From the point of view of feminist hermeneutics—Felski 1989, Hejinian 2000, White 2014—and phenomenology—Husserl ([1912] 1989), Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2013)—the present paper takes up analysis of Laura Mullen’s 2005 poetry collection Subject, specifically focusing on its metatextual, innovative version of poetic subjectivity. While critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff (2010) or Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) have accurately signaled to the death of creativity—an otherwise logical conclusion to the postmodern extinction of the lyric self—feminist and socially engaged analyses of contemporary poetry have reclaimed the need for historically oppressed groups to fight for their right to creativity. As such, although Amy Newlove Schroeder may have coded Subject as a “funeral for subjectivity” (qtd. in Fleisher 2012, 211), Mullen rarely lets the “I” become unnoticed. Instead, as this paper shows, the poet forces the reader to bear in mind the artifices that set the poetic self into movement. The subject—a central tool for straightforward, voice-based poetry—becomes in these poems a subjective object (Husserl [1912] 1989). Aware of itself as a physical object within the page, the “I”—repeatedly italicized or enclosed between inverted commas—is for Mullen a locus for the reconciliation of subjectivity and objectivity, expression and estrangement, agency and subjection. Most concretely, the present paper contends, the feminist subjective object can be now used as a way of contesting the pull of the “uncreative”—materialized in the popularization and evolution of AI—while still engaging in postmodern pastiche, plagiarism and appropriation. All in all, Mullen’s Subject presents the reader with a version of (female) subjectivity that escapes personal expression while still considering the self as a viable artifact within new, feminist, and socially conscious poetry.

This essay presents a reading of Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch (2022) as an example of the strand of post-postmodernist fiction foregrounding a sense of political engagement with the contemporary world. Drawing on the rhetorical approach to narrative, the analysis explores how, through the explicit voicing of the protagonist’s ideological commitments, Gunty thematically addresses the current crisis of meritocracy (cf. Wooldridge 2021; Markovits 2019). The fictionalized Midwest town that serves as the novel’s narrative space provides the ideal background for the local narrative to act as counterpoint to the larger cultural narrative linking talent with social mobility. In political post-postmodernist novels like The Rabbit Hutch, the author employs a character as her surrogate within the storyworld, endorsing her values and investing her commentary—emerging here through character-character dialogue and internally focalized narration—with her authority. Thus, rather than serving as an autofictional element that conveys indifference toward referentiality (cf. Dawson 2023), the character-author biographical connection, I argue, aligns with the novel’s emphasis on its “thematic component” (Phelan 2017). Indeed, this emphasis is realized through a metaphorical telling that enables a political discourse on social justice and the deficiencies of meritocracy. At the same time, it highlights fiction’s relevance—as an intersubjective exchange between authors and readers—in interpreting the actual world.

Canadian ecopoet and naturalist Harry Thurston has spent a whole lifetime paying attention to the more-than-human world, which has resulted in poetry collections and non-fiction books on environmental issues. Drawing on Serenella Iovino’s notion of “non-anthropocentric humanism” and Giorgio Agamben’s thinking on (non)human life and the Western distinction between human and animal, this paper proposes an ecocritical reading of the poetry collection Icarus, Falling of Birds (2017), a 12-part poem that mourns an environmental catastrophe that killed 7,500 to 10,000 songbirds of twenty-six species on the night of September 13, 2013. As Thurston explains, the tragic event happened as a flock of migratory songbirds on their journey southwards was attracted to a mesmerising flare column at a gas plant in Saint John, New Brunswick. Killed by the flames, the falling of these birds recalls, to Thurston’s mind, Icarus’s fall in the Graeco-Roman myth as his wax wings melted in approaching the sun. Upon closer inspection, the poem reveals itself as an accomplished palimpsest woven out of sources as varied as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” and several scientific works on songbirds. This paper argues that, in piecing all these textual threads together, and countering an anthropocentric conceptualisation of songbirds, Thurston is voicing a deft denunciation of humans’ disregard for nonhuman animals and their ferocious overexploitation of natural resources in capitalist societies, which is leading to alarming species extinction.

In 2017, the #MeToo movement forwarded an initiative that called for women who had survived any form of sexual violence to speak about it in what quickly became a forum-like online space for survivor-on-survivor support. In light of this powerful assembly that made the ubiquitousness of sexual and patriarchal abuses quite impossible to ignore, many of the movement’s participants began expressing their anger against the system that had sustained these aggressions in an unashamed and unapologetic way. The anger of #MeToo continued to expand outside the scope of feminist traditional demonstration and permeated into popular forms of culture and entertainment like film, television, and literature. In the latter, female anger has proved to be quite a productive force, having motivated what Jilly Boyce Kay named “a remarkable boom in publishing on female fury” (2019, 591). Based on Sara Ahmed’s model for the sociality of emotions that she articulated in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), this paper intends to offer a mapping of the circulation of female anger into mainstream literature and an exploration of how this affect is operating in some of the literary works of this “boom” of publications. First, an exploration of prior conceptions and writings of female anger will be developed, to then contend how the #MeToo served as a catalyst for its circulation and resignification. Afterwards, the approaches that authors have been taking to write about female anger at the turn of the decade will be examined and examples will be drawn from two primary texts: Lisa Taddeo’s Animal (2021), and Dizz Tate’s Brutes (2023). Finally, the main points of contention about this angry wave of literature will be properly addressed and tackled, all in hopes of reaching a comprehensive work that grounds the basis for a literary tendency that, in light of recent events in the US Presidential Election, might be on the verge of a second wave.

Social media and a plethora of other digital applications have so gradually settled in our daily existence that we rarely question their origin or the fact that they ask nothing in return. Timeo danao et dona ferentes, famously sentenced Laocoön before the gigantic gift horse the Greek offered his Trojan peers. Today, amidst the overwhelming torrent of noise generated by the relentless production and exchange of information, the flip side of the ominous present takes the sibylline form of quiet surveillance. Cathy Park Hong’s “The World Cloud,” the third section of her speculative long poem Engine Empire (2012), explores the psychological and social consequences for the individual living in the age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) and post-disciplinarian psychopolitics (Han, 2017b), where technological companies surreptitiously extract seemingly unimportant personal information from oblivious users who ignore the fine print of the Faustian deal. In this paper, I contend that Hong’s fictional future works as an analogy of our hyperconnected present, bringing to the fore the pressing subject of human relations in the infosphere and its effect on the corporeal and social body. I further claim that the virtual realm described in “The World Cloud,” an unhinged internet of sorts, coincides with Henri Bergson’s ontological plane of pure memory, the repository of human perception, which has been hijacked and commodified. Finally, I will consider Byung-Chul Han’s prediction that the age of big data implies the “end of the person who possesses free will” (2017b, 17-18) and advocate for a more empathetic use of technology in our posthuman future.

Multiple negation is a linguistic structure that entails the coexistence of two or more negative polarity items within the same clause (e.g., She does not have nothing) to create an emphatic meaning. Although the occurrence of this linguistic variant has been traditionally proscribed and restricted to the non-standard dialects of British and the United States English (Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 846), the impact of these exonormative varieties has contributed to its spread across non-native varieties of English (Collins 2023, 66), where it is starting to be analysed from a sociolinguistic and morphosyntactic point of view. To contribute to the existing literature on the matter, this paper aims to explore the sociolinguistic constraints that may have conditioned the presence of multiple negation in Asian Englishes. We have conducted a corpus-based study comparing the occurrence of this linguistic variant across the forementioned native varieties, and the following non-native varieties: Bangladeshi, Indian, Malaysian, Pakistani, Singaporean, Sri Lankan, and The Philippines Englishes, as represented in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. Overall, the Philippines and Singaporean Englishes show the highest frequencies of multiple negation due to the globalization of Present-day English and the morphosyntactic innovations of computer-mediated language. Nonetheless, the other Asian varieties present much lower frequencies, accounted for by the influence of British prescriptivism and their contact with their linguistic landscape.

The formative potential of peer- and self-assessment in EFL contexts has been investigated extensively but much controversy still surrounds the reliability and validity of these modes of assessment. This article explores the reliability of self- and peer-assessment to evaluate oral presentations in English at university level and their effect on student performance. In a fifteen-week longitudinal study, students’ oral presentations (n=65) were co-evaluated by teachers, peers, and students themselves on three occasions, five weeks apart, using an analytic scoring rubric. The mean scores for the three types of assessment (self-assessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment) were compared and analysed to determine the consistency and reliability of the evaluations. The aim was to investigate whether there is a positive correlation between the three types of raters and to determine whether peer and self-assessment are reliable tools that can be used alongside teacher assessment. The findings confirm not only the growing alignment in ratings among the three rater pairs, which improves over time, but also suggest that engaging students in co-evaluation fosters a deeper understanding of their own performance and enhances their oral presentation skills.

The article analyses how, in line with two recent literary trends—the turn to sincerity and realism in post-postmodern fiction as well as the emergence of literary works reconsidering the viability of the myth of the American Dream in the increasingly unequal US—Cameroonian-American writer Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016) provides a realist view of the country which counters the master or grand narrative of the American Dream and the meritocratic ideals that sustain it. Although previous scholarly work on the novel has focused on its exposure of the limits that the promises behind the Dream present for racialised immigrants like the protagonist Cameroonian family in Mbue’s novel, this article seeks to contribute to the discussion by exploring an overlooked dimension of this immigrant narrative set around the Great Recession of 2008. Specifically, it examines how, through a deployment of social realism with touches of naturalism, Mbue portrays the clash between her characters’ former expectations of the United States as the Promised Land of equal opportunities through hard work and the harsh reality they encounter there. This reality is nothing but a country shaped by a hyper-individualistic and competitive neoliberal economic system that became particularly predatory in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. Hence, the article contends that, behind this formal choice, lies Mbue’s aim to expose and by extension dismount the dominant albeit fallacious narrative of the US meritocratic Dream. Ultimately, the article explores the protagonist family’s deep and cruel attachment to this widespread myth until their eventual awakening in an ambiguous ending of return to the homeland which, through its detailed reflection of the harmfulness underlying these characters’ blind faith in a constructed and thus elusive dream, counters the cultural narratives promoting it.

The article seeks to explore the issue of citizenship through an analysis of three nineteenth-century short stories, all of which have tramps as characters. The author of each of these tales exhibits a certain hesitancy that they clearly felt in relation to this issue. In Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle”, the shift from British subject to American citizen explores American identity and the political and experiential ties that bind people to the state. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Seven Vagabonds” describes an alternative America peopled by vagrant citizens who create a heterotopia. The narrative allows Hawthorne to analyse some political ambiguities affecting the American nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Kate Chopin’s “A Wizard from Gettysburg” portrays the loss of citizenship as an example of the lack of belonging in postbellum America. While Hawthorne is the only writer who establishes a firm sense of American citizenship, in that he depicts a society of vagrants as an alternative to his contemporary America, Irving and Chopin emphasize the loss of citizenship as a result of political turmoil, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, respectively. The article also discusses the role of the genre of local narrative in creating the figure of the tramp that represents the stateless citizen and suggests that local narratives reveal the limits of citizenship in a nation in ways that may be not perceived by national narratives.

Present-day English affords two alternative forms for the expression of wish clauses, wish and if only, which are used in free variation to express an unlikely or impossible desire or a regret. Unlike the expression of regrets where the past perfect has become the standard form in the verb phrase, wish clauses allow for the use of alternative forms, thus reshaping the system with subtle differences. Even though the past tense is largely preferred in these contexts, could and would have also been incorporated into the paradigm to denote an unlikely or impossible desire for the present, would specifically to convey the speaker’s impatience, annoyance or discontent about a situation which is expected to change in the future, as in I wish my daughter would study more. Specific studies on the origin and distribution of wish clauses are a desideratum not only when it comes to the use of wish and if only both in present-day and the history of English, but also when it comes to the verb tenses in this type of clauses, would being a typical case at hand. This paper, therefore, investigates the history of the modal auxiliary verb would in the expression of wishes, paying particular attention to its origin, development and subsequent configuration in present-day English. This study has been conceived from a twofold perspective: the first pursues the diachronic analysis of the construction in the late modern English period; the second is a synchronic analysis assessing its status in present-day American English. The results delve into issues such as frequency and grammatical accuracy in the planning of English language teaching courses considering whether such type of constructions should be incorporated into these courses, regardless of their level and their general or specific purposes.