Globalization has favored the expansion of teaching and learning English in higher education worldwide. Spain has not been an exception. The aim of this paper is to examine students’ attitude to codeswitching and determine whether variables such as sex and age play a role in the perception of codeswitching in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP, hereinafter) classroom. The focus is specifically on second-year-Business Administration students. A data-driven analysis of data, collected by means of the questionnaire, reveals that neither sex nor age are significantly influential in the students’ attitude to codeswitching. Furthermore, the findings indicate that resorting to Spanish while learning English contributes substantially to enhancing learners’ learning experience and making it more effective.

Drawing on care ethics and vulnerability theory, this study addresses the prominent role of intimacy in Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (2024), set in contemporary Ireland. Written in a language that focuses on the protagonists’ interiority, bodily sensations, and emotional world, the novel vividly portrays a “radical” sense of intimacy which helps characters reassess their phobias and insecurities within their closest relationships. As will be argued, intimacy in Rooney’s Intermezzo is not just a matter of human connection, but of a personal transformation that allows protagonists to move away from the neoliberal and patriarchal values, norms, and stereotypes of today’s world.

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This research aims to add to the critical discussions of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun by bridging the disciplines of narratology and cognitive science. First, the article traces the presumed voicing of Klara’s robotic cognitive processes, connecting her machine vision to the idea of a non-anthropocentric self and the fictional possibilities of nonhuman un/consciousness. Secondly, it looks at the cognitive-affective interdependencies in the assemblage that artificial intelligences create with the humans in the novel. Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’s idea of cognitive assemblages and Marco Caracciolo’s theorisation of strange narrators, this research considers how Ishiguro’s novel invites readers to navigate interpretive tensions when engaging with nonhuman perspectives, while exploring whether the text participates in a paradigm shift from a human-centred cognitive subject towards a relational configuration that bridges the ontological divide between human and nonhuman “minds.”

This article demonstrates how Ferdinand Tönnies’s celebrated distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) resonates in the works of T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and W. H. Auden, who engage with the implications of rootedness, cosmopolitanism, and the erosion of traditional communities. These thinkers offer valuable insights into the ways in which the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft reshaped social life, cultural identity, and individual consciousness. The paper examines these perspectives, contrasting the virtues of localized, organic communities with the challenges and opportunities posed by modern, cosmopolitan societies. It highlights the ongoing struggle to balance unity and diversity in a rapidly evolving world, where the preservation of cultural identity often clashes with the demands of global interconnectedness. Ultimately, this exploration underscores the enduring relevance of Tönnies’s framework and the continued search for meaning and community in the face of modernity’s transformative pressures.

Þe boke of Ypocras is a zodiacal lunary which outlines the effects that the moon causes in each of the twelve zodiacal signs upon parts of the body leading to different diseases. During the Late Middle Ages this tract circulated extensively and was translated from Latin into different European vernaculars. Middle English manuscript witnesses have been recently studied (Diego Rodríguez, Þe boke). However, post-1500 witnesses remain unidentified and unedited. This paper aims to bring to light the sixteenth-century witness of Þe boke of Ypocras contained in London, Wellcome Library. MS 7117 (ff.92r–94). Its edition enables the identification of this witness and to place it in the line of transmission. Also, it provides new insights to reflect on how this treatise influenced the ongoing interpenetration of medical astrological thought in the sixteenth century

Taking as its theoretical starting-point Bergson’s notion of subjective time and as a practical exemplar Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, this article contends that fiction has the capacity to morph historical context, thereby making it phenomenologically present to readers. As a formal contrast to Proust’s immense novel, Bridget O’Connor’s short stories are analyzed to show how even short fiction can give shape to context, in this case through aspects of style and characterization. As a result, conventional distinctions between history and fiction are elided, which in turn challenges conventional definitions of historical fiction.

This article examines the alternative future of Becky Chambers’s Record of a Spaceborn Few through the frameworks of circular economy, degrowth, and critical posthumanism. As I shall argue, Chambers’s novel envisions a future society that moves beyond extractive capitalism, emphasising a sustainable socio-economic system with communal labour and non-hierarchical social structures through the Fleet, a collection of ships inhabited by the descendants of the last humans on Earth. By analysing the Fleet’s socio-economic system, this article explores how and to what extent Chambers criticises lineal capitalism and proposes an alternative mode of existence, potentially more aligned with critical posthumanism. Drawing on economic theory and speculative fiction, including science fiction, scholarship, the article argues that Chambers’s novel offers a complex vision of post-capitalist futures, demonstrating the role of science fiction in imagining sustainable alternatives to the Anthropocene.

This paper examines Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls (2013) as a reflection on recurrent obstacles to women’s rights. Beukes geometrizes her characters’ temporalities as either linear or circular to convey the conflict between women who fight for equality and the enduring socio-economic forces that block their development as full human beings. Contrary to traditional genderings of time, in Beukes’ work the male chrononaut time-travels in circles to kill promising women, thus embodying backlash discourse and practices that repeatedly jeopardize feminist advances made across time. In contrast, his victims are set in chrononormative linear time to represent women’s struggles for advances in reproductive rights, sexual freedom, and career opportunities.