Humanities, Volume 12, Issue 5

The inquiry into whether food can be classified as “art” has long been a subject of debate. From its roots tracing back to Plato, this question has attracted the attention of both artistic movements and philosophers, especially throughout...

An oeuvre as redolent with the spirit of satire and humor as Percival Everett’s can be said to represent, at the same time, an anthology of humorous devices—a “humorology,” so to speak—and a self-reflexive meditation on...

Israeli settler colonialism, in time, became highly linked to the idea of a state, culminating in an institution that defends the past, present, and future practises maintaining the relations between the “native” and “settlers&rdquo...

During his final years, John Stuart Mill reportedly attempted to update the argument of On Liberty (1859). Published posthumously in 1907, ‘On Social Freedom’ represents the initial, unrefined draft of his reworked ideas. This article arg...

We are living in the midst of a period of mass extinction. All around us, diverse species of animals and plants are disappearing, often largely unnoticed. However, this is also a period in which, on a daily basis, new and fascinating insights into an...

While literature and popular culture have sought to understand Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) in terms framed by the loss of social relationships and the strain caregivers face, this arrangement articulates AD as “being lost”, a fragmenta...

African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels...

The complex mythological web of Miguel de Cervantes’s novella “El celoso extremeño” has been extensively explored by scholars. However, despite the fact that most conducting myths referenced in the novel revolve around themes...

Japan has a longstanding tradition of horror narratives that feature a variety of macabre embodiments. They draw upon ancient folklore, thereby providing a unique perspective on spirits specific to Japanese culture. The influence of these countless s...

In this paper I propose to examine several poems by Elizabeth Bishop through the prism of the concept of letter delineated in “Lituraterre”, where Lacan explores the connection between the literal and the littoral in order to draw a key d...

During 2018, three academics employed what they referred to as “reflective ethnography” to examine the hypothesis that many disciplines (e.g., sociology, educational philosophy, and critical race theory) are motivated by extreme ideologie...

This paper focuses on a peculiar aspect of film viewing, specifically the way in which—interacting with the viewer and their own story—visual images create identifications that can make the viewing a more or less disturbing affective expe...

In Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion (1817), embodiment and disability function metonymically to show the emotional suffering of its characters. Austen gives temporary impairments to the novel’s protagonists, Anne Elliot and Captain Fre...

This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a...

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic instability that followed, has given new life to conspirituality and far-right ideology in so-called Australia. This article discusses how politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy t...

This article proposes a Debordian reading of Michel Houellebecq’s first work Extension du domaine de la lutte that would thrust him into the spotlight as France’s most popular and controversial writer. Specifically, this investigation dem...

Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (2001) is about six women who meet in an express train’s compartment in southern India. One of these women, Akhila, is the narrator of the novel, while we hear the voices of the other women only when they...

The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was founded in 1965 to manage education in London’s inner boroughs; by the early 1970s, it was held up as one of the most progressive education experiments in British history. One of the marks of this...

With a psychoanalytic lens, this article will examine some forms of contemporary narration, which develop in the virtual world and appear as phenomena related to mythopoiesis in preadolescence. Such forms put the body at the heart of the identity tra...

This article looks at a set of anglophone form poetry that I wrote for a course I took while pursuing my master’s degree in Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi (2019–2021), during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India...

Antilogies, or pairs of symmetrically opposed speeches or arguments, were generally ignored by Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius, and, later, by Eduard Norden, Hermann Diels, and most modern scholars of antiquity. As a conseq...

Haniya Yutaka (1909–1997) was one of the leading figures in postwar Japanese literature and avant-garde art movements, chiefly remembered today for his unfinished metaphysical novel Dead Souls [Shirei, 1946–1997]. This essay, however, exa...

This article explores Percival Everett’s multi-dimensional use of a concept he has termed the “slash” (i.e., the line that both separates and conjoins signifier/signified) in his novel American Desert. In effect, this slash is a tro...

This essay offers a comparative analysis of Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman and its 2021 sequel directed by Nia DaCosta. Through an intertextual approach informed by gothic studies, narratology, and critical race theory, the essay shows how DaCost...

This article studies the fictionalisation of the eyes and their potential in La pícara Justina (The Spanish Jilt) (1605), a picaresque novel by the licentiate López de Úbeda. To this end, a collection of passages is discussed in...

The Spanish Golden Age tragedy is assembled around the conflict of passions, which does not find an adequate channel of expression in words because there are feelings that cannot be confessed if one wants to preserve life. However, such intense emoti...

As immersive media, including VR, AR, MR, and XR, continues to expand rapidly during the pandemic era, there remains limited research on its comprehensive characteristics and its potential to create new forms of experience and aesthetics. This may be...

In Trout’s Lie, Percival Everett seems to be once more exploring pure form as part of a quest for abstraction. Yet the effect of the poems in the collection largely relies on the materiality of language characterizing all poetry—mostly a...

Our story starts in April 2020, in the early stages of the UK’s first national COVID-19 lockdown. A multidisciplinary team of researchers and artists began a collaboration with Migrateful, a charity that runs cookery classes led by refugees, as...

The article offers a reexamination of Ovid’s story of Philomela and Procne, with an emphasis on revenge and lament as two responses to acts of wrongdoing and loss. My analysis begins by exploring philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives, m...

In keeping with the focus of this special edition of Humanities on the political child, this article builds on investigations into constructions of the child body in literature and society to examine how portrayals of the child body in Neil Gaiman&rs...

This article examines Percival Everett’s 2005 novel Wounded through three applications of the word “naturalistic” in order to show how the work complicates divisions between nature and man and man and animal. First, the article show...

Turn-of-twentieth-century Sámi concepts of spirits of the dead are presented along with accounts of those exceptional individuals able to see, hear, interact with, and sometimes control them, particularly persons termed noaideslág&aacut...

The transnational configuration of contemporary German literature cannot be detached from its historical continuum, since such a separation would render the archive of histories of exile in and out of Germany inconsistent and incomplete. Bringing lit...

Our contribution discusses the practice of Panem et Circenses (Alessandra Ivul and Ludovico Pensato), an art collective whose work revolves around food and agriculture. After founding Panem et Circenses in Berlin, Ivul and Pensato opened an artist-ru...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who called tourism an industry “whose production is identical to its advertisement”, also wrote about the pitfalls of what he called the “tourism of the revolution” that flourished between the world w...

Representations of play abound in Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary and its 1989 and 2019 subsequent film adaptations. However, play in Pet Sematary is not representative of the innocent actions designed to create functioning adults who me...

Around 1930, the Japanese publishing market was restructured, and as part of this process, the colonial market emerged within the Japanese Empire. In an attempt to expand into the colonial market, publishers such as Kaizō-sha, Chūōk...

This paper will depart from the premise that with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as its flagship author, exemplar and editorial adviser, Heinemann Educational Books, which aimed to represent Africa and Africans through its African Writers Series (...