Beowulf features complex shifts in temporality, traditionally labeled “digressions,” and a generally disjointed narrative structure, making it hard to follow for modern audiences. This article proposes a reframing of this much debated trait of the text by reading two episodes characterized by temporal entanglement and intense emotion, approaching them through the lens of cognitive literary study. Seen as cognitive blends within a specific mode of poetic production and drawing on a now partially lost tapestry of narrative traditions, such moments will be understood on their own terms as aesthetically pleasing and emotionally charged episodes rather than as haphazard interruptions to the main storyline.

March 2026: Catalin Taranu is a medievalist specializing in Old and Middle English and the vernacular cultures of early medieval Northwestern Europe. His research focuses on heroic verse as myth-historical narrative and as a social technology for negotiating emotional norms. He is currently Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and the PI of Becoming Axolotl: Empathy, Simulation, and Embodiment in Medieval Narratives, a project based at New Europe College (Bucharest), collaborating with colleagues at the University of Bern and the The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts within the MAPS framework. His publications include the monograph The Bard and the Rag-picker: Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia (Routledge, 2021) and the co-edited volume Vera Lex Historiae?: Constructions of Truth in Medieval Historical Narrative (Punctum Books, 2022).

This essay situates Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta within the context of the Elizabethan “Stranger Crisis” and reconsiders the portrayal of Barabas in relation to the xenophobic sentiments directed at Continental immigrants. Rather than endorsing the prevailing stranger-as-threat reading, the essay argues that Marlowe exposes the precarious position of immigrant communities and reframes the alleged transgressions attributed to them. The essay further demonstrates how the play illuminates a scapegoating logic through which the host nation displaces responsibility for its own economic, religious, and political failures onto alien populations. The Jew of Malta prompts both its original audience and modern readers to confront not only the futility of such a strategy but also its haunting recurrence across historical cycles.

March 2026: Yaxin Shi is a doctoral candidate at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research primarily focuses on Early Modern English literature, with a specific interest in the dramatic works of Christopher Marlowe. Her current project investigates how Marlowe’s “exotic” plays reflect and negotiate the complex political tensions of Elizabethan England. Correspondence can be addressed to: yaxinshi16@gmail.com.

Anton Chekhov contracted tuberculosis in his late teens; his sickness may have increased his capacity for empathy. His literary talent allowed him not only to internalize other people’s suffering but to voice it, often creating new frameworks and vocabulary for expression of fear and inner calamity. In “A Boring Story” (1889), relatively young Chekhov renders the agonizing thoughts of the protagonist, a dying old man, an eminent professor of medicine, Nikolai Stepanovich. This article analyzes “A Boring Story” as an example of illness and end-of-life stories that have become the focus of narrative medicine. My purpose is to highlight some unavoidable limitations that a narrator such as Nikolai Stepanovich might have faced in the late 1880s. I argue that in presenting this old physician’s thoughts, Chekhov started a discussion about the likelihood and usefulness of such concepts as a proper death and death with dignity, an important topic of today’s debates.

March 2026: Galina Rylkova is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida. She was born in Moscow, Russia/Soviet Union, and received her M.A. in Romance-Germanic languages and literatures from Moscow State University. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Toronto in Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is the author of more than 20 published research articles, book reviews, and two books: The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007) and Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer (Academic Studies Press, 2020). Her current research interests include Psychology of Creative Personality; Narrative Medicine; Chekhov; Nabokov; Cultural Memory; Biography; and World Theater.

“A Letter that Never Reached Russia” has mainly been read as a nostalgic farewell to the narrator’s first love who remained in the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, while he chose exile. The reason why it never reached Russia, in my reading, is not censorship but that it never was sent because, in the process of composing his response to a letter she sent, he has realized that she, long in the Soviet Union, would be unable to understand his complex feelings about living in Weimar Berlin. He is a lonely declassé stranger there but a happy flaneur: no one can tell him what to feel, what to do with his time, what to think and what to write. There is no returning home, not even in letters. Home — and first love — are in the past, lost, and irretrievable.   

March 2026: Professor Emerita Irene Masing-Delic, OSU, currently affiliated with UNC, has published on Turgenev and Dostoevsky, the poetry and prose of the “Silver Age” (Blok, Pasternak, Zabolotsky), utopian thought (Abolishing Death, 1992, Russian Uprazdnenie smerti, 2020), and early Soviet writers (Pilniak, Zoshchenko, Babel, Gorky). Recent publications include:  "A 'Strange Liaison':  Nabokov’s 'Bachmann' as an Orpheus and Possessed-Musician Story." Slavic and East European Journal. 68.1, 2024 and “A Bridgeable Schism? The Russian Silver Age Intelligentsia Holds Its Ground, Spruces up, and Proselytizes.” The Russian Intelligentsia. Myth, Mission, and Metamorphosis. Boston, Academic Studies press, 2025 (pp. 123—48).

Biofiction is fiction that names its protagonist after a real person. In the 1930s it became a dominant literary form among prominent German writers. For Thomas Mann, this genre could be used to provide readers with an existential map for moral living, but Thomas’s son, Klaus, who was openly gay, believed that his father’s commitment to morality led to mental illness. Klaus Mann authored biofictions that metaphorized the lives of real people to represent a possibility of a post-moral way of living that promoted better psychological well-being. In his novella, Barred Window, Klaus implicitly exposes his father’s way of thinking as not just obsolete but also as dangerous.

March 2026: Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses on 20^th- and 21^st-century intellectual, political, and literary history. He is the author and editor of numerous books and currently one of the editors-in-chief of Bloomsbury Academic’s Biofiction Studies series. His work has been recognized with prestigious fellowships, awards, and appointments: he received Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt fellowship (2001-2002), he was the Martha Daniel Newell Professor at Georgia College (2020), the Obama Institute Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (2024), and the Fulbright’s Laszlo Orszagh Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of Pécs in Hungary (2025). He has two forthcoming books, German Exile Biofiction: The Metaphorical Art of Intellectual Activism and World Biofictionalists in Translation: Literature as Existential Map, which consists of seventeen interviews with biofictionalists who write in languages other than English.

In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie’s repeatedly recounted dream of rabbits, land, and companionship drives the two men as they navigate their lonely working migrancy. Their recounting ritual emerges as an event within the novella, raising questions about the effects of nursing a private dream versus keeping a regular practice of speaking it. The rabbit dream finds powerful activation when understood as a performative speech-act which releases illocutionary force to construct new realities. These conditions include the identity built within George and Lennie at the time of speaking; the binding closeness the dream creates between them, which empowers other workers as well and defends them against external threats; and the preservation of Lennie’s identity in the final scene, even as the dream collapses.

March 2026: Kaley Hutter is an MFA candidate at Hollins University and an Adjunct Professor of English at Virginia Western Community College. Her primary research interests include space, place, language, and contemporary poetics. Her poems and nonfiction can be found in journals such as The Harvard Advocate, Meridian, and most recently Witness.

This article reads Borges’s essays on Zeno’s paradoxes through the lens of pataphysics — the “science of imaginary solutions” — to reinterpret his hybrid mode of reasoning that blends disciplines, as well as reason with unreason, order with chaos, and seriousness with humor. Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s concept of pataphysics and Christian Bök’s pataphysical reappropriation of Gaston Bachelard’s “surrationalism,” I argue that Borges’s texts embody a form of pataphysics: a paradox-embracing, jocoserious reflection that challenges rationalism by exploring the “crevices of unreason” — exceptions that disrupt logic from within. Borges offers a playful yet rigorous framework for thought, suited to the contradictions and uncertainties of postnormal times.

March 2026: 

Zofia Grzesiak is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Iberian and Ibero-American Studies at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on Latin American literature, comparative literature, and literary theory, with particular attention to the intersections of science, literature, and philosophy. These interests shaped her project “Borges and Pataphysics” (National Science Centre, Poland, 2019/33/N/HS2/01704).

Her recent work includes “Reading As Conversation with the Overarching Blended Author (Or Roberto Bolaño): Joint Attention, Immersion, and Interaction” (LIT), “Ciencia, literatura, tecnología y «La biblioteca de Babel» de Borges: una patafísica para los tiempos posnormales” (Castilla), and “La patafísica en Roque Larraquy: ¿Hacia un desprendimiento epistemológico?” (Pasavento).

She is a founding member of the ELAR: Estudios Literarios Argentinistas research group and serves as supervisor of the Latin American Literature Student Research Group at the University of Warsaw.

This article uses the repeated references made in John Banville’s 2000 novel Eclipse to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a foundation for an intertextual reading of the two texts. Both the protagonists make elaborate attempts at self-imposed isolation. Through close reading and comparative analysis, the paper argues that while both Alex Cleave and Robinson Crusoe seek to establish autonomous subjectivity through separation from others (particularly women), Banville’s novel critically engages with and ironizes this masculine literary tradition. The study demonstrates how Eclipse both inherits and subverts Defoe’s legacy of the solipsistic male narrator, particularly through Cleave’s failed attempt to achieve authentic selfhood through isolation. The novel’s form becomes increasingly permeable to other voices despite Cleave’s resistance and his aversion to others. By analyzing the parallels between Cleave’s retreat to his childhood home and Crusoe’s island exile, the paper shows how Banville’s work both acknowledges and challenges the novel form’s historically “violent relation to alterity,” particularly in its treatment of female characters.

March 2026: Karen McCarthy is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg. Her undergraduate teaching blends literary study and academic literacy. She teaches an honours module that covers scholarship on early literacy in the South African context, as well as trends pertaining to representation in children’s literature. She oversees the MPhil in Children’s Literature offered by the department. Her research interests are narratology and ethics in narrative fiction, particularly with regard to representations of women and children.

The trauma of a returning soldier is a topos in war literature. Its exploration frequently relies on the semantic and semiotic negotiations between the war zone and the life back home. Mariette Kalinowski’s short story “The Train” stands out among texts examining the struggles of returnees not only through its authorship — it belongs to the rather limited body of war literature by women veteran writers — but also because of the manner in which it projects the materialization of this exchange. Traumatic visions of a bomb going off in Iraq infiltrate and ultimately take possession of the protagonist’s present-day reality. Homeland is devoid of a sense of belonging, and the material objects that populate it become both the repository and the integrators of the protagonist’s traumatic war experience. By employing trauma theory and thing theory, this paper examines the representation of connections between home and the battlefield and looks into the transformation of objects into things that assist in the pursuit of ontological imperatives. To the vocabulary of trauma studies it adds the notion of nodal integrator in the analysis of Kalinowski’s innovativeness in the handling of the topos.

March 2026: Amelia Precup is a lecturer in the Department of Anglophone and Scandinavian Studies at the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University. She is the author of a monograph entitled ‘The reality I speak of here…’ – A Long Analysis of Woody Allen’s Short Fiction. She has presented papers and published work on contemporary American (war) fiction, representations of gender and ethnicity, and (early) modern English literature. Her current academic interests focus on recent American fiction, especially war literature and narratives about conflict.