Five issues stand out in the Book of Esther: political feasting, inter-sex conflicts, intra-sex competition, genocidal threats, and the absence of God. Central to these problems is the basic tenet of Persian imperialism, for imperial governmentality is linked to the techniques of judicial, disciplinary, and panoptic power as well as the patriarchal power of (ab)using women to ensure the smooth functioning of family and empire. To rule a multiracial regime, the king’s policies can quickly change from racial assimilation to persecution and later strategic integration. From the point of view of the Jews, multiracial encounters often lead to the birth of hybrid identities, ambivalent mimicry, and racial anxiety or pride. Esther’s survival has much to do with her tactful negotiation with her abused state: she adopts a deracialized profile, becomes a beauty queen, and devises a drama-queen persona to save her people because Haman’s intercessory act is deemed by King Ahasuerus to be a case of sexual assault. The ending highlights three responses: the king accumulates more resources, the Jews celebrate their survival, and Esther positions herself as the queen of vigilance and self-governance. The post-traumatic ethos is not about a descent into cognitive chaos but the resolution to organize the grief-stricken collective memory and broker truthful relationships with neighbors, the self, and God.

March 2023: Magdalen Wing-chi Ki (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) is Associate Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. She has published papers in Philosophy and Literature, Brontë Studies, Poe Studies, English Studies, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Literature Compass, Mississippi Quarterly, Renascence, Dalhousie Review, Renascence, and Theological Studies. Her books include Jane Austen and the Dialectic of Misrecognition (Peter Lang, 2005) and Jane Austen and Altruism (Routledge, 2020).

The paper offers a comment, from the platform of traditional Jewish exegesis, on some of the issues that Magdalen Ki’s article deals with from a more presentist perspective. It highlights the subtlety of the rabbinical approach as well as its modernity and the complexity of the issues that it raises — social (the condition of women and of minorities), philosophical (the absence of God) and symbolic (intertextual reminiscences).

In particular, it is difficult to understand the armed struggle with which this story ends without placing it back into its precise historical context. This episode, which tells of the first organized genocidal project directed against the Jewish people, will serve as a paradigm for the whole history of antisemitism.

March 2023: 

Betty Rojtman is Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been the Katherine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature. As the chair of the Department of French studies, she has founded the Desmarais Center for French Culture at the Hebrew University, and headed it for many years. Her current research deals with Transcendence and Negativity in traditional Jewish sources (Midrash, Hassidism, Kabbalah) and (post)modern texts (literature, philosophy).

Professor Rojtman is the author of several books, including Feu noir sur Feu Blanc: Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (Verdier, 1986); English translation, by Steven Rendall, Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah, Prefaced by Moshe Idel, 1998), Une grave distraction. Preface by Paul Ricoeur (Balland, 1991), Une Rencontre improbable: Equivoques de la destinée (Gallimard, 2002).

In parallel to her academic work, she writes meditative and poetical essays (Le Pardon à la lune: Essai sur le tragique biblique, Gallimard, 2001. trans. Hebrew by Nir Ratzkovski, Seli’hat halevana, Al hatragiut hatana’hit, Jerusalem, Carmel, 2008), Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (Gallimard, 2007).

Her most recent essay (Une faim d’abîme. La fascination de la mort dans l’écriture contemporaine, Desclée de Brouwer, 2019), has come out in English as Longing for the Abyss: The fascination for death in Contemporary French Thought, trans. Bartholomew Begley (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020) and in Hebrew as Kemiha Latehom. Kessem Hamavet bahagut hatzarfatit shel hameah haesserim, trans. Itay Blumenzweig (Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2020).

Emile Durkheim was the first scholar to treat suicide as a sociological phenomenon, collective rather than private, thus illustrating the failure of modern individualism. This paper demonstrates that the tragic endings of Goethe’s Werther and Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis anticipate Durkheim’s suicide classification: Goethe and Foscolo created heroes whose tragic action accords with the basic elements belonging to Durkheim’s typologies.

March 2023: Alberto Castelli is Professor of Human Science at Hainan University, China. He is mainly engaged with Modernism, Postmodern dynamics, and Cross-Cultural Studies. Castelli's publications include: “Bipolarism in the Nineteenth Century Novel” published by University of Toronto Quarterly and “Perspective on Asia: Is China Kitsch?” in International Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press). Email: 182034@hainanu.edu.cn

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” most inhabitants of the imaginary town fare well, but only on the condition that an unidentified child imprisoned in a dark room suffers: the well-being of most is founded on depriving the child of the inherent right to equality. Such an allegorical image of the suffering child embodies the hierarchical oppositions between adults and children, employers and employees, rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged. This paper analyzes the art of Le Guin’s story and its functioning as a testing ground for ethical theories.

March 2023: Hawk Chang is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. His research has appeared in journals such as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, English Studies, Children's Literature in Education, The Explicator, ANQ, Journal of English Studies, Neohelicon, Changing English, Tamkang Review, Wenshan Review, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature, and CLCWeb, among others. His monograph Traditions and Difference in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction: Ireland Then and Now was published by Springer in February 2021.

Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrote the Jero plays (The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis) thirteen years apart, and they shed light on the distresses of a society in transition from colony to postcolony. Philosopher Achille Mbembe describes the postcolony as a site of high levels of corruption and appropriation of wealth by a ruling elite, a place where colonial rules linger and disrupt the workings of the state. Characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation defined by excess and a lack of proportion, in the postcolony, regimes of violence are prone to celebrating their own grandeur through macabre public events such as executions. Soyinka satirizes the protagonist of the Jero plays, a Machiavellian con artist who wraps himself in the cloak of Pentecostal Born-Again Christianity, for using blackmail and grift to secure a profitable spiritual monopoly on Bar Beach (to say prayers before and after each execution, to administer last rites, and to preach on the evils of crime). Through depictions of venality at every level of society, the Jero plays illustrate the difficulty of eradicating colonial legacies and demonstrate the deleterious effects of entrenched social and political corruption on daily life in the postcolony.

March 2023: Mark S. Ferrara is associate professor of English at State University of New York and author of six books including Palace of Ashes, Sacred Bliss, and American Community. He has taught for universities in South Korea, China, and on a Fulbright scholarship in Turkey.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard is among the least researched of his works, the few critiques on it limited to explorations of the art and the artist in the novel. This article examines the main characters, mostly women, in Bluebeard, in a psychoanalytic framework based on the studies on archetypes and complexes by Carl Jung, Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette, and Joseph Campbell. The article uses these findings along with feminist critiques of Jung to assert that Bluebeard refutes Jung’s essentialist anima-animus model by its anti-sexist depiction of characters. By analyzing the male protagonist’s immature masculinity in Bluebeard and the feminine influence in his turning from an elitist impulsive man-child into an empathetic old artist, the article concludes that Bluebeard replaces the male-biased Jungian schema with a more balanced structure in the post-Jungian feminist vein, presenting a quest for mother, rare in the otherwise father-centric American fiction.

March 2023: Ankit Raj is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Government College Gharaunda, Karnal and has a PhD in English from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. His current research interests include Postmodern Fiction, Archetypal and Myth Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and Comparative Literature, on which he has published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Scrutiny2, The Explicator, and ANQ among other journals. Ankit is a guest editor for Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies (Bingöl University, Turkey). His poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and online venues across seven countries. He is a winner of the Hawakal Young Poets 2022 series and the author of Pinpricks (Hawakal, 2022). Prior to entering academia, Ankit has been a software engineer and lead vocalist with rock bands in India. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4565-7682

Nagendra Kumar is Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. He has been the recipient of the Teachers’ Research Grant of the American Studies Research Center, Hyderabad (1996) and the Outstanding Teacher Award, IIT Roorkee (2015). He is a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar (Austria) and the International Shaw Society (Canada). He has travelled extensively around the globe on academic and professional assignments. His articles have appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Scrutiny2, ANQ, The Explicator, South Asian Review, South Asian Popular Culture, Neohelicon, and Media Watch among other journals. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002- 8292-794

In their memoirs female Holocaust survivors recount the systematic misogynic attack of the female body in Auschwitz. The various literary figures that render, or rather testify to, a scene that is in every way repugnant to humanity in its violence, and the emphasis on the brutal physical aggression inflicted on women in Auschwitz underscore the resulting epistemological malaise.

From the memoirs of Eva Edith Eger (The Choice), Livia Bitton-Jackson (I Have Lived a Thousand Years), Rena Kornreich Gellisen (Rena's Promise), and Erna Rubinstein (The Survivor in Us All), there emerges a collective portrait of the subversive Jewish woman who resists the heavy weight of the Nazi power. Through a close reading of female Holocaust survivors’ memoirs, this essay shows how the brutal assault on gender gave birth – against all odds – to a new Jewish woman who not only overcomes the shock of being despoiled of her basic cultural and gender assets but uses this deprivation to rise above her condition and eventually to write her own self through what Helene Cixous calls “a language of revolution.”

March 2023: Steiner Liliane, Ph.D. Summa cum laude from Bar-Ilan University, is Senior Lecturer in Hemdat Hadarom College of Education. She specializes in comparative literature, gender studies, Holocaust studies, children's literature, philosophy, languages. She is the author of The Interaction between the Sexes, the Post-abjection of the Archaic Mother (Resling, 2014) and Between Breastfeeding and Exams (Mofet, 2019), both in Hebrew. Also in Hebrew she has published three children’s books: Hila's Choice (Sefer Lakol, 1995), Bittersweet Chocolate (Contento, 2014), and The Two Overseers of the Synagogue (Gefen, 2017).

This article is grounded in ideas about defining commitment and the development of self that stem from the writings by Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s view that the self develops in relation to three existential stages or “realms” — the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious sheds light on Nicole Krauss’s novels The History of Love (2005) and Forest Dark (2017). Leo Gursky in the former shares the commitment to romantic love of the young swain in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling; but for Krauss’s character this commitment is displaced in favor of a commitment to writing itself. In Forest Dark the notion of writing as defining commitment reemerges through the character Nicole. A transition from the esthetic to the ethical dimension occurs in Jules Epstein’s newfound commitment to the dead. Ultimately, however, Krauss’s characters in these two novels are characterized as lacking the “inwardness” that in Kierkegaard’s writings is necessary for becoming a self that is able to access the religious realm.

March 2023: Nicholas O. Pagan is a visiting professor of English at the University of Malaya. He specializes in literary theory and writes about literature (particularly American literature) in relation to philosophy, mind, and spirituality. His publications include Theory of Mind and Science Fiction (2014). He has also published in journals including Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal; Religion & Literature; Literature and Theology, Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture; and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory.

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King has been increasingly recognized as a critique of American neoliberalism, but whether Wallace suggests any specific way to challenge the status quo is still an open question. Focusing on the character Leonard Stecyk and his relationship with Wallace’s metafictional stand-in in the novel, this essay demonstrates how Wallace expresses an oppositional politics that takes on the ontological premise of neoliberalism. I argue that, against neoliberalism as an ontological project of immanent totality that configures capitalism as the nature of reality and the competitive homo economicus as human subjectivity, Stecyk represents three ontologies of alterity — the radical alterity of free work, the internal alterity of social reproduction, and the pre-individual alterity of affective resonance — that resist the totalization of capitalism, opening up the possibility of sociopolitical change.

March 2023: Shuyu Lee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She has published works on late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century American authors, including Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace, from the perspective of contemporary continental philosophy. Her research interests include political economy, new materialisms, and workplace fiction. shuyulee@mx.nthu.edu.tw.

This essay reconsiders the view of George Eliot as the vanguard secular novelist through the tension between her early, yet sustained, commitment to the evangelical belief that joy is a providential reward for suffering and the later complications as she depicted a world appearing to lack divine justice or mercy, without promise of an afterlife. I argue that the novel Adam Bede is not a humanist translation of Christian doctrine but a revision of theodicy both from within and from without Christian tradition, representing the mystery of “human sorrow” and suffering as embodied in Jesus Christ. The novel works through to a belief that such suffering awaits all, rather than some, created beings and to the conviction that joy will never banish suffering — that it co-exists with it, taking the form of love. This revision preserved the Christian primacy of suffering while seeking to equalize it and face its demands.

September 2022: Ilana M. Blumberg teaches at Bar Ilan University. She is the author of Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels; Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American; and Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman among Books. She is currently working on the project "Post-Secular George Eliot," supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation.

Examining the alternative tropic imaginaries—demonic and Edenic, respectively— governing the oeuvres of playwright Tennessee Williams and director John Huston this article argues for the convergence of these visions in the context of the latter’s film, The Night of the Iguana (1964). As a means of grounding the distinction between these divergent philosophical, ideological and aesthetic traditions, I turn to the writer whose depictions of exotic, Pacific locales might be considered seminal for American literature, and foundational for both the playwright’s and the film-maker’s tropic sensibilities. Herman Melville’s depictions of the Pacific islands, whether or not they originate the American literary imagination’s readings of the exotic, at least definitively articulate and encode those readings—from the degenerate to the sublime—within literary discourse. Williams’ allusions to Los Encantadas (1854), in Suddenly Last Summer, reveal Melville’s influence upon the playwright’s treatment of the tropics' pathology. Huston, meanwhile, had first stumbled upon the Mismaloya peninsula, where he shot The Night of the Iguana, while searching (albeit abortively) for a suitable location in which to film Melville’s first novel, Typee (1846). The salvific vision of Mexico, refined throughout Huston’s oeuvre and imbued with the spirit of Typee’s tropical fantasy, complements the new optimism detectable in Williams’ Iguana, where renewal and revitalization fall within the realm of tropic possibility. 

Alex Feldman is an Alon Fellow and Lecturer (Asst. Prof.) in the English Department at the University of Haifa. He completed his doctorate at Merton College, Oxford and has held posts at the University of Texas at Austin and MacEwan University, in Alberta, Canada. His research, which has been published (or is forthcoming) in Law & Literature, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Modernism/ modernity and elsewhere, is concerned with the representation of history, and most recently, legal history, on stage. He published his first book, Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage: In History’s Wings with Routledge in 2012, and he is currently working on two further book projects: a co-edited collection of essays, with Dan Rebellato (Royal Holloway, University of London) on the plays of Terence Rattigan, currently under contract at Cambridge University Press, and a monograph provisionally entitled The Rigging of the Law, concerned with the development of jurisprudential drama in the modern and contemporary theatre.

Drawing on Scheler and Merleau-Ponty among others, I develop a framework for interpreting certain themes in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.  This philosophical novel explores the way love shapes our comportment towards the world of others, and raises the question of whether love is blind or potentially truth-disclosing. Using this literary example, I argue that without the dispositional affects of love, care, or concern — the emotional a priori — nothing in the world around us would be more conspicuous than anything else.  In this case we would be faced with a flat, neutral mass of information, without a sense that any of it matters.  Thus, for a comprehensively unloving human being, everything would seem empty of meaning.  It does not follow, however, that the affective constitution of the world is best viewed as a kind of distortion.

September 2022: Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, where he has taught for over fifteen years.  His most recent books are Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (2018, paperback 2020) and The Sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke (2022).

The publication in 1928 of W. Somerset Maugham’s collection of short stories Ashenden, or the British Agent set a new standard for espionage fiction. Based on the author’s own experience in intelligence work during World War I, three Ashenden stories discussed here, “Miss King,” “The Traitor,” and “Mr. Harrington’s Washing,” portray, in different ways, the pressures that history and ideological conflict place upon individuals and their relationships. Ashenden himself becomes subject to doubt, and often ends his mission in failure or at most an ambiguous victory. As one of the earliest protagonists of the modern espionage narrative, Maugham’s “British Agent” represents not only his nation at war but also the sense that that nation’s power and influence on the world stage are beginning to slip away.

September 2022: Martin Griffin is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His publications include Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900 (U. of Mass. Press 2009), Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (with Constance DeVereaux, Ashgate, 2013), and an edited collection on the interactions of American literature and US political history, Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience (with Christopher Hebert, U. of Tenn. Press, 2017). He is currently completing a book-length study entitled Reading Espionage Fiction: Narrative, Conflict, and Commitment from WW1 to the Contemporary Era.

Since its publication and first performance, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) has often been interpreted with regard to the theme of truth and illusion. A less studied but nonetheless important aspect of the play concerns its relation to C. P. Snow’s concept of the “two cultures.” This article argues for the convergence of these two discussions, resulting in an epistemological understanding of Albee. The play not only rejects the mutual alienation of the “two cultures” but also constitutes a dramatic move toward a synthesizing “third culture.” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is read as an epistemological drama of ideas.

September 2022:  Andreas Tranvik is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University. His research is primarily focused on literature as it relates to the history of knowledge. Currently, he is working on a research project about humour and knowledge in the works of the 18th century Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg.

This study argues that Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, published when the feminist revisionist myth-making movement was influential, is a paradigm-shifting narrative prefiguring the theory of gender as performance, which later gained popularity in the canon of contemporary women’s writing. Like the writer’s other subversive texts, it is a heterodox novel that anticipates the main lines of Judith Butler’s gender theory and provides fictional avatars for subsequent women writers. The key theme in Carter’s fiction is the loss of the sense of the norm regarding known sexual categories and traditional gender boundaries. Accordingly, the paper examines gender identity construction in terms of performativity and gender transitivity in The Passion of New Eve by interrogating the process of Evelyn’s forced sex transformation and Tristessa’s iconic characterization as a Hollywood “beauty queen,” to show how the author questions essentialist conceptions and authenticity of gendered subjectivity through her “self-contradictory” and gender-blurring characters.

December 2022:

Mustafa Kirca is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Çankaya University in Ankara. He holds a PhD in English literature from Middle East Technical University, Turkey. His research focuses on translation and comparative studies, contemporary literature, metafiction and parodic re-writing in contemporary fiction. He recently co-edited Mapping Cultural Identities and Intersections: Imagological Readings (2019).

Sıla Erkılıç has been working in Central Bank of Republic of Turkey at Governor’s Office since 2012. She holds her BA in Translation and Interpretation from Hacettepe University (2010) and her MA in English Literature and Cultural Studies from Çankaya University (2016). Her research interest includes twentieth century women’s writing, contemporary fiction, and translation.

Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” tackles the subject of mortality with technical facility and unsparing candour. It has a reputation for profoundly affecting its readers. Yet poets Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz think “Aubade” is bad for us and for poetry: it lures us into the underworld and traps us there, and betrays poetry’s purpose by transcribing rather than transforming the depressing facts of reality. Philosophers, however, quite like it. “Aubade” crops up repeatedly in contemporary philosophy of death. I examine the various appeals that philosophers have made to Larkin’s poem with a view to drawing out subtleties in the poem and the philosophical texts, before turning my attention to broader questions of its merit. At first glance, philosophy’s affinity for “Aubade” may seem to confirm Heaney and Milosz’s contention that the poem is somehow against poetry and on the side of “reason, science, and science-inspired philosophy” (Milosz). I argue that the philosophical uses of the poem help to undercut if not entirely dissolve Heaney’s and Milosz’s polarizing efforts; they are mistaken in their views about the different purposes of poetry and philosophy, but there is some philosophical support for their commitment to averting mortal despair.

September 2022:  Kathy Behrendt is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.  She received her DPhil. from the University of Oxford, where she also taught for several years.  Behrendt has published in the areas of neo-Kantian and Parfitian reductionist theories of personal identity, narrative and anti-narrative views of the self, death, fear of death, illness, literature, and meaning in life.  She is co-founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying. Her current research is focused on longevity and change-intolerance, and the limits of our concern for future generations.

Against the methodological context of play theory, this article revisits the theme of determinism and free will in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West. Highlighting the paradoxical coexistence of determinism and indeterminism in the book, it shows how Judge Holden abuses the appeal of play to lure the Glanton gang into his evil enterprise of a false game of war, which by necessity embraces deterministic rules and the freedom of play. The rules of this false game, however, are violated and neglected by the kid, who thus becomes a spoil-sport, endangering the continuity of the game. To protect his game the judge outlaws the kid, yet the threat will not dissolve: as long as the judge relies on the witnessing of other agents to validate his victory and his game, his self-determination is at risk.

September 2022: Wei Feng received his Ph.D. degree in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College Dublin, and is a professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Shandong University, China. His research interests include intercultural theatre, traditional Chinese theatre, and (post)modernist English literature. He translated Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian into Chinese.