Beginning in March 2020, people around the world dealt with COVID-19 and its devastating aftermath. In Spain alone, over 115,000 died from the virus, according to the World Health Or-ganization.1 The lockdown at the onset of the pandemic led to a variety of responses, including writing poetry. Versos en una pandemia; (llantos y risas) [Verses in a Pandemic: (Tears and Laughter)] by & Aacute;ngel Martin-Blas S & aacute;nchez2 and Servicio de lavander & iacute;a [Laundry Service] by Bego & ntilde;a M. Rueda,3 winner of the XXXVI Premio de Poesia Hiperi & oacute;n [Hiperi & oacute;n Prize for Poetry], both published in 2021, represent two very different reactions to the unprecedented situation in Spain. While Martin-Blas S & aacute;nchez, an older male, found himself separated from family and friends in his small provincial town in Toledo, Rueda, a single female, was on the front lines, working in the laundry room of a large hospital in Algeciras. Although both works reflect their authors' efforts to deal with the pandemic through writing poetry and share similar emotions, such as loss and loneliness, Martin-Blas S & aacute;nchez explores traditional poetic themes such as death and nature through traditional poetic forms and devices, while Rueda incorporates her daily experiences into her poetic production using free verse and very few poetic figures. Ultimately though, both come to gratitude for life itself.
Although critics debate the quality of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, most agree on its aim: Despite the verbal abuse that Zooey has doled out, readers are meant to accept the authenticity of Zooey's closing oration and be left, like Franny, "smiling at the ceiling." Invoking the works of Robert Paxton and Theodor Adorno, I challenge this reading, drawing particular attention to Zooey's use of authoritarian rhetorical tactics. Not only do these techniques continue post-"transformation," Zooey, in fact, amplifies their use in the text's final section, leaning into the same themes of ideological purity, in-group elitism, and ends-justified paternalism present throughout. Read through the lens of authoritarian manipulation, the novel's conclusion is transformed from an authentic moment of self-reflection to something more sinister, namely, the culmination of rhetorical manipulation into the only successful conclusion authoritarian figures seek, the restriction of dissent and instantiation of authority over others.
This essay examines Anne Sexton's poetic defiance in the context of Cold War-era privacy loss, focusing on Live or Die (1966) and, inparticular, "Imitations of Drowning (1965)." Challenging reductive psychoanalytic readings that equate Sexton's emotional intensity with pathology, I argue that she strategically stages fear, vulnerability, and self-exposure to reclaim feminine sovereignty. By placing Sexton alongside male contemporaries such as Andr & eacute; Gide and Robert Lowell, the essay demonstrates how she self-legitimizes emotionality through literary parallels while exposing the gender bias that pathologized women's confessional expression. Sexton's deliberate loss of privacy functions paradoxically as a means of reclaiming it: exposure becomes an assertion of agency rather than a sign of victimhood. Ultimately, Sexton emerges as a willful naysayer who transforms fear and confession into socio-political critique, redefining privacy, authorship, and feminine authority in midcentury American poetry.
In this paper, I explore the complex representations of the femme fatale in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. I argue that these authors challenge traditional portrayals by using the femme fatale's mimicry of feminine and masculine behaviors to destabilize male authority and deepen the melancholic private investigator's crisis.
This article examines how contemporary popular detective fiction by white women authors functions as a form of literary allyship, modeling the complex journey toward racial awareness and advocacy. I argue that white women authors like Karin Slaughter and Susie Steiner use their privileged platforms to demonstrate both the possibilities and pitfalls of white allyship through their maternal detective protagonists. The analysis focuses on two distinct approaches to white female advocacy in detective fiction. In Slaughter's Pieces ofHer, the mother-daughter duo leverages their social invisibility as "nobody" white women to engage in activist detection, using their privileged anonymity to advocate for marginalized communities. By contrast, Steiner's Manon Bradshaw series presents a messier portrayal of white allyship through a detective-mother whose journey toward racial awareness is marked by missteps and ongoing growth as she raises her adopted Black son while confronting institutional racism within policing. Through close reading of these popular texts, I demonstrate how detective fiction serves as cultural intervention, reflecting and shaping contemporary discussions about race, privilege, and social justice. These narratives provide readers with models for understanding white complicity while offering frameworks for productive allyship. Ultimately, this analysis reveals how white women authors use their literary platforms to engage in public reflection about white allyship, creating space for readers to examine their own positions within systems of privilege and oppression.
In this interview, Choctaw author LeAnne Howe discusses her storytelling approach, emphasizing Indigenous knowledge, cultural memory, and historical justice. She reflects on her novels Shell Shaker and Savage Conversations, exploring themes of communal justice, historical trauma, and the critical role of ghosts in restoring Native histories and exposing hidden injustices.
Contemporary teen television programs often use narratives of crime and investigation to represent gendered experiences of networked technologies. They demonstrate how technologies normalize the overlap between surveillance, sous-veillance, and sexual(ized) violence for young women. They also explore how young women can use networked technologies as a form of autonomy and agency.
This study analyzes Maria Jos & eacute; Moreno's Trilog & iacute;a del mal through a psychocritical and sociological lens. It explores how trauma, gender violence, and modern pathologies affect female protagonists, highlighting the evolution of female detective fiction in Spain and the impact of liquid modernity on personal identity.
This essay considers the anxieties present in both the crimes and conversations on My Favorite Murder to elucidate the podcast's feminist nature. I argue that the podcast is an effective feminist text as it emphasizes forgotten victims, promotes social change through mental health advocacy, and engages with marginalized communities such as sex workers, LGBTQ+ victims, and #blacklivesmatter activists.
First published in 1948, the Trixie Belden Series helped to establish the "girl sleuth" articulation of the detective story. The series paid uncommon attention to nature and the environment and, as it did so, offered an anticipatory ecofeminist challenge to the patriarchal ideology that underpins the detective novel formula.
This essay examinesAnils'Ghost throughthe lens of gender and postcolonial detection, arguing that Michael Ondaatje's portrayal of Anil critiques Western rationalism and classical detective fiction. Anil's gender, sexuality, and national estrangement complicate her role as a truth-seeker in a fragmented Sri Lanka shaped by bureaucratic opacity and state violence.
The United States is the only western democracy that still authorizes capital punishment. In recent years, we have put citizens to death using novel, untested methods of execution even veterinarians deem unethical for use on animals. States have also revived the gas chamber and electric chair, which until recently had been consigned to morally dubious chapters of history. State secrecy laws limit the public’s access to executions, but many of us are relieved not to have to confront the violence they entail. What happens when the State kills someone? What does legally sanctioned death look like? When we turn away in disgust or discomfort, what are we failing to see? Capital punishment is intended to express our collective censure of a person’s extreme antisocial behavior—but it says as much about us as it does about those we condemn.
American masculinity changed over the decades after World War II from conquering heroes, independent-minded John Waynes, to Angry White Men who felt victimized and turned out in droves to support their hero, Donald J. Trump. This essay examines the reasons for this metamorphous.
While human-induced climate change has thrown our planet into crisis, certain populations have felt its effects more acutely—and are learning to respond accordingly. Denizens of the first world would do well to listen to their experiences. This essay meditates on climate change from the perspective of the author’s recent encounters with some citizens of the Arctic region—people who are navigating economic, political, and epistemological adjustments as they grapple with the enormous contemporary changes in their environment.
In ordinary parlance, the word “crisis” is often used as a synonym for disaster: a crisis is something to be avoided. But the Greek word, krinein, which means to discriminate, to separate, to choose, suggests a different possibility: a crisis offers an opportunity for choice . The major crises that confront us today are collective and demand collective action, the climate crisis in particular. Time is running out on other crises too. If we continue to delay finding collective solutions, all of our crises will eventually disappear, along with us.
This article explores the tension in American foreign policy between national sovereignty and universal values. This duality, rooted in the Declaration of Independence, counterposes security to moral principles. The contemporary competition between neo-isolationism and globalism has the character of a crisis. Berman examines historical precedents, such as U.S. contributions to global rights, alongside modern policy challenges facing external adversaries, weakened alliances, and domestic malaise. A middle path is needed that strengthens alliances, reforms international institutions, and revitalizes domestic economic capacity and cultural confidence in order for the U.S. continue to be a force for good in the world.
This essay examines the state and future of the feminism, the rights of women, and the feminist movement in France, the United States and around the world of the present and over the past half century. It focuses on successes as well as setbacks in the struggle for women's rights in the United States and France in particular. The author discusses the ERA and its failure, the #MeToo movement as well as the Supreme Court's controversial recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the US Supreme Court. An activist herself, the author also discusses the birth of the feminist movement in France and the recent horrendous Pelicot trial, in which a husband drugged his wife and subjected her to rape by multiple perpetrators in Southern France for more than a decade. The wife, Gis & egrave;le Pelicot, has become a heroine for her ordeal and her courage. What will be the future of feminism in the world today? Will it be two steps forward and one step back, or will it be two steps backward and one step forward-or worse?
Fernando de Rojas’ masterwork La Celestina (published under various titles between 1499 and 1518) in early Renaissance Spain, appears at a transitional moment that pits the rise of humanist inquiry and experimentation against a new monarchy’s fierce control of its expanding territory through Catholicism. Rojas uses the recognizable structure of courtly love in La Celestina but overturns it so the tale can be read either as a warning or celebration of an individual’s ability to think, choose, and rebel against systems of control. Our current transition from analog to virtual and augmented realities and the use of AI prompts similarly ambivalent perspectives as robots come to understand free will. The potential for autonomous and semi-autonomous machines using algorithms to work freely within frameworks to decide which data to present to users may be a technological advance for the machine but also a new form of control over humans.
In June of 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron “threw a hand grenade” into the National Assembly by dissolving it to make sure the far right did not assume majority. The consequences of Macron’s decisions have been catastrophic. Pascal Bruckner discusses in this essay the immediate fall out from Macron’s ill advised action.
