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

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.

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.

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.

The play Elijah (1963), written by the philosopher Martin Buber in his twilight days, represents his diagnosis of the state of humanity at his time. I discuss this play as an allegorical drama, examining it against the background of Buber’s rejection of allegory, and demonstrating its implementation of the specific sense Buber gave to the allegoric in "Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism" (1934). Dramatic, allegorical multilayered agon enables Buber to express the idea of crisis and struggle between the principles of form and formlessness and between decisiveness and hesitation as enabling decision, that is, creation; it enables a simultaneous exploration of the political and the existential, the individual and the collective, as well as the validation of the affinity that Buber identifies between the individual inner struggle and the struggle embodied in history. In the frame of a Biblical play, Buber thus expressed his thoughts about Jewish society in the nascent State of Israel and about post-war Germany, his interpretation of the Cold War. The play renders his philosophical and theological concerns and his interpretation of history, including his own role in it.

October 2020: Einat Davidi, author of Paradiso as Pardes: A Contrapuntal Reading of José Lezama Limas’ Poetology and the Cabalistic Theory of Language and History (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012) and of several articles on Cuban Literature (José Lezama Lima, Guillermo Rosales) and Spanish Baroque literature (Calderón de la Barca, Antonio Enríquez Gómez) is faculty member at the department of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Haifa. 

Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once described The Swamp Dwellers as an exploration of economic displacement and cultural disruption resulting from the pillage of natural resources by colonial governments and international corporations. Soyinka set his play deep in the Niger Delta, a place of dense mangrove swamps and the folkloric Mami Wata—a half-human, half-fish seductress, to highlight the environmental degradation and lost livelihoods of the Yoruba, Ogoni, and other indigenous peoples. By focusing on a handful of characters who inhabit or pass through a small hut built by Makuri and Alu, an impoverished elderly couple eking out an existence in the heart of the swamp, Soyinka reveals how migration and acculturation erode traditional values and reshape identity in ways that encourage avarice and self-interest over family and community, promote political and economic corruption, and accelerate the replacement of indigenous belief systems with the depersonalized transactional values of commerce and trade.

October 2020: Mark S. Ferrara is associate professor of English at State University of New York College at Oneonta and author of several books including Palace of Ashes (2015), Sacred Bliss (2016), and American Community (2020).

This paper explores Varlam Shalamov’s representation of the fate of the Russian intelligentsia in the Gulag, his framing and reframing his idea of the writer’s duty. In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov not only bears witness to the Russian intelligentsia in the camps, but also establishes a dynamic relationship of common identity between the author and those about whom he writes. This relationship restores the erased identities of intelligenty and sheds light on Shalamov’s understanding of the writer’s duty to give voice to their otherwise lost experiences. Instead of declaring the Gulag the site of the death of the Russian intelligentsia in the 20th century, the Soviet camp experience becomes for Shalamov an opportunity to bring nuance to the multidimensional heritage of the intelligentsia and to affirm his belief in the immortality of the intelligentsia as an idea.

October 2020: Josefina Lundblad-Janjić is assistant professor of Russian in Monterey, California, and has worked as a lecturer at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her doctorate in Slavic Languages & Literatures from University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on narratives of imprisonment and exile in the Russian literary tradition in general and on the prose and dramaturgy of Varlam Shalamov in particular.

The article analyses ideological and genre aspects of Joseph Brodsky’s work, associated with the imperial theme in Russian literature. By drawing on methods from comparative literature, historical poetics, and empire studies I claim that a concern with space is not only central to Brodsky’s work but also consistent with his imperial thinking. Brodsky’s verse maintains a direct dialogue with Classicist poetry and Acmeist poetry (particularly Osip Mandelstam), both of which dealt with the notion of empire through adoption of the “high” literary style. The Imperial theme in Brodsky's oeuvre also overlaps with the dismantlement of the Russian imperial subject at the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, I argue that he was, above all, the last Russian imperial poet.

October 2020: Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include: Russian literature, Modern Hebrew literature, and Poetics of Space in East-European context. He serves as senior lecturer at the department of literature, arts and language at The Open University of Israel. Rafi is the author of two books: Jewish Letters at the Pushkin Library:  Yosef Haim Brenner's work and its connection to Russian Literature and Thought (Bialik Institute, 2013, in Hebrew), and Wandering Heroes, Committed Writers: Nihilists and Nihilism in Russian Literature (Van Leer/Hakibutz Hameuhad, 2015, in Hebrew). Together with Natasha Gorodinsky he edited a special issue of Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature dedicated to representations of European metropolis in Hebrew literature.

This paper examines some of the ways in which olfactory representations can convey atrocities of the battlefield and their moral implications. Analysis of olfactory images and of their emotional and even physical affordance suggest the differences in the writers’ ethical and aesthetic stance. Some represent war in all its violence, cruelty, and horror; others leave the harsh reality only implied and stylized, according to the principle that “silence screams louder than words.” Seven Israeli writers are discussed: Yoram Kaniuk, Shulamith Hareven, Yuval Neria, Haim Sabato, S. Yizhar, Haim Be’er and Yitzhak Ben-Ner. Their use (or omission) of references to smell may be indicative of their attitude to war. This study shares the growing interest in the senses and their significance in Humanities and social sciences.

October 2020: Yael Balaban is a researcher of Hebrew literature and a lecturer at Beit Berl College, Israel. She holds a Ph.D. from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include sensory representations in literature, musical ekphrasis, and Modern Hebrew literature. She is author of Many Voices: Reading the Prose of Shulamith Hareven, Magnes Press, 2019 [Hebrew].

This paper posits that Esther Syiem’s poem, “To the Rest of India from Another Indian” (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways — foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its imagination. The subnational discourse, then, homogenizes the national imagination, and sets it in binary opposition to the modulated counter imagination which is also homogenized. It proceeds, after setting up a binary opposition, to contradict, delimit, and alienate itself in order to be recognized as another authentic and central entity parallel to the pedagogy that is deemed to be national. This paper concludes that Syiem’s subnational discourse, considered as a form of minority discourse, goes against the grain of Homi K. Bhabha’s view of minority discourse.

October 2019: 

Muthukumar Manickam is a Research Scholar working on Nationalism with a focus on the representation of the North-East. He studies the points of intersection between Nationalism and Subnationalism. He has published an article titled “Historicising the Banal: Media Representation of India’s North-East as Discriminatory Pedagogy Begetting Subnational Discourse” in Archiv Orientalni, Published by Oriental Institute Czech Academy of Sciences

Vinod Balakrishnan teaches Creative Writing and Communication. He is a motivational speaker, practising poet, and yoga enthusiast. He reads on Life Writing, Nation, Indian Writing in English, Cultural Representation. He has published articles in journals such as a/b, Pragmatism Today, Journal of Somaesthetics, Dharmaram University Journal of Religions and Philosophies, Journal of Creative Communication, and Lit Crit. He has also contributed chapters in various edited volumes published by Springer, Bloomsbury, and Brill.

Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is more than a tribute to life at sea, but the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of a multi-national group of physical laborers paid a meager wage, living in harsh conditions, and performing repetitive and physically debilitating work, is significantly understudied. The present article considers Conrad’s compelling representation of the life of British merchant sailors for a middle-class literary audience. I demonstrate how Conrad makes his readers listen to the voice of the sailors, reflect on the value of their work, and appreciate the importance of seemingly menial, physical labor — such as serving coffee during a storm.

October 2019: Johan Adam Warodell has published articles on Conrad and Melville in The Cambridge Quarterly, Conradiana, The Conradian, English, Leviathan, Notes & Queries, and the Yearbook of Conrad Studies. His writing has won prizes from the Joseph Conrad Societies of Britain and America. He was most recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He is presently completing a monograph on Conrad.