This paper looks to Tracy Sorensen’s 2023 novel, The vitals, to help answer the question: what do we hope for –which bodies, which worlds– when we hope for resilience? The vitals narrates the experience of cancer from the perspective of the author’s abdominal organs and tumours. It is also, less obviously, an intervention into the cultural politics of climate change, informed by Sorensen’s many years as a climate activist. The book also reflects Sorensen’s recognition that climate change, like cancer, represents a challenge to the imagination that is partly attributable to myths of a hierarchical distinction between brain and body and between human and non-human modes of being. This paper reads The vitals as an experiment in dehumanism (Singh, 2018) that counters myths of humanist mastery with an emphasis on place-based imagination, organization and laughter.

This article studies Indian writing in the English language published in English newspapers (Indian, Bangladeshi, British, US) during the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak in India (March 22–May 25, 2020). The selected authors include Arundhati Roy, Tishani Doshi, Anuradha Roy, and Prayaag Akbar, to illustrate the transnational consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak in different areas of India and analyse the narratology of resilience to articulate ethical knowledge against regional, national, and international stereotypes. I propose the concept transformative hope as an oppositional complaint (Bargués et al., 2024; Braithwaite, 2004; Giroux, 2004) against political and representational systems of domain articulated against the capitalist politics of who can afford to survive. This study shows a possible subversive resilience (Bracke, 2016; Darías-Beautell, 2020; Fraile-Marcos, 2020a; O’Brien, 2015) that, together with writing and reading, can implement alliance, rather than affiliation, and praises an ethical and transformative hope that dissents against the resilient appropriation of neoliberalism to benefit from tragedies like Covid-19.

This research focuses on the identification of the Old English exponent for the semantic prime DIE following the approach of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory (Goddard, 2008, 2011; Wierzbicka, 1996). The aim of this paper is to complete the research begun on Old English exponents for the category Life and Death and to review the methodology applied in previous research on this field, which is based on morphological, textual, semantic and syntactic criteria and on the search for examples of the exponent word within the alternative syntactic configurations associated with the prime. The fact that DIE is the only predicate prime which does not allow for optional arguments entails the implementation of a new methodological approach to determine the suitability of the verb selected as prime exponent. All in all, the conclusion is drawn that the OE verb sweltan is selected as the exponent of DIE in Old English.

This article tackles the manifestations of American literary themes in Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men. I contend that the transmedial alignment of TV series and literature heightens our understanding of fundamental myths of American exceptionalism. This paper studies the role of language at script level as a site or tópos where the protagonist’s constant reinvention occurs. Moreover, it provides an interdiscursive analysis of Frank O’Hara’s “Mayakovsky” and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” to show their thematic connection, which is the transition from old to new life. This theme possesses an axiomatic role in the genesis of this show, suggesting a tight intermedial relationship between the show’s scripts and the two literary works I will analyze. On the basis of my analysis, I suggest that reading this TV series as literature is possible if we consider both the show’s thematic connection with American literary themes and its multiple literary references.

This paper analyses the domain of verbs of anger and closely related emotions in order to implement a formalised lexical constructional account. Through a detailed analysis of psych-verbs, this research explores their syntactic and semantic specifications. By investigating the roles of experiencers and stimuli arguments either as syntactic subject or object when causing changes in psychological states, the study attempts to shed light on the syntactic and semantic properties of anger and related verbs and the constructions in which they occur. Drawing on constructional and lexical templates for argument structure, this study provides a detailed mapping of how language lexicalises verbal predicates of anger. Overall, this research offers an insight into their formalised representation, relying on the general principles of the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM) (Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera-Masegosa, 2014; Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal-Usón, 2007, 2008, 2011), Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Bentley et al., 2023; Van Valin, 2005; Van Valin & La Polla, 1997), and Construction Grammar (CxG) (Fillmore & Kay, 1996; Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Hoffmann, 2022; Michaelis, 2013; Sag & Boas, 2012).

The Second Vatican Council and its hermeneutical dynamics of a progressively secularized modern world had a profound impact on the lives of millions. Drawing upon Jüri Lotman’s theory of cultural semiotics, this article aims first to examine Vatican II as an attempt to incorporate frontier discourses into the centrality of the Catholic Church semiosphere, i.e., the Vatican, mainly regarding moral theology and social doctrine. Within this context, I will analyze the impact of the Council on Graham Greene’s Catholic imagination. Through the study of Greene’s correspondence to editors of different publications concerning such controversial topics as birth control, the right to die, and the role of the Church in the political upheavals in Central and Latin America, I will argue that Greene identified himself with Vatican II’s desire to articulate Catholicism in new ways. Additionally, the analysis of his correspondence to the press will offer further insights into how Greene weaves these topics into his literary work. In this sense, Greene embodies the theological issues of the Council in his own religious and literary imagination and illustrates its reception by Roman Catholics in the 1970s and 1980s.