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Humanities
Volume 14
Issue 12
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Humanities, Volume 14, Issue 12 (December 2025) – 18 articles

Cover Story (view full-size image): In recent years, Norwegian cultural production has increasingly foregrounded the experiences of sailors serving aboard merchant vessels allied with the British during the Second World War. These men endured not only physical injuries from submarine and aerial attacks, but also profound psychic trauma. However, the war at sea also left indelible marks on women. This article examines Vigdis Stokkelien’s trilogy on Gro—Lille-Gibraltar (Little Gibraltar, 1972), Båten under solseilet (The boat under the sun sail, 1982), and Stjerneleden (The star joint, 1984)—to explore how emotions as fear, shame, and pain circulated between different individuals and groups during the war and in war memories. What happened at sea marked Norwegians and their national identity for a long time after the war. View this paper
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13 pages, 229 KB  
Article
From Parasite to Symbiont: Cyborg Identity, Ecological Agency and Posthuman Freedom in Suarez’s Daemon and Freedom™
by Ozden Dere
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 243; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120243 - 18 Dec 2025
Viewed by 329
Abstract
This article examines Daniel Suarez’s techno-thrillers Daemon (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) as works of speculative fiction that critically engage with themes of posthuman identity, algorithmic governance, and ecological agency. Rather than portraying artificial intelligence as a dystopian threat, the novels imagine the [...] Read more.
This article examines Daniel Suarez’s techno-thrillers Daemon (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) as works of speculative fiction that critically engage with themes of posthuman identity, algorithmic governance, and ecological agency. Rather than portraying artificial intelligence as a dystopian threat, the novels imagine the Daemon, which is a self-replicating system launched upon its creator’s death, as an infrastructural force that reorganizes global systems of power, labor, and survival. Through a posthumanist reading, drawing on thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, this article interprets the Daemon not as malevolent code, but as an ecological actor embedded in material networks, capable of fostering adaptive forms of life and governance. By reading Suarez’s fiction through the lens of posthuman ecocriticism and infrastructural media theory, the article offers a model for understanding freedom, not as a static right, but as a relational capacity earned through participation in sympoietic systems. It argues that speculative fiction can function as a cartographic tool, mapping not only future technologies but future ontologies. Full article
13 pages, 238 KB  
Article
Aesth(ethics) in Ludonarrative Experiences: 11Bit’s Frostpunk
by Jaime Oliveros García
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 242; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120242 - 18 Dec 2025
Viewed by 238
Abstract
This article addresses the way Frostpunk’s saga highlights the semiotic nature of video games by establishing an aesthetic and ethical link in its ludonarrative mechanics and storytelling, which, in turn, may engage with the player in a debate where the identitarian discourses [...] Read more.
This article addresses the way Frostpunk’s saga highlights the semiotic nature of video games by establishing an aesthetic and ethical link in its ludonarrative mechanics and storytelling, which, in turn, may engage with the player in a debate where the identitarian discourses of both the fictional entities encoded within the game and the player (that is, of both functional and fictional agents) are put into question and thus may be reconfigured. To understand this connection between aesthetics, ethics, and identity, affect is central: through affect, players establish empathic links towards the encoded agents (including, but not limited to, the encoded citizens, the encoded setting, and the encoded avatar of the player within the game world), which in turn allows them to interact with them as if being real, at least while the playthrough is active. To achieve this, this article will first offer a theoretical review of the terms mentioned above (identity, affect, aesthetics, ethics), and then will apply them to 11Bit’s saga, Frostpunk. The article finishes with some conclusions regarding the semiotic nature of the video game and the universality of these analyses. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Beyond and in the Margins of the Text and Textualities)
13 pages, 260 KB  
Article
Projects for Riot in Bentham’s Defense of Usury and Smith’s Wealth of Nations
by David Alff
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 241; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120241 - 16 Dec 2025
Viewed by 224
Abstract
This essay argues that Jeremy Bentham’s experience of the 1780 Gordon Riots and 1787 sojourn to White Russia inspired his conception of several projects for managing unruly populations. Bentham’s devotion to speculative enterprise informs his Defence of Usury, which vindicates schemers and [...] Read more.
This essay argues that Jeremy Bentham’s experience of the 1780 Gordon Riots and 1787 sojourn to White Russia inspired his conception of several projects for managing unruly populations. Bentham’s devotion to speculative enterprise informs his Defence of Usury, which vindicates schemers and dreamers from the criticism of Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations caricatured projectors as “riotous” con-artists who threatened domestic peace. Bentham’s Defence, I show, resuscitated early modern debates over the efficacy of free-lance enterprise to authorize his own efforts to improve society. A projector and theorist of projection, Bentham reveals how residents of the late eighteenth century described riot so that they could suppress it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Anglophone Riot)
12 pages, 238 KB  
Article
‘The Road Was in Ireland’: Modernist Ecologies of Estrangement in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Fiction
by Keelan Harkin
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 240; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120240 - 12 Dec 2025
Viewed by 268
Abstract
Attending to Elizabeth Bowen’s environmental descriptions in her short fiction, including her landscapes, weather, flora, and fauna, reveals a modernist ecological sensibility. In stories such as ‘Summer Night’ and ‘Human Habitation,’ Bowen’s characters find themselves estranged from the kinds of attachment to place [...] Read more.
Attending to Elizabeth Bowen’s environmental descriptions in her short fiction, including her landscapes, weather, flora, and fauna, reveals a modernist ecological sensibility. In stories such as ‘Summer Night’ and ‘Human Habitation,’ Bowen’s characters find themselves estranged from the kinds of attachment to place fostered by a national ecological imaginary. While Bowen’s own nationality, and the effect of her Anglo-Irish class and heritage on her writing, has been a central area of consideration for many scholars, this essay offers an ecocritical reading of her short stories and argues that these works interrogate the viability of national ecologies to help understand the experiences of her characters within a modern world. Whether they find themselves in Ireland or in England, Bowen’s characters inhabit a world that perpetually leads to feelings of detachment and alienation from the terms of belonging and place that underlie such national ecologies. By building on the recent modernist and ecocritical turn in scholarship on Elizabeth Bowen, this essay argues that her short stories challenge the explanatory qualities of romantic national ecologies by instead evoking a modernist ecology of estrangement. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Ecologies in Irish Literature)
18 pages, 324 KB  
Article
Writing the Burden of Family History: Descendant Narratives of World War II Perpetrators in Norway, 1980s–2020s
by Marianne Sætre Amundsen
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 239; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120239 - 12 Dec 2025
Viewed by 664
Abstract
This article presents a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of Norwegian descendant literature written by children and grandchildren of World War II perpetrators—specifically Nazis, Waffen-SS front fighters and members of the fascist party Nasjonal Samling (NS)—from the 1980s to the 2020s. Based on [...] Read more.
This article presents a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of Norwegian descendant literature written by children and grandchildren of World War II perpetrators—specifically Nazis, Waffen-SS front fighters and members of the fascist party Nasjonal Samling (NS)—from the 1980s to the 2020s. Based on an analysis of twenty works, it shows how these narratives articulate the emotional and social burden of family history and engage with an evolving national memory culture. The analysis identifies generational and temporal patterns, including a significant divergence within the second generation. Early publications (1980s) and later “NS children’s” accounts (2010s) foreground stigmatisation, bullying, exclusion and long-term repercussions, whereas self-reflective second- and third-generation works (2000s–2020s) increasingly portray internalised responses, such as inherited shame, guilt and emotional ambivalence. By tracing these developments, the analysis shows that descendant narratives both reflect and reshape existing frameworks of remembrance. Across periods and generations, the burden is marked by strong emotional responses and interwoven with national memory culture. These findings offer new insights into the emotional dimensions of Norway’s evolving memory of World War II, highlighting the interplay between personal, familial and collective memories. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Memories of World War II in Norwegian Fiction and Life Writing)
12 pages, 250 KB  
Article
Disruptions of Time: Found Manuscripts, Hogg’s Influence, and Queer Time in Helen McClory’s Bitterhall (2021)
by Gina Lyle
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 238; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120238 - 12 Dec 2025
Viewed by 238
Abstract
This paper considers Helen McClory’s 2021 novel Bitterhall as one that self-reflexively engages with Scottish Gothic literary traditions, interrogating its own relationship with James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and expressing authorial concerns around influence and the [...] Read more.
This paper considers Helen McClory’s 2021 novel Bitterhall as one that self-reflexively engages with Scottish Gothic literary traditions, interrogating its own relationship with James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and expressing authorial concerns around influence and the production of derivative pastiche. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a specifically queer reading of Confessions, and this article finds a parallel with Bitterhall, suggesting Tom’s anxiety about his sexuality is what makes him vulnerable to the power of a mysterious diary. Drawing from Timothy C. Baker’s exploration of the found manuscript, this paper further considers Bitterhall’s relationship with time and temporal disruption as queer, indicating how the novel’s cyclical narrative style and collapsing of past and present disrupt linearity and indicate a history of queer identities. This paper argues for McClory’s inclusion in wider discussions of contemporary Scottish Gothic and indicates the potential for fresh engagements with Scottish literary traditions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Scottish Fiction)
14 pages, 2274 KB  
Article
The Impossibility of Representation: Delivery Riders and a Failed Storytelling in Li Jianjun’s The Metamorphosis (2024)
by Jasmine Yueming Li
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 237; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120237 - 8 Dec 2025
Viewed by 349
Abstract
This essay analyzes Chinese theater director Li Jianjun’s play The Metamorphosis (Bianxingji) under Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Reimagining Kafka’s Gregor Samsa as a package delivery rider in contemporary China, the play stages a failed narrative of storytelling through live-feed [...] Read more.
This essay analyzes Chinese theater director Li Jianjun’s play The Metamorphosis (Bianxingji) under Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Reimagining Kafka’s Gregor Samsa as a package delivery rider in contemporary China, the play stages a failed narrative of storytelling through live-feed video and informs the impossibility of representing the riders’ labor resulting from the fragmented realities of postsocialist China. It thus challenges the middle-class writers’ efforts to transform delivery riders’ labor into a form of cultural capital and confronts the audience with the exploitative potential of their spectating position. Ultimately, the impossibility of representation staged by the play articulates the inequality and stratification that structures China at the postsocialist moment. The play interweaves three layers of narratives: Geligaoer’s family’s various forms of labor, documentary clips of real-life delivery riders in contemporary China, and an interplay between an external voice and the performers’ bodily movements. This layered narrative foregrounds the artificiality of storytelling and can be situated within the ongoing discussions in the recent decade in China, in which scholars and journalists attempt to secure their middle-class identities by transforming the riders’ laboring condition into a form of cultural capital. In contrast, the play stages the failure of the narrative of storytelling through a projection screen and live-feed cameras to inform the impossibility of a transparent representation of the delivery riders. By excluding the audience from the riders’ subjectivity, the play blocks the audience’s identification with the latter. Through the heavy beauty filter projected on the screen as a metaphor, the play confronts the audience with their own middle-class identity and warns them of the violence inherent in their spectating position. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)
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17 pages, 246 KB  
Article
Silence, Distortion, or Discrimination? Roma Memories and Norwegian Memory Politics of WWII
by Anette Homlong Storeide
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 236; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120236 - 4 Dec 2025
Viewed by 463
Abstract
The Nazi genocide had devastating consequences for Norwegian Jews and Romas. However, their experiences and memories have been treated very differently in Norway with respect to official recognition and public attention. This article investigates the mnemonic marginalization of the Roma and the persistent [...] Read more.
The Nazi genocide had devastating consequences for Norwegian Jews and Romas. However, their experiences and memories have been treated very differently in Norway with respect to official recognition and public attention. This article investigates the mnemonic marginalization of the Roma and the persistent gap between the historical recognition of Roma persecution and its representational absence in national narratives of war and victimhood. It suggests that continued exclusion of the small Roma minority from national identity narratives in Norway results not only from temporal, topographical and narrative characteristics of their memories, but also from discursive connections of negative stereotypes that discredits them as blameworthy victims and results in testimonial injustice. Moreover, it explores the challenges of representing Roma memories without reproducing stigmatizing cultural tropes. The article suggests empathic mnemonic counter-narratives as a strategy for countering dominant framings of the Roma as “the others” and for promoting a more inclusive and self-reflexive politics of remembrance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Memories of World War II in Norwegian Fiction and Life Writing)
15 pages, 251 KB  
Article
Creole Women and Counterdecadence in Lafcadio Hearn’s Antillean Writing
by Peter A. A. Bailey
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 235; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120235 - 4 Dec 2025
Viewed by 591
Abstract
Critics often cast the Creole woman of color in Lafcadio Hearn’s circum-Caribbean writings as a figure of cultural moribundity—an emblem of a Creole world fading under the pressures of modernization. However, Hearn also presents Creole women as vivacious counterdecadent agents, disruptors of the [...] Read more.
Critics often cast the Creole woman of color in Lafcadio Hearn’s circum-Caribbean writings as a figure of cultural moribundity—an emblem of a Creole world fading under the pressures of modernization. However, Hearn also presents Creole women as vivacious counterdecadent agents, disruptors of the political decline experienced by Martinique’s white Creoles after citizenship was restored to the colony’s men of African descent. Through historical contextualization of Hearn’s periodical writing and his correspondence with journalist Elizabeth Bisland, this paper explains why he employs the strategies of Decadent conservatism to imagine a moment in which formerly enslaved Creole women prevent an iconoclastic Republican attack on a sculpture of the Empress Joséphine. Erected in a reactionary period after slavery’s abolition, this monument originally commemorated the reinstatement of plantocratic dominance over the Black population, but by the time Hearn saw the statue, it had become an ironic reminder of weakened white authority. The imagined actions of Hearn’s Creole women resignify the monument, making its survival attest to the limited victory of Republican egalitarianism and the survival of pre-modern traditions of racial deference. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Use and Misuse of Fin-De-Siècle Decadence and Its Imagination)
17 pages, 287 KB  
Article
A Scandal Averted: Bettina von Arnim’s Open-Letter Novel Dies Buch gehört dem König (1843)
by Nursan Celik
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 234; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120234 - 2 Dec 2025
Viewed by 430
Abstract
Dies Buch gehört dem König (This Book Belongs to the King), written and published in 1843 by the German Romantic author Bettina von Arnim, is a quasi-open letter, presented as a series of fictional dialogues with traces of a novel. Dedicated [...] Read more.
Dies Buch gehört dem König (This Book Belongs to the King), written and published in 1843 by the German Romantic author Bettina von Arnim, is a quasi-open letter, presented as a series of fictional dialogues with traces of a novel. Dedicated to the newly crowned King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the letter unfolds social grievances and aims to persuade Friedrich Wilhelm to act like a just king. Due to its delicate socio-critical impetus, the letter does so through strategies of obfuscation and by using a richly pictorial, seemingly naive and lavish way of speech rather than taking an openly reproachful stance. Crucially, von Arnim does not install herself as the letter’s speaker but instead fictionalizes the letter and presents Goethe’s mother, Catharina Elisabeth Goethe, as the letter’s primary voice (‘Frau Rat’). By using a well-respected figure of the ruling class as the letter’s main voice, von Arnim aimed at minimizing its scandalous potential. But even prior to publishing the letter, von Arnim had already managed to trick Friedrich Wilhelm and the Prussian censors herself: by fusing the book’s title and dedication, she paratextually outwitted both the censors and the King, whose permission she sought precisely to bypass Prussian censorship. This article shows how von Arnim managed to avoid a larger scandal both textually by implementing semi-fictional devices and paratextually by presenting the letter as an affirmation of Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his policies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Scandal and Censorship)
15 pages, 282 KB  
Article
Eastern Dancers and the Western Gaze: The Queer Spectacle of Oriental Dance in Decadent Poetry
by Gunja Nandi
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 233; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120233 - 28 Nov 2025
Viewed by 396
Abstract
Eastern dance traditions have historically been shaped by the continuum of socio-political forces, including colonial encounters, and the aftermath of the Empire. An embodied repository of cultural histories, Orientalized dancer communities delineate genealogies of socio-cultural oppression, and queer resistance against dominant forces of [...] Read more.
Eastern dance traditions have historically been shaped by the continuum of socio-political forces, including colonial encounters, and the aftermath of the Empire. An embodied repository of cultural histories, Orientalized dancer communities delineate genealogies of socio-cultural oppression, and queer resistance against dominant forces of erasure. The Oriental dancer in particular, has figured prominently in long-nineteenth century decadent literatures of the Empire, regularly fetishized as an exotic spectacle, inherently imbricated in queer traditions incomprehensible to the West. In postcolonial literature, the bodies of these Oriental dancers often become the ontological space upon which resistance against the intersecting racial and political discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, and anti-colonialist nationalism is enacted. This study interrogates the triangulated discourses of decadence, Orientalism, and anti-colonial nationalism by critically analyzing the nationalist replications and postcolonial resistance to decadent Orientalist representations of the “Oriental” dancer in British and Indian decadent poetry. Through the transnational and transhistorical study of three poems, namely, Athur O’Shaughnessy’s “Salomé,” Sarojini Naidu’s “Indian Dancers,” and Kamala Das’s “The Dance of the Eunuchs,” this study explores the persistent reverberations of the nineteenth-century decadent movement in the postcolonial era. Across these three poems, I would trace the complicities and departures of fin-de-siècle decadence from the colonial discourse, to study how it can be subversively transformed into a language of resistance to the violence visited upon the subaltern dancers’ textual and sexual bodies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Use and Misuse of Fin-De-Siècle Decadence and Its Imagination)
4 pages, 132 KB  
Editorial
Introduction: Toward a Definition of 21st-Century North American Hybrid Poetry
by Ann Keniston
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 232; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120232 - 26 Nov 2025
Viewed by 266
Abstract
The origin of this Special Issue on hybridity goes back several years to my early attempts to combine my sensibilities as a scholar and poet [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)
13 pages, 214 KB  
Article
Hydrocolonialism, Countersurveillance, and “America Independent”: Poetic Framings of Revolutionary Tea Parties
by Victoria Barnett-Woods
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 231; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120231 - 25 Nov 2025
Viewed by 238
Abstract
Between December 1773 and May 1775, several port cities and towns across the American seaboard participated in a “tea party” as an act of political defiance toward the recent onslaught of taxation laws implemented by the British government on American colonists. Indeed, on [...] Read more.
Between December 1773 and May 1775, several port cities and towns across the American seaboard participated in a “tea party” as an act of political defiance toward the recent onslaught of taxation laws implemented by the British government on American colonists. Indeed, on 19 October 1774, in Annapolis, Maryland, taxpayer Anthony Stewart was coerced by the Sons of Liberty to burn his ship to the water line to prove his patriotism to the American cause, despite his Loyalist leanings. The circumstances that led to the Patriots targeting tea as their symbol for destruction, the Bostonian group to attire themselves as Mohawks and throw boxes overboard, the multiple threats made to Customs officials and Loyalists alike, speak to the American Revolution borne of a relationship between the mechanisms of hydrocolonialism (concentrated at the Custom House and at major trade docks) and countersurveillance systems implemented by the Sons and Liberty (represented by a number of different groups) and enforced by emerging poetic forms rising with the times of revolution. This is most demonstrated in the “poet of the American Revolution,” Philip Morin Freneau, and his poetic responses to the events leading up to and during the American Revolution. Taking the example of the Annapolis Tea Party and Freneau’s poetry under the consideration of hydrocolonialism among other critical interventions, this essay will consider the push and pull of imperial surveillance and patriotic countersurveillance at the breaking point of the American Revolution, when riots between colonists over goods and taxes spoke to larger socioeconomic systems of control that remain ever present in American cultural values. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Anglophone Riot)
12 pages, 215 KB  
Article
“The Sweetheart in the Forest” and the Synthetic Storytellers
by Anne Sigrid Refsum
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 230; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120230 - 25 Nov 2025
Viewed by 594
Abstract
What happens to a Norwegian traditional folktale when told by a Large Language Model (LLM)? As machine-generated text becomes increasingly omnipresent, the need to understand such texts through analysis using literary scholarship and seeing them through the lens of folkloristics becomes apparent. For [...] Read more.
What happens to a Norwegian traditional folktale when told by a Large Language Model (LLM)? As machine-generated text becomes increasingly omnipresent, the need to understand such texts through analysis using literary scholarship and seeing them through the lens of folkloristics becomes apparent. For the purposes of examining basic structures of LLM narrative, this article uses the folktale “The Sweetheart in the Forest” (ATU 955) to examine how the style and telling of folktales is adapted by LLMs, including how LLMs display a tendency towards “floating” motifs and imagery, and how the LLMs relate to the cultural specificity of the Norwegian variant. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Depiction of Good and Evil in Fairytales)
15 pages, 332 KB  
Article
Not New Poems but Translations: Ezra Pound’s Image-Centered Cathay from Chinese Tang Poetry
by Iulia Elena Cîndea and Diana Ștefania Jerpel
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 229; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120229 - 25 Nov 2025
Viewed by 492
Abstract
This article reassesses Ezra Pound’s Cathay as translation from Chinese Tang poetry rather than autonomous modernist verse. Building on Pound’s own poetics and compact coordinates from Chinese lyric theory, we argue that Cathay maintains translational fidelity by preserving and sharpening images while accepting [...] Read more.
This article reassesses Ezra Pound’s Cathay as translation from Chinese Tang poetry rather than autonomous modernist verse. Building on Pound’s own poetics and compact coordinates from Chinese lyric theory, we argue that Cathay maintains translational fidelity by preserving and sharpening images while accepting losses in prosodic form and thinning some culture-specific encyclopaedias. Methodologically, we conduct a qualitative, contrastive microanalysis of two Li Bai poems “送友人” (Taking Leave of a Friend) and “长干行” (The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter), aligning the Chinese text, a neutral interlinear gloss, and Pound’s English version. A coding scheme tracks image handling, cultural markers, prosody, and the balance of phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia alongside domestication/foreignization choices. Findings show a stable hierarchy—image (phanopoeia)–stance (logopoeia)–sound/form (melopoeia)—that aligns with Chinese esthetic dynamics of yi/xiang (idea/form) and qing/jing (emotion/scene). Pound’s practice preserves correlative imagery (mountains/river/sunset; moss/leaves/butterflies) and voice, while paratextual titling, address terms, folklore allusions, toponyms, and a fifth-month calendar line reveal domestications, distortions, or omissions traceable to mediation via Fenollosa’s notes. We propose mechanism-sensitive criteria for evaluating distant-pair lyric translation: not formal replication, but reconstruction of the poem’s image–scene–emotion economy. On that basis, Cathay functions as translation—at justified costs. Rather than resolving the long-standing debate on Cathay, we offer a mechanism-sensitive account of how, in two central Li Bai poems, Pound’s image-centred poetics yields a limited but defensible form of translational fidelity within a relay-translation setting. Full article
17 pages, 301 KB  
Article
The Deadly Hopes in Trans Women’s Lives: Comparison of Indonesian Film “Lovely Man” and Japanese Film “Midnight Swan”
by Marisa Rianti Sutanto, Jessica Priscilla Nangoi and Ariesa Pandanwangi
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 228; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120228 - 24 Nov 2025
Viewed by 922
Abstract
This paper will discuss the depiction of trans women in the films Lovely Man and Midnight Swan, comparing the two main characters, Ipuy and Nagisa. Discrimination against transgender individuals persists in contemporary society, particularly in patriarchal Asian countries such as Indonesia and [...] Read more.
This paper will discuss the depiction of trans women in the films Lovely Man and Midnight Swan, comparing the two main characters, Ipuy and Nagisa. Discrimination against transgender individuals persists in contemporary society, particularly in patriarchal Asian countries such as Indonesia and Japan. The films Lovely Man and Midnight Swan are of Indonesian and Japanese origin, respectively. A close analysis of both films reveals that they feature protagonists who embody the exact symbolic representations as entertainers, parents, sexual objects, and pariahs. According to Peirce’s semiotics, these four symbolic representations are determined. A thorough examination of the cinematic expressive movements in both films reveals four metaphorical expressions: the trans woman as an entertainer, the trans woman as a parent, the trans woman as a sexual object, and the trans woman as a pariah. These four metaphorical expressions are validated through extralinguistic references, reflecting socio-cultural realities in Indonesian and Japanese societies. They become arguments through the interpretation of both films. The similarities between the two films can be understood as a social critique of the issues facing trans women in Indonesia and Japan, who require greater attention to their human rights to survive in society. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Film, Television, and Media Studies in the Humanities)
14 pages, 271 KB  
Article
Breaking Down the Walls in Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs (1981) and Visages Villages (2016)
by Natalie Muñoz
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 227; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120227 - 21 Nov 2025
Viewed by 386
Abstract
What do images ask of the future, and what promises do we owe them? Reading Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs and Visages Villages with Derrida’s archive and de Certeau’s city-writing in mind, I treat Varda’s walls as contested palimpsests. Film overwrites and counter-inscribes surfaces, [...] Read more.
What do images ask of the future, and what promises do we owe them? Reading Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs and Visages Villages with Derrida’s archive and de Certeau’s city-writing in mind, I treat Varda’s walls as contested palimpsests. Film overwrites and counter-inscribes surfaces, yet it keeps undertexts legible. I set aside Michael Cramer’s divide between community murals and externally authored photomurals; rather than framing them as opposed projects, the films share one practice: collective inscription, archival method, shifting temporal sense. In Mur Murs, Varda’s camera lets living people eclipse their monumental doubles and turns trompe-l’œil and hushed voices into layers of the palimpsest that refuse closure. In Visages Villages, the larger-than-life portrait of the last remaining inhabitant of a former mining town and the colossal figures of dockworkers’ wives recenter overlooked lives while keeping their impermanence in view. Across both films, cinema becomes the archivable surface: framing, montage, and projection “write” the wall, preserving disappearance even as each screening adds a new layer. Varda practices a careful ethics of remembering that remains future-facing, aware of institutions, and shaped by reality, yet always keeping the walls of stucco, metal, glass, and rock open to re-reading and re-inscription. Full article
14 pages, 240 KB  
Article
The War at Sea, Lived Memories and the Politics of Emotion in Vigdis Stokkelien’s Trilogy on Gro
by Christine Hamm
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 226; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120226 - 21 Nov 2025
Viewed by 581
Abstract
In recent years, Norwegian cultural production has increasingly foregrounded the experiences of sailors serving aboard merchant vessels allied with the British during the Second World War. These men endured not only physical injuries from submarine and aerial attacks, but also profound psychic trauma, [...] Read more.
In recent years, Norwegian cultural production has increasingly foregrounded the experiences of sailors serving aboard merchant vessels allied with the British during the Second World War. These men endured not only physical injuries from submarine and aerial attacks, but also profound psychic trauma, often manifesting in post-war alcoholism and depression. However, the war at sea also left indelible marks on women’s bodies. This article examines Vigdis Stokkelien’s trilogy on Gro—Lille-Gibraltar (Little Gibraltar, 1972), Båten under solseilet (The boat under the sun sail, 1982), and Stjerneleden (The star joint, 1984)—to explore how emotions as fear, shame and pain circulate between different individuals and groups during the war and in war memories. Drawing on affect theory, this reading of Stokkelien’s novels demonstrates how what happened at sea marked Norwegian bodies and national identity for a long time after the war. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Memories of World War II in Norwegian Fiction and Life Writing)
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