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This chapter investigates the representation of transnational human trafficking in news texts in English and Serbian (published between 2000 by adopting contemporary narrative and media theories. The identified narrative strategies and narrative elements (pertaining to the fabula, story, and text) not only shape the news texts, but also function as a semiotic code through which reality is itself constructed. In both sets of news texts, narratives as forms of representation prioritize particular aspects of human trafficking (e.g., use of official sources), while neglecting and/or completely excluding others (e.g., roots of human trafficking). The chapter draws attention to the logic behind such mechanisms that transform information into meaningful structures and thus influence the shaping of public perception and responses to this crime.

In the early hours of October 23rd, 2019, 39 people were found dead in a refrigerated lorry in Grays, Essex, UK. This case attracted media interest across the world; in the 48-h period after the story broke, reporting on this discovery extended to newspapers not just in the UK, but also across Europe. This study uses elements of Critical Stylistics (Jeffries 2010) to analyse and compare first response articles published by European dailies in relation to the event at Grays, to address the nature of this reporting. We found that linguistic choices tend to dramatise what happened, criminalise victims, and even presume the driver’s innocence, with the international criminal network he is presupposed to be part of remaining only speculated on. Though there are attempts to distribute some accountability to governments and policies, as well as structural systemic factors such as war and poverty, responsibility for these factors tends to be diffused, and hence unallocated, this helping ultimately justify draconic law enforcement and border security policies. By highlighting linguistic trends and underlying ideologies which we in turn question, we address the need to tend to the structural causes of such transnational people movement-related crime (i.e. trafficking and smuggling) and shift accountability to governments.

In the era of what Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker call "post-theory," presenting us with theory that is exhausted due to an ever-increasing difficulty in coming up with any clear-cut categorizations, Salman Rushdie's prolific, multifarious oeuvre epitomizes contemporary literature's incessant tendency to evade classifications. Being in between cultures, traditions, genres, conventions and influences, Rushdie's work, often described as hybrid and cosmopolitan, can and should be read from a variety of perspectives. In a time when we are questioning the appropriateness of terms such as "postcolonial" and wondering if more general ones, such as "transnational," "transcultural," or "international," would be better suited for today's literature, this article analyzes Rushdie's fiction between categories as gradually swerving away from postcolonial postmodernism toward cosmopolitanism, with special focus on The Ground beneath Her Feet, in an attempt to address and answer the controversial question of whether we are indeed moving toward a global(ized) literature. KEYWORDS Cosmopolitan(ism); global(ized); postmodern(ism); postcolonial(ism); Salman Rushdie Literary Cosmopolitanism and Global(ized) Literature In the 2005 edition of their guide to contemporary literary theory, Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker point out yet again that we live in a time of post-theory, when "theory […] seems anyway not to be about literature," "the days of theory […] are over," or rather we have reached "the end of theory" (267), with literature, once at the heart of the theoretical project, being neglected by what theory there is and politicized: "the distinctive mark of the literary has been overlaid by the imperatives of race, sexuality, gender" (Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker 269). One need not despair, though, the authors assure us, for it is not an apocalypse but a reorientation (267). A significant contribution to that reorientation is made by a now-substantial body of works in the field of cosmopolitan theory-Berthold Schoene's The Cosmopolitan Novel, Philip Leonard's Literature after Globalization, Katherine Stanton's Cosmopolitan Fictions, and Vinay Dharwadker's Cosmopolitan Geographies are some noteworthy titles-which takes late twentieth and twenty-first century literary cosmopolitanism as one of its foci of interest in the context of contemporary forms and discussions of globalization, while also looking back to earlier times and traditional notions of cosmopolitanism. As a phenomenon, "an attitude and disposition," or "a strategy of resistance" (Schoene 2, 5), cosmopolitanism is no novelty. Like globalization, with which it is inextricably and as yet indeterminately related, it can be traced back to the Renaissance, according to Leonard, the Middle Ages, as suggested by Cosmopolitan Geographies, or antiquity-the very word "cosmopolitan" derives from the ancient Greek word "kosmopolitês." What in Schoene's opinion distinguishes contemporary cosmopolitanism is that it signals "a departure from traditional internationalist perspective...

Reality in Angela Carter’s magical realist novels is depicted through the deployment of numerous picturesque details that correspond to the readers’ experiential reality, differentiating such a world from non-realist forms. Though the magical realist fictional world is akin to the one outside of the fictional reality, the mode’s strategy still differs from that of traditional realism due to the absence of a purely mimetic role. Initially serving to establish what Roland Barthes termed l’effet de reel (the effect of reality), the city in Carter’s novels is indeed constructed according to the principles of magical realism and creates plausible links between textual and extratextual realities. Further inclusion of magical, uncanny elements into such a world, in one respect, leads to the creation of excentric spaces that promote the position of the marginalized Other and allow alternative outlooks on life to gain prominence. A hybrid reality that is the ultimate result of the coexistence of the normal and the uncanny leads to the subversion of what Carter saw as patriarchal stereotypes, primarily due to the fact that it problematizes and ultimately negates their very foundation. In other words, if we cannot agree on the criteria for what is real, how can we trust the ultimate authority of any other criteria? The city in Carter’s novels thus acts as a suitable literary venue for revealing the author’s ideological position.