Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) opens with a single imperative: “Listen.” Criticism of the novel has reached for sonic metaphors—polyphony, cacophony, voice—without treating sound as an analytical category. Drawing on Schafer’s soundscape theory, Attali’s political economy of noise, and Brathwaite’s concept of “nation language,” while flagging the Eurocentric assumptions in Schafer and Attali, I propose the term “heterophonic narrative” to describe James’s acoustic organization: more than seventy-five characters repeatedly vary a shared traumatic ground, a sonic relation that, Bakhtinian polyphony does not by itself fuly specify. The concept derives from Caribbean musical practice—kumina drumming, reggae riddim, call-and-response traditions—where the refusal to merge voices into harmonic unison carries political as well as formal force. The analysis proceeds through four stages: a ghost narrator’s establishment of the novel’s acoustic field; the Singer’s (Bob Marley’s) structurally designed silence as an absent keynote; the relation between heterophonic organization and Bakhtinian polyphony; and a three-level demonstration that heterophony functions as resistance—through tactical illegibility in code-switching at the micro level, through the refusal to domesticate violence into consumable narrative at the aesthetic-ethical limit, and through portable vocal retuning across what Stoever (2016) calls the “sonic color line” at the transnational macro level. Heterophony in this novel, I argue, does not merely describe a formal relationship among voices—it is itself a mode of resistance, operating through the acoustic properties of prose.
Most classical texts in which ships have their own stories are traditionally interpreted in ways which obscure the fact that they are stories about ships. Object-oriented narratology gives an opportunity to look at those stories differently and focus on the object-protagonists. Horace’ ode to a boat (Odes 1.14) has been interpreted as an allegory of the state since antiquity, but in modernity some scholars have tried to find alternative interpretations in which the materiality of the boat played bigger role. Catullus carm. 4 presents the life of a boat, just like Vergil’s Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas’ ships. In all these stories the materiality (i.e., what kind of wood the ships are made) plays an important role. The sacred nature of the trees seems to have a continuation in the miraculous nature of the boats.
The translation and reception of the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s works in China follow a unique trajectory. The introduction of his works began slowly, with their early dissemination primarily depending on the film adaptations by Béla Tarr, which for a time obscured Krasznahorkai’s literary identity. The 2015 Man Booker International Prize marked a turning point, catalyzing the systematic translation of his works in China, led by Sátántangó. Currently, Krasznahorkai’s image in China is shifting from that of a screenwriter behind a director to a writer with independent literary merit. His works are garnering increasing attention for their distinctive style and dystopian reflections. Following his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025, the translation and study of Krasznahorkai within Chinese academia are poised to deepen.
The 1960s and 1970s represent the foundational era of French structuralist narratology, a period during which Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) was elevated to the status of a paradigmatic text for theoretical inquiry. While Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1972) has achieved undisputed canonical status for its systematic and transposable framework, this very ascendancy has, over time, obscured the pioneering and profoundly insightful work of Marcel Muller. At the heart of his schema lies the pivotal and ingenious concept of the “intermediate subject” (sujet intermédiaire), a narrative instance that acts as a crucial relay between the experiencing Hero and the ultimate, artistically transformed Narrator. This paper argues for a thorough reassessment and recuperation of Muller’s contribution, positing that his model, far from being a mere historical precursor supplanted by Genette, offers a uniquely nuanced, textually-grounded, and phenomenologically rich lens for understanding the ontological ambiguity, unstable chronology, and layered enunciation that are constitutive of Proust’s narrative genius. Muller’s work moves decisively beyond the “simple binarism” of the narrating and narrated “I” and prefigures later theoretical concerns with the gradience and distribution of fictional consciousness. This paper seeks to restore Muller’s study to its rightful place as an indispensable, vibrant, and still-challenging work within both Proustian scholarship and the broader field of narrative theory.
This article examines Caribbean futurism as articulated in Oonya Kempadoo’s creative project, including both the novel Naniki and the Naniki Immersive location-based experience. By situating the novel within the speculative tradition of time and space in Caribbean literature, the article analyzes Kempadoo’s decolonial deep time narrative as a means of reclaiming suppressed Caribbean histories, as well as her submerged storytelling, through which she imagines symbiotic multispecies communities in response to an environmentally ravaged Caribbean. By foregrounding the interrelations among technology, literary imagination, and cultural expression across the Naniki project, the article finally explores how Kempadoo envisions sustainable and interactive Caribbean futures. It argues that, by mobilizing Caribbean knowledges and sensibilities, Kempadoo proposes alternative ways of living that address intertwined histories and contemporary forms of oppression and exploitation affecting both land and people. In doing so, her work invites participants to become agents of change in shaping and inhabiting an alternative Caribbean future through highlighting the political intervention of Caribbean futurism.
This paper seeks to outline the chances and limits of hospitality with a focus on texts featuring animals (rodents and insects) that are considered pestilent or parasitical from a human perspective. The first half of the argument discusses and compares two modern Hungarian short stories (Albert Wass’s “Conquest of Rats” and Miklós Mészöly’s “Report on Five Mice”) in their divergent efforts to draw hierarchized demarcations either within the human race, or between humans and animals. While Wass’s fable personifies rats not just to satirically caricature a social group within human society but also to support a racist ideology, Mészöly’s naturalistic narrative clearly refrains from any degree of personification and merely represents individual mice as symbols (specimen) of a general “mouseness.” In the second half, the paper examines two English romantic poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (“The Mouse’s Petition” and “The Caterpillar”) both to offer a sentimentalist context for the previous works and, more importantly, to outline a hospitality that might escape the pitfalls of either racism or speciesism. Barbauld’s poems neither refrain from speaking to, or giving voice to, the animal in order to uphold a speciesist prejudice, nor use these gestures as a rhetorical means to set up a racist hierarchy. Instead, they stage hospitality both as an instance of mercy or compassion toward the nonhuman migrant or wanderer and as a contingent (“capricious”) decision born out of the encounter between two singularities.
Mainstream Australia has a long history of marginalising and silencing Indigenous peoples’ experiences and voices. It was not until the emergence of Indigenous literature in the late 1960s that a new understanding of Australia’s past and its enduring exclusionary concept of whiteness began to enter broader public knowledge. The unsettling of traditional rhetoric and processes by which whites imposed and maintained their position of power is frequently enacted by references to colonial race relations. As Leigh Dale contends, for Aboriginal people, engagement with the past remains essential for understanding and contextualising present realities. Written against the backdrop of postcolonial resistance theories, this article deals with the work of Anita Heiss, an internationally acclaimed Wiradyuri author. Exploring her recent historical novel Dirrayawadha or Rise up in English, it argues that, by rejecting the imperial idea of history, Heiss’ writing provides a space for the connectivity with the majoritarian white Australians as well as with various minoritised constituencies worldwide.
While scholarship has documented it-narratives as records of contemporary attitudes toward material objects, their adaptation in American children’s literature has largely gone unexplored. This article analyzes how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1898) and Louisa May Alcott’s object stories transform the British it-narrative genre to fulfill specific American educational purposes. Despite their reorientation toward juvenile audiences, these works maintain the fundamental generic features of traditional it-narratives, including circulation patterns, limited agency, and episodic encounters. Using the temporal circulation and framing device, Hawthorne’s chair serves as a witness to national history. Alcott effectively merges moral purpose and imaginative fantasy, emphasizing children’s growth into romantic imagination. This evolution illustrates how American authors adapted an inherited literary form to address cultural priorities in children’s development, thereby establishing American children’s literature as a tradition with distinct aesthetic and educational goals.
The aim of the paper is to analyse the use of satire in Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2020 translation of Beowulf. The paper looks closely at the difference between the functions of the Beowulf poet’s subtle irony and Headley’s uninhibited satiric mode, as well as takes into consideration Headley’s opinions about her practice and choices. Moreover, the paper seeks to present Headley’s Beowulf as an appropriation or tradaptation rather than a translation due to the author’s significant changes of the poem’s meaning introduced by means of multiple interpolations and additions with satiric overtones, employment of informal language satirizing the heroic matter of the poem, adherence to potential, yet improbable readings, and other types of unfaithfulness to its only extant manuscript version.
Dans notre contribution, nous adopterons une approche genrée du phénomène de la migration féminine telle qu’elle se présente dans les romans de Sema Kiliçkaya, Le Royaume sans racines (2013) et La Langue de personne. Humour et tendresse sur l’échec du vivre ensemble (2018). Nous analyserons la situation des femmes immigrées dans leur effort de sortir du schéma patriarcal imposé par la culture de leur communauté d’origine. Notre contribution s’efforcera de mettre en lumière les multiples aspects de l’écriture de Kiliçkaya. Il s’agit d’une écriture qui, située entre dénonciation et transgression, et dépassant de multiples frontières — telles que les tabous sexuels et sociaux, la tradition patriarcale ou encore la pression religieuse — peut contribuer à des formes de résilience.
This article examines the concept of hydrological colonialism in Natasha Trethewey's poetry, focusing on Ship Island-a barrier island located approximately nineteen kilometers off the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the northern Gulf of Mexico, United States. Through ecocritical close reading and historical analysis, this study analyzes Trethewey's Native Guard (2006) and Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010) to reveal how racial capitalism, state neglect, and engineered erosion converge across three interconnected Gulf Coast sites: Ship Island, the casino-dominated coastline, and the historically Black community of North Gulfport. The analysis develops three key arguments: (1) that shoreline erosion constitutes a form of slow violence connecting nineteenth-century military segregation of the Louisiana Native Guards to contemporary environmental racism exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina's racialized impacts; (2) that Trethewey's tidal poetics-evident in fragmented sonnets and riverine rhythms-reclaim submerged histories by transforming sites of racial subjugation into spaces of memory and resistance; and (3) that her work enacts what I term hydro-resistance, countering narratives of erasure by reconceptualizing water as a medium of connection rather than destruction. By framing Ship Island within its broader Gulf Coast geography, this article contributes to environmental humanities and island studies scholarship, demonstrating how poetic form itself can theorize the entanglement of race, water, and memory along vulnerable coastlines.
Men’s studies are not yet a well-established research area in the milieu of Italian culture. In the last 20 years, some interesting volumes and several stimulating articles dealing with Italian masculinities have been published. In addition, a growing number of researchers in Italy and abroad devote themselves to Italian men’s studies not only by writing essays and books but also by organizing panels and seminars in conferences. However, the investigation of constructions, representations, and performances of masculinity in Italian literary works, above all in contemporary novels and short stories, is not yet fully developed. For this reason, the aim of my article is to make some considerations on these topics by examining how they are presented in the writings of two popular contemporary Italian authors: Francesco Piccolo and Diego De Silva. The main point that this essay explores in these writers’ literary works is the concept of fluidity, or, in other words, how masculinity is not a static notion but a fluctuating wandering between categories.
Even though much of medieval and early modern literature focused on the theme of courtly love, it indirectly also addressed sex. We would blind ourselves if we ignored this hidden but significant fact. But where and when did poets ultimately come out of their hiding and address the broad theme of sexuality more directly? We could ask this question also pertaining to the history of art, for instance, but in literature across Europe, at the latest since the thirteenth century (fabliaux), sexual activities were a common topic at least in certain genres. When we turn to the fifteenth century, we discover that poets strongly intensified that discourse (Oswald von Wolkenstein, Poggio Bracciolini, or the poets of the anonymous Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles). And when we examine the genre of the sixteenth-century jest narratives (Schwänke), we recognize that traditional notions of shame, embarrassment, shyness, purity, and official decency were hardly valid any longer. It was common to talk about prostitutes, to laugh about sexual affairs, and to discuss even genitalia, at least in literature geared for the ordinary consumer, such as the urban middle class and the intellectual elites. Most likely, the same applied to the rural population, but we do not have enough evidence for them. Much of early modern humorous literature was predicated on marital problems commonly created by different needs in matters of sexuality, and hence on countless cases of transgression.
Through a critical reading of traditional Chinese novels and European literature, this paper compares the development of two servant archetypes: “Granny Wang” in China and “Harlequin” in Italy and France. Both play clown-like minor roles in traditional literature, and are deployed by the authors as literary devices or stereotyped characters rather than as nuanced representations of real individuals—a treatment that breeds semiotic and narrative meanings. In this regard, the study first explores the origins and naming conventions of these characters, revealing how the capricious naming process influences their traits and literary functions. Despite their frequent presence in traditional literature, these characters have long been overlooked and dismissed by mainstream critics and authors. Accordingly, the paper studies how later writers recreated and revitalized these once-anonymous figures with more detailed depictions, granting them greater prominence and subjectivity within their respective fictional universes. Given the chameleon-like traits of the Harlequin and the self-interested characteristic of Granny Wang, it compares and analyzes their fluid and multifaceted natures in the literary works of a later era, which allow the anonymous characters to stand out and endow them with a certain degree of independence, individuality, and potential rebelliousness towards the master-servant relationship or the established hierarchy.
Hanumanic devotion did not travel alone. Along the maritime currents linking Tamil temples of Nagapattinam with the Buddhist sanctuaries of Quanzhou, the divine monkey of South Indian epic lore entered new worlds of meaning, gesture, and form. Rather than a simple replication, the result was a semiotic transformation that produced a cosmologically ambivalent Monkey Pilgrim, re-scripted within Buddhist ritual, sculpture, marionette drama, and vernacular literature. This hybrid figure, encoded in stone on the West Pagoda of Kaiyuan temple and animated in the marionette play Sanzang Qujing, moved across media as a dynamical object—an interpretive force shaped and reshaped in transit. Such signs are never still. In poetic and narrative traditions of the Song period, including texts such as Yijian zhi, the monkey becomes a cipher for karmic entrapment, spiritual aspiration, and moral unease. Here, semiotic translation is not a mechanical transfer but a living process—one that unfolds across textual, visual, and performative thresholds, and is sustained by maritime routes, religious flows, and acts of embodied interpretation. The journey from Hanuman to the Monkey Pilgrim is not one of loss but of proliferating significance, carried forward by oceanic motion and cultural reimagination through a living chain of interpretants.
This article examines the concept of hydrological colonialism in Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, focusing on Ship Island—a barrier island located approximately nineteen kilometers off the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the northern Gulf of Mexico, United States. Through ecocritical close reading and historical analysis, this study analyzes Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006) and Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010) to reveal how racial capitalism, state neglect, and engineered erosion converge across three interconnected Gulf Coast sites: Ship Island, the casino-dominated coastline, and the historically Black community of North Gulfport. The analysis develops three key arguments: (1) that shoreline erosion constitutes a form of slow violence connecting nineteenth-century military segregation of the Louisiana Native Guards to contemporary environmental racism exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina’s racialized impacts; (2) that Trethewey’s tidal poetics—evident in fragmented sonnets and riverine rhythms—reclaim submerged histories by transforming sites of racial subjugation into spaces of memory and resistance; and (3) that her work enacts what I term hydro-resistance, countering narratives of erasure by reconceptualizing water as a medium of connection rather than destruction. By framing Ship Island within its broader Gulf Coast geography, this article contributes to environmental humanities and island studies scholarship, demonstrating how poetic form itself can theorize the entanglement of race, water, and memory along vulnerable coastlines.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, following the trauma of terrorist attacks, contemporary literature has emphasized the collective nature of texts in a number of ways. Firstly, literature pays tribute to anonymous victims by describing their suffering. Through individual tragedies, a collective dimension of pain is depicted. That’s why everyone can recognize themselves in the anonymous characters portrayed in fiction. In this way, the individual is merely the mediator of a debate on the universality of a particular historical situation. Through the study of some contemporary works, this hypothesis takes shape. Lastly, many literary texts are written in several voices, and multiple authors bear witness to the fact that literature, according to the Surrealist movement, can be written by anyone. Anonymous characters and anonymous authors emerging in the very beginning of the 21st Century are symptomatic of a paradigm shift in which the notion of the hero and that of the community are reconsidered.
