This article demonstrates how Ferdinand Tönnies’s celebrated distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) resonates in the works of T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and W. H. Auden, who engage with the implications of rootedness, cosmopolitanism, and the erosion of traditional communities. These thinkers offer valuable insights into the ways in which the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft reshaped social life, cultural identity, and individual consciousness. The paper examines these perspectives, contrasting the virtues of localized, organic communities with the challenges and opportunities posed by modern, cosmopolitan societies. It highlights the ongoing struggle to balance unity and diversity in a rapidly evolving world, where the preservation of cultural identity often clashes with the demands of global interconnectedness. Ultimately, this exploration underscores the enduring relevance of Tönnies’s framework and the continued search for meaning and community in the face of modernity’s transformative pressures.
Drawing on care ethics and vulnerability theory, this study addresses the prominent role of intimacy in Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (2024), set in contemporary Ireland. Written in a language that focuses on the protagonists’ interiority, bodily sensations, and emotional world, the novel vividly portrays a “radical” sense of intimacy which helps characters reassess their phobias and insecurities within their closest relationships. As will be argued, intimacy in Rooney’s Intermezzo is not just a matter of human connection, but of a personal transformation that allows protagonists to move away from the neoliberal and patriarchal values, norms, and stereotypes of today’s world.
Drawing on care ethics and vulnerability theory, this study addresses the prominent role of intimacy in Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (2024), set in contemporary Ireland. Written in a language that focuses on the protagonists’ interiority, bodily sensations, and emotional world, the novel vividly portrays a “radical” sense of intimacy which helps characters reassess their phobias and insecurities within their closest relationships. As will be argued, intimacy in Rooney’s Intermezzo is not just a matter of human connection, but of a personal transformation that allows protagonists to move away from the neoliberal and patriarchal values, norms, and stereotypes of today’s world.
Nghi Vo’s Singing Hill Series follows the character of Chih, a monk that has been entrusted with the task of collecting and preserving stories that either have never been recorded before or that have been deliberately excluded from the canon because they contradict national, hegemonic and cis-heteropatriarchal discourses. Throughout the course of the saga, Chih learns and writes down stories that have been neglected, erased and forgotten, and we, as readers, see how these acts of narrative preservation help to build a present in which those that have been casted as “other,” and in particular, racialized sapphic women, are able to find and recognize themselves. My argument is that the speculative elements of the novellas help to question what is thought of as normal, as possible and as real, and thus, allow for the texts to be read as spaces of narrative hospitality where sapphic women can not only reclaim their (her)stories but can also build a home and a community through them.
