Humanities

3 pages, 140 KB

Open AccessEditorial

New Words, New Worlds

by Stuart Moulthrop

Humanities 2026, 15(7), 82; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070082 (registering DOI) - 25 Jun 2026

As Milton’s Satan informs his fallen comrades in the first book of Paradise Lost, ruling in Hell may have its possibilities [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

13 pages, 221 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Material Sound of Magnetic Tape: Digital Horrors and Analogue Technology in The Black Tapes and The Magnus Archives

by Lowen E. Frampton-Thorburn

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 81; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060081 (registering DOI) - 22 Jun 2026

Abstract

There is a strong connection identified between Gothic and hauntological preconceptions with the past returning to disturb the present, and the presence of analogue technology returning to haunt digital horror narratives. It is through analogue nostalgia, especially its interest in the noise inherent [...] Read more.

There is a strong connection identified between Gothic and hauntological preconceptions with the past returning to disturb the present, and the presence of analogue technology returning to haunt digital horror narratives. It is through analogue nostalgia, especially its interest in the noise inherent to the materiality of analogue technology, that the Gothic preconception with the past is translated into the horror podcast format; the ‘rediscovered manuscript’ becomes the re-mediated cassette tape. This paper will therefore interrogate how hauntology, analogue horror, and nostalgia interact with the Gothic, utilising a comparative methodology between two digital podcast dramas—The Black Tapes (2015–2017) and The Magnus Archives (2016–2021)—which locate the source of their horror in the materiality, spectrality, and agency of analogue technology in different ways. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Media, Cultural Memory and Hauntology)

21 pages, 330 KB

Open AccessArticle

Plato on Laughing at People

by Sarah Lemoine (Jansen)

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 80; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060080 (registering DOI) - 19 Jun 2026

Abstract

In this paper I explore the ethics of laughing at people, drawing on Platonic moral psychology to show why malicious laughter is spiritually destructive. Contra the view that Plato opposes laughter, I argue that for Plato, laughter plays an important role in discourse. [...] Read more.

In this paper I explore the ethics of laughing at people, drawing on Platonic moral psychology to show why malicious laughter is spiritually destructive. Contra the view that Plato opposes laughter, I argue that for Plato, laughter plays an important role in discourse. Through a new analysis of both the dialectic and drama of the Philebus, I argue that Plato distinguishes between specific forms of bad and good laughing at people; the former harms the soul and stifles human inquiry, whereas the latter benefits the soul and furthers human inquiry. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Comedy and Platonic Interpretation)

18 pages, 1724 KB

Open AccessArticle

From Screen to Clinic and Back: A Bibliometric and Interpretive Analysis of Medical Discourse on Mental Health in Film and Screen Media (2010–2025)

by Radu Mihai Dumitrescu

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 79; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060079 - 12 Jun 2026

Abstract

Cinematic representations of mental health operate at the intersection of science, culture and visual meaning, while medical academic discourse plays an important role in shaping how such representations are conceptualized. This study examines how the PubMed-indexed literature (2010–2025) engages with mental health in [...] Read more.

Cinematic representations of mental health operate at the intersection of science, culture and visual meaning, while medical academic discourse plays an important role in shaping how such representations are conceptualized. This study examines how the PubMed-indexed literature (2010–2025) engages with mental health in relation to narrative film and related screen media, combining bibliometric mapping with interpretive analysis. Through a structured PubMed query and VOSviewer co-occurrence analysis, this study identifies 5292 unique terms, of which 530 meet the minimum frequency threshold. Comparison between low- and high-frequency maps reveals a shift from lexical diversity to a consolidated biomedical core centered on classification, diagnosis and measurable affect. Six clusters are identified (neuro-affective, educational stigma, media–behavioral, neuropharmacological–technological, perceptual–emotional and pandemic-related), which together structure the field’s dominant semantic orientations. The findings indicate three main patterns: the predominance of standardized biomedical language, the limited visibility of intersectional categories (e.g., gender, race, identity) at the level of indexed metadata, and a gap between visual processes and narrative meaning. While individual studies often engage with cinematic complexity, this dimension is only partially reflected in the dominant lexical structure. Building on these results, a cluster-informed conceptual framework for film-based medical education is proposed, in which narrative film can support complementary forms of clinical, social and interpretive learning. This study contributes to the field of Medical Humanities by demonstrating that medical discourse not only reflects but also structures the visibility of mental health in relation to screen media, while highlighting the need for more integrated approaches that connect biomedical knowledge with narrative and cultural understanding. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Film, Television, and Media Studies in the Humanities)

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20 pages, 21684 KB

Open AccessArticle

Capitalist Realism and the Death Drive in Analog Horror and “The Nixonverse”

by Dylan Henty

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 78; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060078 - 8 Jun 2026

Abstract

‘Analog horror’ is a subgenre of internet and media horror, beginning c.2015. Its texts use late 20th-century analogue technology as a locus of horror, both narratively and aesthetically, expressing contemporary technophobia and existential anxieties of the first quarter of the 21st century, using [...] Read more.

‘Analog horror’ is a subgenre of internet and media horror, beginning c.2015. Its texts use late 20th-century analogue technology as a locus of horror, both narratively and aesthetically, expressing contemporary technophobia and existential anxieties of the first quarter of the 21st century, using a deliberate and anarchic a-historicity to represent concerns surrounding techno-capitalism and its attendant ‘polycrisis’. This irreverent attitude to historical cause and effect, and technological progress, in subgenre texts such as “The Nixonverse” by creator Eve Casanas represents our modern-day conflict between the digital, techno-capitalist online world, and the corporeal crisis events affecting the real world. This diametric in analog horror expresses the central tenet of Mark Fisher’s concept of ‘capitalist realism’, the idea that capitalist ideology makes it appear that there are no viable alternatives to capitalism. In analog horror narratives, analogue–digital hybrid technologies channel techno-organic monster-figures, with the helplessness of the individual and/or groups to defeat these monstrosities being expressive of this capitalist realist impression that capitalism cannot be overcome, and its polycrisis avoided, enacting fantasies of societal destruction to alleviate this suspended state of anxious helplessness, in the tone of Freud’s ‘death drive’ wish fulfilment fantasies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Media, Cultural Memory and Hauntology)

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22 pages, 292 KB

Open AccessArticle

Suspended Between Gazes: Metatextuality in Alejandro Amenábar’s Thriller Trilogy (1996–2001)

by Santiago Juan-Navarro

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 77; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060077 - 5 Jun 2026

Abstract

This article argues that Alejandro Amenábar’s first three features—Tesis (1996), Abre los ojos (1997), and The Others (2001)—constitute a systematic investigation of cinema’s fundamental operations through thriller form. These films employ different thriller subgenres to explore cinema’s psychic, phenomenological, and ontological dimensions, [...] Read more.

This article argues that Alejandro Amenábar’s first three features—Tesis (1996), Abre los ojos (1997), and The Others (2001)—constitute a systematic investigation of cinema’s fundamental operations through thriller form. These films employ different thriller subgenres to explore cinema’s psychic, phenomenological, and ontological dimensions, progressing from explicit apparatus representation (Tesis thematizes scopophilia) through phenomenological allegory (Abre los ojos uses virtual reality to allegorize cinema as dream machine) to ontological embodiment (The Others makes ghosts figures for cinematic images). Drawing on Martin Rubin’s concept of the thriller as metagenre, Lucien Dällenbach’s typology of the mise en abyme, and psychoanalytic film theory (Mulvey, Metz, Baudry), I show how the thriller’s sadomasochistic rhetoric, its aggressive manipulation of spectatorial response, makes it uniquely suited to metatextual exploration. The trilogy demonstrates that reflexivity intensifies rather than disrupts genre pleasure, challenging conventional oppositions between entertainment and critique, popular cinema and metacinematic practice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Film, Television, and Media Studies in the Humanities)

9 pages, 195 KB

Open AccessArticle

Reproductive Trauma and Archival Reconstruction in Postwar Canada: Heather Marshall’s Looking for Jane

by Oana Celia Gheorghiu

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 76; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060076 - 4 Jun 2026

Abstract

This article examines Heather Marshall’s Looking for Jane as a literary engagement with the history of reproductive control in postwar Canada. It contends that the novel redefines trauma as a structurally generated condition, influenced by institutional and social constraints. Through its fragmented, multi-generational [...] Read more.

This article examines Heather Marshall’s Looking for Jane as a literary engagement with the history of reproductive control in postwar Canada. It contends that the novel redefines trauma as a structurally generated condition, influenced by institutional and social constraints. Through its fragmented, multi-generational narrative, comprising letters, testimonies, and disjointed timelines, the text reconstructs a history that survives only in partial, mediated, and often unstable traces, foregrounding the difficulties of rendering reproductive trauma historically visible. By contextualising individual experiences within a broader framework of institutional oversight and referencing documented practices such as forced adoption and restricted access to abortion, the novel links literary form to historical realities. Its concluding paratext extends this dialogue into the present, engaging the reader directly and emphasising the ongoing significance of reproductive trauma in contemporary discourses on responsibility and recognition. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)

12 pages, 203 KB

Open AccessArticle

Participatory Poetries Against Othering—Creative Writing and Social Literary Practice with Displaced Women in Lebanon

by Siobhan Campbell

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 75; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060075 - 2 Jun 2026

Abstract

This article examines collaboratively produced poems by displaced Lebanese and Syrian women created within a Participatory Arts-Based Research (PABR) project in Akkar, North Lebanon. The study asks how creative writing pedagogy and participatory research methods can reduce forms of ‘othering’ that may arise [...] Read more.

This article examines collaboratively produced poems by displaced Lebanese and Syrian women created within a Participatory Arts-Based Research (PABR) project in Akkar, North Lebanon. The study asks how creative writing pedagogy and participatory research methods can reduce forms of ‘othering’ that may arise in top-down research on conflict and displacement. The project combined creative writing workshop practice with participatory research methods, including joint analysis workshops with NGO partners and participants. Writing prompts, group workshops, and subsequent collaborative translation resulted in reflective and creative texts drawn from lived experience. The work documents war, migration, economic hardship, and fractured social relations. Close readings show how metaphor, dialogue, and narrative fragments function as acts of self-narration rather than passive testimony. Participants describe writing as a way of thinking and coping, and several texts foreground storytelling as a relational process. The study argues that Creative Writing practice, based on the participatory tenets of the ‘workshop’ can support shared knowledge production and ethical engagement. The writings suggest that a counter-archive can emerge in which storytelling can resist victimising narratives and can instead, within a social literary practice participatory paradigm, model new forms of collaborative reflection. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender and Otherness in the Humanities)

17 pages, 298 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Surplus Value and De-Alienation of Working-Class Literatures: On the Work of Chris Pannell

by Shane Neilson

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 74; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060074 - 1 Jun 2026

Abstract

Though working-class literatures poorly fit within the theoretical purview of contemporary literary studies, the absence of scholarship in the Canadian context is particularly acute. Neoliberal readings thrive at the expense of labour-focused readings, with the possible result of insulating against the desired change [...] Read more.

Though working-class literatures poorly fit within the theoretical purview of contemporary literary studies, the absence of scholarship in the Canadian context is particularly acute. Neoliberal readings thrive at the expense of labour-focused readings, with the possible result of insulating against the desired change such readings wish to bring into being. Because Chris Pannell’s poetry is so focused on work, its representations and spiritual qualities amidst a particular post-industrial location (Hamilton, Ontario), it makes for poetry well suited my goal: to create an ambidextrous reading method. In this article, I summarize the work done to date in Canadian literary studies on both labour and neoliberalism. Due to the relatively thin literature in CanLit available over the past few decades, I bring in Lukács and some American literary scholars (Jameson, Christopher and Whitson, Clarke) to round out what a working-class literature might be theorized as, and read as, in Canada while also keeping in view how critiques of neoliberalism are inadequate to the task of serving the working-class. To recalibrate Canadian literary studies, I bring forward Marx’s ideas concerning surplus value and alienation as they pertain to the production of poetry. While acknowledging the contributions of critiques of neoliberalism in Canadian literature, I critique those readings as rooted in Marx. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)

9 pages, 183 KB

Open AccessArticle

Women’s Celibacy and the Propagation Imperative in Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 73; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060073 - 29 May 2026

Abstract

This article considers the literary exploration of women’s celibacy through the prism of science fiction, beginning with an overview of the genre’s often-retrograde engagements with the subjects of marriage, reproduction and heteronormative ideology. Alongside this genre context, a 19th-century Irish historical context is [...] Read more.

This article considers the literary exploration of women’s celibacy through the prism of science fiction, beginning with an overview of the genre’s often-retrograde engagements with the subjects of marriage, reproduction and heteronormative ideology. Alongside this genre context, a 19th-century Irish historical context is outlined, juxtaposing genre history with the ‘matrimonial’ rhetoric that arose following the 1801 Act of Union, which framed the merging of Ireland into the United Kingdom as a ‘marriage’ between Ireland and Great Britain, with Ireland represented as the bride. In the overlap between these two contexts, this article identifies several future-set Irish novels that address this rhetoric directly, while also tracing its (perhaps unconscious) impact in other texts, before moving on to consider one novel in particular: Mercia, the Astronomer Royal (1895) by Amelia Garland Mears. The article concludes by arguing that science fiction’s past missteps with regard to marriage and sex can be explained by the fact that traditional, patriarchal marriage is in fact fundamentally unsuited to a genre primarily concerned with the future, resulting in reactionary overcompensation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing)

23 pages, 2578 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Tempest at the Sea-Marge: Not-Acting on Nantucket

by Scott Maisano and Matthew Brown

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 72; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060072 - 25 May 2026

Abstract

This essay examines an experimental, site-specific performance of The Tempest conducted over a three-day immersive trip to Nantucket, where undergraduate students and faculty collaboratively engage in a practice of “not-acting” Shakespeare’s play. Drawing on Michael Kirby’s theory of “not-acting” and postdramatic theatre frameworks, [...] Read more.

This essay examines an experimental, site-specific performance of The Tempest conducted over a three-day immersive trip to Nantucket, where undergraduate students and faculty collaboratively engage in a practice of “not-acting” Shakespeare’s play. Drawing on Michael Kirby’s theory of “not-acting” and postdramatic theatre frameworks, the authors describe a pedagogical and performative model that minimises conventional acting—eschewing memorisation, rehearsal, costumes, and stable roles—while maximising environmental engagement. The Nantucket landscape itself becomes a dynamic stage, or “sea-marge”, in which natural elements, physical movement, and lived experience displace the primacy of character and narrative. Participants alternate fluidly between performer and spectator, reading the text aloud across shifting locations while responding to weather, terrain, and chance occurrences. This approach foregrounds presence over representation, allowing meaning to emerge through embodied interaction with place rather than through illusionistic performance. The essay situates this practice within broader discussions of postdramatic theatre, contrasting it with immersive productions that retain character-driven frameworks. Here, the fictional world of The Tempest coexists with, rather than subsumes, the real-world environment and identities of participants. Particular attention is given to the ethical and aesthetic implications of “not-acting”, especially in the portrayal of Caliban. By resisting full embodiment, the performance avoids reinscribing colonial and racialised stereotypes historically associated with the role. Designed for digital publication, the essay incorporates embedded video and photographic documentation of the performance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Shakespearean Performance: Contemporary Approaches, Findings, and Practices)

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16 pages, 260 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Feminization of the Land and the Naturalization of the Black Female Body: Ecowomanism and African Ecocriticism in the Poetry of María Elcina Valencia Córdoba, Mary Grueso Romero, and Sonia Nadezhda Truque

by Alexa Melissa Hurtado-Montaño

Humanities 2026, 15(6), 71; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15060071 - 22 May 2026

Abstract

This article analyzes how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Afro-Colombian women poets from the Pacific region challenge and reframe the feminization of the land and the naturalization of the Black female body within colonial and Eurocentric epistemologies. Drawing on a framework that conceptualizes body, territory, [...] Read more.

This article analyzes how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Afro-Colombian women poets from the Pacific region challenge and reframe the feminization of the land and the naturalization of the Black female body within colonial and Eurocentric epistemologies. Drawing on a framework that conceptualizes body, territory, spirituality, and community as an interdependent continuum, the article conducts close textual analysis to demonstrate how these poets construct territory and the Black female body as sentient sites. These sites are simultaneously shaped by historical violence, forced displacement, extractive economies, and racialized gender constructs, while preserving ancestral knowledge and collective memory. The findings show that Valencia Córdoba develops the body–territory through metaphor and anaphora as a generative space; Grueso Romero deploys orality and the sea as transatlantic archives of ancestry and identity; and Truque articulates urban displacement as an ontological rupture that affects memory and Black subjectivity. Ultimately, the article advances the concept of body–territory as a decolonial aesthetic and analytical tool through which Afro-Colombian women’s poetry articulates environmental justice, gendered racialization, and forms of resistance within the Afrodiasporic diaspora. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Geographies of Thought: Black and Indigenous Epistemologies and Literary Production in Spanish America)

22 pages, 277 KB

Open AccessArticle

Dystopia or Utopia? Tracing Huxley’s Influence on Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

by Chiara Sciarrino

Humanities 2026, 15(5), 70; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15050070 - 21 May 2026

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision—particularly Brave New World—on Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, arguing that Smith’s post-Brexit novels can be read as contemporary, politically embedded responses to the dystopian tradition Huxley helped establish. While Smith’s fiction is [...] Read more.

This paper examines the influence of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision—particularly Brave New World—on Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, arguing that Smith’s post-Brexit novels can be read as contemporary, politically embedded responses to the dystopian tradition Huxley helped establish. While Smith’s fiction is rarely labelled dystopian in genre, the Quartet is deeply informed by a dystopic sense of cultural, ecological, and political decay in 21st-century Britain. I propose that Smith adopts and adapts key dystopian motifs from Huxley but repurposes them through a radical humanist lens that privileges relationality, art, and memory as sources of resistance and repair. The paper will be structured in three sections. The first outlines Huxley’s dystopian framework, with a focus on Brave New World’s criticism of technological control, emotional appeasement, and the suppression of dissent through pleasure. The second analyzes Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as a world not governed by totalitarian regimes but by apathy, misinformation, and ideological fragmentation. The final section traces Smith’s divergence from Huxley: where Huxley’s world often excludes hope in favor of bleak satire, Smith inserts gestures of resistance, particularly through intergenerational friendships, the presence of art and literature, and the recurrence of seasonal cycles as metaphors for renewal. Although Autumn explicitly references Huxley’s Brave New World, sustained critical comparisons between the two authors remain relatively rare. Most scholarship approaches Huxley through the tradition of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, while Smith’s Quartet is typically discussed within the context of Brexit literature and contemporary narrative experimentation. Reading the Quartet alongside Huxley, therefore, reveals an unexpected dialogue between early twentieth-century dystopian critique and twenty-first-century literary responses to political crisis. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)

15 pages, 278 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Objectification of Mirah: Representations of Jewish Women as the Other in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda

by Antonia Saunders

Humanities 2026, 15(5), 69; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15050069 - 20 May 2026

Abstract

In her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot (1819–1880) repeatedly stages moments in which gentile characters project expectations onto Jewish women, drawing on inherited cultural representations from literature, history, and the performing arts. These moments reveal how limited their real-world knowledge of [...] Read more.

In her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot (1819–1880) repeatedly stages moments in which gentile characters project expectations onto Jewish women, drawing on inherited cultural representations from literature, history, and the performing arts. These moments reveal how limited their real-world knowledge of Jews—particularly Jewish women—was, and how readily they relied on cultural templates rather than lived experience. George Eliot herself, however, had undertaken extensive study of Jewish history, religion, and culture in preparation for the novel, including research into the Talmud, Mishna, kabbalah, and halacha (Jewish law). Yet this knowledge is purposefully not afforded to her characters. This article examines George Eliot’s increasing understanding of Jewish society, and her shifting attitudes towards Judaism, and explores how allusions to Jewish women in history, literature, and performance shape the gentile characters’ othering of Mirah Lapidoth, a young Jewish woman fleeing enforced familial exploitation, whom Daniel rescues from drowning in the Thames. Two significant conceptual terms underpin my argument. Objectification refers here not only to eroticisation or aestheticisation, but to the broader process by which Mirah is perceived as a symbolic figure—as an image, a type, or role—rather than a fully realised person. Othering denotes the interpretative habit by which gentile characters position Mirah through pre-existing stereotypes or literary precedents, instead of understanding her as a subject with her own history and interiority. Rescue describes the narrative mechanisms by which Mirah is brought into focus, first through Daniel’s intervention, then through her placement within the Meyrick household, and finally through marriage, though always within structures that continue to idealise, discipline, or contain her. I argue that George Eliot’s deployment of familiar stereotypes does not reinforce them; instead, she exposes them as cultural constructions that must be deconstructed or exorcised before she reconstructs her own version of Jewish culture and identity, which she referred to as “the inner life of modern Judaism” in her notebooks. I also argue that Daniel’s rescue of Mirah, rather than an act of pure benevolence, becomes a further site of objectification, othering her as an idealised model of Jewish womanhood rather than acknowledging her as an autonomous individual. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender and Otherness in the Humanities)

22 pages, 10668 KB

Open AccessArticle

When Nora Gets Old: Gendered Noises and Dystopic (Grand)Motherhood in Like a Rolling Stone

by Hui Faye Xiao

Humanities 2026, 15(5), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15050068 - 14 May 2026

Abstract

This article examines the depiction of multiple forms of marginalization and exclusion in a recent Chinese film, Like a Rolling Stone (2024), through the prism of noise at the interface of politics and aesthetics. It starts with interrogating the ways in which the [...] Read more.

This article examines the depiction of multiple forms of marginalization and exclusion in a recent Chinese film, Like a Rolling Stone (2024), through the prism of noise at the interface of politics and aesthetics. It starts with interrogating the ways in which the film transmits and amplifies the patriarch’s “Sacred Noise” as a dominant sonic presence in the domestic space, translating hierarchical social and familial structures into an oppressive acoustic order. As Jacques Rancière has reminded us, aesthetic hierarchies materialize political economic hierarchies, giving them sensible forms that structure our everyday embodied experiences. Therefore, the following section explores how political economic conditions devalue women’s domestic care work and recast their enunciations as undesirable, even non-human, noises. In this part, a series of Asian women’s films and writings are referenced to demonstrate a broader cultural trend in exposing the intertwined aesthetic and political economic inequities under capitalist patriarchy. Moreover, what has often been overlooked even in feminist scholarship and movements is that ageism, in conjunction with sexism and classism, reinforces aesthetic–political hierarchies that produce chasms and divisions even among women themselves (including between mothers and daughters) and push the aging (grand)mother further into the peripheries of the auditory regime. Unsettling such a patriarchal “distribution of the sensible,” Like a Rolling Stone deploys creative acoustic strategies to make audible the hidden exploitation of women’s affective labor and revitalizes the subversive potentials, affective energies and aesthetic values of women’s embodied experiences and everyday gendered noises. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)

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17 pages, 559 KB

Open AccessArticle

A Study of Male Characters in the Assamese Novel Through the Lens of Eco Masculinity

by Pubali Borah and Arabinda Rajkhowa

Humanities 2026, 15(5), 67; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15050067 - 10 May 2026

Abstract

This paper examines male characters in Nilakshi Chaliha Gogoi’s Assamese novel Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa (Oh, My Dibru-Saikhowa) through the lens of Eco Masculinity, drawing primarily on Hultman and Pulé’s tripartite typology of industrial, eco-modern, and ecological masculinities. The study reads the novel’s two [...] Read more.

This paper examines male characters in Nilakshi Chaliha Gogoi’s Assamese novel Oiya Mor Dibru-Saikhowa (Oh, My Dibru-Saikhowa) through the lens of Eco Masculinity, drawing primarily on Hultman and Pulé’s tripartite typology of industrial, eco-modern, and ecological masculinities. The study reads the novel’s two principal male characters—Bakul Bora and Seuj—as contrasting masculine trajectories shaped, respectively, by socio-economic deprivation, displacement, patriarchal conditioning, and legal criminalization on the one hand, and by maternal ecological ethics, generational mentorship, and affective formation on the other. The analysis proceeds through three connected registers. First, it attends to the novel’s narrative form, arguing that its principal focalizing consciousness is Dr. Irina Baruah, a physician through whose perception the male characters are largely presented. Second, it develops the political ecology of the Dibru-Saikhowa region—its colonial and postcolonial conservation history, the institutional gap between the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 and the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the slow violence visited on the Mising villagers of Laika and Dadhiya. Third, it engages intersectional critiques of eco-masculinity and confronts the structural tension of applying a male-centered framework to a female-focalized novel. The paper argues that Eco Masculinity, applied with due attention to narrative form, historical specificity, and eco-feminine agency, offers a productive tool for South Asian ecocritical scholarship, and it suggests two modifications to the framework that follow from this application. Full article

(This article belongs to the Topic Human–Environmental Relations: Ecotourism and Sustainability)

10 pages, 227 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Exchanges of The Good Story

by Katherine Hallemeier

Humanities 2026, 15(5), 66; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15050066 - 7 May 2026

Abstract

This contribution to the Special Issue on epistolary form in the work of J. M. Coetzee examines the form of the “exchanges” in The Good Story (2015). These exchanges extend Coetzee’s longstanding interest in the methods and limitations of psychoanalysis. They stand as [...] Read more.

This contribution to the Special Issue on epistolary form in the work of J. M. Coetzee examines the form of the “exchanges” in The Good Story (2015). These exchanges extend Coetzee’s longstanding interest in the methods and limitations of psychoanalysis. They stand as an iteration of self-reflexive meditation on his writing’s imbrication in these methods and limitations. At the same time, the exchanges strive to enact methods—the sympathetic, the erotic, the intimated—that Coetzee’s writing associates with the literary and would bring into productive dialogue with psychoanalytic practices. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Uses and Forms of Epistolarity in J.M. Coetzee’s Work)

13 pages, 214 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Call of the Ocean: Blue Humanities and Ecological Ethics in Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Mark of Cassandra

by Gülsüm Tuğçe Çetin

Humanities 2026, 15(5), 65; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15050065 - 24 Apr 2026

Abstract

This article examines The Mark of Cassandra by Chingiz Aitmatov through the emerging framework of Blue Humanities. While most prior studies have approached Aitmatov’s ecological concerns from a land-based ecocritical perspective, this article shifts the focus to his engagement with oceanic themes and [...] Read more.

This article examines The Mark of Cassandra by Chingiz Aitmatov through the emerging framework of Blue Humanities. While most prior studies have approached Aitmatov’s ecological concerns from a land-based ecocritical perspective, this article shifts the focus to his engagement with oceanic themes and marine environments. By combining literary interpretation with ecological philosophy, the study suggests that The Mark of Cassandra goes beyond the limits of traditional environmental fiction. It presents the ocean not only as a setting but as a source of knowledge and ethical reflection. In this way, Aitmatov’s work seems to anticipate current global discussions on climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental justice. The novel encourages readers to reconsider the human-centered worldview and adopt a more ecocentric approach. Through its marine symbolism and critical stance on human exploitation of nature, the text offers valuable insights into ecological ethics that cross both national and species boundaries. Overall, this article argues that The Mark of Cassandra is an important literary contribution that challenges the usual borders of ecocriticism and calls for a more integrated and holistic understanding of environmental issues. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)

18 pages, 1535 KB

Open AccessArticle

Moralized Parental Violence and the Ethics of Reconciliation in Sinophone Family Cinema

by Haoyuan Gao and Sunghoon Cho

Humanities 2026, 15(5), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15050064 - 23 Apr 2026

Abstract

This article examines how the discourse of “for your own good” functions as a moral framework through which parental violence is reinterpreted as care in Sinophone family cinema. Focusing on family-centered films as a key site of representation, we analyze how reconciliation is [...] Read more.

This article examines how the discourse of “for your own good” functions as a moral framework through which parental violence is reinterpreted as care in Sinophone family cinema. Focusing on family-centered films as a key site of representation, we analyze how reconciliation is constructed not merely as a narrative resolution but as an ethical expectation. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, we develop the concept of “moralized parental violence” to describe how authority, discipline, and emotional control are legitimized through moral discourse. Through a typological analysis, identify three recurring models of reconciliation: deathbed reconciliation, retrospective understanding, and silent reconciliation. The study further explores works that resist reconciliation, arguing that such narratives suspend ethical closure and challenge normative expectations of forgiveness. By examining narrative structure, visual emphasis, and affective strategies, we demonstrate how cultural texts guide audience responses and shape moral interpretation. Rather than rejecting family values, this study reconsiders how ethics, power, and care are intertwined in cultural narratives and how the refusal of reconciliation opens a critical space for rethinking the limits of moral obligation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Film, Television, and Media Studies in the Humanities)

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