Kara Lynn Andersen, in her paper "Harry Potter and the Susceptible Child Audience," argues for a rethinking of assumptions of child audiences as passive readers and viewers through an analysis of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Andersen argues that instead of categorizing children as passive and homogenous subjects of analysis, they should instead be incorporated as participants in the discourse a...

The article offers a comparative description of typological mechanisms used in political communicative practice and methods of verbal explication of its axiological and symbolic constituents determining universal mental features of individual/collective consciousness. The research position based on a systemic multilevel analysis of the component structure of discourse facilitates the identifica...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how the semantics of third-person pronouns can vary across languages. I investigate third-person non-demonstrative pronouns in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish), including null pro and its overt animate plural counterpart wit. I provide evidence for a striking cross-linguistic difference between the St’át’imcets pronouns and English ones: third-pers...

There is a paucity of neuroaesthetic studies on prose fiction. This is in contrast to the very many impressive studies that have been conducted in recent times on the neuroaesthetics of sister arts such as painting, music and dance. Why might this be the case, what are its causes and, of greatest importance, how can it best be resolved? In this article, the pitfalls, parameters and prospects of...

Online social platforms collapse or converge public and private boundaries, creating both opportunities and challenges for pursuing publicity, privacy, and sociality. Presentations of the self thus become networked performances that must convey polysemic content to audiences, actual and imagined, without compromising one’s own sense of self. This study explored how individuals perform the self ...

In his article "The Reception of Mao's 'Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art' in English-language Scholarship" Qilin Fu examines the three waves of the reception of Mao Zedong's 1942 text. Fu elaborates on the understandings of Mao's ideas about literature and art and discusses the changes depending on historical and political contexts. Fu argues that the changes are explicit or impl...

The history of the colonial world is interpreted differently by western historians and “nativist” historians and ethnologists. The colonialist perspective of history often disregards an entire phase of history before the colonial period, exalting the colonialist enterprise. On the other hand, ethnologists and native historians stress indigenous sources of history, including oral accounts. The p...

In her paper, "Chinese Feminisms and Adaptation-as-Translation Readings of Letter from an Unknown Woman," Jinhua Li investigates the complex cultural and political issues engendered by an increasingly popular phenomenon of transnational film adaptations. Through a comparative reading of Jinglei Xu's 2004 adaptation of Stefan Zweig's novella Brief einer Unbekannten (Letter From an Unknown Woman)...

Music is not an only accompaniment for narratives. It is also a representation medium of narratives. The theme of this paper is proposing a methodology of automatic generation of music as representation medium. First, we describe a system which automatically generates melody lines from a backing based on the constraint of chord and musical knowledge. We regard this as a system based on the harm...