“The Machine Stops” is a science fiction short story by English author E.M. Forster, set in a world where humanity resides underground, relying on an omnipotent global machine to fulfil all its needs. The two main characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, represent two opposing worldviews, giving rise to questions regarding the survival of the collective as opposed to the freedom of the individual. The Machine has become essential in the preservation of this society, which later proves to be incredibly fragile: a society which has come to solely rely on the comforts provided by the Machine and has renounced the physicality of its inhabitants. Forster predicts humanity’s increasing reliance on technology, highlighting the dangers of this becoming the ultimate controlling force, a concern that is also relevant in modern society. The futurist, information-oriented world presented reveals what can happen when humanity disengages itself from its physical and emotional existence, becoming incapable of adapting to changing environments. Examining this world through the lens of the beehive metaphor, the objective is to explore the danger of complacency which leads to stagnation. By delving into how individuals can resist the tendency of the collective to numb their inquisitive human spirit, the necessity of adaptation is revealed. The story delivers a warning and a hopeful message about growth in new global realities, which may resonate with readers to this day.
This article analyzes intertextuality within the genre of romantasy, as well as what I call a romantasy chain reaction (the influence of one title on subsequent ones), initiated by Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses series. After exploring the theoretical aspects of intertextuality, the paper examines this phenomenon in practice on the example of the abovementioned series. The analysis discusses the responses of A Court of Thorns and Roses to the cultural world, but also the responses of other romantasy works (namely Rhapsodic, Quicksilver, Fourth Wing, and When the Moon Hatched, Crescent City, as well as A Song of the Forever Rains) to those books, henceforth creating the aforementioned intertextual chain reaction.
Literature in the socio-political context has been frequently adopted as a weapon against women. It has depicted them as “servants of history,” existing to please men and produce the next generations (Walsh 5). Sometimes, this war inflicted on women was tenacious with colonizers’ attempts to enslave the nations that they conquered. This correlation between sexism and colonialism was present in Ireland, where women were subjugated both to the rules of British colonizers and to Irish men desiring to confine them to their homes. One of the literary traditions contributing to the control of Irish women was the aisling tradition [the word aisling means a vision or a dream; it originated as a Gaelic literary genre connected with love and sovereignty]. The main focus of the aisling is the image of Ireland personified as an ideal woman who comes to Irish men in their dreams, urging them to fight for their country. In modern times, Irish feminists started to point out how the aisling tradition imprisoned women culturally and suppressed their sexuality. Consequentially, Irish women writers have been striving to reverse the profound impact that a variety of literary texts, including this tradition, exerted on the worldview of Irish people. This article will present the ways in which Medbh McGuckian reverses the aisling tradition to give women agency and voice, and juxtapose them with Seamus Heaney’s poetry (especially his two poems: “The Act of Union” and “Ocean’s Love to Ireland”). Furthermore, it will reflect on the transformation from the “male gaze” in Heaney’s poems to “female action” in McGuckian’s poems. The analysis will encompass two of her poems: “The Hollywood Bed” and “The Heiress,” in the framework of literary criticism from acclaimed feminist scholars such as Clair Wills, Alison Garden, and Aimée Walsh. It will also comment on the origins of the term male gaze to contextualize the discussion around it.
This article examines Yōko Tawada’s novel The Emissary as a response to the post-3/11 ecological and nuclear crisis in Japan. It explores how the novel reimagines the post-apocalypse landscape not as a dystopian warning but as a space for provisional and interrelational world-building. The analysis examines the novel’s narrative structure and thematic preoccupations within posthumanist and new materialist frameworks, revealing its rejection of apocalyptic temporality in favour of transcorporeal time and materiality. The study also examines water as a motif for challenging contemporary isolationist post-Fukushima discourses by contextualising the novel within an alternative planetary eco-ethics based on theories of Hydrofeminism. The article demonstrates how Tawada repurposes a genre “born out of crisis” into a speculative “playground” for reparative storytelling grounded in multispecies care and ecological negotiation.
A number of literary works, especially those from dystopian genre, such as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) have been concerned with the notion of agency and its limitations, and have explored it in various settings. In 2022, the broad catalogue of dystopian media welcomed a new addition, the Apple TV+ series Severance. The show creates a setting familiar to the potential viewer by exploring the eerie corporate world of consumption-fueled capitalism, whose subjects chase after emotionlessness required for satisfying results in a profit-oriented workplace. The show explores the relationship between negative affects and late-stage capitalist society, modified by the use of a neurological chip designed to increase the productivity of an employee. The aim of this essay is to apply notions developed by, among others, Sara Ahmed and Eva Illouz, to explore the connection between the agency of a person, their emotional make-up, and an economic system enhanced by futuristic technological advancements.
