This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many r...
This paper is a preliminary attempt to bring to the fore some questions and issues regarding the role of habits in aesthetics. Indeed, much attention has recently been given to habits across a wide range of fields of inquiry: philosophers turn to the...
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&r...
This paper examines Carl Dennis’s secularized religious visions in his Pulitzer-winning poetry collection, Practical Gods (2001). Dennis’s secularized religious visions can be quite understandable in the context of the ascending trends of...
While concepts of remoteness have long conditioned the fabulation of alterity, remoteness is not a quality ascribable to distant places and strange peoples “out there”. No one is by nature “remote”. Building from this proposit...
In early modern Italy, lyric poets of spiritual verse experimented with engaging and depicting the divine Word in novel ways. They aestheticized bodies, including that of Christ, and they imagined eroticized encounters between themselves and the Word...
In their different languages, codes of expression, practices and worldviews, art and religion share a reflexive intention to symbolize the chaos, suffering and ambivalence of the real. In particular, the aesthetic programme of Christianity has sought...
This article reimagines Hispanidad as a flexible cultural repertoire rather than a fixed ideology, examining how Francoism, after 1945, staged official doctrine as public spectacle that then served as “evidence” of its own legitimacy. Thr...
General George Armstrong Custer remains one of the most iconic and mythologized figures in the history of the American West. His infamous defeat at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn largely defines his legacy; historical scholarship and popular r...
Naturalism, as a movement and genre, was heavily influenced by the work of Émile Zola, particularly by his essay, Le roman expérimental (1880). However, despite Zola’s strong influence, Naturalism was also significantly influenced...
Disgust occupies a particular space in Buddhism where repulsive aspects of the human body are visualized and reflected upon in contemplative practices. The Indian tradition of aesthetics also recognizes disgust as one of the basic human emotions that...
This paper presents a conceptual framework for using “convivial greenstreets” (CG) as a resource for climate adaptation. When applied consistently, CG can become an emerging green practice with a positive impact on urban adaptation to climate change:...
The publication of Richard Wilhelm’s German translation of the Daodejing in 1911 ignited a “Daoist enthusiasm” in German literary circles, offering spiritual solace to a generation disillusioned by World War I. This article explores...
While reports of the death of literature are greatly exaggerated, reports of the decline of Aestheticism, New Criticism, and the printed word are not. Literature as a critique of society is alive today, but to survive tomorrow in any form it will nee...
Associating autonomy with art has long been viewed with suspicion, but autonomous signifying agency may be attributed to literary discourse without lapsing into decontextualized aestheticism or neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity. Through literary...
The early encounters between Buddhism and Christianity in China were primarily characterized by mutual exclusivity and competition. By the Republic of China era, both traditions faced mounting pressures—Buddhism under the impact of modernizatio...
This article examines how the same heritage or revival site can produce both welcoming and hostile atmospheres depending on the cohort, yielding selectively permeable environments that enable some groups while constraining others. Climatic volatility...
This text is a critical interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s theory in the context of the contemporary situation in art and culture. Benjamin’s innovative method of analysis and key concepts in art theory and their simultaneous research an...
Fin-de-siècle decadence—marked by symbolism, dandyism, aesthetic withdrawal, and defiance of bourgeois norms—has long been reimagined beyond its original European contours. Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle...
Early modern theologians often cast female curiosity as both a moral flaw and an epistemic transgression. Aware of this suspicion, Teresa of Ávila professed to have renounced such dangerous impulses in her youth. Yet the persistent presence of...
The image of the Apsara, a celestial dancer in Cambodian myth, is closely associated with Cambodian cultural preservation practices like Cambodian classical dance. The Apsara, its aesthetic features and its association with Cambodian cultural preserv...