Publications

Article Publications


Suggested Keywords: Narrative, Self, Subject, Consciousness, Identity, Memory, Body, Desire, Trauma, Love, Queer, Exile, Language, Difference, Space, Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia, Temporality, Aesthetics, Representation, Music, Theatre, Media, Cinema, Fiction, Adaptation, Translation, Ethics, Freedom, Visual, Indigenous, Colonialism, Capitalism, Postmodern, Technology, Posthuman, History, Politics, Literature

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Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason by Talal Asad

Emre Keser | University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

Volume 6 Issue 1 | pp. 3.1–3.6

Published on 29 December 2023
Book Review

Excerpt | Those who are familiar with Talal Asad’s works, in particular Genealogies of Religion (1993) and Formations of the Secular (2003), will not be surprised that this book too deals with “the idea of the secular” (1). In his previous works, Asad has dealt with the secular by offering genealogical critiques of the binary between the religious and the s...[show more]

Keywords | Modern Self, Secularism, Translation, Language, Religion, Discursive Tradition, Christianity, Islam, Qur’an, Ghazālī, Ibn Taymiyya, Jürgen Habermas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin

PDF Downloads: 159
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To Tell or Not to Tell: Nature and Objectives of Mental Illness Narratives/Autopathographies

Naveen John Panicker | St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, India

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 2.76–2.88

Published on 21 December 2023
Theme | Telling Life Stories: Ethos, Positionality, and Structures of Narrative

Abstract | The act of writing about oneself has almost always been seen as an inherently truthful act, and the ensuing narrative as authentic; memoirs, autobiographies, and life narratives in general have often been regarded as truthful accounts of an individual or a collective experience. But any act of narrativizing—regardless of whether it borrows its sour...[show more]

Keywords | Mental Illness Narratives, Memoirs, Autopathography, Depression, Suicide, Memory, Agency, Testimony, Language, Katherine Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind, William Styron, Darkness Visible

PDF Downloads: 133
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Empathy and Abjection after Burke (2): Embodied Narrative and the Resistance against Persuasion

James S. Baumlin | Missouri State University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 2.55–2.75

Published on 10 November 2023
Theme | Telling Life Stories: Ethos, Positionality, and Structures of Narrative

Abstract | This present essay continues a two-part survey devoted to Kenneth Burke’s agonistic model of rhetoric—specifically, its binary of identification/division among speakers and audiences—and its permutations throughout late-20th century theory. Like Part 1, Part 2 of this double essay asks, What is it in rhetoric that leads it to succeed, or fail, as ...[show more]

Keywords | Abjection, Embodied Narrative, Empathy, Ethos, Identification, Mirror Neurons, “Listening-Rhetoric,” Neurorhetoric, Rogerian Argument, Wayne C. Booth, Kenneth Burke, Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen, Julia Kristeva, Carl Rogers

PDF Downloads: 129
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Empathy and Abjection after Burke (1): On the Rise and
Fall of “Listening-Rhetorics,” 1936–2023


James S. Baumlin | Missouri State University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 2.37–2.54

Published on 10 November 2023
Theme | Telling Life Stories: Ethos, Positionality, and Structures of Narrative

Abstract | What is it that leads rhetoric to succeed, or fail, as an instrument of persuasion? What is it in human psychology that makes individuals susceptible, or resistant, to rhetorical appeals? What are the moments and movements in recent history that have led theorists to revise their understanding of rhetoric in its aims and techniques? These questions...[show more]

Keywords | Audience Psychology, Cognitive Theory, Cultural Difference, (Burkean) Division, Embodiment, Empathy, Ethos, (Burkean) Identification, “Listening-Rhetoric,” Narrative, “New” Rhetoric, Scapegoating, Understanding, Rogerian Argument, Wayne C. Booth, Kenneth Burke, I.A. Richards, Carl Rogers

PDF Downloads: 123
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Teaching a Decolonial Counterstory: 1551 Valladolid
Debate and Silko’s Almanac of the Dead


Charles McMartin | University of Arizona, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 2.20–2.36

Published on 11 October 2023
Theme | Telling Life Stories: Ethos, Positionality, and Structures of Narrative

Abstract | This article theorizes how educators can draw from Aja Martinez’s research on counterstory to teach decolonial theory. It provides a case study of this approach explaining how a particular scene from Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Almanac of the Dead, acts as a ‘decolonial counterstory.’ The scene details how indigenous revolutionaries in Chiapas, M...[show more]

Keywords | Counterstory, Pluriversality, Coloniality, Decolonial Theory, Valladolid Debate, Pedagogy, Delinking, Bio-Politics, Geo-Politics, Sedimented History, Leslie Marmon Silko, Walter Mignolo, Aja Martinez, Bartolomé de las Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda

PDF Downloads: 210
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“Embodied Narrative” in Transhumanism: Notes on
Emerging Models of Ethos


James S. Baumlin | Missouri State University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 1.45–1.59

Published on 11 October 2023
Forum Submission

Excerpt | It is a Western rhetorical model that Martin Hollis addresses in the epigraph above, and it’s from within that version of the “categorial self” that my own comments proceed. I am, by training, an historian of rhetoric whose research has focused on classical models of ethos and their postclassical advancements. Our transit through antiquity to the 2...[show more]

Keywords | Embodied Narrative, Transhumanism, Ethos, homo narrans, Actant, Cyborg, 4e Cognition, Marco Caracciolo, Karin Kukkonen

PDF Downloads: 147
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Positionality of Self in Writing and God Trick Fallacy

Aimée Morrison | University of Waterloo, Canada

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 1.32–1.44

Published on 11 October 2023
Forum Submission

Excerpt | I don’t write unless I get invited to. It’s not that I’m so important or famous or in demand. It’s that I tend to have a comically bad time getting through blind peer review, to the extent that it takes me years sometimes to get an article accepted. In at least one instance, I had a conference paper proposal rejected by a reviewer acting on behalf ...[show more]

Keywords | Academic Writing, Personal Pronoun, Positionality, Self, Chaos Theory, Life Writing, Donna Haraway

PDF Downloads: 131
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Stutter Voice in Writing: Rethinking Dysfluency

Craig A. Meyer | Jackson State University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 1.27–1.31

Published on 11 October 2023
Forum Submission

Excerpt | One’s voice is partly a marker of one’s authorial personality. Voice is both metaphorical and rhetorical. Further, the concept of voice embodies one’s cognitive and auditory representation of oneself. Voice articulates an ethotic narrative, of sorts, that offers insight into the storyteller. I stutter. I have for as long as I can remember. My inter...[show more]

Keywords | Stutter, Voice, Speech Dysfluency, Communication, Writing, Disability, Robert Zoellner

PDF Downloads: 230
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Place-conscious Practices: Understanding Ecological
Consciousness through Lakota Wakan


Cathie English | Missouri State University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 1.19–1.26

Published on 11 October 2023
Forum Submission

Excerpt | For thirty years, I have studied place and what it means to live in a specific locale. I have learned that to sustain a locale economically, culturally, and spiritually, I also needed to work toward understanding an ecological sustainability. I have to understand an ecosystem; I have to become ecologically conscious. Human beings cannot live consci...[show more]

Keywords | Ecological Consciousness, Lakota Mythology, Spiritual Geography, Wakan, Grammar of Animacy, Colonization, Soul Work, Pedagogy, Emmanuel Levinas, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Henry David Thoreau

PDF Downloads: 118
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The Ethos of Narrative: Telling/Writing, Listening/Reading, Communication, and Caring

Patrocinio Schweickart | Purdue University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 1.12–1.18

Published on 18 September 2023
Forum Submission

Excerpt | My main research interest lies in the field of theories of reading and reader-response. Being a feminist scholar, I am also interested in research in all fields that show how the perspectives and experiences of women can bring to light important aspects that have been obscured or underestimated by prevailing androcentric theories. Specifically, I a...[show more]

Keywords | Narrative, Reading, Listening, Reception, Dialectical Thinking, Ethics of Care, Communicative Action, Moral Consciousness, Asymmetrical Relationships, Double-consciousness, Reader-response Theory, Feminist Ethics, Pedagogy, Carol Gilligan, Jürgen Habermas, Nel Noddings

PDF Downloads: 183
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Rethinking the Whole “Truth” Thing (Or, Assaying “Answerability” and the Reader/Writer Contract)

George H. Jensen | University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 1.5–1.11

Published on 18 September 2023
Forum Submission

Excerpt | “To tell nothing but the truth—must, in all cases, be an unconditional moral law: to tell the whole truth is not equally so.” —Thomas De Quincey, Letter to the Editor, London Magazine, November 27, 1821
Dear reader. Yes, I am going to adopt the outmoded form of direct address to the reader—which was probably already quaint and artificial even to re...[show more]

Keywords | Truth, Non-Fiction, Fiction, Self, Authenticity, Identity, Ethics, Writing, Answerability, Reader/Writer Contract

PDF Downloads: 143
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Introduction: “Assaying” the (Post-)Modern Essay

James S. Baumlin | Missouri State University, USA
Craig A. Meyer | Jackson State University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 1.1–1.4

Published on 18 September 2023
Forum Submission

Excerpt | “For a faculty of wise interrogating is half a knowledge.” —Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning (1605).

Dating back to Plato (and surviving in several versions), the above aphorism can guide us still: “Right questioning”—to put it in more modern parlance—”is half an answer.” In his Advancement of Learning (1605), Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) d...[show more]

Keywords | Aphorism, Knowledge, Essay, Assay, Rhetoric, Ethos, Life Narratives, Academic Writing, Probative, Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne

PDF Downloads: 138
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Complete Truth and Fuzzy Genres: Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle

George H. Jensen | University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA

Volume 5 Issue 4 | pp. 2.1–2.19

Published on 02 August 2023
Theme | Telling Life Stories: Ethos, Positionality, and Structures of Narrative

Abstract | Traditionally, nonfiction is defined as a genre that tells stories which actually happened; it is a product of memory. In contrast, fiction is, in part or whole, a fabrication, a product of imagination. We seem to accept these distinctions even though, as sophisticated readers, we know the simple dichotomy often dissolves, and we are often skeptica...[show more]

Keywords | Autofiction, Fictive Memoir, Nonfiction, Nonfictive Novel, Genre, Narrative Truth, Authenticity, Writing, Bakhtin, Knausgaard

PDF Downloads: 249
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Becoming Sahibs: Bengali Bhadralok Travel Cultures and a Colony in Paschim, c. 1850–1911

Ahana Maitra | Jadavpur University, India

Volume 5 Issue 3 | pp. 1–24

Published on 20 May 2023
Theme | Poetics of Travelling Self: Discursive Formations and Purposiveness of Travel

Abstract | From around the second half of the nineteenth century, the Bengali Bhadralok were no longer travelling only for the purposes of pilgrimage. By this time secular travel cultures were emerging, and the Bengali Bhadralok who had come into close contact with the discourses of colonial modernity began to travel extensively. Many of these Bhadralok trave...[show more]

Keywords | Colonial traveller’s gaze, Paschim, Colonial ambitions, Utopia, Bengali Bhadralok Culture, South Asian Travel Writing, Nineteenth Century Health Tourism, Bholanath Chunder, Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore

PDF Downloads: 250
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Locating Innocence in Sexual Difference: Problematized Masculinity in Hemingway and Baldwin

Rachid Toumi | Université Ibn Zohr, Morocco

Volume 5 Issue 3 | pp. 25–41

Published on 20 May 2023
Special Submissions

Abstract | This paper examines the theme of gender in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Both expatriate artists interrogate in their novels an American gendered identity tied to innocence and trauma in historical junctures. For these influential members of the New/Lost Generation, sexuality is less a biological fact th...[show more]

Keywords | Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Sexuality, Patriarchy, Masculinity, Innocence, Gender Fluidity, Identity, Subjectivity

PDF Downloads: 139
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“Bhānusingha Thākurer Podābolī”: A Study of Vaiṣṇava Aesthetics in Tagore’s Poetry

Ujjaini Chakrabarty | Tezpur University, India

Volume 5 Issue 3 | pp. 42–60

Published on 20 May 2023
Special Submissions

Abstract | Rabindranath Tagore’s poems have been the subject of much analysis and discussion for their poetic beauty and philosophical strain. Enriched with metaphor and symbolic imagery, his poems express the experiences of the phenomenal and spiritual world with equal finesse. This same dexterity can be witnessed in “Bhānusingha Thākurer Podābolī,” his firs...[show more]

Keywords | Rabindranath Tagore, Padāvalī, Rādhā, Kr̥ṣṇa, Narrative poetry, Medieval Bengali poetry, Devotional literature, Vaiṣṇava aesthetic theory, Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism

PDF Downloads: 169
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Reifying, Reinscribing, and Resisting Manicheanisms in Representations of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

Lauren van der Rede | Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Volume 5 Issue 3 | pp. 61–81

Published on 20 May 2023
Special Submissions

Abstract | The genocide which unfolded in Rwanda in 1994 remains one of the most harrowing examples of annihilatory violence in recent memory. It is framed infamously as an expression of violence which in 100 days saw the murder of approximately one million people, the displacement of millions more, and psychological, social, and economic devastation that rem...[show more]

Keywords | Rwandan Genocide, Colonialism, Tutsi, Hutu, Twa, Victims, Perpetrators, Manicheanism, Mahmood Mamdani, Roland Barthes, “My Parents’ Bedroom”, Uwem Akpan, Say You’re One of Them, Let the Devil Sleep: Rwanda 20 Years after Genocide, Black Earth Rising

PDF Downloads: 137
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Reading Silences of Suffering: Narrative Medicine Approach to George Saunders’s “Home”

Shannon R. Wooden | Missouri State University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 2 | pp. 1–14

Published on 15 September 2022
Theme | Legacies of Trauma: The Tragedy of Before and After

Abstract | Literary writers have for centuries professed literary language’s unique ability to convey those aspects of the human condition which are too deep, complex, or painful to simply tell. From Romantic poets insisting on literature’s divine vision of truth to Virginia Woolf’s exhortation to “turn to the poets” for language compatible with the inexpress...[show more]

Keywords | George Saunders, “Home”, Short Fiction, American Literature, Trauma, Suffering, Narrative Medicine, Narrative Practice, Pedagogy

PDF Downloads: 287
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Lina Meruane’s Palestine Writing: Becoming-World in World Literature

Cristina Morales | Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Octavi Rofes | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Volume 5 Issue 2 | pp. 15–38

Published on 15 September 2022
Theme | Legacies of Trauma: The Tragedy of Before and After

Abstract | Lina Meruane’s work on Palestine began in 2012 and comprises what throughout the text will be addressed as the author’s Palestine Writing, a mesh of pieces belonging to different genres that, understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s framework, constitute Meruane’s literary machine. Analysing the book’s title, Volverse Palestina, this paper discuss...[show more]

Keywords | Meruane, Literary Machine, Becoming-minor, World Literature, Palestine, Volverse Palestina, Deleuze, Guattari, Comparative Literature, Worldish

PDF Downloads: 266
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Duelo, or the Cryptic Translation of Mourning: Friendship Between Languages

Noraedén Mora Méndez | University of Southern California, USA

Volume 5 Issue 2 | pp. 39–59

Published on 15 September 2022
Special Submissions

Abstract | The experience of loss and the possibility to overcome mourning has been a concern for both psychoanalysis and philosophy. Loss is also important in the practice of translation; Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, among other thinkers, have insisted on the complication between texts in translation and the concepts of life, death, survival, and lov...[show more]

Keywords | Mourning, duelo, translation, crypt, friendship, love, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud

PDF Downloads: 394
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Post-Brexit Trade (re)Negotiations: Geopolitical Implications for India, UK and EU

Benjamin Duke | Keele University, England
Saumya Tewari | Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India

Volume 5 Issue 2 | pp. 60–87

Published on 15 September 2022
Special Submissions

Abstract | International relations for the UK are set to change fundamentally. The nation is amidst the process of renegotiating trade relationships with the remaining EU member states and the world. This paper discusses one aspect of the changing geopolitical relationships caused by Brexit: new trade negotiations with Commonwealth countries. Having chosen to...[show more]

Keywords | Post-Brexit, Trade Negotiations, Colonialism, Geopolitics, UK, India, Commonwealth Countries

PDF Downloads: 369
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Sikk for Sindh: A Study of Utopianism in Sindhi Hindu Narratives of Partition

Abhilasha Sawlani | Ashoka University, India

Volume 5 Issue 1 | pp. 1–18

Published on 07 January 2022
Theme | Life Narratives: Prismatic World of the Author and Beyond

Abstract | Most narratives about the Partition of the Indian subcontinent frame the lost home/city/cultural milieu as an idealized model of syncretism. The frontier region of Sindh was a particularly fertile locus for the confluence of diverse cultures and religions. The resultant syncretism made it a particularly apt site for the projection of nostalgic and ...[show more]

Keywords | Partition of India, Sindhi Narratives, Sindhi Hindus, Pre-partition Nostalgia, Utopia, Syncretism, Sindh, Autoethnography, Personal Interviews

PDF Downloads: 229
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Life-Writing in an Age of Postmodernism: A Corderian Rhetoric of Creative Nonfiction

James S. Baumlin | Missouri State University, USA

Volume 5 Issue 1 | pp. 19–35

Published on 07 January 2022
Theme | Life Narratives: Prismatic World of the Author and Beyond

Abstract | In the lifeworld that we experience from within and share with others, there are some things that we don’t know, some things that we can’t know, some things that we don’t need to know, and some things that we don’t want to know (or, perhaps, to admit). Parsing these differences marks the delicate artistry of creative nonfiction (CNF). Whereas ficti...[show more]

Keywords | Creative Nonfiction (CNF), Consciousness, Lifeworld, Intimacy, Ethic of Care, Jim W. Corder, Corderian Rhetoric, Postmodernism, Narrative, Autoethnography

PDF Downloads: 321
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Keeping It in the Family: Domestic Violence and Spectral Testimony in Contemporary American Memoir

Summer Sutton | University of California, Riverside, USA

Volume 5 Issue 1 | pp. 36–57

Published on 07 January 2022
Theme | Life Narratives: Prismatic World of the Author and Beyond

Abstract | This essay considers how the cultural valuation of transparency within life writing prohibits the state to recognize and address the harm against marginalized subjects. To do so, this essay turns to two recent memoirs of childhood stricken by domestic violence: Rachel Sontag’s House Rules (2008) and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy (2018). House Rules document...[show more]

Keywords | Life Writing, Domestic Violence, Trauma, Discipline, Legibility

PDF Downloads: 201
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Thingness of the Work of Art: Reflections on the Ontology of Untranslatability

Sounak Das | Jadavpur University, India

Volume 5 Issue 1 | pp. 58–70

Published on 07 January 2022
Special Submissions

Abstract | The paper begins by disclosing untranslatability not as a given fact, but as a consequence resulting from a certain epistemological attitude towards the work of art. A subjectivist outlook towards art and translation encounters the work in its thingness that eventually resists its reification. Taking cue from the insights of phenomenological thinke...[show more]

Keywords | Untranslatability, Thingness, Other, Event, Ontology

PDF Downloads: 178
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Africanfuturism—a New Commonsense? Apocalypse as Sense-Making after the Crises of Postcolonial Modernity

Damilare Bello | University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Volume 4 Issue 4 | pp. 1–27

Published on 21 September 2021
Theme | Rethinking Space Beyond the Pandemic

Abstract | Critical dystopia, apocalypse as myth of endings, and the longue durée of human cultural history are all circumscribed by the necessity of the future: they are subtended by the extrapolation/speculation of the present into the future, whether in plausible, possible, or annihilative terms. Concerning African postcolonial politics and its literary im...[show more]

Keywords | Africanfuturism, Dystopia, Decoloniality, Crises of Modernity/Modern Science, Apocalypse, Heterotopia, Afrotopia, Utopian-thinking, Chinelo Onwualu

PDF Downloads: 286
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Politics of Minor Literature: Decolonized space and Posthumanism in Xenogenesis Trilogy

William Puckett | University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Volume 4 Issue 4 | pp. 28–46

Published on 21 September 2021
Theme | Rethinking Space Beyond the Pandemic

Abstract | This essay examines the hierarchic structures present within Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy in order to explore the problematics of colonisation and subjugation along with the following generations of post-colonial subjectivity that lead toward a questioning of hybridization and originary voice. Consequently, this inquiry will be grounded ...[show more]

Keywords | Space and Place, Minor Literature, Xenogenesis Trilogy, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Colonial Hierarchies, Hybridization, Post-Colonial Subjectivity, Posthumanism, Octavia E. Butler

PDF Downloads: 152
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Elsewheres of Desire: Indian Cinematic Landscapes as Spaces of Transition

Debjani Mukherjee | University of Auckland, New Zealand

Volume 4 Issue 3 | pp. 1–21

Published on 31 July 2021
Theme | Modalities of Fantasy: Reconfiguring Time and Space

Abstract | Contemporary Indian popular cinema has undergone a radical thematic and aesthetic shift with the arrival of the multiplex as a cinematic exhibition space. The multiplex first appeared in India in 1997, its spaces becoming entwined with the narrative of the urban transformation of India’s metropolitan cities in the image of global urban spaces. The ...[show more]

Keywords | Indian Cinema, Exhibition Space, Multiplex Theatres, Film Exhibition, Cinematic Landscape, Globalization, Film Aesthetics, Liminality, Psychogeographical Imagination, Foucault, Heterotopia, Transformation, Consumerism

PDF Downloads: 263
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Living in a Dream: Alfred Kubin’s Inner Landscapes

Rocío Sola | Pompeu Fabra University, Spain

Volume 4 Issue 3 | pp. 22–37

Published on 31 July 2021
Theme | Modalities of Fantasy: Reconfiguring Time and Space

Abstract | This paper seeks to provide an overview of the importance of dreams in the work of the well-known multidisciplinary Austrian artist, Alfred Kubin, through the prism of an aspect not so often addressed: Landscape. From an explanation of how Kubin understands dreams and the perception of images generated by them, the aim here is to create a paralleli...[show more]

Keywords | Alfred Kubin, Space, Landscape, Dream Realm, Oneiric, Stimmung, Imagination, Perception, Inner Self, Inner Imaginary, Limits of Consciousness, Individual Unconsciousness, Foucault, Heterotopia

PDF Downloads: 208
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I (can’t) See You: Politics of in/visibility in the Writings of Ishtiyaq Shukri

Iqra Raza | St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi

Volume 4 Issue 2 | pp. 1–17

Published on 14 February 2021
Theme | Remainder from Epistemology: Exploring the Discursive Possibilities of Aporia

Abstract | This paper seeks to study the shift in representation of the Muslim body (within the context of War on Terror) from figuration of an embodied autonomous subjectivity to a disembodied one haunting through the remnants of its presence, via a close textual analysis of Ishtiyaq Shukri’s novels The Silent Minaret (2005) and I See You (2014). The paper s...[show more]

Keywords | Spectrality, Historiography, Mourning, Ishtiyaq Shukri, South African Anglophone writing, Muslim Experience, War on Terror, Derrida, post 9/11 studies

PDF Downloads: 266
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Democratised Media in the Digital Age: John Grierson and Travails of Political Propaganda

Jack Haydon Williams | University of Aberdeen, Scotland

Volume 4 Issue 2 | pp. 18–42

Published on 14 February 2021
Special Submission

Abstract | The ideals behind creative freedom often come into conflict with the stark realities of financial interest. Commercial image-making is subject to numerous compromises based on the general practicalities of a project and the financial obligations that sponsorship imposes on the autonomy of the content producer. Comparing the studio-based and state-s...[show more]

Keywords | Documentary, Propaganda, Idealism, Democracy, Freedom, Free Will, Digital Media, Neoliberalism, Abstraction, Nationalism, Ethics, John Grierson, Hegel, Chomsky, Steyerl, Cinema Studies

PDF Downloads: 186
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Data Enlightenment and its Discontents: Free Will and Myth of Human Authority in the Age of Big Data

Stavroula Anastasia Katsorchi | University of Athens, Greece

Volume 4 Issue 2 | pp. 43–54

Published on 14 February 2021
Special Submission

Abstract | New technologies of data-extraction, such as Big Data, collect information from online users and connect them in order to trace behavioural patterns and predict future marketing choices. Online activity is becoming more essential than ever before despite growing concerns about privacy. Personalised advertisements based on prediction not only manipu...[show more]

Keywords | Big Data, Agency, Free Will, Technology, Data-Mining, Surveillance, Digital Panopticon, Online Capitalism, Enlightenment

PDF Downloads: 303
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Navigating the Labyrinth of Chaos: Metaphor and Myth in Joker’s Dystopian Capitalism

Loraine Haywood | University of Newcastle, Australia

Volume 4 Issue 1 | pp. 1–12

Published on 30 December 1899
Theme | Navigating Chaos: Living the Apocalyptic Dystopia

Abstract | Navigating the chaos of labyrinthine spaces, the film Joker (Phillips 2019) reverses notions of wholeness in the image of the human subject. The opening scene depicts a dual representation of Arthur and Joker as the film constructs a dystopian dream by merging the labyrinth of the city and the labyrinth of the mind. This duality extends to the smea...[show more]

Keywords | Dystopia, Capitalism, Joker, Batman, Labyrinth, Chaos, Carnival, Žižek, Freud, Lacan

PDF Downloads: 432
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King Lear, Mandel’s Station Eleven, and the Shakespearean Apocalypse: Meditations on Pandemic and Posthumanism

James S. Baumlin | Missouri State University, USA

Volume 4 Issue 1 | pp. 13–32

Published on 30 December 1899
Theme | Navigating Chaos: Living the Apocalyptic Dystopia

Abstract | From the end of World War II through the late 20th century, the Shakespearean vision of apocalypse—of King Lear as harbinger of the Holocaust—predominated in intellectual culture. Whereas postwar critics could speak of “Shakespeare our contemporary,” the 21st century has carried us beyond the world depicted in his drama. Drawing vocabulary from Mar...[show more]

Keywords | Apocalyptic Literature, Pandemic, Dystopian Literature, Epochal Analysis, Postmodernism, Posthumanism, Technoculture

PDF Downloads: 1450
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Ghana’s Trokosi Case: Contestations between Cultural Relativism and Universalism

Danielle Agyemang | University of Sussex, England

Volume 4 Issue 1 | pp. 33–49

Published on 30 December 1899
Special Submission

Abstract | The study herein sheds light on Trokosi, a traditional practice in Ghana and its surrounding countries in West Africa, which is widely believed to violate the rights of girls by condemning them to a life of servitude in fetish shrines to “atone for the sins of their family members” (International Needs UK 1). Though the practice and its impact are ...[show more]

Keywords | Trokosi, Fetish Shrines, Ghana, Tradition, Education, Freedom, Religion, NGOs, Human Rights, Empowerment, Servitude, Slavery, Cultural Studies

PDF Downloads: 577
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The Beast of History: Human to Animal and Animal to Human Transformations in Polish Horror Films

Agnieszka Jezyk | University of Toronto, Canada

Volume 3 Issue 4 | pp. 1–25

Published on 10 July 2020
Theme | Questioning the Human:
Posthuman accounts in Popular Culture

Abstract | This essay presents a comparative analyses of four Polish horror films—two from the communist period: Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach (1970) by Janusz Majewski, and Marek Piestrak’s The Return of the She-wolf (1990), and two recent works: The Lure (2015) by Agnieszka Smoczyńska and Werewolf (2018) by Adrian Panek. In the context of the ...[show more]

Keywords | Metamorphosis, Transgression, Subjectivity, Polish Horror Films, Cinema of Dread, Polish History, Animal Studies

PDF Downloads: 850
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Pain in someone else's body: Plural Subjectivity in Stargate SG-1

K.M. Ferebee | The American University of Afghanistan

Volume 3 Issue 4 | pp. 26–48

Published on 10 July 2020
Theme | Questioning the Human:
Posthuman accounts in Popular Culture

Abstract | Lennard Davis, in his work on visualizing the disabled body, argues that at root the body is inherently and always already fragmented. The unified “whole body” is, therefore, hallucinatory in nature—an imaginary figure through which the body’s multiplicity is repressed. There is much in this view that is consonant with posthumanism, which so often ...[show more]

Keywords | Plural Subjectivity, Phantomatic Ontology, Posthumanism, Science Fiction, Stargate SG-1, Disability Studies, Environmental Humanities

PDF Downloads: 726
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Unworlded After-Picture: The New State of Being in the Virtual Cosmos

Mary Claire Brunelli | City University of New York, USA

Volume 3 Issue 4 | pp. 49–70

Published on 10 July 2020
Theme | Questioning the Human:
Posthuman accounts in Popular Culture

Abstract | In 1938, Heidegger christened his era “the age of the world picture,” evoking the human capacity to represent a meaningful existence through authentic social engagement and care for shared surroundings. There have been various “world pictures” throughout history, each a response to popular media produced by the latest technology. From papyrus to pr...[show more]

Keywords | World Picture, Unworlding, Dasein, Subiectum, Para-self, Cognition, Subjectivity, Digitization, Network Media, Virtual Technology, Martin Heidegger, Brian Rotman, Subject

PDF Downloads: 445
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Of Efficient Fragments: Reification and British Aestheticism

Yannis Kanarakis | Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

Volume 3 Issue 4 | pp. 71–85

Published on 10 July 2020
Special Submission

Abstract | This paper utilizes Fredric Jameson’s work on the concept of “reification” as a means of considering the artistic movement of aestheticism as the cultural logic of late nineteenth century capitalism. The paper intends to show that Jameson’s concept can help us approach this paradoxical relation in a systematic way, where, on the one hand, the aesth...[show more]

Keywords | Aestheticism, Aesthetics of Fragmentation, Market Economy Reification, Nineteenth Century Capitalism, Fredric Jameson, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne, Cultural Studies

PDF Downloads: 381
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“…town that doesn’t keep showing up in books”: Genre Reflexivity in Post-Millennial Metafictional Horror

Dominic Thompson | Lancaster University, England

Volume 3 Issue 4 | pp. 86–107

Published on 10 July 2020
Special Submisson

Abstract | Metafiction and horror can be traced back as far as classical antiquity and even the early ages of oral storytelling, but it is their relationship within a post-millennial readership with which this paper is concerned. Metafictional horror—as it appears towards the end of the twentieth century and, more specifically, the beginning of the twenty-fir...[show more]

Keywords | Metafiction, Horror, Metahorror, Millenium, Parody, David Wong

PDF Downloads: 995
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Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making Of Modern Urdu Literary Culture In Colonial South Asia. By Jennifer Dubrow.

Ayesha Abrar | Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India

Volume 3 Issue 4 | pp. 108–112

Published on 10 July 2020
Book Review

Excerpt | Among the diverse vernacular literary cultures of the Indian subcontinent, Urdu as a language stands out for its ability to reveal as much about the colonial past as about the globalized present. Jennifer Dubrow, an associate professor of Urdu at the Washington University, presents an incisive account of Urdu literary cultures of nineteenth century...[show more]

Keywords | Urdu Cosmopolitanism, Colonial Modernity, Nineteenth Century Print Culture

PDF Downloads: 299
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The Posthuman Lifeworld: A Study of Russell T. Davies's Doctor Who

Jonathan Hay | University of Chester, England

Volume 3 Issue 3 | pp. 1–19

Published on 02 April 2020
Theme | Posthuman Praxis of ‘human’

Abstract | Via the analysis of a cross-section of episodes from Russell T. Davies’s era of the revived BBC Science Fiction television series Doctor Who (2005–2010), this paper demonstrates that the programme utilises representations of the viewer’s everyday lifeworld to figure a posthuman rhetoric. Through the viewer’s in-phenomenal interaction with its repre...[show more]

Keywords | Cognitive Engagement, Mundane, Novum, Science Fiction, Critical Posthumanism, Television Studies, Darko Suvin, Doctor Who

PDF Downloads: 743
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Spoken Word Videos and the Automodern Femme: Subversive Agency and Technologizing Safe Spaces

Oluwadamilare I. Bello | University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Volume 3 Issue 3 | pp. 20–46

Published on 02 April 2020
Theme | Posthuman Praxis of ‘human’

Abstract | The emergence of digital media and the world-wide-web altered the texture of agency, and digitally-mediated performance poetry like the spoken word became pivots to women agency. But how do preprogrammed technologies like new media—as social forces—permit human autonomy without hedging it? What concessions are made or limits excised when women wres...[show more]

Keywords | Spoken Word Videos, Automodern Femme, Performance poetry, New-Media, Automodernity, Technology, Robert Samuels, Eva Alordiah

PDF Downloads: 438
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"Your country behind the mountain, behind the year": Insistence of an Inaccessible Alterity in Paul Celan's Poetics

Rosanne Ceuppens | KU Leuven, Belgium

Volume 3 Issue 3 | pp. 47–67

Published on 02 April 2020
Special Submission

Abstract | Alterity is a key issue in modern literature and in related disci-plines such as philosophy. In ‘The Meridian’ (1960) Paul Celan clearly foregrounds his poetics of otherness. He posits that “[f]or the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other to-ward which it is heading.” In this paper, Celan’s conception of alterity will be examined...[show more]

Keywords | Poetics, Alterity, Ethics, Paul Celan, The Meridian, Levinas, Existence and Existents, Romantics

PDF Downloads: 449
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Indigeneity as Alive: Tommy Orange's Framework for a Present Tense People in There There

Greg Riggio | Montclair State University, USA

Volume 3 Issue 3 | pp. 68–91

Published on 02 April 2020
Special Submission

Abstract | This paper explores the postmodern framework Tommy Orange crafts in There There to challenge hegemonic conceptions of indigeneity. These monolithic representations set limits on Indigenous peoples’ ability to see themselves represented in the present tense real-world, thus, limiting their ability to see themselves as present tense peoples. As Orang...[show more]

Keywords | Indigenous Peoples, Representations, Present Tense People, Postmodernism, Social Media, Tommy Orange

PDF Downloads: 1963
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The Supermarket: Consumerism, Simulation, and the Fear of Death in Don DeLillo's White Noise

Houda Hamdi | University of Montreal, Canada

Volume 3 Issue 3 | pp. 92–106

Published on 02 April 2020
Special Submission

Abstract | Through a study of Don Delillo’s metafictional novel, White Noise, this paper portrays the ways in which the novel reflects upon the postmodern American world of consumerism and simulation. The space of the supermarket reveals not only the post-modern subject’s obsession with the erratic shopping mode of life, but also the detachment of the subject...[show more]

Keywords | Postmodernism, Consumerism, Simulacra, Death, Metafiction, Polyphony, Hyperreality, De-Doxify/De-Doxification, Baudrillard

PDF Downloads: 1568
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The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences by Niamh Moore, Andrea Salter, Liz Stanley, and Maria Tamboukou

Wayne E. Arnold | University of Kitakyushu, Japan

Volume 3 Issue 3 | pp. 107–111

Published on 02 April 2020
Book Review

Excerpt | The relatively recent archival turn—the necessity to enter library archives for research—has resulted in an increased engagement with previously undiscovered materials throughout numerous fields. Emphasizing this turn, the four authors of The Archive Project lay out various intersecting theoretical and practical issues—specifically looking at epist...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review, Archives, Feminist Studies

PDF Downloads: 239
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Play As Subversion: Videogames in the Age of Transhumanism

Shalini Harilal | English and Foreign Languages University, India

Volume 3 Issue 2 | pp. 1–17

Published on 01 January 2020
Theme | Body, Mind, and the Posthuman: A Corollary to Postmodern Thought

Abstract | This paper discusses the contemporary relevance of video games within the larger context of an increasingly technology-oriented societies. The argument proposed is that an optimistic view of the future as imagined by transhumanism could lead to an anticipation of radical goals like prolonged lifespan and immortality which, at present, remain unatta...[show more]

Keywords | Death, Horcrux, Philosophy, Posthuman, Transhumanism, Video games

PDF Downloads: 1336
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Cyborg Incorporated: Mechanics, Aesthetics, and Cyborg Narrativity in David Cronenberg's Videodrome and eXistenZ

Meike Robaard | University of Groningen, Netherlands

Volume 3 Issue 2 | pp. 18–45

Published on 01 January 2020
Theme | Body, Mind, and the Posthuman: A Corollary to Postmodern Thought

Abstract | Reflecting on the ubiquity of screens in contemporary life, this paper seeks to suggest that we inhabit a “cyborgian condition” in which (human) bodies (and self-understanding) are composed with technology. Upon analyzing David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and eXistenZ (1999), and in engaging with existent theoretical discourse, this paper studie...[show more]

Keywords | Cyborg, body-horror, posthumanism, David Cronenberg, cinematography, corporeality, narrative, aesthetics, technology

PDF Downloads: 2202
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Prosthetic Versus Embodied Memory in Westworld's "Kiksuya" and Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer

Colleen Johnson | Oregon State University, USA

Volume 3 Issue 2 | pp. 46–61

Published on 01 January 2020
Theme | Body, Mind, and the Posthuman: A Corollary to Postmodern Thought

Abstract | The creation of human-passing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in both science fiction and the real world must interrogate the importance of materiality and embodiment in the development of personal identity and consciousness. While it may seem that both Uta Briesewitz’s episode of Westworld, entitled “Kiksuya,” and Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer [Emot...[show more]

Keywords | Artificial Intelligence, posthumanism, memory, identity, embodiment, materiality, cinema studies

PDF Downloads: 672
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Love as Nepenthe: Displacing Homer with Shelley in Joyce's Ulysses

Dylan Emerick-Brown | University of Central Florida, USA

Volume 3 Issue 2 | pp. 62–77

Published on 01 January 2020
Special Submission

Abstract | One of the least explored muses for James Joyce’s Ulysses was Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound which left its mark on Joyce’s protagonists, Leopold and Molly Bloom. Joyce quoted Aristotle in his notes in the spring of 1903, “It is harder to endure pain than to abstain from pleasure” and it is this exact sentiment that brings together the s...[show more]

Keywords | James Joyce, nepenthe, Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley, love

PDF Downloads: 1145
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Misrepresentation, Identity, and Authorship in Percival Everett's Erasure

Gergely Vörös | Comenius University, Slovakia

Volume 3 Issue 2 | pp. 78–90

Published on 01 January 2020
Special Submission

Abstract | The microcosm of Percival Everett’s Erasure—just as our own world—is interwoven with a set of normative expectations that not only circumscribe the self-identity of its main character, Thelonious Monk Ellison, but have a determining effect on him as an author as well. This paper explores a delicate link connecting racial misrepresentations, cultura...[show more]

Keywords | Percival Everett, Erasure, race, power, ideology, subjectivity, double consciousness

PDF Downloads: 1272
[Full Text PDF]
"On the Vaporization and Centralization of the Self": The Notion of the Subject in Modern Western Discourse

Donato Loia | The University of Texas, Austin, USA

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 1–22

Published on 21 October 2019
Theme | Erasure of the Subject: Postmodern Reflections

Abstract | The paper focuses on initiating a conversation on the “question of the subject,” beyond the strict contraposition of autonomy and non autonomy. The discussion begins by providing a brief introduction to the notion of “autonomy of the subject.” It describes certain crucial arguments that have validated the decentering of the subject-centered paradig...[show more]

Keywords | Autonomy, Non-Autonomy, Subject, Continental Philosophy, Visual Studies

PDF Downloads: 509
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Negotiating Subjectivity and Body: Access to an E-pistolary Corporeality

Dong Xia | Utrecht University, Netherlands

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 23–47

Published on 21 October 2019
Theme | Erasure of the Subject: Postmodern Reflections

Abstract | Through a reading two novels based on email communication, The Metaphysical Touch (1998) by Sylvia Brownrigg and The Correspondence Artist (2011) by Barbara Browning, this paper discusses the changing culture of subjectivity and the body when writing and digital technologies converge in the literary space. This paper employs Katherine Hayles’s conc...[show more]

Keywords | Epistolary Novel, Subjectivity, Body, Metaphysics Of Presence, Database, Pattern And Randomness

PDF Downloads: 357
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Identity and Difference: Understanding Subjectivity through Wittgenstein's Family Resemblances

Paul Martorelli | Wellesley College, USA

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 48–70

Published on 21 October 2019
Theme | Erasure of the Subject: Postmodern Reflections

Abstract | This paper examines how the traditional subject of identity politics might be reimagined to enable less regulated subjects capable of politically mobilizing on their own behalf. The paper reads the oral arguments of Hollingsworth v. Perry as a text that relies on and produces the modern subject, that is, a subject constituted as the sum and unity o...[show more]

Keywords | Political mobilization, Queer Theory, Subject, Wittgenstein, Hollingsworth v. Perry

PDF Downloads: 558
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Image and Truth: Paradigms of Modern Translation Theory

Rawad Alhashmi | University of Texas, Dallas, USA

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 71–89

Published on 21 October 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | The field of translation theory witnessed two revolutionary shifts in the twentieth-century. These paradigm shifts are here attributed to the innovative theories of two key thinkers, the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin and the American poet and critic Ezra Pound. Despite writing in the same century, and making significant con...[show more]

Keywords | Truth, Image, Intention, Consciousness Art, Language, Translation Studies

PDF Downloads: 1082
[Full Text PDF]
Written and Over-written: Investigating Metafictional Strategies in Janet Frame's The Carpathians

Pooja Sancheti | IISER, Pune, India

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 90–112

Published on 21 October 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | Unlike several movements in literature, postmodernism lacked a specific manifesto and often varied in its concerns depending on the media that it engaged with. However, on the whole, postmodernist fiction is generally characterized as being playfully (and highly) selfreflexive and self-conscious of its status as artifice, dominantly leaning towards...[show more]

Keywords | Postmodernist Poetics, Embedded Narrative, Metafiction, Ontological Dominant, Realities, Memory, Language

PDF Downloads: 639
[Full Text PDF]
Image, Language, and Subjectivity in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape

Ananta Ahuja | Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, University of Delhi

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 113–123

Published on 21 October 2019
Theme | Exploring Subjectivity: Mind, Body, Action

Abstract | “Let’s just say you’re not quite there” (qtd. in Samantha Ellis’ Beckett’s Play at the Old Vic, April 7, 1964), the Beckettian subject is often read along the lines of this response offered by the playwright to one of his famous actresses, Billy Whitelaw, on her enquiry about the relative nature of her character in Footfalls. Coming across as a hyp...[show more]

Keywords | Image, Presentation, Representation, Existence, Subjectivity, Time, Temporality

PDF Downloads: 983
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There's a Special Kind of Monster that is a Woman': Locating Female Subjectivity in the Narrative of the Monstrous Murderess in Netflix's Alias Grace

Nikita Gloria Pinto | Stella Maris College, University of Madras, India

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 124–138

Published on 21 October 2019
Theme | Exploring Subjectivity: Mind, Body, Action

Abstract | In a 2018 interview with the Irish Independent, Amanda Knox, the infamous and wrongfully convicted killer in the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, commented on her gendered vilification by the public, “All wrongfully convicted people are portrayed as monsters but there’s a special kind of monster that is a woman.” This tendency to depict criminal wo...[show more]

Keywords | Historical Fiction, Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace, True Crime, Netflix, Amanda Knox, Madness, Nineteenth-Century, Narratives, Women's History, Representation

PDF Downloads: 853
[Full Text PDF]
Shame and Failure of Recognition in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Siddhant Datta | St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 139–151

Published on 21 October 2019
Theme | Exploring Subjectivity: Mind, Body, Action

Abstract | Maurice Merleau-Ponty sees shame as a dialectic between the self and the other, as that of the master and slave. In so far as one has a body, Merleau-Ponty argues, s/he may be reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person. To regain the status as a subject, one has to seek recognition within the dialectic (MerleauPonty 193)....[show more]

Keywords | Shame, Aloofness, Neocolonialism, Dialectic, Recognition, Desire, Subjectivity, Self, Other, Lacan, Foucault

PDF Downloads: 812
[Full Text PDF]
Resistance as Embodied Experience: A Study of Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi" and "Behind the Bodice

Anoushka Sinha | University of Delhi

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 152–160

Published on 21 October 2019
Theme | Exploring Subjectivity: Mind, Body, Action

Abstract | Experience and knowledge might seem interchangeable terms. However, when theoretically examined, they pose a conflicting dilemma in their respective nature and relation with each other. On one hand, knowledge is primarily derived from experience. The intrinsic characteristic of intimacy and immediacy of any experience categorizes it as highly subje...[show more]

Keywords | Resistance, Experience, Knowledge, Body, Naked Protest, Gendered Subalterns, Embodiment, Mahasweta Devi

PDF Downloads: 10110
[Full Text PDF]
Exploring the Anxiety of Action in Call Me by Your Name

Suchandra Bose | Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), India

Volume 3 Issue 1 | pp. 161–168

Published on 21 October 2019
Theme | Exploring Subjectivity: Mind, Body, Action

Abstract | André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name (2007) is divided into four parts each of which intends to capture Elio’s conflicted emotions in the purview of his doomed love for Oliver, a 24 year old scholar from America. Elio’s incessant need to impede his actions through the ambivalence of speech, wavering desires, and misconstrued ideas lays foundat...[show more]

Keywords | Anxiety, Identity, Queer, Language, Spaces, Desire, Self, Subjectivity, Aciman, Sedgwick

PDF Downloads: 2107
[Full Text PDF]
Toward a Dialogic Reception in Adaptation Studies: Bundle Theory and Fidelity Discourse in Contemporary Adaptations of Macbeth

William Puckett | University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Volume 2 Issue 4 | pp. 1–16

Published on 24 July 2019
Theme | Adaptation: In Service of Cinema or Novel?

Abstract | Exploring the limitations of fidelity discourse with regard to adaptation studies, this essay explores the possibility(s) of a plurality of engagement across media, that will promote a dialogue between source text and adaptation which moves beyond the prescribed 1:1 relationship that fidelity criticism is wont to qualify for any filmic relationship...[show more]

Keywords | Adaptation, Fidelity Criticism, Inter-mediality, Bundle Theory, Contemporary Shakespeare

PDF Downloads: 877
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Through the Haze: Fidelity of Adaptation in Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice

Travis Merchant | North Carolina State University, USA

Volume 2 Issue 4 | pp. 17–32

Published on 24 July 2019
Theme | Adaptation: In Service of Cinema or Novel?

Abstract | Many directors and writers struggle with adaptations of novels. However, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation, Inherent Vice, acts as a commentary on the original work by emphasizing characters and images to embody the voice of the original author, Thomas Pynchon. This voice is accomplished through Sortilège, a character who appears briefly in the nov...[show more]

Keywords | Adaptation, Fidelity Discourse, Embodied Voice, Intoxication, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Thomas Anderson

PDF Downloads: 1354
[Full Text PDF]
From Online Danmei Literature to Web Series: A Study of Chinese Internet-based Adaptations Under Censorship

Yumo Yan | Columbia University, USA

Volume 2 Issue 4 | pp. 33–52

Published on 24 July 2019
Theme | Adaptation: In Service of Cinema or Novel?

Abstract | On June 30 th 2017, “General Rules for Reviewing Netcasting Content” were issued by the China Netcasting Services Association that for the first time officially banned homosexual content from web series. Adapting their scripts from popular online danmei literature, Chinese danmei web series consequently faced severe challenge as to how to stay true...[show more]

Keywords | Danmei, Homosexuality, Online Literature, Web Series, Chinese Censorship

PDF Downloads: 2217
[Full Text PDF]
A Geography Animated with Intentions: Reclaiming Indigenous Vitality through Land-Based Decolonial Struggles in Frantz Fanon's Algeria Writings

Nanya Jhingran | University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Volume 2 Issue 4 | pp. 53–71

Published on 24 July 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | The paper reads Wretched of the Earth alongside Toward the African Revolution and A Dying Colonialism, and meditates on Fanon’s attention to the dynamics of geology, geography, and infrastructure in colonial and revolutionary Algeria. Across his work(s), Fanon can be read as charting the matrix of fixity/mobility, arrest/frenzy, and death/vitality ...[show more]

Keywords | Indigeneity, Anticolonial Nationalism, Infrastructure, Geography, Land, Algeria, Frantz Fanon

PDF Downloads: 614
[Full Text PDF]
What Cannot Be (Re)written: Disentangling Panoptic Structures in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" and Herland

Heather Fox | Eastern Kentucky University, USA

Volume 2 Issue 4 | pp. 72–83

Published on 24 July 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon was an architectural response to an eighteenth-century problem, positioning inmates’ bodies relative to the watchtower to perpetuate a sense of constant visibility. But the Panopticon’s design is not dependent on a prison setting; it can be evoked in any setting that constructs a panoptic relationship between the observe...[show more]

Keywords | Panopticon, Survelliance, Patriarchy, Bodies, Women's Literature, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jeremy Bentham

PDF Downloads: 1428
[Full Text PDF]
Ecosomatic Paradigm through Disability Studies in John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra

Gage Greenspan | California Polytechnic State University, USA

Volume 2 Issue 4 | pp. 84–95

Published on 24 July 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | This essay argues that John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra provides a literary basis for Matthew J. C. Cella’s “ecosomatic paradigm,” while simultaneously complicating this paradigm, especially for its exclusion of mental disabilities. A critique of the ecosomatic paradigm is undertaken in order to expose its potential applicability to a wide...[show more]

Keywords | Ecocriticism, Disability Studies, Ecosomatic Paradigm, John Muir, Matthew J. C. Cella

PDF Downloads: 798
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Trial by Silence and A Lonely Harvest by Perumal Murugan

Rituparna Sengupta | Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India

Volume 2 Issue 4 | pp. 96–101

Published on 24 July 2019
Book Review

Excerpt | In January 2015, Tamil writer, poet, and scholar, Perumal Murugan made a dramatic declaration on his Facebook page: “Author Perumal Murugan is dead. He is no God. Hence, he will not resurrect. Hereafter, only P Murugan, a teacher, will live.” 1 This was in response to the controversy around his book Maadhorubaagan, (2010; tr. One Part Woman, 2013) ...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review

PDF Downloads: 1972
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India Moving: A History of Migration by Chinmay Tumbe

Swati Mantri | Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India

Volume 2 Issue 4 | pp. 102–105

Published on 24 July 2019
Book Review

Excerpt | In the face of recent global migration and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Indian sub-continent, South America, sub-Saharan region, and beyond, Chinmay Tumbe’s India Moving: A History of Migration is a timely reminder of treating migration as a dynamic phenomenon and not as a oneoff event wherein the transformative effect of journey on the migrant...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review, Migration

PDF Downloads: 2500
[Full Text PDF]
Post-Apartheid 'Disgrace': Language and Politics of Human Rights

Chinmaya Lal Thakur | Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 1–10

Published on 29 March 2019
Theme | Engaging Fictions: Aesthetic Orientations and Reception of Novel

Abstract | This paper enquires into the ethics and politics of formal mechanisms that are configured to address wrongs and violations of human rights committed against select groups of people in specific historical circumstances. It reads the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established by the post-Apartheid government of South Africa as an attempt t...[show more]

Keywords | Post-Apartheid, Human rights, History, Confession, Secular, Ethics, J.M. Coetzee

PDF Downloads: 1112
[Full Text PDF]
Shame's Pallor and the Paranoia Imperative in The Wings of the Dove

Wenwen Guo | Emory University, USA

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 11–41

Published on 29 March 2019
Theme | Engaging Fictions: Aesthetic Orientations and Reception of Novel

Abstract | In Teasing out the relationship between shame, knowledge, and paranoia, this paper gives a mimetic paranoid reading of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902). It contends that James realizes a totally shame-bound subject in Kate Croy, whose face pales when she is gripped with the sensation of shame. Unlike the paranoia-driven characters like Ka...[show more]

Keywords | Henry James, Shame, Pallor, Paranoia, Affective Theory

PDF Downloads: 791
[Full Text PDF]
Spectators Onstage: Metatheatrical Experiments in Early Tom Stoppard

Iswarya V. | Madras School of Social Work, India

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 42–57

Published on 29 March 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | While listing the ground-breaking contributions of twentieth-century theatre practitioners and theorists in incorporating the audience into the scheme of performance, the metaphysical engagement of the spectators in the Theatre of the Absurd and the emerging metatheatre of the same period is often overlooked. Tom Stoppard’s early experimental plays...[show more]

Keywords | Tom Stoppard, Spectatorship, Metatheatre, Audience Participation

PDF Downloads: 676
[Full Text PDF]
The 'Three Moments of Art' and Truth-Event: Reflections on Muktibodhian Creative-Process

Anup Kumar Bali | Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), India

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 58–84

Published on 29 March 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | This paper tries to engage the question of singularity in creative-process of poetry which challenges the dichotomous understanding of form and content. It argues that the self-struggle of Muktibodh is a continuous quest of singularities of reality against the hegemonic ideological reality. It intends to reflect upon the processuality of self-strug...[show more]

Keywords | Creative-process, Singularity, Truth-Event, Self-Transformation, Subjectivity, Muktibodhian Creative-Process

PDF Downloads: 1059
[Full Text PDF]
Hip Hop as Cultural Capital: Remixing Bourdieu's Theory to Affirm Cultural Wealth

Milanika Turner | Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee, USA

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 85–102

Published on 29 March 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | Despite their popularity in the United States of America, rap music and hip hop culture are misunderstood by many and often characterized as violent, misogynistic, vulgar, and/or venomous. Furthermore, scholarly examinations of rap music rarely emerge from within the actual culture, even though an insider’s perspective could yield valuable emic kno...[show more]

Keywords | Hip Hop, Cultural Capital, Popular Culture, Critical Race Theory, Popular Music

PDF Downloads: 3644
[Full Text PDF]
Reading Authors/Authors Reading: Navigating Textual Worlds through Rainbow Rowell's Carry On

Anagha Gopal | St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 103–117

Published on 29 March 2019
Theme | The Idea of a Text

Abstract | This paper examines the possibilities of theorizing the emerging author-reader relationship in the Young-Adult (YA) Fantasy genre, with reference to Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On (2015) and its fan community on Tumblr. The paper offers the changing parameters of reading as an entry-point into exploring the textuality of participatory web-based interfac...[show more]

Keywords | Tumblr, Fan-Work, Re-Use, Gift Economy, Author-Reader Relationship, Metatexts, Virtual Reality

PDF Downloads: 1759
[Full Text PDF]
Adorno at Ferndean: Some Considerations on Slavery and Aesthetics in Jane Eyre

Anshul Timothy Mukarji | St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 118–113

Published on 29 March 2019
Theme | The Idea of a Text

Abstract | This paper seeks to work both with and against readings of Jane Eyre which reduce it to an iteration of colonial discourse. By taking Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as a theoretical frame of reference, it seeks to read the formal contradictions in the novel. In arguing for an attention to problems of form, it seeks to highlight how colonialism i...[show more]

Keywords | Jane Eyre, Adorno, Atlantic, Colonialism, Slavery, Form

PDF Downloads: 819
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Misplacing Heads, Textual Formation, and Reformation: Somadeva’s Kathā Sarit Sāgara, Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads, and Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana

Mehvish Siddiqui | Hindu College, University of Delhi

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 131–142

Published on 29 March 2019
Theme | The Idea of a Text

Abstract | Vetala, the daemon, tests King Vikramaditya’s wisdom by telling him tales and making him solve a riddle at the end of each tale. This premise forms the structure of Somadeva’s 11 th century collection of Indian folktales retold in Sanskrit—the Kathasaritasagara. One of the tales in the book is about a woman who accidentally switches the head of her...[show more]

Keywords | Heidegger, Time, Space, Identity, Memory, Dasein

PDF Downloads: 1819
[Full Text PDF]
The Textual Experience: The Interplay of the Image and the Text in Watchmen

Karan Kimothi | Ramjas College, University of Delhi

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 143–154

Published on 29 March 2019
Theme | The Idea of a Text

Abstract | The reader while approaching a text might be tempted to focus entirely on the words on the page. However, the idea of a text consists of numerous non-verbal elements which come together to form the reader’s experience of the text. This paper attempts to examine the interaction of such verbal and non-verbal elements in Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’...[show more]

Keywords | Watchmen, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Graphic Novel, Comic Books, Visual Culture

PDF Downloads: 1576
[Full Text PDF]
Feminist Epistemology and the Web-based Text: Reflections on Raya Sarkar's List

Raginee Sarmah | St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 155–164

Published on 29 March 2019
Theme | The Idea of a Text

Abstract | Raya Sarkar’s list of ‘alleged sexual harassers’ in the academia, without names and personal narratives, is a text which frames a new turn in our understanding of feminist politics. The ‘List’ (with a capital l) is not an ordinary inventory but a potent text which transforms the diurnal activity of list making. In the length of a year, the List has...[show more]

Keywords | Sexual Harassment, University Spaces, List, Reordering, Author, Canonicity, Caste

PDF Downloads: 836
[Full Text PDF]
The Postmodern Text: Answer to the Problem of Meaning

Raunak Kumar | Ramjas College, University of Delhi

Volume 2 Issue 3 | pp. 165–174

Published on 29 March 2019
Theme | The Idea of a Text

Abstract | Postmodernism uncovers an ugly face of semantic dominance of certain stereotypical narratives over the ‘others,’ often discarded narratives of empathy and equality. This paper focuses on some of the debates in literary theory where the philosophy of metaphysics is slowly replaced with a philosophy of the consciousness. It attempts to highlight hidd...[show more]

Keywords | Phenomenology, Sartre, Postmodern, Postmodernism, Text, Consciousness, Deconstruction, Existentialism, Semiotics, Heidegger, Husserl, Intentionality, Mrs. Dalloway, Sexing the Cherry, Defamiliarisation, Subjectivity

PDF Downloads: 1128
[Full Text PDF]
"Blood Draws Flies": Arab-Western Entanglement in Sulayman Al-Bassam's Cross-Cultural Hamlet

Yvonne Stafford-Mills | Cerro Coso College, Southern California, USA

Volume 2 Issue 2 | pp. 1–27

Published on 01 January 2019
Theme | Reading Con(Text): Dynamics of Power and Subversion within Novels

Abstract | Shakespeare’s plays have a long history of global adaptation and appropriation. Rather than being viewed as a means of cultural domination, Shakespeare has been championed by colonized and post-colonial nations as a means of asserting a unique cultural identity by establishing contemporary and globally recognized theatres. In the Middle East, this ...[show more]

Keywords | Adaptation, Global Shakespeare, Hamlet, Al-Hamlet Summit, Middle East, Sulayman Al-Bassam

PDF Downloads: 1407
[Full Text PDF]
Stereotypes, Sexuality, and Intertextuality in Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone

Suzy Woltmann | University of California, San Diego, USA

Volume 2 Issue 2 | pp. 28–51

Published on 01 January 2019
Theme | Reading Con(Text): Dynamics of Power and Subversion within Novels

Abstract | Towards the end of Alice Randall’s 2001 novel The Wind Done Gone (TWDG), the reader is confronted by an epistolary inclusion: the narrator’s mother, Mammy, writes from beyond the grave to negotiate a marriage proposal for her daughter. Mammy’s voice is clear. As Cynara, the narrator, tells us, “syllable and sound, the words were Mammy’s” (162). TWD...[show more]

Keywords | Adaptation, Slavery, African-American Literature, Signification, Gone With The Wind

PDF Downloads: 1165
[Full Text PDF]
Liminality and Bachelardian Space in Herbert Mason's Gilgamesh

David Capps | Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, USA

Volume 2 Issue 2 | pp. 52–68

Published on 01 January 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | This paper explores Herbert Mason’s rendition of Gilgamesh as a work that navigates the loss of friendship, and self in terms of Gaston Bachelard’s concept of ‘poetic space.’ In the first section the paper foregrounds the relationship between Enkidu and Gilgamesh in terms of Hegelian recognition. It argues that this recognition informs both the dep...[show more]

Keywords | Bachelard, Gilgamesh, Herbert Mason, Enkidu, hybrid, poetics of space, lyricism, Victor Turner, Hegel, Recognition, Liminality, Intimate Immensities, Aggregation, Poetic Image, Oneiric Value

PDF Downloads: 1302
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Linguistic Contextuality: Deixis, Performance, Materiality

Aaron Finbloom | Concordia University, Canada

Volume 2 Issue 2 | pp. 69–88

Published on 01 January 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | This essay examines the philosophical-linguistic question of how does the context of an utterance impact its meaning and performance? In exploring this question the paper weaves a complicated story around the marginal linguistic phenomena of deixis to eventually argue that much of language may indeed be contextual. The paper offers a nuanced distin...[show more]

Keywords | Deixis, Performance, Materiality, Context, Media, Post-Structuralism, Derrida, Butler

PDF Downloads: 737
[Full Text PDF]
Bodily Humor and Ideologies of Disability in Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key

Shelby Ragan | Illinois State University, USA

Volume 2 Issue 2 | pp. 89–106

Published on 01 January 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | There is a scarcity of protagonists with disabilities in children’s literature, but one series that has received both critical and popular attention is the Joey Pigza series by Jack Gantos. This paper explores the use of humor in the first book of the series, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key. Drawing on theories of humor by scholars such as David Russe...[show more]

Keywords | Disability Studies, Humor, Ideology, Children's Literature, Joey Pigza, Jack Gantos

PDF Downloads: 1474
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Feminism and Time in Recent Speculative Fiction

Elisabeth Bell | Western Colorado University, USA

Volume 2 Issue 2 | pp. 106–126

Published on 01 January 2019
Special Submission

Abstract | This paper examines the possibility of a meaningful “feminist” science fiction, partly in response to popular media descriptions of Naomi Alderman’s The Power as a feminist text. It contends that feminists must in some way support the possibility of difference from domination and violence. Reading with feminist ethicists, Denise Ferreira da Silva a...[show more]

Keywords | Feminism, Ethics, Futurity, Time, Entanglement, Hauntology, Anti-anti-utopian, Capitalism, Neoliberalism

PDF Downloads: 1235
[Full Text PDF]
Seasons of the Palm by Perumal Murugan

Naveen John Panicker | University of Delhi

Volume 2 Issue 2 | pp. 127–132

Published on 01 January 2019
Book Review

Excerpt | God may be dead but the author most certainly isn’t. The aspect of narrativisation inevitably foregrounds the author and brings him under the scanner; the manner and degree of representation, the nature of its politics, and estimations or valuations of authenticity and truthfulness are worked out against the historical, political, social, and indiv...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review

PDF Downloads: 2689
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The Presence of Gatsby in the Absence of Towers-9/11 Literature and the American Dream

Talia Fishbine | University of Maryland, USA

Volume 2 Issue 1 | pp. 1–13

Published on 20 September 2018
Theme | Traversing Time: Novel Through Ages

Abstract | F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has successfully maintained its position as a staple of American literature for close to a century. The way in which 9/11, particularly as a literary genre, has interacted with the widely read classic necessitates an examination of its position in a contemporary, post-9/11 landscape. Arguably Gatsby’s most sig...[show more]

Keywords | American literature, 9/11 literature, The American Dream, Capitalism, Race, The Great Gatsby

PDF Downloads: 1289
[Full Text PDF]
The Tale of The Magic Mountain in the Analysis of Paul Ricoeur

Chavdar Dimitrov | Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria

Volume 2 Issue 1 | pp. 14–39

Published on 20 September 2018
Theme | Traversing Time: Novel Through Ages

Abstract | This paper is an attempt to explain the role of fictional configuration in a specific philosophical approach. The possibility is opened by the topic of time, common to the later prose of Thomas Mann and the narrative theory of Paul Ricoeur. After an introduction to The Magic Mountain, the problematic of temporality is delineated in terms of tenses ...[show more]

Keywords | Narrative temporality, Horizon, Prolepsis, Semantics of action, Threefold mimesis, Metaphorical identification, 'Tales of time', Paul Ricoeur, Harry Jansen, William Dowling

PDF Downloads: 1197
[Full Text PDF]
Mapping the Specter: Seeing Asking for It as Spectral Realism

Marybeth Ragsdale-Richards | Wilson College, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, USA

Volume 2 Issue 1 | pp. 40–60

Published on 20 September 2018
Theme | Traversing Time: Novel Through Ages

Abstract | This paper argues that O’Neill intentionally adopts the traditional standards of patriarchal poetics in Asking for It to underscore the immediacy of dispelling rape myths. To this effect, feminist visual culture studies have been utilized to draw attention to the way O’Neill antagonizes the male gaze—and thus the spectator’s gaze—in Emma’s self-fas...[show more]

Keywords | Young adult literature, Spectral realism, Rape narratives, Rape myths, Feminist, visual, cultural studies, Asking for It

PDF Downloads: 800
[Full Text PDF]
Atlantis as Heterotopia: On the Theoretical Simultaneity of Plato's Atlantis

Kwasu D. Tembo | University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Volume 2 Issue 1 | pp. 41–75

Published on 20 September 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | This essay offers a theoretical analysis of Plato’s Atlantis. It opens with a close reading of Atlantis based on excerpts from Plato’s account of the island-continent and its city-state detailed in the dialogues of Timaeus and Critias (360 BCE). Further on, it explores the manner in which Plato portrays Atlantis as a heterotopian chronotope so as t...[show more]

Keywords | Plato, Atlantis, Foucault, Jameson, Heterotopia, Utopia

PDF Downloads: 1245
[Full Text PDF]
Derrida's Open and Its Closure: The Aporia of Différance and the Only Logic of Thinking

Mengxue Wu | The State University of New York, Buffalo, USA

Volume 2 Issue 1 | pp. 76–98

Published on 20 September 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | Derrida’s thought on “trace,” “différance,” “writing,” and “supplement” is always thought to be the breaking of logocentrism, the essence, the positive meaning, and the closure of the metaphysics of presence; this thinking is accordingly regarded the thinking with the fundamental structure of difference and openness. By tracking back to Saussure, H...[show more]

Keywords | Open, Difference, Différance, Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Exit

PDF Downloads: 1549
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Improvising Theatrical Jazz in a Queer Space: Aishah Rahman's Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage

Ege Altan | King's College London, England

Volume 2 Issue 1 | pp. 99–109

Published on 20 September 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | Omi Osun Joni L. Jones finds the relations between queerness and jazz in the concept of theatrical jazz in Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment. By undoing the conventional way of thinking about queerness, Jones unites queerness and jazz in the concept of theatrical jazz. She writes, “[t]he jazz aesthetic in theatr...[show more]

Keywords | Queer studies, Queer temporality, Theatrical jazz, Experimental theatre, Liminality

PDF Downloads: 600
[Full Text PDF]
Postmodernist Poetics in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry

Pooja Sancheti | IISER, Pune, India

Volume 1 Issue 4 | pp. 1–18

Published on 27 June 2018
Theme | Postmodern Topography

Abstract | This paper explores some of the key features of postmodernism, exemplified in how truth, history, and realism are treated within its contexts. These are connected to integral aspects of the postmodernist ethos such as deconstruction of binaries or dichotomies, disregard for metanarratives, and discursive realities, the theoretical underpinnings for...[show more]

Keywords | Sexing the Cherry, postmodernism, hybridity, dichotomy, construct, pastiche, truth, history, realism

PDF Downloads: 1122
[Full Text PDF]
On Gnawa and Jazz: Melodious rythms sing back to power

Jamal Akabli | Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra, Morocco

Volume 1 Issue 4 | pp. 19–27

Published on 27 June 2018
Theme | Postmodern Topography

Abstract | While Jazz has established itself as an international genre of music, Gnawa has a long way to tread to earn a name for it. Both genres are anchored in the same history, genealogy, and different rythms that carry their tunes. This article will retrace some of the similarities and difference that bind and distinguish these musical styles, and why the...[show more]

Keywords | Jazz, music, gnawa, similarities, differences, condition, third space

PDF Downloads: 685
[Full Text PDF]
Abdelkrim Berchid: Festive Theatre and the Post-Colonial Condition

Abdeladim Hinda | Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra, Morocco

Volume 1 Issue 4 | pp. 28–42

Published on 27 June 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | This essay highlights the reasons that pushed Arab theatre harbingers to think of a theatrical theory in light of which they could express themselves without feeling trapped in Eurocentric histrionic patterns. It also examines Abdelkrim Berchid’s keen interest in theorization and elucidates Festivity’s athletics and poetics of difference. The essay...[show more]

Keywords | Theatre, drama, festivity, post-colonial condition, aesthetics, theorization, poetics of difference, Occidentalism

PDF Downloads: 702
[Full Text PDF]
Literature and the Extra-temporal: Paul Ricoeur on Proust's Novels of Time

Chavdar Dimitrov | Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria

Volume 1 Issue 4 | pp. 43–63

Published on 27 June 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | This paper aims at a better understanding of the role of literature in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. An overview of his narrative theory is a chance to concentrate on specifics in the methods of Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. The inquiry focuses on the possibilities for exchange of perspectives on the subject-matter. The introduction is a delinea...[show more]

Keywords | semantics of action, prolepsis, temporality, memory, metaphorical identification, narrated time, phenomenology of reading, Paul Ricoeur

PDF Downloads: 758
[Full Text PDF]
Recruiting the 'Tirupathi' in Serampore: the policy of Telugu migrants to construct an ethnic and cultural identity for themselves in the face of Bengali domination

Souradip Bhattacharyya | National University of Singapore

Volume 1 Issue 4 | pp. 64–76

Published on 27 June 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | The aim of this paper is to portray and analyze—through ethnographic study of the Tirupathi Puja of the Telugu migrants of Serampore—such processes through which the power-relation between the working-class migrants and the middle-class Bengalis are redefined by the migrants’ strife to assert their ethnic identity and establish a public sense of be...[show more]

Keywords | Migration, social space, public space, space-time, neighborhood, religion, practice, construct, power-struggle, middle-class, working-class, Bengalis, ethnic identity, Tirupathi Puja

PDF Downloads: 535
[Full Text PDF]
The Suicidal and the Perversion of Virtues in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Naveen John Panicker | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 4 | pp. 77–86

Published on 27 June 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | The expansion in scientific knowledge and the reformulation of cultural and social boundaries, norms, and perceptions have led to the rethinking of several notions that have governed sociality for centuries; the aspect of suicide, and thereby the conventional response to the suicidal, nevertheless still tend to retain the burnt aftertaste of fear a...[show more]

Keywords | Suicide, Depression, David Foster Wallace, Ambivalence, Pain, Virtue, Perversion

PDF Downloads: 604
[Full Text PDF]
Memory, Space, and Exile in Vladimir Nabokov's "A Guide to Berlin"

Marianne Cotugno | Miami University, Ohio, USA

Volume 1 Issue 3 | pp. 1–11

Published on 17 March 2018
Theme | Rhetoric of Exile

Abstract | “A Guide to Berlin” shows the triumph of the individual, artistic mind in response to German state-building following the disaster of World War I. Alluding to changes in the city brought about by war, the story demonstrates the conflict between the ways in which the state attempts to organize social and physical space, for example, through the esta...[show more]

Keywords | Vladimir Nabokov, exile, A Guide to Berlin, memory, space

PDF Downloads: 796
[Full Text PDF]
Exiles in Our Own Land: Native American Novelists

Rachel Tudor | University of Oklahoma, USA

Volume 1 Issue 3 | pp. 12–23

Published on 17 March 2018
Theme | Rhetoric of Exile

Abstract | This paper examines the status of Native American novelists and their texts in America in reference to critical assessment, explication, style, critical theory, audience reception, and awareness. The essay includes explication of texts of leading Native American authors and critics: N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Thomas King, Louis Owens, Greg S...[show more]

Keywords | Native American, Indigenous, Postmodern, Realism, Mimetic, Magical realism, Heteroglossia, Polyphony, Simulacrum, Exile

PDF Downloads: 1153
[Full Text PDF]
The Formative and Transformative Function of Desire in Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy: A Deleuzian Perspective

Muhammad Yousri Beltagi Ahmed Aql | Kafrelshiekh University, Egypt

Volume 1 Issue 3 | pp. 24–36

Published on 17 March 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | The main objective of this paper is to examine the formative and transformative role of the concept of desire in one of the foundational texts of postcolonial theory: The Intimate Enemy (1983) by Ashis Nandy. The paper investigates the concept of desire by emphasizing its role not in baptizing the traditional forms of postcolonial identification bu...[show more]

Keywords | Resistance, Desire, Becoming-postcolonial, The Virtual, The people-to-come, Deleuze

PDF Downloads: 1030
[Full Text PDF]
"A terrible beauty is born": Interrogating Joe Sacco's Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza

Sameera Mehta | Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 3 | pp. 37–46

Published on 17 March 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | The paper focalizes Joe Sacco’s seminal contributions to graphic journalism, Palestine (1993) and its thematic continuation Footnotes in Gaza (2009), through the lenses of the violent and the visual, to interrogate their interrelatedness. ‘What does the graphic mode do for a sensitive and traumatic geopolitical issue?’ is the question that undergir...[show more]

Keywords | Journalism, Graphic Novel, Comic, Palestine, Terror, Trauma, and Visual, Joe Sacco

PDF Downloads: 1227
[Full Text PDF]
Cinema as Historian: Agnotology and the Politics of Historical and Fictional Representations of the Vietnam War

Naveen John Panicker | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 3 | pp. 47–54

Published on 17 March 2018
Special Submission

Abstract | Cinema is visual storytelling, and is therefore a medium that tells by showing; in order to do that, it is required to ‘create’ that which it aims to present. There is a certain degree of artifice inherent in this form of ‘telling by showing’ and cinema, therefore, is mostly placed under the umbrella term of fiction. However, films that deal with h...[show more]

Keywords | Memory, History, Authenticity, Cinema, Hollywood, Agnotology, Vietnam War, Film Studies

PDF Downloads: 851
[Full Text PDF]
The Last Days of Cafe Leila by Donia Bijan

Anubha Anushree | Stanford University, USA

Volume 1 Issue 3 | pp. 55–58

Published on 17 March 2018
Book Review

Excerpt | Donia Bijan’s The last days of Café Leila (The Café, 2017) is like a wafting aroma of your mother’s sambhar or pulao, exciting just in the right balance of anticipation and contentment — anticipation of new intimacies through food and contentment of knowing what these intimacies bring. Nearly 300 pages long, this novel is the most recent offer from...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review

PDF Downloads: 595
[Full Text PDF]
Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss by Andre Aciman

Deeksha Suri | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 3 | pp. 59–61

Published on 17 March 2018
Book Review

Excerpt | Within the range of studies available on the subject of exile, Letters of Transit brings to light the individual responses dealing with nostalgia and finding a new voice. In this book, five authors present their meditations on exile, loss, and the meaning of home. As mentioned in the Foreword, these writers hail from different regions and backgroun...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review

PDF Downloads: 811
[Full Text PDF]
The City Son by Samrat Upadhyay

Prakriti Madan | IP University, India

Volume 1 Issue 3 | pp. 62–63

Published on 17 March 2018
Book Review

Excerpt | Samrat Upadhyay is a well known creative writer with many short stories and novels to his credit. His first work, Arresting God in Kathmandu (2001), is a collection of short stories which won him the Whiting Award, followed by The Guru Of Love (2003), The Royal Ghosts (2006), and Buddha’s Orphans (2010) among others. His last novel, The City Son, w...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review

PDF Downloads: 360
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Project Ginsberg and Me: Reflections on an Experimental Translation

Anuj Gupta | Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Volume 1 Issue 2 | pp. 1–10

Published on 01 January 2018
Theme | Translation Studies

Abstract | This paper is a preface that was written for an experimental translation project which was carried out in the summer of 2016. In this project, a series of extracts from poems by Allen Ginsberg were collated that swivel around the idea of “freedom” (a word that gained immense semantic intensity due to the political environment in JNU in February 201...[show more]

Keywords | Translation, Ginsberg, JNU, Freedom, Polysystem Studies, Music

PDF Downloads: 705
[Full Text PDF]
A Pragmatic Analysis of English Euphemism and its Application to Literary Translation

Wang Huabin | City University of Hong Kong

Volume 1 Issue 2 | pp. 11–22

Published on 01 January 2018
Theme | Translation Studies

Abstract | English euphemism is popular as a way of conveying positive words, through which speakers can achieve the goal of communication instead of offending others. As regards its usage, emphasis is put upon the reflection of politeness in a speech environment. Euphemism can also be found in literature, which calls for a correct understanding of its distin...[show more]

Keywords | English euphemism, pragmatic function, literary translation

PDF Downloads: 917
[Full Text PDF]
Indigenous Knowledge System and Linguistic Code with Reference to Ngu Loc Community of Vietnam: A Socio-linguistic Appraisal

Hemanga Dutta | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Pham Thi Ha Xuyen | Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi, Vietnam

Volume 1 Issue 2 | pp. 22–34

Published on 01 January 2018
Theme | Translation Studies

Abstract | This study analyzes the use of indigenous knowledge and linguistic code used in the Ngu Loc community settled in Hau Loc district, Thanh Hoa province, Vietnam which has a rich tradition of eight hundred years. This paper contributes to the understanding of the formation and development of an indigenous knowledge system of this coastal village in Vi...[show more]

Keywords | linguistic code, indigenous knowledge, folk traditional practices, Eco-criticism

PDF Downloads: 682
[Full Text PDF]
Wealth and Entitlement in Detective Fiction: Britain's History of Pillage in India

Keertika Lotni | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 2 | pp. 35–42

Published on 01 January 2018
Special Submissions

Abstract | The theme of the paper is to read evidences of loot and pillaging in detective fiction. Citing, Wilkie Collin’s novel The Moonstone (1868) and The Sign of the Four (1890) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Britain’s responsibility for the economic position it pushes its colonies into has been investigated. The novels in question are both written by Britis...[show more]

Keywords | Detective Fiction, Wilkie Collin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British Colonialism

PDF Downloads: 362
[Full Text PDF]
British Educational Activities in North India: 1840 to 1841

Sumeet Tanwar | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 2 | pp. 43–52

Published on 01 January 2018
Special Submissions

Abstract | This article proposes to inquire some aspects of the educational activities undertaken at schools located in North-western and Central provinces (modern day Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh) between 1840-1841, when the new scheme for vernacular education was launched. The new scheme, launched when education through the medium of English failed to a...[show more]

Keywords | British Educational Education, English education, Vernacular education, Translation

PDF Downloads: 793
[Full Text PDF]
The Rise of the Curry

Sayantani Sengupta | University of Calcutta

Volume 1 Issue 2 | pp. 53–63

Published on 01 January 2018
Special Submissions

Abstract | The British have a love-hate relationship with curry. On one hand they are mesmerized by the delectable taste and the tantalizing aroma of the spicy curry; on the other hand they are perpetually haunted by their fear of “losing race” if they were to love a dish from a colony. The goal of this paper is to explore the circumstances which led to the a...[show more]

Keywords | Queen Victoria, India, Curry, Foodscape, Colonialism

PDF Downloads: 609
[Full Text PDF]
The Book of Death by Khalid Javed

Md. Faizan Moquim | Jamia Milia Islamia, India

Volume 1 Issue 2 | pp. 64–65

Published on 01 January 2018
Book Review

Excerpt | Khalid Jawed, apart from being a short story writer, poet, translator, and critic, is one of the leading Urdu fiction writers in India. His critically acclaimed short stories collections in English translation include Burey Mausam Mein (2000), Akhri Dawat (Penguin Book India, 2007), and Tafreeh ki Ek Dopehr (Scheherzade Karachi, 2008), from where h...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review, Urdu, Death, Existence

PDF Downloads: 824
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Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop

Pallavi Bhardwaj | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 2 | pp. 66–68

Published on 01 January 2018
Book Review

Excerpt | Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), in an interview with Alexendra Johnson, explains home in the following terms, “I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s a pretty good description of a poet’s sense of home. He carries it within him… ” This expression of home has a persisting presence in Ques...[show more]

Keywords | Book Review

PDF Downloads: 339
[Full Text PDF]
That Thing Called Love, And The Thing Called Fat

Prerna Subramanium | Indian Institute of Technology Gujrat, India

Volume 1 Issue 1 | pp. 1–8

Published on 29 September 2017
Theme | Performing Arts

Abstract | This paper discusses three spoken word poems which have narratives of people who talk of different realms, manifestations, and experiences of fat shaming. Fat-shaming has become an increasingly acknowledged world-wide issue due to the increased importance of media-represented thin bodies and the qualitative judgement that is passed on the same. Fat...[show more]

Keywords | Bodies, Fat-shaming, Love, Performance, Identity, Gender, Spoken word

PDF Downloads: 728
[Full Text PDF]
Freedom of Expression, Literature, Fact, and Fiction

Syed A. Sayeed | English and Foreign Languages University, India

Volume 1 Issue 1 | pp. 9–19

Published on 29 September 2017
Special Submission

Abstract | On 5th of July, 2016, the Madras High Court delivered a significant judgment in a case relating to a petition filed by some persons and organisations against the Tamil author Perumal Murugan, demanding that Murugan’s Tamil novel, Madhorubagan, should be banned as it hurt the sentiments of the people of a particular village and had ‘portrayed the Ka...[show more]

Keywords | Literature, Fact, Fiction

PDF Downloads: 820
[Full Text PDF]
Performing Murder and Metaphor

Ritwick Bhattacharjee | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 1 | pp. 20–26

Published on 29 September 2017
Special Submission

Abstract | While detective fiction works primarily focus on the process of revealing the systems of signs, i.e. clues, that effectively lead the detective (and the reader) to the criminal, there is another set of signs that often go either unremarked or out rightly unnoticed: the red herrings. Within the structure of a detective novel and, insofar as a piece ...[show more]

Keywords | Detective Fiction, Phenomenology, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Signs, Red Herrings

PDF Downloads: 2147
[Full Text PDF]
The Nature of 'Perception' in Wordsworth's Poetry

Deeksha Suri | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 1 | pp. 27–34

Published on 29 September 2017
Special Submission

Abstract | During Eighteenth century Enlightenment, the terminology of perception and the discourse around it has been the central aspect of philosophy. The conceptual framework of the period can be divided into Critical Rationalism and Empiricism. Rationalists, such as Descartes, initiated a new stage in philosophical thought by establishing doubt within hum...[show more]

Keywords | Romantics, Wordsworth, Poetics

PDF Downloads: 1674
[Full Text PDF]
Last Resort Lalli or the New Age Miss Marple

Shrehya Taneja | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 1 | pp. 35–45

Published on 29 September 2017
Special Submission

Abstract | The space occupied by female detectives in fiction has formed an important part of the subgenre of Crime Fiction. Looking at the famous fictional female detectives who have captured the reader’s imagination, one is reminded of Christie’s ‘Miss Marple,’ Keene’s ‘Nancy Drew,’ and Heilbrun’s ‘Kate Fansler.’ Moving to the Indian landscape, we are famil...[show more]

Keywords | Indian detective fiction, female detectives, Crime fiction

PDF Downloads: 717
[Full Text PDF]
Fela Anilkulapo-Kuti's 'Beast of No Nation'

Raheem Oluwafunminiyi | University of Ilorin, Nigeria

Volume 1 Issue 1 | pp. 46–60

Published on 29 September 2017
Special Submission

Abstract | Following his release from prison in 1986, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti released the album, ‘Beast of No Nation’ to critical acclaim. The song came both as a scathing criticism of the Nigerian military regime at the time and in response to the event surrounding his detention and prison experience. Specifically composed in themes highlighting, among other th...[show more]

Keywords | Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Beast of No Nation, Nigerian military, Music, Artistic vision, Repression

PDF Downloads: 1653
[Full Text PDF]
Image and Text in Ravi Shankar and Vikram Seth's Beastly Tales from Here and There

Samarth Singhal | University of Delhi

Volume 1 Issue 1 | pp. 61–68

Published on 29 September 2017
Special Submission

Abstract | The paper discusses narrative choices, both visual and textual, made in Seth and Shankar’s Beastly Tales from Here and There (1991). The illustration of the book occupies a unique place in art history and print culture as a juxtaposition of text and image. Shankar’s caricatures which are placed beside Seth’s text are analyzed to make way for an arg...[show more]

Keywords | Image, Caricature, Dissent, Children, South Asia, Beastly Tales from Here and There

PDF Downloads: 1143
[Full Text PDF]