Which is the identity of a traveler who is constantly on the move between cultures and languages? What happens with stories when they are transmitted from one place to another, when they are retold, remade, translated and re-translated? What happens with the scholars themselves, when they try to grapple with the kaleidoscopic diversity of human expression in a constantly changing world? These and related questions are explored in the chapters of this collection. Its overall topic, narratives that pass over national, language and ethnical borders includes studies about transcultural novels, poetry, drama, and the narratives of journalism. There is a broad geographic diversity, not only in the collection as a whole, but also in each of the single contributions. This in turn demands a multitude of theoretical and methodological approaches, which cover a spectrum of concepts from such different sources as post-colonial studies, linguistics, religion, aesthetics, art, and media studies, often going beyond the well-known Western frameworks. The works of authors like Miriam Toews, Yoko Tawada, Javier Moreno, Leila Abouela, Marguerite Duras, Kyoko Mori, Francesca Duranti, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Rībi Hideo, and François Cheng are studied from a variety of perspectives. Other chapters deal with code-switching in West African novels, border crossing in the Japanese noh drama, translational anthologies of Italian literature, urban legends on the US-Mexico border, migration in German children's books, and war trauma in poetry. Most of the chapters are case studies of specific works and authors, and may thus be of interest, not only for specialists, but also for the general reader.

As the dominant narrative forms in the age of media convergence, films and games call for a transmedial perspective in narratology. Games allow a participatory reception of the story, bringing the transgression of the ontological boundary between the narrated world and the world of the recipient into focus. These diverse transgressions - medial and ontological - are the subject of this transdisciplinary compendium, which covers the subject in an interdisciplinary way from various perspectives: game studies and media studies, but also sociology and psychology, to take into account the great influence of storytelling on social discourses and human behavior.

Although the idea that graphic narratives represent an important literary form is still debated in academic circles, in recent years comics scholarship has emerged into wider contexts. This collection of new essays considers various literary approaches to graphic narrative and sequential art. The authors examine the politics of comic form and narrative, the ways in which graphic narrative and sequential art "cross over" into other forms and genres, and how these articulations challenge the ways we read and interpret texts. By bringing literary theory to bear on graphic narrative and balancing readings of individual texts with larger ideas about comics scholarship as a whole, this work expands our understanding of the form itself and its engagement with political culture.

Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography. A Chilanga teen wins a trip to Miami to film a reality show about family while pining for the American brother she’s never met. A Louisiana carpenter tends to his drug-addicted son while rebuilding his house after a slew of hurricanes. A New Orleans ne’er-do-well opens a Catholic-themed bar in the wake of his devout mother’s death. A village girl from Chiapas baptizes her infant on a trek toward the U.S. border. In the collection’s second half, we follow a Veracruzan-born drifter, Manuel, and his estranged American son, Tommy. Over decades, they negotiate separate nations and personal tragicomedies on their journeys from innocence to experience. As Manuel participates in student protests in Mexico City in 1968, he drops out to pursue his art. In the 1970s, he immigrates to Louisiana, but soon leaves his wife and infant son behind after his art shop fails. Meanwhile, Tommy grows up in 1980s Louisiana, sometimes escaping his mother’s watchful eye to play basketball at a park filled with the threat of violence. In college, he seeks acceptance from teammates by writing their term papers. Years later, as Manuel nears death and Tommy reaches middle age, they reconnect, embarking on a mission to jointly interview a former riot policeman about his military days; in the process, father and son discover what it has meant to carry each other’s stories and memories from afar.

End-of-life experiences are often viewed in terms of only one perspective such as medicine. In this volume, a variety of end-of life experiences are presented and each case is analyzed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. These range across a broad array of the helping professions, and disciplines such as information, law and the social sciences. The book provides a variety of narratives about end-of-life experiences contributed by members of the Wayne State University End-of-Life Interdisciplinary Project. Each of the narratives is then analyzed from several different disciplinary perspectives. These analyzes illustrate how specific end-of-life narratives can be viewed from different dimensions and helps students, researchers and practitioners see the important and varied meanings that end-of-life experiences have at the level of the individual, the family, and the community. The narratives include end-of-life experiences of individuals from a number of diverse backgrounds.

This interdisciplinary volume written by experienced scholars in border studies explores the political role of images and narratives addressing borders, borderscapes and migration. The volume offers new methodologies to approach the political aesthetics of the border and related issues such as borderland identities and border-crossings.

Borders separate but also connect self and other, and literary texts not only enact these bordering processes, but form part of such processes. This book gestures towards a borderless world, stepping, as it were, with thousand-mile boots from south to north (even across the Atlantic), from South Africa to Scandinavia. It also shows how literary texts model and remodel borders and bordering processes in rich and meaningful local contexts. The essays assembled here analyse the crossing and negotiation of borders and boundaries in works by Nadine Gordimer, Ingrid Winterbach, Deneys Reitz, Janet Suzman, Marlene van Niekerk, A.S. Byatt, Thomas Harris, Frank A. Jenssen, Eben Venter, Antjie Krog, and others under different signs or conceptual points of attraction. These signs include a spiritual turn, eventfulness, self-understanding, ethnic and linguistic mobilization, performative chronotopes, the grotesque, the carceral, the rhetorical, and the interstitial. Contributors: Ileana Dimitriu, Heilna du Plooy, John Gouws, Anne Heith, Lida Krüger, Susan Meyer, Adéle Nel, Ellen Rees, Johan Schimanski, Tony Ullyatt, Phil van Schalkwyk, Hein Viljoen.

Challenging the Boundaries seeks to transcend the limits of literary genres and national cultures, exploring both old and new frontiers in language and literature from an interdisciplinary, multifaceted, and challenging perspective. Selected from the pathbreaking Istanbul conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, these papers treat topics ranging from contemporary neurobiology’s insights into the sources of poetic creativity to the cultural theories of Michel Foucault and Hélène Cixous and their literary consequences; from the films of the American director David Lynch to those of the Senegalese artist Djibril Diop Mambéty; from the work of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk to James Joyce’s Ulysses and the stories of Virginia Woolf. This volume will be of particular interest to readers who might wish to become acquainted with the work of able young scholars from an exceptionally wide array of academic cultures and theoretical commitments. The authors whose essays appear in Challenging the Boundaries reflect in their approaches and subjects both the breadth and depth of the international academic community. PALA Papers is a series of volumes comprising essays selected and edited from presentations at the annual conferences of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, an international body of scholars whose work focuses on the interdisciplinary nexus of linguistics, discourse theory, and literary analysis, criticism, and theory. Each volume will present studies that provide models to scholars throughout the world for conducting their own research in this multidisciplinary paradigm on such topics as, among many others, close linguistic analysis of canonical literary works, corpus-based studies of literary narrative, and the linguistic basis of contemporary social and cultural theory.

This book is a study of the short story, one of the widest taught genres in English literature, from an innovative methodological perspective. Both liminality and the short story are well-researched phenomena, but the combination of both is not frequent. This book discusses the relevance of the concept of liminality for the short story genre and for short story cycles, emphasizing theoretical perspectives, methodological relevance and applicability. Liminality as a concept of demarcation and mediation between different processual stages, spatial complexes, and inner states is of obvious importance in an age of global mobility, digital networking, and interethnic transnationality. Over the last decade, many symposia, exhibitions, art, and publications have been produced which thematize liminality, covering a wide range of disciplines including literary, geographical, psychological and ethnicity studies. Liminal structuring is an essential aspect of the aesthetic composition of short stories and the cultural messages they convey. On account of its very brevity and episodic structure, the generic liminality of the short story privileges the depiction of transitional situations and fleeting moments of crisis or decision. It also addresses the moral transgressions, heterotopic orders, and forms of ambivalent self-reflection negotiated within the short story's confines. This innovative collection focuses on both the liminality of the short story and on liminality in the short story.

“This is a book of stories told by adolescents and adults about teaching and learning. . . . Puzzlement, wonder, curiosity, disruption, and distress mark the emotions of all the storytellers here.” —From the Foreword by Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University “Crossing Boundaries is a must-read for anyone interested in improving the academic achievements and enhancing the literacy practices of marginalized students.” —Beverly Moss, The Ohio State University “This book will shake the ‘common’ and reshape the ‘knowledge’ we have about the passion and potential of students in urban schools.” —JoBeth Allen, University of Georgia In her new book, Valerie Kinloch, award-winning author of Harlem on Our Minds, sheds light on the ways urban youth engage in “meaning-making” experiences as a way to assert critical, creative, and highly sophisticated perspectives on teaching, learning, and survival. Kinloch rejects deficit models that have traditionally defined the literacy abilities of students of color, especially African American and Latino/a youth. In contrast, she “crosses boundaries” to listen to the voices of students attending high school in New York City’s Harlem community. In Crossing Boundaries, Kinloch uses a critical teacher-researcher lens to propose new directions for youth literacies and achievements. The text features examples of classroom engagements, student writings and presentations, discussions of texts and current events, and conversations on skills, process, achievement, and underachievement. Valerie Kinloch is associate professor in literacy studies in the School of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. Her other books are Harlem on Our Minds: Place, Race, and the Literacies of Urban Youth and Urban Literacies: Critical Perspectives on Language, Learning, and Community. All royalties go to the Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color grant and mentoring program sponsored through the National Council of Teachers of English