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.
