Abstract Franz Kafka's protagonists are conspicuously featureless, and yet Kafka is persistently read as a fabulist of the plight of the individual before impervious, impersonal, and indifferent legal structures. How can Kafka champion the individual against such forces when his heroes do not have personalities to lose? This essay addresses that question through a close reading of Kafka's “Fürsprecher” from the standpoint of Rüdiger Campe's concept of Fürsprache . Kafka's characters are featureless because they are stand‐ins for the process of fictional narration, itself an instance of the situation of rhetorical speech. Two primary advantages of Fürsprache as a narratological technique are outlined, including its capacity to register multiple personas within the same speaker.
Animals play an essential role in The Zoo Story. In "The Story of Jerry and the Dog," Jerry describes the dog's hostility and their stare-down. However, if the dog had a voice, it would narrate (sniff) a diametrically different tale. The furry creature welcomes Jerry, receives a confirmation of mutual goodwill, and plays games with the human friend. This species misunderstanding culminates in a poisoning and severs Jerry's only connection to the world, so Jerry decides to go to the zoo to learn about animals. The distinction between "the way humans exist with animals" and "the way animals exist with humans" reveals a posthumanist world of the animal umwelt beneath the facade of anthropocentric projection. Posthumanism believes in dynamic species interactions of becoming, networks humans with nonhuman agents, and represents a potential remedy to the theater of the absurd.
This article examines J. R. R. Tolkien's concept of eucatastrophe as a structure of cultural memory within modern fantasy. Drawing on the theories of Jan and Aleida Assmann and Renate Lachmann, it argues that eucatastrophe functions not merely as a narrative device but as a mnemonic form transmitted and transformed across literary contexts. Focusing on Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, a novel centered on the erasure and recovery of cultural identity, the analysis demonstrates how this inherited narrative structure is reconfigured within a different historical and ethically complex framework. While the restoration of Tigana's name appears to reproduce a recognizably Tolkienian resolution, it remains marked by loss, fragmentation, and incomplete knowledge. The article shows that eucatastrophe in Tigana operates as a mode of cultural memory that enables collective reconstitution while preserving the limits of recovery, thereby foregrounding the tension between remembrance and irretrievable loss.
Drawing on memory studies and trauma theory, this essay examines the dilemma of forgiveness and the ethics of memory in Malaysian Chinese writer Tan Twan Eng's English-language novels The Gift of Rain (2007) and The Garden of Evening Mists (2012) in the context of Malaysia's Look East policy. It explores how Tan revisits the history of the Second World War in Southeast Asia and intervenes in unresolved ethical questions about memory, forgiveness, and reconciliation in contemporary Asia. I argue that Tan's novels evoke the traumatic legacies of the Japanese occupation in Malaysia and delineate the protagonists' negotiations between preserving wartime memory and healing personal trauma. Rather than endorsing postwar retribution, Tan's works meditate on the complexities of restoring justice and achieving reconciliation. Both novels ultimately seek to reconcile the ethical obligation to remember with the desire for peace and thus propose nonviolent reconciliation. By framing reconciliation not as a settled outcome but as an ongoing process, Tan invites readers to reconsider contemporary inter-Asian relations between Japan and the countries affected by its wartime occupation.
This article examines how contemporary global fiction interrogates the limits of the human through literary form, employing posthuman refusal as its analytical framework. Drawing on Francesca Ferrando's discussions of posthuman refusal as a mode of resisting anthropocentric closure, the study situates refusal as a reading practice attentive to the ways literature suspends human centrality. The argument is further informed by formalist insights (Jameson, Levine), biopolitical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe), and the instability of meaning (Derrida) to demonstrate how narrative form itself functions as ontological critique, destabilizing anthropocentric assumptions embedded in coherence, perspective, and temporality. Close analysis of Han Kang's The Vegetarian, Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, and Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead reveals how each novel stages a distinct challenge to human sovereignty-vegetal ontology, ecological opacity, and species hierarchy-while converging in formal strategies of estrangement such as fractured narration, focal instability, and epistemic collapse. Through comparative close reading and attention to textual structures, the article demonstrates how fiction enacts posthuman refusal not only thematically but formally, contributing to world-literary inquiry and engaging ongoing debates on climate, multispecies justice, and decolonial ecologies.
Practitioners of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) have critiqued the metaphysical assumptions of contemporary poetry, and particularly the position of the lyric speaker. Scholars such as Graham Harman and Timothy Morton have positioned themselves as critics of these lyric sensibilities. In recent years, concerns have risen around their critiques and presuppositions, particularly around epistemology. "A new Anthropocene aesthetics" joins with accumulating scholarly concerns around the efficacy of an object-oriented aesthetics. Investigating the claims of these practitioners, it asks what a responsible poetics of the Anthropocene entails and what aesthetic commitments mean for ontological systems. Some scholars, such as Benjamin Boysen, have dismissed OOO entirely, claiming its inconsistencies disqualify its critiques. However, these readings have commonly misunderstood the nuances of the relevant arguments. Utilizing the work of dg nanouk okpik, the present essay argues that poetics has a path forward that takes seriously the critiques of Harman and Morton, while also recognizing the shortcomings of their work. Using okpik's work as a model, it seeks to determine how a responsible concept of the poetic subject position might be constructed for a new geologic age.
Sich Texten intim anzun & auml;hern, bedeutet sich lesend unvoreingenommen und ungesch & uuml;tzt auf Begegnungen einzulassen mit abwesenden und anwesenden Anderen, und mit sich. Texte werden dabei nicht als Produkt von Berechnungen und Daten begriffen, sondern als Ausdruck von Welterfahrung und Weltwissen einer oder mehrerer Personen. Um Verstehen zu realisieren und daran m & ouml;glichst Teilhabe zu erlangen, ist eine Lekt & uuml;repraxis n & ouml;tig, worin Elemente der Dekonstruktion (Abwesenheit der Autorschaft und Iteration) mit Elementen der Hermeneutik (Diktat und Vollzugssinn) verbunden werden. Autor:innen werden als abwesende vorgestellt, aber als konkrete Person(en) in Raum und Zeit vorausgesetzt. Die lesende Person wird ihrerseits zwar als sozial eingebettete begriffen, aber in der Lekt & uuml;repraxis als je Besondere als f & uuml;r die Realisierung von Verstehen notwendige und mitverantwortliche verteidigt. Angesichts aktueller Herausforderungen durch datenbasierte Sprach-Systeme und deren massive Auswirkungen auf Gerechtigkeitsverst & auml;ndnis, Wahrheitssuche und demokratische Grundrechtforderung kommt der Praxis intimer Lekt & uuml;re und ihrer Pflege neue und grundlegende Bedeutung zu.
This essay argues for an abiding connection between empathy and advocacy by revealing their unrecognized parallels in Aristotle and Nietzsche. The argument makes three new claims. First, I identify an ancient form of sharing emotions, unnamed in but fundamental to Aristotle's Rhetoric, that I call "empathy by analogy." Next, I show that the essential tragic function, for Nietzsche, is the sympathetic advocacy of the chorus for the Dionysian. While compassion and empathy are conflated in the Birth of Tragedy (1872), the later Dawn (1881) differentiates the two. The language of this disambiguation allows for a reconstruction of the advocatory work of empathy in Nietzsche's poetics. Finally, despite real differences between ancient and modern empathy, both exhibit an irreducible structural paradox that is best articulated by the choral F & uuml;rsprache for the Dionysian.
Occasional poetry, composed for specific events such as weddings or funerals, was a dominant form of poetry in early modern Europe. Despite its historical prominence, the role of the occasion as a literary and rhetorical construct in occasional poetry has been very little studied. This article investigates how early modern occasional poetry represents its occasions by studying occasional poetry written in the Swedish Kingdom. Rather than treating the occasion merely as a historical backdrop, I argue that it functions as a central poetic element that shapes the poem's communicative structure. Drawing on rhetorical theory, lyric studies, and close readings of wedding and funeral poems, this study examines how poets construct spatiotemporal settings, engage audiences, and elevate real-life events through projections that include fictional elements. The study sheds light on the poetics of a genre that has a dual role as both a social gesture and a literary artifact.
This article analyzes Irene Lisboa's epistolary correspondence, seeking to understand the relationships established by the author and her correspondents, as well as the meanings constructed therein. Anchored in a qualitative and inductive approach, with an interpretative orientation, the study focuses on a limited corpus of letters, analyzed using qualitative content analysis and narrative analysis techniques. The results highlight correspondence as a dynamic field, marked by the coexistence of strong and weak relationships, as proposed by Granovetter and developed by Filho and Santos (2018, Comunica & ccedil;& atilde;o e Sociedade, 33, 183), and Ure & ntilde;a-Carrion et al. (2022, Applied Network Science 7), revealing different intensities of connection, discursive strategies and identity positions. Strong relationships are associated with continuity and affective density, while weak relationships, although more sporadic, play an important role in the circulation of ideas and the author's insertion into cultural and intellectual networks. The analysis demonstrates that letters are situated narrative constructions in which identities and meanings are negotiated, mediating between the intimate and the public. Recognizing the limitations of the corpus and the contextual nature of interpretations, the study highlights the potential of epistolary writing as a privileged source for understanding the relational, cultural and symbolic dynamics of Irene Lisboa's work and career, pointing to avenues for future research.
As a seminal figure in African American drama, August Wilson dedicated his entire career to portraying community of Africanness in his plays. Despite his consistent advocacy for this concept in public addresses, Wilson never provided a rigid or prescriptive definition of community of Africanness. This article argues that community of Africanness is an ethnographic marker distinguishing African-descended peoples, including African Americans, from other cultural groups. In Wilson's drama, community of Africanness aligns closely with his black aesthetics, which encompass his perspectives on history, music, religion, ritual, and myth-particularly those of African and African American communities. These cultural elements are intricately woven into nearly every play in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, establishing him as a prominent voice for African Americans since the Harlem Renaissance.
In this article, I analyze Goethe's Italienische Reise, Dickens' Pictures from Italy, and Kang Youwei's Yidali youji, three travelogues about Italy published by a German, an Englishman, and a Chinese within the span of less than a century, even if they reflect journeys made in the late 18th, mid-19th, and early 20th centuries, respectively. In particular, I focus on the perceptions and constructions of Italian Catholicism found in all works, analyzing common observations while also being attentive to important differences. I argue that, despite moments of sympathy displayed toward Catholicism that are grounded in each author's idiosyncratic religiosity, all agree that Catholicism bears responsibility for Italy's material underdevelopment and hinders the advancement of crucial modern values. While all believe that pre-modern religious values should continue to inspire the modern age, they agree in their ultimately negative assessment of Catholicism's ability to offer a religiosity suited for the modern era.
Neil Bartlett's 2012 theatrical adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray presents a provocative reimagining of Wilde's novel, emphasizing its homoerotic and aesthetic dimensions while engaging with the historical and cultural anxieties surrounding queerness. Bartlett's interpretation foregrounds the challenges of representation, particularly through his deliberate omission of the portrait, his use of symbolic objects like the gold cigarette case, and his heightened emphasis on Lord Henry's and Basil Hallward's homoerotic affections for Dorian. By intensifying the queer subtext and integrating theatrical techniques that implicate the audience in Dorian's moral corruption, Bartlett's adaptation functions as both a tribute to and an expansion of Wildean aestheticism. His portrayal of same-sex desire aligns with both Victorian and contemporary discourses on queerness, further complicating the relationship between aestheticism, morality, and identity. This study examines how Bartlett navigates the intersection of adaptation, homoeroticism, and theatrical spectacle, ultimately demonstrating how his version of Dorian Gray reconfigures Wilde's narrative for a modern audience while retaining its historical complexity.
This article presents the concept "constructive alienation" as a response to the oversaturation of apocalyptic environmental fiction that has contributed to deep-seated desensitization toward the climate crisis, resulting in crisis of imagination (Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable, 2016; Solnit, If you win the popular imagination, you win the game: Why we need new stories on climate, 2023), spiraling into a crisis of futurity (Pratt, Planetary longings, 2022). Turning my attention to a new tendency in environmental fiction emerging in Latin America and East Asia, I argue that constructive alienation works by resensitizing characters to the crisis-and invite readers to be affected as well. This expands the scope of the common trait's of environmental fiction: it is set in the present, rather than in a distant future, and it is intimately connected to realist modes, intertwined with feminist speculations represented through the weirdly horrible (Fisher, The weird and the eerie, 2016). By reading two works from this new tendency in environmental fiction, Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, I investigate how the traditionally negative, unconstructive affect alienation is reworked through weirdly horrible, xenofeminist (Hester, Xenofeminism, 2018), and posthuman feminist (Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, 2016) elements. I conclude that constructive alienation has a surprising, novel potential for representing the environmental crisis; as an unequally distributed, structural crisis that is both familiar and unfamiliar, seen through a disorienting narrative structure.
The present essay turns the received view of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on its head, arguing that Orwell's dystopian classic mobilizes the modernist techniques of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to lampoon the ideological fatalism of Eliot and other cultural conservatives. Via a painstaking close reading of the puns and other literary devices that Orwell makes use of, the essay shows how the plot of the novel amounts to an example of doublethink in practice, inviting the reader to see through the limited point of view of Winston Smith that is being satirized throughout. Such a view of the novel makes evident that Orwell's dystopian story is fully consistent with his socialist vision that recognizes the faux-revolutionary pathos of Winston as little but a bad joke.
This essay focuses on Andr & eacute;s P & eacute;rez de la Greda's Cabeza de mujer (1892), an adultery novel in the tradition of Madame Bovary, in which the heroine Leonor reads Adolphe Belot's La Bouche de Madame X*** (1882), an erotic novel about a dandy obsessed with the mouth of a noblewoman he has encountered in a brothel. In the Spanish text, Leonor reimagines this plot from the perspective of the woman, converting it into the story of an unhappy wife whose situation mirrors her own. The essay begins by showing how Belot's novel anticipates the possibility of a female reader and imagines her reactions. It then analyzes Leonor's response to the novel. Although she retells the story in her own image, she is capable of critical distance and ultimately distinguishes herself from Madame X. Unlike classic Bovaresque adulteresses, who look down on their surroundings because they identify with an idealized heroine, Leonor feels herself to be superior to her fictional analogue. The final section examines the extent to which the subsequent plot confirms this hypothesis of difference and how the author adapts the risqu & eacute; French tale to a Spanish context in such a way as to avoid its trivialization of adultery.
Anthropologists and folklorists have already done the spade work regarding the topic of 'Martenehe' (marriage of an ordinary man with a female fairy) within the field of global fairy tales. Probing this issue further by extending our gaze toward literary texts from the high and late Middle Ages, particularly in Anglo-Norman England, Brittany, Wales, and neighboring territories, we discover quickly that the theme was of considerable importance and occupied deeply medieval imagination and fantasy, and this, in a way, until today, such as in filmic iterations. This study, based on literary comparisons, reveals the extent to which fear of the foreign woman, sexual attraction to the fairy, interest in building a dynasty with all means available, and curiosity about otherness at large combined to create a whole series of relevant fictional documents from the twelfth through the sixteenth century where 'Martenehe' assumes center position.
Beginning with Freud, psychoanalysis and literature have maintained a close, albeit at times confusing, relationship. The preceding century witnessed unspeakable horrors, both in the intensity and magnitude of armed conflicts, likewise producing numerous works of war literature based on experiences in combat and the trauma suffered. Psychoanalysis responded, in turn, to the exigencies of moving beyond the consulting room in order to address mass psychosis and the dangerous corollaries of warmongering, particularly in the postwar era of nuclear rapprochement. War has a fundamentally psychological dimension, and literary criticism must take into consideration the psychic factors which actuate the push toward war within the individual and society. Imprinted with memory, war literature thus emerges as a primary resource for exposing the motivations and visualizations of strategists, politicians, soldiers, and civilians who have rallied round and responded to the call to battle. The following essay examines the phenomenon of war lust in literature through a psychoanalytic lens, tracing the significant theoretical contributions of Freud, Fornari, Fromm, Hillman, and Jacoby, thereby offering a hermeneutics of the destructive attitudes that constitute casus belli.
This article examines Joseph Brodsky's controversial 1992 poem "On the Independence of Ukraine" to reveal the complex cultural paradox of what this study terms the "sub-imperial intellectual." Drawing on Dominick LaCapra's trauma theory, Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory, and Viatcheslav Morozov's "sub-empire" concept, this literary analysis demonstrates how Brodsky represents a unique intellectual type emerging from empires that occupy subordinate positions in global cultural hierarchies while maintaining dominance over peripheral regions. Through systematic textual close reading combined with theoretical analysis, the study traces Brodsky's identity transformation from Leningrad poet to American Nobel laureate, revealing how his cross-cultural trajectory reinforced a profound cultural paradox characterized by simultaneous identification desire toward Western civilization, critical stance toward the Soviet political system, and insistence on Russian cultural superiority. The analysis demonstrates that Ukraine's independence triggered deep imperial trauma for Brodsky, threatening his position as cultural mediator between Russian and Western civilizations. His violent poetic response represents an attempt to reconstruct cultural authority through purely linguistic means, re-demarcating cultural boundaries in the post-imperial era. This study contributes new theoretical frameworks for understanding postcolonial intellectual identity and provides insights into the historical roots of contemporary Russian-Ukrainian cultural conflicts.
