Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080116

Authors: Michael Bryson

This essay examines the potentially dire implications of artificial intelligence for the future of humanism, higher education, and the Humanities by introducing the philosophical conflict between Protagoras’ claim that humanity is the measure of all things and Plato’s competing assertion that the truest standards of value reside outside human experience. It argues that this tension continues to shape contemporary posthumanist, deterministic, and institutional modes of thought, all of which subordinate human judgment to external authorities, structures, or technologies. Drawing on examples from literary theory, the history of online education, and recent AI initiatives within the California State University system, the essay contends that artificial intelligence threatens to accelerate the standardization of teaching, diminish faculty autonomy, and redefine education in managerial and technocratic terms, which redefine faculty as an unnecessary expense. In response, it advances an inclusive humanist framework that affirms the intrinsic value of human experience, creativity, and judgment while calling for renewed faculty governance, intellectual independence, and a reaffirmation of the Humanities as indispensable to democratic and educational life.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080115

Authors: Linus Nicolaj Carlsen

The article investigates how electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is represented in the following four literary works of the 21st century: October’s Child, Store Kongensgade 23, The Parakeet, and I Am What I Remember. The article argues that electroconvulsive therapy is treated as a mnemonic metaphor that highlights not just its significance for individual experiences of memory loss following treatment and how such treatment elicits traumas that span generations, but also how ECT can be said to have a gendered bias. The article attempts to show how the practice of ECT is emblematic of a certain patriarchal tendency within psychiatry that obfuscates women’s chance of being heard. It makes the argument that ECT as a metaphor paradoxically works as a narrative catalyst that forces a practice of remembrance, and that this practice is in many ways a feminist project. As such, it offers a critical insight into psychiatric practices and shows the importance of giving voice to those who suffer from after-effects of psychiatric treatment. Finally, the article argues that ECT is a feminized metaphor that continues a figurative line of thought in Western social imagination, which entangles women, technology, and mental illness.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080114

Authors: Mona Baie Martina King

This article examines the narrative representation of high-technology clinical spaces and their challenging effects on the personhood of patient-protagonists in two Swiss hospital narratives: Walter Matthias Diggelmann’s Schatten (1979), a fictionalized autopathography on lung cancer, and Ulrike Ulrich’s Hinter den Augen (2013), which narrates an MRI examination. Combining classical narratology with the narratology of space, the paper delineates a shift from the twentieth- to the twenty-first-century text that moves from a critical representation of technologized hospital space as an antagonistic environment to a nuanced embrace of medical technology that intricately intertwines the machine and the self. As the analyses show, this shift from opposition to embrace of technology is accompanied and engendered by distinct structural characteristics: While both texts work with artistic forms of representing inner states, such as internal monologue and unreliable narration, their respective ‘poetics of the high-tech hospital’ diverge significantly, from a fundamentally dichotomous semantic setup (Diggelmann) to an integrative narrative based on formal mimesis (Ulrich). Focusing on how literary prose uniquely renders the experience of increasingly technologized hospital landscapes, the article contributes to literary scholarship at the intersection of the medical humanities, the cultural history of the hospital, and science and technology studies.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080113

Authors: R P Shruthi G Christopher

This study examines how Perumal Murugan’s Seasons of the Palm and Pyre represent the relationship between caste, ecology, and psychological suffering through the concept of solastalgia. While solastalgia is often understood in relation to environmental destruction or climate-related loss, this study argues that Murugan’s narratives expand its meaning by showing how ecological distress can also arise from caste-based exclusion, spatial control, and the denial of belonging within one’s own surroundings. In these narratives, rural landscapes are not neutral settings but socially organised environments shaped by labour, hierarchy, surveillance, and everyday forms of violence. Through the experiences of Shorty and Saroja, the study shows how nature functions as a space that both sustains life and regulates access to it. From Dalit psycho-ecological perspectives, the study argues that ecological suffering in Murugan’s narratives is inseparable from the caste structures. The study further suggests that environmental justice in the Indian context must account for caste as a central force shaping ecological experience. Ultimately, Murugan’s narratives highlight that ecological grief is also social grief and that questions of land, place, and belonging are deeply tied to the structures of power, calling for a more inclusive understanding of ecological thought that recognises these entangled realities.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080112

Authors: Marcelo Nogueira

This article examines the Popcretos, a series of collage works by Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos, situating them within the broader trajectory of his experimental poetics and the political context of Brazil’s military dictatorship. While existing scholarship has focused primarily on the series’s visual and semiological dimensions, this article argues that sound operates as a structuring element across the Popcretos, shaping how images are arranged and meanings emerge. Drawing on sound studies scholarship and critic Carrie Noland’s concept of sound-sensitive visuality, the article traces how the tension between noise and silence informs de Campos’s work from his earliest poems through the concrete poetry movement’s political turn in the early 1960s. Close readings of three works from the series (“The Anti-Noise,” “An Eye for an Eye,” and “Hush!”) reveal how sonic categories are mobilized to critique cultural imperialism, mass media spectacle, and authoritarian censorship. The article concludes that the Popcretos exceed ocularcentrism, functioning also as a multisensorial form of “auditory writing” within its sonic–visual materiality.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080111

Authors: José Manuel Rodríguez Herrera

This article argues that Denise Levertov’s Vietnam-era poetry develops a poetics of language ethics: a formal practice through which words are tested against bodies, suffering, agency, and moral judgment. Focusing on “During the Eichmann Trial,” “Life at War,” and “Prologue: An Interim,” the essay examines how Levertov exposes the bureaucratic, legal, and military languages that render violence administrable and morally tolerable. Drawing on Levertov’s poetics, postwar American poetics, Hannah Arendt’s account of moral thoughtlessness, and critical discourse analysis, it shows how quotation, fragmentation, lineation, apostrophe, parataxis, and bodily imagery resist abstraction and restore ethical perception. By situating these poems within the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam War, the Boston Five prosecution, and antiwar protest culture, the article presents Levertov’s work as a historically specific model of linguistic vigilance and poetic witness, one that remains alert to the ethical vulnerability of public language today.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080110

Authors: Ahmet Uruk

Referred to by Julian Huxley in his 1957 work New Bottles for New Wine, transhumanism champions the use of science and technology to transcend human biological limits and attain a “posthuman” state. While science fiction frequently familiarizes audiences with these speculative dimensions, William Gibson’s short story The Winter Market (1986) exposes the dehumanizing impacts of technological immortality and mind uploading in a cyberpunk world. Rather than presenting a seamless techno-utopian future, Gibson’s narrative centers on the concept of gomi—Japanese for trash or junk—to illustrate the literal and psychological expulsion of the human subject. Therefore, this paper argues that The Winter Market uses the material reality of gomi as its core structural and thematic focus, exposing how advanced capitalism and cybernetic technology reduce the organic body, human experience, and artistic expression to marketable, discarded commodities. Through a close reading of Gibson’s distinct language and narrative form, this study, ultimately, interrogates the trade-offs of technological transcendence, demonstrating how the pursuit of disembodied immortality culminates in alienation and the fragmentation of authentic identity.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080109

Authors: Pavel Drábek

Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, both in its incomplete, revised version (published 1590) and the original ‘Old Arcadia’, features a number of remarkable adventures that explore gender identities and identities that are redefined either from within or by the force of external manipulation, deceit, coercion or error. Under the umbrella of the pastoral setting, in other places, in the ‘not here’, Sidney’s personas face troubles that ‘other’ who they are—to themselves and to others. “And let us see what power is the author of all these troubles: forsooth, love; love, a passion, and the basest and fruitlessest of all passions”. The troubles are never simple. In the words of one of the protagonists, who undergoes a complex case of gender shift: “For, indeed, the true love hath that excellent nature in it, that it doth transform the very essence of the lover into the thing loved, uniting and, as it were, incorporating it with a secret and inward working”. This essay explores the performative complexities of these secret and inward workings, drawing on theatrical versions of Sidney’s Arcadia and its cognate parallels: both from the early modern period and in recent performances and theatrical experiments. The essay theorises Sidney’s concept of ‘poesy’ from The Defence of Poesy and brings it in line with the notion of dramaticity.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080108

Authors: David Lombard

This article argues that parental memoirs of schizophrenia are fruitful sites for producing relational knowledge, a form of understanding that emerges through interactions among care recipients, caregivers, and clinicians rather than residing in any single epistemic agent. It analyzes Dominique Laporte’s Mon fils, schizophrène and Josie Méndez-Negrete’s A Life on Hold as parental memoirs that narrativize knowledge about schizophrenia that often remain absent from clinical accounts. Building on the notions of narrative multiplicity and epistemic justice, the article shows how these memoirs redistribute epistemic authority across perspectives (psychiatrists’, caregivers’, and care recipients’). The article situates Laporte’s text as a testimonial memoir and Méndez-Negrete’s as an autoethnographic memoir, highlighting how both construct knowledge through caregiving. To account for their narrative strategies, it introduces the concept of hypodiegetic witnessing, which draws on Arthur Frank’s concept of witnessing and Mieke Bal’s theory of hypodiegetic narrative. Through storytelling practices such as pláticas, cuentos, intertextual references, and embedded stories, these memoirs mediate psychotic experience without claiming direct access to it. Rather than merely representing caregiving, parental memoirs generate and circulate relational knowledge, contributing to more epistemically just and polyphonic understandings of schizophrenia and mental illness.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080107

Authors: Emma McKenzie

The following article investigates the way in which popular media in Western culture reinforces a shared imagination linked to the treatment and care of people experiencing mental health conditions that are often associated with horror, violence, and crime. These representations haunt our vision of what it means to receive a mental health diagnosis, instilling fear and negative perceptions of mental illness in our psyche. The violent and disturbing imagery that is often used to portray mental illness, and made for entertainment purposes, reinforces a shared subconscious fear that haunts our imagination. These portrayals of mental illness fail to bridge the gap between human trauma, a medical diagnosis and a positive return to the community. This article uses examples of popular media from the twenty-first century to demonstrate how imagery linked to the age of asylums persists in today’s representations of mental health experiences. These images are reinforced by mainstream news stories, which draw on the most sensational and frightening incidents of mental health episodes. In summary, this article will highlight the way that popular media is influenced by society and has the power to reshape our understandings of mental health experiences for the better. To do this, there is a need for positive change within the mental health system, and more balance within news stories about mental health conditions.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080106

Authors: Ayako Ono

This paper investigates the identity and circumstances of Nampo Joshi (南芳女史) (Ōzawa Nampo 大澤南芳, b. 1845; born Takei Tsuru), the woman artist who painted the kachō-ga (bird-and-flower painting) affixed to the reverse of James McNeill Whistler’s Blue and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (1871/1873, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow). Completed in 1867, as the Edo period ended, Nampo’s work reached Europe with remarkable speed, raising the question of how a painting by a Japanese woman came into Whistler’s possession. Few historical documents directly pertaining to Nampo survive. However, she was the wife of the painter Ōzawa Nankoku (大澤南谷, 1844–?), and a systematic examination of records related to him—land registers, official gazettes, periodicals, exhibition catalogues, and diaries—reveals that the couple established themselves in Nihonbashi, the commercial centre of Tokyo. This broader archival investigation reconstructs who Nampo was: the socio-economic standing she and her husband achieved and the ways in which they extended their endeavours well beyond the traditional boundaries of their craft—participating energetically in the civic life of the new capital, in the exhibition culture of the Meiji period, and in educational and philanthropic activities. Crucially, the study demonstrates that masters deeply involved in Rangaku (Dutch Studies) networks advocating Japan’s opening to the world trained both artists and argues that this progressive intellectual milieu may provide essential context for understanding the swift acceptance of Nampo’s work in Europe.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080105

Authors: Florian Sedlmeier

The essay rereads the literary field of the mid-twentieth century as structured by “the art of the insult”—a game the literati, exemplified by James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, are invested in. In essays and interviews, these writers engage in ad hominem verbal attacks to test the limits of the socially sayable, which are also the limits of personal friendship. Existing scholarship has shown how the fraught relation between Baldwin and Mailer was marked by gender, race, and sexuality. Drawing on under-researched and newly accessible material, the article makes the case that these differences are superseded by the shared identity as literati who ground literary innovation in social provocation. The alliance culminates in their closing ranks to censor and legitimize the underlying scandal: Mailer’s physical assault against his wife Adele, whose autobiography the article considers in closing.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080104

Authors: Paul Longley Arthur Isabel Smith

Chad Hartigan’s science fiction romantic drama Little Fish was released in 2020, soon after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the disease plaguing communities in Little Fish is not affecting people’s bodies but their minds—those who have contracted Neuroinflammatory Affliction (NIA) are losing their memories. The story centres upon the experiences of one young couple as they anxiously witness the disease take hold of their community, loved ones, and eventually one another. The film explores relationships between memory and identity, and poses questions about the ways these processes interact with those of love and loss. Who are we once we begin to lose memories of our histories and ourselves? Who do we then become to our loved ones, with whom we have shared these memories and selves? What binds us together? The paper examines the film using concepts from memory studies, in particular psychoanalysis and philosophy, to argue that after conscious memory is gone, aspects of memory and identity remain through the body, the unconscious, and love.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080103

Authors: Amy McCarthy

Mixtapes are a form of autobiography and are a tool for storytelling. Summer Pierre’s graphic music memoir All the Sad Songs uses the mixtape to curate and deconstruct memories. Through a series of mixtapes discarded in her basement, Pierre details her relationships through music. The absence and presence of mixtapes haunt the narrative and create the scaffolding of Pierre’s memoir. This article explores how the hauntological nature of cassette tapes structures narrative in graphic music memoirs. Music memoirs are about identity building for the music memoirist and the reader. The graphic memoir differs from the traditional memoir format as the author must show as well as tell. Pierre’s graphic memoir demonstrates Pierre’s changing music identity through both text and illustrations. Memoir writing is a performative act, and the author, similar to the mixtape creator, is the curator of the narrative the memoir presents. By using a ‘dead media’ to aid life writing, Pierre presents her journey as a musician through a lifetime soundtrack.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15080102

Authors: Yongyu Quan

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), a role-playing game developed by CD Projekt RED, exhibits enduring appeal even ten years after its release. The game features European folkloric and Gothic aesthetics that highlight its uniqueness and gained good reception among global players. Yet, the mechanism of this transnational and transcultural appeal is still insufficiently researched. This article challenges debates about the ephemeral nature of internet trends as digital folklore, analysing how regional folk traditions converge into cultural globalisation through interactive media such as video games. The main approach of this study is literary and cultural, adopting digital folklore theory, Globalgothic theory, and Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities. This article also examines in-game quests and landscape aesthetics as part of gameplay through close reading. This study finds that the game interprets regional folk traditions into universal Gothic themes through players’ participatory performance, decontextualised narrative design, and virtual world construction. A new form of digital folklore emerges in the Witcher Universe as an imagined community forms in the virtualised reality. At the same time, longstanding folkloric and literary traditions function as an anchor for this rejuvenated digital folklore and community.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070101

Authors: Marina Vidas

The article analyzes the constructions of the racial and social “other” in portraits of or for members of the Danish royal family held in The Royal Danish Collection at Rosenborg Castle and the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle. More specifically, it examines portraits of young Blacks who served at the Danish court and who were painted by Northern European artists in the second half of the seventeenth century. In these paintings, the young people are posed with Danish royals, or with animals with whom they are contrasted or likened. The first section interrogates primary documents dating from the second half of the seventeenth century for information concerning the status and various aspects of the lives of young Blacks at the Danish court, as well as the language used to describe them. These written sources provide a frame of reference for the subsequent interpretation of four paintings in the second section. It is argued that all four paintings convey the performative nature of Black servitude and exemplify how enslaved individuals were expected to appear and behave. When displayed within royal residences, it is put forth that these works functioned to promote the “othering” of court Blacks, reinforce the boundaries separating the Danish royal family from their attendants, and visually assert the monarchy’s superiority, authority, and control.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070100

Authors: Recep Baydemir

Türkiye’s Early Republican Era (1923–1946) was a period marked by profound ideological shifts, during which social values and national identity were reshaped. During this time, monuments and statues was utilized by Republican intellectuals as a ‘strategic tool for diffusion’ to instill the ideology of the Republic among the public. The monuments and statues of this period were designed to reflect revolutionary changes, forge a national identity, and emphasize the new values of the Republic. Questions such as: How did the figures in the monuments and statues of this period convey new Republican values like modernization, secularism, and nationalism to the public? What aspects of society did Republican elites aim to transform, and how did they represent this transformation through monuments and statues? What role did monuments play in the construction of national identity? remain to be answered. This study aims to shed light on the political and social context of the era by analyzing certain monuments produced during Türkiye’s Single-Party Era, thereby seeking to understand how Republican ideology was reflected in art and the role/impact of art in the construction of national identity. To this end, three monuments and one painting—considered to best reflect the era and to best convey the ideology of the Republic—have been selected as examples. While these monuments are subjected to in-depth analysis to decipher the explicit and implicit ideological messages they contain, the examples’ dimensions of meaning are also examined within the context of Althusser’s Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses and Sennett’s concepts of nakedness and the political/sovereign body.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070099

Authors: Anitha Merin Vincent V. Karunanithi

Deborah Rodriguez’s The Kabul Beauty School belongs to the body of Western humanitarian literature produced post-9/11 portraying the significant role of America in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. This study analyzes how the memoir embodies what is conceptualized as ‘autoethnographic orientalism’, a critical framework that identifies how the Western subject constructs knowledge of the Orient through personal narratives that prioritize self-discovery by using autoethnographic conventions of reflexivity, participant observation, personal disclosure and affective engagement. Integrating intersectional complicity into the framework reveals the reproduction of orientalist hierarchies while claiming feminist solidarity with Afghan women. The close reading and qualitative analysis of the memoir identifies five dimensions of representational politics—memoir as an orientalist form, the autoethnographic gaze, intersectional complicity, rescue narratives and agential empowerment, and narrative blind spots. The study demonstrates how Rodriguez’s observation and documentation of cultural practices reinforce colonial discourse of perceived differences and deficiencies rather than arriving at a deeper cultural understanding. The findings suggest that post-9/11 humanitarian memoirs need to employ a critical reading practice that will engage with both the empathetic dimensions of the text as well as the structural complicity embedded in them.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070098

Authors: Arabinda Rajkhowa Munmi Dutta Ashim Chutia Brojen Sarmah Paresh Khanikar Chandan Jyoti Chutia

This article presents a sociohistorical analysis of Assamese popular science writing (bigyan sahitya) over nearly two centuries (1846–2018), arguing that what has often been described as a regional literary tradition is more usefully understood as a durable vernacular knowledge ecosystem—a sustained institutional, periodical, and discursive infrastructure through which scientific modernity has been linguistically mediated, socially circulated, and culturally embedded in Assamese-speaking publics. Drawing on Assamese-language archival sources and engaging international scholarship on the public understanding of science, vernacular modernity, and postcolonial knowledge circulation, the article reconstructs three interlocking structures through which the ecosystem has operated: the print public sphere consolidated by the missionary newspaper Arunodoy from 1846; the civic-scientific institutional architecture of Pashupalan (1925), the Asom Bigyan Samiti and Bigyan Jeuti (launched in 1961), and the Asom Bigyan Lekhak Sangstha (1999); and the literary-scientific mediation that produced the science-fiction tradition (kalpabijnan). The ecosystem has reproduced itself through workshops, handbooks, and terminology projects, navigating four political–economic ruptures without institutional collapse. The case offers a productive empirical basis for theorising how societies vernacularise scientific knowledge over the long term.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070097

Authors: Tianzhi Zhang

Mo Yan’s stage play Crocodile (Eyu) marks a shift away from novel-centered scholarship in Mo Yan studies. Centered on a continually fed, ever-growing crocodile, the play moves the animal from a textual symbol to a stage image. Existing studies emphasize theme, symbolism, or genre but say less about how stage procedures establish the crocodile’s presence as a publicly perceptible fact and generate meanings around power, desire, and judgment. This article addresses that gap through a script-based, stage-oriented semiotic analysis. Drawing on Barthes’s denotation and connotation together with Hjelmslev’s expression and content planes, it analyzes how stage images organize perception and meaning. It argues that presence in Crocodile is produced through linked sensory, spatial, and verbal cues: at moments of concealment and disclosure, expansion, threshold, and loss of control, the play turns the crocodile into a collectively witnessable event rather than a mere symbol, while repeated cues consolidate associations around power, desire, and judgment, reorienting spectatorship toward the conditions of witnessing. By treating the stage image as an operative mechanism rather than a symbol to be decoded, the article shows how the play, through stage procedures, establishes the crocodile as a perceptible and witnessable stage presence that generates meaning.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070096

Authors: Howard Ira Einsohn

This essay argues that Bernard Shaw and Richard Rorty, two of the most accomplished figures of the modernist age in their respective vocations—one an Anglo-Irish dramatist and polemicist; the other, an American philosopher and university professor—were similar in ways that merit our close attention. The focus here is on their mutual quest for a global civilization that would come as close as humanly possible to achieving a Jesusian kingdom of heaven on earth. Neither believed in the otherworldly supernaturalism of orthodox Christianity and the absolutist church dogmas that went with it, but both contended that the Nazarene’s social-gospel values were salvational. In addition to their hopeful Jesusianism, Shaw and Rorty held four associated attributes in common that are especially noteworthy: their antifoundationalism; their pragmatism; their utopianism; and their liberal, social democratic commitments. Collectively, these symmetries show that Shaw and Rorty shared substantive views about how humans ought to live, in order that they not just survive by the skin of their teeth, but that they perhaps one day flourish and do so for all the generations that would follow.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070095

Authors: Iva Dimovska

This article examines the structuring tension between the occurrence and non-occurrence of sexual events in Elizabeth Bowen’s novels Friends and Relations (1931) and The House in Paris (1935), arguing that the conflict between sex and celibacy operates as a central narrative motor in her interwar fiction. Reframing this dynamic through the related distinction between occurrence, non-occurrence, and event, I suggest that Bowen’s novels are organized not simply around sexual acts or their absence, but around the question of whether sexual possibility is allowed to consolidate into narrative event or withheld within a structure of suspension. In Friends and Relations, sexual possibility remains imminent yet is repeatedly deferred, producing a narrative governed by a “non-occurrence” rather than event. In The House in Paris, by contrast, sexual occurrence is permitted but emerges as catastrophe, consequence, and irreversible temporal rupture. This opposition is represented through Janet (Friends and Relations) and Karen (The House in Paris), who embody two regimes of narrative temporality: one in which sexual possibility is withheld from event, and one in which it becomes an irreversible event. Across both novels, celibacy and sexuality are interdependent forces determining the passage, or refusal of passage, from occurrence to event.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070094

Authors: Debayudh Chatterjee

In The Gypsy Goddess (2014), Meena Kandasamy offers a searing retelling of the 1968 Kilvenmani Massacre, in which at least forty-four lower-caste agricultural workers, including women and children, were brutally murdered while mobilizing for better living conditions under the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Distinguishing her novel from earlier representations, Kandasamy employs a non-linear and self-reflexive narrative that satirically draws on multiple voices and genres. My paper argues that the novel’s summoning of Kilvenmani’s specters serves a dual function. First, it exposes the limits of Western postcolonial and postmodern academic discourses in the neoliberal era. Second, by resurrecting a foundational episode in post-colonial India’s communist movement, it advances a case for reimagining communism as a credible alternative to intertwined structures of caste, class, and gender oppression. I demonstrate that Kandasamy accomplishes this through an inward critique of her own postmodern form deployed in The Gypsy Goddess, ultimately gesturing toward solidarities later articulated as Social Reproduction Theory.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070093

Authors: Samim Reza

This contribution to the Special Issue on J. M. Coetzee’s use of epistolary forms examines the unique and unconventional deployment of epistolarity in Age of Iron (1990). It argues that, instead of following traditional epistolary conventions, Age of Iron uses the protagonist’s letter as an investigative tool to probe the inherent problematics of truth-telling from a precarious and complex subject position. The article highlights absence as the central motif that underpins the urgency of communicating the truth. Central to this investigation is the distinction between virtuality and spectrality, approached through the critical philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how shifting dimensions of narrative imagination (Coetzee and Kurtz), moving from virtuality to spectrality within an epistolary framework, restrain the otherwise endless interplay of binaries, restrict the arbitrary construction of meanings, and foreground the importance of authorial intent (Coetzee) in the author’s exercise of authority to speak the truth. It further argues that, through the use of epistolary discourse, the novel endorses a performative mode of engagement that seeks to establish the authenticity and legitimacy of the truth (Lyotard), instead of speaking it.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070092

Authors: Deirdre Foley

The marriage bar was a widespread rule requiring women to give up their jobs upon marriage. It is generally familiar to many as a peculiarity of Ireland’s past. However, the precise details and history of its operation are frequently misunderstood and incorrectly attributed. The bar applied culturally to most aspects of employment for many years and was not exclusive to the civil service, which was governed by legislation reinforcing the bar. After introducing the intricacies of this topic, this article takes a closer look at the cultural aspects of the bar across family, archival and oral history sources. In doing so, I frame the research as a deeply personal encounter with history. Combining oral history with manuscript sources and bookended by a personal history of the marriage bar, this article considers its impact across generations. The marriage bar is also discussed in terms of Irish culture, social class, and marital status. Finally, the adjustments and ongoing limitations experienced by Irish women in the labour market after the marriage bar was gradually eradicated are discussed. I argue that the marriage bar has had a profound socio-cultural impact on Irish society across generations; its effect has never been limited to married women. While the policy caused an incalculable loss of personal fulfilment and remuneration to generations of married women, it simultaneously stymied the promotion prospects of many single women.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070091

Authors: Jianwei Gong

Since ancient times, interpretations of the dragon image in China have followed two distinct yet intertwined paths: one official and one popular. As seen in The Scholars and the late Qing novels of exposure, the dragon is often used to refer to officials and objects associated with imperial power. At the same time, because holding office required a high level of cultural attainment, those likened to dragons were also expected to possess considerable scholarly refinement. Satirical depictions of dragons in everyday life reveal just how deeply embedded the dragon image was in traditional Chinese society. Moreover, the distinctive nature of satirical fiction enables it to direct irony at the official, imperial-centered version of the dragon. The dragon imagery in The Scholars and late Qing condemnatory fiction takes on these characteristics because of the very nature of satirical literature. Rooted in reality, such works inevitably reflect the dragon as it actually existed in society. During the Ming–Qing period, and especially within the examination system, the dragon image was indeed marked by this kind of complexity. Furthermore, it was impossible for imperial power to monopolize the dragon symbol. The dragon inevitably permeated all corners of popular life, beyond the reach of imperial control. This in turn reveals the free, worldly orientation of satirical fiction and its resonance with the early stirrings of enlightenment thought.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070090

Authors: Ceyhun Kaçmaz

This article offers a comparative reading of Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, examining how the two novels represent historical migration and contemporary displacement. It argues that, in both texts, migration cannot be reduced to physical movement from one place to another. Rather, it functions as a cultural rupture that reorders space, identity, belonging, memory, witnessing and alienation. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O frames forced migration from the Caucasus to Türkiye through homeland loss, family memory, genealogical continuity and the search for settlement. Huzursuzluk, by contrast, locates the Syrian war, the persecution of Yazidis, refugeehood, trauma and witnessing within the wider violence of the contemporary Middle East, tracing their effects on individual and cultural memory. Its central argument is that the two novels stage witnessing in two distinct modes. Read through Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, Kutlu’s novel renders witnessing as the intergenerational inheritance of homeland loss, whereas Livaneli’s stages the synchronic implication of a contemporary listener in another’s suffering; on this reading, migration fiction holds these two configurations together as simultaneous ethical possibilities rather than as successive literary phases.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070089

Authors: Shlomy Mualem

Nietzsche claimed, in The Birth of Tragedy, that the Platonic dialogues are the lifeboat on which Socrates rescues older poetry, only to finish off comedy. This article contests that claim. Distinguishing comedy (a mode organized around to geloion, whose object Plato himself defines in the Philebus as self-ignorance) from irony (a two-level device of meaning), it argues that Socratic irony in Plato is comic in a precise threefold sense: genealogically, as the inheritance of the eirōn-mask from the Aristophanic Clouds; structurally, wherever the dialogues frame it for staged laughter; and thematically, as the instrument of the laughing exposure of doxosophia. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s reading of the Socratic maieutic as ‘indirect communication’ and Vlastos’s concept of ‘complex irony,’ the article offers a close reading of Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium within the generic frame Plato himself names at 222d: the satyr-play, ‘tragedy at play,’ in which tragic material is held inside a laughing form. The speech’s mythological imagery (Silenus, Marsyas, Corybants, Sirens) carries a coordinated dark sub-text that reverses its overt meaning—the satyric signature, not a departure from the comic. Against Vlastos, who locates pedagogical failure in Alcibiades’ self-deception, and Lane, who finds complex irony’s deliberate indeterminacy ethically indefensible, the article proposes a meta-ironic resolution: Plato stages both positions simultaneously, performing at the authorial level the very pharmakon-logic the speech describes—a seriocomic philosophical method grounded in the mythological ambivalence of the theatre of Dionysus.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070088

Authors: La-Toya Scott

This article examines Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868) to explore how memoirs written by Black women become literary spaces of rebellion. Writing from within elite white domestic interiors as a dressmaker and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, Keckley challenges the racialized structures that sought to confine Black women to silence, labor, and invisibility. Using a Black feminist literary methodology grounded in close reading, historical contextualization, and the concepts of radical interiority and Reflexive Identity Narration (RIN), this article analyzes how Keckley converts domestic labor, witnessing, and narrative self-definition into acts of insurgent authorship. The analysis demonstrates that Keckley’s narrative exposes the contradictions of white domesticity, asserts Black women’s intellectual and emotional autonomy, and transforms the domestic interior into a site of political critique. By claiming narrative authority and strategically shaping what is revealed and withheld, Keckley enacts a form of rebellion rooted in self-authorship and witnessing. This article concludes that Behind the Scenes offers an early blueprint for Black feminist rebellion, expanding conventional structures of the genre of slave narratives.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070087

Authors: Nina Papathanasopoulou

This article examines Martha Graham’s radical reception of the women of Greek tragedy across her performing career, from the early 1930s to her retirement from the stage in 1969. I argue that Graham repeatedly turned to Greek tragic heroines—Electra, Medea, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, Alcestis, Phaedra, and Hecuba—with two interlocking aims: to stage archetypal human emotion, and to confront and make sense of her own personal experiences of love, jealousy, aging, and loss. Inspired by psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, and the abstract art of collaborator Isamu Noguchi, Graham was drawn to Greek tragedy’s direct engagement with human suffering. What makes her reception radical is its consistent relocation of tragic conflict from the civic sphere to the psyche: rather than framing female transgression through public judgment, Graham turns the drama inward, giving visible form to what ancient texts leave unstaged—Jocasta’s embodied reckoning with unbearable knowledge, Clytemnestra’s interior logic of injury and justice, Phaedra’s unruly desire brought into full view. The article also introduces the public-facing initiative “Martha Graham & Greek Myth,” which extends this scholarship to broader audiences through presentations that integrate live dance with scholarly discussion, making Graham’s reception of these tragic women accessible beyond the academy.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070086

Authors: Leeann Lane

This article examines the later life experiences of women who participated in the revolutionary period in Cork city and county who did not go on to marry. Many within this cohort of Cork female activists experienced poverty, ill health, economic dependency and loneliness in the aftermath of the revolutionary period. Their unmarried status left these women particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal state structured—legally, economically and culturally—on an essentialist view of the married, childbearing woman. The invisibility of adult dependency in Ireland was summed up in the 1926 Census of Population report: ‘no account is taken in this inquiry of adults who may be supported out of the household income’. Mary Daly notes the ‘high proportion of the population working within a family economy which had little reliance on money incomes and waged employment’. This may, as she states, ‘have reduced the numbers exposed to the blunt instrument of unemployment’ in the context of the 1930s depression. However, the emotional and psychological effects of economic dependency have not been considered in any depth. The lack of statutory benefits for lower-class single women who were unable to access paid employment and who did not have the requisite social insurance stamps meant that they faced a vista of poverty and dependency on charity and family members. The latter were often begrudging and indisposed to assume the financial burdens of those who they often deemed economically ‘unproductive’. This article argues that, in so many cases, financial dependency resulted in the loss of agency and autonomy for unmarried women.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070085

Authors: Alice Zheng

The Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform at the end of the twentieth century displaced millions of workers into a rapidly shifting market. How do displaced workers navigate the coexistence of historical structures, of relations of production and social reproduction, both old and new? This article takes up these questions through two films by director Zhang Meng—Piano in a Factory and Lucky Dog—that center on former SOE workers amidst postsocialist China’s new economic order. In both films, characters navigate life outside the SOE structure by improvising with limited resources and repurposing what remains available, by way of both creativity and constraint. Reading these acts, this article proposes the term labor of making-do to name a practical, creative activity through which subjects navigate limited material conditions, competing subjectivities, and disrupted social relations in the shifting reality. Drawing on embodied socialist skills and memory, making-do as a particular form of labor reproduces subjects in a new historical structure. In the face of the market, it sometimes functions outside market logics. While informed by the historical legacy of the socialist ideology of labor, the labor of making-do is not primarily a nostalgic attempt to restore socialist ideals; nor is it a deliberate resistance to capitalism. Rather, it demonstrates a lived, spontaneous and often unglamorous process by which precarious subjects negotiate sustenance and survival, and through which revised subjectivities are produced. It is through such contradictory and quotidian processes that social reproduction unfolds across coexisting historical structures.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070084

Authors: Ewald Mengel

This article investigates the functions of the epistolary form in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe as a means of constructing authenticity and probing what Susan Barton calls the “substance of the truth.” Two distinct forms of authenticity play a central role in Foe (1987). The first is related to the narrative conventions of autofiction, particularly fictional autobiography, the epistolary form, and what has been termed “circumstantial realism,” as exemplified by Daniel Defoe and the eighteenth-century novel. The second emerges through Susan Barton’s insistence on the “substance of the truth” (F, 51), which appears to transcend these conventions of realistic narration. By employing a different, non-realist form of authenticity, Coetzee critiques the oppression and erasure of the female writing subject and foregrounds the fate of Friday, the traumatized subaltern who cannot speak. Coetzee’s postmodern rewriting thus both employs and deconstructs the representational conventions that establish authenticity, while also revealing an ethical commitment characteristic of his work in general.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070083

Authors: Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

Speculative environmental fiction can inscribe reactionary responses to ecological crises even without intending to. This article examines Shinkai Makoto’s 2019 film and novel Weathering with You to show how it inadvertently encodes what I term reactionary care: an individualistic and escapist disposition toward environmental crises that diminishes collective human responsibility for both their causes and their consequences. Two mechanisms drive this encoding in this case. First, the story displaces causal responsibility away from human agency by attributing climatic disruption to supernatural forces. Second, it naturalizes individual emotional fulfilment over collective welfare by subordinating environmental engagement to the protagonists’ romantic bond as if the two were mutually exclusive. This work of fiction acknowledges a situation of environmental crisis but its representation of causes and consequences demotes it beneath a desire for romantic intimacy as if the two were incompatible.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15070082

Authors: Stuart Moulthrop

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

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060081

Authors: Lowen E. Frampton-Thorburn

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060080

Authors: Sarah Lemoine (Jansen)

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060079

Authors: Radu Mihai Dumitrescu

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060078

Authors: Dylan Henty

‘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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060077

Authors: Santiago Juan-Navarro

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060076

Authors: Oana Celia Gheorghiu

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060075

Authors: Siobhan Campbell

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060074

Authors: Shane Neilson

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060073

Authors: Jack Fennell

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060072

Authors: Scott Maisano Matthew Brown

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15060071

Authors: Alexa Melissa Hurtado-Montaño

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15050070

Authors: Chiara Sciarrino

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15050069

Authors: Antonia Saunders

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15050068

Authors: Hui Faye Xiao

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15050067

Authors: Pubali Borah Arabinda Rajkhowa

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15050066

Authors: Katherine Hallemeier

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15050065

Authors: Gülsüm Tuğçe Çetin

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15050064

Authors: Haoyuan Gao Sunghoon Cho

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.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15050063

Authors: Rachel L. Carazo

The world of Star Wars may seem far removed from Renaissance England, but through an examination of the regnal aspects of Henry VIII and (Emperor) Sheev Palpatine (Darth Sidious), it is evident that their ruling styles, concerns, and personal characteristics are quite similar. Specifically, they share (1) a connection to the arts through visual, architectural, and political themes, making them ‘Renaissance men’; (2) a fixation with male (Force-sensitive) bloodlines, whether through biological children or Sith Apprentices; and (3) a legacy of having their most powerful and ‘best’ heirs being women—Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) and Rey (Palpatine/Skywalker). Hence, these case studies, which rely on the trait approach of leadership, demonstrate the utility of comparing leaders from different times, cultures, and realities in an effort to understand not only good and bad leadership elements, but also the nature of leaders’ downfalls.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040062

Authors: Ihsan Alwan Muhsin Al-Sweidi

Fallujah, by Jonathan Holmes (2007), is one of the archetypal examples of verbatim theatre, which addresses the truths of the Iraq War through dramatised eyewitness accounts and documentation reconstructions. Sketched in the Second Battle of Fallujah, the play reveals moral, political, and epistemological aspects of how modern warfare is presented. This article hinges on the postmodern theory of Jean-François Lyotard—especially the concepts of language games, paralogy, and the differend—to discuss the play Fallujah as a subversion of official grand narratives of the Iraq War. Through the use of testimonial intertextuality, irony and fragmentation, Holmes builds a multidimensional tableau of discourse contradictions in which truth is relative, and legitimacy is constantly deferred. The play turns into a meta-discursive critique of Western power dynamics, challenging the manner in which the knowledge is created, distributed, and twisted in the name of liberation and humanitarianism. Further, the article examines both dramaturgical and aesthetic techniques that lend truthfulness to Holmes’ concept of the verbatim approach as it dislocates the truth in relation to war and victimhood. The results help us comprehend the role of modern theatre in the reconstruction of the cultural memory and morality in the post-war era. The article concludes that Fallujah is a vivid example of postmodern theatrical resistance, an ethical and artistic response to commodity violence and the obliteration of lived suffering.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040061

Authors: Maureen O’Connor

From the witch-like widow on the edges of civilisation to the retired spinster who, after an active but disappointing sexual past, chooses to continue her single life, the celibate women of Edna O’Brien’s fiction have as much to contribute to the author’s career-long examination of the damage done by Irish patriarchy as any of the miserable housewives, resentful mothers, and abused girls who dominate critical analyses of her work. Unlike the many admirable nun characters in O’Brien’s fiction, the women in this study are not consciously renouncing society or deliberately retreating from the world. While they can be vulnerable characters who risk disapproval and even violence, they can also offer alternative models of Irish womanhood, subtle and complex, alternatives not always recognised when the narrator is a young girl and sometimes appreciated too late by more mature narrators and characters.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040060

Authors: Agata Bielik-Robson

This essay conducts a comparative analysis of the literary use of kabbalistic motives in the two seemingly very distant authors: Jacques Derrida and Philip K. Dick. It shows how the Lurianic “fable,” conceived in the Derridean terms as a literary récit, shapes their understanding of time as an open-ended game whose outcome remains unknown. It thus wants to prove that Derrida’s essay Given Time, based on the little prose by Charles Baudelaire called “The False Coin,” and the penultimate book by Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion, tell the same story which is also a meta-story: a speculative meditation on the nature of temporality and story-telling, which involves the messianic “theology of risk.” In both cases we deal with what the essay terms as an “inverted Gnosticism”: while the traditional Gnostic doctrine envisions time as the factor of the world’s decay and imperfection, Derrida and Dick, inspired by the Lurianic kabbalah, see it as the chance of the world to verify itself, that is, to make itself real and true in the process of “unprejudiced becoming.”

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040059

Authors: Justin F. Martin

Since his inception, Luke Cage’s superhero mission has explored themes related to justice, interpersonal relations, and institutional integrity. This paper draws on examples from comics and his television series to explicate these themes through the lens of social and moral development. In doing so, it suggests lessons for improving the recent landscape of American civil discourse. The Overview introduces the character against the backdrop of the social role of superheroes, moral development scholarship, and recent polling data related to civil discourse. The Heroic Journey examines his superhero mission further, highlighting his attempts to promote a sense of mutual trust and shared obligations across varied social interactions. Lastly, the Super Takeaway discusses the potential of Luke Cage narratives to keep disagreeing persons “at the table” long enough to come to some (civil) agreement.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040058

Authors: Michael G. Cronin

This is a study of the nun as a queer archetype of femininity across Kate O’Brien’s fiction and non-fiction. Alongside characters who are actual nuns, the fiction includes characters who can be described as ‘nun-like,’ especially in their renunciation of sexual desire. In the fiction, this secular renunciation is aligned with religious celibacy as actively chosen and ethically purposeful and situated as similar to artistic creativity. The study argues that O’Brien’s nuns are paradoxical and queer figures, undermining the temporality, class politics and models of human subjectivity central to O’Brien’s own ideological commitments. Attending to these nun figures prompts significant questions about the liberal feminist politics underpinning contemporary O’Brien studies and the prevailing critical reception of O’Brien as an exemplary Irish woman writer.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040057

Authors: Ulugbek Ochilov Shuhrat Sirojiddinov Muhabbat Baqoyeva Feruza Khajieva Otabek Fayzulloyev Bakhtiyor Gafurov Kakhramon Tukhsanov Dilnoza Sharipova Makhmud Babaev Gulrukh Bobokulova Shahnoza Kholova Shahnoza Tuyboeva

This article examines the interaction between phenomenological illness theory and magical realism in Stephen King’s The Green Mile. It uses ideas from phenomenological psychopathology and illness narrative theory to explain how King presents supernatural events through a restrained and matter-of-fact narrative register. Instead of considering magical realism as a genre or a mere literary device, the article views magical realism as a stylistic mode that is produced by the tension between realistic descriptions and unexplained supernatural moments. Through a close reading of King’s prose, especially his diction, narrative voice and bodily descriptions, this study shows that John Coffey’s healing acts represent the otherwise incommunicable experience of suffering. These supernatural events make visible forms of institutional violence such as prison brutality, racial injustice and execution, which are often invisible in traditional realist narratives. This article also argues that magical realism is not limited to Latin American literature but can function effectively in American popular fiction. Finally, the findings suggest that, while magical realism may be helpful in exposing injustice and suffering, it may also have the danger of aestheticizing pain rather than fully transforming it into political critique.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040056

Authors: Michael T. Williamson

Produced at a point of significant change in literary representations of what was called “the black experience,” the comic book series Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan each represent an ambitious collaboration between Don McGregor, the white writer of the series, and Billy Graham, the black series artist. As a revision of “black experience” novels published by Holloway House during the early 1970s, this comic book series significantly alters the ways in which mourning, memory, and mental fortitude are represented in a world of almost entirely black characters. Fighting villains who create phantasmic illusions that evoke self-doubt, The Black Panther, one of three black superheroes introduced by Marvel comics during the 1960s and 1970s, brings to light and then revises traumatic historical memories. The hero’s journey around the provinces of Wakanda, a black kingdom in Western Africa, requires the Panther to defeat a variety of villains and their proxies and to posit an alternative to revolutionary self-hatred. We learn from this journey that tradition and modernity can coexist and that traumatic memories need not repeat themselves endlessly. Instead, they can be revised and incorporated into narratives that celebrate the power of the disciplined imagination to imagine a better future.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040055

Authors: Enit Karafili Steiner

This essay explores Mary Shelley’s contribution to the political philosophy of children’s rights and its connection to duties-based justice by establishing a dialogue between Frankenstein and The Rights of Infants (1797). A little-studied treatise by Thomas Spence, Rights of Infants advances a proto-feminist stance that is not unlike Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s model in that it foregrounds duties from which rights can be extrapolated. Two points made by Spence inform this reading of Frankenstein. First, Spence’s text spotlights a neglected line of thought during the French Revolution, which, contrary to social contract theory, posits the child as the paradigmatic recipient of justice and familial life as the cornerstone for deliberations on justice. Second, Spence identified acts of conquest camouflaged as a fabled, non-existent consent between people and government by social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke. Shelley’s novel dramatizes these two points by taking infancy as the ground zero on which to think of justice, and then, incrementally exposing a logic of conquest through the concatenated deaths of William and Justine and the destruction of the inanimate female creature. The essay concludes that the novel stages a far-reaching interrogation of rights-based justice, thus extending a view of justice that has gained prominence in critiques of neoliberalism over the last half-century.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040054

Authors: Ubaid Khursheed Rayees Ahmad Bhat Anudeep Kaur Bedi

Anna Burns’ No Bones has extensively documented its depiction of trauma during the Troubles; less attention has been paid to the systematic mechanisms through which pervasive psychosocial harm is quietly administered and normalised. This article moves beyond readings of individual suffering to diagnose a collective condition, arguing that Burns constructs a veritable architecture of harm: a meticulously designed system operating not through overt aggression alone, but through the mundane, yet powerfully insidious, interplay of social forces governing everyday life. This synthesis reveals how these forces converge to produce what Achille Mbembe terms a death-world: a state of being where populations are subjected to conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead. Within this necropolitical landscape, the protagonist Amelia’s routines are dictated by shrinking spatial affordances, while incessant rumour functions as a policing mechanism that enforces social death long before physical death is a threat. This analysis demonstrates that harm is not an atmospheric byproduct of conflict, but the very logic of this architecture, which compels the community to participate in its own subjugation. Ultimately, by mapping this architecture, this article reframes Burns’ novel from a historical text of the Troubles into a trenchant meditation on the governance of populations under duress. It offers a vital framework for understanding how quiet harm is spatially engineered, a dynamic with profound relevance for contemporary studies of carceral geographies, algorithm-driven social control, and the politics of atmospheric violence. It posits Burns’ work as a crucial resource for theorising the invisible structures that shape and constrain modern life.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040053

Authors: Nam-lin Hur

Honmyōji Temple in Kumamoto preserves copies of four letters exchanged in the early 1620s between a father, Yŏ Ch’ŏn’gap, in Chosŏn, and his son, Yŏ Taenam (Nichiyō), in Japan, although one of the letters was never delivered. Both father and son were abducted to Japan during the Imjin War (1592–1598), but while the father was able to return home, the son was not. In the late 1610s, upon learning that his son, now the abbot of Honmyōji, was alive in Kumamoto, the father sought to contact him by letter. His efforts eventually succeeded, leading to an exchange of correspondence. These four letters, the only known instance of overseas communication between family members separated by Japan’s invasion of Chosŏn, provide valuable insight into the tragic fate of a family divided by war. Drawing on these documents, this article examines how a Korean boy was abducted during the Imjin War and later became the abbot of his captor’s temple. It also explores the father’s efforts to bring his son home and the reasons their hopes for reunion were never realized. Together, the letters bear witness to the dramatic transformation in the life of a young Korean boy who became a victim of war.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040052

Authors: Elizabeth Abele

In her fiction, Joan Didion crafted female protagonists who embodied the strange stirrings documented by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, as common among mid-century White, educated women. Didion’s protagonists are all daughters, wives, and mothers who come to realize their lives are built on empty compromises. However, in her late 20th-century novels, their awareness leads to actual changes: the Didion Women who confront the void in Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted find their lives impacted by the machinations of U.S. Cold War policies. These novels specifically trace the impact of American imperialism on wives and daughters at home—those that the policies claimed to protect. These protagonists, and their witnesses, refuse to be passive casualties. Their narration by an embedded professional female journalist adds weight to the journeys of these overlooked women. Through her protagonists of privilege, Didion unflinchingly documents the physical and psychological damages of patriarchy—both personal and political—presenting female models of awareness and resistance. This essay will examine Didion’s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted as the capstones of her woman-centered fiction, presenting detailed portraits of matrons who deliberately disentangle themselves from history.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15040051

Authors: Julyan Oldham

In Molly Keane’s 1934 novel Devoted Ladies, the young Irish character Piggy Browne is dismissed as a “fat, hungry virgin”, an insult that incites the text’s denouement. This article uses the figure of Piggy Browne to juxtapose virginity and fatness in Keane’s writing, asking how fat can inform our understanding of the single Irish woman in Keane. I set up both fat and virginity as relevant concerns to Keane’s work, drawing on a range of her fiction as well as writing about virginity, land, and time. Focussing on Piggy in Devoted Ladies demonstrates how the novel is interested in the emotional lives of women, however satirically. Moreover, ideas of virginity, fat, and hunger become useful ways of thinking about Piggy’s role in the ending of Devoted Ladies. Keane ultimately emphasizes a fall, not a culmination, concluding on a moment of agency, if not progress.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030050

Authors: Yixiao Sun

Millenarianism originated from apocalyptic literature in Judaism, emphasizing that the “Messiah” would establish a “millennial kingdom” on earth ruled by the Jews. This ideology became a theoretical weapon for Jews to resist imperial tyranny during classical antiquity and was later embraced by early Christian theology. By the early modern period, with the intense unfolding of the Reformation and social upheavals, the theory of the “millennial kingdom” re-emerged as a mainstream topic in Christian theology. Regarding the nature of the “millennial kingdom” and how it would be realized, early modern Christian factions split into two interpretive camps. One emphasized the spiritual attributes of the “millennial kingdom”, while the other stressed its material aspects, advocating the violent establishment of a political entity on earth ruled by Christians. These two distinct interpretive models ultimately converged on the issue of colonial expansion, transforming millenarianism into a theoretical tool to justify overseas expansion.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030049

Authors: Albrecht Classen

Medieval literature often seems to be a remote, irrelevant, incomprehensible world of narrative texts lost in heroic, religious, or courtly themes, limited to stories about King Arthur, courtly lovers, military heroes, and religious martyrs, saints, and prophets. In reality, as any expert can easily confirm, when we turn our full attention to pre-modern literature from across Europe (and also other parts of the world), we can often recognize the true extent to which poets utilized their narratives for spiritual, philosophical, religious, scientific, and medical explorations that have much to tell us today and prove to be deeply meaningful in a timeless manner. One key aspect, which was shared among virtually all medieval artists, poets, and theologians, consisted of the unique experience by an individual who is entitled through a physical opening to see into the depth or the height of all existence and can thus discover a wholly different world. Through this motif of the gaze, an entire epiphanic realization can set in, which thus quickly transforms the purely entertaining narrative medium into a narrative catalyst of profound spiritual experiences, helping the individual to gain inspiration from the Godhead (e.g., mysticism). Indeed, numerous times, medieval poets employed the motif of the visionary gaze, developed in very concrete terms, to trace and explain the process of perspicuity and accompanying acuity which ultimately leads to new intellectual, emotional, and religious understandings and experiences. While many intellectuals already embraced this notion of a visionary concept of spiritual comprehension, it might come as a surprise that secular and religious poets also operated quite intentionally with the concept of a hole in the wall or some other opening as a springboard for intellectual and spiritual experiences, directly drawing from the concepts of the optical sciences as understood at that time. Oddly but highly significantly, Christian and pagan notions tend to intersect in those narrative moments, particularly in late medieval literature, merging the visionary experience with the monstrous within human society, associating the gaze with the erotic and religious dimension.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030048

Authors: Nesrin Mengi

Through the process of modernization, Turkish literature transcends aesthetics to reflect sociological and cultural changes. The tensions between the individual and society, tradition and modernity, and religion that emerged with Westernization are particularly reflected in the novel. Religious discourse takes different forms at each historical threshold during the modernization process. During the Tanzimat, Servet-i Fünûn, Milli Edebiyat and Socialist Realist periods, it served as a defensive or critical reference point in the face of debates on modernization and Westernization. With the secular policies of the Republic, its public function transformed, evolving into an arena for cultural and moral debate, and it increased its visibility within the multiparty political structure after 1950. From the 1980s onwards, Islamic discourse became an artistic and ideological force in both the social and literary spheres. This article examines the stages of Islamic discourse in Turkish novels within a historical framework, arguing that religious representations are not merely elements reflecting social change, but also play an active role in the reconstruction of identity formation and narrative aesthetics. The study analyzes the functions of religious elements using a text-centered approach. The findings show that religion is not merely a theme in literary texts, but a living element that transforms alongside society, influences identity formation, and shapes narrative aesthetics.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030047

Authors: Zhuoyi Wang

This article reads the recent Chinese sci-fi blockbuster franchise The Wandering Earth (2019) and The Wandering Earth II (2023) as linked thought experiments about planetary survival as governance. It argues that the franchise operationalizes survival through administrative techniques that allocate life chances and format subjects for compliance, including selection policy, evaluative procedures, and computational judgment. Drawing on feminist social reproduction theory, affective and emotional labor scholarship, and critical posthumanism, the article shows how the films redistribute life-making work under catastrophe by routing care, sacrifice, and intergenerational continuity through gendered paternal figures. Fathers become the privileged conduits through which attachment is rendered socially legible as authorized labor, while other forms of care remain structurally secondary unless crisis forces their instrumental uptake. At the same time, the franchise is preoccupied with the limits of procedural governance. Across both installments, paternal attachment repeatedly appears as a governance problem: it cannot be fully stabilized as procedure yet becomes actionable at system stress points. The survival regime thus depends on a recurrent sequence of emergency recruitment followed by retroactive legitimation, whether through official affect, selective recognition, containment, or memorialization.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030046

Authors: Traci S. O’Brien

This introductory essay revisits the concept of “Prague German Literature,” focusing on the Prague Circle’s engagement with enduring humanistic values amid early twentieth-century upheaval. While Franz Kafka is one of the most well-known authors of the twentieth century, this essay (and the Special Issue) highlights lesser-known Czech German authors and engages with the criticisms of the definitional boundaries of terms like “circle” and “school.” Drawing on recent scholarship, it situates these writers within Prague’s multilingual, multiethnic context and challenges postmodern approaches that reduce the literature to power discourse. Instead, it advocates for renewed attention to moral ambiguity, cultural mediation, and universal human concerns. Revisiting foundational scholars such as Max Brod, H. G. Adler, and Margarita Pazi, the essay also engages contemporary critics who propose more nuanced models of literary affiliation. Ultimately, this essay argues for the continued relevance of these authors in fostering intercultural dialog and reflecting on the (in)stability of values in times of crisis, framing the contributions of this Special Issue.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030045

Authors: Brian Hillman

Jewish thinkers and artists have used Midrash as a framework for exploring the entanglement of cultural inheritance and social justice projects. Marian D. Moore’s (1956–) poetry collection Louisiana Midrash (2019) exemplifies this dynamic. It blends Moore’s cultural landscape, Shreveport and New Orleans, Louisiana, African History and the Biblical and Midrashic literary traditions. Moore’s unique poetic voice, in the context of twenty-first century Midrash grounded in Jewish tradition, explores the intersection of African American history and Jewishness. Moore’s Midrashic poetry integrates African American and Jewish traditional biblical interpretation with the cultural reality of post—Katrina Louisiana. This article will discuss several of Moore’s poems in the context of her Black poetic Midrashic framework. The analysis illustrates how Louisiana Midrash shows the flexibility of Midrash as a creative genre and literary form, as it grows beyond a normative Jewish framework and becomes open to a multitude of voices and perspectives.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030044

Authors: Trent Hergenrader

This article argues that students inspired by stories set in enormous open-world videogames can use a combination of free interactive fiction (IF) tools and tabletop role-playing game open gaming licenses (OGLs) to simulate stories that allow their players to customize their characters based on their play style preferences, and to face obstacles that require virtual dice rolls where the player may succeed or fail. This provides them with an experience similar to writing for a major videogame franchise and go through the thought processes required when writing interactive narratives.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030043

Authors: Mariusz Pisarski

The goal of the article is to demonstrate the common threads and methods of studying digital storytelling as a unified, second-order aesthetic code. Just as the category of translation, when applied to digital literature, was expanded into a more complex set of methods known as media translation, the article applies similar logic to the notion of intertextuality and proposes an augmented form of “digital“ or “media intertextuality“. Games, interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, story generators, and other born-digital forms are all “texts” that share evolutionary poetics and intertextual strategies extending beyond language into multimodal, procedural, and embodied affordances. Drawing on the concept of structural quotation and semiotic calques, this article suggests that intertextuality should operate across multiple extra-linguistic registers: visual, procedural, and embodied. Neither evolutionary continuity nor broad intertextuality have been sufficiently emphasized in current game studies outside the literary angle. In several examples and case studies—from Zork II to World of Warcraft—this paper demonstrates how repetition with difference, brought about by intertextual links, generates evolutionary continuity and intertextual richness. In this dialogical ecology, AAA blockbusters and experimental works are worth studying together, even if, within the discourse of digital entertainment, they are currently at war. The former push the boundaries of expressive possibility, whereas the latter accrue cultural capital by reworking and critiquing shared codes.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030042

Authors: Stanley E. Gontarski

Surrealism persistently resisted its own historicization, defining itself not as a literary or artistic movement but as an activity of the mind aimed at total liberation. This essay re-examines surrealism’s internal contradictions: its rejection of literature alongside its dependence on literary institutions; its commitment to psychic freedom alongside political orthodoxy; and its hostility to authorship alongside the production of canonical works. Drawing on manifestos, journals, performance practices, and postwar critical reception, the essay situates surrealism at the fault line between modernism, Dada, and later poststructuralist theory. It argues that surrealism’s most enduring legacy lies less in its aesthetic products than in its reconfiguration of cultural authority among artist, artwork, and reader, a redistribution that continues to shape contemporary literary, media, and performance studies.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030041

Authors: Sonja Tiernan

Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926) was a significant contributor to the Celtic Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century; however, her literature differed immensely from that of her male counterparts. Gore-Booth’s writings had a prevailing feminist message, while her later works were manifestly concerned with the study of sexuality and the deconstruction of gender. Gore-Booth’s literature remained vastly overlooked and undervalued until recent times. In the twenty-first century, her poetry and plays are experiencing somewhat of a resurgence. Amid Gore-Booth’s modest literary revival, this article examines her writings from a fresh perspective. Tracing Gore-Booth’s social reform work and later devotion to the New Age religion of Theosophy, it is evident that her writings increasingly endorsed celibacy. This article will highlight how Gore-Booth advocated for celibacy as a radical practice with the potential to dismantle the social construction of gender and of presumed heterosexuality. Notably, Gore-Booth only advocated for heterosexual celibacy, placing same-sex relationships as the ideal, especially lesbian partnerships. This research centers on readings of Gore-Booth’s lesser-known writings including a neglected play Fiametta, her theological writings and the journal Urania which clearly express her revolutionary ideas.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030040

Authors: Joachim Schiedermair

The article has two objectives: It begins by noting that, in memory studies, indexicality has thus far played a role primarily in the analysis of photographs. Central to this was Roland Barthes’ insight that photography should be read not only as an iconic sign but also as an indexical sign: a photograph touches us not only through what it shows, i.e., not only as a pictorial representation of its referent, but also through the fact that it is an imprint of light, causing it to function like a trace in the snow. While the insight into the indexical quality of photography has been extremely fruitful, it is surprising that other indexical signs (such as shadows or echoes) have received no attention in the discussion of memory studies. The first objective of this essay is to make a start on this, and it does so in dialogue with a Norwegian comic book. In Steffen Kverneland’s Skygger (Shadows), family memories of the German occupation of Norway play a decisive role. Most studies of World War II in contemporary literature focus on how historical events are represented. Kverneland takes a different approach. He is not interested in the representation of memories but in the function of remembering. He relates memories of World War II to current crises and to the aesthetics of his artistic work. The second objective of this essay is to analyse the comic, paying close attention to the various dimensions of indexicality.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030039

Authors: Mark DiMauro

Saitama, the titular hero of ONE’s One Punch Man, is a man so absurdly powerful that nothing, and no one, can stand against him. This limitless ability, rather than acting to make a superhero idol of Saitama, has instead reduced his psychological state to that of extreme nihilistic apathy. It is not until Saitama begins to unlock other aspects of his life, including friendship and community, that he begins to see there is more to life than strength. Working within the satirical bounds of the text, which skewers everything from false fulfillment in accolades to false friends to just about every superhero and manga trope in between, Saitama eventually reengages with his life and becomes far more heroic because of it. In the Overview, the text discusses the manga’s origin and explains some of the satirical jabs. In the Heroic Journey, the article takes you through Saitama’s past and current mental state. In the Super Takeaway, the life lesson Saitama’s story can teach us is that even in the face of boredom and a world in which work itself feels obsolete, there remain ways to overcome apathy so long as we are willing to find them for ourselves.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030038

Authors: Amy J. Ransom

During the years of the so-called Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975), with its economic recovery after World War II, France witnessed the development of a technologized consumer society and a technocratic approach to public planning, which fostered a futuristic outlook and a boom in paperback publishing. A major success story of this era was the Éditions Fleuve Noir science-fiction series, Anticipation, to which popular genre author Maurice Limat contributed numerous novels. Although marketed as science fiction and set far in the future and in outer space, Limat’s novels featuring the Chevalier Bruno Coqdor resemble more often those of a knight-errant from medieval romance. These works of space fantasy express medieval nostalgia but also engage the massive social changes occurring in France during this period while extrapolating France’s survival in the distant future.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030037

Authors: Kaushik Tekur

This article examines the revival of the Romantic Ballad in contemporary anglophone writing through Vanavil K. Ravi’s The Ballad of the Warrior-Girl, which reimagines the Tamil folk figure, Kuyili and her role in the Sivagangai rebellion, a Romantic-era anti-colonial uprising in South India. In retelling this folk memory, Ravi mobilizes a Romantic-era form to recast an instance of a local uprising, rife with caste dynamics, into a national and globalized narrative aligned with neo-nationalist storytelling conventions. By transforming a lower-caste, female militant in a local language into a Hindu, pan-Indian icon of patriotic martyrdom, Ravi’s ballad participates in a larger trend of globalized translations. I situate the text within intersecting histories of Romanticisms, balladic traditions, and the global circulation of literary forms. Through this, I outline what I call the ‘global ballad’ as distinct from the ‘globalized ballad’. While the latter flattens cultural difference into consumable cosmopolitanism, the former centers opacity and untranslatability across rhizomatic relationalities. I show how reading literary texts alongside different critical traditions is a productive way to counter the exoticized, neoliberal circulation of literature in translation.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15030036

Authors: Alexandra-Monica Toma Mihaela-Alina Ifrim

This article examines Romanian internet memes as cultural micro-narratives that encode social critique, identity negotiation, and emotional response through compressed, multimodal storytelling. Using a mixed-method approach, the study integrates qualitative narrative analysis with quantitative sentiment data drawn from the RoMEMESv2 corpus, comprising 983 Romanian-language memes. The analysis identifies recurrent narrative roles and plot structures adapted from Propp’s morphology and applied to digital contexts, revealing archetypal roles, such as the slacker hero, the bureaucratic villain, the domestic guardian, and the trickster. From a quantitative point of view, the corpus exhibits a dominant negative sentiment, particularly within political memes, which combine systemic critique with affective ambivalence. These findings distinguish Romanian memes from datasets in other languages, suggesting that negativity functions not as deviance, but as a culturally specific narrative and emotional resource. Multimodal analysis demonstrates how visual and textual elements operate through anchorage, intertextuality, and symbolic compression, so as to construct narrative messages within single frames. The study argues that Romanian memes function as digital folklore: they narrate social frustration and institutional distrust through irony, repetition, and archetypal condensation, offering insights into the emotional and narrative logic of post-communist digital culture.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020035

Authors: Ingeborg Rebecca Mjelde Helleberg Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt

The aim of this article is to provide a new theoretical and methodological framework for analyzing the ethical, relational, and normative dimensions of transgenerational memory work, taking a comparative close reading of two Norwegian second-generation Holocaust family memoirs, Irene Levin’s Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust (2020) and Bjørn Westlie’s Fars krig (2008), as its case in point. Both narratives are simultaneously biographies, autobiographies, and historiographies, and they mediate between family memory and national memory. The authors position themselves as second-generation descendants, addressing and being addressed by their parents, and as Holocaust researchers, addressing and being addressed by a public audience. Departing from the theoretical perspective of relational life writing and Judith Butler’s concepts “scene of address” and “frameworks of recognition”, this comparative literary analysis of rhetorical situations, genres, and modes of narrating discusses the author-narrators’ engagement with their parents’ silence and writings and reveals how personal histories intersect with collective reckoning. By attending to the relational and performative aspects of storytelling, this article highlights how postgeneration literature enacts ethical reflection, recognition, and accountability.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020034

Authors: Joseph J. Darowski

The X-Men are a superhero team published by Marvel Comics. Initially marketed as a team of teenage superheroes, the franchise eventually began emphasizing the “mutant metaphor” as a narrative device that differentiated it from other comic books. This pivot towards highlighting the empathy displayed by the X-Men towards others and the intolerance their foes have for anyone who is different became defining characteristics of the franchise that have carried forward for decades. As the X-Men moved from a somewhat generic franchise to one that framed its heroes as symbolic outsiders, a wider and deeper fanbase embraced the series. Through complex storylines, symbolic metaphors, and nuanced character development, the series implicitly and often explicitly encourages empathy. With a thematic focus on concepts such as marginalization and otherness, the X-Men franchise promotes tolerance as heroic and condemns prejudice as villainous. The message for readers is that empathy, not optic blasts or the ability to control the weather, is what makes the X-Men heroic.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020033

Authors: R. Lyle Skains

Truly impactful innovations are developed by outsiders out of a sense of need; those that rise to mainstream recognition and acceptance, however, are colonized by dominant hegemonies. This paper traces cycles of innovation and colonization in literature, publishing, and computing as ancestral domains to electronic literature, which has been subject to the same gendered and othered frontier-colonization cycles that dominated its forebears. Elit was a new frontier for writing and publishing, a strong site of marginalized creativity, until it was codified and colonized into publishing and academia by the dominant class: women could create, but men had the actual and cultural capital to create and develop the structures to platform their work into the dominant discourse. This paper analyzes how feminist and marginalized digital writers resist colonization of their innovations and erasure of their innovations by hacking platforms, subverting narrative conventions, and amplifying hidden voices. The paper examines elements of innovation-colonization cycles in elit and adjacent practices (indie games, fanfic), showcases Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s algorithmically-generated epoetry as a site of subversion, and presents fanfic community Archive of Our own as a preliminary model of value-sensitive and inclusive community design. It argues for the development of feminist-first platforms—digital spaces that actively resist the structural colonization of marginalized storytelling.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020032

Authors: Vincent Barletta

This article rereads Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens in the Odyssey through the lens of sound, arguing that the episode stages a foundational tension between knowledge and alterity in Western thought. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the “temptation of temptation,” the essay shows how Odysseus’s famous stratagem—hearing the Sirens while bound to the mast—models a form of mediated proximity that allows sound to be collected without ethical exposure. Close readings of Homeric Greek, especially the Sirens’ claim to knowledge of ὅσσα γένηται, reveal that their song gestures not merely toward retrospective epic knowledge but toward natality and coming-into-being, a dimension Homer pointedly withholds. By placing the Sirens alongside early colonial soundscapes and modern reflections on cartography, the article argues that Western listening practices privilege mastery over vulnerability. Against this tradition, the Sirens’ unheard song marks a suppressed alternative: listening as openness, risk, and ethical relation.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020031

Authors: Chauntee’ Schuler Irving

Our Fairytales: The Cost of Migration, National Myth, and Creative Labor in Unser Deutschlandmärchen is a performance analysis that examines lived cultural narratives through the lens of the Maxim Gorki Theatre’s production of Dinçer Güçyeter’s autobiographical novel Unser Deutschlandmärchen. The impact on Turkish migrants in Germany and their descendants is explored through an investigation of primary production texts, migration and diaspora literature, and Turkish–German cultural commentary. A discussion of fairy tales and national mythos reveals the material contributions migrant communities often make to host nations through systemic endurance and cultural enrichment, frequently at the cost of forgoing “happily ever after.” The reformation of the traditional fairy tale recasts Turkish–German migrants as modern fairy-tale heroes who generate counter-cultural narratives through collective, intergenerational, and ethnographically inherited memory.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020030

Authors: Suze van der Poll

This article examines the reshaping of the period of the Second World War in Cecilie Løveid’s play Maria Q, a drama centered on the enigmatic historical figure of Mara Vasilyevna Pasetchnikova, better known as Maria Quisling, the second wife of Vidkun Quisling, who was Norway’s fascist prime minister during that war. Drawing on studies of historical fiction and intertextuality, this article aims to show how Cecilie Løveid employed the genre of historical drama but transformed it so that she could offer her reimagining of the war period in Norway to a present-day audience. I read Maria Q as an experimental historical drama in which Løveid not only used her freedom as a writer of dramatic fiction to combine fact with imagination but simultaneously incorporated various texts and genres as sources to further her own multifaceted reimagining of Maria Quisling as a complex character. As I will demonstrate, by foregrounding dialogism as her central dimension, Løveid rejected a unitary, monologic and authoritarian conception both of recent Norwegian history and of Maria Quisling’s role in it.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020029

Authors: Arthur Viorel Tulus

Personal experiences, even when recounted as autobiographical novels, can deepen our understanding of the past, as they present a lived history of real events. In the novel De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years), Iosef Mendel Hechter, using the literary pseudonym Mihail Sebastian, recounts his experience as a young Jewish intellectual, born and raised in Romania, in a society divided by ethnic tensions driven by ultra-nationalism and anti-Semitism. Our study aims to critically examine, through a historical perspective, the socio-political realities depicted by the author, the collective mentality, and the typological stereotypes of his fictional characters. These reflect the actual choices and paths taken by Romanian Jews in their responses to the anti-Semitic pressures of the era. We believe that adopting this less frequently explored perspective will enrich both our understanding of that period and the depth of the novel itself. Thus, autobiographical literature and history engage in a meaningful dialogue, where microhistory, represented by the individual experience of the main character, Ștefan Valeriu, can verify or refine macrohistory, particularly the social, political, and economic context in which interwar Romanian society developed.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020028

Authors: Francesca Medaglia

Desire, a transformative force, is one of contemporary serial narratives’ most intricate and multifaceted dimensions. Far from being reducible to a mere representation of sexual attraction, desire in television seriality operates as a prism through which to explore issues of intimacy, identity, and power. This paper seeks to analyze how desire is staged and problematised within a set of emblematic series that have significantly shaped contemporary cultural imagination. Grey’s Anatomy explores the entanglement of desire with professional life, emotional fragility, and collective trauma, constructing narratives where eros intersects with affective labour and the negotiation of identity within high-pressure contexts. Sex and the City proposes a very different model, placing female desire at the centre as a space of autonomy, experimentation, and confrontation with the normative frameworks of late capitalist society. By contrast, The Handmaid’s Tale reimagines desire within a dystopian theocracy, assigning it an overtly political function: here, erotic impulses and affective attachments become acts of resistance against systemic repression and biopolitical control. More recently, Sex Education embodies a cultural shift, presenting desire through a plural and inclusive lens that embraces diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and relational practices. These case studies, when viewed collectively, reveal how television series rework cultural codes of sexuality and intimacy, producing new imaginaries of the body, pleasure, and identity. In this perspective, serial narratives emerge as key cultural laboratories, reproducing and challenging dominant ideologies of desire while offering audiences opportunities for recognition, critique, and affective engagement beyond the screen.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020027

Authors: Astrid Ensslin Kübra Aksay Sebastian R. Richter

This article offers the first systematic analytical methodology to understand distant play as a multidimensional, ludoliterary, critical, and philosophical practice of engaging with so-called idle or semi-idle games. It uses Anselm Pyta’s The Longing, a so far underexplored semi-idle, slow game that challenges traditional gameplay paradigms through its metareferential, bookish, philosophical, and contemplative structure, as a case study. Our central argument is that The Longing deploys antimimetic temporal mechanics, interpassive forms of bookish play, and ideas of existentialist resistance to explore themes of time, agency, and existential longing, thereby offering a reflective space for dealing with neo-liberal, post-pandemic, polycrisis-stricken angst. To come to terms with the multidisciplinary complexities of the game, our paper adopts a triadic analytical methodology interweaving insights from postclassical, medium-specific narratology, platform-comparative literary analysis, and existentialist philosophy. This combined approach transcends existing ludoliterary frameworks and accounts for divergent forms of play. Our first focus is the game’s multiscalar temporal layering and the strategies it requires from players to “ludify” antimimetic frictions between those layers. This is followed by an examination of how the game constructs a bookish player by interweaving ludexical processes of reading, unreading, dis-reading, and writing (in) books and other printed documents. Finally, we turn to the game’s complex interpassive relationships between player, player-character, and game world, highlighting in particular the role of walking, collecting, building, and searching as acts of catharsis and rebellion, and examining failure as a valid ludic alternative to survival and happiness. Ultimately, our analysis renders distant play as a form of parasocial resistance, which in The Longing manifests as an affective and philosophically fine-grained combination of more-than-human relationality, care, and relief vis-a-vis the nothingness of lost hope. The game thus offers a new form of e-literary engagement, placing books and their “unnatural,” transmediated affordances front and center while questioning the capitalist undercurrents of contemporary literary media and critiquing a culture of acceleration.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020026

Authors: Fae McNamara

Throughout her oeuvre, Mary Lavin (1912–1996) engages with the nuances of “celibate moments” within masculine life cycles. This periodic sexlessness is often expressed through the complexities of strained or upended marital unions, as in “A Happy Death”, as well as the homosocial and fraternal relationships depicted in “The Joy Ride” and “The Becker Wives.” Within these overlooked narrative spaces, we can consider the relational implications of sexlessness, singleness and marital struggle on interpersonal relationships and the intimacies of masculine sexual identity in post-independent Ireland. In Lavin’s work, the short story is not a conclusive form, and celibacy is not always a permanent practice or observed behaviour. Instead, celibacy can be transient, often silent but equally charged with generative or destructive potential. This article will theorise male celibacy as part of Lavin’s commitment to silence and restraint and include this as part of her refusal of conventional romantic closures. Celibacy in this case takes on a significant positionality within interpersonal characterisations, not merely as a passive symptom of unhappiness or a given consequence of marital decline or spousal death, but as an active and at times frustrated response to hegemonic expectation. To conceive of masculine celibacy in these works, this article considers how celibacy functions within domestic short fiction and Lavin’s conceptualisation of everyday estranged intimacies.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020024

Authors: Cherrie Kwok

This article examines some postcolonial dimensions of a global literary movement in the twenty-first century called Neo-Decadence. It begins by highlighting the artistic and political preoccupations of the movement within the context of the century’s turn toward authoritarianism and late capitalism amidst an increasingly hyper-digital landscape. Then, it examines two short stories set in Iran and Peru in order to stress the emergence of what the article calls the Neo-Decadent “Real” (an anti-realism that bears witness to our century’s late capitalist and digital saturations); Fugitive Aestheticism (an aestheticism that, in emphasizing taste, touch, and smell, escapes permanent or totalizing capitalist capture); and Neo-Decadent Sexuality (queer circuits of desire that play with the consumptive impulses of late capitalism). In the process, it demonstrates how Neo-Decadence overlaps with, but also departs from, fin de siècle European decadence. It concludes by examining how Neo-Decadence might expand our on-going understanding of decadence more broadly, as well as the movement’s limitations with respect to its relationship to academia, the environment, and women.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020025

Authors: Oluwaseyi B. Ayeni Oluwajuwon M. Omigbodun Oluwakemi T. Onibalusi Isabella Musinguzi-Karamukyo

This study explores water as memory and as method in African thought. It shows how rivers, rain, and oceans act not only as sources of life but also as teachers who carry a story, restore balance, and reveal moral truth. Drawing from Yoruba, Akan, Igbo, southern African, Kenyan and Afro-Atlantic traditions, this paper presents water as archive and as oracle, holding the past while speaking to the present. This article develops the idea of hydro epistemology, understood here as a way of knowing through flow, renewal, and relationship. In this framework, knowledge is created through ritual engagement with water, transmitted through oral memory and ecological observation, tested against environmental response and revised when conditions change. Water is treated as a witness, mediator and guide, rather than a passive resource. By setting these traditions alongside global discussions on water governance, nature-based ecological care and decolonial environmental ethics, this paper argues that African water imagination offers more than symbolism. It proposes a practical philosophy in which caring for water and caring for life are the same act. To listen to water is to remember, to restore and to recover a way of living that renews both people and land.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020023

Authors: Heming H. Gujord

In his 17 novels, Kjartan Fløgstad (born 1944) has analysed the traces of WWII and possible continuations of right-wing ideology into post-war politics and ideology. In my article, I focus on four novels: Dalen Portland, U3, Grense Jakobselv, and Due og drone (Dove and Drone). Dalen Portland and U3 were published in the context of the Cold War, whereas Grense Jakobselv and Due og drone were published in a context in which history was claimed to have reached its end after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fløgstad has opposed the end-of-history thesis since it was introduced in the influential study by Francis Fukuyama in 1992. From Fløgstad’s perspective, history has reached a dead end, as democratic ideals are being challenged and economic disparities are widening—even within the welfare states of Northern Europe. In all the novels being discussed, Fløgstad has consistently focused on factual and possible interlinks between right-wing figures of thought and stakeholders of political and economic power. Thus, the only consistent superpower, the United States, has also been an object of Fløgstad’s interest. The importance of the United States is even indicated in the well-chosen title for the English translation of Dalen Portland: Dollar Road. The interpretation of Fløgstad’s novels is simultaneously an interpretation of history. Given the threats to democratic ideals that have emerged in the 2020s, Fløgstad’s analysis has demonstrated notable foresight.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020022

Authors: Zay Dale

This essay examines how textiles operate as violent aesthetic tools in the formation of Black existence during American slavery. While the American plantation relied on cotton production and the regulation of what the enslaved would wear, enslaved people transformed these fibers into instruments of refusal, creativity, and ontological reclamation. A study of textiles during American slavery exposes how the violence of enslavement was lived on the surface of the body through clothing. Reading art and runaway advertisements alongside narratives by Olaudah Equiano, John Brown, Booker T. Washington, and Harriet Jacobs, this article reveals how the enslaved resisted and rebelled against the textiles they were forced to wear. Bringing together visual art, runaway slave advertisements, and slave narratives, I argue that textiles form a crucial archive for understanding Black rebellion and resistance. This essay situates historical acts of resistance through textiles; it is through clothing that enslaved people articulated a radical insistence on their presence, thus turning fiber into flesh.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020021

Authors: Kun Qian

This article examines labor relations in China’s entertainment live-streaming, where the state and private companies jointly regulate desire to secure political control and economic profit. Using Hao Wu’s documentary People’s Republic of Desire as a case study, I analyze how physical and affective labor are converted into emotional commodities circulated across platforms. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the “libidinal economy,” I argue that while desire carries the potential to disrupt economic structures, it is ultimately absorbed into sustaining the political-economic status quo in contemporary China. Moreover, engaging Thomas Lamarre’s notion of “platformativity,” I further show how video platforms interweave the political, economic, and psychic to sustain a “tittytainment” economy that masks ongoing labor exploitation. The rise of live-streaming thus offers a critical lens for understanding the shifting relations among capital, labor, technology, and state governance in the digital age.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15020020

Authors: Diana Vela

This article examines the representation of women’s madness in the novel Misiá Señora by Albalucía Ángel to argue that the protagonist’s diagnosis of madness and subsequent institutionalization serve as a social construct, lack a scientific foundation and function as mechanisms of social discipline. I contend that the psychiatric procedures to which she is subjected operate less as therapeutic interventions than as punitive correctives aimed at regulating her defiance of patriarchal authority and her transgression of normative gendered behavior. This essay begins by reviewing scholarship on the novel that does not question the mental health diagnosis attributed to the main character. It then undertakes a close reading of the protagonist’s institutionalization to demonstrate how Ángel’s novel reveals madness as a device to neutralize women who resist socially prescribed roles. The analysis draws on feminist critiques of the “psy” disciplines—particularly those that interrogate the gendered construction of mental illness and the historical role of these disciplines in policing women’s bodies, emotions, and conduct. The conclusions highlight that, in Misiá Señora, the protagonist’s pathologization functions as a disciplinary tool that reinforces hegemonic gender norms by framing dissent as clinical deviance and justifying coercive forms of control.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15010019

Authors: Kathleen P. Costello-Sullivan

This article examines Norah Hoult’s 1929 short story “Miss Jocelyn,” from her short story collection Poor Women!, as an intertextual response to James Joyce’s representation of single women in the short story “Eveline” included in his landmark 1914 collection Dubliners. Drawing on Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey’s work on singlehood, I suggest that Hoult challenges the dichotomy of “married” versus “premarried” that Joyce critiques in “Eveline”. At the same time, Hoult’s portrait of Miss Jocelyn powerfully engages the material and social factors that so often condition single women’s lives. She considers not only Miss Joceyln’s awareness and loss of her former independence, but also the ways that ageism compromises her options and agency. While both stories examine the disempowerment of women, “Miss Joceyln” highlights the loss of agency, the financial dependency, and the societal dismissal to which celibate older women were often subject in early twentieth-century Ireland and Britain, thus treating celibacy as a “third space”—an option not proffered in Joyce’s work.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15010018

Authors: Lidia Mihaela Necula

This article explores how Herta Müller and Paul Bailey transform the apparatus of state bordering, i.e., passports, permits and catechisms, into metaphors for an interior struggle between flight and belonging. In The Passport, The Land of Green Plums and Bailey’s Kitty & Virgil, emigration is portrayed not as departure alone but as a prolonged contest between the body that moves and the spirit that lingers. Those who cross borders geographically remain anchored, often painfully, in the mental and moral landscapes of the home they leave behind. The paper examines how documents, bodies, and languages become shifting frontier zones where identity is repeatedly issued and withdrawn, shaped by the pressures of memory, exile, and biopolitical control. Müller’s vision, written from within Romania’s history, and Bailey’s, refracted through an English consciousness yet partly set in Romania, converge in a poetics of witness that treats exile as both wound and testimony. Ultimately, these works suggest that identity survives in the liminal space between motion and remembrance where thought halts at its own threshold, memory traces its faint watermark, and the self bears its unspoken credential.

Humanities doi: 10.3390/h15010017

Authors: Lina Ruth Harder David Jhave Johnston Scott Rettberg Sérgio Galvão Roxo Haoyuan Tang

The Extended Digital Narrative (XDN) research project explores how experimental creative practice with emerging technologies generates critical insights into algorithmic narrativity—the intersection of human narrative understanding and computational data processing. This article presents five case studies demonstrating that direct engagement with AI and Extended Reality platforms is essential for humanities research on new genres of digital storytelling. Lina Harder’s Hedy Lamar Chatbot examines how generative AI chatbots construct historical personas, revealing biases in training data and platform constraints. Scott Rettberg’s Republicans in Love investigates text-to-image generation as a writing environment for political satire, documenting rapid changes in AI aesthetics and content moderation. David Jhave Johnston’s Messages to Humanity demonstrates how Runway’s Act-One enables solo filmmaking, collapsing traditional production hierarchies. Haoyuan Tang’s video game project reframes LLM integration by prioritizing player actions over dialogue, challenging assumptions about AI’s role in interactive narratives. Sérgio Galvão Roxo’s Her Name Was Gisberta employs Virtual Reality for social education against transphobia, utilizing perspective-taking techniques for empathy development. These projects demonstrate that practice-based research is not merely artistic production but a vital methodology for understanding how AI and XR platforms shape—and are shaped by—human narrative capacities.