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Humanities
Number of Followers: 11  Open Access journalISSN (Print) 2076-0787 Published by MDPI  [258 journals]
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- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 36: Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage:
Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of
Dénètem Touam Bona
Authors: Geoffroy de Laforcade
First page: 36
Abstract: Afropean anthropologist, philosopher, and art curator Dénètem Touam Bona is an original “border thinker” and “crosser” of geographic and conceptual boundaries working within a tradition of Caribbean historical poetics, notably represented by Édouard Glissant. He explores ideas of “fugue” and “refuge” in light of the experience of maroons or escaped slaves, key actors of the simultaneous expansion of freedom and industrial-scale chattel slavery in the Americas. In “Freedom as Marronage” (2015), Neill Roberts defines freedom itself as perpetual flight, and locates its very origins in the liminal and transitional spaces of slave escape, offering a perspective on modernity that gives voice to hunted fugitives, defiant of its ecology, enclosures, and definition, and who were ultimately excised from its archive. Touam Bona’s “cosmo-poetics” excavates marronage as a mode of invention, subterfuge and utopian projection that revisits its history and representation; sacred, musical, ecological, and corporeal idioms; and alternative forms of community, while also inviting contemporary parallels with the “captives” of the global border regime, namely fugitives, nomads, refugees, and asylum seekers who perpetually evade norms, controls, and domestication. He deploys the metaphor of the liana, a long-stemmed tropical vine that climbs and twines through dense forests, weaving relation in defiance of predation, to evoke colonized and displaced peoples’ subterranean evasion of commodification, classification, control, cultural erasure, and ecological annihilation. This article frames his work within an Afro-diasporic history and transnational cultural criticism that envisions fugitivity and exilic spaces as dissonant forms of resistance to the coloniality of power, and their relevance to understanding racialization, representations of the past, and narratives of freedom and belonging across borders.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-05-03
DOI: 10.3390/h12030036
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 3 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 37: Productive Psychoses: Views on Terrorism
and Politics in Homeland
Authors: Janna Houwen
First page: 37
Abstract: In the eight seasons of Showtime’s television show Homeland, leading character Carrie suffers from a bipolar disorder which repeatedly results in psychotic episodes. During these psychotic breakdowns, her grip on reality is disturbed by delusions. However, her psychotic disposition also leads to abilities and insights that make her a valuable agent in international secret agencies such as the CIA. This essay examines how the productivity of Carrie’s psychoses can be related to the political, military-industrial order within which she operates as a spy fighting terrorism and other threats to national and international security. What does the fact that a person suffering from psychoses is able to comprehend complex international political processes tell us about these processes and the context in which they occur' To answer this question, I turn to two scholars, both of whom have theorized subjectivity in relation to psychosis: psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosopher Mauricio Lazzarato. The radically different notions of Lacan and Lazzarato lead to different interpretations of Homeland. However, although Lazzarato is a critical opponent of Lacanian psychoanalysis, I demonstrate that Lacan’s psychoanalytical ideas and Lazzarato’s machine theories can to some extent be read as complementary in an analysis of Homeland, for what the two distinct theorists have in common is that they both relate subjectivity to sign systems—to the emergence and assignment of meaning, as well as to the suspension and absence thereof. This paper argues that the psychoses of Homeland’s lead character produce political meanings because of the condition’s specific relation to meaninglessness.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-05-04
DOI: 10.3390/h12030037
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 3 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 38: Conserving Africa’s Eden' Green
Colonialism, Neoliberal Capitalism, and Sustainable Development in Congo
Basin Literature
Authors: Kenneth Toah Nsah
First page: 38
Abstract: Starting with European colonization, African natural resources in particular and nature in general have been coveted and exploited mainly in the interest of Euro-American industrialized countries, with China as a recent major player from Asia. Interestingly, the incessant quest by some Western NGOs, institutions, and governments to protect and conserve African nature not only are inspired by ecological and climatic concerns but also often tend to propagate a false image of Africa as the last Eden of the earth in order to control Africa’s resources. Using literary texts, this article argues that some Euro-American transnational NGOs and some of their governments sometimes conspire with some African governments to spread global capitalism and green colonialism under the pretext of oxymoronic sustainable development as they attempt to conserve a mythical African Eden. Utilizing three novels and one play from the Congo Basin, namely In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.: Le Testament de Bismarck (2014), Assitou Ndinga’s Les Marchands du développement durable (2006), Étienne Goyémidé’s Le Silence de la forêt ([1984] 2015), and Ekpe Inyang’s The Last Hope (2011), I contend that such Euro-American environmental NGOs and their governments sometimes impose and sustain fortress conservation (creation of protected areas) in the Congo Basin as a hidden means of coopting Africa’s nature and Africans into neoliberal capitalism. For the most part, instead of protecting the Congo Basin, green colonialists and developmentalists sell sustainable development, undermine alternative ways of achieving human happiness, and perpetuate epistemicide, thus leading to poverty and generating resentment among local and indigenous populations. As these literary texts suggest, nature conservation and sustainable development in the Congo Basin should not be imposed upon from the outside; they should emanate from Africans, tapping into local expertise, and indigenous and other knowledge systems.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-05-08
DOI: 10.3390/h12030038
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 3 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 39: Composting Ecofeminism: Caring for Plants,
Authors: Kathryn Yalan Chang
First page: 39
Abstract: Using the documentary The Biggest Little Farm (2019) and its follow-up sequel The Biggest Little Farm: The Return (2022), this article examines how American filmmaker and farmer John Chester and his wife Molly transformed previously dead land lacking biodiversity into Molly’s dream farm over the past decade. My article argues that the way the films illustrate the Chesters’ intricate relationships with plants, animals, and multispecies players is a way of showing how ecofeminism’s concerns and insights can best be integrated into organic food/farming, which do not foreground gender in their analyses and activism. The article consists of four parts. The first describes the challenges Apricot Lane Farms faced before and after the Chesters’ arrival. The second part explores the Chesters’ “thinking with the soil” and de la Bellacasa’s commitment to soil care in Matters of Care (2017), showing how this can serve as a refuge in a sense, as defined by Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. The third part examines the Chesters’ approach to conflicts, setbacks, and loss of life by emphasizing the potential for “staying with the trouble.” Finally, the article concludes by demonstrating how the Chesters present Apricot Lane Farms as an attachment site of co-flourishment by caring for the plants, animals, and microorganisms essential to supporting all life’s ecosystems.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-05-16
DOI: 10.3390/h12030039
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 3 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 40: Cinema, the Settler
Authors: Lorenzo Veracini
First page: 40
Abstract: While the history and technology of cinema are considered for the purpose of achieving decolonial ends, this paper suggests that ‘classic’ cinema may be considered a quintessentially settler colonial medium. However, the moving image is now delivered in new ways and through new devices, and streaming has transformed global patterns of cinema production and consumption. Thus, two developments are considered in relation to this transformation. On the one hand, there are signs that mainstream cinema may be genuinely addressing its implication with colonialism, and this paper focuses on a formal apology and on a big budget movie that adopted a radically innovative approach to representing Indigenous peoples: Prey (2022). On the other hand, streaming has made cinema portable and has made consumption in personally deliberated instalments possible. The ‘digital natives’ consume cinema in fragmented and noncollective patterns, and their activity is subjected to unprecedented modalities of surveillance and appropriation. This paper concludes that a form of digital colonialism supported by streaming operates in ways that are homologous with modes of settler colonial appropriation.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-05-17
DOI: 10.3390/h12030040
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 3 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 41: Healing with the Nonhuman Actor: A Study of
the Recuperation from Loneliness and Isolation Caused by the COVID-19
Pandemic through the Cinematic Text Lars and the Real Girl
Authors: Shipra Tholia
First page: 41
Abstract: Loneliness and isolation were two factors introduced as “effective measures” during the COVID-19 crisis. The lockdown exacerbated loneliness among those already suffering from acute illnesses. In this context, a rereading of the film Lars and the Real Girl by Craig Gillespie is particularly relevant as it offers novel perspectives on loneliness. The interplay between Lars’s desire to be in a compassionate relationship and the fear of meeting and socializing is comparable to what was witnessed across the coronavirus-afflicted world. This paper explores the potential for understanding delusion caused by traumatic experiences as a form of communication rather than a mental disorder. The film explains how a silicone sex doll functions as a medium between the lonesome Lars and society in resolving the trauma. The paper focuses on the infantile nature of humans and uses infantilism in a conducive manner to understand anthropomorphism for bridging the gap between a lonely/delusional person and society while drawing examples from the film. The introduction of a nonhuman actor—an anatomically correct doll—becomes an opportunity for a traumatized person such as Lars to know himself well and gradually open up to socializing. As he moves from external to threshold en-rolling, followed by internal en-rolling, it indicates his opening up to communication as he moves from language to lalangue and creates his world with the doll. This film presents a therapeutic approach to treating schizoid personality disorder with the assistance of a nonhuman actor.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-05-23
DOI: 10.3390/h12030041
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 3 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 42: “This Girl Changed the Story of the
World”: Queer Complications of Authority in KindaTV’s Carmilla
Authors: Drumlin N. M. Crape
First page: 42
Abstract: This article investigates the intersection of adaptations of narrative content and form as exemplified in the KindaTV YouTube series Carmilla (2014–2016), a contemporary revisioning of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 vampire novella of the same name. By contextualizing Le Fanu’s text within the emerging medicalized discourse around so-called deviant sexualities and close reading the invocations of medical, legal, and narrative authority within Carmilla, I reveal an approach to authority which upholds hegemony. Consequently, in engaging with KindaTV’s YouTube adaptation, the rehabilitating of queer feelings and connections reframes authority within the narrative, while the interactive platform and active fan communities resist the idea of a single textual authority. By considering the source text and adaptation through the lens of authority, it becomes clear that, as part of addressing the homophobic history of the Gothic, KindaTV’s Carmilla presents a world full of possibilities that directly opposes the way authorities like legal, medical, and academic systems have historically pathologized queer people.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-05-25
DOI: 10.3390/h12030042
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 3 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 43: ‘Is This the Real Me' What Is the
Real Me'’: Deconstructing Authenticity in Aline
Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love
Authors: David Brauner
First page: 43
Abstract: In spite of being a central figure in the underground comix scene, a trailblazer in the field of female-authored comics, and one of the progenitors of the graphic memoir, there has been relatively little scholarship on Aline Kominsky-Crumb. For much of her career, she was in the shadow of her husband, Robert Crumb, an iconic figure of the counterculture, and any attention she has received for her own work tended to be marred by condescension or predicated on the naïve assumption that, as Susan Kirtley claims, it ‘showcase[s] a raw, unvarnished authenticity’. It also tended to ignore her writing, focusing almost exclusively on her artwork. In this essay, I analyse her anthology, Need More Love, paying particular attention to the nuances of its uses of text, to argue that Kominsky-Crumb’s work might be read as a sustained, self-reflexive interrogation of the idea of authenticity.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-05-29
DOI: 10.3390/h12030043
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 3 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 21: “People Who Fill the Spaces”:
Jodi Picoult and the Sarah Josepha Hale Award
Authors: Jordan Hansen
First page: 21
Abstract: This paper discusses the implications of Sarah Josepha Hale’s polarizing opposition to the franchise of women on her legacy award, given to many authors since its inception, but most notably to contemporary women writers whom Hale likely would have rejected. In 2019, the award went to Jodi Picoult, an author who bridges journalistic writing on topics such as abortion, white supremacy, and gun violence, among others, with fiction novel writing. Hale’s own works are archived through the Richards Free Library, and as such, the award is given for the entire collective body of work of one nominated literary person. The award impacts not only Picoult’s career but Hale’s legacy as an open opposer to the franchise of women, as well as the opportunities for contemporary women writers.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-02-23
DOI: 10.3390/h12020021
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 22: A Foreshortened Future and the Trauma of a
Dying Earth in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet
Authors: Amar Singh
First page: 22
Abstract: An experience of anxiety is caused by the anticipation of unseen future events, especially in the context of ecological trauma, where the prospect of a world without humans in the distant future is often portrayed through mediated cinematic memories. As a result of anthropological intervention on our planet, it is feared that humanity will cease to exist unless steps are taken to prevent it. Furthermore, as climate change intensifies, humans are left with more questions regarding their future. One recent film that addresses this issue is Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020). The film explores the concept of a dying Earth in the future, whose inhabitants seek help from the past to restore the planet’s balance by reversing entropy. Despite failing to provide any remedy by revealing ‘What’s happened happened’, a viewpoint that Christopher Nolan, as an auteur, has already presented in his previous film Interstellar (2014), the film leaves the audience with the question, what is the purpose of projecting an unseen trauma' By evaluating the events that contributed to the image of a crumbling Earth in the film, this paper seeks to examine the concept of future trauma as an indication of post-traumatic stress disorder while simultaneously exploring it as a film that acknowledges Nolan’s own anxiety over the decline of a medium he cherishes.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-02-25
DOI: 10.3390/h12020022
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 23: Representation of Whom' Ancient Moments of
Seeking Refuge and Protection
Authors: Elena Isayev
First page: 23
Abstract: Within the ancient corpus we find depictions of people seeking refuge and protection: in works of fiction, drama and poetry; on wall paintings and vases, they cluster at protective altars and cling to statues of gods who seemingly look on. Yet the ancient evidence does not lend itself easily to exploring attitudes to refugees or asylum seekers. Hence, the question that begins this investigation is, representation of whom' Through a focus on the Greco-Roman material of the Mediterranean region, drawing on select representations, such as the tragedies Medea and Suppliant Women, the historical failed plea of the Plataeans and pictorial imagery of supplication, the goal of the exploration below is not to shape into existence an ancient refugee or asylum seeker experience. Rather, it is to highlight the multiplicity of experiences within narratives of victimhood and the confines of such labels as refugee and asylum seeker. The absence of ancient representations of a generic figure or group of the ‘displaced’, broadly defined, precludes any exceptionalising or homogenising of people in such contexts. Remaining depictions are of named, recognisable protagonists, whose stories are known. There is no ‘mass’ of refuge seekers, to whom a single set of rules could apply across time and space. Given these diverse stories of negotiation for refuge, another aim is to illustrate the ways such experience does not come to define the entirety of who a person is or encompass the complete life and its many layers. This paper addresses the challenges of representation that are exposed by, among others, thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Liisa Malkki and Gerawork Gizaw.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-07
DOI: 10.3390/h12020023
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 24: Making Bedlam: Toward a Trauma-Informed Mad
Feminist Literary Theory and Praxis
Authors: Jessica Lowell Mason
First page: 24
Abstract: Building on what Margaret Price describes as the “long history of positive and person-centered discourses” of the term Mad, this article seeks to offer a (re)tooling and (re)theorization of the not-so-antiquated concept of “bedlam” as part of a Mad feminist literary theory and practice that aims to situate reading and writing practices on the subject of madness within a trauma-informed Mad framework and to (re)shape reading and writing practices by (re)seeing or seeing-in-a-new-and-old-Mad way the concept of “bedlam”—rendering it agential and unhinging it from its historical meanings. The article theorizes “bedlam” as a form of deliberate Mad literary practice, offering two examples of “bedlam-making”, one in the poetry of Anne Sexton’s 1960 collection To Bedlam and Part-way Back and the other in the historical fiction of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The article strives to re-articulate “bedlam” in a way that draws attention to the agency of language on the subject of madness, when written and read by writers and readers aware of the acute violences and traumas performed upon bodies exiled from “Reason”, attending to the ways in which writers and readers make a subjectivity of “bedlam” or a resistance to and critique of systemic oppression that gives social agency to Mad literary action. “Making bedlam”, it is argued in this essay, is a Mad feminist literary theory and practice, part of social justice discourses and liberation-focused action, which is deeply connected with other liberation movements in pursuit of the end of systemic violences.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-09
DOI: 10.3390/h12020024
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 25: “What to Do with the Dangerous
Few'”: Abolition-Feminism, Monstrosity and the Reimagination of
Sexual Harm in Miguel Piñero’s “Short Eyes”
Authors: Laura E. Ciolkowski
First page: 25
Abstract: The problem of child sexual abuse (CSA) is a crucial point of entry into abolition-feminist conversations about justice and punishment, healing and repair. The popular belief that the “child sex offender” is uniquely irredeemable, eternally depraved and dangerous can trouble abolition-feminist efforts to address the devastating harm of CSA without reproducing the violence of prison and punishment. It also forces us to return to the question of “what to do with the dangerous few'” A familiar “tough on crime” refrain, this question mystifies the social, economic, and political conditions that nurture interpersonal violence. It also illustrates how centering our attention on “the monster in our midst” feeds an attachment to the mistaken belief that sexual harm is locatable in individual, bad people; that it is fixable by criminal law, and, in short, that justice and repair can be measured by the number of years one is sentenced to live behind bars. Miguel Piñero’s 1972 play “Short Eyes” exposes the failure of our attempts to incarcerate our way out of child sexual abuse and opens a literary-artistic space in which to explore the roots of violence and the abuse of power. The play dramatizes the particular ways in which the incarceration of those deemed the worst of the worst does not alleviate suffering or promote safety; rather, it prevents us from getting to the root of even the most horrific forms of abuse and from fully engaging, confronting and, finally, interrupting the daily, quotidian acts of sexual violence that are hiding in plain sight.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-09
DOI: 10.3390/h12020025
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 26: The Influence of Dutch Genre Painting in
Emblematic Prints: Jan Luyken’s Des Menschen, Begin, Midden en Einde
(1712)
Authors: Sooyun Sohn
First page: 26
Abstract: This paper examines Dutch printmaker Jan Luyken’s visual strategy represented in his emblem book, Des Menschen Begin, Midden en Einde (1712). As a poet as well as a printmaker, Luyken wrote a poem in this book and produced image prints by himself. Jan Luyken has long been omitted from surveys of Dutch art due to the absence of archival evidence about his life and works. The themes that Luyken employed in his prints, such as parents’ virtue, mother and child, and children’s play, and his genre style, including doorsien, are all examples of contemporary pictorial devices of genre painting prevalent in Luyken’s time. An analysis of the similarities between Des Menschen Begin, Midden en Einde and contemporary genre paintings demonstrates that Luyken’s prints coincided with the development of Dutch Golden Age art. Luyken consciously employed a strategy of incorporating trendy interior items and idealized figures to make his pieces more attractive to his contemporaneous buyers. This is contrary to evaluations of him as an outdated artist indifferent to the contemporary art world.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-10
DOI: 10.3390/h12020026
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 27: From Global Studies to Global Humanities
Authors: Stefan Amirell
First page: 27
Abstract: In contrast to the field of global studies, which has seen spectacular expansion and institutionalisation since the turn of the twenty-first century, there have to date been only a few attempts to promote or institutionalise global humanities as a field of study or research. Moreover, even though several disciplines in the humanities have undergone global turns in recent years, the humanities, with the exception of a certain brand of global history, are not prominent within the field of global studies. Against this background, this article surveys the various attempts that have been made in recent years to promote the concept of global humanities in the form of international scholarly networks, departments, and study programs, and the handful of attempts to sketch the outlines of a research agenda for global humanities. The strengths and limitations of the current approaches are discussed, and the articles advocating the notion of global humanities as a field or framework of research are brought into conversation with one another. Some common themes are identified in the literature on global humanities to date, such as the ambition for the field to be globally inclusive, critical, and transdisciplinary. Building on the recent global turns in some of the humanities disciplines and the steps that have been taken to purge these of traditional national and Eurocentric biases, global humanities should aim to develop frameworks of analysis that can be used to study all cultural expressions of humankind and to foster intercultural dialogue and understanding. Such an undertaking goes beyond the study of modern globalisation, which is the subject matter of global studies.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-14
DOI: 10.3390/h12020027
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 28: Precarity and Class Consciousness in
Contemporary Swedish Working-Class Literature
Authors: Magnus Nilsson
First page: 28
Abstract: This article analyses aesthetical–political strategies for the promotion of class consciousness among workers in a few examples of contemporary Swedish working-class literature from different genres that describe and criticize precarious working conditions. Special attention is given to how these texts engage in dialogue with the notion of the precariat and to the authors’ use of decidedly literary forms. One important result is that Swedish working-class writers highlight the heterogeneity among those working under precarious conditions while also arguing that they share certain economic conditions, both amongst each other and with members of other groups (especially the traditional working class). Furthermore, it is argued that the use of literary forms (as opposed to, e.g., reportage or documentary) reflects the absence in the precariat of class consciousness, and the authors’ belief that literature can contribute to the creation of such a consciousness.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-15
DOI: 10.3390/h12020028
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 29: Dancing with the Sniper: Rasha Abbas and
the “Art of Survival” as an Aesthetic Strategy
Authors: Moritz Schramm
First page: 29
Abstract: In the last few decades, a growing dissatisfaction with traditional approaches can be observed in migration and refugee studies. In particular, the widespread focus on the “refugee” and “migrant” as exclusive objects of study has been criticized for its underlying tendency of repeating the binary polarization between migrant and non-migrant, native and foreign as well as majority and minority. This chapter considers the short stories of Syrian journalist and writer Rasha Abbas against this background. Instead of reducing her stories to the depiction of flight and exile, this chapter explores her stories as aesthetic expressions of what can be called the “art of survival”—the concept focusing on strategies of empowerment and tactics to regain autonomy. In Abbas’ prose, this “art of survival” is achieved and expressed through the blending of times and spaces as well as the aesthetic transformation of reality into surreal realms. Experiences of war, displacement, exile, and patterns of exclusion in the new homeland merge into complex pictures of the human capacity to reframe and reinvent a given reality. When viewed from this perspective, the surreal and psychedelic nature of her writing intensifies the power of aesthetic freedom, thus helping overcome traditional representations of migrants and refugees in cultural expressions and literature.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-16
DOI: 10.3390/h12020029
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 30: The Cosmopolitanism of the Early Sophists:
The Case of Hippias and Antiphon
Authors: Giovanni Giorgini
First page: 30
Abstract: An investigation of the emergence of the notion of ‘Cosmopolitanism’ in 5th century Greece. The author focusses on the early sophists, and specifically on Antiphon and Hippias.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-24
DOI: 10.3390/h12020030
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 31: Planet YouPorn—Pornography, Worlding,
and Banal Globalization in Michel Houellebecq’s Work
Authors: Gustaf Marcus
First page: 31
Abstract: This article studies mediated erotic content, especially pornography, as a form of worlding in Michel Houellebecq’s work. Whereas love creates a space of alterity, pornography paradoxically combines the most intimate spatiality of the body with ever-expanding technological systems and global forms of mediation. This short-circuiting of space points to a new sense of being in the world, which is studied in selected passages from the novels La Possibilité d’une île and Soumission, as well as in the essay “Prise de contrôle sur Numéris.” With reference to Ulrich Beck’s description of “banal cosmopolitanism,” I argue that otherness is either reduced to free-floating objects of consumption or to an experience of absence in these texts. Furthermore, this duality is refracted as two “reflexively” interwoven discourses or voices in the work. One is associated with prose and with the bringing of the world to the body of the subject, and the other with poetry and the dissolution of the body into the space of the world.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-03-30
DOI: 10.3390/h12020031
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 32: Shakespeare and the Book of Henry
Authors: Peter C. Herman
First page: 32
Abstract: In this article, I argue that the four plays of the Henriad (Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V), as presented in the 1623 Folio, constitute a unified whole intended for reading. The plays are connected not only by the endings of one play leading directly into the beginning of the next, but they are also unified by thematic and verbal echoes. I will focus first on establishing the connections between the plays, and then on the thematic resonances. I show how the plays are connected by verbal echoes, some thematically relevant, some not. I then show how Shakespeare provides differing accounts of Richard’s fall and invites the reader the compare and contrast them with each other. Finally, I turn to Shakespeare’s treatment of the common soldier, which culminates in the confrontation between the disguised Henry V and Michael Williams, Alexander Court, and John Bates, a scene not present in the quarto version of this play. Although this scene can stand alone, one has to have read the previous chapters of the Henriad to comprehend the full force of Shakespeare’s revision.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-04-05
DOI: 10.3390/h12020032
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 33: What Performative Contradiction Reveals:
Plato’s Theaetetus and Gorgias on Sophistry
Authors: Robert Metcalf
First page: 33
Abstract: Socrates’ use of performative contradiction against sophistic theories is a recurrent motif in Plato’s dialogues. In the case of Plato’s Theaetetus and Gorgias, Socrates attempts to show that Protagoras’ homo mensura doctrine and Gorgias’ doctrine of the power of logos are each performatively contradicted by the underlying activity of philosophical dialogue. In the case of the Theaetetus, Socrates’ strategy of performative contradiction hinges on Protagoras’ failure to perform in the way that he theorized the sophist performing—namely, being able to change appearances through logoi (Theaetetus 166d–167d). In parallel fashion, Gorgias’ account of the power of rhetoric is performatively contradicted by the orator’s inability to prevail over Socrates, instead resorting to insincere responses to Socrates’ questions in order to save face—a dialogical “performance” that ties directly to Socrates’ portrait of Gorgianic rhetoric as a matter of pandering to the audience (Gorgias 460a–465a). Plato’s aim in dramatizing these performative contradictions, I argue, is to illuminate both the proximity between Socrates and the great sophists, particularly with respect to Socrates’ practice of elenchos, but also the distance between Socrates and the sophists in how they conceive of our situatedness within the world of human concerns.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-04-10
DOI: 10.3390/h12020033
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 34: Reproductive Rights and Ecofeminism
Authors: Sally L. Kitch
First page: 34
Abstract: The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs decision in June 2022 came as a shock. Yet, upon reflection, the decision simply reinforced what history has shown: women’s rights and opportunities have always been subject to controls, fluctuations, and specious rationales. Dobbs is one in a long line of legal edicts in the U.S. and elsewhere that either allow or curtail and control female agency, including reproductive agency. The decision’s devastating consequences for U.S. women’s reproductive lives are damaging enough, but they are only part of the story. In addition to its hobbling effects on reproductive rights and justice, the Dobbs decision goes hand in hand with the underlying causes of today’s unparalleled environmental emergency. This article argues, through ecofeminist theory and feminist and Native American climate fiction, that Dobbs is a catalyst for understanding the role of patriarchy—as a particularly insidious form of androcentrism—in the destruction of our planet. Evidence is mounting to support claims made by ecofeminists since the 1970s: patriarchy and resulting masculinist values have been foundational to the extractive and exploitative attitudes and practices regarding marginalized peoples, colonized lands, and racialized entitlements to natural resources that have endangered the earth’s biosystems.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-04-11
DOI: 10.3390/h12020034
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 35: Black Noise from the Break: Ma and
Pa’s Black Radical Lyricism
Authors: Julia Reade
First page: 35
Abstract: Kendrick Lamar’s 2022 track “We Cry Together” is, if nothing else, a masterful piece of wordplay and rhythm. Lamar manages to create a lyrical conversation that sounds both dialectical and diametric. Both the song and album are a definitive break from his earlier tenor that struck a mass appeal. A private conversation between two people, “We Cry Together”, insofar as it captures the intimate interiority of a couple, is also a break within the album itself. Textual renderings of Black performances cut away in ways similar to Lamar’s song or the soloist in a jazz ensemble, their breaks signifying sound. Invoking as aural praxis the language of jazz musicology and Black lyrical theory of Fred Moten, this article closely reads chapter four in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin as one such special representation of textual aurality. First, it identifies multiple manifestations of “the break” before probing the deeply conflicted concept of Black noise as the racialized, resistant, resilient, and resonant octave of radical Black performance. A lyrical improvisation of a Black noise defiant in its indeterminacy, Ma and Pa’s duet cuts away from Castle’s polyphonic ensemble, creating the break within a break, within a break. Lingering in the cut, listening as Fred Moten, Douglas Kearney, Ren Ellis Neyra, and Zadie Smith encourage, the article arrives at a euphonic reproduction as induction into a legacy of synesthetic, lyrical, radical Black noise.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-04-19
DOI: 10.3390/h12020035
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 2 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 6: The Assassination of Lieutenant Joe
Petrosino: A Contested Symbol in the Mainstream and Italian-American Press
in the Early 20th Century
Authors: Marina Cacioppo
First page: 6
Abstract: Recently, scholars have looked at the ethnic press through a social constructionist lens, examining the process through which immigrants developed a sense of identity and the role of print culture in forming “imagined communities” (Anderson). Here, I analyze the coverage of the 1909 assassination of police Lieutenant Petrosino in both mainstream and Italian-American press and popular culture. This shocking event ignited a debate over the nature and origin of the Mafia and the dangerousness of the Italian community, a debate involving discourses of racial difference, immigration restriction, and the capability of Italians to assimilate. This debate became an important arena in which Italian immigrants defined themselves and their place in America. Italians were represented predominantly in the context of criminality, so immigrant writers constructed their own counter-representations in newspapers, re-coding stereotypes and negotiating a collective Italian-American identity. In the press, Petrosino became a contested symbol: on the one hand, of the rhetoric of the inclusiveness of the American melting pot and, on the other, of the possibility of redemption from the discredit that the actions of a small minority threw on the whole community.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-03
DOI: 10.3390/h12010006
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 7: Post-Postmodernism, the “Affective
Turn”, and Inauthenticity
Authors: George Kowalik
First page: 7
Abstract: This article considers Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” in contemporary fiction by looking at a constellation of novels published near the turn of the twenty-first century: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). As Rachel Greenwald Smith claims, this “Turn” offers a “corrective or counter to postmodernist suspicion towards subjective emotion” and has foundations of sincerity and authenticity, which align it with the premise of post-postmodernism. These novels, I argue, collectively engage with the affective turn’s inherent post-postmodern potential, as their authors respond to, challenge, and react against postmodern irony and the license of inauthenticity that comes with this.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-10
DOI: 10.3390/h12010007
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 8: Translation in Digital Times: Omid Tofighian
on Translating the Manus Prison Narratives
Authors: Omid Tofighian
First page: 8
Abstract: On 12 February 2020, while on an international tour promoting Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, the translator of the book, Omid Tofighian, participated in a seminar at Utrecht University, organised by Australian academic, Anna Poletti (associate professor of English language and culture, Utrecht University). Poletti is also co-editor of the journal Biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly, which published a special issue on No Friend but the Mountains in 2020 (Vol. 43, No. 4). The seminar involved Poletti, Tofighian and translation scholar, Onno Kosters (assistant professor of English literature and translation studies, Utrecht University) in conversation. Iranian–Dutch filmmaker, Arash Kamali Sarvestani, co-director with Boochani of the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017), was in attendance, as well as the Dutch publisher, Jurgen Maas (Uitgeverij Jurgen Maas, Dutch translation based on the English translation). The event was titled ‘No Friend but the Mountains: Translation in Digital Times’. The following dialogue, ‘Translation in Digital Times: Omid Tofighian on Translating the Manus Prison Narratives’, is derived from this seminar and focuses on Tofighian’s translation of the book from Persian/Farsi into English. The topics covered include the Dutch translation from Tofighian’s English translation, genre and anti-genre, horrific surrealism, Kurdish elements and influences, the Kurdish translation (from Tofighian’s English translation), translation as activism, process and technology.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-11
DOI: 10.3390/h12010008
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 9: Gorgias on Knowledge and the Powerlessness
of Logos
Authors: Josh Wilburn
First page: 9
Abstract: In Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes, the orator draws attention to two important limitations of speech’s power that concern its different relationships to belief vs. knowledge. First, logos has the capacity to affect and change a person’s beliefs, but it is powerless to change or undermine a person’s knowledge. Second, speech has the power to produce a new belief, but it is powerless to produce knowledge itself where knowledge is lacking. My primary aim in this essay is to examine Gorgias’s epistemology of persuasive logos with a view to illuminating these two limitations. I suggest that Gorgias’s claims in the Helen and Palamedes make the most sense when considered in the forensic and deliberative contexts in which the art of rhetoric thrived in ancient Greece. In such contexts the prevailing epistemology that contemporary orators take for granted is a kind of folk empiricism that privileges sense-perception as a source of knowledge, and I argue that Gorgias’s ideas about logos and its limitations are best understood in terms of that epistemological framework. Speech cannot make people “unknow” what they have seen with their own eyes, nor can it act as a surrogate or replacement for sense-perception itself.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-12
DOI: 10.3390/h12010009
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 10: Lessons from Shawshank: Outlaws, Lawmen and
the Spectacle of Punishment
Authors: Boyce
First page: 10
Abstract: For more than a century, cinema has offered a rich source of images and narratives about crime and punishment. Unfortunately, the restricted nature of correctional environments and the social stigma surrounding incarceration leave most viewers reliant on media representations for the majority of their knowledge about correctional spaces. In most media representations of crime and punishment, outlaws and lawmen are reduced to stereotypical archetypes, and incarcerated characters are some of the evilest villains one will ever encounter. Moreover, the prison environment is painted as a playground for bad behavior, as penance for redeemable outlaws, or as an outright paradox that claims to reduce criminality despite appearing to increase it. Our uncritical acceptance of such characterizations goes hand in hand with our cultural addiction to mass incarceration. Limitless stories about uncontainable monsters perpetrating awful crimes inside cushy taxpayer funded facilities endorse a worldview where a permanently expanding and harshening prison system is vital to the safety of a functioning society. In short, our reliance on the spectacle of punishment has left us woefully and willfully misinformed about prison and those who wind up there.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-12
DOI: 10.3390/h12010010
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 11: ‘A Whole Other World than What I Live
in’: Reading Chester Himes, on Campus and at the County Jail
Authors: Ed Wiltse
First page: 11
Abstract: This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position as prison writer turned detective writer, whose influence is clear not only in the usual suspects such as Walter Mosley but also in the Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, and in the urban fiction tradition from Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim on down through today’s Triple Crown books and others. I then look at how Himes’ work has been received by the college students and incarcerated people who each spring for the past 20 years have worked together in reading groups set at the local county jail in a project linked to a class I teach, in order to raise questions about genre, audience and pedagogy. The two groups of readers, who may come to see each other as one group over the series of meetings, often develop readings of Himes’ novel that push back against the analysis I present in the classroom.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-16
DOI: 10.3390/h12010011
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 12: “Readers” and
“Writers” in Japanese Detective Fiction, 1920s–30s:
Tracing Shifts from Edogawa Rampo’s “Beast in the
Shadows” to The Demon of the Lonely Isle
Authors: Shoko Komatsu
First page: 12
Abstract: This paper explores the shifting position of “readers” and “writers” within serialized works by Japanese detective fiction author Edogawa Rampo. The essay focuses on two works published at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s: the novella “Beast in the Shadows” and Edogawa’s first long-form serialized novel, The Demon of the Lonely Isle. By examining the kinds of magazines in which Edogawa published, as well as the expected readership of those magazines, we discover several important stylistic shifts in Edogawa’s writing as he transitions from being a genre fiction short story writer to an author of popular novels. In Edogawa’s short detective fiction for niche magazines, the position of the reader and writer overlap, mirroring the way readers of detective fiction magazines often became writers themselves. Edogawa parodies his simultaneous position as dedicated reader and writer of detective novels. Moving to popular magazines and long-form fiction causes those self-parodies to shift into the background. Edogawa severs the correlative or dual position of writer/reader in favor of a detached “author” and consuming “reader”. This paper explores the genesis of this change in relation to the development of magazine media in modern Japan.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-18
DOI: 10.3390/h12010012
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 13: Acknowledgment to the Reviewers of
Humanities in 2022
Authors: Humanities Editorial Office Humanities Editorial Office
First page: 13
Abstract: High-quality academic publishing is built on rigorous peer review [...]
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-18
DOI: 10.3390/h12010013
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 14: Deciphering the Parrot’s Voice:
Satō Haruo’s “Okāsan” (“Mother”)
and Josei (Woman) Magazine
Authors: Atsuko Nishikawa
First page: 14
Abstract: Satō Haruo’s “Okāsan” (“Mother”) is a story that was published in Josei (Woman) magazine in October 1926. The plot follows “I” as he listens to the words of the parrot he bought from the pet store and deduces and fantasizes freely about her previous home. In this paper, I spotlight the fact that the home that “I” envisions through the voice of the parrot, Laura, corresponds to the family image that was being presented concurrently in Josei magazine and showcased that the ideal family was simply nothing more than an ideal. In relativizing Josei’s familial discourse, and in this relationship between the published magazine and the story, I argue for the latter’s importance.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-20
DOI: 10.3390/h12010014
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 15: Anxious Apocalypse: Transmedia Science
Fiction in Japan’s 1960s
Authors: Brian White
First page: 15
Abstract: Science fiction (SF) developed as a self-identified genre in Japan in the 1950s and quickly underwent a boom in the 1960s. Throughout this period, SF literature, film, and television were tightly intertwined industries, sharing production personnel, textual tropes, and audiences. As these industries entered global circulation with the hope of finding recognition and success in the international SF community, however, they encountered the contradictions of the Cold War liberal cultural system under the US nuclear umbrella. Awareness of the discursive marginalization of Japanese SF in the Euro-American dominated global SF scene manifested in Japanese texts in the twin tropes of apocalypse and anxiety surrounding embodiment. Through a close reading of two SF films—The X from Outer Space (Uchū daikaijū Girara, 1967) and Genocide (Konchū daisensō, 1968), both directed by Nihonmatsu Kazui for Shochiku Studios—and Komatsu Sakyō’s 1964 SF disaster novel Virus: The Day of Resurrection (Fukkatsu no hi), I argue that, largely excluded from discursive belonging in the global community of SF producers and consumers, Japanese authors and directors responded with texts that wiped away the contemporary status quo in spectacular apocalypses, eschatological breaks that would allow a utopian global order, as imagined by Japanese SF, to take hold.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-22
DOI: 10.3390/h12010015
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 16: “I Try Not to Be a ‘Neutral
Teacher’”: Teacher Identity Formation of Non-Tenured
Early-Career Academics in the Humanities
Authors: Vincent C. A. Crone
First page: 16
Abstract: With internationally growing attention to the quality of higher education, a formal teaching qualification has become at many universities a requirement for non-tenured staff to be eligible for tenure. To obtain a qualification, participants in this case study reflect in a portfolio on their teacher identity by describing what they think is important and what guides the choices they make. Based on a thematic analysis of 47 portfolios by aspiring non-tenured early-career humanities scholars in The Netherlands, I will describe the recurring stories about beliefs, values, and commitments toward being a teacher in the humanities. The analysis will provide insight into how teacher identity is determined by the cultural rules of their disciplinary community to which they want to gain access as non-tenured academics.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-01-28
DOI: 10.3390/h12010016
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 17: Edmond Picard and the Congo Free State: A
Study in Law and Literature
Authors: Bryant White
First page: 17
Abstract: While the law and literature movement has treated a number of important texts, contexts, and figures from both spheres, surprisingly absent is the situation of Leopold II’s Congo Free State and the person of Edmond Picard. This article seeks to redress that absence, looking first at Edmond Picard as an important figure who represents both law and literature and analyzing a few texts directly related to colonialism in the Congo: specifically, his legal opinion Consultation délibérée and his travel narrative En Congolie. Then, we examine a few examples of Anglo-American literary resistance to Leopold’s project in the Congo before coming to some conclusions. This study seeks to demonstrate the way in which questions of law and literature are inextricably linked: legal texts pose problems common to literary texts, and vice versa. Interacting with the work of prominent law and literature scholars, such as Richard Posner, Richard Weisberg, and Robin West, we conclude that the two spheres ought not to be abstracted from one another, but rather be examined conjointly, the case of the Congo Free State offering a glimpse into how the two work hand-in-hand with real world consequences for human lives.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-02-02
DOI: 10.3390/h12010017
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 18: Animal Phenomenology: Metonymy and Sardonic
Humanism in Kafka and Merleau-Ponty
Authors: Don Beith
First page: 18
Abstract: Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes inspiration from Franz Kafka’s metonymic animal literature to develop his concepts of institution and “sardonic humanism.” Metonymy is a literary device, an instituting dimension of language, that allows us a lateral access to animality and expression. Kafka’s dog story enacts a radical reflection, a critical phenomenology parodying human life. Kafka puts forward a philosophy of generative openness to the animal, against social alienation. This reading comes with Merleau-Ponty’s existential redeployment of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unconscious as expressive passivity or institution of adulthood. As instituting–instituted, we are always between preserving and surpassing the past, though different comportments and institutions can dogmatically or openly take up these possibilities. Kafka’s (struggle through) metonymic animal literature reminds us that philosophical truth is expressive, that unconscious desire animates language, and that the oppressive silencing of the generative past, the feeling child and the other animal, is at the root of society’s institutionalized oppression. Institution offers a literary method of phenomenologically resisting, of creative critique.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-02-03
DOI: 10.3390/h12010018
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 19: Coming-of-Age of Teenage Female Arab Gothic
Fiction: A Feminist Semiotic Study
Authors: Zoe Hurley, Zeina Hojeij
First page: 19
Abstract: This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in the context of children’s and young adults’ Arab Gothic literature. Across the Middle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oral storytelling who, in diegetic terms, can manifest as the Gothic figure of an aging female, deranged older woman or succubus (known as sa’lawwa in Arabic). In this study, a novel feminist semiotic framework is developed to explore the extent to which the Gothic female succubus either haunts or liberates Arab girls’ coming-of-age fictions. This issue is addressed via a feminist semiotic reading of the narratives of Middle Eastern woman author @Ranoy7, exploring the appeal of her scary stories presented on YouTube. Findings reveal tacit fears, ambivalences and tensions embodied within the Arab Gothic sign of the aging female succubus or jinn. Overall, the research develops feminist insights into the semiotic motif of the female jinn and its role in constituting Arab females as misogynistic gendered sign objects in the context of the social media story explored.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-02-14
DOI: 10.3390/h12010019
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 20: “My Whole Life I’ve Been a
Fraud”: Resisting Excessive (Self-)Critique and Reaffirming
Authenticity as Communal in David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old
Neon” and Albert Camus’s The Fall
Authors: Allard den Dulk
First page: 20
Abstract: The themes of paralyzing, solipsistic self-critique versus the necessarily communal character of authentic, meaningful existence in the work of American novelist David Foster Wallace are best understood in light of existentialism. This article compares Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” with Albert Camus’s novella The Fall, as responses to similar unproductive tendencies within the respective postmodernist and Marxist discourses of their times. Both works portray an absolutist self-critique that produces feelings of (inauthentic) fraudulence and exceptionality; and both include an interlocutor that ultimately makes the reader the direct addressee of the text. In doing so, “Good Old Neon” and The Fall confront the reader with the moral task of resisting excessive (self-)critique and reaffirming authentic, meaningful existence as always arising in connection to others.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2023-02-16
DOI: 10.3390/h12010020
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 1: Sophistry and Law: The Antilogical Pattern
of Judicial Debate
Authors: Giombini
First page: 1
Abstract: This essay aims to reveal the relationship between sophistry and law in a twofold direction: on one side, how the development of ancient Greek law influenced sophistry’s production, and on the other, how and to what extent the knowledge and skills developed by sophists contributed to the development of legal expertise in classical Athens. The essay will initially focus on the historiographical category of the sophists to identify a line that connects these intellectuals to the new vision of society, the democratic polis, and the community that presides over legal and judicial life. This section will show that we can indeed speak of a “sophistic movement” in light of the structuring role of antilogies (antilogiae, or antithetical arguments) in forensic rhetoric. The rest of the essay will examine, from a theoretical point of view, sophistic methods of argument that contributed to the development of ancient Greek law. Touching on the issues of opposition, the debate, the reductio ad absurdum, and the principle of non-contradiction, the essay will highlight the relevance of sophistic thought to the judicial field and, more generally, the legal arena, in ancient Athens, so much so that one can think of the sophists as advocates of a particular legal culture.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-20
DOI: 10.3390/h12010001
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 2: Reading Behind Bars: Literacy and Survival
in U.S. Prison Literature
Authors: Katie Owens-Murphy
First page: 2
Abstract: This paper unpacks the contradiction between the benefits of literacy and the punitive prison policies that seek to curb or regulate reading by beginning with the complicated historical relationship between incarceration and literacy. I then turn to the testimonies of two prominent incarcerated autodidacts who I now regularly teach within my prison literature classes both on my university campus and at a men’s prison. The writings of Malcolm X and Etheridge Knight model the difficulties of negotiating the institutional risks and personal and political rewards of learning to read and write behind bars—particularly while Black. What is more, while literacy may provide an “on-ramp” toward higher education, barriers for incarcerated people continue to proliferate in our current era in the form of book bans, paywalls, and the material conditions of prisons themselves.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-20
DOI: 10.3390/h12010002
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 3: Constructing the ADHD Child in Historical
Children’s Literature
Authors: Hou
First page: 3
Abstract: In this article, debates around ideas of childhood and disability will be engaged through the close reading of the retrospective diagnosis of a child with ADHD in an early work of German children’s literature (also widely translated, including into English in 1848), Heinrich Hoffmann’s poem Struwwelpeter. ADHD is one of the most widely diagnosed and medicated childhood developmental disorders of the present day. At the same time, recent debates have raised questions about the diagnostic criteria, the potential side effects and efficacy of medication, and the impact of the current political context on the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s classic arguments about bio-power (2008), as well as the most recent work of critical psychology on childhood developmental disorders, the article draws out both how retrospective diagnoses of ADHD and other disorders, including Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), are defined by current criteria within the political context of the current psychological, cultural, and medical controversies.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-21
DOI: 10.3390/h12010003
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 4: Representing the Silk Road: Literature and
Images between China and Japan During the Cold War
Authors: Zhixi Yin
First page: 4
Abstract: The essay focused on the TV documentary series The Silk Road and discussed the significance of this co-production between China and Japan. Two television stations, NHK and CCTV, provided each other with technical support to create a new image of the Silk Road in 1980. They attempted to rediscover the cultural relationship in Asia. Japanese Oriental studies were either the base for this co-production or the source of trouble. CCTV needed to utilize and overcome Japanese technology and the resources from Oriental studies, to represent national culture and identity through images. On the other hand, Japan once again sought ways to represent the Asian “others.” However, the challenge was making it relative to Orientalism and imperialism. This essay also compares the two versions and suggests that both ancient Asian cultural histories that they represented through images reflected the contemporaneous political situation of the Cold War. In CCTV’s version, the images of the Silk Road became a symbol of the re-establishment of China’s national identity, including the imagination of a “multi-ethnic state” and a “community of cultural memory that unites East and West”. Furthermore, this version also represented the trade with neighboring states. Each of these elements had a realistic role in the political environment of 1980. On the other hand, NHK’s version contains a narrative to prove Japan is the last stop on the Silk Road. Moreover, before this documentary, Japanese literature had long sought the “unknown” of the Silk Road and became a strong intellectual foundation for The Silk Road. The narrative of Japan “being a part of the Silk Road, but unlike in colonialism, as a traveler” is what Yasushi Inoue repeatedly expressed in his literary works and appeared to have been passed on through the images of the documentary. Carrying the negative legacy of Japanese imperialism, then being caught between the United States and the Socialist bloc, and having a difficult choice of political identity, Japanese intellectuals refrained from expressing their political positions and chose to describe cultural history from the “traveler’s” perspective. This essay suggests this is an attempt to redefine Japan on the cultural map of Asia and indirectly to break through the polarization of capitalism and socialism in the Cold War.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-21
DOI: 10.3390/h12010004
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 12, Pages 5: Neo-Barroco, the Missing Group of the New
American Poetry
Authors: Paul E. Nelson
First page: 5
Abstract: The New American Poetry anthology delineated “schools” of North American poetry which have become seminal: The Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov), the New York School (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara), the San Francisco Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer), and the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure). The word seminal is used in a traditional way, from the root: “of seed or semen … full of possibilities”, but here also because the work is dominated by men and the omission of poets like Diane di Prima and Joanne Kyger seems especially egregious now. As compared to the whiteness of academic verse of the time, the New American Poetry was radical and more diverse, but could be seen as quite inadequate in those aspects from a contemporary perspective. Of course culture must always be judged in proper context, including its era and the anthology has had a powerful impact on the poetry of the continent from which it came. This paper posits that The New American Poetry, had it looked even slightly off the shore of North America, could have included the Neo-Barroco school of Latin American poetry. The affinities are almost endless and the limited scope of even the most radical poets of the post-war generation is exposed.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-28
DOI: 10.3390/h12010005
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 130: The Work of a Moment: When Jane Austen
Stops Time
Authors: Maria Frawley
First page: 130
Abstract: This essay examines Jane Austen’s occasional but potent attention to singular moments that seem to stand outside of the usual flow of time. Signaled by her use of phrases such as ‘the work of a moment’ or ‘the work of an instant’, these momentous moments gain resonance when studied against the backdrop of Austen’s nuanced attention to temporal representation in narrative and to the temporal dimensions of human experience. The essay argues that Austen’s momentous moments ultimately function as a crucial dimension of what Amit Yahav in Feeling Time designates the ‘sensibility chronotope’, a perspective that asserts primacy over chronometry and chronology. Attending to these moments in the fiction further enables us to assess Austen’s contribution to what would later become a distinctive feature of the nineteenth-century realist novel, the preoccupation with roads not taken and ‘lives unled’, as Andrew Miller argues in On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-22
DOI: 10.3390/h11060130
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 131: A Sign of Good Taste: Mori Ōgai,
Mitsukoshi, and the Concept of Shumi
Authors: Jurriaan van der Meer
First page: 131
Abstract: This paper attempts to situate the notion of shumi as a rhetorical device used by modern Japanese department stores as part of their marketing strategies. Although often equated with the concept of ‘taste’, I demonstrate how shumi both overlaps with and differs from the concept of taste, as it is often discussed in critical theory in the context of consumerism. I do this by examining how shumi was used in the PR-magazines of various department stores and other related forms of print media. Special attention is paid to the PR-magazine of Mitsukoshi, which is perhaps the most innovative department store in modern Japanese history. Subsequently, I analyze three short stories by Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) published in Mitsukoshi’s PR-magazine between 1911 and 1912. Mitsukoshi printed short stories by acclaimed authors in their magazines, mostly as a form of lighthearted entertainment and branding. Yet, when read closely, Ōgai’s three stories also form a profound observation of the skewed moral reality of a market-driven economy. Each of the narratives under scrutiny in this paper shows the human cost of a system in which social relations are dictated by consumer objects. The cultivation of the urge to consume was carefully framed around the rhetoric of shumi and was thus not merely a marketing tool to increase profit margins but also a mechanism to manipulate the desires and anxieties of consumers. A reading of Ōgai’s three short narratives reveals the ambivalent morality produced by the rhetoric of shumi, which in turn engendered and validated the identities of an emerging middle class through the consumable object-as-sign.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-26
DOI: 10.3390/h11060131
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 132: ‘& Not the Least Wit’:
Jane Austen’s Use of ‘Wit’
Authors: Cox
First page: 132
Abstract: Jane Austen is celebrated for her wit and wittiness. She famously defended novels in Northanger Abbey, for example, on the basis that they display ‘the liveliest effusions of wit’. Critics have long been occupied with detailing the implications of Austen’s wit, but without due attention to Austen’s own explicit deployment of the word within her writing. Offering a re-evaluation of Austen’s use of ‘wit’, this article provides a much-needed examination of how the term is implemented by Austen in her fiction (from her juvenilia, and through her six major novels), contextualises wit’s meaning through its seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century senses, and reveals that ‘wit’ did not necessarily have the positive connotations often presumed in modern suppositions. It transpires that, seemingly paradoxically, Austen routinely adopts the label ‘wit’ ironically to expose an absence of true wit, whilst concurrently avoiding the application of the word in moments displaying true wit. This article argues for the need to understand the crucial distinction between wit and true wit in Austen’s fiction.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-26
DOI: 10.3390/h11060132
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 133: North to South through a Post-Feminist
Prism: Israeli Society as Reflected in Ora Shem-Ur’s Fictional
Detective Novels
Authors: Anat Koplowitz-Breier
First page: 133
Abstract: Ora Shem-Ur’s detective series starring Ali Honigsberg established her as one of the early female pioneers in the new wave of Israeli detective fiction writers. In line with the current trend in post-feminist criticism towards analyzing the place of women within popular culture by looking at fiction as an agent of social change, this article suggests that the series not only addresses gendered topics but also other tensions and social exploitations of power within Israeli society. Shem-Ur thus provides a fascinating portrait of Israeli society in the 1990s, reflecting the way in which female detective fiction developed from light reading material into a social mirror presenting and addressing social changes and shifts in gender conception. Reading the series through a post-feminist lens, the article seeks to demonstrate how its themes of the relations between men, women, and power, and of economic corruption and politics, shed light on contemporaneous Israeli social issues.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-27
DOI: 10.3390/h11060133
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 134: Authenticity and Atwood’s
‘Scientific Turn’
Authors: Myles Chilton
First page: 134
Abstract: Margaret Atwood’s science/speculative dystopian MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—opens up questions about how genre-mixing indexes and probes interrelated notions of authenticity. This focus is prompted by the simple question of why Atwood, having established worldwide renown for realist novels of socio-historical authenticity, switched to blending realism with science/speculative fiction. Through analyzing how the trilogy departs from realism, while never truly embracing SF, the paper argues that while the realist novel may offer the strongest representations of authentic psychological states, larger questions of epistemic authority and the state of our world demand a literature that authenticates knowledge. The MaddAddam trilogy challenges the notion that realism’s social, existential and moral concerns are more authentic when supported with a scientific explanatory logic. Authenticity is thus found in a negotiation between Truth and whether to trust in the locations (social and geographical, literary and literal) of knowledge.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-29
DOI: 10.3390/h11060134
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 135: Technicity and the Virtual
Authors: A. S. Aurora Hoel
First page: 135
Abstract: This article outlines an eco-operational theory of technical mediation that centers on Gilbert Simondon’s notion of technicity. The argument is that technical apparatuses do the work of concepts. However, the eco-operational viewpoint completely alters the status of concepts: what they are, where they are, and what they do. Technicity, as understood here, concerns the efficacious action and operational functioning of a broad range of apparatuses (including living bodies and technical machines), which are conceived as adaptive mediators. The focus on technicity provides a new notion of the virtual, that of the operationally real, which resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s while also marking a new direction. What is more, by approaching mediation in terms of technicity, the eco-operational framework offers a novel understanding of concept or generality that stakes out a middle path between Kantian representational generality and Deleuzian concrete singularity.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-31
DOI: 10.3390/h11060135
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 136: Transits in Oncology: A Protocol Study for
a Therapy-Educational Training Built-In Intervention
Authors: Carolina M. Scaglioso
First page: 136
Abstract: The study “Transits in oncology” has been perfected with the collaboration of the UOC of Oncological Mammary Surgery of the Azienda Ospedaliero Universitaria Senese Siena, specifically by Prof. Donato Casella. The study means to analyze the impact of art-therapy interventions aimed at minimizing psychological distress in women with a diagnosis of breast cancer/mammary carcinoma (anxiety/depression), hence improving their psychophysical wellbeing. To this end, the study employs the evaluation of specific psychological parameters with the purpose of monitoring anxiety and depression levels, while investigating a potential correlation between the anxiety and depression levels and other psychological variables, such as alexithymia. The mammary carcinoma diagnosis, to all effects, constitutes an actual “disorienting dilemma” for the woman: it leads to questioning one’s way of life, and their past and future choices; the upheaval is conducive to a reflective phase that upsets one’s “expectations of meaningfulness”. The art-therapy intervention has been elaborated in a protocol that underscores its transformative methodology qualities: it aims to act on the regenerative potential of the turmoil, for an elaboration of trauma that does not negate it or further it (the feeling that nothing will change and everything will go back to the way it was before), but rather disrupts it. The final goal is to promote new existential practices, generating positive change towards self-awareness, stimulating the activation of one’s latent resources by accessing one’s symbolic world and one’s imagination.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-31
DOI: 10.3390/h11060136
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 137: “Befo’ de Wah”: Sounding
Out Ill-Legibility in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories
Authors: Cameron MacDonald
First page: 137
Abstract: In 1969, blues guitarist Earl Hooker released Two Bugs and a Roach, solidifying him as a pioneer of the wah-wah technique. Before the wah-wah pedal, however, there was Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories, a collection of frame narratives that recollect plantation life “befo’ de wah”. In this essay, I insist the slide, slip, and compressions of Hooker’s wah-wah voicings find resonance in Chesnutt’s own linguistic play, through which the sonics of Julius’ sociolect texture the text towards speculative spellings, grammars, and meanings that query the logics of white, Enlightenment rationality and its hegemonic conceptions of space, time, value, and subjecthood. In listening to the tales’ resonances with the “wah”, I suggest Chesnutt articulates the “ill-legibility” of plantation existence and its echoes into and out from the present, as evidenced by Hooker’s own disproportionate susceptibility to and lifelong struggle with tuberculosis. In doing so, Julius’ storytelling makes legible modes of survival that attune to how Black bodies persist via the (un)sound logics of illness, slavery, and sonority. Overall, I argue Chesnutt amplifies modes of existence that emerge from the distinct spatio-temporality of the plantation, thus re-forming with and through the ills of slavery and persisting against rational legibility, capital production, and normativity.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-31
DOI: 10.3390/h11060137
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 138: Tall Tales—Myth and Honesty in Tim
Burton’s Big Fish (2003)
Authors: Sylvie Magerstädt
First page: 138
Abstract: Questions about the relationship between truth and fiction have a long history in philosophical thinking, going back at least as far as Plato. They re-emerge in more recent philosophical debates on cinema and are powerfully illustrated in Tim Burton’s 2003 film Big Fish, which narrates the story of Edward and his son Will, who tries to uncover the truth behind his father’s tall tales. Will’s desire for honesty—for facts rather stories—has led to a considerable rift between them. While the film extols the beauty of storytelling and the power of myth, it also raises questions about the relationship between honesty and myth, fact and fiction. This article explores these themes from a multidisciplinary perspective by drawing on diverse sources, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben/On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense (1873), contemporary philosophical writings on fiction, the virtues of truthfulness, honesty and sincerity, as well as ideas on memoir and creative life writing drawn from literary studies. Overall, it argues for the positive, creative potential of storytelling and defends the idea that larger truths may often be found behind embellished facts and deceptive fictions. The final section expands this discussion to explore cinema’s power to create what Nietzsche called ‘honesty by myth’. Through the variety of background sources, the article also aims to demonstrate how ideas from multiple disciplinary contexts can be brought together to stimulate fruitful conversations on cinema, myth and the power of storytelling.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-31
DOI: 10.3390/h11060138
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 139: Caring for Everything Inside: Migrant
Trauma and Danticat’s Narrative Bigidi
Authors: Jay Rajiva
First page: 139
Abstract: In this essay, I argue that Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, in short stories from her most recent collection, Everything Inside (2019), challenges toxic forms of representation by attending to the imaginative potential of Haitian migrant experience within moments of collective trauma. This challenge, I suggest, is based on bigidi, a Creole expression denoting permanent imbalance that is once philosophy, dance practice, musical aesthetic, and cultural tradition. The principle of being off-balance without falling, central to how bigidi finds expression in Guadeloupean swaré-lé-woz and other forms of Caribbean dance, interweaves rhythm, music, and bodily movement with a community-oriented site of cultural expression. By saturating the narrative and readerly spaces of Everything Inside with uniquely Caribbean elements of improvisation, audience interaction, and performance, Danticat foregrounds moments of shared intimacy and vulnerability between Haitians, disrupting the representational trauma circuit of migrant death.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-07
DOI: 10.3390/h11060139
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 140: Reading Performances of Illness Scripts,
Clinical Authority, and Narrative Self-Care in Samuel Beckett’s
Malone Dies and Jérôme Lambert’s Chambre Simple
Authors: Swati Joshi, Claire Jeantils
First page: 140
Abstract: Malone Dies (1956) by Samuel Beckett and Chambre simple (2018) by Jérôme Lambert present the narratives of precarity in the clinical setting, wherein the clinical caregivers view the suffering of the patients as a spectacle and chart out pre(script)ions and pro(script)ions for them. Both novels open on a note of uncertainty. This paper examines the narratives of fear and anxiety of the institutionalized patients (probably) in the mental asylum in Malone Dies and the public hospital in Chambre simple. The caregivers in both novels represent the voice of medical authority who focus on cure rather than care, providing their patients food and medications or conducting tests. Hence, Malone and le Patient are compelled to develop artistic coping mechanisms of self-care, reclaiming the ownership of the self. In Malone Dies, the abatement of in-person care and the fear of spending time in isolation before death motivates Malone to devise the narratives. Malone is the sole performer and spectator of his performance of patienthood. Similarly, le Patient chooses the position of the spectator, thus turning upside down the “spectacle” of the epilepsy script, where the patient is viewed as the performer of catharsis by the clinical audience. Here, the lens of performance studies helps us understand clinical caregivers’ emphasis on preparing an illness script that governs Malone and le Patient’s script of narrative self-care. We argue that caregivers’ expectations pressurize patients with chronic conditions to implement forms of artistic self-care in clinical settings.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-09
DOI: 10.3390/h11060140
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 141: On Representing Extreme Experiences in
Writing and Translation: Omid Tofighian on Translating the Manus Prison
Narratives
Authors: Omid Tofighian
First page: 141
Abstract: On 10 June 2021, the Norwegian translator Signe Prøis (for publisher Camino Forlag) organised an event with both Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian (both by video link from New Zealand and Australia) in conversation with translation studies scholar Erlend Wichne (University of Agder, Norway; Agder forum for translation studies). The event was titled: ‘Can I translate it' On representing extreme experiences in writing and translation’. The dialogue in this article features excerpts from the seminar with a focus on Tofighian’s translation of Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018) into English. The topics covered include responsibility, translation as activism, some aspects of the broader context to translating No Friend but the Mountains, the role of place, and a shared philosophical activity.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-10
DOI: 10.3390/h11060141
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 142: Civil War Song in Black and White: Print
and the Representation of the Spirituals
Authors: Jeremy Dwight Wells
First page: 142
Abstract: This article explores how White writers wrote about African American spirituals during and after the Civil War. While these writers tended to view Black speech as deficient, they were willing to regard Black musical expression as simply different, paving the way for its eventual nationalization as “American music”. Noting that White writers were not in the habit of admitting the inadequacies of their preferred modes of representation, the article concludes that the print representation of the spirituals contributed to a transformation of what was meant by the word “American”.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-11
DOI: 10.3390/h11060142
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 143: Really, Truly Trans and the (Minor)
Literary Discontents of Authenticity
Authors: Aaron Hammes
First page: 143
Abstract: Identity formation, questions of identity, shifting identities, perceived deviant identities, and reactions (social, political, cultural, individual) to them are the stuff of Bildungsroman as well as more “experimental” subgenres of long-form fiction. For minority/minoritized subjects and authors, questions of identity take on a different pallor: their work is expected to engage with questions of identity according to either or both how their subject position confronts marginalization and otherness, and how their subject position conditions every experience they have in the world, both inside and outside community. This inquiry investigates how contemporary transgender minor literature constructs dis/identity through authenticity. Imogen Binnie speculates in her 2013 novel Nevada on the concept of “Really, Truly Trans”, a cipher for identity policing and presumptions of sex–gender authenticity, based on cisnormative characteristics and, occasionally, inter-community phobias and proscriptions. More recently, Torrey Peters challenges measures of trans authenticity through both her titular detransitioner and his former partner in Detransition, Baby. Trans minor literature is an ideal testing ground for phobic public presumptions around “authentic” sex–gender and anti-identitarian strategies of those who are forced to confront purity tests and exclusion or suppression on grounds of authenticity, and each novel presses at phobic majoritarian dictates of authenticity and its presupposed value.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-13
DOI: 10.3390/h11060143
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 144: All That Is Solid Turns into Sand: Woman
in the Dunes across Page and Screen
Authors: Xinyi Zhao
First page: 144
Abstract: This paper attempts a close study of Abe Kobo’s novel Woman in the Dunes and its screen adaptation (dir. Teshigahara Hiroshi 1964). Engaging adaptation studies, media studies, and sound studies, this paper moves from the conventional focus on the linear transfer of text from a source to a result, to examine adaptation as a multilevel, multisensory, and multidirectional process of remediation. By mediating documentary cinema and avant-garde tradition, the filmic adaptation, as the paper argues, not only provokes and enhances its literary original, but also illuminates existentialist concerns that gained critical currency in the 1960s. The paper moves on to analyze Takemitsu Toru’s score in relation to Teshigahara’s surrealist imagery; in doing so, it elucidates the way the film gives the sand a form of human agency alluded to yet not fully realized in Abe’s novel. Scrutiny of Abe and Takemitsu’s early years in Japan-occupied Manchuria further connects Abe’s work to the issue of postcolonial identity while opening Woman in the Dunes to more interpretative possibilities as an I-Novel. Through mediating collective history and personal memory, adaptation opens a dialogic intersubjective horizon where questions of identity and affect intersect in the post-war media environment.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-17
DOI: 10.3390/h11060144
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 145: When William Came to Japan: A Comparative
Study of When William Came and the Post-War Period of Japan
Authors: Satoru Fukamachi
First page: 145
Abstract: When William Came (1913) is Hector Hugh Munro’s (Saki) novel that describes the German invasion of Britain and its aftermath. It has been regarded as a propaganda novel since its publication, calling for conscription and the like; however, its psychological portrayal of Londoners under German rule is worth reading. Though there are studies on the literary and cultural aspects of this work, none have examined how realistic his depiction would be if Britain had lost the war. However, the premise of this work—how to live in a situation where a traditionally powerful nation is defeated and, because it is an island nation, it is impossible to reverse its defeat—can be historically examined. This study examines the accuracy of Munro’s imaginings by comparing his imagined post-war British people with real post-World War II Japanese people. Although it can be argued that Munro was optimistic about the existence of the colonies, the results show numerous similarities between the changes in the two populations, before and after the war, and in their feelings towards the victorious nation. Munro’s insights into people were surprisingly profound.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-22
DOI: 10.3390/h11060145
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 146: Letting Go, Coming Out, and Working
Through: Queer Frozen
Authors: Neil Hayward Cocks
First page: 146
Abstract: This article builds on an already established understanding of Disney’s Frozen as a queer text. Following Judith Butler, however, it works against a notion of ‘queer’ that is locatable in the intrinsic truth of plot, imagery, and character, and removed from questions of performance and narration. In taking this approach, and in keeping with the focus of this Special Edition of Humanities, the article undertakes an extensive, fine-grained reading of ‘Let it Go’, the stand-out song from the first Frozen film. Rather than argue for or against the idea that ‘Let it Go’ is a Coming Out song, issues of textual perspective and textual difference are foregrounded in a way that challenges claims to the stability of identity. The pressing question, for this article, is not whether the lead character of Frozen truly is ‘out’, but the possibility of fixing identity in this way, the precise nature of the reversals and antagonisms that being ‘out’ and ‘letting it go’ require in this particular text, and how such determinations might impact on a wider understanding of ‘queer’.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-24
DOI: 10.3390/h11060146
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 147: Medusa’s Gaze and Geijerstam’s
Gay Science in the Swedish fin de siècle
Authors: Gustaf Marcus
First page: 147
Abstract: Gustaf af Geijerstam’s Medusas hufvud (Medusa’s Head, 1895) is one of the “account-settling novels” of the late nineteenth century. These novels reflect on the aesthetic reorientation after the breakdown of the “Eighties movement” in Sweden. One important dimension of this transformation was the growing emphasis on gendered visions of authorship. I argue that Geijerstam’s novel is an attempt to create a male author role and a male intellectual sphere. The establishment of a male literary sphere requires homosocial desire, an artistic passion that Geijerstam understands as similar and different from sexual desire. This terminology is employed, after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to insist on a productive continuum between the repositioning on the literary field that the novel represents and the thinly disguised homosexual tensions between its three male characters. However, the homosexual tensions are also related to secrecy, disgust, and terror (most clearly visible in the important Medusa motif). I finally argue that Geijerstam employs the erotic triangle, where the woman functions as a “mediator” for a relationship between the men, as a plot device that lets him simultaneously explore and dissimulate this homosocial desire.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-11-25
DOI: 10.3390/h11060147
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 148: Trauma, Diasporic Consciousness, and
Ethics in Nicole Krauss’s The Forest Dark
Authors: Tiasa Bal, Gurumurthy Neelakantan
First page: 148
Abstract: Dislocation, expatriation, and the attendant loss of homeland are concerns at the heart of Jewish literature. The dialectical relationship between identity and the sense of homeland informing the Jewish diasporic consciousness, in particular, has often culminated in nostalgic depictions of Israel in post-war American Jewish literature. In focusing on such a literary representation, this essay unravels the multidimensionality of diasporic Jewish identity. Critically analyzing Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark (2017), it evaluates the trauma of exile and the psychic dilemma of third-generation American Jewish writers. The novelist brings about a confluence of nostos and nostalgia in Forest Dark. In evoking the visceral sense of loss, dislocation, and a painful yearning for the lost homeland, the author succeeds in tracing the lives of two protagonists, Jules Epstein, a retired New York lawyer, and Nicole, a Jewish American novelist struggling with a deep marital crisis. The text foregrounds the theme of self-discovery exemplified in the homecoming of its two central characters. Following his parents’ death and haunted by the anguish and horror of the Shoah, Jules unmoors himself from his current life and flies to Tel Aviv on a whim. Nicole, who suffers from creative blockage on account of her failing marriage, undertakes the trip to Tel Aviv hoping to recover from her soul-sickness, as it were. If Jules and Nicole do not cross paths, it still remains that their Jewish identities stem from the originary tragedy of the Holocaust. Although removed from the horrific sights and scenes of the tragic event, intergenerational trauma resonates with certain aspects of the diasporic Jewish existence. Using theoretical interventions of memory studies and the Freudian concept of Unheimlich or the uncanny, this essay explores the ethical implications that undergird Nicole Krauss’s diasporic depiction of Israel.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-03
DOI: 10.3390/h11060148
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 149: Clenched and Empty Fists: Trauma and
Resistance Ethics in Han Kang’s Fiction
Authors: Shannon Finck
First page: 149
Abstract: Broadly speaking, the literary history of human–nonhuman metamorphoses conveys certain ethics regarding human-to-human relations by mediating these relations through metaphors of inhumanity. Where such transformations appear in the literature of the present, however, the human is often decentered, fostering an uneasy consort between human and nonhuman beings and ways of being. Taking the fiction of South Korean author, Han Kang, as a case study, this essay examines the political or civic value of reinvigorating vegetal or arboreal transformation in contemporary stories that unfold against a backdrop of global climate change and ecological collapse. I argue that Han’s work depicts the mimicry of or engagement with nonhuman forms of life as both passive strategies for resisting human acts of violence and exploitation and alternative models of sociality and care. Drawing especially on the unruliness of plants and non-animal organic matter, Han’s translated works invite readers to consider what human subjects can learn about both individual and networked, interspecies modes of protest from green subjectivity.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-05
DOI: 10.3390/h11060149
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 150: Isabelle de Charrière, Jane Austen,
and Post-Enlightenment Fiction: Writing the Shared Humanity of Men and
Women
Authors: Valérie Cossy
First page: 150
Abstract: This article analyses Isabelle de Charrière and Jane Austen together in relation to the changing perception of humanity affecting European thinking at the end of the eighteenth century. Not only is Charrière’s rather lesser-known work likely to benefit from the comparison, but Austen’s novels also gain in philosophical depth when read alongside hers. Each one an outsider in her own world, Charrière and Austen wrote against the grain of inherited gender prejudices but also against the growing conservatism of binary orthodoxy around 1800. Adopting as writers a perspective freed from ‘feminine’ expectations, as opposed to the lady novelist embodied by the famous Isabelle de Montolieu, they endeavoured to invent characters and stories distinct from the pervasive definitions of the feminine and the masculine, giving readers the possibility of considering the shared humanity equally shaping men and women.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-05
DOI: 10.3390/h11060150
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 151: ‘“I Like Her
Parrots”’: Accessibility, Aesthetics, Zadie Smith’s On
Beauty and the Women’s Prize for Fiction
Authors: Andy Mousley
First page: 151
Abstract: One of the key criteria given to the judges of the Women’s Prize for Fiction is ‘accessibility’. Accessibility, readability and more recently ‘relatability’, have gained traction in recent years over other indices of literary value, such as quasi-modernist notions of difficulty and alterity. This article questions the gendering of accessibility as well as its relationship to neoliberalism. Its specific focus is on the 2006 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, a book that foregrounds questions of aesthetics and aesthetic value and attempts in its form and content to negotiate between the popular and the literary. Simultaneously problematising and simplifying ideas of beauty and artistic worth, the novel’s success was arguably due, in part, to the way that it at once tapped into and resolved insecurities surrounding judgements of aesthetic value. Controversies over literary awards are routine, but this article argues that they were especially rife in the 2000s. This article also sets these controversies over literary value and the novel’s own various engagements with the aesthetic in the context of recent, postcritical backlashes against the hermeneutics of suspicion that came to influence literary and critical theory in the 1980s and 1990s.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-05
DOI: 10.3390/h11060151
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 152: Eros and Etiology in Love’s
Labour’s Lost
Authors: Darryl Chalk
First page: 152
Abstract: In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s construction of eros as a kind of ‘vulgar love’, distinctive from ‘heroic love’, emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love’s Labour’s Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-06
DOI: 10.3390/h11060152
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 153: Socrates and the Sophists: Reconsidering
the History of Criticisms of the Sophists
Authors: Noburu Notomi
First page: 153
Abstract: To examine the sophists and their legacy, it is necessary to reconsider the relation between Socrates and the sophists. The trial of Socrates in 399 BCE seems to have changed people’s attitudes towards and conceptions of the sophists drastically, because Socrates was the first and only “sophist” executed for being a sophist. In the fifth century BCE, people treated natural philosophy, sophistic rhetoric and Socratic dialogue without clear distinctions, often viewing them as dangerous, impious and damaging to society. After the trial of Socrates, however, Plato sharply dissociated Socrates from the sophists and treated his teacher as a model philosopher and the latter as fakes, despite many common features and shared interests between them. While Plato’s distinction was gradually accepted by his contemporaries and by subsequent thinkers through the fourth century BCE, some disciples of Socrates and the second generation of sophists continued to pride themselves on being sophists and philosophers at the same time. Thus, this paper argues that Socrates belonged to the sophistic movement before Plato dissociated him from the other sophists, although the trial of Socrates did not immediately eliminate confusion between the sophist and the philosopher. The reconstructed view of the contemporaries of Socrates and Plato will change our conception of the sophists, as well as of Socrates. Finally, the paper examines the relation of Socrates to Antiphon of Rhamnus. Plato deliberately ignored this Athenian sophist because he was a shadowy double of Socrates in democratic Athens.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-07
DOI: 10.3390/h11060153
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 154: A Site-Perspective on the Second Sophistic
of the near East and Its Impact on the History of Rhetoric: An Overview
Authors: Richard Leo Enos
First page: 154
Abstract: This essay introduces and examines the impact of the Second Sophistic in the Near East on the history of rhetoric. Although the overall impact of sophists is apparent as early as the Classical Period of ancient Greece, this work emphasizes the renaissance of sophistic rhetoric during the so-called Second Sophistic, a movement that flourished slightly before and throughout the Roman Empire. The Second Sophistic provided an educational system that proved to be a major force spreading the study and performance of rhetoric throughout the Roman Empire. This essay examines and synthesizes scholarship that employs conventional historical approaches, particularly research that often focuses on individual sophists, in order to establish a grounding (and justification) for concentrating on what is termed here as a “site-perspective.” That is, this essay stresses the importance of the sites of sophistic education and performance, arguing for such an orientation for future research. This essay also advances observations from the author’s own experiences and research at ancient sites in Greece and Turkey, as well as other sources of archaeological and epigraphical research. Such work reveals that artifacts at archaeological sites—epigraphy, statuary now held at museums in Greece and Turkey, and a range of other forms of material rhetoric—provide contextual insights into the nature, influence, and longevity of rhetoric during the Second Sophistic beyond examining the achievements of individual sophists. A site-perspective approach reveals that a symbiotic relationship existed between the educational achievements of the Second Sophistic—in which rhetoric played a major role—and the social and cultural complexities of the Roman Empire. Such observations also reveal the benefits, but also the need, for further fieldwork, archival research, and the development of new methodological procedures to provide a more refined understanding of the impact of the Second Sophistic on the history of rhetoric.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-07
DOI: 10.3390/h11060154
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 155: Good Life without Happiness
Authors: Timo Airaksinen
First page: 155
Abstract: A good life combines lively living and a good purpose, which depend on action results and consequences. They supervene upon the action results that create life’s meaning. A good life is never evil because evil deeds, as such, are not part of the agent’s action repertoire. Agents cannot claim them as their own; if they do, dishonest hypocrisy and social stigmatization follow. But, when action results are good, the purpose is good, too. One cannot realize an evil purpose by acting morally. I argue against the idea that a passive, dreaming life could be a good life. I discuss specific kinds of religious life that follow a monastic rule. A good life may not be happy, although it tends to be so. I discuss various theories of happiness, including the traditional Socratic view that virtue and virtue only make an agent happy. I conclude that a good life is not the same as a virtuous life; hence, a good life can be unhappy. To conclude, I discuss personal autonomy in social life. A good life requires that one’s actions and goals are one’s own, but such ownership is hard to realize because of a social life’s complicated and demanding mutual dependencies. I conclude that full ownership is fiction, so a good life is a social life.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-07
DOI: 10.3390/h11060155
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 156: Fear of the Queen’s Speed: Trauma
and Departure in The Winter’s Tale
Authors: Caroline Bicks
First page: 156
Abstract: The essay applies trauma theory to early modern understandings of grief and its contagious after-effects to provide new ways to think about the figuring of trauma’s reach into individual embodied minds and their environments, and about its larger impacts on narrative structures, theatrical spaces, and the people who populated them. To do so, I turn to Shakespeare’s most deliberately tricky play, The Winter’s Tale, and to its undeniably traumatized Queen Hermione, who defies the laws of time, space, and motion to an extent unmatched by any other human character in his canon. The essay explores how Shakespeare imagines and mobilizes the aggrieved Hermione; and how her departure and repeated, belated returns play out different forms and effects of traumatic response. These include the gaps and eruptions endemic to the processes of accommodating the impossible and listening to stories that are structured around absence and aporia. It is my contention that in his later play he was experimenting with how those effects could spill out beyond the brains and bodies of trauma’s original victims, and transform the people and spaces beyond them.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-07
DOI: 10.3390/h11060156
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 157: Muriel Rukeyser’s
“Campaign” and the Spectacular Documentary Poetics of the
Whistle Stop Tour
Authors: Michael Anthony Smith
First page: 157
Abstract: This article examines how documentary poetics—particularly as employed by Muriel Rukeyser—use a montage of images to form a visual landscape. This visual landscape is wielded effectively by politicians during the Whistle Stop Tour electioneering. In Rukeyser’s “Campaign”, one section in her long-form poetic biography of Wendell Willkie, entitled One Life, she describes the journey of the 1940 Republican presidential candidate as he campaigns from the observation car of a train. The visual landscape created by the Whistle Stop Tour and described through documentary poetics contains Willkie, his audience, and the train itself. It is a unified spectacle, one that contains the rider, the reader, and the onlooker. Rukeyser’s documentary poetry and sensory-rich verse delimit the observation car as the mechanism through which this spectacle forms. The documentary poetics genre is one aptly suited for the description of the landscape through this railcar—a high velocity railspace that relays information by montage, which is to say, through a filmic collage of information assembled into a readable layout of the perceived world.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-09
DOI: 10.3390/h11060157
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 158: The Japanese-Language Newspaper Novel
Abroad
Authors: Edward Mack
First page: 158
Abstract: This article presents initial findings about the history of the publication of serialized novels in Japanese-language newspapers published in North and South America. An under-studied publishing venue for literature to begin with, even less is known about the serialization of novels in these diasporic communities despite them being the most widely circulated fiction. Focusing on what can be reconstructed of the history of these works and their publication, this study focuses on five newspapers and their serialized novels during the 1930s, with a particular focus on the novel Constellations Ablaze by Ozaki Shirō and the lesser-known author Nakagawa Amenosuke. This preliminary survey suggests an industry that navigated international copyright law, reader’s tastes, and the interconnection of different local readerships.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-13
DOI: 10.3390/h11060158
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 159: Women’s Perceptions of Nature: An
Ecofeminist Analysis of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body
Authors: Nigus Michael Gebreyohannes, Abiye Daniel Ambachew
First page: 159
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to explore ecofeminist issues in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body. It mainly focuses on the relationship between women and nature and explores the perceptions of women toward the natural environment. Thus, a close reading was done to extract the necessary information from the novel. Next, the extracted data was analyzed using textual analysis. Additionally, ecofeminist literary criticism was adopted as a lens to analyze the novel. Therefore, based on the analysis made, the novel portrays various issues related to women and nature. Firstly, the novel shows that African women are gardeners, agricultural laborers, and protectors of the land and the natural environment, which makes them have a strong relationship with the natural environment. On the other hand, it shows, that not all women have the same perception of nature. In this manner, Tracey, a white businesswoman, considered nature as an income generator in the form of the ecotourism industry, regardless of the degradation of the natural environment. In contrast, the native women consider nature as a means of their survival. Nyasha, a woman from Zimbabwe, believes nature and land space enhance co-operation and harmony between inhabitants. Similarly, Tambudzai, also from Zimbabwe, recounts the beauty and healing power of nature, and she expresses her concern about the degradation of the natural environment. Therefore, the novel has discovered the different relationships between women and nature. Their understanding of and connection to nature vary and directly relate to their background and context. At last, the novel portrays the impact of neocolonialism and capitalism predominantly on women and nature. In this manner, the author shows her concern for African women and the natural environment.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-15
DOI: 10.3390/h11060159
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 160: Anti-Bourgeois Media in the Japanese
Proletarian Literary Movement
Authors: Takashi Wada
First page: 160
Abstract: The Marxist and socialist ideas that spread throughout the world following the Russian Revolution of 1917 were also influential in bringing about changes in art and culture. Proletarian literature, which flourished in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, was one such example. However, due to Japan’s particular historical circumstances, Japanese proletarian literature was in an ambivalent position between revolutionary literature by left-wing intellectuals and proletarian literature by and for the proletarian class in the pure sense. This article examines the chaos and friction implied by the term “proletarian” from three perspectives: the relationship between proletarian media and bourgeois media, the media distribution system, and the boundary between writers and readers. Through this examination, it clarifies that the approaches of Japanese proletarian media, while imitating bourgeois media to some extent, were unique in their potential to transform the boundary between writers and readers.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-12-15
DOI: 10.3390/h11060160
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 6 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 104: ‘A Great Deal of Noise’: Jane
Austen’s Disruptive Children and the Culture of Conversation
Authors: Richard De Ritter
First page: 104
Abstract: Children occupy a peripheral position in the novels of Jane Austen, with the result that they have received little critical attention. This article proposes that, despite their marginal status, children play a significant role in Austen’s work as agents of disruption, whose presence is frequently signified by the noise they make. It is through their interventions that Austen dramatizes a wider crisis in the capacity of conversation to improve, educate, and forge meaningful connections between individuals. The significance of Austen’s representations of children can be grasped more fully by reading Austen in relation to her contemporaries, namely Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More. While these authors view children as the embodiment of Enlightenment hopes and Revolutionary fears, Austen avoids such polemical representations. Rather than rational actors participating within a culture of improving conversation, Austen’s children are defined by their inarticulate voices and disruptive tendencies. Ultimately, however, it is through their inarticulacy that Austen expresses her doubts about the status of conversation as a site of enlightened exchange.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-08-25
DOI: 10.3390/h11050104
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 105: The Metaphysics of Sophistry: Protagoras,
Nāgārjuna, Antilogos
Authors: Robin Reames
First page: 105
Abstract: There is no category of thought more deliberately or explicitly relegated to a subordinate role in Plato’s dialogues than Sophists and sophistry. It is due to Plato’s influence that terms “sophist” and “sophistry” handed down to us have unilaterally negative associations—synonymous with lies and deception, obscurantism and false reasoning. There are several reasons to be dubious of this standard view of the Sophists and their practices. The primary reason addressed in this essay is that the surviving fragments of the Sophists do not accord with this standard view, a discrepancy that is particularly acute in the case of the 5th-century sophist Protagoras. This essay attends to Protagoras’s doctrines concerning antilogos, the sophistic practice of contradiction and negation. I contend that sophistic antilogos was a paradoxical practice that embodied metaphysical stakes for language and discourse. I challenge the standard view of Sophists and their antilogos by reconstructing a speculative counter-definition: a method for instantiating through language an ontology of flux and becoming over and against what would come to be a Platonist metaphysics of enduring, pure Being. I do this through a comparative analysis of Protagoras and the second century C.E. South Asian Buddhist thinker, Nāgārjuna.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-08-26
DOI: 10.3390/h11050105
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 106: Script and Language as Semiotic Media in
Japanese Storytelling: A Theoretical Approach through Haruki
Murakami’s Noruwei no mori
Authors: Jacob Wayne Runner
First page: 106
Abstract: In contrast to the writing practices of many modern languages, Japanese routinely employs four denotative systems that operate in conjunction, but which are actively recognized as distinct from one another: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and the Roman alphabet. Simultaneously, English, as well as English-derived language usages have been noted for their significant intralinguistic roles in Japanese, going far beyond straightforward loan borrowing functionality. Convention informs the implementations of both script choice and language, and yet neither subjective phenomenon is perfectly uniform. Approaching these issues from a perspective of semiotic theory, this article identifies the flexibility and creative syncretism that is made available by virtue of written Japanese’s systemic open-endedness in terms of script and linguistic multiplicity. It assesses the emblematic functionality that is achievable through deliberate variation or shift in these semiotic media of print, and it demonstrates how auxiliary associative, ideological, and emotive meanings are ascribed to specific language instances. Finally, as an applied literary analysis, it evaluates Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel 『ノルウェイの森』 (Noruwei no mori; Norwegian Wood) in order to clarify prominent semiotic possibilities and to emphasize the easily taken for granted creative aesthetic potential of Japanese’s media-based multiplicity.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-08-28
DOI: 10.3390/h11050106
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 107: Scandinavian Studies in Germany with a
Special Focus on the Position of Old and Modern Icelandic
Authors: Irene Kupferschmied, Magnús Hauksson
First page: 107
Abstract: Scandinavian Studies today are divided into (at least) three areas, which should ideally also be represented by their own chairs at the universities, if one wants to cover the subject as broadly as possible. Likewise, the four languages, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, should be offered to a certain extent. Scandinavian Studies, however, belong to the so-called “small subjects”, and financial and personnel resources are often limited. In addition, the federal states (Bundesländer) have an influence on the equipment of the universities. The subject of Scandinavian Studies can therefore be structured very differently at the individual universities. It is largely undisputed that foreign language skills are an important factor in promoting international understanding. As well, language skills are an absolute foundation in all aspects of a philological subject. Nevertheless, language teaching at universities is generally under pressure, and questions arise about its justification. This is true for both modern and ancient languages. In our article, we mainly describe the positions of Old and modern Icelandic within Scandinavian Studies, which differ greatly. This is mainly due to traditions within Scandinavian Studies and the institutions at which they are taught. Considerations are made regarding the legitimacy of these areas and their connections with other parts of the subject.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-08-29
DOI: 10.3390/h11050107
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 108: Béroul’s Tristran: Emblems of
Sublimation, Exhibitionism, and Castration Fantasy
Authors: Hardaway
First page: 108
Abstract: The violence in Béroul’s Tristran has discomforted many readers and even a few scholars. However, by examining the psychological motivations behind these graphic scenes, important structural elements are revealed. Mark and Iseut have fantasies of violence that lend themselves to analyses. The fantasies emerge from the subconscious, and they are the result of concealed resentment and repressed emotions. For Mark, the consequences are rage and murder. Tristran makes many boasts regarding his physical strength, but he has a propensity for avoidance and passivity, even when his authority is being challenged. Iseut uses an encoded rhetoric to facilitate what she wants, while she simultaneously preserves her own security. Nonetheless, in the end, Tristran and Iseut’s affair is mostly sustained through King Mark’s self-delusion. At a subconscious level, he must be aware of his wife’s infidelity, but he cannot bring himself to recognize it. Failing to resolve his inner conflict, Mark redirects his rage and attacks his advisor, Frocin, the one character in the poem who appears committed to telling the king the truth. The plot continues as the love affair remains concealed, largely because the characters are motivated by subconscious forces.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-08-31
DOI: 10.3390/h11050108
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 109: Winston Churchill’s Divi Britannici
(1675) and Archipelagic Royalism
Authors: Willy Maley, Richard Stacey
First page: 109
Abstract: Divi Britannici (1675) is a major restoration history that deserves to be more widely known. The work’s author, Sir Winston Churchill (1620–1688), is certainly less well-known than his celebrated descendant of the same name. Seldom mentioned in discussions of seventeenth-century historiography, Divi Britannici can be read alongside contemporary histories, including John Milton’s History of Britain (1670). If British historians have generally overlooked Divi Britannici then Churchill’s work did come to the notice of Michel Foucault, who recognized its arguments around conquest, rights and sovereignty as crucial to the development of political thought in the period. In this essay we excavate Churchill’s arguments, sift through the scattered critical legacy, and locate Divi Britannici both within the context of Restoration histories, with their warring interpretations of England and Britain’s past, and within a tradition of British historiography that associates monarchical rule with national stability. What scholars have missed, however, is the propensity of Churchill to align the restored Stuart monarchy with a form of ethnic co-operation between Scotland, Ireland and England, designed to counter the perceived divisions which were exacerbated by the policies of Cromwell and the parliamentarians.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-01
DOI: 10.3390/h11050109
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 110: The Emergence of Rationality in the
Icelandic Sagas: The Colossal Misunderstanding of the Viking Lore in
Contemporary Popular Culture
Authors: Classen
First page: 110
Abstract: For a long time now, Old Norse literature has often been colonized and misappropriated by modern right-wing political groups for their own ideology, symbolism, and public appearance. A critical reading of Icelandic sagas, however, easily demonstrates that those public strategies are very short-sighted, misleading, and outright dangerous for our democratic society. To stem the flood of misinformation regarding the Viking world and its literature, this article joins a small but forceful chorus of recent scholars who are hard at work deconstructing this politicization of saga literature by way of offering new readings of those texts in which the very Viking ideology is actually exposed by the poets, rejected, and supplanted by new forms of social interactions predicated on a legal system and an operation with rationality in the public sphere.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-01
DOI: 10.3390/h11050110
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 111: Refuge and Resistance: Theater with Kurds
and Yezidi Survivors of ISIS
Authors: Ellen Wendy Kaplan
First page: 111
Abstract: This essay looks at ongoing efforts to revitalize arts and culture among the Yezidi and broader Iraqi Kurdish communities. The Yezidi are survivors of the 2014 genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State (ISIS, also known by its Arabic acronym Da’esh) which resulted in mass killing, captivity and expulsion from their ancestral homeland of Mt. Sinjar in northern Iraq. They are part of the Kurdish people, who have engaged in centuries of struggle to protect their cultural and political identity, establish autonomy and ensure their security in the broader Middle East. After a brief overview of the Yezidi genocide and its aftermath, we trace some theatrical efforts in the 20–21st century and look at two embryonic theater initiatives in Iraqi Kurdistan. The description of cultural projects at Springs of Hope Foundation (Shariya Camp) is followed by personal reflection and analysis of the aims, uses and challenges of Applied Theater. This ‘umbrella term’ refers to a process that uses a theatrical tool-kit in non-theater contexts. The aesthetic, ethical and political challenges inherent in this work are considered: the essay explores questions of ethical care and the implications and pitfalls of working with vulnerable and displaced populations, issues of representation, and creating spaces for healing and expression through participatory theater. Finally, we discuss a new initiative in Iraqi Kurdistan that seeks to address ethnic and political fissures through theater. The essay culminates with a consideration of belonging and re-imagining home.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-02
DOI: 10.3390/h11050111
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 112: ‘OMG JANE AUSTEN’: Austen and
Memes in the Post-#MeToo Era
Authors: Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Maria Vara, Georgios Chatziavgerinos
First page: 112
Abstract: This essay will focus on the central position that Jane Austen holds in the growing culture of memes in the Social Web and examine how these present-day cameo artefacts are both transforming the way Austen is perceived and appropriated today, and exploiting her work as a source of inspiration for contemporary debates on genre, gender, and sexuality. It will first trace the origins of memes, these cultural replicators that discharge mini portions of irony, in Northanger Abbey—a novel depending on the reader’s active participation—and argue that the literary landscape of the 1790s popular culture (as reflected in Austen) is a foreshadowing of post-millennial memes. Furthermore, through a close reading of a plethora of memes based on stills from screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, the essay will study how Austen’s renowned Mr. Darcy—filtered through the famous impersonations by Collin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen—has activated new re-imaginings of masculinity and heterosexuality in the post-#MeToo epoch. As some memes suggest, Mr. Darcy, a reformed hero who has learned how to match hegemony with sensibility, is the perfect antidote to the anathema of toxic masculinity and the perfect catch to the crowds of female Janeites. At the same time, however, a large number of memes indicate that, to an expanding male fandom that steers away from a nostalgic reactionary return to Austen, Mr. Darcy is celebrated for the queer potential of his conflicting features.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-02
DOI: 10.3390/h11050112
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 113: Visionary Architects: Barbara Guest,
Frederick Kiesler, and the Surrealist Poetics of the Galaxy
Authors: Susan Rosenbaum
First page: 113
Abstract: In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest’s experiments in visual poetry were influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s architectural designs: both artists, inspired by Surrealist poetics, sought to build visionary structures that took shape on the page but moved beyond it. Following Kiesler’s 1965 death, Guest published a poem in 1968 inspired by Kiesler’s “Galaxy” structures, titled “Homage", and included a shortened version in Durer in the Window (2003). Kiesler composed a number of works under the name “Galaxies”, all of which shared an interest in merging architecture with other art forms, including sculpture, mobiles, drawing, and painting. In “Homage”, Guest was less interested in describing Kiesler’s “Galaxies” than in building a commensurate architecture of the page, dependent on the spatial arrangement of lines and stanzas, the visual impact of white space, and the reader’s imaginative navigation of both. Putting Kiesler’s “Galaxies” and Guest’s “Homage” in dialogue illuminates a model of inter-arts reception as co-creation or what Kiesler called “Correalism” that depends on the spatial dimensions of the poetic imagination. Both works can be understood as open, mobile, “museums without walls” that anticipate the future by inviting dynamic collaboration and future transformation. Finally, I argue that the relationship between these works models the kind of affiliation important to experimental women artists and poets such as Guest, affiliations that helped form an En Dehors Garde “in the shadow” of the avant-garde.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-05
DOI: 10.3390/h11050113
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 114: Look Back in Angria (The Brontë
Family Fandom)
Authors: Anne Jamison
First page: 114
Abstract: Transhistorical accounts of fanfiction often refer to the Brontës’ juvenilia, but such references are largely cursory even as they make a claim about the siblings’ Angria and Gondal writings that needs more careful consideration. This essay offers a more thorough examination of what it means to claim “the Brontës wrote fanfic”, analyzing their family- and site-specific mode of creative production and consumption in relation both to established definitions of contemporary fanfiction and to their own sources and environment. Archival research has enabled me to situate some of the Brontës’ earliest texts in their original tiny, hand-produced format alongside the print periodicals and physical books that the young authors read and transformed. I analyze how the siblings’ books mimic the multiplicity and flexibility of authorship modeled in their local newspaper and how their drawing, marginalia, and corrections accentuate the interactive nature of the printed book. Viewing the Brontë siblings as a family fandom enthusiastically devoted to the creation and appreciation of transformative works helps make visible a model of authorship they share with contemporary fanfiction: authorship not just as collaboration but as play and exchange among diverse materials, sources, activities, media, writers, and readers. Then, as now, this mode exists simultaneously with commercial authorship but is distinct from it, as the siblings recognized, altering their plots, practice, and presentation for their novels.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-05
DOI: 10.3390/h11050114
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 115: “Miles Is a Mode; Coltrane Is,
Power”: Notes on John Coltrane as Poetic Muse and Michael
Harper’s “Alone” in Songlines in Michaeltree (2000)
Authors: James Mellis
First page: 115
Abstract: This article looks at the ways jazz legend John Coltrane was a muse for many Black Arts era poets and proceeds to discuss how Michael Harper rendered Coltrane in his work, focusing on editorial changes between the 1970 and 2000 versions of Michael Harper’s poem, “Alone”. In it, the author argues that the change marks a revision of the centrality of Coltrane as Harper’s muse from his early to later career.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-09
DOI: 10.3390/h11050115
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 116: ‘Speculative Slipstreaming’:
The Impact of Literary Interventions within Contemporary Science Fiction
Authors: Devanny
First page: 116
Abstract: Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson are two canonical writers participating in a ‘literary slipstream’ through their ventures into science fiction, creating crossover texts that confuse the boundaries between the literary and the popular. This interface is exemplified through the awards received by these writers, which help to bring literary credibility and integrity to the genre. Atwood’s first speculative novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was nominated for a Nebula award and the Booker Prize, whilst her MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2015) was followed by the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society in 2015. Winterson was awarded an OBE for her services to literature in the same year that she published The Stone Gods (2006), whilst her most recent novel Frankisstein (2019) was longlisted for the Booker Prize. This article explores the extent to which distinctions between the popular and the literary are reliant upon notions of inferiority and superiority, and the problematics of a desire to frame genre fiction according to perceived notions of literary value.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-09
DOI: 10.3390/h11050116
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 117: Portraits of Working Women: Lola
Ridge’s “The Ghetto” and the Visual Record
Authors: Linda Arbaugh Kinnahan
First page: 117
Abstract: This essay focuses on Lola Ridge’s long poem “The Ghetto” in relation to the gendered imagery and visual construction of the modern laborer emerging across early twentieth-century print media. Perpetuating gendered notions of the modern worker as predominately masculine, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual representations of the laborer typically feature manly, virile figures, often in resistance to capitalism and inevitably eliding the industrial woman laborer. Ridge’s “The Ghetto” alternatively locates modern labor in the female industrial worker. The essay considers the poem’s splicing of collective and individual portraits of immigrant working women, developing a visual rhetoric that asserts women’s agency amidst modernity’s changing forms of work, insisting upon their visibility as workers, activists, and feminists. Consideration of several visual print genres includes women’s labor publications; social and industrial documentary photography; and periodical illustrations from The Masses. In visually representing women workers, these sources of visual media contextualize Ridge’s approach in “The Ghetto” and social attitudes toward gender and labor persisting in the century’s early years.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-12
DOI: 10.3390/h11050117
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 118: The Lonely Woman Icon, Niedecker, and
Mid-20th-Century Advertising
Authors: Elizabeth Savage
First page: 118
Abstract: Popular advertising of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s depicting single women presents an especially useful reference point for Lorine Niedecker’s poems. Attendant to the development of romantic and social promises extended by these ads is the woeful character of the lonely and excluded woman. Notably, the danger of becoming a social outcast is not securely tied to an age demographic; although romantic intimacy promising or concluding in marriage stands as the primary goal of all purchasing conduct, the time of vulnerability to rejection is surprisingly extended—from early adolescence when social reputation is established to prime matrimonial age and reaching into years after marriage. A woman’s relationships with friends, suitors, and even children remain threatened by supposed lapses in self-awareness that guidance found in advertising can restore. While the use of sex to sell has long been recognized as a major part of advertising history, the complementary fear (of not having sex, of sexual and social rejection, and consequent despair) underlying these strategies is usually thought about as a fairly recent (and effective) advertising method. In ways that expose the images of women under construction in the social mindset, Niedecker’s poems call upon advertising’s thumbnail images and characters to inspect the rigid public attitude advertising was cultivating, an attitude male critics perpetuated in constructing American literary history.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-13
DOI: 10.3390/h11050118
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 119: A Conspiracy with Twelve-Year-Old Jane
Austen: Juliet McMaster’s Illustrations for ‘The Beautifull
Cassandra’
Authors: Kazuko Hisamori
First page: 119
Abstract: This article discusses a picture book, The Beautifull [sic] Cassandra, that was published by Juvenilia Press in 2021. The text was written by Jane Austen, most probably in 1788, and was edited and illustrated by Juliet McMaster some 200 years later. My key questions are: What are the characteristics of Austen’s text' What are the strategies that McMaster uses to illustrate the text' How do we evaluate the picture book as a whole'
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-14
DOI: 10.3390/h11050119
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 120: Roundtable: The Past, Present and Future
of Fan Fiction
Authors: Lincoln Geraghty, Bertha Chin, Lori Morimoto, Bethan Jones, Kristina Busse, Francesca Coppa, Kristine Michelle “Khursten” Santos, Louisa Ellen Stein
First page: 120
Abstract: Fanfiction as a cultural practice has rapidly evolved in recent years, from a community-based form of social interaction to a globally recognised form of narrative world-building [...]
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-22
DOI: 10.3390/h11050120
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 121: Horses, Humans, and Domestic Bodily
Knowledge in All’s Well That Ends Well
Authors: Hillary M. Nunn
First page: 121
Abstract: Without visual cues, modern viewers may not discern the ways that All’s Well That Ends Well brings together the bodies of horses and humans, asking viewers to consider the physical dependence and sometimes overlapping medical conditions the two species share. Helena’s success in curing the King’s fistula and conceiving Bertram’s child have not been linked to the skills involved in working with horses, let alone the blurring of boundaries between the human and the equine. This is particularly striking given that the play associates both the King and Bertram—the two men she must win over to gain happiness—with images of veterinary care and riding as represented in the era’s household medical and horsemanship manuals. Early modern recipe books provide a valuable glimpse of how seventeenth century viewers might have pictured the interconnectedness of human and animal bodies, in health and in sickness. These books make clear that some cures for fistulas could be used on humans or on horses. Such medicines take as a given the human body’s embeddedness on its surroundings, revealing an essential dependence between humans and horses, often blurring the boundaries assumed to exist between them. The play positions Helena not only as a practitioner of household medicine skilled in caring for humans and animals alike, but also as a subtle and resourceful horsewoman able to coerce others to do her bidding.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-23
DOI: 10.3390/h11050121
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 122: Tove Ditlevsen’s Witness of
Trauma as a Source of Hope
Authors: Julie K. Allen
First page: 122
Abstract: The defining life experience of the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) was domestic trauma, both externally- and self-inflicted. Born at the end of the first World War amid an economic depression, Ditlevsen grew up in a hardscrabble working-class neighborhood of Copenhagen, lived through the Nazi occupation of her country during World War II, cycled through unhealthy sexual relationships, underwent illegal abortions and unnecessary surgeries, suffered from depression and prescription drug addiction, and died by suicide at the age of fifty-eight. Instead of repressing or denying her traumatic experiences, however, Ditlevsen chose to confront, reinscribe, and transform them in her literary texts, finding and offering hope that exposing secrets to public scrutiny can lead to acceptance and healing. In her searingly candid poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs, Ditlevsen exemplifies the efficacy of working through trauma: she confronts the fraught choices and abusive relationships by which her life was shaped candidly and unapologetically as an act of survival. In the process of bearing witness on the printed page to domestic trauma and its consequences, Ditlevsen models the vital role of literature, for both readers and writers, in documenting, processing, and overcoming traumatic experiences.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-26
DOI: 10.3390/h11050122
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 123: “In Truth, They Are My
Masters”: The Domestic Threat of Early Modern Piracy
Authors: Susan Jones
First page: 123
Abstract: Thomas Walton (known as Purser) and Clinton Atkinson (known as Clinton) were hanged for piracy in 1583. This article examines a range of texts relating to Purser and Clinton, including court depositions, plays and ballads, to consider the ways in which their lives and deaths were depicted and discover what this might tell us about contemporary attitudes towards piracy. Purser and Clinton were based in Dorset where the boundaries delineating piracy as an illegal activity were blurred and the local beneficiaries of piracy spanned the social hierarchy, reaching as high as nobility and the Admiralty. A wealth of textual evidence details the links between the maritime and littoral networks which sustained their activities, enabled their rise to prominence, and engineered their ultimate downfall. In reading together both official documents and popular printed texts this article reveals some of the complex networks which supported and were supported by piracy and, in doing so, locates the figure of the pirate within wider discourses of society, governance and mobility.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-09-29
DOI: 10.3390/h11050123
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 124: John Brown, Black History, and Black
Childhood: Contextualizing Lorenz Graham’s John Brown Books
Authors: Brigitte Fielder
First page: 124
Abstract: Lorenz Graham wrote two children’s books about the (in)famous abolitionist, John Brown—a picture book, John Brown’s Raid: A Picture History of the Attack on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (1972) and a biography for young adults, John Brown: A Cry for Freedom (1980). Both books recount a history of Brown’s life and antislavery work, situated within Brown’s African American context and recounted from a Black perspective. While Graham’s books are exceptional in their extended treatment of this historic figure for a child audience, they are not unprecedented. This essay situates Graham’s children’s biographies of Brown in the long history of Black writers’ work on him—for both adults and children. Reading Graham’s John Brown in this context shows how Graham follows familiar traditions for encountering Brown within the larger context of Black freedom struggles. Graham’s books follow a rich tradition of presenting him to Black children.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-03
DOI: 10.3390/h11050124
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 125: “Almost Like Family. Or Were
Authors: Simon Halink
First page: 125
Abstract: In the course of the twentieth century, the glorified image of Viking Age Scandinavia exerted an increasing attraction on intellectuals and nation builders in remote parts of Europe, especially those which self-identified as peripheral, marginalized, and ‘northern’. In the Dutch province of Friesland, the cultivation of a Frisian national identity went hand in hand with an antagonizing process of self-contrastation vis-à-vis the urbanized heartland in the west of the country. Fueled by these anti-Holland sentiments, the adoption of Nordic identity models could serve to create alternative narrative molds in which to cast the Frisian past. In this article, I will chart this process of cultural “nordification” from its initial phase in the writings of Frisian Scandinavophiles to contemporary remediations of Frisian history in popular culture and public discourses. In this context, special attention will be paid to the reception history of the pagan King Redbad (d. 719) and his modern transformation from ‘God’s enemy’ to beloved national icon.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-09
DOI: 10.3390/h11050125
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 126: Pirate Assemblage
Authors: Thomas
First page: 126
Abstract: This essay “Pirate Assemblage” explores two related questions. The first is how we read and appreciate the literary form of pirate literature such as Alexander Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678) and Charles Johnson’s two-volume General History of the Pyrates (volume one 1724, volume two 1728). The second is what the answer to that first question suggests for how we regard pirate literature in relation to more canonical eighteenth-century literature and how this relation might revise our reading of that literature. My answer to the first question explores the concept of “assemblage” for reading and appreciating pirate literature, and my answer to the second question that eighteenth-century literature read in relation to this “pirate assemblage” suggests new ways of reading canonical texts such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) that were written soon after the first volume of The General History of Pyrates. In doing so, my essay responds to the large body of scholarly literature on pirates that has focused on the question of identity—race, class, gender, and sexuality—and the question of whether or not such literature was transgressive. In my essay, by closely reading the unique literary form of pirate literature and utilizing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of “assemblage” and “minor literature,” I argue that pirate literature, rather than representing transgressive identities, instead progressively produces new economic and social connections that deterritorializes the economy, literary form, and language.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-12
DOI: 10.3390/h11050126
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 127: The Future of Public Health through
Science Fiction
Authors: Jarrel Kristan Zakhary De Matas
First page: 127
Abstract: This study investigates the ability of science fiction to address issues that emerge in public health. The issues that form the focus of this paper include the spread of misinformation and disinformation, dependence on technology, and competent public-private partnerships that serve the interests of society. Each of these issues is brought under the spotlight by Barbadian sociologist Karen Lord in ‘The Plague Doctors’ and American psychiatrist Justin C. Key in ‘The Algorithm Will See You Know’. The stories, although set in unrealized futures and describe as yet inconceivable advancements in technology, contain real-world problems involved in accessing healthcare. In doing so, both writers attend to the viability of literature, and the humanities in general, as a vehicle for encouraging reform to public health policies that face challenges such as inequities in healthcare and raising greater awareness of health concerns. My study bridges public health and literature, specifically science fiction, to get certain messages across. These messages include effectively communicating risks to people’s health, increasing understanding of social responsibility, and addressing uncertainty with transparency. The stories in question reveal futures where public health management has, for the most part, either got it right, in the case of ‘The Plague Doctors’, or not quite, in the case of ‘The Algorithm Will See You Now’. Because I consider the COVID-19 pandemic to be less of a disruptor to public health and more of a revealer of what public health needs to focus on, I foresee interdisciplinary projects such as mine as crucial to bridging the disconnect between people and public health policies.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-16
DOI: 10.3390/h11050127
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 128: Subterranean Sound, Expatriation, and the
Metaphor of Home: A Fictional Descent with Richard Wright
Authors: Robin E. Preiss
First page: 128
Abstract: In 2021, the unexpurgated second novel of American author Richard Wright was at last unearthed from the depths of the archive. In a vivid demonstration of the affective capacity of written sound, The Man Who Lived Underground tells the story of a man who finds an unlikely refuge from imminent death in the sewer beneath the city streets. This article listens closely to Wright’s portrayal of architectural acoustics and sonic distortion within the text, attending to sensory and metaphorical dimensions of urban and social stratification. Drawing on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s co-conceived “fantasy in the hold”, I push back against the overwhelmingly dystopian readings of Wrights subterranean as a scene of racialized subjection. Their “undercommons” allows me to reframe the undercity as a site of refusal and a source of collective empowerment. Returning to Wright himself, I connect the subterranean metaphor to deeper biographical themes of intellectual exile and his eventual expatriation to Europe. In a gesture redolent of the undercommons, he followed his character in locating a quality of freedom underground. I read this autonomous inversion of the Middle Passage—the lateral motion of the middle crossing—as comparable to the vertical mobility that frames the events and stakes of the story.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-18
DOI: 10.3390/h11050128
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
- Humanities, Vol. 11, Pages 129: Climate Pessimism and Human Nature
Authors: David Higgins
First page: 129
Abstract: This article builds on scholarship that understands climate change not only as a geophysical phenomenon, but also as a complex idea. It argues for a historicised analysis of what it terms “climate pessimism”: the belief that catastrophic global heating cannot be prevented. Focusing especially on nonfictional texts by Jonathan Franzen and Roy Scranton, it suggests that climate pessimism draws on a Western intellectual tradition that takes a sceptical view of human capacities and the possibility of progress. At the same time, climate pessimism tends to evoke an idea of atomised human nature associated with capitalistic modernity. Franzen draws on ideas from evolutionary psychology in a rather simplistic way. Scranton, a more complex thinker, engages not only with Buddhist thought but also with the philosophies of Benedict Spinoza and Arthur Schopenhauer. Although often criticised as a “doomer”, he sometimes moves towards an epistemological pluralism and sense of human potentiality. The concluding section brings in the concept of the pluriverse as both a corrective to climate pessimism’s tendency to Westerncentrism, and a point of connection to Scranton’s work.
Citation: Humanities
PubDate: 2022-10-20
DOI: 10.3390/h11050129
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 5 (2022)
