Children's literature is an important resource for knowledge construction among young children. As they read the stories or have the stories read to them, children are presented with multiple ideologies and belief systems and this includes notions of masculinity and femininity (Taylor, 2003: 301). These ideologies are absorbed by young children and go on to influence their attitudes and behaviour as they participate in society. Perhaps for this reason, the reading of gender in children's literature has been an area that has drawn the interest of numerous researchers over the decades (Bender and Lach, 1990; Collins, Ingoldsby & Dellman, 1984; Crabb & Bielawski, 1994; Dellmann-Jenkins, Florjancic & Swadener, 1993; Desai, 2001; Dutro, 2002; Gooden & Gooden, 2001; Kortenhaus & Demarest, 1993; Oskamp, Kaufman & Wolterbeck, 1996; Poarch & Monk-Turner, 2001; Turner-Bowker, 1996; Weitzman et al., 1972). These studies have generally pointed to evidence of sexism, that is, the denigration of females realised in tandem with the exaltation of males (Ivy & Backlund, 1994: 72).

At the intersection of psychological and literary studies and acknowledging dialogical aspects of the self in Herman’s Dialogical Self Theory (DST), we coined the concept of “Virtual Fictional/Factual Positioning” (VFP), which is also guided by Bakhtin’s discussion on the author-hero relation. VFP evaluates the possible dialogical coalition of the author’s positions as “I-as-artist/novelist” and “I-as-the-hero-of-my-story,” amongst other positions in literary narratives. Evaluation of the existing literature on DST and the few adaptations of this theory for literary purposes highlights the insufficient consideration paid to the dialogical possibilities of the self in literary studies. To develop our argument based on our new model, we present a textual analysis of Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark and examine the protagonist’s narratives and his relation with his hero in the story within the story. Furthermore, we address the question of whether this protagonist/author’s self consists of polyphonized dialogical voices or merely a cacophony of various thoughts with fewer logical and no dialogical qualities.

Abstract-Science Fiction is a literary genre of technological changes in human and his life; and is full of imaginative and futuristic concepts and ideas. One of the most significant aspects of Science Fiction is human transformation. This paper will present, firstly, an overview on the history of Science Fiction and some of the most significant sci-fi stories, and will also explore the elements of human transformation in them. Later, it will explain the term of transhumanism as a movement which follows several transformation goals to reach immortality and superiority of human through advanced technology. Next, the views by a number of prominent transhumanists will be outlined and discussed. Finally, three main steps of transhumanism, namely transhuman, posthuman, and cyborg, will be described in details through notable scholars' views in which transhuman will be defined as a transcended version of human, posthuman as a less or non-biological being, and cyborg as a machine human. In total, this is a conceptual paper on an emerging trend in literary theory development which aims to engage critically in an overview of the transformative process of human by technology in Science Fiction beyond its current status.

is one of the most notable poets in contemporary English poetry. In accordance with her poetic dexterity, she was appointed as Great Britain's Poet Laureate in 2009. This study deals with Duffy's "Politics," which was introduced in The Bees (2011), her first collection published after having been named Poet Laureate. In this poem, the poet tackled natural and unnatural imagery resultant from diverse experiences. This study proposes that the material environment surrounding Carol Ann Duffy is intertwined with her nonmaterial environment in "Politics." This argument runs parallel with the concept of unnatural ecopoetics, which is considered to be a new direction in ecopoetics in examining contemporary poetry. The current study argues that the poet's ideology after becoming poet laureate and also her experience as a Scottish, feminist, bisexual poet have all together configured a kind of nonmaterial environment intertwined with the material world or nature in the textual space through "Politics". This assumption is not far from Sarah Nolan's concept of Unnatural Ecopoetics in her book Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces of Contemporary Poetry (2017). So, this study is conducted in the light of Nolan's concept, which denotes the relations between the human, natural, and unnatural environments and the language in the poetic text. Accordingly, more focus will be on the poet's experiences, memories, ideology, and feelings which inspired her to symbolize nature in another dimension in "Politics" as an unnatural ecopoetics poem.

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