Contemporary American Literature Research Papers (original) (raw)

2025, Lagos Notes and Records. Vol 29. pp. 17-36

Scholars have debated the classification of the African American literature as a plain historic text, which further stimulates the controversy between history and literature. It is on this presumption that this paper critically explored Lawrence Hills' The Book of Negroes, more as a subversive text, which is constructively predisposed to certain postmodern stylistic techniques. While amplifying obtrusive matters that still affect the black race in contemporary American society, it is observed that Hill employs Historiographic Metafiction to creatively reconceptualise the narrative of African American slave history. By implication, the fictional mode in The Book of Negroes deconstructs a fixed categorisation of historical hermeneutics of African American slave narratives, as limited to the issues of slavery, captivity, racism, oppression, and so on. While using qualitative approach as methodology, Jacques Derrida's Deconstruction served as theoretical framework, complemented by Linda Hutcheon's conception of historiographic metafiction. As a stylistic import, this paper submits that historiographic metafiction is substantiated as a counterdiscourse against the lopsided criticism that deprecates black history and literary artistry as immaterial. With reference to its literary originality, The Book of Negroes is therefore categorised as a deviant form of black writing in contemporary times.

2025, Transpositiones

Enki Bilal'sgraphic novel Animal'z portrays apost-apocalyptic cli-fiscenario that is symptomatic of the Anthropocene imagination. In this narrative, the few humans that still liveafter the "coup de sang," the environmental phenomenon that has devastated the Earth,haveadoptedahybrid human-animal mode of existence in adesperate attemptfor survival. These hybrid beings, like human-dolphin hybrids, are testimony of an advanced transhumanist industry based on human experimentation and technological body modification. This hybridism, in turn, poses interesting questions from acritical posthumanist perspective, since it blurs existing boundaries between the human and the nonhuman and emphasizes multispecies entanglement, while also interrogating the nature of humananimal relationships.

2025, Anafora: Journal of Literary Studies

This article examines how Celeste Ng's novel Little Fires Everywhere deconstructs the American Dream by revealing the racial and class-based binaries that shape inclusion, power, and identity in suburban America. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction, Edward Said's Orientalism, Lisa Lowe's critique of the model minority myth, and Homi Bhabha's concept of the third space, this article argues that Ng reveals the illusion of equal opportunity by exposing how conformity to white, middle-class norms becomes the price of belonging. By using a nonlinear narrative, complex character dynamics, and a critique of commodified diversity, the novel questions the promise of equal opportunity and shows how privilege is maintained through exclusion. Ng's novel challenges the binary logics of success versus failure and insider versus outsider, revealing how marginalized characters resist and reframe the terms of belonging within structures of conditional inclusion.

2025, Deleted Journal

The prevalent modern-day exploitation of women and girls is alarming and insupportable to people of conscience globally. Generally, government around the world have been intentional at averting the menace by introducing policies and ensuring workable framework to prevent trafficking in persons. The methodology adopted is doctrinal. Notwithstanding, increased efforts by state and non-state actors to eliminate human trafficking by shrinking the susceptibility of would-be victims and abuses of human rights in all its forms, the article consider the complexities surrounding human trafficking in over-lapping emergencies, the legal issues and the human rights violations and suggests that providing a global framework will facilitate stakeholders efforts at collapsing the walls of traffickers, enhancing educational information among others.

2025

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: lorenzo rossi/Alamy Stock Photo

2025

This dissertation gives due respect to the genre of campus fiction, focusing on selected works by C.P. Snow: The Masters, The New Men, and The Affair. Combining theoretical and practical perspectives, the study is structured into three chapters, alongside an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction establishes the research objectives, key questions, methodology, literature review, and chapter outline. Chapter one defines the English campus novel, highlighting its unique characteristics and examining its appeal; it also touches upon American and Egyptian academic novels and movies. Chapter two investigates the tensions between tradition and innovation in academia, emphasizing the interplay between scientific progress, literature and societal values. Chapter three examines the narrative techniques Snow employs to portray the nuances of academic life. The study ultimately reveals that Snow's novels transcend a mere depiction of university culture; they offer a profound examination of the human condition, confronting essential questions about morality, identity, and the quest for meaning. It also concludes that there is a lack of effective roles for students, Jews and intertextuality. The novels' settings capture the evolving nature of academia and its connection to society, emphasizing the tensions between tradition and progress, authority and influence, personal and professional identity, as well as isolation and insularity. Snow's narrative uniquely blends technical and artistic elements, including poetic language, introspective storytelling, complex sentence structures, formal diction, allusions and references, subtle sarcasm, understatement, and restrained emotion.

2025, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 23:2

This article discusses the changing understanding and practice of autofiction in the broader cultural context of the transformations of lived reality, the media landscape, and ways of writing and reading life stories. Originally defined as an autobiographical narrative breaking the conventions of classical autobiography, autofiction and its meaning change as notions of autobiography and the autobiographical loosen. The article suggests that a signaled autofictional intent and deliberate ambiguity of framing are important markers of contemporary autofiction. The second part of the article analyzes the strategies of such signaling in Czech writer Jan Němec’s Ways of Writing about Love (2019). It demonstrates how this work underlines the performative nature of self-representation by commenting on the process of self-narration and self-invention as well as by enacting a patchwork identity through inserting other texts and playful touches into the narrative. By allowing new media to influence the form of the book and by transcending the boundaries of the text to continue his self-performance in other media, Němec probes the possibilities not just of “writing about love” but also of performing the self. The work thus exemplifies autofiction’s tendency to respond to sociocultural developments, including changing patterns of life storytelling.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume 23, Number 2, June 2025, pp. 249-267
Special issue Performing Selves in the 21st Century https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54958

2025, Praxis International Journal of Social Science and Literature

Through the historical novel, Eggers' 'What is the What First', I argue that the enduring hardships faced by displaced individuals persist throughout their journey from their homeland to a host nation. The Sudanese Second Civil War compels Deng and his community to flee because of the perilous conflict between the Sudanese army and rebel forces. Their vulnerability forces them to seek refuge in foreign countries. Yet, from the onset of their journey to their arrival in the host country, refugees encounter unwelcoming conditions in camps, enduring mental trauma, mistreatment, and harsh weather. Even upon reaching their destination, new challenges emerge, including legal, cultural, and emotional hurdles. This enduring suffering is a universal experience. Excessive sovereignty exercised by nation-states in a state of exception further oppresses refugees, compelling them to remain invisible for survival. Finally, I argue that these problems must be addressed by creating an unshakable framework that combines the ideas of universal right to political space with the ethics of unconditional hospitality. In pursuit of establishing the foundation for this framework, the application and practice of Arendt's rights to have right, Kant's conditional hospitality, Levinas' ethics of encountering the face, Derrida's concept of unconditional hospitality, and the principles of a just city are recommended. To improve the lives of refugees and alleviate their suffering, national and international governmental and non-governmental organizations must play a role based on the principles of unconditional hospitality.

2025, American International Journal of Contemporary Research

This paper investigated the influence of tangible resources on the performance of county health services in Kenya using resource based view approach. The research collected secondary data of all counties from ministry of health records and reports regarding current tangible resources owned by county health services departments as well as data on performance indicator achievements (over the last three years) then analyzed the relationship between the two variables to identify tangible resources associated and most useful to performance. The findings of this study confirm that there is tangible resource heterogeneity across Kenya's county health departments that explain performance indicator achievement differentials. Not all resources contribute to superior performance. It's just some specific resources that are responsible for superior performance. These are the critical strategic resources that the study suggests may be currently needed for improved performance in given health indicators. The study makes a recommendation for an improved approach that uses a composite performance index, a single measure of overall health performance, upon which resources are evaluated. This study that relates health resources with performance has the potential of advancing resource based theory from being a mere theoretical framework to being a practical framework for practicing managers, policy makers and planners in the health sector.

2025

This interdisciplinary study undertakes a comparative analysis of human identity in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, juxtaposing traditional humanity with the emerging concept of digital humans. Through a post humanist lens, this research examines how the novel's portrayal of human resilience, morality, and relationships in a world informs our understanding of identity in the face of technological advancements. The investigation is guided by three primary research objectives. It aims to analyze traditional human identities, as represented in The Road. It also aims to cover the possibilities of digital humans' challenge or reaffirm traditional notions of human identity, particularly in relation to embodiment, agency, and community.This study offers a nuanced exploration of the tensions and synergies between traditional and digital human identities. The research employs a qualitative methodology, combining close reading and thematic analysis of The Road with theoretical frameworks from posthumanism and digital humanities. This study contributes to the burgeoning discourse on digital humanity, shedding light on the evolving nature of humanity in the digital age. The findings provide valuable insights for scholars, theorists, and practitioners working at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and human identity. Ultimately, this research invites a critical reevaluation of what it means to be human in a world where technological advancements increasingly blur the lines between human and machine.

2025

This study critically investigates the observational themes obvious in the apocalyptic sci-fi Sea of Tranquility (2022). It reveals complexities surrounding human existence and free will across diversely periods of time. Each character within Sea of Tranquility deals with basic question concerning individual life and existence. The narrative efficiently intertwined considerable storylines set within diversified eras to traverse mutual human experiences. During 1912 to 2401, this work carries various characters who advocate warmth of solitude throughout distinct segments of the plotline. Set within a post-apocalyptic backdrop, Sea of Tranquility transports readers into a world lacking familiar systems and structures that once defined society. This research inquires into the influence of science and technology on human condition, aspirations, and making unconventional choices. This is qualitative study utilizing the framework Sartre's existentialism to inquire the idea of meaningful existence and emancipation in a post-apocalyptic simulative dystopia.

2025, BELLS

Classical Philology has certainly been in luck because there have been many contemporary and non-contemporary playwrights who, as a result of a personal decision and a clear consciousness of the Greek origins of Western theatre, have used all sorts of explicit or implicit references to heroes, myths, historical events, etcetera, taken from Classical Antiquity. Therefore, we should suppose that this wide range of references endow their plays with an extra value. At any rate, T. Williams's plays do display this classical fidelity in Suddenly Last Summer -with such a degree of literary savoir faire that in my opinion it could hardly be surpassed-by referring on this occasion to two mythical characters, Venus and Oedipus, who seem to be the most suitable to attain the necessary tragic tension. Indeed, the influence of the classical legacy on T. Williams's plays has often been examined 3 and I should like to mention, for instance, a good study by A. Gómez García entitled Mito y realidad en la obra dramatica de T. Williams 4 , which was published in Salamanca in 1988. In accordance with the literary tendency known as "mythical, archetypal or primitive", she is in favour of relating -audaciously and at the same time carefully-several of T. Williams's plays with archetypal classical myths, which does not mean that the playwright becomes a prisoner of the prestigious model but, on the contrary, he integrates it coherently into his personal symbolical world. He takes advantage, then, of ancient myths -like many other playwrights-on account of their enigmatic, symbolical and non-temporary nature, so that A. Gómez establishes some significant associations such as: "Persephone in Saint Louis" and The Glass Menagerie; the "katábasis to Hades" and Kingdom on Earth; "Dionysus crowned with roses" and The Rose Tattoo; "Orpheus and Eurydice" and Battle of Angels and Orpheus Descending, and, finally, "Oedipus in search of his identity" and Suddenly Last Summer. "Oedipus in search of his identity" already shows that the thesis of A. Gómez and mine must be somehow different with regard to the significance of the role played by Venus in Suddenly Last Summer. As a teacher of Classical Tradition, I know perfectly well the risk of turning any classical reference into the key of the "best" interpretation of a text. This kind of risk must certainly be taken into account but, on the other hand, I am reasonably convinced that the binomial Venus-Oedipus, Oedipus-Venus -with the help of some more classical reference I shall comment later on-, becomes in this case highly significant. And I also know the risk of approaching a literary work too much conditioned by the archetype, i.e. by myth, thus accepting

2025, Constructing Otherness: Exploring Identity at the Crossroads of Borders in John Lanchester’s The Wall and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

This thesis delves into the nuanced exploration of the intersection between borders and identity, with a focused emphasis on the construct of Otherness in contemporary fiction. Through a comparative analysis of John Lanchester’s The Wall and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, this study seeks to unravel the intricate ways in which physical and metaphorical borders shape the construction of identity and influence the portrayal of Otherness in the characters’ narratives. The theoretical framework integrates concepts from literary studies, examining how these novels contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation surrounding borders, identity formation, and the complex dynamics of Othering. By narrowing the focus to these specific aspects, this research aims to address a notable research gap and provide a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary human experience within the literary context. The findings promise to contribute valuable insights into the socio-political discourse surrounding borders, identity, and Otherness in contemporary literature.

2025

El objetivo de la presente tesis es demostrar que hay una serie de obras correspondientes a la ultima parte de la carrera literaria de Arthur Miller que muestran signos de haber sido influidas por una sensibilidad postmoderna. Mi relato comienza por definir el postmodernismo, para acto seguido comentar un conjunto de textos criticos que considero fundamentales con vistas a una discusion posterior de las obras objeto de estudio. En concreto se trata de cinco textos, escritos desde mediados de los 70 hasta mediados de los 2000, con los que ejemplifico la influencia del pensamiento y la literatura postmoderna en el Miller de ese periodo, pero tambien como muchas de sus ideas estaban en consonancia (desde un punto de vista politico, cultural y estetico) con gran parte del discurso dominante. Todo ello me permite concluir que Arthur Miller no fue durante esos anos, como suele afirmarse, una figura marginal sino alguien de una sensibilidad plenamente contemporanea. Para definir el postmod...

2025, The Kid’s Search for Identity in Blood Meridian

This paper explores the symbolic and moral trajectory of The Kid, the unnamed protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Somewhere in Tennessee. A woman dies giving birth to a boy. Her husband turns to alcohol and grief and never makes a strong connection with his son. eventually, one day, the boy runs away from home. He was 14 years old. Two years after running away, our protagonist is no longer a boy but a kid, and he finds himself in Texas, where he joins a militia that invades Mexico. Cormac McCarthy's brutal novel Blood Meridian, the violent and unforgiving landscape of the American West, becomes the backdrop for a harrowing journey through human depravity. The novel's bleakness and intensity make it a powerful, yet a demanding literary experience, exploring themes of violence, morality, the nature of evil, and the human capacity for cruelty.

2025

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the function and effect of black comedy in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Several different explanations for the presence of comedy in such a relentlessly violent novel have been made: that this humor is simply a realistic depiction of the folksy, dry vernacular of the time; that it reinforces the idea that the characters are so morally bankrupt that they are able to make jokes in the midst of so much destruction; or, that it serves to keep the reader's sensibilities in a state of flux between attraction and revulsion: relieving tension, then increasing it again and again, thereby defying easy structuring of how one should feel. This essay proposes that the gallows humor in the novel helps to establish an absurd universe (as delineated by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus), and as this existential void is circumscribed, anything and everything in the novel becomes potentially farcical.

2025

Résumé
La corruption et le développement sont liés de par leurs
manifestions. La corruption humaine est la plus grande manifestation du
consumérisme, c’est-à-dire l’idolâtrie de la consommation. Le corrompu
consomme le développement, parce qu’il ne voit le développement que
sous l’angle des grandes villas, des grosses voitures, des immeubles, des
champagnes, etc. Il mène une vie de spectacle basée sur la consommation
du développement. Alors que le développement est la signification
première de la production, de la contribution et de la création. Se
développer, c’est être capable de créer, de construire, d’innover. Ainsi,
celui qui a choisi de consommer le développement, est en toute évidence,
un corrompu. Il déduit en lui, l’identité de l’homme. Toute son attention
est fixée sur des villas, des immeubles, des voitures déjà faites. Puisque
l’identité de l’homme lui demande de ne consommer que pour être
debout en vue de se développer par son aptitude à la production ; le
constructeur est préoccupé par l’œuvre qui l’attend. Décorrompre donc,
c’est sortir du consumérisme pour embrasser le productivisme qui est
l’un des objectifs essentiels du développement. En ce sens, cet article vise
à démontrer que le productivisme doit être une idéologie sur laquelle le
Camerounais sérieux devrait se fonder pour se mettre en quête effective
du développement ; car la créativité est l’une des caractéristiques
fondamentales du véritable développement humain au Cameroun.

2025, Indonesian Journal Of Multidisciplinary research

This paper investigates how diasporic identity is formed and dislocated through narratives in The Kitchen God's Wife and The Lowland, using the lenses of postcolonial and diaspora studies. It emphasizes the educational significance of literature in fostering critical awareness of identity, hybridity, and adaptation across cultural contexts. The analysis highlights how literary texts can serve as pedagogical tools in helping students understand displacement, cultural negotiation, and the psychological impacts of migration. Drawing on Stuart Hall, Gayatri Gopinath, and James Clifford's theories, the study engages with character development across generations, while underscoring the value of diaspora literature in global education curricula.

2025, Journal of Linguistic Studies Theory and Practice

In an era where classic literature is continuously reimagined through film adaptations, Fahrenheit 451 stands as a prime example of how stories can be transformed across different media. This research explores the adaptation process of Ray Bradbury's iconic novel, examining how its dystopian narrative has been reinterpreted by two different directors: François Truffaut (1966) and Ramin Bahrani (2018). Employing theories from adaptation studies and especially drawing upon the canonical work of Hutcheon (2006), this study explores how these filmmakers navigate the transition from textual storytelling to visual representation. Truffaut’s adaptation, rooted in the 1960s, remains faithful to the original narrative -- preserving its core themes, while Bahrani’s modern version reconstructs the story to reflect contemporary societal issues. This comparison reveals the complexities of adapting fiction into film, highlighting the struggle between maintaining authenticity and embracing creative liberty. The study emphasises how each director’s choices regarding setting, character portrayal, and technological advancements reflect their unique vision of the narrative. By analysing these adaptations, the research underscores the dynamic relationship between fiction and film, demonstrating how stories evolve over time to resonate with diverse audiences.

2025, HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)

SAHMADI, Docteur ès Etudes anglaises, chercheur indépendant L'on aura beaucoup travaillé à réconcilier la fiction à la réalité, nous démenant corps et âme pour défendre la première contre tous les reproches plus ou moins virulents vitupérés à l'encontre de la facticité et la futilité de la fiction. Cette malédiction n'est plus réellement à l'ordre du jour. On réhabilite la fiction, la peaufine pour enlever toute trace de diabolisme. C'est grâce à la multiplicité et à la multiplication des indices communs à la réalité que l'oeuvre de fiction est en droit de réclamer son statut légitime d'être-au-monde. C'est ainsi que, malgré l'irréalité des personnages fictionnels, il est possible de converser sur les ressorts d'un événement au combien déterminant -la rencontre avec l'Autre. Qu'il s'agisse d'êtres humains, d'éléments biologiques, d'objets planétaires, la rencontre se décline à tout niveau et se laisse aborder sous différents angles. On appréhende une rencontre, ou bien l'on peut la désirer ardemment, la retarder ou la précipiter, ou même elle survient sans crier gare. La rencontre possède décidément bien des facettes qui contribuent à tous niveaux émotionnels à marquer et se démarquer. Une rencontre peut être fatale ou frivole, mais sa force réside avant tout dans ses conséquences. En effet, qui dit rencontre dit forcément impact, et possibilité de mésentente comme d'accord parfait et divin. Comment ce moment quasi atemporel peut-il tourner au cauchemar, à la confrontation perpétuelle ? Comment résoudre ce conflit interne et retrouver l'harmonie d'antan? Il semblerait que ce côté obscurci, bon gré mal gré, soit l'élément primordial, la condition indispensable de l'harmonie désirée, aussi paradoxal que cela puisse paraître. Il n'est pas anodin que toute tentative de réconciliation, que ce soit avec autrui ou avec soi-même, intervienne après une période conflictuelle, de lutte (plus ou moins) acharnée. Quelles que soient les motivations des partis concernés, une paix aboutie, un compromis atteint ou une réconciliation inattendue et inespérée n'auraient pas raison d'être sans confrontation préalable. Le charme de tout accord se ressent d'autant plus fortement que le désaccord a été violent, qu'il s'est prolongé dans la durée, qu'il a fait des « victimes». Aussi évidentes que ces

2025, The Grove - Working Papers on English Studies

The aim of this research is to give an accurate account of how female stereotypes around the concept of hygiene and domesticity in early 20thC North American context influenced newly arrived Eastern European immigrants. Located in New York’s Lower East Side ghetto and determined by their Jewish background, these immigrants’ arrival caused them a cultural shock to the point that they started shaping their identities according to the new standard of beauty and cleanliness related to the Americanness they were eager to perform. For this purpose, Anzia Yezierska’s short story The Lost Beautifulness serves as a referent because it demonstrates the failure of Americanization as the prospective means through which the American Dream could be experienced, a credo which, according to the author, would only reinforce classist policies instead of cancelling them. To this effect, Yezierska depicts the actual consequences for these Jewish female immigrants after attempting to Americanize their p...

2025, Czytanie Literatury Nr 13 (2024): auto/biograficzne

The paper examines contemporary autofictional texts about queer identities in the context of current debates on identity politics. Paul B. Preciado’s Can the Monster Speak? (2020) and Kim de l’Horizons’s Blutbuch (2022) reflect queer identities in the form of transgressive and transitory writing which blurs the boundaries between academic and fictional discourse and ultimately leads to a hybridisation of the narrative. Both texts use autofiction as a means of epistemic disruption, that is as a critical questioning of Western epistemology, especially with regard to academic discourse (Preciado) and cultural memory (de l’Horizon). The ‘I’ of the autofiction becomes the catalyst of an anti-hegemonic knowledge and anti-hegemonic discourse and thus performs a core concern of identity politics in a literary way, namely the claiming of a subject and speaker position in the hegemonic discourse. At the same time, the aporias of identity politics discourses also become clear when looking at both autofictions.

2025

and its Discontents" was organized by Richard Aldersley (NYU-Paris), Samantha Lemeunier (ENS-Ulm) and Mantra Mukim (CYU-Paris) and took place on September 19 & 20 at the École Normale Supérieure and New York University Paris. The gathering was made possible under the auspices of the Société d'Études Modernistes, the Modern and Contemporary Colloquium, and the CNRS. The participants, coming from different corners of the globe, shared a variety of perspectives and innovative reassessments of the classical conception of the "Long Poem" within the canonical modernist landscape. The idea of the long poem's "fixity" was tackled during these two enriching days, and through thirty diverse artistic and critical approaches. These talks ranged from textual analyses of poems from precursors of modernist versification all the way to contemporary readings that assimilated those past acclaimed works. The content developed across the presentations allowed for a wider understanding of not only the evolving contexts and techniques of the long poem's unfolding, which typically consisted of "formatting" a sizable set of verses into specific "lengths," but also toward an unrestrained vision of that practice well past the end of the twentieth century, into our present-day world. As a result, the renewed poetic appreciations that each panel proposed were the background for the sometimes difficult, at times restless, but mostly thoughtprovoking accounts that contested the frontiers of an otherwise well-established compositional method. 2 Virginia Jackson (UC Irvine) opened the conference days with a keynote lecture entitled "Impossible Poetry." She offered a panorama of the history of poetry from Poe's theorization and his treatment of the long poem to the theory of the lyric.

2025, A paper presented in a graduate symposium that took place on 22-23 July 2022, at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Throughout history, poets have adapted their modes of expression in response to changing circumstances. The study of the humanities, particularly poetry, is integral to fostering diversity and inclusion. This research identifies a connection between poetry, innovative ideas, and visual art. It further explores the concept of confessional poetry as a vital medium through which poets articulate their innermost thoughts and emotions. Key concepts such as confession, empathy, self-portraiture, and self-actualization are examined. The term "confessional" encompassed a broader meaning when this poetic form first emerged. The legitimacy of personal experiences as artistic subjects has been a topic of significant debate. Empathy and identification with

2025

The research shows the new connections that are contextualized by the ambience of post modernity. The inter connections of all actors of communication plan, established through them edition of association and the mutation is one of its main features. Today, it appears that the dividing lines between multiple fields of activity are more subtle and interdisciplinary indicates one of the best routes to walk in post modernity.

2025, Money in American Literature (ed. Paul Crosthwaite)

The great postwar buildout comprises the most dramatic chapter in the longer history of suburbanization in the US. No other moment compares in terms of scale, speed or social significance: the period saw a broader white middle-class identity coalesce around suburban homeownership. The literature that attends to these physical and social transformations – narrative material which continues to shape perceptions of suburban life today, and which provides this chapter its principal focus – is characterized by hyperbolic tensions about money. Concerns about not having quite enough of it repeatedly become matters of life and death in these stories; the very real advantages of suburban living are thus typically obscured or disavowed. This chapter argues, however, that some of the period’s literature possesses a further, instructional role: texts such as Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit offer guidance, in a manner not unlike contemporary self-help literature, about how to make money matter to just the right degree to maximize the advantages of suburban settlement. This fine balancing, which is always executed in the absence of any consideration of the precarity of others, is a precise measure of the privilege of these fictional white middle-class subjects.

2025

A Dissertation Submitted To The School Of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfillment Leading To The Award Of Master Of Business Administration Degree In Corporate Management At KCA University.

2025

The quest for the protection of women against Gender-based violence has taken the centre-stage in the human rights discourse. At the international level, the United Nations has formulated policies and legislations to achieve this goal. Human Rights mechanisms have also been put in place to ensure the protection of the human dignity for all individuals. The United Nations through most of her legislations have in strong terms prohibited gender-based violence and have enjoined state parties to take steps to ensuring the elimination of all forms of discrimination, inequalities and gender-based violence. It is against this backdrop that this paper sets out to outline, the extent to which Nigerian laws have progressed. The paper will also examine the innovations and inadequacies. In conclusion, a number of suggestions will be made for improvement of the existing legal regimes.

2025, Acta Neophilologica

2025

This article disrupts the materialistic paradigm disseminated by modern Western civilization through introducing samples of its subversion as represented in literature addressed to the young audience. The researcher limits herself to the analysis of two children's stories: How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957) by Dr. Seuss (1904-1991) and Al-Amira wa Al-Sha'ir (The Princess and the Poet) (2004) by Abdelwahab Elmessiri (1938-2008), both stories stand against the notions of consumerism, materialism, and culture industry. Dr. Seuss and Elmessiri employ children's narratives as a medium to critique modernity, a socio-cultural shift that displaces the sacred transcendental realm with an unwavering focus on scientific rationality in which materialism and consumerism are regarded as the sources of happiness. The paper adopts a comparative approach through which the similarities and differences between Dr. Seuss and Elmessiri's narratives, with reference to Alain Touraine and George Simmel's critiques of modernity, along with a consideration of Michel Foucault's conceptualization of critique. Through the characters of the Grinch and the princess, Dr. Seuss, and Elmessiri, respectively, advocate for a return to the spiritual dimensions of human existence beyond the confines of material possessions. Dr. Seuss focuses his critique on the commercialization of holidays and the adverse consequences of materialism, while emphasizing the redemptive potential of compassion and community as well as the significance of human connections, whereas Elmessiri questions the prevalence of scientific reason over the spiritual dimensions of human existence, delving into the paradigms of immanence and transcendence.

2025, Evija Trofimova. Paul Auster’s Writing Machine: A Thing to Write With. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 223 p.

2025

Draft of a chapter that eventually appeared in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020 (Eds. Patrick O’Donnell, Lesley Larkin, and Stephen Burn), which was published in 2022 by John Wiley and Sons. If quoting and... more

2025

A series of posts that compares the 22 Tarot Trumps to the plays of William Shakespeare

2025

DRAFT A few months ago I contributed an essay in this magazine discussing the collaborative work of turn of the 20 th century Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and founders of analytical psychology and psychotherapy, Carl Jung, and... more

2025, Rethinking the North American Long Poem: Matter, Form, Experiment, edited by Ridvan Askin and Julius Greve, University of New Mexico Press

Claudia Rankine's American Lyric long-poem project spans two books with the same subtitle: Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). 1 Lonely is Rankine's first book to feature collaged visual components that appear in combination with the text. Some of these images are: a small, cube-like television; an X-ray; photographs; maps; prescription labels; a diagram of an artificial heart; and a billboard. Of these, the television is most ubiquitous, a realistic image of an old-fashioned, boxy television set with black-and-white static on its screen that contains a barely discernible image of President George W. Bush that blends in with the white noise. Used to denote the book's section breaks, the television also displays scenes from movies and television news, as well as slogans from commercials. Lonely examines physical illness and painful emotional states (loneliness, sadness, hopelessness) as both individual and social states of being and takes up, as an ethical question, the relationship of the self to the other: "Why are we here if not for each other?" 2 Lonely engages large-scale existential concerns about life and death, including both individual trauma that can go unrecognized, relegated to the silence of a "personal problem, " and collective trauma, such as that experienced in conjunction with the AIDS crisis in South Africa and other nations, the Gulf War, and the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and other US landmarks. In addition to nearly universal existential conflicts, the poem also explores the specific precarity of Black lives brought about by interpersonal and structural racism, including hate crimes and police violence. Rankine links these themes with the experience of everyday life in the twentieth century, which is deluged by the twenty-four-hour news

2025, Hollywood Progressive

he passing of the celebrated novelist, Cormac McCarthy, on June 13, 2023, brought a close to one of the most accomplished careers in American letters. As the author of thirteen novels, two screenplays and a dramatic work in five acts over a period spanning almost sixty years, which unflinchingly explore the depths of human evil, McCarthy had a significant impact on the development of post-war American literature. In works owing as much to his seeming indifference to the prevailing movements and fashions of the day, as they do to his innovations in style, "unblotted" punctuation, and narrative perspective, his work is suffuse with descriptions indicative of a preference for modernist aesthetics over the decentering postmodernist pyrotechnics that dominated the literary scene since the early 60s. These features were bolstered by an elevated prose style that often wielded a Biblical resonance in which McCarthy gave presence to the desolate worlds appearing in his earliest writings starting with The Orchard Keeper in 1965, which a critic writing in Kirkus lauded for its "unusual writing furrowed by a stark, visual imagery." Given the surreal and often gruesome themes McCarthy so often explored, however, he also had his detractors. Another critic writing in The New York Times on this same novel, for instance, dismissed McCarthy's writing as at once "handicapped" due to a "humble and excessive admiration for William Faulkner," while conceding that "he does write with torrential power." McCarthy was able to give modern emphasis to the kind of evil few could imagine as an McCarthy was able to give modern emphasis to the kind of evil few could imagine as an intimate part of American history and culture. intimate part of American history and culture.

2025, Hollywood Progressive

2025

As one of the outstanding works written in the late twentieth century, Paul Auster's Moon Palace is the extension of the prominent discussion existing in his works, which concerns the issue of identity formation and the characters' involvement in the expedition toward self-acknowledgment. Looking through the life of Marco Fogg as the main character of the novel, it has been desired to outline the existential points of view laid in the novel. Unlike the previously conducted studies, this paper is diverting the central focus of its analysis from the psychosocial perspectives introduced by James Marcia to the existential outlook by providing the notions of critical existential philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre. Accordingly, the famous theory of identity formation that Marcia established has close parallels with the concepts that Heidegger and Sartre have discussed concerning the human beings who are considered beings-in-the-world, or, as it is called, "dasein." Throughout this procedure, the main protagonist's various identity formation phases have been investigated through existential concepts like "thrownness," "nothingness," and "bad faith." And in the end, the outcome of such an analysis is tracking down the latent sides of existential concepts existing in the novel, which have not been the center of focus in previous studies.

2025

This paper analyses Thomas Pynchon's V. (1961) in light of two contradictory scientific perspectives and argues that Pynchon uses complex science-based formulations on different semantic levels to give shape to a seemingly shapeless world of uncertainty. V. is considered by many critics a historiographic metafiction which evolves through certain new readings of the early 20 th century Europe's colonialism and is given a sense of uncertainty to historical consciousness via Pynchon's postmodernist style. This paper suggests that though Pynchon uses the techniques (on the syntactical level) which define postmodernism and create a pandemonium of complexity and meaninglessness, he leaves hidden blueprints which give shape and order to the syntactical and semantic chaos created in his works. To achieve this goal, the main methodological focus of the paper would be on Claude. E. Shannon's (1948) "information theory.

2025

In the wake of WWII, how far science and technology may advance and the ethical responsibilities they bring became prominent problematics in philosophy and literature, including Kurt Vonnegut's novels, particularly Cat's Cradle (1963), a work of post-apocalyptic science fiction that intriguingly displays the dual nature of science as both creative and destructive. Since the novel deals with the catastrophic potentials of scientific inventions, it provides fertile ground for an ethical analysis based on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Poststructuralist thought, which has not previously been employed to analyze the concept of science in this novel. Considering this and using a descriptive-critical method, this qualitative, library-based study explores how in Cat's Cradle science actualizes virtual possibilities, comparing it with artistic creation. Based on Deleuzeoguattarian theory, the analysis delves into the ethical implications of scientific knowledge as truth and the (im)morality of science. The results suggest that in Vonnegut's narrative science is essentially neither moral nor immoral, but rather virtually amoral, since Dr. Hoenikker is depicted as a scientist who, unaffected by morality, recognizes the virtual power of creation in science and represents what Deleuze terms active science. The findings of the study, thus, elucidate the virtual potentials underlying science in the novel, the way it affects the characters' deterritorialization, its relation to ethics, and its capacity not only to extract functions but also create presubjective concepts and affects. The findings of the study carry significant implications for investigating the nature of science in (post-)apocalyptic science fiction, not least Vonnegut's other novels.

2025, Avant-Gardes au Prisme du Genre de 1945 à Nos Jours: Esthétiques, Mémoires, Actualité [Cahiers d'études germanilques]

From 1972 to 1977 the German painter Marianne Wex undertook an extensive research project aimed at demonstrating the cultural nature of gendered physical postures, published in book form as Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, in 1979. Emerging from Wex’s experience with feminist consciousness-raising and collective self-education, the dialectical account of her own political and personal awakening deploys the language of kinesic analysis alongside ethnographic self-study. The dialogue of Let’s Take Back Our Space with pop behavioral psychology and cybernetics is integral to Wex’s systems thinking, while her self-implication as articulated in both text and images represents a radical, even defiant, divergence from those referents in a project of what queer and trans* theorists have come to call “autotheory.”

2025, Mediations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan University Press)

This is a re-introduction to Barbara Guest's life and work, via her prose, being the "Introduction" for Mediations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, also edited by Joseph Shafer.

2025, 17th SAAS Conference: American Dreams, American Nightmares, American Fantasies

In Walden, Transcendentalist poet Henry David Thoreau sets out what, for him, represents the great symbol of American poetry: the pond as an extension of the poet’s reverie, ontological reflection and communal state with the universe. Ponds appear throughout American literature as symbols of uncertainty, existentiality, and refer to remote places of dream and death. Taking as a hypothesis the link between a poet’s physical self-exilic experience and his exegetic detachment from urban society, a psychoanalytical reading evidenced by the protrusion of katabatic elements such as stagnated water may be looked upon. This paper aims to compare the ostracising approaches of dreams and water in poetics so distant in sociopolitical contexts as the one from Elena Garro (Mexico, 1916-1998), Louise Glück (United States, 1943-2023) and Louise Erdrich (United States, 1954—).

2025, PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION

According to postcolonial and feminist theorists, women are suppressed and depressed by the colonial power and patriarchy and this has not merely happened once in a blue moon but a progressive process even after the independence in many countries especially in America. It is widely seen that women are oppressed and subjugated in the name of racism, colorism, gender difference. The current article deals with such inequalities in society especially in America in the light of the novel "God help the Child (2015)" by Tony Morrison. In the novel, the protagonist named Bride faces such issues and complexities throughout her life starting from her childhood. When she opens her eyes in her home the element of otherness can be vividly seen in the character of Bride, as she was rejected by her parents because of her dark skin and she was deprived of her basic rights in the name of colorism and racism.