Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control (2021) offers a nuanced Africanfuturist narrative in which myth, magic, and technology converge to shape a speculative vision of Ghana. This paper examines the protagonist Sankofa’s journey through the theoretical lens of the technological trickster, a hybrid figure drawn from African mythological traditions and speculative technoculture. Drawing on Faucheux and Lavender III’s concept of tricknology, the analysis reads Sankofa not merely as a mythic or symbolic figure, but as a living disruption, a technological-trickster hybrid who contests the very frameworks of race, gender, and futurity. By embodying this archetype, Sankofa navigates and challenges sociocultural expectations of gender, identity, and power. The novella reimagines traditional ideals of African femininity, particularly motherhood, domesticity, and submission, by positioning a technologically empowered Black female body at the centre of narrative agency. Through this framework, the paper explores how Okorafor mobilises tricksterism not only as a mode of resistance but also as a mechanism for projecting liberatory futures for African women. Ultimately, the novella contributes to a growing corpus of Africanfuturist fiction that interrogates colonial residues and systemic inequities while offering alternative epistemologies grounded in African cosmologies.
This article offers an ecocritical reading of the collection Ova Aves (2011), co-authoredby award-winning Canadian poet-naturalist Harry Thurston and prestigious photographer Thaddeus Holownia. The book gathers thirteen poem-photograph pairings that constitute a moving meditation on the animal other as it manifests in bird eggs originally kept at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, curated by ornithologist Gay Hansen. By drawing readers’ attention to the uniqueness and fragility of eggs, Ova Aves is a timely reminder of the need for humankind to rethink how we relate to the nonhuman in the Anthropocene.
The article examines contemporary depictions of youth and teenagers in post-millennial American television and their reception by critics and viewers. Traditionally, television tackled challenges and problems young people have to face in a two-fold and simplistic way, focusing on either radically pejorative situations and behaviors (crime, drugs, sex) or on superficially cheerful scenarios (entertainment, gossip, having fun) (Buckingham, 2021; Hebdige, 1988). The author analyzes the reviews of two television shows, Glee and Euphoria, which – although representing different genres and narrating different experiences – are acclaimed for offering more complex and authentic representations of teenagers by addressing issues that are often marginalized, tabooized, or even absent in contemporary American television discourses.
Red Pill (2020) is a novel by British writer Hari Kunzru. The novel explores two ongoing socio-political trends. First, it is concerned with the dominance of transparency in contemporary society, a situation which is presented as totalitarian. Then, Red Pill analyses the rise of the alt-right in Western countries. Kunzru also highlights the shortcomings of common liberal-progressive responses to modern-day far-right discourse. This article examines the novel from the point of view of Critical Transparency Studies, drawing on the work of, among other, Georg Simmel and Byung-Chul Han.
This paper examines the National Film Board of Canada (NFBC) as an institutional enabler of vernacular media in post-millennial Canadian storytelling. Through interactive projects such as Bear 71 and Do Not Track, the NFBC supports grassroots responses to surveillance, ecological precarity, and datafication. These works engage power structures through participatory frameworks grounded in lived experience. The digital gaze anchors this analysis, highlighting how visibility, vulnerability, and civic presence emerge in digital space. Bear 71 stages ecological surveillance as entanglement; Do Not Track exposes algorithmic structures of commodification. Situated within the Canadian aporetic condition—a structural dynamic of cultural multiplicity, institutional contradiction, and plural representation—the NFBC model sustains participatory media ecologies. By aligning storytelling with civic infrastructure, these works advance cultural democracy and foster enduring public engagement. This study informs Canadian Studies, media scholarship, and cultural policy.
The following study introduces an exploration of queer narrative identity as depicted in selected characters in recently popularized Caribbean American fiction. A close examination of Xochitl Gonzalez’s Olga Dies Dreaming allows for an analysis of the challenges faced and the contested spaces traversed by queer literary characters, within a transcultural context, subsequently foregrounding a nuanced understanding of queer identity and relations of power. Through a selective reading of Gonzalez’s Olga Dies Dreaming the literary representation of queer identity is placed under an intersectional lens and examined against a backdrop of postcolonial US Caribbean communities in New York. Stereotypical representations of Latin machismo, intergenerational conflict, intense familial relationships and a closeted behavioral model regarding queerness are some of the main factors that emphasize immigrant vulnerability and affect identity negotiation.
Fede Álvarez’s film Don’t Breathe (2016) and Poe’s classic tale ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843) present a significant number of intertextualities, which pave the way for approaching Álvarez’s film as a contemporary adaptation of Poe’s tale. Both narratives comprise pervasive references to the gaze and the act of looking, methods of invigilation and disclosure, the house as a projection of its dweller, and the relevance that age and gender discourses acquire in them. This article offers a comparative analysis of both narratives with the view to prove that Álvarez’s film reflects and subverts the dynamics of surveillance and exposure displayed in Poe’s original tale.
Celeste Ng’s "Little Fires Everywhere" (2017) dismantles the idealized image of the suburban family, exposing the inequalities concealed by middle-class privilege. Set in the planned community of Shaker Heights, the novel depicts the unraveling of the seemingly perfect Richardson family following their encounter with Mia Warren, an unconventional single mother. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and cultural capital, this paper analyzes suburban conformity as a marker of moral legitimacy and social power. In dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, it further examines how family ideals function as fragile social constructs. Ultimately, the article argues that Ng exposes the myth of the “perfect” nuclear family as a mechanism that reproduces exclusion and systemic inequality in contemporary American culture.
This article examines Mira Jacob’s Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations as a contemporary migrant narrative that negotiates racial belonging in post-9/11 America through visual minimalism, fragmented dialogue, and intergenerational exchange. In this graphic memoir, Jacob shares the daily conversations she has with her son, which form the point of departure for the work. Situating the memoir within the socio-political climate shaped by intensified surveillance, racial profiling, and populist rhetoric, the study explores how everyday family conversations become sites where identity, fear, and belonging are continuously negotiated. The narration mostly follows Jacob’s dialogues with her young biracial son, Z, as well as with family, friends, and partners. These moments of dialogue, filled with humour, frustration, and doubt, offer insight into how racialized individuals search for belonging in a society that often excludes or misrepresents them.
The present study analyses the speech delivered by President Trump on 20 January 2025 as his Inaugural Address. The discussion briefly addresses the features of linguistic worldview as well as the significance of metaphors in language. The text is scrutinised to present President Trump’s figurative language use. Such an approach attempts to identify recurrent imagery which reflects the worldview represented by the speaker. The conducted analysis aims at showing the observed salient aspects of metaphorical language use and those images that are repeatedly represented in the speech delivered during inauguration. The analysis identifies recurrent imagery and metaphorical patterns.
This article analyzes the conceptual metaphors employed in Dietrich Busse’s chapter on Frame-Semantik (‘Frame Semantics’) (2009), with a focus on the Conduit metaphor (Reddy, 1979/1993) and related metaphorical patterns. The study highlights that metaphors in Busse’s text not only illustrate complex issues but also serve terminological, epistemic, and model-constitutive functions. The findings demonstrate that metaphors contribute to didactic accessibility, cognitive rationalization of abstract phenomena, and the shaping of theoretical categories. The article argues for a clear distinction between metalinguistic and meta-language metaphors, emphasizing their systematic integration into linguistic theory-building and their relevance for the conceptual modelling of language and communication.
This paper studies the blending of diverse conspiracy theories (CTs) in the context of public debates in Germany about the COVID-19 pandemic, with a special focus on right-wing extremist CTs. They provide a prototypical example of metaphorical projections of fictitious resistance/war scenarios onto a conceptually alien topic (i.e. that of pandemic containment), as predicted by Danesi’s (2023) analysis of CTs. Retrospective interviews with CT believers confirm a degree of conceptual “fossilization” (Danesi) but it still remains an open question whether this is the result of neurophysiological processes, as posited by Danesi, or of socio-emotive benefits, such as emotional reassurance in identity building. In either case, mere fact-checking and/or -falsification is insufficient to prevent the CTs’ socially detrimental effects. I therefore argue that in addition to cognitive analysis, CTs have to be confronted by counter-narratives that empower the recipients to rely on their own epistemic competencies.
At the centre of this paper is a selected metaphor ‘Austria is a laboratory for Hungary’, which was introduced into the Hungarian coronavirus discourse by the Hungarian Prime Minister. It was not only quoted or reused in more than 50 Hungarian online media texts between 2020 and 2021 but was also used by its author in 11 interviews and speeches. Following Siefkes’ (2013) discourse-semiotic approach, we will analyse the discursive dynamics of the metaphor in these 11 texts, how it is repeated and further developed against the background of discourse-specific text patterns.
Metaphors are addressed relatively rarely in Construction Grammar approaches. After outlining previous research on conceptual metaphors within usage-based Construction Grammar, the aim is to raise awareness of the cognitive-metaphorical and metonymic motivation underlying foreign-language constructions. In connection with the development of a multilingual project database, metaphors and metonymies in German phraseme constructions are to be examined from the perspective of teaching German as a foreign language, with reference to general methodological-didactic and specific construction-didactic principles.
Although previous approaches to change communication are diverse, they have proven to be largely ineffective in corporate practice. A look at recent change studies clearly shows that one in two change initiatives fails to deliver the desired results and collapses after a short time. This highlights the urgent need for improvement in this area in order to increase the success rate of change processes. This article therefore presents new solution approaches from a linguistic perspective. It focuses on the dynamics and deep interaction between language, mindset, and communication in the context of organizational change. It demonstrates how mental models and metaphors – when used effectively – can be key drivers of organizational performance, enabling managers and employees to engage with change processes in a more sustainable and individualized way.
This paper investigates the conceptual motivation underlying selected proverbs from the biblical Book of Proverbs that contain animal names. The analysis examines references to a range of animals, including birds, reptiles, and both wild and domesticated mammals, and highlights their culture-specific symbolic significance for the interpretation of the proverbs. Employing methodological tools from Cognitive Linguistics – specifically conceptual metaphor, metonymy, and metaphtonymy (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Goossens, 1990; Kövecses, 2010; Ruiz de Mendoza, 2011) – the study demonstrates that animal imagery in Proverbs functions as a vehicle for moral and practical instruction. The corpus for this analysis is the English Standard Version of the Bible, available at https://biblehub.com/.
The paper examines the usage of the lexeme white to denote a mixture of heterogeneous elements, which originally appeared in optics and acoustics, in particular white light, white noise. The metaphoric use of natural science terms (notably, the latter originally metaphoric) by DeLillo and Pratchett allowed applying natural science terms to the social phenomena of the informational space, filled with undefined elements forming human consciousness, opinions, and worldviews. The paper studies the origin and functioning of the terms white noise, white knowledge as an example of usage and meaning shifts and a case of terminology interdisciplinary flow.
Further developing visual and multimodal metaphor theory requires taking into account medium, mode, and genre. The medium of film has hitherto been rather sparsely studied for its metaphorical potential. In this paper I report good examples and exciting insights from assignments and essays by students in my “Metaphor & Film” MA elective, University of Amsterdam (Autumn 2024), clustering these in issues that deserve sustained scholarly scrutiny by the next generation of (film) scholars interested in metaphor.
