This article takes up the question of more-than-human communication with the vegetal world, not from the perspective of how to communicate with the plant beings who inhabit the world with us by asking how an ethical being with plants can alter what it means to be human In order to do so, I will turn to the consider the ways in which Critical Plant Studies address these questions with a focus on plant communication before turning to consider the ways in which we can become with the vegetal, and the effects planty entanglements have on our understandings of what it means to be human and how Sue Burke’s 2018 science fiction novel Semiosis engages with these questions by bringing to the fore the agency of plants.
Economic crises have the potential to dramatically reconfigure hitherto firmly-held beliefs, norms, and dogmas. This includes gender norms as well, since they always depend on the current economic configuration and typically change with it. Paul Auster’s Sunset Park explores the lives of four young people during the Great Recession and their ways of coping with it. The novel provides an excellent opportunity for an exploration of how gender norms fluctuate with the economy. In particular, this paper analyses the impact of the crisis on masculinity, as showcased by Miles Heller and Bing Nathan, the two main male characters. The central issue in the paper is the extent to which they manage to subvert and reshape masculinity and provide positive models for identification, as well as to what extent this is deliberate. The paper also analyses the intertext with The Great Gatsby and The Best Years of Our Lives to explore how these references help examine the masculinity portrayed in Sunset Park.
This paper analyses how the gothic imagination of Rudyard Kipling, while creating a Village of the Dead that exudes disgust and horror in “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” (1885), also inadvertently creates a quarantine space influenced by the late nineteenth-century colonial discourses of health and disease, especially that of cholera. As debates around miasma, tropical diseases and quarantine swirled in the long nineteenth century, these medical anxieties in Kipling produced a quarantine space that hinges on the notion of power, gothicized through a cultic setting. As the paper attempts to situate Kipling’s tale within the discourse of Epidemic Orientalism, it finds that the discourse coincides with interests and tropes of Imperial Gothic, conflating the cholera epidemic, Indian superstitions and the theory of degeneration to produce alterity.
This article examines Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (2023) as a transformative work of postmemorial literature that fuses personal, historical, and ecological trauma within a metamodern framework. Drawing on the theories of Marianne Hirsch, Martin Heidegger, and Charlene Spretnak, the analysis traces how the novel expands postmemory beyond familial inheritance to encompass planetary crisis and ecological interconnectedness. Through narrative fragmentation, ethical self-reflection, and a poetics of care, Flanagan’s text models a reconstructive metamodernism that resists nihilism and affirms the profound communion of all life. Ultimately, Question 7 offers an ethics of love and responsibility, inviting readers to dwell authentically and respond to contemporary crises with renewed relationality and hope.
