Academic literature on the topic '4705 Literary studies'

This chapter addresses literary metaphors, which are used in literary works to enrich the meanings and evoke aesthetic effects. The aim of this chapter is to provide a unified view that can explain how literary metaphors are understood and generated. The chapter authors argue that comprehension of various types of literary metaphors involves a process of direct or indirect categorization by integrating and extending existing metaphor theories and empirical findings, in particular the author's metaphor research such as the interpretive diversity theory of nominal metaphors and the indirect categorization theory of predicative metaphors. The chapter authors also apply the unified view of literary metaphor comprehension to metaphor production, and discuss how people generate literary metaphors.

Today more than ever, narrative content generation has become important. This is due to the advances and accessibility of computational devices. As these devices become more familiar to people and easier to handle, there will be greater expectations for autonomous functioning and desires for a natural communication with the users. To achieve such demands, computational devices need to process and generate higher levels of meanings such as context and abstraction of topics. This chapter gives a background on topics that have been developed so far in content analysis and content generation, but focuses mainly on the figure-ground impression model, for both analysis and generating narrative context. By focusing on the characters and their attributes in the text, not only is this model able to represent the figure-ground impressions qualitatively, but also quantitatively. Such a feature may be useful to execute in computational devices such as artificial intelligence.

This chapter focuses on the therapeutic function of Algerian literary production during the pandemic between 2020 and 2021. It describes the socio-educational environment of the Algerian population before the lockdown and highlights the effect of the pandemic on the cultural life of Algerian intellectuals and citizens. Also it reveals the importance of new technological media such as television, the internet, social networks, and digital books for transmitting literary works as well and then reflects on the contribution of Algerian writers and artists in this exceptional period. Likewise, the use of digital media as an option to replace traditional media in the literary environment is valued.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new ways of facing the world and its multiple realities. Picturebooks, as a crossover genre, help in the process of understanding new contexts while offering literature as therapy. The new challenges of the 21st century require the implementation of methodologies that focus both on words and on other modes of representation to construct knowledge, and to this end, literacy education through challenging picturebooks involves paying attention to the diverse pedagogical demands of a global, aesthetic, and multimodal world. This chapter supports the notion of visual literacy as a multidimensional concept and proposes the approach to different picturebooks dealing with neighbours and neighbourhoods through the pedagogy of the multiliteracies, in order to enhance the transformation of the self and the global and local understanding of the current world. A learning path for teachers is designed according to the four knowledge processes: experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying.

The first part of this chapter, consisting of Sections 1 and 2, aims at explaining the apparent scarce presence of Spanish Flu in modernist literature in general and in Borges' literary work in particular. The reason seems to be threefold: the degrading demise associated with illness in comparison to the glorifying destiny attributed to casualties from war, the different metaphorization processes undergone by distinct pandemics and epidemics, and the fact that this 1918 pandemic coincided in time with World War I and artists were trying to avoid evocating more suffering. The second part of the chapter, Sections 3 and 4, focuses on how the threat of Black Death and later Spanish Flu, which confined Borges at home, together with his frail health condition, made him prone to immersing in literature and dreams to escape from reality and experience adventures as real for him as those in the outside world.