Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Shakespeare’s King Lear focuses on how the titular character is driven by repressed desires, fears, and internal conflicts. He believes that the audience grasps this emotional complexity by projecting their unconscious feelings upon him. Freud’s engagement with Shakespeare serves as a natural entry point into questions about how one understands another’s inner life, specifically as it impacts the modern-day conception of empathy. His philosophical compeers Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein propound theories that allow one to access another’s mind. For them, speech, intonation, and facial expressions serve an epistemic function, revealing that person’s motives, desires, and beliefs. Their seminal treatises of empathy expand upon Freud’s theory of projection and thus serve as a vital heuristic tool in explicating King Lear. Just as Freud grounds his theory of empathy in the listener’s response to a comic’s jokes, Shakespeare uses the Fool’s acerbic riddles to express the affectionate knowing between him and Lear. The intelligence underlying these witticisms not only undoes the rigid taxonomy of “fool” and “wise man,” but also brings to light those matters that weigh most heavily upon Lear’s consciousness, proving that “the phenomenon of foreign psychic life is indubitably there.” (On the Problem of Empathy 1989, p. 5) All of these writers espouse a view of empathy that creates a web of shared understanding that explicates how the Fool grasps Lear’s unconscious mind and forges a meaningful connection with him.
This article proposes reading Don Quixote as a work of, rather than a supplement to, political theory. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s accounts of narrative configuration and narrative identity, I develop a concept called ‘narrative politics’ to describe the condition when political judgment must proceed through contested interpretation rather than the application of a unified framework. I argue that Cervantes stages precisely this condition through the formal innovations of Don Quixote: the novel’s unstable narrators, competing sources, and politically charged choice of a Moorish historian as chronicler establish the condition of narrative politics from its opening pages. Two extended case studies develop this argument. First, the interpolated tale ‘El curioso impertinente’ dramatizes how the pursuit of epistemic certainty through rational method destroys the bonds of trust on which collective life depends. Second, the metafictional opening of Part II stages the instability of narrative authority under conditions of competing interpretations. Together these episodes reveal Don Quixote as a meditation on the fragility of political judgment in Cervantes’s own early modern Iberian world, where no single narrative can secure authority, and where judgment emerges only through the irreducibly plural activity of interpretation.
This comparative study examines the erosion of ethical certainty under conditions of extreme scarcity and institutional collapse. Focusing on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), and José Saramago’s Blindness (1998), the article argues that these narratives dismantle the moral binary of “good versus evil” by exposing how ethical frameworks fracture when survival becomes the primary imperative. Through close reading informed by existential philosophy, trauma theory, and psychoanalysis, the study traces how protagonists navigate moral compromise when communal reinforcement disappears. Morality in these texts emerges not as a fixed disposition but as a contingent practice, continually tested by deprivation, fear, and the demand of the Other. By following the boy’s question in The Road—“Are we the good guys?”—across all three works, the article demonstrates that moral ambiguity operates not as a stylistic device but as an irreducible existential condition. The study concludes that these novels refuse moral resolution, instead asking readers to inhabit the uncertainty of ethical choice once civilisation’s conventions have burned away.
This article examines the ethics and affective complexities of care in Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil and Other Stories, arguing that the collection foregrounds the imaginative, relational, and often troubling demands of caretaking within a more than human world. Drawing on feminist and posthuman care theory—particularly the work of María Puig de la Bellacasa, Joan Tronto, and Donna Haraway—the article analyzes how Schweblin’s stories stage encounters in which care involves uncertainty, power asymmetry, and the necessity of imagining the needs of others who cannot fully articulate them. In the stories “Welcome to the Club,” “The Fabulous Animal,” “An Eye in the Throat,” and “Atlàntida,” specific relations of care reveal both the failures and transformative potential of caregiving practices. These narratives depict care as simultaneously sustaining and oppressive, exposing how guilt, substitution, and silence shape relationships among humans and nonhumans alike. Schweblin’s fiction frames care as an embodied, relational practice that unsettles human exceptionalism and highlights the ethical importance—and limits—of attempting to perceive the world from marginalized perspectives.
In Literature and Revolution, a classic of literary criticism and literary theory, Leon Trotsky gave attention to the work of several outstanding women writers. This article examines his critical treatment of these Russian women poets and their work. It shows that he consistently denigrated both the women and their writing by deploying conventional stereotypes and misogynist tropes, including those of the witch and of gynaecological writing. He targeted especially the women’s religious commitments and the domestic orientation of their work, portraying them as immured in a decadent and obsolescent pre-revolutionary culture. Literature and Revolution was published in 1924, before Trotsky slid from political power as a result of the ascent of Stalin, and from the time of its publication, it has remained an influential study of the relationships between political revolution and literary activity, especially, though not exclusively, on the Left. Trotsky did devote attention to the cultural production of contemporary women writers, though not as much or as seriously as that he gave to their male counterparts. It is argued that, in pursuing his ideological objectives of reorienting literature towards revolutionary values and themes, Trotsky’s analysis nevertheless worked to uphold and reinforce, rather than to challenge, existing concepts of gender difference and gender hierarchy.
This study examines the hypothetical issue of the impact of ancient Egyptian beliefs on Africa as a whole. Several focal points are explored. These include (1). The situation of the discipline of folklore within allied academic specializations. (2). Culture diffusion within Africa, and (3). Spoken folk stories as the only field that integrates, in the space and time continuum, culture on the one hand, with its bearers/(society), on the other. (4). [Beside the] colonial past, the problem, is a result of a number of academic factors that include: (a). The establishment at universities of African studies departments that confine the continent to the sub-Saharan tier excluding Africa of the North; thus, folklore is isolated without a proper stage for studying it academically (see Dorson 1972); (b). The stereotyping concerning the capacity of scholars with unfamiliar names or recognized departmental membership as capable of dealing with theory or innovation, though some of their ideas are adopted by the famous without accrediting the source; (c). Ignoring the unfamiliarity for the family (especially under conditions of secrecy; cf. bias, ethnocentrism); and (d). Inadequacy of academic classroom pedagogy on the basics of verbal lore. Folklore in its original, mainly verbal branches, as represented by Stith Thompson’s monumental works on motif (1955–1958), and its predecessor by Antti Aarne on Type, (1910, 1928, 1961/1964), whose coverage, especially on Africa of the North, is seriously lacking in both the Type and Motif Indexes. The tracking of this line begins with recent calls for need for morphological studies of a South African tale (Dseagu [2001] 2021). An association among various regions of Africa with ancient Egypt concerning mythological contacts merits this investigation.
In our current moment, sport and romance are uniting in the creation of YA sports fiction titles that are flooding the market and enjoying widespread popularity. Despite this exciting intersection between sport and romance in the world of fiction for young people, little research has been conducted on the realities and possibilities of the genre. This paper employs inductive thematic analysis to explore answers to the question: How does sport function across three current, contemporary, high-quality YA sport romances? Findings reveal how, within each text, the protagonist’s relationship with sport is initially represented as a romance trope that is, at best, idealized, and at worst, dangerous. This is followed by the introduction of a fellow teen who foments romantic interest in the protagonist, and serving as an unwitting rival, reveals the flaws and failings of the initial sporting suitor. The protagonist, now under the spell of a new love, is forced and enabled to see, confront, and redefine their relationship with sport. This paper is important in the way it invites purposeful consideration of sport and romance and their intersections in young adult literature at a time when YA sport romances abound but scholarly examination of the genre is just beginning to emerge.
In his poem The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare uses ekphrasis—the virtuosic description of a piece of art such as a painting, tapestry, or tableau—to critique the Roman ideal of female virtue. After her husband’s description of her beauty incites Tarquin to rape her, Lucrece processes her wrong and positions herself heroically by identifying herself with the figure of Hecuba in a painting of the fall of Troy. She then commits suicide, and her body becomes a vehicle of political renewal, prompting Roman men to revolt against the Tarquins and found the Roman Republic. Shakespeare’s wronged Roman women imitate Lucrece, ekphrastically orienting themselves to destruction in hopes of effecting political change. Tracing Lucrece-inspired moments of ekphrasis across multiple plays reveals how Shakespeare is in conversation with ancient literary techniques, critiques of Stoicism, and the moral concerns about Lucrece’s suicide raised in the Christian tradition. I argue that Shakespeare’s deliberate omission of ekphrasis from the story of the Stoic Portia highlights her suicide as unnecessary and reveals the self-destructive power of the Roman ideal of female virtue. While we may be tempted to think of ekphrasis as purely decorative, in these ekphrastic moments, poetics, philosophy, and political action are intertwined.
This article examines the representation of mental illness, emergency treatment, and recovery, in Ned Vizzini’s 2006 Young Adult novel, It’s kind of a funny story. Existing criticism has predominantly pursued what we term “diagnostic realist” approaches, which evaluate fictional representations against clinical criteria. We both affirm what this work achieves and make the case for extending it. Drawing on work on disability representation in Young Adult Literature and perspectives from Mad Studies, we propose that a social model lens, which locates mental difference within social and structural contexts rather than within individual pathology, opens out further possibilities for understanding what this and related novels do. We then demonstrate how close attention to Vizzini’s artistry—including to his use of romance conventions, figurative language, intertextuality, and first-person focalisation—reveals a text that does not simply mirror mental illness realistically, but which actively dramatises how social environments, institutional structures, and modes of creative expression shape the experience of and recovery from mental ill health. Rather than displacing diagnostic approaches, we argue that these wider critical paradigms, inclusive of the social model and attendant attention to craft, can enhance understanding of the help such novels can provide for different kinds of readers.
Taylor Swift’s songwriting is frequently analyzed through the lens of confessional songwriting, blurring the boundaries between factual and fictional storytelling. This article proposes understanding her work as transmedia meta-autobiographies, a genre characterized by self-reflexivity and the questioning of autobiographical rules. Drawing on Mueller-Greene’s definition of meta-autobiography and intersectional theories, the study analyzes Swift’s lyrics, music videos, and paratextual elements, specifically focusing on selected works after her split with Big Machine Records, as this marks a different era in her creative work and is also linked to the discourse around her re-recordings. The analysis demonstrates how Swift utilizes transmedia storytelling to perform the act of remembering and writing, effectively staging her “self” across various media formats. This self-representation could according to the rules of the genre function as a counter-narrative to traditional male-centric autobiographical forms by centering girlhood. However, the article also highlights contradictions regarding authenticity and the commodification of this identity.
In this article I interrogate how the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist aligns with as well as problematizes racial capitalism. The optic of racial capitalism enables me to trace the film’s articulation of race relations within the US and the power of white supremacy internationally, particularly as they manifest in the geopolitics of the US empire. The optic of racial capitalism foregrounds the inextricability of what Cedric Robinson termed racialism and the historical development of capitalism(s). The film demonstrates how racial capitalism is naturalized through the creation of aspirations for the symbolic markers of upward mobility and the acquisition of wealth, which is to say, cultural as much as financial capital. The film also illustrates that racial capitalism is a work in progress; it is neither singular nor homogeneous in its effect as it mutates across the world; it derives its power from the construction of racial infrastructures, political–economic institutions, states and, as I will argue in this essay, through regimes of racial affect.
Peter S. Beagle’s decision to feminize the formerly masculine figure of the unicorn in his influential 1968 fantasy novel The Last Unicorn represents a key moment in the evolution of this now ubiquitous image, one embraced today as a symbol of pride by LGBTQ+ communities. The novel and its 1982 animated film adaptation have themselves remained popular among queer and especially trans audiences, who have often found the narrative resonant with their own experiences. This essay provides a preliminary overview of the queer history of the unicorn symbol and continues into a trans reading of the novel, arguing that these responses to Beagle’s work by contemporary readers reflect dimensions of the narrative congruent with concerns about gender performance and misrecognition; gender dysphoria; and queer temporalities. The nature of the fantasy form itself, we maintain throughout, can also particularly enable reparative readings by queer and trans audiences.
Over the past century, literary theory has branched out in several directions. Diverse schools of literary thought, such as Semiotics, New Criticism, Intentionalism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction, have passionately plowed new ground within the academy and just as passionately defended that territory against their neighbor’s incursions. At times, authors and their intentions have been central to literary criticism, while at others, they are intellectually discarded or severely reduced in importance. Much of the friction caused by the shifting focus of literary criticism is driven by impassioned rhetoric and convictions that leave little room for compromise. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened the possibility of a dispassionate arbiter, one that, should the literary community have the courage and conviction to embrace and exploit, could offer a new level of harmony between divergent literary theories.
This paper examines how Dushyant Kumar’s collection, sāye meṅ dhūp (lit. Sunlight in the Shadows), reinvented the classical ġhazal genre as a vernacular weapon of anti-authoritarian dissent—not by abandoning ambiguity, but by recalibrating it under conditions of constraint—during India’s Emergency. This study argues that Kumar’s work constitutes a radical departure from the genre’s traditional emphasis on the abstract longing of the lover for the beloved and other tropes which are peculiar to writing ġhazal in the Perso-Urdu world. Instead, Kumar systematically repurposed its conventions—its ambiguity, its metaphors of the beloved and the garden, its themes of sacrifice—to mount a sharp polemic against Indira Gandhi’s regime. Through an analysis of ġhazal-s selected for their range of polemical strategies—from direct satire and political allegory to the recasting of traditional themes like martyrdom—this paper demonstrates how Kumar’s conscious use of a blended Hindi–Urdu vernacular was central to his political project. By writing in “the language I speak,” he dragged the elite ġhazal into the public square, transforming it into a medium for articulating collective disillusionment, resistance, and a scathing critique of a democracy in crisis. Kumar’s work thus stands as a testament to the ġhazal’s potent, and often overlooked, capacity for explicit political engagement.
Time travel in science fiction, a subgenre distinct yet often overlapping with alternative history, often explores historical contingency through counterfactual scenarios to produce alternative histories. Yet some works deliberately negate this potential, presenting time travelers who refrain from altering the past despite possessing the apparent ability to do so. This essay examines this underexplored narrative mode through a comparative analysis of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Miyabe Miyuki’s The Incident at the Gamō Residence. Framing the narrative device as a non-interventionist history, it explores how both novels deploy time travel not to revise history but to confront the ethical, emotional, and cultural implications of engaging with historically traumatic events that remain causally intact. Drawing on science fiction theory and historiographical debates, the essay argues that these texts redirect the function of time travel toward ethical reflection, embodied experience, and the formation of national identity. While Kindred presents history as an ongoing system of racialized violence that resists reconciliation, The Incident at the Gamō Residence frames historical violence through affective memory and postwar nostalgia, facilitating symbolic closure. Together, these novels demonstrate how time travel can serve as a critical apparatus for negotiating national trauma without recourse to historical revision.
This essay examines how contemporary Anglophone Chinese women writers rewrite the imagery of Chinese snake women through speculative retellings that foreground sisterhood, queer desire, and diasporic identity. Drawing on queer diaspora studies and feminist criticism, I argue that Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake (2024) revise the figure of the Chinese snake woman to imagine forms of female intimacy and kinship that transcend heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks. In these works, sisterhood operates both as a familial bond and as an intimate, queer relation charged with affective, physical, and occasionally erotic intensity. The original White Snake legend—one of China’s Four Great Folktales—has long invited queer readings, especially through the complex relationship between White Snake and her companion Green Snake. In dialogue with the Chinese snake myth, Lai and Koe relocate the snake woman into speculative worlds shaped by queer desire, racial marginalization, and transnational migration. In Salt Fish Girl, Lai reimagines the reincarnations of the half-snake Chinese mother goddess Nu Wa across colonial South China and near-future bio-capitalist Canada, portraying a cross-temporal lesbian love between the protagonist and the titular Salt Fish Girl. In Sister Snake, Koe’s protagonists—serpent sisters Su and Emerald, separated between Singapore and New York—disrupt normative family scripts while forging a fragmented but enduring affective bond. Through the motif of the Chinese snake woman, these works construct imaginative spaces in which intimate sisterhood subverts patriarchal and national containment, advancing a queer vision of female togetherness.
To understand contemporary ecopoetry’s power, we need to think historically about genre. This essay primarily focuses on satire. I first give a brief overview of key ideas from the last several decades on genre theory, particularly prose essays that explore what poetic genres are and if they evolve. I then survey ways to understand how the history of satiric poems furnishes valuable perspectives on contemporary developments in ecopoetry, which is defined as poetry linking ecological and social crises. The role of satire in ecopoetry has been too little studied—even though poets themselves, prodded by environmental degradation, have long valued the genre. At the heart of the essay are readings of poems by Jorie Graham, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Jenny L. Davis, and others. Their work provides test cases for my hypothesis that the climate crisis is causing satiric poetry to adapt, modifying its methods and goals. When elements of a genre are no longer suited for contemporary needs, innovative poets get to work. Yet contemporary innovations paradoxically reaffirm the ancient legacy of satire’s importance.
We present a psycholinguistic test battery designed to examine the cognitive and affective processes involved in reading Polish poetry. This toolkit combines reader profiling (vocabulary, memory and reading proficiency) with tasks that assess the influence of lexical, textual, affective and poetic features on recognition, context restoration and association generation. Pilot data confirmed the reliability of the measures and their sensitivity to recognised psycholinguistic effects. Vocabulary size and delayed memory rehearsal strongly predicted performance in content restoration, while recognition and association latencies were closely related, indicating shared retrieval mechanisms. Structural and affective properties also influenced responses: line-final words improved recognition but impeded association, with these effects being moderated by word length and frequency. Words that were negatively valenced, abstract and hardly imaginable were restored more accurately than positive or concrete ones. These findings demonstrate the potential of the battery for profiling readers and provide new insights into how Polish poetic language engages memory and associative processes.
My sinuous life as a humanist traversing disciplinary, periodic, geographical, and national borders has yielded palpable wonders, the most wonderful being the opportunity to live and connect many lives. I was made bilingual, bicultural, and cosmopolitan in colonial Hong Kong, a classicist at Pepperdine University, a Renaissance scholar at Berkeley, an intersectional Americanist at UCLA, and a polyglot comparatist by UCEAP. The many splendors of literary America unraveled by Bruins of disparate stripes have driven me to herald the variegated beauty of Chinese American heritage. I have gone from being an outsider, a suspect even, in both English and Asian American studies to being a humanist resource. It behooves me to usher in, among the Bruins, my mother tongue—the language of the Tang poets, gold miners, and the Transpacific railroad workers, and to stage Cantonese opera. “In my end is my beginning.”
Ease of cognitive processing is an important predictor of aesthetic liking. However, many acclaimed artworks are fairly complex and require substantial cognitive effort. Are they aesthetically liked despite or because of this increased cognitive challenge? The present study pursued this question experimentally. The high syntactic complexity of Heinrich von Kleist’s narratives provided the test case. According to literary scholars, this high syntactic complexity should support increased levels of how “suspenseful,” “intense,” “interesting,” and evocative of a sense of “urgency” the texts are perceived, and it should thereby also support higher overall aesthetic liking. This expectation is in line with recent models in empirical aesthetics according to which higher ease of processing and higher cognitive challenge are not mutually exclusive, but can conjointly drive aesthetic liking to higher levels. The standard hypothesis of cognitive fluency instead predicts a disfluency-driven negative effect on aesthetic liking. We tested these two predictions in two studies by presenting excerpts from Kleist’s narratives in their original vs. syntactically simplified versions to participants. Results differ substantially depending on how the target variables are statistically modeled. If ease of processing and cognitive challenge are modeled separately as predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings, higher ease of processing is a strong positive and higher cognitive challenge a largely negative predictor. However, when the two complementary cognitive variables are modeled conjointly, they are both positive predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings. Their predictive power differs, however, significantly. Only the positive effect of ease of processing is pervasive across all readers. That of cognitive challenge is substantially modified by individual differences. Specifically, it was observed for readers who (1) are of higher age, (2) like to read narratives in general, and (3) reported prior positive experiences with Kleist. Supporting the ecological validity of our findings, readers meeting these criteria are more likely than others to actually read Kleist outside the laboratory.
