ABSTRACT Originating in Earth system science, the Anthropocene designates a geological epoch shaped by the entanglement of human and nonhuman forces. Once taken up within the humanities, however, it poses a fundamental epistemological challenge to historiography: natural history and human history converge at a planetary scale, compelling us to reckon with geological deep time that exceeds direct human experience, and thus raising the question of how history can be narrated when its temporal frame extends beyond the horizon of human perception. This article rereads Seamus Heaney's bog poems, primarily on “Punishment” (1975), in response to the broader impact of the Anthropocene on the humanities. It points out that interpretations which reconstruct these poems through the scalar expansion characteristic of Anthropocene thinking have not, in fact, responded to earlier readings that criticize them as myths suspending the specificity of violence during the Troubles and its historical responsibility. Drawing on the emerging concept of Anthropocene realism as articulated by Adeline Johns‐Putra, this article contends that Heaney's bog poems do not move toward a macro‐totalizing view of history. Rather, through Walter Benjamin's notion of Stillstellung , they enable history to appear momentarily in a partial and incomplete form, by acknowledging both the inaccessibility of certain temporal dimensions and the limits of situated subjectivity, thereby revealing a dimension of historical materialism inherited within the concept of Anthropocene realism itself. This article not only offers a reinterpretation of Heaney's bog poems grounded in an Anthropocene historical consciousness, reading them as historical realism unfolding across deep time, but also responds to the theoretical debates that have emerged as the Anthropocene enters the humanities.
While the hemispheric turn in literary studies has reshaped the geographical study of William Faulkner, the transpacific dimension in his early fiction remains largely unmapped. Reading his 1920s New Orleans fiction against the biopolitics of the Exclusion era, this article reveals a narrative laboratory where racial forms and modernist aesthetics intersect. On the one hand, texts like "Yo Ho and Two Bottles of Rum" (1925) crystallize the era's biopolitical logic; here, an Orientalist erasure hollows out Chinese figures to construct a mirror for white colonial instability and anxiety. On the other hand, the unpublished manuscript "Peter" (c. 1925) experiments with an alternative framework: modernist impersonality. And yet, this detached gaze proves precarious, ultimately ruptured by the disruptive vitality of the unclassifiable Chinese-Creole subject. Through the profound tension between Orientalist objectification and internal resilience, these narrative experiments complicate the era's racial discourses and disrupt the region's geographical insularity. Ultimately, these texts not only anticipate the human endurance central to Faulkner's later fiction but also map a transpacific South that extends far beyond established hemispheric boundaries.
This paper reads Serindia (1921) as an archaeological afterlife of Xuanzang's Da Tang Xiyu Ji, arguing that Aurel Stein's explorations participate in a distinctly modernist geography shaped by movement, fragmentation, and layered temporality. Guided by earlier textual itineraries, Stein reconstructs Central Asia not as an empty terrain but as a landscape structured by memory, ruins, and historical circulation. His method transforms travel into a form of reading, in which space is approached through philology, translation, and material traces. Through close attention to Stein's descriptions of desert routes, rediscovered sites, and manuscript and artefact finds, the paper demonstrates how Serindia constructs space through a spatial synthesis of ruins, texts, and routes, bringing disparate temporal and material strata into alignment. Rather than producing fragmentation for its own sake, this process reorients multiplicity toward historical reconstruction, integrating archaeological evidence with textual memory. Xuanzang's narrative geography persists as a latent structure within Stein's empirical mapping, shaping the rediscovery of Buddhist networks across the Silk Road. Space in Serindia thus emerges not as fixed territory but as a palimpsest of textual and material histories, in which past journeys continue to organize modern perception and movement across regions. Stein's work reveals how modernist geography can take form through the reactivation of earlier spatial imaginaries, suggesting an alternative genealogy of modern spatial consciousness. In this sense, Serindia constitutes an afterlife of Xiyu Ji, translating a seventh-century sacred landscape into a modern archaeological and historical consciousness.
This article traces the emergence and development of debates on "resistance" in Japanese literary discourse from the immediate aftermath of Japan's defeat in 1945 to the conclusion and implementation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. In the turbulent postwar literary scene, writers and critics vigorously pursued questions of wartime responsibility, repeatedly emphasizing the alleged absence of resistance within Japanese literature during the war. In response to this perceived historical "blank," French R & eacute;sistance literature was introduced as an exemplary model, and an idealized notion of resistance-understood as a collective, national movement-was conceptually transplanted into the Japanese context. By examining how this transplanted model came to structure postwar discussions of resistance, this article argues that the framework itself imposed significant limitations on what could be seen and articulated. Precisely because resistance was imagined primarily in national terms, it became closely aligned with emerging postwar visions of the nation-state, while the legacies of empire and colonial domination were rendered largely invisible. Through a close analysis of postwar criticism, literary debates, and key texts, this article critically reassesses both the possibilities and the blind spots of postwar Japanese resistance discourse.
This paper analyzes Nino Haratischwili's international bestseller Das achte Leben (f & uuml;r Brilka) (2014), translated into English as The Eighth Life (2019). Living and working in Germany while writing in German as well, Hartischwili has played a key role in the recent internationalization of Georgian culture. With Georgian literature invited as the guest of honor at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair, Hartischwili served as a spokesperson. However, this gesture directly contradicted Georgia's cultural branding, which relied on the uniqueness of the Georgian language. As such, this paper explores why Haratischwili was deemed the most suitable writer to showcase Georgia's culture to the world. The paper reflects upon the combination of local, national, and global elements in The Eighth Life, a novel that has found massive success in translation, including in Georgia. Telling the story of six generations of women in a Georgian family, while capturing Georgian history along with global twentieth-century events, several concerns typical of the so-called global novel permeate the text-whether one understands the global novel as a poetic form or as a material process of circulation. Significantly, however, the nation is not absent from the equation: a quest for identity and anxieties about what it means to be Georgian infuse the novel. The novel appears to take the form of National Allegory while seeking out belonging at a larger scale. Meanwhile, ambivalent feelings concerning the Georgian language permeate the discourse of those agents involved in the novel's circulation.
