Journal of Contemporary Philology

Foreword

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This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Philology contains selected articles presented at the ESIDRP 2022 conference, English Studies at the Interface of Disciplines: Research and Practice, organised by the Department of English Language and Literature, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Around one hundred academics participated in the conference, whose main aim was to foreground the value of exploring issues in the discipline of English Studies from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives.

Insta-Girlhood: Selfies as Auto-Performative Responses to Sexism and Misogyny

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In this essay, I attend to the affective aesthetic dimensions of feminist art projects which critically engage with the trope of the Insta-girl in an attempt to raise issues about the cultural constructions of girlhood on social media and in “real life.” With the help of two case studies – Noa Jansma’s Dear Catcallers and Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, I will discuss the production and consumption of a particular type of Insta-girl which appeal to audiences via modes of fetishization and abjection. Jansma’s work consists of selfies she took with random men who catcalled her. The documentary character of her project supports her project’s aim to record the nature, extent and frequency of catcalling she experienced. In turn, Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections critiques the construction, circulation and consumption of the trope of the Insta-girl, a postfeminist, late-capitalist figure characterized by her “oversharing” of intimate details about her everyday life. Both artists’ auto-performative responses to sexist and misogynistic tropes in social media impel audiences to question late-capitalist and neoliberal constructions of “girl-hood.”

Political Leadership and Gender During the Covid-19 Pandemic: On the Populist Features of Metaphor Use

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This study aims to show how different political leaders combine metaphor use with the populist sentiment in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To analyse the populist nature of the recurrent metaphor use, 17 leaders’ national lockdown speeches from different countries were collected and analysed within the theoretical framework of critical metaphor studies and frame semantics. Procedurally, metaphors in the collected speeches were identified by applying Pragglejaz Group’s MIP (2007) and coded into thematic categories via NVivo 12.0. Overall, four thematic codes (470 metaphorical expressions) were established, and their content analysis has demonstrated specific differences in the leadership style with regard to populism. It has been clarified that the male political leaders tend to prioritise the arousal of negative emotions discursively expressed through the antagonism between the collective Self and the collective Other (the virus), and a heightened sense of unpredictable (economic) future. By contrast, the female political leaders overwhelmingly focused on their affinity with the collective Self in the context of social accountability and mutual trust.

Vaccine Mandates: Deepening the Rift Between Polarized Ideology on Social Media

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Facing the consequences of one of the most deadly waves of the Covid-19 pandemic towards the end of 2021, the political authorities all over the world struggled to persuade people to get as massively vaccinated as possible, using rhetoric which ranged from threats to even begging. Focusing on the vaccine hesitancy by certain populations, most governments have started to impose a vaccine mandate for all citizens, which resulted in eruption of protests across a number of European, Australian and American cities. Consequently, the intolerance of “the other”, either vaccinated or unvaccinated, has risen among social media users. By combining the methods of critical discourse and pragmatic analysis, this research attempts to investigate the main pro and con argumentation of social media users (Macedonian and English) made in the comment threads of posted online news on mandatory vaccination. The detailed discursive analysis of the samples reveals that fear, triggered by threat as well as risk, is what justifies both sides’ attitude and reasoning.

Pre-Service EFL Teachers as Reflective Practitioners: Student Portfolios as Evidence of Emerging Professional Identities

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The purpose of the present study is to get a better understanding of the reflection process of pre-service EFL teachers at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš during their theoretical TEFL Methodology course, before entering the EFL classroom. An important element of students’ individual work in this course is their portfolio which consists of the students’ views and opinions on the most important principles of TEFL, recorded at the beginning and the end of the 12-week course, as well as a reflective essay on how and why their beliefs have changed during the course. This qualitative case study employs an in-depth content analysis of these reflective portfolios collected in 2020 and 2021, aiming to identify the themes pertaining to the participants’ emerging teacher identities as well as examine changes in their beliefs about various aspects of language teaching and their own professional development. The findings suggest that reflective thinking should be an essential component of pre-service teacher education courses from the very beginning, and not only during the teaching practice.

Interculturality and Interdisciplinarity in Bachelor Thesis Writing: Mentors’ and Mentees’ Perceptions

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This paper explores some aspects of the Anglo-centred (US-based and UK-based educational practices) academic literacy promoted in a non-native English academic context. It seeks to understand better how mentors who were trained and partly educated in an Anglo-centred settings, or never received education abroad, affect the bachelor thesis writing process of their mentees. Through several methods such as analysis of theses’ structures written in L2 (English), surveys and semi-structured interviews with students and with their mentors in three fields, I will present the findings on how the student positioning is affected when they write a BA thesis in English, while simultaneously trying to cope with the transcultural instruction and the local institutional requirements. The thematic analysis also highlights a range of educational practices and understandings of the thesis writing process including, on one hand, how students build argumentation, distinguish between facts and opinions, become objective, avoid plagiarism following the Anglo-centred writing instruction and, on the other, a fluidity in how university professors use their diverse linguistic and educational resources for the same purpose, without challenging the dominating values of the L2 academic literacy.

The Effect of Distance Learning on Student Emotional and Social Well-Being in a Pandemic Context

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Distance learning signifies a transformation in the sphere of education, characterized by use of technology as well as new ways of learning and cooperating. Despite the multitude of international scholarly conferences and panel discussions on how to improve the quality of online education, students were seldom consulted on how they personally coped with or felt about the introduced changes and whether they experienced emotional and social consequences from the shift to distance learning. This creates a strong need to investigate how distance learning affects student emotional and social well-being. Emotional well-being can be conceptualized as the balance of experienced feelings (positive and negative) and the perceived feelings (happiness and satisfaction) and is strongly connected to psychological well-being (personal growth, environmental mastery, autonomy) and social well-being (social integration and contribution) (Keyes 2007). The purpose of this study is to explore whether distance learning has an impact on student emotional and social well-being. Online survey research was conducted among 60 translation and interpreting students in North Macedonia, which results suggest that students are highly impacted from an emotional and social point of view. A variety of emotional intelligence-related activities can be integrated to improve specific areas from both academic and personal point of view, such as self-awareness, self-management, motivation and empathy as generic competences of key importance during isolated distance learning as well as for a future profession as translators and interpreters.

Cardenio’s Various Fortunes

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This paper revisits a presumably lost Jacobean play, The History of Cardenio, attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. This adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ story featured in the first part of Don Quixote has been the subject of many conjectures and hypotheses throughout the centuries, primarily because of Lewis Theobald’s 1728 Double Falsehood, which he claimed was the lost play in question. Following Stephen Greenblatt’s work on cultural poetics and cultural mobility – concerning issues of authorship, mobility of ideas and texts, the relationship between society and literature – we will first retrace the trajectory of Cervantes’ Don Quixote from Spain to England in the early XVII century and examine its reception among the writers of the time. We will then focus on several notices that an adaptation of a story featured in Don Quixote was performed in the English playhouses of the time, a play later attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare, which was never published and was considered lost up until the XVIII century and the publication of Double Falsehood. Finally, we will give a brief critical analysis of the several texts in circulation, a notice of the most recent findings and conclusions on the Cardenio issue, and an account of the XXI century adaptations of the play around the world, a project carried by Stephen Greenblatt.

Problems in Interpreting Collocations from Macedonian into English and Vice Versa

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This paper talks about language propensity to transfer information and connect it to the act of interpreting, explaining what interpreting is and distinguishing between consecutive and simultaneous interpreting. It goes on to introduce the concept of collocations by defining and classifying them, and providing examples for each type so as to make the distinction clearer. It connects proper use of collocations and better language user competence, imperative for interpreters. Then it presents and covers an original research conducted with university students of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting from Macedonian into English language and vice versa analysing the students’ knowledge and proper use of collocations connected to two specific topics – economy and politics. It also exemplifies the different types of mistakes the students made in their renditions and analyses the sample of collocations, specifically observing the most and least common types of collocation structures present in the sample of examples. Finally, the paper concludes that around 50% of the analysed collocations are incorrectly rendered by the students, which stresses the importance of introducing collocations in the curricula of interpreting, therefore language learning as well.

Слободниот стих како хиперобјект

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Спасовска, Сузана В. Слободата на стихот, Студија за македонскиот слободен стих, Скопје, 2021, 272 стр.