2021 March - 58 articles
Between 1845–1849, twelve enslaved women in Montgomery, Alabama lived through prolonged, gynecologic experimentation at the hands of Dr. James Marion Sims. What happened, in his 16-bed backyard hospital, often begins the origin narrative of modern U....
The proposed paper will begin by looking at the father–son relationship in Elie Wiesel’s Night. I will then briefly note the father–child relationship between God and Israel in the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. I will link the two challenges evident...
Video games have become important but understudied narrative media, which link into as well as perpetuate popular forms of cultural memory. They evoke and mediate space (or the illusion thereof) in unique ways, literally putting into play Doreen Mass...
The instinct to tame and preserve and the longing for eternal beauty makes skin a crucial element in the genre of the Body Horror. By applying a gendered reading to the art of destruction and reconstruction of an ephemeral body, this paper explores t...
This essay re-examines Henry James’s complex relationship with Edgar Allan Poe by focusing on the echoes of one of Poe’s most celebrated tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), that later reverberate in James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888). It highlights...
Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) presents a model of female relations invested in queer futurity and queer temporality, disrupting the patriarchal geometry of courtship in order to provide the play’s heroines access to an...
The paper establishes a connection between the becoming-writer of Burroughs, who found his calling and style during the 1950s and his signature characteristic of becoming-animal. This can first be observed in Queer, where Burroughs develops his so-ca...
This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The...
This essay argues that Anne Waldman’s 1973 selected poems, Life Notes, articulates a vision of the environment that is positively and reparatively enmeshed with language and culture. Embracing the paradox at the heart of the best environmental writin...
While classical fairy tales do not portray much depth of suffering, many contemporary fairy-tale retellings explore trauma and its aftermath in great detail. This article analyzes depictions of trauma in fairy tales, utilizing as a primary case study...
There has always been a posthuman aspect to the processing and consumption of animal-based meats, especially as cuts of meat are distanced from the animals supplying them, thus turning the animals themselves into information more so than bodies. Plan...
Urban agriculture is often advanced as a sustainable solution to feed a growing urban population, offering a number of benefits: improved fresh food access, CO2 absorption, social justice and social cohesion among others. Going beyond these direct ta...
A socially-engaged literary Modernist, whose writings possess an incisive skepticism toward political power, Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976) was a working-class autodidact who became a prominent voice in Swedish letters during the twentieth century. His h...
This essay examines the role of Marxist concepts in recent architectural theories of ecology using two architecture firms, Estudio Teddy Cruz and Sauerbruch Hutton (SH), as case studies. In their writings, Cruz and SH mobilize the critique of capital...
The complex narrative composition of image and text in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän discloses entanglements between humans and nonhuman entities that impact the narrative and that demand careful consideration. The story depicts the ag...
In the midst of the current global health crisis, there is ongoing discussion about the need to cultivate resilience, that is, the ability to survive tragic events, adversity and prolonged stress. This paper engages in a reading of Euripides’ Heracle...
Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethics and Paul Celan’s dialogical poetics, this article interrogates the impossible memorial and ethical demands that literary responses to the Holocaust place upon their readers. While Levinas reveals o...
This essay examines two monuments: the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa and the American This is the Place Monument in Utah. Similar in terms of construction and historical purpose, both employ gender as an important tool to legitimize the settle...
This article reassesses Henry James’s attitude to the historical novels of Walter Scott in light of James’s observation, made early on in the First World War, that the current global situation “makes Walter Scott, him only, readable again”. Scott’s n...
The interrelationship of natural and cultural history in Don DeLillo’s Underworld presents an ecology of mimesis. If, as Timothy Morton argues, ecological thought can be understood as a “mesh of interconnection,” DeLillo’s novel studies the interpret...
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is among the seminal texts of the Beat Generation canon, and the author himself is renowned as a hero of American letters and freedom. Kerouac’s book is clearly one of the most inspirational of the last century and helped t...
The German mountain film (Bergfilm) has received extensive critical attention for its political, social, and aesthetic implications, but has received remarkably little attention for its role in the environmental history of the Alps. This article cons...
This article provides a decolonial feminist analysis of Latinx artist Scherezade García’s most recent portable mural, Blame it on the bean: the power of Coffee (2019), created for and installed in the café and library of The People’s Forum, a “moveme...
Within the modern capitalist World-System, Missionary work was mostly developed through the connubiality with colonial powers. The missionary work of the Anglican Church is no exception. This article centers on the missionary enterprise carried out i...
This essay moves the first steps toward an understanding of the intricate intertwining between the notion of orientation and that of Point of View (POV) across the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (and in his work with psychotherapist Felix Guattari), an...
A pivotal scene in the 2019 reinvention of Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film Local Hero into musical theatre involves a hangover[...]
When William Came by Saki (H. H. Munro) is a unique novel in the genre of invasion literature. Starting after a fictional war between Britain and Germany, it depicts no scenes of invasion. Recently, there have been studies from the perspective of how...
Entrepreneurship is typically understood as capitalist, but new models are emerging; these new models, like Welter et al.’s “everyday-entrepreneur,” can be understood in the tradition of techné, in which entrepreneurship is an embodied practice balan...
The 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s theology, dissolving gender binaries and incorporating medieval constructs of the female into the Trinity, captivates scholars across rhetorical, literary, and religious studies. A “pioneering feminist”, as...
We outline here a certain history of ideas concerning the relation between intuitions and their external verification and consider its potential for detrivializing the concept of virtuality. From Descartes and Leibniz onward to 19th-century geometry...
This essay reads Edith Södergran’s poetic subject in Dikter (Poems) (1916) as multiple and, in their complex negotiation and revision of the cultural body assigned female at birth, representative of a gender expansiveness that we can identify today a...
Contemporary Brooklyn fictions, as a genre, are centrally concerned with gentrification and authenticity. This article situates literary Brooklyn and these concerns in relation to the United States at the national level. Thinking about Brooklyn’s gen...
This paper offers a Latourian reading of T.C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done. It shows that the novel satirizes contemporary ecological debates and stages the cultural wars of our current ecological culture. It also demonstrates, however, that...
In 2017, the Singaporean government unveiled the Farm Transformation Map, a highly technology-driven initiative that intends to change its current, near-total dependence on imported food. The plan focuses on the prospect of high-productivity farming—...
Peer review is an essential part in the publication process, ensuring that Humanities maintains high quality standards for its published papers [...]
After providing an introduction to German language family narratives of the past forty years and discussing the relevance of Michael Rothberg’s notion of the “Implicated Subject” for the study of these narratives, this article presents a detailed ana...
This article examines the Care and Maintenance (CM/1) form of Paula Bettauer for what it reveals about her memories of surviving the Holocaust and her husband’s murder in Auschwitz. The record includes a personal narrative, chronologies of her...
Literary descriptions of the multitude of experiences during the Holocaust and World War II face the dilemma of the (non)representability of extreme duress. This article delves into the testimonial remnants of two men in the gray zone of complicity:...
This article accounts for what language and memory are and are not capable of in literary depictions of the Holocaust. To read, analyze, or even write Holocaust narratives, readers must expect to encounter new forms of writing and expression. This in...
In 1989, I began collecting and populating my university campus office with items reflecting what I knew—from my research, teaching, and lived experience as a Black American—was racist Americana. These items have supplemented my teaching of African A...
Five and a half decades ago, when Stith Thompson was the doyen of American folklore studies, he published his essay “The Challenge of Folklore” in PMLA, a leading journal of the Humanities (Thompson 1964) [...]
Emergency Shakespeare is a collaboratively owned theatre company based in an English prison for men convicted of sexual offences. It is the first permanent theatre company of its kind with this population. This article explores the ways in which Shak...
Focusing on the so-called Nördliche Kalkalpen or Northern Limestone Alps of Germany and Austria, I will discuss how human interaction with these mountains during the age of the Anthropocene shifts from scientific and athletic exploration to comm...
Poet, theorist and politician, Aimé Césaire produced, over the course of his literary and political career, a singular body of work equally noteworthy for its analysis of colonialism as for his poetic innovation. Publishing his texts in...
“Source criticism” (källkritik) has become an essential part of the Swedish government’s activities against false information, deception campaigns, and propaganda, which are viewed as fundamentally destabilising forces that can...
Only recently have scholars begun to discuss the implications of the Anthropocene for the translation of literature, introducing the new practice and study of ecotranslation. The Anthropocene—a term popularized by Paul Crutzen—describes t...
To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since t...
The present paper brings to the fore issues relating to the meaning and construction of ethics in online team communication by exploring the discursive strategies that contribute to the construction of a team’s sense of duty and individual virt...
In this essay, I give an alternative reading of Chaucerian resonances that fill Lydgate’s The Temple of Glass by analyzing the poem’s allusions to the House of Fame. I argue that Lydgate, as a poet who was well read in Chaucer and conside...
Coal, and even more so, brown coal or lignite, is currently under-researched in the energy humanities. Lignite still provides approximately 25% of “green” Germany’s energy; its extraction obliterates human settlements and vibrant ec...
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