Neuroaesthetic research has often examined aesthetic experience through measurable categories such as beauty, pleasure, preference, prediction, and reward. Although these approaches have produced important insights, they do not fully explain how culturally situated musical experience may be organized around sound-induced scene formation, atmosphere, temporal openness, emotional restraint, memory, and reflective awareness. This article brings the Chinese aesthetic concept of yijing into dialogue with neuroaesthetics and music cognition and proposes a preliminary Neuro-Yijing Model as a conceptual and hypothesis-generating framework. The model comprises three interrelated and recursive dimensions: perceptual–imaginal formation, affective resonance, and reflective integration. Through a conceptually guided analysis of Xiyang Xiaogu (Evening Drum and Flute at Sunset), anchored in a publicly available 1999 pipa performance by Wu Man and its programmatic notes, the article distinguishes between sound-based affordances and verbal–cultural framing in the formation of imagined scene and affective meaning. The term “Neuro” is used here not to claim an identified neural basis for yijing, but to position yijing as a cultural–aesthetic framework for refining questions about imagery, embodied listening, affect, memory, and self-referential cognition. The model’s added value lies in treating sound–scene transformation, culturally mediated affect, and contemplative completion as a unified but testable process rather than as isolated perceptual, emotional, or self-related components.
This article explores the lived experiences of transgender persons, with particular attention to how their gender identities are narrated and perceived in encounters with the healthcare system. Research consistently shows that transgender people experience substantially higher rates of health challenges than the general cisgender population. Drawing on gender theories developed by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Paul B. Preciado, which are rarely known within healthcare, we demonstrate how medical institutions often impose rigid expectations on the stories of transgender people that fail to capture the nature of transgender lives. Inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s mode of reparative reading, two literary works by young Danish trans authors show how transgender people in Denmark are compelled to perform a biomedical narrative of suffering to access gender-affirming care. We thus argue for a more open-minded approach in medical discourse to transgender healthcare that recognizes the variability of gender identity. One way forward may be to integrate courses such as narrative medicine—including reading literary texts about and by transgender persons—into medical education and continued learning.
This article examines the evolution of literary genres within the contemporary media ecosystem shaped by convergence culture and participatory practices. Traditionally understood as classificatory and normative frameworks, genres are increasingly challenged by transmedia storytelling, digital platforms, and collaborative forms of cultural production. Contemporary narratives often expand across multiple media environments, where each platform contributes differently to the construction of meaning and audience engagement. In this context, genres become fluid and dynamic structures negotiated among authors, industries, and audiences. The essay combines theoretical reflection with the analysis of transmedia narratives, online literary platforms, and fanfiction communities to investigate how digital participation reshapes literary forms and modes of reception. Particular attention is devoted to the intermedial and collective dimensions of contemporary storytelling and to their implications for genre theory. Rather than simply arguing that genres have become increasingly fluid, the article proposes that convergence culture transforms the analytical function of genre itself. Through three complementary case studies, it argues that genre should be understood less as a stable classificatory taxonomy than as an interpretative and discursive framework continuously negotiated across media, platforms, industries, and participatory audiences.
In 2002, the students in my Performing Shakespeare seminar at Davidson College encountered many interpretive challenges when they mounted a full production of Love’s Labor’s Lost. Several cruces, they learned, came down to performance choices significant enough to determine either the audience’s engagement with a play that seems even more remote than most Shakespeare works or the larger interpretation of the play. Such cruces include the dense punning in 3.1 among Don Armado, Moth, and Costard; the verbal match among Berowne, the King, and the lords over Rosaline’s attractions and Berowne’s lengthy following speech rationalizing the men’s breaking of their oath (4.3.210 ff.); the Princess’s interaction with, first, the Forester and then Costard in 4.1.1-55; and the humbling of Don Armado in 5.2.666-710 and his response to it in 717-19 and 866-76. During the students’ rehearsal period, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in residence on campus at the time, worked with them on some of the challenges within such passages, several of which also claim attention in Shakespearean literary criticism. Excerpts from the students’ journals, as well as performance choices from selected professional productions, elucidate each crux, providing historical context. Ultimately, both performance and understanding of Love’s Labor’s come alive in these cruces, which continue over centuries to prompt readers’ and audiences’ thinking long after an individual production is past. If some of the cruces are insoluble, they are quintessentially theatrical.
Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 20.6 million new cancer cases each year, and its incidence is expected to rise as the global population ages. At the same time, new technologies and advanced treatments are increasing survival rates, particularly in high-income countries. The need to understand cancer’s impact on psychosocial well-being and patients’ existential lifeworld is reflected in research, literature, pathographies, and other art forms. This article examines blogs as a distinctive arena for meaning-making, healing, and the articulation of cancer experiences. Through a close reading of three cancer blogs written by individuals with pelvic and colorectal cancers living in Norway, we examine illness narratives that often receive limited attention in private and public discourse. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity and configuration, we analyse how bloggers organise events, create meaning, and narrate their lives during potentially terminal illness. We also engage with Mikhail Bakhtin’s reflections on genre to explore blogs’ communicative character, heterogeneity of voices, and orientation towards anticipated responses. The findings suggest that cancer blogs function as intentional narrative and social resources during profound existential transformation. They also demonstrate that philosophical and literary concepts are valuable tools for analysing blogs as health humanities texts capable of capturing chaotic and disrupted illness stories.
This essay examines the potentially dire implications of artificial intelligence for the future of humanism, higher education, and the Humanities by introducing the philosophical conflict between Protagoras’ claim that humanity is the measure of all things and Plato’s competing assertion that the truest standards of value reside outside human experience. It argues that this tension continues to shape contemporary posthumanist, deterministic, and institutional modes of thought, all of which subordinate human judgment to external authorities, structures, or technologies. Drawing on examples from literary theory, the history of online education, and recent AI initiatives within the California State University system, the essay contends that artificial intelligence threatens to accelerate the standardization of teaching, diminish faculty autonomy, and redefine education in managerial and technocratic terms, which redefine faculty as an unnecessary expense. In response, it advances an inclusive humanist framework that affirms the intrinsic value of human experience, creativity, and judgment while calling for renewed faculty governance, intellectual independence, and a reaffirmation of the Humanities as indispensable to democratic and educational life.
This article examines the narrative representation of high-technology clinical spaces and their challenging effects on the personhood of patient-protagonists in two Swiss hospital narratives: Walter Matthias Diggelmann’s Schatten (1979), a fictionalized autopathography on lung cancer, and Ulrike Ulrich’s Hinter den Augen (2013), which narrates an MRI examination. Combining classical narratology with the narratology of space, the paper delineates a shift from the twentieth- to the twenty-first-century text that moves from a critical representation of technologized hospital space as an antagonistic environment to a nuanced embrace of medical technology that intricately intertwines the machine and the self. As the analyses show, this shift from opposition to embrace of technology is accompanied and engendered by distinct structural characteristics: While both texts work with artistic forms of representing inner states, such as internal monologue and unreliable narration, their respective ‘poetics of the high-tech hospital’ diverge significantly, from a fundamentally dichotomous semantic setup (Diggelmann) to an integrative narrative based on formal mimesis (Ulrich). Focusing on how literary prose uniquely renders the experience of increasingly technologized hospital landscapes, the article contributes to literary scholarship at the intersection of the medical humanities, the cultural history of the hospital, and science and technology studies.
The article investigates how electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is represented in the following four literary works of the 21st century: October’s Child, Store Kongensgade 23, The Parakeet, and I Am What I Remember. The article argues that electroconvulsive therapy is treated as a mnemonic metaphor that highlights not just its significance for individual experiences of memory loss following treatment and how such treatment elicits traumas that span generations, but also how ECT can be said to have a gendered bias. The article attempts to show how the practice of ECT is emblematic of a certain patriarchal tendency within psychiatry that obfuscates women’s chance of being heard. It makes the argument that ECT as a metaphor paradoxically works as a narrative catalyst that forces a practice of remembrance, and that this practice is in many ways a feminist project. As such, it offers a critical insight into psychiatric practices and shows the importance of giving voice to those who suffer from after-effects of psychiatric treatment. Finally, the article argues that ECT is a feminized metaphor that continues a figurative line of thought in Western social imagination, which entangles women, technology, and mental illness.
This article examines the Popcretos, a series of collage works by Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos, situating them within the broader trajectory of his experimental poetics and the political context of Brazil’s military dictatorship. While existing scholarship has focused primarily on the series’s visual and semiological dimensions, this article argues that sound operates as a structuring element across the Popcretos, shaping how images are arranged and meanings emerge. Drawing on sound studies scholarship and critic Carrie Noland’s concept of sound-sensitive visuality, the article traces how the tension between noise and silence informs de Campos’s work from his earliest poems through the concrete poetry movement’s political turn in the early 1960s. Close readings of three works from the series (“The Anti-Noise,” “An Eye for an Eye,” and “Hush!”) reveal how sonic categories are mobilized to critique cultural imperialism, mass media spectacle, and authoritarian censorship. The article concludes that the Popcretos exceed ocularcentrism, functioning also as a multisensorial form of “auditory writing” within its sonic–visual materiality.
This article argues that Denise Levertov’s Vietnam-era poetry develops a poetics of language ethics: a formal practice through which words are tested against bodies, suffering, agency, and moral judgment. Focusing on “During the Eichmann Trial,” “Life at War,” and “Prologue: An Interim,” the essay examines how Levertov exposes the bureaucratic, legal, and military languages that render violence administrable and morally tolerable. Drawing on Levertov’s poetics, postwar American poetics, Hannah Arendt’s account of moral thoughtlessness, and critical discourse analysis, it shows how quotation, fragmentation, lineation, apostrophe, parataxis, and bodily imagery resist abstraction and restore ethical perception. By situating these poems within the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam War, the Boston Five prosecution, and antiwar protest culture, the article presents Levertov’s work as a historically specific model of linguistic vigilance and poetic witness, one that remains alert to the ethical vulnerability of public language today.
This article argues that parental memoirs of schizophrenia are fruitful sites for producing relational knowledge, a form of understanding that emerges through interactions among care recipients, caregivers, and clinicians rather than residing in any single epistemic agent. It analyzes Dominique Laporte’s Mon fils, schizophrène and Josie Méndez-Negrete’s A Life on Hold as parental memoirs that narrativize knowledge about schizophrenia that often remain absent from clinical accounts. Building on the notions of narrative multiplicity and epistemic justice, the article shows how these memoirs redistribute epistemic authority across perspectives (psychiatrists’, caregivers’, and care recipients’). The article situates Laporte’s text as a testimonial memoir and Méndez-Negrete’s as an autoethnographic memoir, highlighting how both construct knowledge through caregiving. To account for their narrative strategies, it introduces the concept of hypodiegetic witnessing, which draws on Arthur Frank’s concept of witnessing and Mieke Bal’s theory of hypodiegetic narrative. Through storytelling practices such as pláticas, cuentos, intertextual references, and embedded stories, these memoirs mediate psychotic experience without claiming direct access to it. Rather than merely representing caregiving, parental memoirs generate and circulate relational knowledge, contributing to more epistemically just and polyphonic understandings of schizophrenia and mental illness.
Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, both in its incomplete, revised version (published 1590) and the original ‘Old Arcadia’, features a number of remarkable adventures that explore gender identities and identities that are redefined either from within or by the force of external manipulation, deceit, coercion or error. Under the umbrella of the pastoral setting, in other places, in the ‘not here’, Sidney’s personas face troubles that ‘other’ who they are—to themselves and to others. “And let us see what power is the author of all these troubles: forsooth, love; love, a passion, and the basest and fruitlessest of all passions”. The troubles are never simple. In the words of one of the protagonists, who undergoes a complex case of gender shift: “For, indeed, the true love hath that excellent nature in it, that it doth transform the very essence of the lover into the thing loved, uniting and, as it were, incorporating it with a secret and inward working”. This essay explores the performative complexities of these secret and inward workings, drawing on theatrical versions of Sidney’s Arcadia and its cognate parallels: both from the early modern period and in recent performances and theatrical experiments. The essay theorises Sidney’s concept of ‘poesy’ from The Defence of Poesy and brings it in line with the notion of dramaticity.
The essay rereads the literary field of the mid-twentieth century as structured by “the art of the insult”—a game the literati, exemplified by James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, are invested in. In essays and interviews, these writers engage in ad hominem verbal attacks to test the limits of the socially sayable, which are also the limits of personal friendship. Existing scholarship has shown how the fraught relation between Baldwin and Mailer was marked by gender, race, and sexuality. Drawing on under-researched and newly accessible material, the article makes the case that these differences are superseded by the shared identity as literati who ground literary innovation in social provocation. The alliance culminates in their closing ranks to censor and legitimize the underlying scandal: Mailer’s physical assault against his wife Adele, whose autobiography the article considers in closing.
This paper investigates the identity and circumstances of Nampo Joshi (南芳女史) (Ōzawa Nampo 大澤南芳, b. 1845; born Takei Tsuru), the woman artist who painted the kachō-ga (bird-and-flower painting) affixed to the reverse of James McNeill Whistler’s Blue and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (1871/1873, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow). Completed in 1867, as the Edo period ended, Nampo’s work reached Europe with remarkable speed, raising the question of how a painting by a Japanese woman came into Whistler’s possession. Few historical documents directly pertaining to Nampo survive. However, she was the wife of the painter Ōzawa Nankoku (大澤南谷, 1844–?), and a systematic examination of records related to him—land registers, official gazettes, periodicals, exhibition catalogues, and diaries—reveals that the couple established themselves in Nihonbashi, the commercial centre of Tokyo. This broader archival investigation reconstructs who Nampo was: the socio-economic standing she and her husband achieved and the ways in which they extended their endeavours well beyond the traditional boundaries of their craft—participating energetically in the civic life of the new capital, in the exhibition culture of the Meiji period, and in educational and philanthropic activities. Crucially, the study demonstrates that masters deeply involved in Rangaku (Dutch Studies) networks advocating Japan’s opening to the world trained both artists and argues that this progressive intellectual milieu may provide essential context for understanding the swift acceptance of Nampo’s work in Europe.
This article investigates the functions of the epistolary form in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe as a means of constructing authenticity and probing what Susan Barton calls the “substance of the truth.” Two distinct forms of authenticity play a central role in Foe (1987). The first is related to the narrative conventions of autofiction, particularly fictional autobiography, the epistolary form, and what has been termed “circumstantial realism,” as exemplified by Daniel Defoe and the eighteenth-century novel. The second emerges through Susan Barton’s insistence on the “substance of the truth” (F, 51), which appears to transcend these conventions of realistic narration. By employing a different, non-realist form of authenticity, Coetzee critiques the oppression and erasure of the female writing subject and foregrounds the fate of Friday, the traumatized subaltern who cannot speak. Coetzee’s postmodern rewriting thus both employs and deconstructs the representational conventions that establish authenticity, while also revealing an ethical commitment characteristic of his work in general.
This article examines the later life experiences of women who participated in the revolutionary period in Cork city and county who did not go on to marry. Many within this cohort of Cork female activists experienced poverty, ill health, economic dependency and loneliness in the aftermath of the revolutionary period. Their unmarried status left these women particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal state structured—legally, economically and culturally—on an essentialist view of the married, childbearing woman. The invisibility of adult dependency in Ireland was summed up in the 1926 Census of Population report: ‘no account is taken in this inquiry of adults who may be supported out of the household income’. Mary Daly notes the ‘high proportion of the population working within a family economy which had little reliance on money incomes and waged employment’. This may, as she states, ‘have reduced the numbers exposed to the blunt instrument of unemployment’ in the context of the 1930s depression. However, the emotional and psychological effects of economic dependency have not been considered in any depth. The lack of statutory benefits for lower-class single women who were unable to access paid employment and who did not have the requisite social insurance stamps meant that they faced a vista of poverty and dependency on charity and family members. The latter were often begrudging and indisposed to assume the financial burdens of those who they often deemed economically ‘unproductive’. This article argues that, in so many cases, financial dependency resulted in the loss of agency and autonomy for unmarried women.
This article examines Martha Graham’s radical reception of the women of Greek tragedy across her performing career, from the early 1930s to her retirement from the stage in 1969. I argue that Graham repeatedly turned to Greek tragic heroines—Electra, Medea, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, Alcestis, Phaedra, and Hecuba—with two interlocking aims: to stage archetypal human emotion, and to confront and make sense of her own personal experiences of love, jealousy, aging, and loss. Inspired by psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, and the abstract art of collaborator Isamu Noguchi, Graham was drawn to Greek tragedy’s direct engagement with human suffering. What makes her reception radical is its consistent relocation of tragic conflict from the civic sphere to the psyche: rather than framing female transgression through public judgment, Graham turns the drama inward, giving visible form to what ancient texts leave unstaged—Jocasta’s embodied reckoning with unbearable knowledge, Clytemnestra’s interior logic of injury and justice, Phaedra’s unruly desire brought into full view. The article also introduces the public-facing initiative “Martha Graham & Greek Myth,” which extends this scholarship to broader audiences through presentations that integrate live dance with scholarly discussion, making Graham’s reception of these tragic women accessible beyond the academy.
The Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform at the end of the twentieth century displaced millions of workers into a rapidly shifting market. How do displaced workers navigate the coexistence of historical structures, of relations of production and social reproduction, both old and new? This article takes up these questions through two films by director Zhang Meng—Piano in a Factory and Lucky Dog—that center on former SOE workers amidst postsocialist China’s new economic order. In both films, characters navigate life outside the SOE structure by improvising with limited resources and repurposing what remains available, by way of both creativity and constraint. Reading these acts, this article proposes the term labor of making-do to name a practical, creative activity through which subjects navigate limited material conditions, competing subjectivities, and disrupted social relations in the shifting reality. Drawing on embodied socialist skills and memory, making-do as a particular form of labor reproduces subjects in a new historical structure. In the face of the market, it sometimes functions outside market logics. While informed by the historical legacy of the socialist ideology of labor, the labor of making-do is not primarily a nostalgic attempt to restore socialist ideals; nor is it a deliberate resistance to capitalism. Rather, it demonstrates a lived, spontaneous and often unglamorous process by which precarious subjects negotiate sustenance and survival, and through which revised subjectivities are produced. It is through such contradictory and quotidian processes that social reproduction unfolds across coexisting historical structures.
The article analyzes the constructions of the racial and social “other” in portraits of or for members of the Danish royal family held in The Royal Danish Collection at Rosenborg Castle and the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle. More specifically, it examines portraits of young Blacks who served at the Danish court and who were painted by Northern European artists in the second half of the seventeenth century. In these paintings, the young people are posed with Danish royals, or with animals with whom they are contrasted or likened. The first section interrogates primary documents dating from the second half of the seventeenth century for information concerning the status and various aspects of the lives of young Blacks at the Danish court, as well as the language used to describe them. These written sources provide a frame of reference for the subsequent interpretation of four paintings in the second section. It is argued that all four paintings convey the performative nature of Black servitude and exemplify how enslaved individuals were expected to appear and behave. When displayed within royal residences, it is put forth that these works functioned to promote the “othering” of court Blacks, reinforce the boundaries separating the Danish royal family from their attendants, and visually assert the monarchy’s superiority, authority, and control.
Türkiye’s Early Republican Era (1923–1946) was a period marked by profound ideological shifts, during which social values and national identity were reshaped. During this time, monuments and statues was utilized by Republican intellectuals as a ‘strategic tool for diffusion’ to instill the ideology of the Republic among the public. The monuments and statues of this period were designed to reflect revolutionary changes, forge a national identity, and emphasize the new values of the Republic. Questions such as: How did the figures in the monuments and statues of this period convey new Republican values like modernization, secularism, and nationalism to the public? What aspects of society did Republican elites aim to transform, and how did they represent this transformation through monuments and statues? What role did monuments play in the construction of national identity? remain to be answered. This study aims to shed light on the political and social context of the era by analyzing certain monuments produced during Türkiye’s Single-Party Era, thereby seeking to understand how Republican ideology was reflected in art and the role/impact of art in the construction of national identity. To this end, three monuments and one painting—considered to best reflect the era and to best convey the ideology of the Republic—have been selected as examples. While these monuments are subjected to in-depth analysis to decipher the explicit and implicit ideological messages they contain, the examples’ dimensions of meaning are also examined within the context of Althusser’s Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses and Sennett’s concepts of nakedness and the political/sovereign body.
