2024 October - 32 articles
Since ancient times, music has been instrumental in giving life to the stories we build our identities and cultures around. I will examine how, in our time, music creates new myths by creating its own heroes and heroines through capital and the star...
This essay proposes to read the classic cycle of Godzilla films (roughly, 1954–1995) using a posthuman perspective that makes its emphasis on animal, vegetal and mineral life. We will use posthuman and materialist philosophy to analyze hybrid m...
In 1978, the American hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult released the song “Godzilla” as the first single from the fifth studio album Spectres. Despite not registering on popular charts, it would eventually evolve into an iconic song of...
Human beings have had beautiful dreams for a harmonious world since centuries ago; this can be termed cosmopolitanism, shijie datong, or global community. Based on theories expounded by Confucius, Tönnies, Anderson, Bauman, Derrida, and Appiah,...
One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called ‘late stage’ capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one tha...
Ecocriticism is an advancing field in literature that has opened up avenues in reading world literature from a whole new perspective. This paper seeks to flesh out ecocritical concerns in the selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Naomi Shihab Nye by...
Chris Bush’s Faustus: That Damned Woman (first performed in 2020) is a feminist and contemporary adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The magus is a woman who travels through time from the seventeenth century to the far dis...
After a decade of dormancy following the release of Tōhō Studios’ Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), Godzilla and other kaijū burst back onto the scene with Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014). Several American sequels and a tele...
In her 2010 article “Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma”, Griselda Pollock lamented the aperture between psychology, particularly that of PTSD, and esthetics in the search to bear witness to traumatic experience. This article ex...
Posthuman discourse calls for a fundamental shift away from modern anthropocentric thought. This shift stems from the reflection that many of the problems in the modern capitalist world, including climate change, are rooted in anthropocentric attitud...
In the lifetime anthology of Robert Frost’s poetry, one poem consistently stands out as the most beloved and recognizable of his works. To the average reader, for over a hundred years “The Road Not Taken” has engendered images of in...
Drawing on Karl Marx’s ecological concepts of the “metabolic rift” and the “emancipation of senses”, this paper explores an alternative ecocinema that integrates the ecological with the social and the economic. Early Hol...
The female body is often depicted in parallel with the environment in many literary works. This article examines how the female body can prompt a rethinking of the environment by analyzing three literary works, Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, publish...
In 2015, the Japanese public broadcaster NHK aired an educational series that re-examined traditional fairy tales by putting their characters on trial for their immoral behavior, such as revenge, violence, and dishonesty. These tales, rooted in premo...
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960 and is credited with initiating the confessional poetry movement, which included followers and students of Lowell such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In Life Studies,...
The “haunted house formula” is a central component in every Female Gothic narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, it revolves around a heroine trapped in a gloomy mansion, seeking to escape a male villain. This...
This article merges evaluations of Black life through the Southern Gothic and the intersection of Black studies to conceptualize the “Black Gothic”. The Black Gothic conceives of a future that requires closely examining the past and the p...
The Marsden Case, Ford’s first published novel after the First World War, has received relatively little critical attention. This paper aims to redress the balance by offering a sustained reading which illustrates how the context of the First W...
Utopian science fiction, as a fusion of science fiction literature and utopian literature, integrates the construction of imagined interactions between people, technology, society, and the environment in future narratives. In doing so, it deepens the...
This article examined the underrepresentation of Black characters in children’s picture books, particularly in natural settings, and its effect on Black children’s relationship with nature. Through an analysis of four contemporary picture...
Traditional book publishing has a pronounced and unjust deficiency of Black and African American voices. White culture, thoughts, and rules are the standard in traditional publishing. Black and African American authors are not typically picked up by...
Contemporary politics is filled with anxiety about the survival of democracy—particularly within a framework pitting liberal representative democracy against authoritarianism. In times of anxiety about authoritarianism, Western artists repeated...
This study explores the intersection of folklore and literature, specifically examining how a methodology developed for interpreting wondertales can be applied to a complex literary corpus, such as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps...
Overall, the cultural and artistic practices that continue to surround hitchhiking subcultures are largely untapped by serious scholastic research. This paper, deliberately non-linear, explores the haptic dimensions of hitchhiking. We use this mode o...
From Night of the Living Dead (1968) to The Walking Dead (2010–2022), zombie media offers a consistent refrain, namely to avoid becoming a zombie. This refrain makes intuitive sense. Why would anyone welcome becoming a member of a roaming, mind...
This essay argues that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Chuck Palahniuk’s self-described “Horror Trilogy” of novels, Lullaby, Diary, and Haunted, is their representation of obsessions, compulsions, and obsessive–co...
The Prague Circle, under the leadership of Max Brod (1884–1968), was a prominent literary group that flourished from 1900 to 1939. This era witnessed a struggle between emancipation and assimilation for German-speaking Jews within the Habsburg...
This article examines humanist anecdotes about the turbulent times of the mid-twentieth century by F. C. Weiskopf and Lenka Reinerová. It provides a comparative reading of Weiskopf’s Elend und Größe unserer Tage. Anekdoten 193...
This article seeks to examine a new trend in Arabic women’s literature that not only aims to forge women’s communities but also creates resistance. Digital media is the mechanism that some Arab women authors employ to implement and foster...
Paul Beatty, as a representative writer of contemporary African American literature, pays close attention to the living space of African Americans, and their inheritance of their own history and culture in his Booker-Prize-winning novel The Sellout....
This study aims to explore the issues of Islamophobia and Christian ideology prevalent in Spanish society in the 16th and early 17th centuries by examining the slave trade conducted by Barbary corsairs and the hard lives of Christian captives depicte...
The medieval epic poem, The Divine Comedy, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s prestige drama, Westworld, have more in common than at first meets the eye. Both represent hellish and purgatorial geographies, both physical and psychological. And bo...
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