This article proposes a new approach to Titus Andronicus's infamous ‘Fly-Killing Incident’ in act 3, scene 2 which prioritizes the role of the segmented fly as a character alongside the dismembered Andronici. Rejecting the critical tendency to read the diminutive figure as a passive emblem for interpreting humanity, this article explores the subjectivity of the fly as an individual with a particular focus on the implications of its murder and dismemberment. Whilst acknowledging its often-flippant critical history, this article asks, ‘What if we took the fly seriously’?

Abstract: This article unearths two cases of Afrodescendant literary criticism from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin America. Afrodescendant writers Martín Morúa Delgado (Cuba, 1856-1910) and Hemetério José dos Santos (Brazil, 1858-1939) critiqued the works of the influential white Cuban Cirilo Villaverde and Afro-Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, respectively. In 1892, Morúa questioned the racial representations in Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882), challenging its status as an antislavery novel. Similarly, in 1910, Hemetério critiqued Machado for overlooking Brazil’s history of enslavement and omitting enslaved characters from his works. While Morúa’s critique is recognized by scholars of Villaverde, Hemetério’s critique of Machado remains fundamentally overlooked. This article argues that their critiques were not just mere reactions to specific works but strategic efforts to assert literary autonomy and influence national literatures. It examines the challenges these writers faced in the highly racialized post-abolition context, particularly the weight of the “informant” role, and how they navigated this while asserting their autonomy. By focusing on Morúa’s observations on aesthetics and Hemetério’s on history, the article challenges the prevalent critical tendency in contemporary Afro-Latin American studies to privilege historical readings, arguing that for these writers, both form and content were important. Keywords: Afro-Latin American criticism; Martín Morúa Delgado; Hemetério José dos Santos; Cirilo Villaverde; Machado de Assis; post-abolition; realism

Abstract In the early nineteenth century, concert reviews often judged pianists and pianos on their combined value. This critical tendency is exemplified in the professional career of virtuoso pianist Anna Caroline de Belleville. This article examines the reciprocal relationship between Belleville and her pianos — particularly Érard’s and Streicher’s — within the contexts of the technological development of piano-making and piano performance culture. I argue that the distinct advantages of Belleville’s pianos helped her develop a well-rounded pianism that combined both brilliancy and lyricism, winning her a place among the most distinguished pianists of the day. Furthermore, Belleville’s active engagement with and promotion of her pianos enhanced the instruments’ own reputation and commerciality. This understudied yet illuminating story about the interdependency of the virtuoso and her instruments (and attendant instrument makers) enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century performance culture by highlighting the inextricable relationship between technology, virtuosity, commerciality, and entrepreneurship.

This article argues that Eliza Haywood’s novella Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725) presents a theory of fiction in its diegesis rather than in metafictional reflections. In other words, the protagonist engages in world-building actions—constructing a secret plot with a specific setting and a cast of different personas—that reveal the novella’s form to be evidence for the content of its theory. Resisting the critical tendency to read Fantomina as evidence for its historical context or as characteristic of a primitive stage in the novel’s rise, the author contends that the novella’s episodic, atemporal conception of fiction provides a model after which critics may construct more varied, maze-like, histories of the novel.

ABSTRACT: This essay seeks to identify and discuss a recurrent narrative pattern in Don DeLillo's middle period novels, namely Libra, Underworld, Cosmopolis , and Falling Man . The pattern can be tentatively described as a multiplotted narrative structure, combining several sequences of events of varying duration and order. I propose the category "converging narratives" to depict it, drawing on the ambivalent meaning of "convergence" itself and referring to both the tendency converge and its fulfilment. I will argue that DeLillo's converging narratives work as sophisticated creative interrogations of the ideas of sequence and causality, which are insufficiently described through existing terminology. I draw on unnatural narratology and poststructuralist theory in order to formally describe and discuss the implications of DeLillo's converging narratives, identifying the ways in which narrative convergence fails to produce a sense of totality in them. My reading of these texts tries to move beyond the critical tendency to inscribe them within binary systems of aesthetic classification around realism, postmodernism, and post-postmodernism, which concentrate on the relation of fiction to the representation of totalities or closed systems. My conclusion points to how DeLillo creatively articulates an irresoluble tension between opposing forces at work within the very concept of "convergence."

The purpose of the research is to reveal the meaning of media fusion as a technology and mechanism of the television ecosystem transformation in the first quarter of the 21st century. The research methodology. The article tested, firstly, the ecosystem approach that helps to identify television as an ecosystem and one of the important segments of the digital audio-visual landscape on the modern stage that is in a transformational stage, characterised by fusional, co-evolutionary and convergent processes between traditional and new media, and, secondly, the methodology of media archaeological research, according to which traditional media still make up a significant part of news consumption among the elderly, but however new media have changed the paradigm of development and functioning of the TV industry, pushing the former to deconstruct models of managing and republishing popular content on social, mobile and digital (non-traditional) platforms. The scientific novelty is that, for the first time, attention is focused on the importance of media-fusion technology in the convergence of traditional and new media within the modern digital audio-visual landscape and the phenomenon of media fusion as a mechanism of the television ecosystem transformation in the 21st century is conceptualised. Conclusions. It was proved that media fusion as a mechanism of the television ecosystem transformation is becoming a critical tendency, especially in the example of the big video model, and is opening new possibilities for television media development through the transition of traditional television to platform integration with new media. Media fusion technology has also resulted in a change in focus. It approaches the media and delivery methods of television (multimedia) content, models of working with the audience (“user-generated content”), restructuring of the newsroom (“news disc” and “media director”), and a change in the production model, turning it into a chain of “planning” for all formats.

Abstract This article explores the influence of settler colonialism on the emergence and development of literary modernism in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on Algeria-born Albert Camus's first novel, L’étranger (1942), questioning the critical tendency to read this work solely in relation to metropolitan literary and philosophical trends. Recontextualizing L’étranger with regard to a largely forgotten corpus of French-Algerian colonial fiction, including novels by Louis Bertrand, Robert Randau, and Paul Achard, reveals parallels between Camus's “absurd hero” and the hypermasculine and violent protagonists often idealized in this cultural milieu. Reading L’étranger within a French-Algerian context suggests that Meursault's “existential” transcendence of conventional morality emerges within the ideological nexus of settler colonialism—a situation defined by the need to eliminate the indigenous population while disavowing responsibility for doing so. This analysis suggests tantalizing connections between the aesthetic innovations commonly called modernism and the material-affective structures of settler violence. Such parallels make it important to consider the frontier as a space that is central to the cultural developments of modern literary history.

The main aspect of the critical tendency of non-Muslim biographers is the criticism of the political and social issues of the biography of the Prophet (peace be upon him). In this regard, their first objection is that the Prophet (peace be upon him) forcibly spread his religion among the people through the sword, so that people were forced to accept Islam. The purpose of taking up the sword was to show how many hardships the Prophet and his companions had to face in the early period of Islam, but the principles of patience, perseverance and peace were adopted, and later he took up the sword to defend himself to prevent the oppression of the infidels. Similarly, non-Muslim biographers presented him as an unimportant figure in society, while the personality of the Prophet (peace be upon him) was well-known and recognizable in the Meccan and Medinan periods, and people loved him more than their own lives and property. The livelihood of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and his companions has also been objected to. Muslims gathered in trade caravans to fulfill their economic needs and fulfilled their needs, while the purpose of stopping these trade caravans was to weaken the power of the infidels and the purpose of the Muslims was to create fear and power in the hearts of these infidels. Non-Muslim biographers have described the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)'s preaching struggle as the acquisition of political power and authority, while he (peace be upon him) lived a life of great humility and simplicity, transcending all these things. There was no purpose in his life to acquire political power and authority, rather his entire life was spent for the upliftment of the religion of Islam, to bring people out of the valleys of misguidance and to bring them to guidance. This was the purpose of his life. The claim that the Jews were treated very badly in society and were forcibly exiled is also not true, but rather they had to be killed and exiled because of their deceit and harm to Islam. There is no point in criticizing the political and social affairs of non-Muslim biographers, as if they want to diminish your greatness by making such objections that people will express hatred and enmity towards you. In reality, these people can never succeed in their goal. In this discussion, along with criticizing the political and social affairs of non-Muslim biographers, it has also been refuted with arguments.

ABSTRACT Modern criticism tends to assume that the excess of meaning in Shakespeare’s language gives voice to forces other than the motivations of his characters. But this critical tendency diminishes Shakespeare’s approach to characterisation. Focusing on The Merchant of Venice, my essay shows how the play continually encourages spectators and readers to sense implicit meaning in a character’s speech, without clarifying whether any meaning is actually being implied. The surprise of the play is that its characters turn such ambiguity to their advantage by employing proxy forms of expression that allow them to say indirectly what they would otherwise feel powerless to say. These proxy languages, however, exact a cost: they alienate characters from themselves by distancing them from their own intentions. While moneylending, for example, helps the title character of the play, the merchant Antonio, express his love for Bassanio with increasing fervency, it also turns him suicidal; so, too, does Shylock’s moneylending empower and then disempower him. The more successful form of proxy expression in the Merchant seems to be Portia’s disguise as Balthazar. But the essay ends by asking whether Shakespeare himself thought he paid a price for speaking indirectly through disguises.

ABSTRACT This essay considers – and seeks to complicate – the critical tendency to gender constrained writing as ‘masculine’ and to read women’s experimental literature as a ‘feminine’ writing of the body. Via readings of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between and Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (1986), it elucidates how the constraint in each novel actually produces the focus on the body – without thereby simulating a writing of the body – and on questions of gender and desire. In both novels, I suggest, gender itself emerges as a form of ‘constraint’. In so doing, the essay seeks to move beyond any facile polarisation of constraint and excess, the conceptual and the embodied, and to unpick the gender-political possibilities of certain experimental literary strategies.

Abstract: This article examines the lifelong trajectories of exile in Lê's late works, Lame de fond (2012) and Je ne répondrai plus de rien (2021). Departing from a critical tendency to focus on the exilic identities of the young female protagonists that featured most prominently in Lê's early works, this article analyses Lê's contemplation of exile as a long-term condition in her late works. It concludes by drawing a parallel between these fictional texts and Lê's own lifelong, non-fictional construction of a 'lettered republic' of exiled, transient, and isolated writers that culminates in De personne je ne fus le contemporain (2022).

Abstract Bioregionalism was popularised in the 1970s back to the land movement. It is distinguished from other forms of environmentalism through the spatial imaginary of a bioregion as the scale for environmental action and regenerative living. Bioregional thought has been widely critiqued by geographers for its potentially deterministic understanding of the relationship between place and culture. This paper argues that bioregionalism is less of a homogenous movement and more of a discursive forum that houses a spectrum of perspectives. We identify three key tendencies within bioregional thought, an ontological tendency, a critical tendency and a processual tendency. Each tendency is rooted in different spatial imaginaries, and generates different axiologies and strategies of change. We argue that contemporary processual tendencies in bioregional thought are productive for geographers considering questions of (1) materiality, agency and place, (2) politics, ethics and place, and (3) acting in place for urgent and ethical change.

ABSTRACT Kazuo Ishiguro’s penchant for affectless, stilted or robotic narrators, along with his tendency to return across his oeuvre to the same concerns and motifs, has led to a growing critical tendency to identify his writing as (interestingly) uninteresting. His most recent novel Klara and the Sun (2021) (swiftly condemned as boring by many online opiners) seems to address this question head on, by thematising interestingness itself. This article reads Klara and the Sun in light of recent work (by Sianne Ngai and others) which theorises interestingness as one of our contemporary aesthetic categories. Exploring Ishiguro’s iterated fictional concerns, in particular via a comparison with Never Let Me Go, it tests out a number of ways in which the uninterestingness of Ishiguro’s narratives has been turned to critical account, but argues that Klara and the Sun withstands these critical manoeuvres. Instead, it demonstrates – via engaging with John Frow’s formalist work on literary interest – that Klara offers a phenomenological investigation of how fictional interest is made. This account serves as a quiet manifesto for the interest of fiction tout court, and for the interest of Ishiguro’s ongoing fictional project.

It’s now twenty-five years since Eve Sedgwick put into question suspicion’s monopoly over the critical landscape with the first version of her essay, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’.1 Against the 1970s and 1980s ‘critical habits’ of paranoia and suspicion, Sedgwick proposed repair: an orientation and a tendency that involved pursuing not just relations between an abstracted subject and object, but also the modes of knowledge, and emotional experiences, of the particular subject involved in the critical relation: the ‘seeker, knower, or teller’.2 Reparative reading has had its critics, many of them writing in the vein of Lauren Berlant’s warning, in Cruel Optimism, against the ‘overvaluation of reparative thought’ as part of a ‘larger overvaluation of a certain mode of virtuously intentional, self-reflective personhood’.3 Nonetheless, Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair is written from a present-day context in which debates over repair’s value take as given that it has usurped suspicion as the dominant mode of US literary scholarship. Against what appears to be this naturalisation of repair, one of Stuelke’s central aims is to return us to the critical and political events of the 1970s and 1980s – the historical moment in which Sedgwick was developing her critique of paranoia – in order to understand the sea-change. The book’s five chapters attend to distinct scenes in which the critical tendency to repair coalesced with tendencies in activism, indicating the imbrication of each with the action and rhetoric of the state. These are: the US feminist sex wars; the black feminist imaginary of the Caribbean; Central American solidarity movements; the rise of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programmes; and the audio-sphere of the US invasion of Panama. From such concentrated moments of discourse, Stuelke sets out to illustrate that the reparative turn should be understood as responsive to and produced by the ideological landscape of neoliberalism and its affective episteme: its casting of ‘knowledge, self, and world in the language of emotion and feeling’.4

Abstract: Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman , or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital.

ABSTRACT After three family members’ deaths, expulsion from the Paris Conservatoire for perceived lack of talent, and escaping compulsory military service via deliberate bronchitis infection, Erik Satie returned to Montmartre and soon composed the Trois Gymnopédies (1888). Gymnopédie no. 1's famously liminal simplicity is now culturally ubiquitous. This article speaks to the lacuna between Satie's nebulous queerness and his favoured term ‘gymnopédie’ by unveiling a somatic gesture in the oft-forgotten Gymnopédie no. 3 where the player's hands interlace to sustain overlapped chord voicings. To read this gesture as a form of touch that queers classical technique, I contextualise the suite's affects in Satie's grief-laden biographical moment, and analyse Gymnopédie no. 3's somatic device via traditional music analysis. I examine John Cage's sonic pedagogies developed during his 1948 Black Mountain College lectures to show how Cage's paradigm of embodiment was derived from Satie's methodological treatment of embodied experience. Finally, I include a transdisciplinary somatic interpretation of Gymnopédie no. 3 to contrast customary music analysis. As a practice of perverse presentism, I seek to write within historical tenuity surrounding Satie's queer positionality and the Gymnopédies, necessitating queer pedagogies that visit this question without engaging the critical tendency to essentialise queerness as transhistorical fact.

The Frankfurt School of Criticism is a school with a critical tendency that was established in the thirties of the twentieth century and reached its climax in the year 1968, it was named after the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt as its center. This school was distinguished by the multiplicity of its intellectual directions, which, despite their differences, agreed on their criticism of the totalitarian industrial society and the various contradictions it produced.

Reviewed by: Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein Yael Levin Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 312 pp. Hugh Epstein’s Hardy, Conrad and the Senses brings together an impressive array of known and lesser-known Victorian scientists, philosophers, and psychologists to stage a defamiliarizing return to Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. Testing assumptions of historical periodization that have traditionally separated critical approaches to their work, the book shows that the labels Modernism and Victorian have muffled significant connections between the two authors’ representation of sensory impressions. Epstein uses this new focus to reframe the comparative analysis beyond the critical tendency to read the two authors [End Page 374] together through their shared pessimistic vision of a human existence bereft of providence. A book of criticism can offer no greater reward than allowing us to see works we know and love in a new light. Reading these novels alongside a historically informed conceptualization of the senses, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses does precisely this. The book proceeds as an interrogation of the work of the senses, a preoccupation that Victorian art shared with the physical sciences. Epstein asks that we view what has been deemed a uniquely modernist preoccupation through Victorian discourse and ideas. This is a theoretically simple yet original move. Distinguishing between the literary impressionism associated with modernism and the work of the authors in question, Epstein shows that the focus here is not on the consciousness of the focalizer. Unlike Henry James, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf, Hardy and Conrad look to the “vibrations in the ether,” “the relations between things” that we associate with atmosphere. Conrad’s sensationism, he writes, “conceives of receptiveness and understanding as a continual process of exchange rather than as a raid whose haul is secreted within imprisoning walls; and the action of each novel is to disallow their desire to remain onlookers in an unassailed subjectivity” (42). The drama unfolds as a tension between the “vivifying receptiveness of the senses” that threaten “to absorb one into the present moment” and the need to “maintain the self-possession which enables one to negotiate the world” (19). It shuttles from mind to mood, from interiority to exteriority, a “physical involvement in a scenic moment that is also active in producing consciousness” (49). This is a recording of the present that contains consciousness rather than being contained by it. Epstein terms this literary method scenic realism. It is the particular form which marks the contribution of Hardy and Conrad to the swelling of novelistic description in the age of the observation of phenomena. It asks for a responsiveness to atmospheres and vibrations, a bodily cosmic awareness, such that the components of a scene as a whole, including human consciousness, infuse the rendering of moments as they pass. The written scene that results thus belongs neither entirely to a personal inner conception, nor entirely to a visible external social or physical reality, but to the moment in which those two coalesce to realise themselves as an event. (70) Such literary exploration proves significant against the backdrop of a conceptualization of subjectivity that is seen as inherently passive. American historian and diplomat Henry Adams (1903) describes the subject as “a conscious ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotations or vibration” (qtd. in Epstein 50). It is precisely the anxiety owing to this passivity that generates the need to re-establish one’s sense of identity and individuality. This is an important qualification to a conceptualization of a passive subjectivity, as current insights on the same speak to the way one becomes with the world [End Page 375] rather than as a separate entity. Epstein compares the two conceptualizations to suggest that though contemporary ideas might recall the scientific and literary Victorian experiments, they cannot be squared with Victorian thought. The immanent conception of self as it is viewed today is often associated with moral development rather than with a threat to our place in the world. Though he highlights this important distinction, Epstein also persuasively shows how Hardy and Conrad anticipate this new way of thinking. ________ While the title suggests an...

Female images in art are one of the eternal themes, which more-less belong to all styles and art directions. Such themes are a kind of a channel of social communication, a mirror of consciousness of the epoch. The works demonstrating the changing of women’s status are of special interest. The beginning of 20th century in German culture, was a period of Weimar republic (1919–1933), when the social settings were strongly rethought. The art of New Objectivity balanced between two extreme dots — “degeneration” and “revival”, between ugliness und classicism. In one time, it is represented by two nearly opposite lines — “verists” and “magic realists” (“neoklassicists” or “quasiklassicists”). The art of New Objectivity with its specific “neorealism” of artistic means firstly represents the social phenomenon with its significant critical tendency. This is the feature that distinguishes it from other earlier avant-garde divisions, such as Fauvism, Cubism, and even Expressionism with its subjectivism and reflection. The main aim of the study is to review female images in German art of the 1920s — beginning of the 1930s revealing a specific creative method and following features of artistic mind, which is very important for understanding the essence of German art of the abovementioned period. It shows us very different foreshortenings of German society of that time, from grotesque sharp images of O. Dix, G. Gross, R. Schlichter, and K. Hubbuch, to bourgeois polite images of A. Kanoldt, G. Schrimpf, K. Mense, and idealized by K. Schad.

The commendable critical tendency to increasingly consider the politics of video games in general is routinely met with resistance on the part of those who insist on their apolitical nature, in parallel to other areas of popular culture. In this contested discourse, it is all the more important to be specific about what it actually means to claim that video games are political, and this essay offers one particular way in which to address this issue. Understanding the political as a way of imagining a community as a political actor through symbolic practices, either in the interest of creating the sovereign of democratic systems or an ethnicity, I argue that video games may employ a populist imagination in constructing ‘the people’ as a basically unified group (usually in implicitly or explicitly essentialist ways) as much as they may resist or subvert this populist fantasy of homogeneity. I am especially interested in games that dialectically combine both these aspects at the same time by way of dissonances between their representational elements and their gameplay. Focusing on strategy games and action games, my examples include Civilization V, Democracy 3, Tropico 4, BioShock Infinite, Just Cause 3, and Far Cry 4.