Voices From the Wreckage: Young Adult Voices in the #MeToo Movement

Edited by Kimberly Karshner, Lorain County Community College

'Voices From the Wreckage: Young Adult Voices in the #MeToo Movement' is an edited collection by Kimberly Greenfield Karshner (Lorain County Community College). This collection focuses on situating young adult voices in the #MeToo movement, and into American culture and identity. Children’s and young adult literature is an area of study that has rapidly evolved in the past ten years, bringing previously silenced voices to light. This is especially true for YA LGBTQ+ voices, and also for young narrators who are not only discovering, celebrating, and coming to terms with their identities, but also dealing with assaults on their identities. This collection will build on what writers like Laurie Halse Anderson have begun, first with her groundbreaking book on sexual assault, 'Speak', published in 1999, and more currently, her follow-up book, 'Shout' (2019). These authors continue what Anderson started, exploring texts from the perspectives of YA male and female voices, Native American and international perspectives, and LGBTQ+ character representation. Chapters investigate various literary forms such as graphic novels, memoirs, and novels, and cover topics such as sexual desire, consent, trauma, and survivorship. The literature featured in this volume will assure young people that they can tell their stories and that they will be heard. 'Voices From the Wreckage' will be a valuable tool for anyone who teaches Young Adult Literature, or for those who are avid readers and fans of the genre. The authors in this collection are starting and continuing very important conversations on the topic of sexual abuse and trauma, a conversation necessary for the intended audiences of these books, and for adult readers and teachers who are facilitating the emotions connected to these topics.

Advances in Brand Semiotics & Discourse Analysis

Edited by George Rossolatos

This volume addresses some of the most important conceptual, methodological, and empirical challenges and opportunities with which the sister disciplines of semiotics and discourse analysis are mutually confronted in the context of considering new avenues of cross-disciplinary application to distinctive branding research streams. In continuation of the collective volume 'Handbook of Brand Semiotics' (Kassel University Press, 2015), which sought to consolidate relevant scholarship and to identify the main territories that have been established at the cross-roads between branding and semiotic research, the current 'Advances in Brand Semiotics & Discourse Analysis' aims at accomplishing further strides in critical areas, such as the exigency for reconsidering the aptness of existing semiotic theories in the face of the radically shifting co-creative landscape of digital branding, the benefits of systematically micro-analyzing brand communities’ discourses by drawing on CAQDAS programs, the combination of big data analytics with discourse theory in corpus analysis, and the epistemological issues that emerge while combining discourse analysis with time-hallowed marketing qualitative and quantitative research methods. At the same time, the volume hosts a resourceful blend of empirical studies and novel conceptual frameworks in burgeoning streams, such as place, heritage, culinary, personal, and political branding.

TASTE: Why You Like What You Like

A Cultural Studies Analysis

Arthur Asa Berger, San Francisco State University

Taste is an enigmatic topic. We recognize that taste plays an important role in our life in that everything we buy and many things we do are governed by our sense of taste. But what exactly is taste? How do we get our sense of taste and how does it affect our everyday lives? Does it evolve as we grow older or is it a constant in our lives? Is it affected by all the “influencers” to whom we are exposed as we watch TikTok and commercials, or do influencers merely spark some kind of inner sense of taste that was with us all the time? Is our taste based on our social and economic status or something else? What role do income and cost have in determining what we choose to buy? What role do the qualities of what we buy and the choices we make shape our decisions? Is taste based on logical thinking about things we wish to do or buy upon emotions we have generated by things like identification, status, or cultural imperatives? Taste always involves some element of choice, because if there is no choice, taste is irrelevant or moot. But what are the determinants when we compare things to buy or get or do when we have choices to make? This book takes its point of departure from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose book 'Distinction' is considered a classic work of sociological analysis. The topics dealt with are shown in the table of contents below. The book is distinctive in that it offers discussions of four methodologies/theories used in discussing taste: semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, sociological theory and Marxist theory and then applies these theories in the second part of the book to a variety of topics involving taste, such as yogurt, dogs, the singer Celine Dion, ocean cruises, brands, smartphones, men’s facial hair, and so on. Readers of the book will learn four methodologies they can use in analyzing taste and see how these methodologies were applied.

In Search of the Lost World: The Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body

Tsaiyi Wu, Shanghai Normal University

From a historical perspective, the book studies how modernist artists, as the first generation who began to rethink intensively the legacy of German Idealism, sought to recreate the self so as to recreate their relationships with the material world. Theoretically, the book converses with the topical de-anthropocentric interests in the 21st century and proposes that the artist may escape human-centeredness through the transformation of the self. Part One, “Artificiality,” begins the discussion with the fin-de-siècle cult of artificiality, where artists such as Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau dedicate themselves to love stony sphinxes, marble statues, and inorganic appearances. The cult of artificiality is a mischievous subversion to Hegel’s maxim that inwardness is superior to matter. In the cult of artificiality, art is superior to nature, though art is no longer defined as immaterial imagination but rather reconfigured as mysterious appearances that defy signification and subjugate the feeling heart. Part Two, “Auto-philosophical Fiction,” discusses the genre where the artists (Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf) set philosophical ideas in the laboratory of their lives and therefore translate their aesthetic ideals—the way they wish to relate to the world—into a journey of self-examination and self-cultivation. In Pater’s novel 'Marius the Epicurean', the hero explores how a philosophical percept may be translated into sentiments and actions, demonstrating that literature is a unique approach to truth as it renders theory into a transformative experience. Exploring the latest findings of empiricist psychology, the artists seek to escape the Kantian trap by cultivating their powers of reception and to register passing thoughts and sensations. Together, the book argues that de-anthropocentrism cannot be predicated upon a metaphysics that presumes universal subjectivity but must be a form of aesthetic inquiry that recreates the self in order to recreate our relationships with the world.

Languaging Class: Reflecting on the Linguistic Articulations of Structural Inequalities

Edited by Claudia Ortu, University of Cagliari, Italy and Francesco Bachis, University of Cagliari, Italy

This volume explores the issue of social class from the point of view of its linguistic articulations. Indeed, as Machin and Richardson (2008) stated, “discourses may be variously approached as (often simultaneously) reflecting class structures, as a site of class inequalities, as expressive of class identities or class consciousness and/or as a constituent part of more performative class action.” Some of the contributions that make up the volume were presented at a conference held at Cagliari University, Italy, in 2017 and responded to the call for analyses on the role of language in reflecting, maintaining, enacting, and inculcating ideas on social class in literary and non-literary texts and discourses in any cultural or linguistic setting. This volume aspires to encourage scholars in disciplines and academic fields that have shied away from reflections on structural inequalities in favor of studies on ethnic, gender, and cultural identities in the last decades to take back on board the concept of social class and to engage with it in a novel way. The variety of approaches – ranging from the more traditional sociolinguistic one, anthropology, to literary and discourse studies – and cultural settings – with case studies coming from 3 continents – represented in the chapters show that social class is a productive and illuminating concept for trying to (re)make sense of social reproduction and change.