Essay Reads Research Articles

Everything and Nothing

Kathe Koja’s strange horror novel The Cipher (1991) is a peculiar genre fiction that immediately attracts the attention of both horror connoisseurs and philosophers alike. It is at once a visceral, psychological horror and a theoretically intriguing dilemma. It follows the fascinating and horrific events that transpire after a disc of pure nothingness opens up in the protagonist’s home, consuming the lives of the characters just as it does the plot. This non-object pushes readers to discern its peculiar ontology but yields, as one would expect, nothing. This essay reads The Cipher through Martin Heidegger’s equally unorthodox version of the nothing (das Nichts), demonstrating how Heideggerian metaphysical thought can help to illuminate the novel’s strange nothingness, and how Koja’s novel can help us to see the horror inherent in Heidegger’s philosophy. It suggests that horror may be found not in the nihilistic lack of meaning but in our “imprisonment” in meaning.

The death of a tropical neurasthenic in George Orwell’s Burmese Days

ABSTRACT George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, concludes with the suicide of John Flory, a 35-year-old Englishman who spent 15 years working as a timber merchant in British-ruled Burma during the 1920s. This essay argues that Orwell’s Burmese Days integrates the imperial medical discourse of tropical neurasthenia, popularized in the early 20th-century tropical colonies, into the characterization of the protagonist. By examining Flory’s death and his allegedly deviant behaviours in the context of the symptoms and aetiology of tropical neurasthenia, this essay reads Burmese Days as a medical case study of a tropical neurasthenic patient, wherein his suicide is presented as the inevitable outcome of a pathological condition. Given that tropical neurasthenia is intrinsically linked to the tropical climate and white racial anxiety rooted in climatic determinism, revealing the interconnectedness of humans with the broader ecological system, this reading opens a path for a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the novel.

From Great Books to World Literature: Anthologies as Institutional Supplements Around 1900 and Today

Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, Great Books anthologies and essay collections began to create a coherent narrative of the world's literature, one that usually ended with the teleological arrival of its imagined reader: Euro-American man. This essay reads four such publishing projects—Charles Dudley Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern (1896), Henry Cabot Lodge's The Best of the World's Classics (1909), John Macy's The Story of the World's Literature (1925), and Charles W. Eliot's The Harvard Classics (1909)—in order to argue that justifications of their selections constitute a theorization of the relationship between the one (text, editor, or imagined reader) and the many (possible texts, editorial boards, or national citizenry). In this way, these anthologies are meta-institutional texts, generating theories that can help us understand how contemporary world literature anthologies might reimagine their role as mediating between the representative and the universal.

“Rise up and tell it”: Go Tell It on the Mountain , #ChurchToo, and James Baldwin’s Christian Witnesses

Abstract: This essay reads James Baldwin’s depiction of women witnessing against a preacher in his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain . It situates him in the company of contemporary #MeToo and #ChurchToo activists and Black theologians who call for accountability and reform in the church through the language of witness. Focusing on Baldwin’s witnessing women, the essay considers how the novel speaks into contemporary conversations about abuses of power and the treatment of sexual assault victims within the church. It argues that Baldwin’s novel urges contemporary readers to bear bold witness to their experiences in church and to listen and act in response to the witness of others.

Parables for planetary crisis: storytelling and multispecies migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Throughout his oeuvre, Amitav Ghosh deals with storytelling and migration. Exploring legacies of empire and entanglements between the human and non-human world, his writing is driven by an ethical imperative to excavate “forgotten” stories, and, especially in his later texts, to find new forms of storytelling suited to capture pasts, presents, and futures shaped by a growing sense of planetary crisis. Gun Island (2019), a generic mix of personal quest narrative, thriller, romance, and folk tale, depicts a world disrupted by different forms of multispecies migration. Linking the Indian subcontinent, the US, and Europe, it chronicles voluntary and forced journeys of humans and animals between the Global North and South, intertwining refugee and climate crises in the Mediterranean and Bangladesh with the morally charged legend of the gun merchant, a seventeenth-century world traveller. The text brings current and historical links between migration and climate change, which are comparatively rarely treated in literary fiction, into sharp focus. As this essay argues, it highlights specifically the need to broaden the notion of migration literature and its subgenres to include both human and animal migration and the impact of globalization and current realities of climate change. Exploring genre and poetics in Gun Island, this essay reads the novel against the broader aesthetic and cultural-historical arguments made in Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). To explore Ghosh’s poetics, which fuse everyday realism with the uncanny, the improbable, and the mythical, this essay also draws on Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose’s notions of “ethography”. It argues that Gun Island, as a multispecies climate migration novel, responds to the author’s call for a rediscovery of storytelling beyond Western-style realism or SF, as a means to capture human and non-human subjectivities and to undo demarcations between rationality and spirituality.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s China

Abstract This essay reads Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) to show how chinaware could be used to delineate American identity in late nineteenth-century fiction. As I show, china’s aura of exoticism—reflected in its very name—could be deployed by regionalist writers to prop up local identity. Importantly, Jewett’s characters make china the centerpiece of their bequeathals so that the foreign is the vehicle by which generations exert influence over the present. Chinaware’s utility reifies the association of Asian identity with objectification. The town more generally appropriates Chinese signifiers and objects in their creation of a distinct spirit. I argue that towns perform this subsumption of the international in the service of the regional to position themselves in an intriguing position with regards to the national: distinct but also useful. Authors like Jewett show how the regional can, in part, deviate from the national by offering a tame and safe version of exoticism. The stakes of materiality thus include the determination of American belonging.

Words, Wounds and Pre-oedipal Oneness: Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer

This essay reads Maryse Condé’s 1999 récit d’enfance, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, as a “generational text”; a text that is both about the unresolved and ambivalent feelings aroused by writing about the dead mother, and also about this loss as the site and source of (literary) generation. Le Cœur defiantly rewrites the classic narrative of Antillean matrifocality, and yet, although the mother’s death is relegated to a single line, maternal loss suffuses the entire narrative. Moreover, the text is a reflection on language, writing and literature more generally, and can be read as an exploration of the painful transition from preoedipal to symbolic. Words in this text are destructive entities that wound and distort all relationships, but especially the relationship with the mother, igniting a sustained yearning to return to the security of the prelinguistic pre-oedipal.

Figures and Grounds: Art and the Body Politic in Ali Smith’s Winter

Abstract The essay reads Winter (2017), the second volume of Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet,” as a novel that engages with Brexit by revitalizing the metaphor of the body politic. Focusing on the role of landscape, the novel’s use of art objects and its intertextual conversation with Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline (ca. 1610), the essay also addresses the ways in which the reimagining of the body politic is entangled with Smith’s poetic strategies, arguing that matters of form and aesthetics are indistinguishable from the novel’s ethical and political concerns. Exploring parallels with post-’45 British landscape painting and art, especially Barbara Hepworth’s works, the analysis is concerned with two striking intrusions of the irrational in the novel: a hallucinated lump of landscape hovering above the characters and a child’s head floating in the air; both are crucial to the revitalization of the metaphor of the body politic as well as in the conversation the novel conducts with British art and with Cymbeline, a play that is an exploration of the idea of the body politic and of sovereignty in the context of the end of Britain’s relations with Europe. (TB)

The Imperishables: Somatic Remediation, Femininity, and Plasticity in Ōshima Nagisa's Urban Critique

This essay probes the understudied relationship between the hypermediated urban environment and the coding of femininity in the late 1960s and 1970s Japan. Through reading Ōshima Nagisa's Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), this essay explores the unique gender dynamics remapped in the avant‐garde media practice in an era when “urban” and “media” became interconnected and filmic medium was redefined in relation to the vibrant media milieu. This essay is motivated by “the imperishables,” a prevalent trope that can be located in a wide array of literary and filmic works in the 1960s and 1970s: the vanishing men and the “plastic” women. Resilient, enduring, prone to violations but always “failing” to disappear from the screen, women's bodies occupy central roles in reorienting the epistemic structures in many prominent radical works that investigate the opaque urban network during Japan's Cold War restructuring. This essay reads cinema as a contentious site where articulations of sociopolitical sentiments and concerns with film's medium specificity find catalytic convergence with the continuous coding of gender. Rather than simply viewing female bodies as representations of social reality or fetishized objects, this article traces how femininity, constructed as both cultural artifact and techno‐aesthetic device, showcases internal dissidence in the leftist urban critique and the emergent somatic politics in the avant‐garde imaginaries of alterity.

Rossellini beyond Repair

This essay analyzes Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), a film Gilles Deleuze made famous for its way of “seeing convicts” in a range of social institutions, including the factory, the bourgeois family, and the psychiatric hospital. Recent accounts of Rossellini’s career have tended to emphasize his role in manufacturing narratives of postwar national innocence. By contrast, this essay reads Europa ’51 as offering a critique of the carceral state, though one that knows itself to be contained, disempowered, and confined. Mindful of the limits of this critique, the essay brings Rossellini’s film into conversation with ongoing debates about “reparative reading” and its alternatives. Noting that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick encounters, or rather avoids, a “deinstitutionalized person on the street” in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” this essay highlights the film’s very different understanding of institutionalization, which anticipates the demystifying and consistently anticarceral critique of official psychiatry that would emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas the fantasies sustaining Italian neorealism were reparative, the essay argues, Rossellini’s critical and self-critical turns in Europa ’51 take viewers beyond repair.

Research on the application of English short essay reading emotional analysis in online English teaching under IoT scenario

AbstractSpeech‐emotion analysis plays an important role in English teaching. The existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can fully explore the spatial features of speech information, and cannot effectively utilize the temporal dependence of speech signals. In addition, it is difficult to build a more efficient and robust sentiment analysis system by solely utilizing speech information. With the development of the Internet of Things (IoTs), online multimodal information, including speech, video, and text, has become more convenient. To this end, this paper proposes a novel multimodal fusion emotion analysis system. Firstly, by combining convolutional networks with Transformer encoders, the spatiotemporal dependencies of speech information are effectively utilized. To improve multimodal information fusion, we introduce the exchange‐based fusion mechanism. The experimental results on the public dataset indicate that the proposed multimodal fusion model achieves the best performance. In online English teaching, teachers can effectively improve the quality of teaching by leveraging the feedback information of students' emotional states through our proposed deep model.

“This Automaton of Flesh”: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man , the Paradox of the Moderns, and Romantic Ecohorror

This essay reads Mary Shelley’s The Last Man alongside Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and his later work addressing the climate crisis, exploring how the novel instantiates and critiques the complex relationship between nature, culture, science, and politics that Latour refers to as the “modern Constitution.” As it dramatizes the tensions within Romantic-era sciences and the wider discourse of philosophical vitalism in Romanticism, The Last Man performs an extended meditation on materiality that prefigures Latour’s insistence that facing the future in a time of climate crisis depends upon letting go of the conception of nature inherited by the Moderns as an organizing cultural concept. I situate this reading within critical conversations about contemporary apocalyptic fiction and ecohorror in order to argue that the The Last Man —and by extension, Romanticism—offers opportunities to imagine how human and nonhuman forms of agency could work together to compose different stories about life in the Anthropocene.

“You Belong to My Time, Not His”: Ageing, Queerness, and “Allotted Time” in E. Nesbit’s Dormant

ABSTRACT E. Nesbit’s fiction is recognised for conveying the author’s unconventional stance upon issues of paramount concern to fin-de-siècle and post-1900 Britain, including socialism, women’s suffrage, and marriage. This essay reads her neglected novel Dormant (1911) through the lens of literary age studies to argue that it participates in the era’s imaginative re-shaping of life-course possibilities, which focused especially on women. It finds Nesbit’s notoriously contradictory feminist impulses mirrored by, and intersecting with, the novel’s representations of age and ageing. Through age-defying and un-ageing characters, Dormant tantalises with queer prospects and “second-chance plots”, which signify an expansive later-life potential that sits in seeming opposition to the youth-centric Bildungsroman. The eventual circumscription and withdrawal of such non-normative possibilities – through notions of “allotted time” and age-appropriateness – re-inscribes a narrative of decline in which age entails a narrowing of possibilities. Dormant’s navigation of these ambiguities, this essay contends, makes it a crucial but as yet understudied reflection upon the tensions evoked by re-negotiations of age and ageing, and how the limits of an individual life are structured by them.

Dancing Bodies in Zadie Smith's Swing Time

Abstract: This essay reads Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) as generating innovative and insightful conversations between literary criticism and dance studies. Smith's novel explores the onstage and offstage performative experiences and challenges of hybridized bodies and hyphenated identities in a transcontinental context. The novel sets up an interactive dancefloor for its leading characters—the unnamed female narrator and her childhood friend Tracey—both of whom are biracial and live in the working-class neighborhoods of Northwest London. Drawing from cultural studies and dance theories, this essay considers the narrator's and Tracey's practices and experiences of dance to discuss the swinging connections and disconnections between selves, bodies, and cultures carried through the protagonists' challenged expressions of agency and mobility in glocal and transnational contexts.

Top-down Chinese as a second language reading strategies

Abstract This study investigated how 22 college-level Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners used reading strategies when reading essays of various genres in a strategies-based reading instruction program, in which they were explicitly taught ten top-down reading strategies. In addition to strategy use frequency and preference, this study explored the interrelationships among multiple strategies and whether strategy use frequency correlated with reading proficiency. Qualitative and quantitative data analyses revealed that the most frequently used strategies included previewing, anticipating, making a summary, and attending selectively. They were used in combination with other strategies in an orchestrated way. This study did not find a significant correlation between reading proficiency and total strategy use frequency or the frequency of using any single strategy. Strategy use frequency alone, without considering strategy use accuracy and appropriateness, might not be a good indicator of reading proficiency. This study provides an in-depth analysis of how CSL readers used single strategies and blended multiple strategies. Its findings shed light on second language learners’ reading process, reading difficulties, and the rationales behind their strategy use. Pedagogical implications are provided for CSL teachers regarding how to embed explicit strategy training into reading classes.

Stuplime Orientalism

The essay reads Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism through Sianne Ngai’s category of the “stuplime”. Unlike the noble emotions elicited by the Kantian sublime, the stuplime causes the ugly feelings of tedium, excitation, fatigue. In the Kantian sublime, viewing subjects experience an overwhelming feeling which impresses on them their own inadequacy; in my reading of stuplime orientalism, the “Orient” becomes the object of this “inadequacy”. This shift from inadequate subjects to inadequate objects is one manifestation of the political valence of the stuplime, a means by which control is maintained both of the “Orient” as a colonial project and of the orientalist’s mind. As Ngai argues, however, the political potential of ugly feelings is always ambivalent: stuplime orientalism can therefore also be coopted through curation of stuplime orientalist detail, which I deploy in the second half of this essay to read Jade Snow Wong’s memoir, Fifth Chinese Daughter. Resisting the urge to summarize Jade Snow Wong’s exhaustively descriptive rice passages, I delineate an alternative interpretation to the prevailing view that she merely self-orientalizes, instead suggesting a reading that engages histories of denigrated racial formation and labour precisely through, and not in spite of, stuplime orientalist detail.

Cosmetics as Tools of Resistance and Survival in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract: Wearing makeup may not be merely a perfunctory beauty ritual in The Sheltering Sky and Nineteen Eighty-Four . This essay reads it as an act of defiance and emancipation that begins with the woman's face, using the very objects that putatively contribute to the objectification of women. In these novels—written by western white men in 1949—the restorative properties of makeup enunciate Kit and Julia's desire to restore their own existential image in a world that oppresses and dehumanizes women. Employing Lacan's gaze theory as its primary methodology, this study sheds light on how cosmetics are portrayed as front-line defenses of feminine identity—especially needed in hard times and dystopian contexts.

“English like Hindi”: Chetan Bhagat, Popular Fiction, and India’s Voice

Abstract This essay examines the rise of Chetan Bhagat, an icon of the New India “after English” who ironically writes his best-selling popular fictions in English. When Bhagat’s demotic English travels outside India, it is taken up by readers and critics whose responses to his work reveal the persistence of the fantasy of accessing India’s unmediated voice. The essay reads the extant Anglo-American critical discourse on Bhagat, with special attention to the postcritical and post-postcolonial turns in contemporary literary scholarship. It argues that Bhagat’s anointment as a global Anglophone literary icon with purchase on the “real” India lays bare a problem endemic to English literary studies—namely, the problem of enacting comparative literary analysis within English itself. It also raises a number of questions at the intersections of world literature and the global Anglophone, which are rival strategies for the teaching of non-Western literatures in English in US academe. In its concluding sections, the essay considers whether it is possible to teach Bhagat’s “English like Hindi” without allowing it to masquerade as a conduit to a supposedly authentic Indian vernacular sphere.

Rasselas : The Enigma and the “Agile Music”

Abstract: This essay reads Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) against the background of negative or apophatic theology and argues that it is unique among Johnson’s works in expressing a sense of life as an enigma . The silent or hidden symbol of the story is the Giza Sphinx, one of the foundational symbols of such theology: the second-century Church Father Clement of Alexandria, whose works Johnson owned, associated the enigmas of the Hebrew Bible with the mystery of the Egyptian sphinxes. More widely, Rasselas contains absent objects and symbols, enigmatic silences and responses, hidden images and paradoxes, self-defeating dualisms and habits of style, apophatic philosophy (“philosophy can tell no more”), and an enigmatic conclusion (“ nothing ”). The apophatic quality is embodied in the text through what Jorge Luis Borges refers to as Rasselas ’s “agile music,” the subtle, flexible management of narrative voices, which generates a distinctive kind of attention in the reader.

Gazing at monsters: aesthetics, politics, and the national distribution of the sensible

ABSTRACT The Humanity Monument, a gigantic monument in Kars, a northeastern border city of Turkey, was intended to be visible from the Armenian side of the border and supposed to send messages of peace, apology, and reconciliation, implicitly alluding to the Armenian genocide of 1915. It depicted two halves of a human, or two humans, looking at each other in the eye. However, the then prime minister Erdoğan called it a “monster” in a public speech, leading to the monument’s demolition. He then suggested that his comments were just aesthetic judgments free of political convictions, echoing the familiar paradigm of “aestheticizing politics”: covering over or obscuring a political motive (“the ideological”) through the aesthetic. Although a useful understanding, this reduces both aesthetics and politics to ideology and establishes a binary between the sober critic and the a(n)esthetized masses. Instead, drawing upon Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic as what disturbs “the distribution of the sensible,” that is, the partition of roles, territories, parts, and visibilities, this essay reads the story of the monument as a disturbance of the national distribution of the sensible, pointing to the ways it embodies and reveals the monstrosity of the modern state founded upon the event of genocide and further complicates the distinctions between critic and masses, self and other, and gaze and object that the aesthetic ordering of the nation-state relies on.