In her 1989 Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, Eva Hoffman graphs so articulately the asymptotic narrative that brings her younger self into alignment with the retrospective self who writes the book, that there seems little for the literary interpreter to do but restate the author’s lucid insights. Still, appreciative criticism may yet illuminate the artistry with which this work, written by a gifted intellectual who was also a talented amateur musician, is composed: major movements at the macro-level, scrupulous performance by the page and the phrase. Hoffman not only declares here and there what her “life in a new language” means, but also manifests that meaning as an intention unfolding through the design and sequence of its leading episodes. Furthermore, her self-conscious handling of English, including its seasoning by vestigial and not-quite-translated words from Polish and other tongues, lets the verbal medium strike at times a deeply textured chord resisting the forward linearity of narrative. Thus Hoffman rehearses in the reader’s company – solicits, indeed, the construing reader’s intimate collusion in – those temporal knots of throwback and anticipation which inform her book’s most moving passages.

Stylistic analyses of negation have traditionally and predominantly focused on linguistic texts due to lack of a well-defined tool for investigating negation in multimodal texts. To fill this methodological gap, the present study integrates the critical stylistics tool of negation in written texts with Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) framework of visual analysis to develop a tool for the analysis of negation in multimodal texts. This tool is named the multimodal textual conceptual function of negation (MTCFN) and is used to explore how multimodal meanings of negation are constructed in Princess Diana Panorama interview, broadcasted in 1995. The analysis revealed that the co-occurrence of language and images in the same text creates a co-text that regulates and determines the meanings of negation produced by both semiotic systems. The combination of the visual affordances of gaze direction, head tilts, and different shot types and angles helps reinforce and make coherent the meanings initiated through the verbal medium, thus creating a coherent and impactful multimodal narrative. The study concludes that stylistics holds significant potential for informing approaches to the analysis of multimodal texts and recommends that further research is carried out on other multimodal text types to test the explanatory adequacy of the proposed MTCFN tool.

Among the several publications focusing on spiders and insects in Albania, very few address their venom, toxicity and medical significance. This study presents the first comprehensive data on the ecology and distribution of medically significant insects and spiders found in Albania, including information on morphology, habitat preferences and venom toxicity. The data presented here has been gathered from an extensive literature review and through citizen science, focusing on social networks, written and verbal media, observations collected from the online platforms iNaturalist and records available on The Global Biodiversity Information Facility website. Results show that spiders from the “widow” group, belonging to the genera Latrodectus Walckenaer, 1805 and Steatoda Sundevall, 1833, are frequently mentioned in the literature for the severity of their bites due to the potent neurotoxin α–latrotoxin present in their venom. Meanwhile, the medical significance of hymenopterans, especially the honeybee Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758, is due to the anaphylactic reactions induced by their highly allergenic venom. This study presents the first attempt to map the distribution of venomous spiders and insects present in Albania, with detailed information on their morphology, ecology, and venom toxicity, with the aim of informing the public and health professionals across the country, and more largely, the Balkan region.

Anxiety is commonly seen among patients undergoing mandibular third molar (MM3) surgery. Traditionally, OMF surgeons try to minimize patient anxiety through a verbal pre-operative patient education (PPE) during the informed consent process. Audio-visual (AV) aids have been tried as an alternative, but there is no clear consensus on whether the AV medium is superior. To evaluate and compare the effect of PPE through AV or verbal medium on perioperative anxiety levels and retention of PPE information among patients undergoing MM3 surgery. A double-blinded randomized trial with a total of 76 patients was conducted. Group A received PPE by verbal modality, and Group B received PPE through AV modality. In both groups, baseline anxiety was assessed by State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T) questionnaire and peri-operative anxiety by self-reported visual analog scale (VAS) scores and hemodynamic parameters at different time periods during the MM3 surgery. Retention of PPE information was assessed using a 10-item single-response questionnaire at two time periods. No statistically significant differences were observed in the perioperative VAS scores, hemodynamic parameters and retention of PPE between the two groups. The AV modality of PPE did not significantly influence patient anxiety and retention of PPE information during MM3 surgery. This randomized trial was prospectively registered with clinical trials registry, India (CTRI)-CTRI/2021/05/033898.

Background: Denture cleaning is essential to prevent malodor, poor aesthetics and the accumulation of plaque/calculus with its deleterious effects on the mucosa. Moreover, denture and mucosal tissues of the edentulous mouth's hygiene, especially in the elderly are essential for overall health. Therefore, the present study was conducted to assess the denture hygiene knowledge and attitudes toward patient education in denture care among dentists in Benghazi, Libya.
 Materials & Methods: The present questionnaire survey was conducted on 180 dentists. A self-administrated questionnaire was designed to gather the socio-demographic characteristics, assess the denture hygiene knowledge, attitudes and practices among dental clinicians. The data was entered and analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS Version 20 for Windows, SPSS Inc. Chicago, IL).
 Results: A total of 155 questionnaires had been returned to the researcher giving a response rate 86 %. The sample comprised of 74.8% of females and 25.2% of males. About 57.4% of participants were general dental practitioner. While 17.4% and 25.2% of them specialist (prosthodontics and non -prosthodontics). About 87.6% of dental general practitioner had aware about accumulation of oral biofilm on denture, but almost of them did not know that the oral biofilm associated with denture stomatitis. While high rates of specialists (prosthodontics 74.1% and non-prosthodontics 64.1%) had positive attitude in compared with general practitioner 48.3% (The difference was significant) about explaining denture hygiene instructions to old patients. All of prosthodontics gave patient's instruction regarding the denture cleansing methods at the time of denture delivery 64% of them used verbal medium for instruction delivery.
 Conclusion: Dental general practitioner had limited knowledge and attitudes toward patient education in denture care whereas specialists had sufficient denture hygiene knowledge, attitudes and practices toward patient education in denture care.

Children with mentally disable is a children who has cognitive barriers experience, in early reading it is often disturbed by the difficulty of remembering the letters, and also connecting phonemes with the objects. This article presents innovations on how to teach early reading to mentally disable students in elementary schools. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of how teachers teach early reading to mentally retarded students in elementary schools. This study uses qualitative methods that describe how teachers teach early reading, with the subject of mentally disable classroom teachers at SDLB Kasih Ibu Pekanbaru. Data collection techniques are through observation and interviews. The results of research observation planning data, the teacher gives emphasis to the letters and shows the image in accordance with the initial letter given emphasis, and linking the material with everyday life that can be found by students using an easy to understand reading method. Observation data of the presentation component, the teacher in explaining the material using simple language, by verbal media and giving emphasis to the letters that students’ will be read. The conclusion of this study is the application of one component of the skills explains in teaching initial reading, the component of material presentation in the first day's observations has been going well.

Language when used as a verbal medium carries variety of significant meanings. The cooperative principle is one of the major foundations for a comprehensive and smooth conversation. Language when used as a verbal medium carries variety of significant meanings. The cooperative principle is one of the major foundations for a comprehensive and smooth conversation. The research in hand aims to focus on the advertisements in relation to Grice’s Cooperative Principles. The thought-provoking observation is that advertisers target their audience by creating idealistic taglines which usually deviate from the cooperative principles of communication. Electronic media language can either form a conversational bond with the audience or can sway them in opposite. The data for the said purpose was collected through the advertisements being aired on Pakistani news channels and Pakistani drama channels at prime hour. The analysis covers the implications of maxims of the cooperative principles over the tag lines of these advertisements and the influential meanings that hid under their discourse. By using the analytical method and qualitative approach the researcher tried to emphasize the meanings of conversational implicatures with and without following the cooperative principles. These taglines are significant in capturing the mind of the population and so they are made attractive and memorable keeping this as a prime foundation. The implication of maxims resulted in understanding the influential meanings both apparent and hidden as well as led the researchers understand various ways of flouting of maxims that happens while creating the tagline ideas. Though maintaining the integrity to not to manipulate the audience rather convincing for a second thought.

Archiving Black Diasporas

Visual media photography is prioritized to present actual and factual information as news media and art media, and Visual Poetry is a work of art that combines two visual and verbal media as one work. The purpose of this research is to make still life photography works and the meaning of photo works as a medium for Visual Poetry. The object of the photo is about the condition of the Lapindo Mud on Porong Sidoarjo Indonesia, which has been neglected for years without serious handling. This creation method uses a photographic method of photographing natural objects. Methods of collecting data by observation, interviews, and documentation offline and online. The discussion of meaning uses the semiotic theory of Roland Barthes. The result of this creation is to capture visual phenomena which are then converted into words and finally assembled into poetry. The meaning of the final work of the photo comes from the visual and verbal media that are presented together, and of course it remains open to meaning that is free from the audience. Visual Poetry's work is used as a social critique of the condition of the Lapindo Mud which is physically and socially neglected. The conclusion of this creation is that visual and verbal media have their respective advantages and limitations, but can be combined into new works and new meanings. The benefit of the creation of this work is the development of methods of visual meaning that can produce new art media.

Reviewed by: Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability by Eszter Szép Pamela J. Rader Eszter Szép. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability. Ohio State UP, 2020. 206 p. Humans dwell in bodies. How they feel about, relate to, and narrate their bodies and the bodies of the Other are not restricted to any one discipline. Drawing, like writing, is an embodied experience. Eszter Szép argues that reading comics is not just a cognitive experience, but "it is also a performance and interaction of bodies," (1) and "the line is a partner of the drawer and body" (77). However, writing, a verbal medium, happens even before the pen (pencil or laptop letters) hit the page; I compose while I walk which creates a state of mind. Barry, one of the writer-drawers studied here, teaches her students to think of "drawing as a way of thinking" (63). Grounding her monograph in an impressive swath of theory and comics scholarship, Szép summarizes the array of sources that inform the study in the introduction and reiterates those sources frequently throughout the chapters. Building on film theory, art history, and trauma studies, Szép focuses on activities of the body crucial to making and reading comics. Her introduction, nearly a third of the volume, draws out the theoretical frameworks and scholarship for her interest in the healing and transformation process in the artist and reader of autobiographical comics. The oft repeated goals established in the first three chapters center on vulnerability as a "central experience expressed by drawing," while chapters four and five focus on reader [End Page 351] engagement and performance in dialogue with one's own vulnerability and/or that of the Other (50). Non-fiction graphic narratives by Lynda Barry, Ken Dahl, Katie Green, Miriam Katin, and Joe Sacco explore self-esteem, trauma, and paths to healing across the authors' and their avatars' experiences with drawing, herpes, anorexia, Caesarean, and war. Szép makes a painstaking case for the specific medium of nonfiction comics as a mediated interaction between three bodies: the drawer, the reader, and the material comic. Representing and re-drawing the body of the authors' avatars is serious business. In Chapter One, readers of Lynda Barry's books like Syllabus and What It Is, will recognize the author's nearsighted monkey and the hair-tie Lynda avatars. Szép's reading of Barry's texts focuses on the active line and the state of mind produced by the drawer while drawing. Ken Dahl's Monsters, in Chapter Two, invites the drawer to illustrate how the Herpes virus transforms not only the avatar Ken's body but self-image as Dahl personifies the ever-changing virus. Without question, this redrawing of the body and its virus destabilizes form and identity. What Elisabeth El Refaie calls "pictorial embodiment" invites the drawer to redraw and reimagine the personality's diverse aspects in discrete modifications of the avatar (83). In the case of Miriam Katin's Letting it Go in Chapter Four, her avatar's vulnerability spans several pages of an involuntary defecation and clean-up. These texts, for Szép, affirm that "[d]rawing is interpretation; it is a way to organize reality" (39). The drawer-writer's perspective is an interpretation of the events experienced. Comics transform the metaphor into an embodied reality to foster dialogue about vulnerability. While bodies are indeed the subject of Szép's chosen graphic memoirs, the style of lines are a technique for "[expressing] engagement and compassion with the pain and vulnerability of others" (109). In Chapter Three, Szép zeroes in on Joe Sacco's Bosnian war reportage and his haptic use of crosshatched backgrounds and textures. She makes a compelling case for how Sacco's "compulsive" crosshatching (121) allows the author-drawer to dwell with the drawn stories and their avatars. This dwelling opens a temporal space wherein Sacco sits with and engages with his subjects, showing a form of bodily engagement. However, in Chapter Five, the use of scribbling in Katie Green's memoir Lighter Than My Shadow performs a different function; according to Szép, this particular style permits one "to visualize...


 
 This study aims to determine how the Bank BPRS Amanah Ummah conduct marketing strategy in marketing the product pledge of gold, and whether the implementation of the strategy is able to influence the development of the number of customers at BPRS Amanah Ummah. This study uses primary data from interviews with Admin Pawn systematically to obtain data and information, as well as the use of secondary data from literature, books, and other sources relevant to this article. From these results, that the marketing strategy undertaken by BPRS Amanah Ummah is Product Strategy, Pricing Strategy, Location Strategy, Promotion, Service strategy, Process, and Physicl Evidence. So it is known that the product marketing strategy of gold pawn at Bank BJB Syariah Cabang Bogor is able to influence the development of the number of customers, is evidenced by the achievement of targets and an increase in turnover of Islamic business and growth of number of customers from year to year is increasing, and the way of promotion through verbal media is the best strategy to attract customers and increase revenues of the bank itself to pawn their gold at the BPRS Amanah Ummah, thus affecting the income of banks.
 Keyword: Marketing Strategy, Gold Pawn, BPRS Amanah Ummah

Online retailers want to provide ease of online shopping to their customers. Online customers are providing personalized services to their customers to increase the effectiveness of online shopping and increase customer satisfaction. Digital assistants like text medium (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram etc.) and verbal medium (Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Windows Cortana etc.) are helping customers and providing them convenience than ever before. On the other hand, customers are still skeptical about online shopping through these digital assistants. In this research paper the researcher will discuss the elements that cause customer skepticism and the determinants of customer satisfaction in regard to Artificial Intelligence-powered Digital assistants. This would assist online retailers in providing a better online shopping experience by removing customer dissatisfaction and privacy concerns associated with conversational commerce. This will help online retailers to provide a better online shopping experience by eliminating the overall customer dissatisfaction and privacy concerns regarding conversational commerce.

It is often said that short stories do not sell well because readers prefer novels. Yet the short story has recently made a comeback. As Sam Baker observed in a 2014 article in The Telegraph, the brevity of the genre seems the perfect fit for our fast-paced life. “Many people struggle to find the time to engage with a full-length novel. A short story offers the perfect antidote—it's the equivalent of listening to a single track of music instead of the whole album” (Baker, “Irresistible”). These miniature literary worlds of short stories are a distillation of few emotions and ideas authenticated by a meticulous care for details, which manage to keep alive the audience's short attention span. In France, the annual Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle sustains the interest in the short story by recognizing polyvalent writers who have also distinguished themselves in other genres, from the two most recent winners—Regis Jauffret and Caroline Lamarche—to internationally renowned previous awardees like André Chedid, René Depestre, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. And while the Italian Strega Prize awarded in the 1950s to collections of short stories by writers of the caliber of Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani, and Dino Buzzati are considered the exception to the rule, more recent eloquent signs of the return of the short story on the international scene are the Nobel Prize to the Canadian writer Alice Munro, the Folio Prize to the American George Saunders, and the Man Booker International Prize to the American “flash-fiction” writer Lydia Davis.Among contemporary short-story writers who convey “perfect, nuanced, subtle, luminous understanding and expression of people's lives, of the human heart” (Baker, “Irresistible”), the name of Jhumpa Lahiri stands out. A multicultural author at the crossroads of three different continents (born in London from Bengali parents and brought up in New England), she has authored novels such as The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), yet the short story is the literary form that has defined her more distinctly so far. Her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), received the O. Henry Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award), to be followed by Unaccustomed Earth (2008), winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and, more recently, The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2019)—also available in Italian as Racconti italiani (2019)—to which Jhumpa Lahiri has contributed as editor and co-translator.1Precisely this latter editorial endeavor offers an engaging vantage point from which to delve into Lahiri's compelling journey into literatures and languages. The plural, in Lahiri's case, is de rigueur, considering not only her deep exploration of tensions and negotiations between Indian and Anglo-American traditions but also, more surprisingly, her bold decision to problematize this binarism by embracing a third culture, the Italian one, going as far as selecting its language for her own literary creation, despite having no prior personal, family, or historical connections with it. With The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri shows the power of storytelling and translation to widen the horizon of understanding and create connections. She makes ideas travel, challenging cultural monopolies and the constraints of identity politics.Italy has amply contributed to the multifaceted tradition of the short story—from the novelle of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone to its sixteenth-century followers Matteo Bandello and Anton Francesco Doni, the seventeenth-century Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile, Adriano Banchieri's I Trastulli di Villa, Giovanni Sagredo's witty L'Arcadia in Brenta, and the eighteenth-century Novelle morali by Francesco Soave. But it is in the late nineteenth century that the genre burgeons in Western culture, thanks to leading writers from Edgar Allan Poe (who, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” recodifies its rules regarding length, ending, and unity of effect) to Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Anton Čechov, among many others. The Italian short story follows suit, increasing exponentially not only in output but also in variety of subjects and approaches, effectively marking the transition from romanticism to realism, naturalism, and aestheticism. The genre continues to thrive in the twentieth century, when it acquires more nuanced and complex features, blurring historical and geographical borders, and blending different registers and styles borrowed from travel writing, autobiography, social critique, and psychological inquiry.Jhumpa Lahiri's The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories captures this substantial and diverse production and recasts it creatively, offering a refreshing image of Italian authors not simply as members of a national corpus but also as contributors to an imaginative process and a critical discourse addressing timely global questions across national borders. The wealth of authors included in Lahiri's anthology attests to the pervasiveness of the short story in post-unification Italy. This is all the more intriguing because, paradoxically, early twentieth-century intellectuals were lamenting the provincialism of Italy on the international literary scene, which they ascribed to the lack of a sustained production of powerful novels able to engage a vast array of interlocutors inside and outside the newly-born nation. Apart from a few exceptions, namely Alessandro Manzoni and Giovanni Verga (albeit not exempt from criticism for their detached representation of popular classes), Antonio Gramsci deplored the Italian novel as rhetorical and petty, devoid of authentic national-popular and universal human content (Marxismo, 121–22). Likewise, in 1929 Leo Ferrero declared that Italy renounced Europe because Italian writers knew neither their country nor the outside world. In order to have an international dimension, a novelist should depict his/her own nation inspired by moral sentiment, political passion, and the sense of tradition, but always implying other countries at the same time (“Perché l'Italia,” 21–29). Lahiri's renewed attention to the Italian short story challenges this static and provincial view of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian cultural scene. Her anthology foregrounds a literary milieu in great ferment, with a surprisingly multifarious narrative activity that innovates from the point of view of both content and form, in dialogue with international interlocutors that facilitate aesthetic experimentation and a broader circulation of ideas.Any anthology is the result of its editor's personal choices as to what to include and what to leave out. The editor's imprint on The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories is, all the more reason, particularly significant. A peculiar element is, for instance, Lahiri's decision to bypass chronology2 and to arrange the stories in reverse alphabetical order, starting from Elio Vittorini, the renowned novelist, translator, and literary critic, editor of the anthology Americana which, in 1941, brought to the Italian audience the most important (and at that time still rather unknown) American authors—from Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Steinbeck to James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Fante, deeply influencing the literary consciousness of a fascist-dominated nation.Arguably, The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories will be remembered as Jhumpa Lahiri's Italian anthology in the same way in which we have crystallized in our minds this illustrious predecessor with whom, not accidentally, she engages on several levels, in conversation with his exemplary endeavor, as she explains in her own introduction: “Vittorini was my guiding light as I assembled this book […] and it is in homage to him and to that landmark work—to the spirit of saluting distant literary comrades, of looking beyond borders and of transforming the unknown into the familiar—that I offer the present contribution” (Penguin “Introduction,” xxi).Roland Barthes, in his seminal article “Reflections on a Manual” claims that “the literary manual and the literary text, the pedagogy and the practice of literature have nothing of consequence to do with each other. […] Teaching prefers history to literature because historical facts—in their traditional sense of a narrative sequence of events that are codified, categorized, put in a precise order—“make sense,” whereas literature “unmakes” sense (Barthes “Reflections,” 70, my emphasis). “The literary manual seeks to impose an imperialistic discipline that literature repudiates” (Barthes, 70). These remarks are particularly appropriate to Lahiri's operation. Her new order (or, intentionally, lack thereof) aims to offer a fresher image of Italian literature and culture, to tell a new story about Italy that perhaps the Italian eye would not capture while following the traditional, regimented concatenation of cause and effect, the logical thread of past and present, the genealogy of literary masters and disciples. Each work in her anthology speaks to us on its own terms, be it penned by canonical authors like Verga, Pirandello, Svevo, Moravia, Sciascia, and Calvino, well-established or emerging female signatures from Deledda, Morante, Ortese, and Ginzburg to Cialente and Campo, or niche writers like D'Eramo, Delfini, D'Arzo, or Bianciardi, independently of periodization and canonical influences. The variety of Italian regions, from Sicily to Tuscany and Friuli Venezia-Giulia is not only represented by the authors' diverse geographical origins but also emerges from the setting of the stories. Likewise, pivotal historical conjunctures provide the background to numerous plots, offering insights into the social and political evolution of Italy, from the emergence of the bourgeoisie, the woman's question, and the avant-garde, to fascism and the postwar years.Lahiri also transcends the standard notion-based authors' biographies. She crafts fresh portrayals of writers, unencumbered by many dates, titles of major works, and the usual salient information. She does not linger on technicalities, but rather brings writers and stories to life, in little cameos made of curious unfamiliar facts, impressions, and contacts that these writers established and that their stories fostered. One recurring factor in this rich network of relationships is the pioneering role of periodicals as promoters of innovative poetics and international synergies that delineate a much more dynamic literary scene than the conventional framework would suggest. Indeed, numerous stories in her collection were published in leading journals across the political spectrum (La Tribuna; La Stampa; Il Corriere della sera; L'Unità) and in magazines (Omnibus, L'Europeo, La fiera letteraria, Oggi, Comunità, Il Mondo, Città, Lettere d'oggi, Letteratura, Tempo presente, Cronache, Le grandi firme)—many of them no longer in print, hence offering captivating snapshots of forgotten cultural scenarios. Students will find these profiles very accessible and palatable. Even Italian scholars already familiar with these authors will have a chance to discover or refresh many intriguing facets of their careers and approaches to literature, beyond canonical, crystallized images.The unavoidable question emerges as to what extent this anthology speaks about Lahiri herself. Her prominence as a writer tempts us to read her selections of Italian authors and material through the lens of her overall poetics. Even without implying an intentional correlation, commonalities emerge between the stories she has edited and her own works, and this adds relevance to the volume beyond its immediate scope. Translation, for instance, is an approach and a practice that she shares with numerous authors in her anthology, who intensely worked with foreign texts or who had exposure to linguistic and cultural environments beyond their native Italy, in ways that fertilized their identity and creativity. Besides Vittorini, who learned English by translating Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and, as we have seen, moved on to becoming a pivotal mediator between the United States and Italy, Lahiri features other writers who participated in multiple linguistic and cultural contexts. We find the well-known examples of Italo Svevo (who was educated in German, spoke Triestine dialect at home, and learned English with James Joyce) and Italo Calvino (who was born in Cuba, lived in France, and consistently investigated language and translation), as well as of other prominent figures like Cesare Pavese (translator of Melville, DosPassos, and Joyce), Beppe Fenoglio (a translator of Coleridge and Hopkins, who also wrote his last novel in English), Anna Banti (prolific translator from French and English—Colette, Woolf, Austen, Thackeray), and Antonio Tabucchi (who lived and taught in Portugal, wrote extensively about its literature, and published in Portuguese). Numerous less iconic figures reinforce this plurilingual and multicultural framework, which makes it reductive to qualify them with a single adjective of nationality. For instance, Cristina Campo was self-taught in many languages, and translated Dickinson, Donne, Carlos Williams, and Weil; Fausta Cialente, a rootless Sardinian who died in England, translated James and Alcott; Tommaso Landolfi, a lover of foreign languages, was competent in French, Spanish, German, and English, studied Arabic, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese, Swedish, and Russian, and wrote about Gogol and Akhmatova; Alba De Cespedes, a Cuban by birth, moved to Italy and then to France, published her first novel in French and translated it into Italian; Anna Maria Ortese lived in Libya as a child, and Fabrizia Ramondino was raised in Spain, France, and Germany.This pervasive foreignness embedded into the authors' alleged Italianness raises questions about the boundaries and meaning of national identity, which are magnified by other instances of linguistic and cultural transfer in the stories, and foreground the asymmetries and obstacles in interpersonal relations. Dialogues and exchanges reveal an intrinsic alterity that turns individuals into strangers even in their own linguistic and cultural environment. This communicative and psychological schism finds a paradigmatic example in Parise's story “Melancholy,” where the term “estranged” (54) insistently connotes the female protagonist's self-perception.Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark (1992), shows how most great novels of the American canon (by white male writers like Hemingway or Fitzgerald) conceal within themselves the unnamable but fundamental presence of otherness—in those cases black identity, necessary to the mainstream writers' own cultural self-definition. In Lahiri's anthology, too, we find authors, characters, situations, and issues that we could define as, if not unnamable, at least problematic, provocative, and marginalized, because they undermine certainties, expectations, and traditional values. Questions of identity and belonging in the stories are often predicated upon hybridity3 and mutability, which, as Lahiri herself observes in her introduction, converge in the recurring topos of the metamorphosis. These transformations effectively capture the great contradictions of any culture, debunking the myth of cultural purity and of the monolithic nation. Not accidentally, various authors in her anthology—among them Alvaro, Svevo, Pirandello, Sciascia, Cialente, Bilenchi—underscore the regional element in their own autobiographical background as much as in the peripheral geographical and cultural setting of their own stories. In the age of globalism and cosmopolitanism, against the backdrop of the current tensions regarding the Europe-building design, and of the cooptation of national identity as a card provocatively played against different kinds of minority groups, Lahiri's attention to regions enriches and problematizes a supposedly single “Italian identity” by showing that local identities, with their own traditions and languages, are real, and that Italy's national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries are quite blurred, to say the least.Lahiri defines her anthology a self-portrait but not designed to be that. Authenticated by her direct experience of Italy, this volume adds a polyphony of voices in which her transnational mind reverberates, reinforcing her idea of “home” in constant tension between domesticity and foreignness.The polyvocal, multicultural, hybrid condition that Lahiri highlights in The Penguin Books of Italian Short Stories is the existential challenge that she openly in all the she has penned in in to her in Her with Italian short stories as an editor and translator, is of the many ways in which she has a with Italy, its literature, and Italy is represented in several stories in her collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008), from the that brings from for his and of previous in to the setting of the last story where the two and by chance in two and their Italy But Lahiri has international attention for her with Italy as the author of the In which her of into a new and by a new the language in which Lahiri has to several in in Italian she has also published the autobiographical Il of and the short novel translated into English by Lahiri herself as The meaning both I and I find identity and as two that in Lahiri define and the these Lahiri has extensively her with language and cultural identity, an unavoidable tension between belonging and that translation as a practice and a condition of James was at that could not in English without a to English and to in French or my which to be to the to the of own linguistic to to to the This is the that Lahiri has by to of her cultural and linguistic we could define Bengali as an from English as an through and American environments in which she and Italian as her own as she has to be by both and the from Antonio Tabucchi in In a different a language that was a of and One of the in The this third a third in her because she approaches it American or without or or of any It was to her on the two countries that could her in of that had no a recent at I Lahiri to the and in her for a new and a new in a new she that she she only from It is quite of her to this considering the of her linguistic that she herself has with her audience on numerous the to The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri this with an and the she on translation as the only while the of in linguistic is the of literature, but language also it up it to and Translation, in the is the in translation the literary the She hence the of for create national literatures with their languages, but literature is by and of George who claims that we would on at the same time Lahiri's of the to her of a new and the of many of her characters, who are by different that they as of an unavoidable in Lahiri's own who the of language is the translator in Interpreter of As a linguistic and cultural is to facilitate but is to the between his Indian and those of the American The had between him about a do not the of his own to his a chance to be by the authentic of a different culture, the in which the is transcends the of a the power of Western on the narrative of their book instead of a direct with the their and even as an to their own and Yet we find and an to to and to even among of the same language and in Lahiri's collection of stories Unaccustomed We of the and lack of of parents parents despite their experience of from parents had only for the of their for the of a time and to which the claims by the American and way of life, their to their to and to facilitate Indeed, as was between our two who like strangers to in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories we have the example of “The which us with an lack of understanding between and The it that a not her a to by his had to as to a Lahiri's collection of Italian stories a for a language able to to an about and asymmetries in interpersonal and social for in the of family, woman's that are also to Lahiri's own But what if the that Interpreter of Maladies more language to any language to all we within first of all to and then to and to into our own all that the are and The 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The following article explores ekphrasis as a literary device in the context of the Russian and English language literary texts. The phenomenon of ekphrasis is regarded to be a relatively researched area in the literary criticism. However, the majority of the existing research focuses on the visual representations in the verbal medium, thereby neglecting the aspect of the reader’s possible interpretation of an ekphrastic description and its stylistic expression in a literary text. Thus, the aim of this article is to identify the specific language patterns constructing ekphrastic references in the Russian and English language literary texts by conducting a comparative linguo-cognitive analysis of ekphrastic intertextual references in Dina Rubina’s ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ (2006) and Margaret Atwood’s ‘Cat’s Eye’ (1988). The research is based on the comparative linguo-cognitive analysis combining the following cognitive poetic techniques: the ‘figure — ground’ dichotomy, the model of literary resonance, and the narrative interrelation theory. The analysis of the figure-ground relations in ekphrastic descriptions has shown that the main character takes the figure position and becomes a pronounced attractor, thereby exerting an affective influence on the reader’s perception. The application of the literary resonance model confirms this claim by identifying typical semantic, syntactic and stylistic features (attractors) of the character in the analysed ekphrastic passages. The comparison of an ekphrastic description to a passage which it is based on has revealed the characteristic parallelism of their syntactic and semantic patterns. In part, parallel constructions contain specific intertextual references that create links to an art object, thus actualising the representation of a picture in the reader’s perception. A comparative linguo-cognitive analysis of ekphrastic references in Russian and English literary texts has shown the possible intratextuality of ekphrastic references, which establish the relationships between plots within the narrative. Additionally, in both literary texts, ekphrastic references imitate the visual construction of an object of art at the semantic, syntactic and textual levels and, as a result, accentuate the metaphorical realisation of the presented artefact.

The expressions of Sufi spiritual experience are often shown on verbal media (Sufi language) such as poetry or simple expressions, etc. Reading the expressions requires careful reading so that the esoteric meaning can be captured. The purpose of this article is to read the writing of the walls in the at-taqy Islamic boarding school. To be able to do this reading, the semiotic method is used. Similar research has been carried out, but what makes this study unique is that the writing of the wall is a living sufism at the At-Taqy Islamic Boarding School. The result is the writing of the walls in the at-Taqy Islamic boarding school loaded with basic concepts of Sufism, namely about Fana, Wahdatul Wujud, Taubat and Muhasabah.

The Ekphrastic Visual / Verbal Game of Mirroring in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 Yosr Dridi (bio) Ever since the publication of André Gide’s 1893 journal, the mirror trope in artistic representation has been irrevocably linked to the originally heraldic metaphor1 of mise-en-abyme. Describing the paintings of Hans Memling and Quentin Metsys, Gide devotes particular attention to the way “a small convex and dark mirror reflects the interior of the room in which the scene of the painting is taking place” (30). These painting-reflecting mirrors-within-the-painting are Gide’s way of illustrating his fascination with any work where he can “find transposed . the very subject of that work” (30). It was not until 1950, when Claude-Edmonde Magny published her Histoire du roman français depuis 1918, that Gide’s observation about reflexive mirrors found a conceptual consecration in the notion of mise-en-abyme. In its turn, mise-en-abyme had to wait until Lucien Dällenbach rebaptized it as “the mirror in the text” for its ultimate association with the mirror representational metaphor. In his The Mirror in the Text, Dällenbach posits that “the mise en abyme and the mirror are sufficiently interchangeable for us to combine the two and to refer to ‘the mirror in the text’ whenever the device appears” (35). Such is the short history of how the mirror trope came to be equated with mise-en-abyme. Thus theorized, the mirror in the text / mise-en-abyme has traditionally been understood as either a painting within the painting, a play within the play, or a novel within the novel. But what of a painting or a film within the novel? What of Remedios Varo’s Bordando El Manto Terrestre and the fictional film Cashiered in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49? Can they not be analogically considered mirrors of the text in the text? These questions warrant an examination of the notions of pictorial and cinemato-graphic ekphrasis in relation to the mirror trope. Originally a rhetorical device in the Greco-Roman tradition of “bring[ing] the subject matter vividly before the eyes” and “mak[ing] listeners into spectators” (Webb 1, 8), ekphrasis has come to mean the “verbal representation of visual representation” in modern scholarship (Heffernan, Museum 3; Mitchell 152). In addition to its definition as the vivid verbal rendering of plastic2 artifacts within a literary work, ekphrasis can be classified [End Page 23] into two types, depending on the object of ekphrastic representation. Accordingly, a verbal representation of a painting or a sculpture is referred to as a “pictorial ekphrasis,” and a verbal description or narration of a film or a filmic element is known as a “cinematic [or cinematographic]3 ekphrasis” (Heffernan, “Cinematic Ekphrasis” 4). The distinction between pictorial and cinematographic ekphrases is formulated as follows: “while pictorial ekphrasis often turns an arrested moment into a story, cinematic ekphrasis typically narrates what is already a story told by a sequence of images” (4). The rationale behind the theorizing of cinematographic ekphrasis rests on the fact that, like painting or sculpture, cinema is also visual art and, as such, it can lend itself to ekphrastic representation. Be it pictorial or cinematographic, ekphrasis is a nexus between visual and verbal poetics. However, despite the visual nature of its object of representation, ekphrasis remains essentially a literary mode, performed entirely in the verbal medium. It is, therefore, only logical that pictorial and cinematographic ekphrases would adapt themselves to the specificities of literary writing by narrativizing and dramatizing the visual subject matter. In this regard, Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner insightfully observe that there is no such thing as “an ekphrasis degree zero,” asserting that pure descriptive ekphrasis, untrammeled by narrativization and dramatization, is a rare (and rather uninspired) occurrence in literary writing (ii). There is always a purely literary, and by extension defamiliarizing, added value in any ekphrastic representation of a painting, sculpture, or filmic element. Laura M. Sager Eidt classifies such transformative ekphrases under the category of “dramatic ekphrasis,” which appropriates and dramatizes the visual artwork by summoning it up, eliciting its recognition in the audience, and eventually altering it...

Christopher Alexander’s Battle for Beauty in a World Turning Ugly: The Inception of a Science of Architecture?

The earliest medical descriptions of anorexia occurred in 1689 with Richard Morton's Phthisiologia, Or, A Treatise of Consumptions, however, it took another century for medical science to accept anorexia nervosa as a medical condition. Later on, it was Hilde Bruch who initiated the first public discussion on anorexia in the latter half of the twentieth century. While the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resorted solely to the verbal medium to narrate their eating disorder experience, the post-millennial era turned to a variety of visual and verbovisual media. Stylistically differing widely from verbal texts, graphic medicine, a subgenre of comics, provides singular ways of negotiating eating disorders. Accordingly, a concise overview of some of the canonical works on eating disorders from 1970-2018 will be presented. Lastly, graphic medicine and the aptness of the comics medium in representing the subtle layers of eating disorder experience will be examined.

The paper explores the difficulties of women writers in establishing their tradition and language while articulating with the mainstream world. Women of color and lesbians are often targeted in the literary world of Whites. The paper draws inferences from Anzaldua’s essays; “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and “Speaking in Tongues”. Her own autobiographical experiences become the fuel for her writings. These essays unfold her past with special reference to “linguistic terrorism”. Language varies from one culture to another and the superiority of language is an illogical concept. The native language often becomes subject to racial attacks in diasporic context. Gloria Anzaldua, born in Mexico, was constantly humiliated for her Chicano culture and Spanish language once she moved to United States. She perceived language as the soul of her existence and a verbal medium to revolt. For Anzaldua writing echoes the inner turmoils of oppressed women and elevates them to a timeless realm. She uses writing as a tool to overcome the tradition of silence.

ABSTRACTPaul Auster’s creative practice involves a tendency to transcend the boundaries between different mediums, as exemplified by his cinematographic fiction. Although relevant research has started to gain traction in recent years, there are still few in-depth analyses of the medium of film, its implication in the verbal medium, and its connection with the themes explored in an individual novel of Auster’s. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s film philosophy, the present essay attempts to explicate the meaning and function of writing cinema in The Book of Illusions. Starting with several fundamental issues concerning viewing and writing—including the philosophical basis on which cinematic experience and its expression can possibly be construed—this essay delves further into their connections with one of the ethical questions presented in the novel: how can and should one relate to another’s life and work? From the viewpoint of Cavellian film philosophy, the question may be phrased this way: how can and should I, a viewer, respond to “a world complete without me”?