay: What literary criticism can learn from computer gaming studies

Abstract: The article discusses the future role of narrative computer games in the academic canon. As a popular part of everyday culture, this medium is coming to the attention of several disciplines at the same time. Especially comparative literature studies has to face the question of how to deal with computer games, whether to ignore them, to treat them marginally, or to even incorporate them. This article outlines the major challenges as well as the possible benefits of their inclusion into the systematical and theoretical scope of comparative literature.

Quelle place pour la littérature enfantine et de jeunesse dans le discours critique de la littérature africaine

Abstract: In this study I will consider the question of the reshaping of children’s literature on the African continent and in doing so, I will focus on three aspects in particular: the place of children and young people in African literature from the 1990s to the present; how the-matics and perspective have developed in literature for children and youths; lastly, the question of a new context for the diffusion of literature coupled with new market interests, the role and impact these texts have on the public.

Chinese projections of Thoreau and his Walden’s influence in China

Abstract: In 1995, Walter Harding turned out an article titled “Thoreau’s Reputation” trying to render a picture of how Thoreau had been perceived in a world other than the United States. He mentioned in particular the translation of the writer into different languages such as German, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, French, Czechoslovakian and Italian and he specifically dwelled on the Japanese reception of Thoreau and his works, without a single word about the abundance of Chinese scholarship on the same writer. This essay begins with a critical survey of how Thoreau has been perceived in China. It argues that there are tentatively three different stages as regards the Chinese projections of Thoreau in terms of issues raised and handled. The first stage roughly from the 1920s to 1949 marks China’s burgeoning interest in the American writer featured by a passion for Western literature as both cultural and intellectual nourishment. The second is mainly a period of ideological appraisals from 1949 to 1977 in which Thoreau is regarded as a champion of democracy and a critic of American capitalist civilization. The third one is known as the multiple approach period from 1978 onwards in which Thoreau studies has flourished and continues to grow in China. Focused discussions have revealed the following: (1) comparative approaches have been made into the Chinese elements in the formation of Thoreau’s notion of civilization and views of Nature; (2) critical attention has been drawn on Thoreau’s political thought and ecological awareness, rendering a multitude of interpretations both textually and theoretically; and (3) further discussions focus primarily on Thoreau’s personal conduct raising a question of how to appraise Thoreau’s withdrawal from society and giving rise to an ambiguous identity of Thoreau. Intertwined in my discussion is a further exploration of Walden’s influence in China and how Thoreau is integrated in contemporary Chinese writing at this age of ecological awareness.

Cyberliteratures: a global perspective

Abstract: Globalization is a process of enormous proportions that alters and reconstructs the cultural map of the world by introducing new ways of creating, investigating and teaching in every area of knowledge. The electronic resources available to us necessarily modify the way we think and act. In view of the double process of globalization and digitalization underway at the start of the twenty-first century, the ICLA/AICL created, in the year 2005 and with the support of its President, Dr. Tania Franco Carvalhal, the Research Committee on Comparative Literature in Digital Age (CLDA). The general aim of this Committee is to study the relationships of interference, displacement and intertextuality in hypermedia among different literatures in order to develop a clearer picture of new supports for transliterary and plural identities. The change of paradigm from text to hypertext involves an epistemological change in the study of new personal and national identities. The binary schema that for so long prevailed within the core of comparative studies has been devaluated, and it is being increasingly replaced by the possibilities offered by hypermedia, possibilities related to both epistemological perspectives and new media technology, and also to the fact that hypermedia considers alternative forms of expression and recognises differences. The first step of the Research Committee was to highlight the need for the incorporation of new media technology and the epistemological potential of hypertext into every aspect of the field and discipline of Comparative Literature. The Committee strives to achieve, as a major objective, the consolidation of a research network on Comparative Literatures and e-Humanities learning. Placing identity issues at the centre of the debate, the Committee tries to avoid classical universalisms as much as all that is reductive and binary. Dialogism and mobility in literatures may be particularly well represented by a hypertextual model. In fact, an open and creative system is needed, and not a closed, linear one, since we consider that the study of literature is a re-reading/re-writing activity and readers are makers of meaning. Nowadays, the invading metaphor of the network represents a relational model that creates links: literary texts become a bundle of possible

The Western canon in Hebrew digital media

Abstract: This article presents the findings of the first part of a research project on the Western canon and Israeli active cultural memory in the Digital Era. The article focuses on the methodological problems of mapping a national cultural memory from the angle of the use it makes of Western literary heritage. The detailed description of the mapping process—beginning with the construction of an initial list of relevant canonic texts and ending with the validation of three cultural “memes” (Don Quixote’s tilting the windmills, Hamlet’s contemplation of suicide, and Romeo and Juliet as the ultimate lovers) as the most appropriate matter for constructing multimedia hypertext educational threads, touches upon many aspects of Intertextuality and Cultural memory theories, and the positive and negative aspects of the Internet with respect to both.

In wildness is the preservation of China: Henry Thoreau, Gao Xingjian, and Jiang Rong

Abstract: Two widely read Chinese novels of the past 20 years—Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain (1990) and Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004)—echo Henry David Thoreau’s proclamation (in his essay “Walking”) that “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” These texts, which reveal their origins in journals, present highly personal quests for what remains of the wild in China; turning their backs on Beijing, the authors search for validation of a belief, expressed by Thoreau and other environmental writers within a Romantic tradition, that a people in close contact with the wild maintain a strength, earthiness and vitality not found in urban cultures; and that close contact with the wild, especially with wild animals, has a spiritual dimension. These compelling Chinese quests yield different results, inevitably depart from Thoreau’s 19th-century optimism, and make complementary statements on what modern China risks losing as it progressively, and in the name of “progress,” eliminates the wild.

La valeur littéraire du livre comme promoteur principal de la lecture

Abstract: In this article we propose a number of reflections on reading promotion in general and literary reading in particular, attempting to offer a justification for a reevaluation of the teaching of literature in schools, colleges and universities. With a special focus on the Portuguese educational and literary systems, the article may also concern those who are necessarily interested in the educative value of reading and discussing literature.

Odysseus comes to know his place: reading the Odyssey ecocritically

Abstract: Although nature looms large throughout Homer’s Odyssey, literary critics have entirely neglected to discuss his construction of the natural world in this foundational Western work. This neglect might be the result of two factors: the blurred line between geographical and fantastical locales in Odysseus’ travels and the blurred line between natural forces and deities. This essay recognizes that Homer not only reconstructs the Mediterranean world in his epic through detailed references to weather, geology, plants, birds, and animals but also that his similes suggest a consciousness of inter-species relationships. Principally, however, this essay argues, as does William Cronon, that “relationships, processes, and systems are as ecological as they are cultural,” and that Odysseus’ response to nature may usefully be understood in relation to three ecocritical models: the anthropocentric or domination model, the stewardship model, and the biomorphic model. His exploitative and aggressive behavior toward the Cyclopes, Circe, and the cattle of the Sun is contrasted with his recognition upon his homecoming of his own animal nature and his appreciation of the agrarian and pastoral life. While the tradition of writing in The Odyssey genre has vigorously continued in Western literature, only recently have contemporary environmental writers moved toward a recognition of the threat of the anthropocentric perspective to the imperative of working toward the stewardship and biomorphic models.

From exclusion to familiarity: The question of otherness in contemporary Greek literature for young readers

Abstract: This paper initiates an exploration into contemporary Greek literature for young adults and more specifically, literary texts with a social dimension. Contemporary Greek writers deliberately address social issues in a realistic manner by presenting all the different facets of Alterity: xenophobia, ethnocentrism, racism. Today these narratives pose new questions and attempt to familiarize the young public with an image of the Other, the Foreigner, the Different. The writers focus on the positive aspects of multiculturalism in contemporary societies in hopes of discrediting stereotypical images of the Other that continue to prevail in the collective imagination, to sensitize the public and ultimately to abolish the fault lines of bigotry.

Théorie de la littérature pour enfants: Dans les ou au-delà des « Grandes Théories »?

Abstract: Children’s Literature was not always considered a well recognized field of research and study by the academic world, since the interest of scholars was focused on its pedagogic parameters and educational usefulness. At the same time, it was dedicated to the designation of the term “child” and the concept of childhood. During the last three decades, Children’s Literature has been allowed its own poetics, its own theory, meaning a frame of principles that are followed when approaching literary texts and lend to this frame not only a descriptive or normative character but also a “reflective” intention. When theorists realized the need to stray from empirical readings and scientifically based all their reports on the nature and the operation of literature written for children, or that is read by them, they mobilized and developed principles from the Theory of Literature. However, they do not overcome the dynamics of the term “child” in its coupling with the term “literature”, which finally ensures the particularity and charm of the reading process, even though it makes it complex, if not interdisciplinary.