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2024

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How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao Dec 2024

How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao

Kritika Kultura

Animal fable, a genre that anthropomorphizes animals to convey moral lessons, demonstrates the possibility that animals can be tools to teach us to be ethical human beings. In this article1 I adopt ethical literary criticism, especially its conception of human-animal relations and the term brain text to investigate the role and place of animal fable in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi to explore how the post-Darwinian animal might be exploited by fabulists to tackle human reality. In the novel, brain texts of Pi as the storyteller reveal his intention to use stories as ethical interpretations of his experience which …

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Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian Dec 2024

Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian

Kritika Kultura

By adopting Nie Zhenzhao’s conception of brain text, this paper explicates the generation of traumatic postmemories as represented in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a third-generation descendant of Holocaust witnesses. The authors argue that the traumatic effects of great catastrophic events, such as the Holocaust during the Second World War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, can be transformed into brain texts of horror and trauma of the survivors, which, with time passing by, become the traumatic postmemories of the survivors’ descendants who have not experienced these events. As far as this novel is concerned, …

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Ethical Literary Criticism And Ariel Sotelo Tabag's Panangsapul Iti Puraw A Kabalio, Mark Louie Tabunan Dec 2024

Ethical Literary Criticism And Ariel Sotelo Tabag's Panangsapul Iti Puraw A Kabalio, Mark Louie Tabunan

Kritika Kultura

Nie Zhenzhao’s ethical literary criticism provides a new take on ethics in literature, emphasizing the historicity of ethics and providing a new toolkit in understanding ethical dilemmas in literary texts. This article deploys ethical literary criticism in reading Panangsapul iti Puraw a Kabalio [Search for the White Horse], a marvelous realist novel by award-winning Ilokano writer Ariel Sotelo Tabag. Focusing on the ethical knots encountered by the four characters of the Tabaco clan, it examines the ethical choices they made against the backdrop of the ethical environments of the Second World War and the Martial Law period. Examining the life …

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A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Teenager: Ethical Literary Criticism And David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Jiayi Chen Dec 2024

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Teenager: Ethical Literary Criticism And David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Jiayi Chen

Kritika Kultura

Inspired by ethical literary criticism, this article1 attempts to bring to critical attention the ethical dimensions of Mitchell’s war writing in Black Swan Green. By analyzing the way in which Jason’s brain text in relation to war formulates and develops, this article tries to throw light on Mitchell’s strategy of approaching and reconsidering the causes and consequences of war from the perspective of a teenager. It is argued that Mitchell has exploited diverse expressive resources—the art of the fragmentary, for example—to break new ground for rethinking the wars that fade into history. Instead of portraying violent scenes where bloody battles …

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Brain Text Conversion And Cross-Cultural Integration: The Theatrical Adaptation And Performance Of Shakespeare's Comedies In China, Hui Su Dec 2024

Brain Text Conversion And Cross-Cultural Integration: The Theatrical Adaptation And Performance Of Shakespeare's Comedies In China, Hui Su

Kritika Kultura

By taking the concept of brain text, this paper1 attempts to illustrate that Falling Man by Don DeLillo is an exemplar of how brain text(s) can be processed into literary text(s). Firstly, this paper extends Nie’s concept to include four types of brain texts, namely, those pertaining to characters, readers, society, and writers, then probes into DeLillo’s trauma writing by showing how DeLillo (re)represents different characters’ brain texts in the novel. The silence and loud voice of Drew’s photo “The Falling Man” function to simulate and build up readers’ brain text, and DeLillo’s criticism of “us-them” ideology as society’s brain …

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Circling The End Of The Line In Monsoon: Glints Of Significance Across Vimala Devi's Short Story Cycle, Paul Melo E Castro Dec 2024

Circling The End Of The Line In Monsoon: Glints Of Significance Across Vimala Devi's Short Story Cycle, Paul Melo E Castro

Kritika Kultura

This article analyzes Vimala Devi’s Monsooni (the 2019 English translation of her Monção, originally published in Portuguese in 1963, with a second augmented edition in 2003) as a short story cycle, a genre that differs as much from the traditional novel as from non-integrated collections of short narratives in its “tension between variety and unity, separateness and interconnectedness, fragmentation and continuity, openness and closure” (Lundén 12). It is this generic affiliation, the author argues, that makes possible Devi’s particular portrait of late-colonial Goa. Drawing on various theorizations of the short story cycle genre, the article scrutinizes the interconnections and breaks …

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The Nomad Of The Naked Body: The Trans-Corporeal Ecopoetics Of Sunwoo Kim, Won-Chung Kim Dec 2024

The Nomad Of The Naked Body: The Trans-Corporeal Ecopoetics Of Sunwoo Kim, Won-Chung Kim

Kritika Kultura

The material turn in the environmental humanities drastically changes our perception of who we are and challenges our attitude toward nature. In this article, the author argues that there is a critical connection between the works of Sunwoo Kim, one of the most prominent ecofeminist poets of Korea, and the trans-corporeal poetics of new materialist feminism. By resuscitating “dead” nature and recognizing the agency of things in the world, Sunwoo Kim deconstructs humanity’s prestigious position of all-powerful subjects and repositions them as equal actors with other nonhuman beings. Trans-corporeal poetics allows her to combine the two most conspicuous trends of …

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Humanizing Corporeal Spectacle: Humor And Resistance In Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Simon C. Estok Dec 2024

Humanizing Corporeal Spectacle: Humor And Resistance In Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Simon C. Estok

Kritika Kultura

This article examines Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the comments it makes about the long- term corporeal effects of environmental catastrophes. Sinha’s choice of a first person narrative strategy strongly sharpens the visceral impact of the story. The narrator is a lovably unlovable misfit who has been deformed and crippled by an industrial disaster that claimed thousands of lives. While the effects of the disaster play out through the body of the narrator himself (he calls himself “Animal” because he is so deformed), they are more than merely bodily effects: they are psychological, social, economic, developmental, sexual, and so on. …

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Bodies And Body Politics Of China's Northeastern Rust Belt, Yina Cao, Xudong Guo Dec 2024

Bodies And Body Politics Of China's Northeastern Rust Belt, Yina Cao, Xudong Guo

Kritika Kultura

The old industrial zone in northeastern China—China’s rust belt region—is a fertile site to explore the body’s political significance in China’s industrial rises and falls. In recent years, writers in the rust belt region have been increasingly concerned about the social impact of the region’s economic decline, with Zhang Meng’s film The Piano in a Factory (2010) and Shuang Xuetao’s novella Moses on the Plain (2016) being the most representative. Taking these two ar- tistic works as examples, this article discusses the implications of “organ” metaphors describ- ing the “rust belt.” This article uses the perspective of body politics and …

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Toxic Environments In The Handmaid's Tale, Its Sequels, And Other Feminist Dystopias, Péter Hajdu Dec 2024

Toxic Environments In The Handmaid's Tale, Its Sequels, And Other Feminist Dystopias, Péter Hajdu

Kritika Kultura

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was much more concerned with sexist oppression than environmental issues. The late 2010s experienced a boom in feminist dystopian novels, including a sequel by Atwood herself, and the television series adaptation of the novel is also part of this trend. This development evolves in a much more environmentally conscious context, which necessarily influences the interpretation both of the 1985 novel and the sequels. This article offers readings of recent feminist dystopias from the viewpoint of current environmental crises, especially the pollution crisis and climate change. The basic problem the religious fundamentalist regime of …

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Reading Corporeality In The Climate Change Era: A Comparative Study Of Seamus Heaney's And Hua Hai's Ecological Poetry, Chao Xie Dec 2024

Reading Corporeality In The Climate Change Era: A Comparative Study Of Seamus Heaney's And Hua Hai's Ecological Poetry, Chao Xie

Kritika Kultura

Few critics have paid serious attention to the corporeality depicted in the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s climate change poetry, despite the fact that the body has become an increasingly crucial topic in the climate change era. In a situation similar to Heaney’s, the Chinese ecopoet Hua Hai has stressed the mutual transformations between different forms of bodies in his works, but there have been few studies on Hua’s ideas of the body. These ideas are closely related to Confucianism and Daoism in particular. This article, referencing corporeal theories in the West and the East, is a comparative reading of Heaney’s …

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Corporeality, Genetic Technology, And Climate Change In The Year Of The Flood, Young-Hyun Lee Dec 2024

Corporeality, Genetic Technology, And Climate Change In The Year Of The Flood, Young-Hyun Lee

Kritika Kultura

In her novel The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood vividly illustrates the unmistakable impact of climate change on people’s lives these days. Genetic manipulation has become one of the technologies that people have grown dependent on to solve environmental problems in this age of climate change, where severe droughts, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and the like are being reported more frequently than ever. But genetic engineering has profound consequences for human corporealities, as both COVID-19 and The Year of the Flood show. In the novel, Atwood presents a world where humanity finds it hardly possible to survive without …

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Brain Text, Brain-To-Text, And The Mind Style Of Literature, Songlin Wang Dec 2024

Brain Text, Brain-To-Text, And The Mind Style Of Literature, Songlin Wang

Kritika Kultura

Zhenzhao Nie’s ethical literary criticism, specifically his theory of brain text and ethical selection, envisions an innovative and energetic understanding of the psychological and ethical processing of literature in the brain. This is evidenced by a survey of the ontological controversy between dualism and monism and a review of contemporary research in neuroscience, together with an investigation of the concept of brain text. Based on a comparative study of the neurolinguistic and neuroethical approaches and Nie’s theory of brain text, the paper endorses Nie in his proposal of the brain text as the source of literature and his advocating of …

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Brain Text And Sphinx Factor: An Ethical Interpretation Of Adultery In Julian Barnes's Fiction, Yili Tang Dec 2024

Brain Text And Sphinx Factor: An Ethical Interpretation Of Adultery In Julian Barnes's Fiction, Yili Tang

Kritika Kultura

The theme of adultery occupies a central position in literature as it features intense emotions and conflicts between the self and others in its interplay of loyalty and illicit desire. From the perspective of ethical literary criticism, brain text and Sphinx factor are two critical terms that help us explore the value of adultery as a fictional theme. As one of the basic forms of a material carrier that literary work relies on, brain text stores human beings’ cognition and perception as memory in its special biological form, interacting with the Sphinx factor which is composed of two parts — …

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Ethical Selection And Brain Text: The Development Of Ethical Literary Criticism, Gexin Yang, Hongxia Zheng Dec 2024

Ethical Selection And Brain Text: The Development Of Ethical Literary Criticism, Gexin Yang, Hongxia Zheng

Kritika Kultura

This essay examines the discursive emergence of ethical literary criticism—a new wave of theory and practice of literary criticism that has developed in the West even as it has also historically thrived in China. It begins with the revival of ethical criticism in the West when American ethical criticism blossomed and advanced new conceptions of reading. The paper then turns “eastward” to China and discusses the historical context in which ethical literary criticism emerged in the country. It surveys the history of importation of Western theories and the resulting inundation of the “theoretical complex” since China’s opening up to the …

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Problematizing The Validity Of Neurethics And Moral Treatment: Brain Text As A New Humanistic Approach To Moral Education, Yanyan Jia, Houliang Chen Dec 2024

Problematizing The Validity Of Neurethics And Moral Treatment: Brain Text As A New Humanistic Approach To Moral Education, Yanyan Jia, Houliang Chen

Kritika Kultura

With the advancements in neuroscience and technology, the neurocognitive approach to the human brain seems to outrun the traditional humanistic approach to moral studies, while its demystification and biological reduction of morality is also questionable, particularly, its implicative suggestion for moral treatment. Contrastingly, ethical literary criticism, especially the brain text theory proposed by Zhenzhao Nie, enlightens us with a new approach to moral education. Essentially different from the clinical moral treatment advocated by neuroethics, ethical literary criticism does not diagnose a particular reader as a “moral patient” in advance, but instead thinks it necessary for all people to get good …

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Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And Ian Mcewan's Machines Like Me, Biwu Shang, Fong Keng Seng Dec 2024

Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And Ian Mcewan's Machines Like Me, Biwu Shang, Fong Keng Seng

Kritika Kultura

From the perspective of the conceptual system of ethical literary criticism and specific key concepts such as brain text and electronic text, this paper attempts to examine the conflicts between the mechanical and the human in Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me (2019) in order to explore issues such as natural selection, ethical selection, ethical consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Taking these thematic concerns as reference points, this paper argues that a human being is a product of natural selection and ethical selection, while a machine is a product of scientific selection. In the novel, the conflicts between the three main …

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Ethical Literary Criticism: Oral Literature And The Formation Mechanism Of Brain Text, Zhenzhao Nie Dec 2024

Ethical Literary Criticism: Oral Literature And The Formation Mechanism Of Brain Text, Zhenzhao Nie

Kritika Kultura

In the conceptual system of ethical literary criticism, the existence of all literatures relies on what is called a text; it includes oral literature, a term that largely refers to literature disseminated orally. Before its dissemination, however, the text of oral literature, which can be properly termed as “brain text,” is stored in the human brain. By brain text, what is referred to is the textual form used for storytelling before writing symbols were created and used to record information; it has continued to exist even after the creation of such symbols. Other types of texts exist apart from brain …

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Introduction: Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And New Readings Of World Literature, Biwu Shang, Maria Luisa F. Torres Reyes Dec 2024

Introduction: Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And New Readings Of World Literature, Biwu Shang, Maria Luisa F. Torres Reyes

Kritika Kultura

This introduction briefly frames the parameters within which the eight articles of the Forum explore the topic of ethical literary criticism, and more specifically brain text, and attempts at reading anew selected texts from World Literature. In addition to offering brief summaries of the articles, it also reflects on possible directions for future research and theory and practice of ethical criticism in response to recent developments in the literary scene like the rise of new “genres” in the digital world.

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The Bago And The Matandá: Representations Of The Colonizer In Spanish Narratives About The Philippines In The Late Nineteenth Century, Cristina Guillén Arnáiz Dec 2024

The Bago And The Matandá: Representations Of The Colonizer In Spanish Narratives About The Philippines In The Late Nineteenth Century, Cristina Guillén Arnáiz

Kritika Kultura

This article sets out to explore two of the most prominent recurring figures in Spanish literary production about the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century: the so-called bago, a Spaniard who is “new” to the islands, meaning that they just arrived in the Philippines, and the bago’s counterpart, the matandá, a Spaniard who has spent a considerable amount of time in the colony. The bipartite trope is studied in nine texts by Spanish authors, written between 1876 and 1894. By composing scenes of encounter between these two figures, the authors seek to illuminate an idea of ambivalence present …

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Matter Really Matters: A Poetic Material Islemecocritical Reading Of Inanimateness Animism, Inas Samy Abolfotoh Dec 2024

Matter Really Matters: A Poetic Material Islemecocritical Reading Of Inanimateness Animism, Inas Samy Abolfotoh

Kritika Kultura

Inanimateness is a common characteristic of physical matter. Non-living nature is regarded as a lifeless object. Its value in scientific fields stems from being a container of living ecosystems. Poets, however, have a different vision. They perceive a type of mysterious life in what is scientifically labeled inanimate. It is a different type of life, an anonymous one that cannot be empirically proven but is strongly sensed by persistent observers. Material Islamecocriticism, which is a Material Ecocriticism from an Islamic perspective, deciphers this puzzling view of the inert world: the in-between death-life position. This position makes some see it as …

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Speaking Across The Lines: 1965, The Family, And Reconciliation In Indonesia, Kar-Yen Leong Dec 2024

Speaking Across The Lines: 1965, The Family, And Reconciliation In Indonesia, Kar-Yen Leong

Kritika Kultura

In the aftermath of the 1965 killings, Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia initiated a series of policies and ideological programs that sought to turn the Southeast Asian nation into an “integral state.” The family unit then became institutionalized and idealized as an object providing the state with the necessary discursive language to maintain then-president Suharto’s three-decade long rule. His regime, however, continued to demonize hundreds of thousands of former political detainees, denying their families access to basic rights. Branded as having come from “unclean environments,” the descendants of the Suharto regime’s political detainees continue to face discrimination even after …

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Colonial Mobility And The Biopolitics Of The Colonial Non-Place, Jinhyoung Lee Dec 2024

Colonial Mobility And The Biopolitics Of The Colonial Non-Place, Jinhyoung Lee

Kritika Kultura

By approaching Namcheon Kim’s short story “On the Road” (1939) from the new mobilities paradigm, this paper explores the paradoxical relationship between the colonial government and the postcolonial politics in late colonial Korea. In this short story, the Korean territories in the late 1930s are represented as colonial “non-places,” in which is exercised imperialistic biopower through colonial mobility. The Korean people residing in the non-places are characterized as bare lives on-the-move who only seek to survive, yielding their political rights to the imperialistic biopower. Thereby, this short story demonstrates the reorganization of the colonial territory as a colonial non-place and …

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Slow And Quick Violence: Illnesses And Injuries In America Is In The Heart, Ling Liu Dec 2024

Slow And Quick Violence: Illnesses And Injuries In America Is In The Heart, Ling Liu

Kritika Kultura

This article aims to offer a new route into the study of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart by going beyond the usual sociocultural focus and turning instead to the material, specifically the illnesses and injuries borne by Filipino bodies—tuberculosis, syphilis, hunger, injuries, even death—to learn about their colonial and migrant experiences. In the novel, tuberculosis affects working-class migrant Filipinos disproportionately in both the Philippines and the United States of America. Migrant Filipinos are also constantly haunted by hunger and are always injured, or even shot; and working-class women frequently die from syphilis. Applying ecocritical theories to study the …

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Melodrama Of Migration: Suffering, Performance, And Stardom In Ricardo Lee's Dh: Domestic Helper, Oscar Tantoco Serquiña Jr. Dec 2024

Melodrama Of Migration: Suffering, Performance, And Stardom In Ricardo Lee's Dh: Domestic Helper, Oscar Tantoco Serquiña Jr.

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

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Reimagining The Fluid Categorization Of The Communist, Chinese, And Jews In Umar Kayam's Fiction, Paulus Sawarto Dec 2024

Reimagining The Fluid Categorization Of The Communist, Chinese, And Jews In Umar Kayam's Fiction, Paulus Sawarto

Kritika Kultura

This essay revisits DH: Domestic Helper, a 1992 play from the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) that explores how Philippine labor out-migration ensnares female migrant subjects in states of perennial leave-takings and tentative resettlements abroad. The discussion comprehends the suffering that overseas Filipina workers experience, as well as the agency that they demonstrate through performance in everyday life outside their source country. This essay concludes with an inter-subjective analysis of the very star and ultimate persuasion of PETA’s phenomenal theater production, Nora Aunor, the melodramatic mode of theater making, and the topic of labor out-migration. By putting these issues side …

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Enmeshing Class, Gender, And Ethnicity Of "Family" In Selected Fiction By Women Writers, Sri Mulyani Dec 2024

Enmeshing Class, Gender, And Ethnicity Of "Family" In Selected Fiction By Women Writers, Sri Mulyani

Kritika Kultura

In a Marxist framework, class struggle is prioritized while gender struggle is only secondary. This debate on class over gender priority and vice versa has dominated Anglo-American critical scholarship. Meanwhile, in Asia, Mao Zedong claims that China’s Cultural Revolution has freed women from both class and Confucian patriarchal domination. His claim, however, is far from the truth since Chinese women still have to fight for their equality. Likewise, there are still ongoing struggles for women’s rights and equality in today’s Western societies. This article argues that various revolutionary social changes in Eastern or Western contexts imply a hierarchical relation where …

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Packing Death In Australian Literature, Iris Ralph Dec 2024

Packing Death In Australian Literature, Iris Ralph

Kritika Kultura

In this article, the author identifies critical connections between the transformation of food in the last two hundred thirty years and arguments by animal studies, indigenous studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and environmental history scholars. She does that through a reading of two works of Australian literature: Merlinda Bobis’s cli-fi novel Locust Girl and Evie Wyld’s post-pastoral fiction All the Birds Singing. Bobis’s novel raises questions about the given transformation as it directly relates to the birth of the commercial kangaroo-meat industry, depletion of arable land as a direct consequence of the overuse of it for introduced species of animals reductively called …

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The Problematic Representations Of The Orient, Women, And Food Transformations In Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, Jungyoun Kim Dec 2024

The Problematic Representations Of The Orient, Women, And Food Transformations In Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, Jungyoun Kim

Kritika Kultura

Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel, The Windup Girl, illustrates Bangkok using genetic diseases and plagues. In this work, mass-produced, genetically modified food becomes both a diplomatic weapon and subsistence for survival. Western-based multinational agri-corporations transform food as industrial products, and Bacigalupi in turn illustrates the problems of genetic modification led by global capitalism and multinational corporations. However, his critique of genetic modification and food transformation relies on ethnic and gender stereotyping within an Orientalist frame. While he challenges the practices of corporate capitalism, his representation of Asian cultures and traditions is monolithic and consistently reproductive of Orientalist stereotypes. Also, the politics of …

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Graphic Novels: Understanding How Fifth Graders Read Literary Text Through Eye Movement Analysis, Suriani Mohd Yusof, Zalina Mohd Lazim, Khazriyati Salehuddin, Mizhanim Mohamad Shahimin Dec 2024

Graphic Novels: Understanding How Fifth Graders Read Literary Text Through Eye Movement Analysis, Suriani Mohd Yusof, Zalina Mohd Lazim, Khazriyati Salehuddin, Mizhanim Mohamad Shahimin

Kritika Kultura

The use of multimodal texts as a teaching resource is believed to be one of the fundamental requirements in keeping abreast with the rapid evolvement of literacy. This practice is reflected in the teaching of literature at primary schools in Malaysia when graphic novels, an example of a multimodal text, are introduced as one of the contemporary literary texts. The unique combination of language and images to make meaning in new ways is considered to be one of the main attributes why graphic novels are relevant in promoting multimodality in literature learning. Although its benefits are extensively explored, little research …

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