Literature

In this article I interrogate how the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist aligns with as well as problematizes racial capitalism. The optic of racial capitalism enables me to trace the film’s articulation of race relations within the US and the power of white supremacy internationally, particularly as they manifest in the geopolitics of the US empire. The optic of racial capitalism foregrounds the inextricability of what Cedric Robinson termed racialism and the historical development of capitalism(s). The film demonstrates how racial capitalism is naturalized through the creation of aspirations for the symbolic markers of upward mobility and the acquisition of wealth, which is to say, cultural as much as financial capital. The film also illustrates that racial capitalism is a work in progress; it is neither singular nor homogeneous in its effect as it mutates across the world; it derives its power from the construction of racial infrastructures, political–economic institutions, states and, as I will argue in this essay, through regimes of racial affect. Full article

Time travel in science fiction, a subgenre distinct yet often overlapping with alternative history, often explores historical contingency through counterfactual scenarios to produce alternative histories. Yet some works deliberately negate this potential, presenting time travelers who refrain from altering the past despite possessing the apparent ability to do so. This essay examines this underexplored narrative mode through a comparative analysis of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Miyabe Miyuki’s The Incident at the Gamō Residence. Framing the narrative device as a non-interventionist history, it explores how both novels deploy time travel not to revise history but to confront the ethical, emotional, and cultural implications of engaging with historically traumatic events that remain causally intact. Drawing on science fiction theory and historiographical debates, the essay argues that these texts redirect the function of time travel toward ethical reflection, embodied experience, and the formation of national identity. While Kindred presents history as an ongoing system of racialized violence that resists reconciliation, The Incident at the Gamō Residence frames historical violence through affective memory and postwar nostalgia, facilitating symbolic closure. Together, these novels demonstrate how time travel can serve as a critical apparatus for negotiating national trauma without recourse to historical revision. Full article

This paper examines how Dushyant Kumar’s collection, sāye meṅ dhūp (lit. Sunlight in the Shadows), reinvented the classical ġhazal genre as a vernacular weapon of anti-authoritarian dissent—not by abandoning ambiguity, but by recalibrating it under conditions of constraint—during India’s Emergency. This study argues that Kumar’s work constitutes a radical departure from the genre’s traditional emphasis on the abstract longing of the lover for the beloved and other tropes which are peculiar to writing ġhazal in the Perso-Urdu world. Instead, Kumar systematically repurposed its conventions—its ambiguity, its metaphors of the beloved and the garden, its themes of sacrifice—to mount a sharp polemic against Indira Gandhi’s regime. Through an analysis of ġhazal-s selected for their range of polemical strategies—from direct satire and political allegory to the recasting of traditional themes like martyrdom—this paper demonstrates how Kumar’s conscious use of a blended Hindi–Urdu vernacular was central to his political project. By writing in “the language I speak,” he dragged the elite ġhazal into the public square, transforming it into a medium for articulating collective disillusionment, resistance, and a scathing critique of a democracy in crisis. Kumar’s work thus stands as a testament to the ġhazal’s potent, and often overlooked, capacity for explicit political engagement. Full article

Over the past century, literary theory has branched out in several directions. Diverse schools of literary thought, such as Semiotics, New Criticism, Intentionalism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction, have passionately plowed new ground within the academy and just as passionately defended that territory against their neighbor’s incursions. At times, authors and their intentions have been central to literary criticism, while at others, they are intellectually discarded or severely reduced in importance. Much of the friction caused by the shifting focus of literary criticism is driven by impassioned rhetoric and convictions that leave little room for compromise. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened the possibility of a dispassionate arbiter, one that, should the literary community have the courage and conviction to embrace and exploit, could offer a new level of harmony between divergent literary theories. Full article

Peter S. Beagle’s decision to feminize the formerly masculine figure of the unicorn in his influential 1968 fantasy novel The Last Unicorn represents a key moment in the evolution of this now ubiquitous image, one embraced today as a symbol of pride by LGBTQ+ communities. The novel and its 1982 animated film adaptation have themselves remained popular among queer and especially trans audiences, who have often found the narrative resonant with their own experiences. This essay provides a preliminary overview of the queer history of the unicorn symbol and continues into a trans reading of the novel, arguing that these responses to Beagle’s work by contemporary readers reflect dimensions of the narrative congruent with concerns about gender performance and misrecognition; gender dysphoria; and queer temporalities. The nature of the fantasy form itself, we maintain throughout, can also particularly enable reparative readings by queer and trans audiences. Full article

This essay examines how contemporary Anglophone Chinese women writers rewrite the imagery of Chinese snake women through speculative retellings that foreground sisterhood, queer desire, and diasporic identity. Drawing on queer diaspora studies and feminist criticism, I argue that Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake (2024) revise the figure of the Chinese snake woman to imagine forms of female intimacy and kinship that transcend heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks. In these works, sisterhood operates both as a familial bond and as an intimate, queer relation charged with affective, physical, and occasionally erotic intensity. The original White Snake legend—one of China’s Four Great Folktales—has long invited queer readings, especially through the complex relationship between White Snake and her companion Green Snake. In dialogue with the Chinese snake myth, Lai and Koe relocate the snake woman into speculative worlds shaped by queer desire, racial marginalization, and transnational migration. In Salt Fish Girl, Lai reimagines the reincarnations of the half-snake Chinese mother goddess Nu Wa across colonial South China and near-future bio-capitalist Canada, portraying a cross-temporal lesbian love between the protagonist and the titular Salt Fish Girl. In Sister Snake, Koe’s protagonists—serpent sisters Su and Emerald, separated between Singapore and New York—disrupt normative family scripts while forging a fragmented but enduring affective bond. Through the motif of the Chinese snake woman, these works construct imaginative spaces in which intimate sisterhood subverts patriarchal and national containment, advancing a queer vision of female togetherness. Full article

We present a psycholinguistic test battery designed to examine the cognitive and affective processes involved in reading Polish poetry. This toolkit combines reader profiling (vocabulary, memory and reading proficiency) with tasks that assess the influence of lexical, textual, affective and poetic features on recognition, context restoration and association generation. Pilot data confirmed the reliability of the measures and their sensitivity to recognised psycholinguistic effects. Vocabulary size and delayed memory rehearsal strongly predicted performance in content restoration, while recognition and association latencies were closely related, indicating shared retrieval mechanisms. Structural and affective properties also influenced responses: line-final words improved recognition but impeded association, with these effects being moderated by word length and frequency. Words that were negatively valenced, abstract and hardly imaginable were restored more accurately than positive or concrete ones. These findings demonstrate the potential of the battery for profiling readers and provide new insights into how Polish poetic language engages memory and associative processes. Full article

To understand contemporary ecopoetry’s power, we need to think historically about genre. This essay primarily focuses on satire. I first give a brief overview of key ideas from the last several decades on genre theory, particularly prose essays that explore what poetic genres are and if they evolve. I then survey ways to understand how the history of satiric poems furnishes valuable perspectives on contemporary developments in ecopoetry, which is defined as poetry linking ecological and social crises. The role of satire in ecopoetry has been too little studied—even though poets themselves, prodded by environmental degradation, have long valued the genre. At the heart of the essay are readings of poems by Jorie Graham, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Jenny L. Davis, and others. Their work provides test cases for my hypothesis that the climate crisis is causing satiric poetry to adapt, modifying its methods and goals. When elements of a genre are no longer suited for contemporary needs, innovative poets get to work. Yet contemporary innovations paradoxically reaffirm the ancient legacy of satire’s importance. Full article

My sinuous life as a humanist traversing disciplinary, periodic, geographical, and national borders has yielded palpable wonders, the most wonderful being the opportunity to live and connect many lives. I was made bilingual, bicultural, and cosmopolitan in colonial Hong Kong, a classicist at Pepperdine University, a Renaissance scholar at Berkeley, an intersectional Americanist at UCLA, and a polyglot comparatist by UCEAP. The many splendors of literary America unraveled by Bruins of disparate stripes have driven me to herald the variegated beauty of Chinese American heritage. I have gone from being an outsider, a suspect even, in both English and Asian American studies to being a humanist resource. It behooves me to usher in, among the Bruins, my mother tongue—the language of the Tang poets, gold miners, and the Transpacific railroad workers, and to stage Cantonese opera. “In my end is my beginning.” Full article

Ease of cognitive processing is an important predictor of aesthetic liking. However, many acclaimed artworks are fairly complex and require substantial cognitive effort. Are they aesthetically liked despite or because of this increased cognitive challenge? The present study pursued this question experimentally. The high syntactic complexity of Heinrich von Kleist’s narratives provided the test case. According to literary scholars, this high syntactic complexity should support increased levels of how “suspenseful,” “intense,” “interesting,” and evocative of a sense of “urgency” the texts are perceived, and it should thereby also support higher overall aesthetic liking. This expectation is in line with recent models in empirical aesthetics according to which higher ease of processing and higher cognitive challenge are not mutually exclusive, but can conjointly drive aesthetic liking to higher levels. The standard hypothesis of cognitive fluency instead predicts a disfluency-driven negative effect on aesthetic liking. We tested these two predictions in two studies by presenting excerpts from Kleist’s narratives in their original vs. syntactically simplified versions to participants. Results differ substantially depending on how the target variables are statistically modeled. If ease of processing and cognitive challenge are modeled separately as predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings, higher ease of processing is a strong positive and higher cognitive challenge a largely negative predictor. However, when the two complementary cognitive variables are modeled conjointly, they are both positive predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings. Their predictive power differs, however, significantly. Only the positive effect of ease of processing is pervasive across all readers. That of cognitive challenge is substantially modified by individual differences. Specifically, it was observed for readers who (1) are of higher age, (2) like to read narratives in general, and (3) reported prior positive experiences with Kleist. Supporting the ecological validity of our findings, readers meeting these criteria are more likely than others to actually read Kleist outside the laboratory. Full article

For this article, we reviewed and synthesized narratological theories on reliability and unreliability and used them as the basis for an exploratory study, examining how real readers respond to a literary short story that contains several unreliable or conflicting narrative accounts. The story we selected is “In a Grove” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (orig. 藪の中/Yabu no naka) from 1922 in the English translation by Jay Rubin from 2007. To investigate how readers evaluate trustworthiness in narrative contexts, we combined quantitative and qualitative methods. We analyzed correlations between reading habits (i.e., Author Recognition Test), cognitive traits (e.g., Need for Cognition; Epistemic Trust), and trust attributions to characters while also examining how narrative sequencing and character-specific reasons for (dis)trust shaped participants’ judgments. This mixed-methods approach allows us to situate narrative trust as a context-sensitive, interpretive process rather than a stable individual disposition. Full article

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) evoke the act of listening to music as a way to dismantle stereotypical representations of urban resistance and to paint a diverse picture of how communities throughout Los Angeles were impacted by unrest in 1992. From Yamashita’s Buzzworm, a character always tuned into the radio, to Beatty’s Nicholas Scoby, the protagonist’s best friend who is on a mission to listen to every jazz song ever made, these writers render secondary characters who are most concerned with the consumption of music and the act of listening as a form of culture sharing. In fact, these characters utilize portable devices, particularly the Walkman, to bring personal music and media consumption into public spaces. In this paper, I argue that characters like Buzzworm and Scoby facilitate the creation of specific sonic textures that allow authors to break down artificial barriers of racial representation in the aftermath of urban unrest. These writers highlight the act of listening in order to limn the cross-cultural impact that the 1992 unrest had throughout the Southern California region. Full article

This case study examines the reproductive choices of republican couple Eliza Sharples (1803–1852) and Richard Carlile (1790–1843) and the conflicted political and personal trajectories of those choices. This includes examination of his initial public writings supporting birth control methods set next to his retrogressive attitudes about women’s roles and his increasingly conservative and patriarchal attitudes about sexuality while using Sharples’s pregnancy out of wedlock to make his case for “moral marriage.” It sets his ideas next to Sharples’s proto-feminist uses of her pregnancy (confinement) vis-à-vis his confinement in jail as she seeks to show how her “confinement” does “labor” for republican and feminist causes. The paper highlights a crisis when the jail rescinded Sharples’s right to visit Carlile and studies the rhetoric used in the heated, desperate, triangulated exchanges between the jailors, Carlile and Sharples. Full article

The theoretical question of what makes texts “literary” has a long tradition in literary studies. At the level of concrete individual encounters/transactions between readers and texts, literariness has been shown to reflect how actual readers pre-categorize, approach, and process texts. Literariness has been approached from three different angles: the study of formal and semantic features of literary language, which dates back to the formalist beginnings of the concept; the study of literary reading modes and the generalized literary categories in which they are grounded; and the study of actual reading experiences. We argue (1) that these three aspects are mutually dependent and, in fact, constitute three sides of the same coin and (2) that different texts and genres instantiate distinct literariness profiles, that is, distinct ‘literarinesses’ in the mind of the reader—what makes a text literary differs between text types. Building on previous work in linguistics, literary studies, psychology, and stylistics, we discuss the cognitive implications of these two central claims for the reader. We also integrate our approach with extant research on genre-specific profiles and develop a set of ideas for future research in this field. Full article

In her aim to establish education as a scientifically grounded discipline—conceived as “an experimental science” in her non-fictional treatise Practical Education (1798)—Maria Edgeworth pioneered the integration of literary attention into educational practice. This paper examines her use of different short prose forms as a means of cultivating attentional capacities in young children and adolescents, while simultaneously providing educators with adaptable tools for designing exercises targeted to varying levels of attentiveness. Through close analysis of two narratives, “The Purple Jar” and “The Good French Governess”, we argue that Edgeworth’s short stories and tales experiment with various degrees of (narrative) complexity to foster the development of two key attentional habits, the transition of thought and the abstraction of attention, both essential for navigating everyday environments. Our findings suggest that Edgeworth’s literary experiments not only contribute to our understanding of attentional affordances of different short fiction forms and help advance knowledge about literature and cognition; they also underscore the pedagogical potential of “attention narratives” in educational contexts. Full article

This article investigates the role of space in the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides, focusing on The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002) through the lens of spatial theory. Drawing on key thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Doreen Massey, the study explores how Eugenides constructs spatial environments that not only frame but actively shape the identities, desires, and traumas of his characters. In The Virgin Suicides, suburban domestic spaces are shown to function as heterotopias—sites of surveillance, repression, and mythologized femininity—while Middlesex engages with transnational and urban spaces to narrate diasporic and intersex identity as dynamic, embodied, and liminal. The analysis reveals that Eugenides uses space as both a narrative device and a thematic concern to interrogate gender, memory, and power. Rather than passive backdrops, the novelistic spaces become charged arenas of conflict and transformation, reflecting and resisting dominant socio-cultural discourses. This study argues that space in Eugenides’ fiction operates as a critical register for understanding the politics of belonging and the production of subjectivity. By situating Eugenides within the broader field of literary spatiality, this article contributes to contemporary debates in literary geography, gender studies, and American fiction. Full article

When scholars view characters in King Lear through a Machiavellian lens, they read Edmund, Goneril, and Regan as stock Machiavels. In contrast, they often perceive Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar as selfless, apolitical characters. This essay argues that the latter characters are more complicated and politically adroit than they are often judged to be. They are Machiavellian as well, but Shakespeare conceives them within a more appreciative view of the concept of realpolitik. This essay explains the characters’ strategies by relating them to Machiavelli’s tenets of achieving and maintaining political power. The central quandary of the play is the lack of a male heir to the throne. Cordelia attempts to solve the problem by marrying the King of France for political reasons. She has an alliance with Kent, who helps her to justify her invasion of her homeland with French forces. Once the plans for a surprise attack go awry, Cordelia does not follow Machiavellian strategies and is consequently killed. Ironically, Edgar is as ambitious as Edmund, whom he lets plot against his father and bring about Gloucester’s slow decline so as to inherit his father’s fortune while Edmund incurs the blame for his father’s demise. Like Kent, he enlists a disguise for self-advancement. The most adroit Machiavellian characters—Edgar, Kent, and the King of France—all survive through chicanery and cunning. Shakespeare illustrates that secular methods of governorship defeat the old world of divine politics. Full article

This article re-examines Julio Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parks” (1956) and “Instructions for John Howell” (1963) through the lens of reader-response theory, hermeneutics, and cognitive narratology. Traditionally viewed as examples of the fantastic, these stories are interpreted here as complementary explorations of passive and active reading, offering a literary dialectic that parallels the reflections articulated in Cortázar’s Rayuela [Hopscotch] (1963). Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s theories of textual gaps and reader cooperation, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of appropriation, and more recent approaches to cognitive immersion and narrative engagement, this study argues that both stories dramatize reading as an ethical and political act. “Continuity of Parks” illustrates the dangers of uncritical textual consumption, culminating in the protagonist’s epistemic and existential annihilation, while “Instructions for John Howell” presents a model of insurgent readership, where the spectator’s appropriation of the play foregrounds the risks and possibilities of narrative intervention. By analyzing the use of metalepsis, destabilized focalization, and narrative layering in these stories, this article highlights how Cortázar anticipates contemporary concerns regarding reader agency, interpretive autonomy, and the sociopolitical implications of literary engagement. Full article

In the analysis of isiXhosa literary texts, the role of stylistic sentences in enhancing the meanings and reinforcement of themes and their impact in foregrounding the textual features has been largely ignored and under researched. This study is intended to explore the efficacy of stylistic sentences in the isiXhosa creative work Ukhozi Olumaphiko. In Ukhozi Olumaphiko, the author artfully employs periodic, cumulative, and balanced stylistic sentences for the realization of different purposes in the story. In this study, content analysis has been used as a qualitative and quantitative research technique, as it allowed for a detailed examination of the novel Ukhozi Olumaphiko. Stylistic sentences were identified, interpreted, and coded, using integer coding for classification. Employing literary stylistics as a theoretical approach, the stylistic sentences were analysed according to their literary impact and effect. The findings indicate that the author utilises periodic sentences predominantly in the beginning stages of the story, a spread of cumulative, balanced, and periodic sentences in the middle stages, and periodic and cumulative sentences more in the end stages of the novel. The stylistics mentioned enhance the themes, textual meanings, and narrative features of Ukhozi Olumaphiko text and are useful in weaving suspense in a way that captures the reader’s attention and evokes emotions. Full article