Abstract This paper is based on a lecture at Oxford University given in January 2026 at the invitation of the Oxford University Ukrainian Society. It offers some highlights in the history of Ukrainian literature, but does not claim comprehensive coverage of all historical periods. The article explores how Ukrainian literature has survived empire, censorship, and repression while preserving its own language, traditions, and internal logic. From medieval epics and baroque drama to modernism, the ‘executed renaissance’, émigré post-1945 literature, and contemporary writing shaped by Russia’s war against Ukraine, this is an overview of a Ukrainian literary tradition often overlooked or misrepresented.
Abstract This essay investigates the emergence of a recognizable visual genre in the covers of contemporary Italian publishing, arguing that the extraordinary popularity of a recent boom in Italian historical family sagas, novels rooted in specific regional geographies, has generated not merely a graphic trend but a new visual grammar. Starting from the breakthrough of Stefania Auci’s I leoni di Sicilia and the editorial line subsequently developed by Nord, the article explores how the success of this literary phenomenon has been accompanied by the consolidation of a shared aesthetic built around female portraits, soft chromatic palettes, historical paintings, and nostalgic atmosphere. What emerged first in relation to a highly successful narrative model gradually developed into a recognizable iconographic code, later extending beyond Nord into other publishing houses, including for example Einaudi, Bompiani, and Piemme, suggesting the formation of a trans-editorial visual language associated with this recent success in Italian historical family sagas. Drawing on paratext theory and publishing history, the essay proposes a shift from the cover as an expression of publisher identity to the cover as a marker of genre, capable of anticipating themes, emotional promises, and readers’ expectations before reading begins. More broadly, it argues that this emerging visual grammar contributes to constructing a collective imagination around historical fiction, revealing how publishers shape not only what readers choose to read, but also what they expect literature to look like.
The article addresses the problem of theorizing the relationship between sound and visuality on the material of the more specific topics of recorded sound and visual image. The text is organized as a playlist: throughout the eight sound examples, it identifies the concepts of current image theory that are relevant for theoretical problems of sound studies. Most of the selected examples capture and process ambient sounding spaces, but they do so through different means. In the first example, we draw from the theme of evocation (the ability of the image and the recorded sound to provoke acts of imagination), which takes on a special significance in recorded sound, since it has no traditional need to simulate a “correct” model of perception (to “arrest” it). The following examples explore the theme of silence, demonstrating that the notion of the lateral and the problem of pictorial mark are relevant for its disclosure: they help to work with the indeterminacy of sound, which shares some properties with the indeterminacy of images. The narrative then turns to the theme of the materiality of sound and sound as material evidence: the examples of the Johnstown audio recording and Bob Ostertag’s album help to explore the notion of sonic props working simultaneously through evocation and the staging of a material environment. To clarify these notions, the example of ZX Spectrum tapes is considered, helping to draw attention to the notion of a causal milieu and referring to a metaphor from Pliny’s story that points to the possibility of the image not as representation but as a new material act inscribing itself into the world. Here the concepts of visual image and recorded sound intersect most closely, but further examples are intended to emphasize their differences: while operational and immersive images tend to turn their visuality weak and almost self-destroyed, the recorded sound avoids such a problem: it combines the evocative functions with the “enveloping” immersive properties.
Pre-modern sound practices can be defined as practices that activate things and processes with minimal intervention. Their infinitely diverse cosmos, however, did not help them become a significant part of the world of scientific rationality, which they ceded to numerical and formulaic precision at the expense of another type of precision — sonic. An arbitrary idiosyncrasy toward sound determined the fate of all Western science, but the new field of sound epistemology is, before our very eyes, reclaiming a missed historical opportunity to think with and about sound, now on a new basis. These new foundations already take into account the division between sound practices and auditory techniques that emerged in connection with the modern capitalization and commodification of sound, and compel us to recognize auditory epistemologies as a field distinct from sonic epistemologies. If auditory epistemologies explore sound, then sonic epistemologies reflect, speak, and research through sound. Thus, the task of sonic epistemologies is to retain the critical potential and use auditory epistemologies as an alternative to formalized, industrialized and commodified sound experience.
This article examines the specifics of atmospheric regulation and circulation in the sound design of specially established “third places.” Third places are approached from the perspective of atmospheric research and analyzed from the perspective of a specific type of musical material, sometimes referred to as “third direction,” “third stream,” or — in another tradition — “middle music” (Mittlere Musik), with its associated so-called Muzak (music), which, through its means, facilitates atmospheric production. The concept of third places, which finally took shape in the late 1990s, quickly became obsolete due to objective and unexpected changes that altered the role of spatial localities, microstructures of sociality, and the establishment of new types of spatial and social connections. Music, when considered from the perspective of social functioning, from the very beginning questions its affective status as a mere means of emotional expression, with the alibi of mediation and entertainment. The persistent demand within the atmospheric turn for the inclusion of social aspects of the modern subject’s sensory structures, in the case of the forced constellation of music and space, helps to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the atmospheric approach. The idea of transformation and the approaching miracle, actively brought to the forefront in atmospheric discourses, clearly reveals the relationship between the selfgenerated and the fabricated, the manifest and the produced.
Abstract The main objective of this article is to identify the management operations and business strategy that have contributed to the economic and financial sustainability of the bookshop Livraria Lello in Porto, as well as the importance of marketing and communication policy in the development of the shop’s business model. The work is based on a literature review as well as on consulting published articles on Livraria Lello. The bookshop’s economic and financial reports from 2010 to the present were also analysed. Lello can be analysed in two main periods: before and after 2015. Before 2015, Lello was a bookshop with structural problems and facing difficulty in surviving, like many other independent bookshops. However, since 2015, Lello has been able to take advantage of a new market context, including the large influx of tourists to the city of Porto, and has developed a sustainable business model. It has also been able to adopt management, marketing, and communication strategies and practices that are consistent with the business project and with market opportunities that have been identified, including during the pandemic period in 2020 and 2021.
Los estudiantes necesitan desarrollar un adecuado nivel de velocidad lectora para lograr una buena fluidez y comprensión lectora. El objetivo de este estudio fue investigar cómo se desarrolla la velocidad lectora en diferentes géneros textuales —narrativo y expositivo— entre los escolares a lo largo de la escuela primaria. Los resultados muestran que a medida que los lectores avanzan en niveles escolares, adquieren una mayor velocidad de articulación y de elocución en la lectura. Sin embargo, los estudiantes de diferentes grados pueden variar la forma en que usan su velocidad lectora en diferentes géneros textuales, y la dirección de esta variación también puede diferir según las métricas de medición de la velocidad. Este estudio sugiere que los fonemas, al ser menos sensibles a las características del texto que las palabras y las sílabas, son las mejores unidades para estudiar el efecto de los géneros textuales sobre la velocidad lectora. En este sentido, los estudiantes de los primeros grados de primaria mantuvieron una velocidad lectora constante en los diferentes géneros textuales, mientras que los lectores avanzados aceleraron al leer el texto expositivo en comparación con el texto narrativo. Se concluye que cada género discursivo puede exigir a los estudiantes que utilicen su tiempo de una manera particular para apoyar el procesamiento cognitivo del texto y facilitar la reconstrucción de su significado. Sin embargo, este uso específico del tiempo acorde a los géneros solo se observa en los lectores avanzados.
Abstract The definitional boundaries of the book have grown increasingly unstable in an era of hybrid formats, platform publishing, and shifting media practices. Technical, institutional, and pragmatic approaches each capture aspects of the book’s status, yet none provides a framework that highlights the book’s enduring cultural authority. This article advances a causal-ontological model grounded in Aristotle’s four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final). It is argued that the first three causes are often implicitly acknowledged in publishing studies, whereas the final cause, understood as the book’s purposive orientation, has remained largely overlooked in debates on the ontology of the book. It is argued that this dimension, though not metaphysically essentialist, illuminates the book’s epistemic affordances, cultural resilience, and symbolic persistence. By distinguishing between ancillary and ultimate ends, the causal model accounts for the book’s dual status as commodity and cultural instrument. In doing so, it clarifies persistent taxonomic challenges and demonstrates how philosophical analysis can enrich the theory of publishing.
This article presents an interdisciplinary study of the applicability of the phenomenon of alien sound in the context of soundscapes—as a point of rupture where the familiar auditory order is called into question. Drawing on the responsive phenomenology of Bernhard Waldenfels, concepts of acoustic ecology, and sound research methodology, the authors analyze how geophony, biophony, and anthropophony interact in an era of climatic, urban, and technological transformations. Particular attention is paid to the processes of sound displacement and muffling, leading to a loss of auditory sensitivity and a kind of cultural “deafness” to the environment. Through an analysis of the artistic practices of Katie Paterson, John Akomfrah, Jacob Kierkegaard, Christina Kubisch, and others, as well as her own sound project dedicated to the ash dump site of TPP-17 in St. Petersburg, this article demonstrates how sound art can return repressed sounds to the audible zone and transform the act of listening into a form of critical and ethical action. The strangeness of sound, revealed through artistic practices, is presented not as an anomaly, but as a way to recognize acoustic and cultural discontinuities that elude conventional instrumental and analytical approaches.
In The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time Edmund Husserl asks whether “temporal objects” exist. To answer this question in the affirmative, he turns to melody, drawing on Augustine’s reflections. According to Husserl, a melody is perceived both as a sequence of notes and as a unified whole, relying on consciousness’s ability to retain past sounds (retention) and anticipate future ones (protention). Unlike voluntary memory, retention is involuntary and embedded in perception. Building on Husserl’s ideas, Bernard Stiegler identifies structural parallels between retention and phonographic recording, in which primary and secondary retentions converge into tertiary, technologically mediated memory. The article develops this argument by analyzing how technological conditions shape the consumption and perception of music as a temporal object across different media epochs: mechanical (phonograph), magnetic (tape recorder), and digital (streaming). As it moves from one technical context to another, the song—like music as a whole—evolves while preserving its viral nature and its drive to implant itself into the listener’s consciousness. The author shows how the song operates within these shifting technological frameworks, shaping collective and individual memory and redefining the very act of listening.
