2023 February - 20 articles
The themes of paralyzing, solipsistic self-critique versus the necessarily communal character of authentic, meaningful existence in the work of American novelist David Foster Wallace are best understood in light of existentialism. This article compar...
This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in the context of children’s and young adults’ Arab Gothic literature. Across the Middle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oral storytell...
Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes inspiration from Franz Kafka’s metonymic animal literature to develop his concepts of institution and “sardonic humanism.” Metonymy is a literary device, an instituting dimension of language, that allows...
While the law and literature movement has treated a number of important texts, contexts, and figures from both spheres, surprisingly absent is the situation of Leopold II’s Congo Free State and the person of Edmond Picard. This article seeks to...
With internationally growing attention to the quality of higher education, a formal teaching qualification has become at many universities a requirement for non-tenured staff to be eligible for tenure. To obtain a qualification, participants in this...
Science fiction (SF) developed as a self-identified genre in Japan in the 1950s and quickly underwent a boom in the 1960s. Throughout this period, SF literature, film, and television were tightly intertwined industries, sharing production personnel,...
Satō Haruo’s “Okāsan” (“Mother”) is a story that was published in Josei (Woman) magazine in October 1926. The plot follows “I” as he listens to the words of the parrot he bought from the pet store a...
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This paper explores the shifting position of “readers” and “writers” within serialized works by Japanese detective fiction author Edogawa Rampo. The essay focuses on two works published at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s:...
This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position as prison writer turned detective writer, whose influence is clear not only in the usual suspects such as Walter Mosley but also in the Blaxploita...
For more than a century, cinema has offered a rich source of images and narratives about crime and punishment. Unfortunately, the restricted nature of correctional environments and the social stigma surrounding incarceration leave most viewers relian...
In Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes, the orator draws attention to two important limitations of speech’s power that concern its different relationships to belief vs. knowledge. First, logos has the capacity to affect a...
On 12 February 2020, while on an international tour promoting Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, the translator of the book, Omid Tofighian, participated in a seminar at Utrecht University, organised by A...
This article considers Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” in contemporary fiction by looking at a constellation of novels published near the turn of the twenty-first century: David Foster Wallace’s Infini...
Recently, scholars have looked at the ethnic press through a social constructionist lens, examining the process through which immigrants developed a sense of identity and the role of print culture in forming “imagined communities” (Anders...
The New American Poetry anthology delineated “schools” of North American poetry which have become seminal: The Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov), the New York School (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank...
The essay focused on the TV documentary series The Silk Road and discussed the significance of this co-production between China and Japan. Two television stations, NHK and CCTV, provided each other with technical support to create a new image of the...
In this article, debates around ideas of childhood and disability will be engaged through the close reading of the retrospective diagnosis of a child with ADHD in an early work of German children’s literature (also widely translated, including...
This paper unpacks the contradiction between the benefits of literacy and the punitive prison policies that seek to curb or regulate reading by beginning with the complicated historical relationship between incarceration and literacy. I then turn to...
This essay aims to reveal the relationship between sophistry and law in a twofold direction: on one side, how the development of ancient Greek law influenced sophistry’s production, and on the other, how and to what extent the knowledge and ski...
