“Behind every polished monologue lies a fractured self, whispering through the cracks of Victorian decorum.” This study examines the evolving architecture of selfhood in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, revealing how Victorian anxieties about morality, gender, and institutional authority influence the performance of identity and prefigure modernist fluidity. The research examines Browning’s poetic project as a subversive critique of fixed selfhood, entrenched class structures, and the moral posturing of his age. Employing close textual analysis alongside historicist contextualization, the study interrogates Browning’s use of unreliable narrators—figures who, under the guise of confession, reveal the chasm between public virtue and private vice. These poetic personae serve not merely as characters but as vessels through which Browning exposes the ideological fault lines of his society. Findings reveal that Browning envisions identity not as an essence but as an emergence—a protean negotiation between self and sociality, mediated by performance, power, and colonial modernity. His work dismantles binaries of sincerity and artifice, virtue and vice, stability and fluidity. The novelty of the study lies in bridging his poetics to postmodern identity, reclaiming him as a proto-modernist voice. Ultimately, the research affirms Browning as a poet of transgression—one who weaponizes dominant paradigms to interrogate the very ground on which they stand. IUBAT Review—A Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 8(2): 105-129

SIGNUM TEMPORIS? THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE DISPUTE IN THE CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY TRANSFORMATIONSThe article explores the idea that late modernity is partly characterised by linguistic conflicts, arising from clashes between complex communication and value-based structures. They reflect differing attitudes toward the modern era, resulting in various strategies for transcending it. Moreover, linguistic collisions are compared to religious ones, greatly impacting Europe’s modern self-recognition during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation periods. In this context: 1. Heinz Schilling’s overview of 16th- and 17th-century religious and confessional conflicts is employed as a model for in-depth understanding of multidimensional identity confrontations; 2. the Russian-Ukrainian war is portrayed as a result of complex linguistic dissent, representing vital identity polarization of our time; 3. it is argued that today’s evolution of communication and value-based structures amplifies the discord among postmodern identities (e.g., European identity founded on the principle of unification in diversity vs. Russian identity founded on the principle of unification through domination).

Sam Shepard’s True West dramatizes the internal psychological conflict described in Sigmund Freud’s structural model of personality id, the ego, and the superego through the intense and shifting relationship between the two brothers, Lee and Austin. According to Freud, the human psyche is composed of three significant hypothesized parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The first signifies the primitive desires and instincts, the superego symbolizes moral ethics, and the ego mediates between the two while navigating external reality. Austen, apparently the cultivated screenwriter, represents the ego in the play. He functions as a mediator between Lee’s wild behavior and the expectations of the outside world. He is composed, mature, and controlled, serving as the antithesis of his brother Lee. They are different in every regard. However, as the play progresses, the rational and logical brother crumbles as his behavior becomes increasingly similar to that of his brother’s, and vice versa. The brothers melt into a one character. As True West is a clear dramatization of the fragmentation of postmodern identity, this study discusses the notion through a Freudian lens. Lee and Austin do not have fixed personalities but fluid expressions of the psyche’s internal conflict due to the postmodern fragmentation condition. Exposing how the struggle between id, ego, and superego can unravel the very notion of a stable self, which results in resorting to the primitive nature of the self (the Freudian id), ingrained in the human psyche as the only constant identity that Austen and Lee find themselves with.

This paper confronts an extraordinary contradiction: With an ideology built on historical continuity and collectivism, the world’s most populous authoritarian state now finds itself enmeshed in the contradictions of postmodern identity politics. With its gleeful pulverizing of truth, identity, and coherence, postmodernism has inadvertently infiltrated the narrative-driven fortress of the People’s Republic of China. In its national narrative, however, postmodernism erodes “Chineseness” from within. I explore how this paradox stretches across cultural, political, and diplomatic spheres, complicating China’s global image and muddling its efforts to project ideological coherence on the world stage.

Background.The identity crisis caused by the cultural context of postmodernism manifests in fragmentation, ironic detachment, and the loss of the ability for symbolic participation. Contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches partially address this challenge, yet they either reproduce modernist assumptions about a coherent self or employ postmodern deconstruction as a therapeutic strategy. Perform-therapy, grounded in Raoul Eshelman’s theory of performatism, is proposed as a new psychotherapeutic paradigm capable of restoring existential engagement without resorting to naive idealism. Purpose.To provide a theoretical foundation for perform-therapy as a method for restoring identity under conditions of postmodern fragmentation of subjectivity and the loss of symbolic involvement. Materials and methods.The primary method is comparative theoretical analysis, based on the juxtaposition of cultural and philosophical foundations of psychotherapeutic paradigms (modernism, postmodernism, performatism). The analysis draws on the works of Raoul Eshelman, neuropsychological studies of symbolic behavior, and observations from clinical practice. Elements of cognitive neuroscience and the anthropology of ritual serve as empirical support for interpreting therapeutic mechanisms. Results.Perform-therapy is presented as an independent therapeutic model, distinct from narrative and existential therapies across several parameters: the nature of narrative, the role of artificiality, the function of irony, the client's mode of participation, and the ontological metaphor of therapy. Its central mechanism is double framing, through which the client recognizes the artificiality of the therapeutic frame yet embraces it as authentic, thereby bridging the gap between knowledge and belief. This stance is shown to activate universal cognitive-affective mechanisms, including the default mode network and ritual behavioral patterns, thus restoring the subject’s capacity for experience, action, and symbolic integration. Perform-therapy is found to be particularly effective in working with clients exhibiting features of postmodern identity (hyper-reflection, fragmentation of self, emotional alienation), and it is also applicable in self-therapy and culturally sensitive interventions. The proposed concept opens up prospects for the development of new forms of symbolic therapy suited to the post-postmodern era.

This study explores the intersection of postmodern identity and artificial intelligence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. The novels set against the backdrop of increasing technological advancements and their impact on human relationships, this research aims to examine how these novels represent the blurring of boundaries between human and artificial intelligence, and the implications for postmodern identity. Employing a comparative literary analysis within a post-humanist framework proposed by Hayles (1999) this study analyses the themes, motifs, and characterizations related to artificial intelligence and human-AI relationships in the two novels. The findings reveal that both novels challenge traditional notions of human identity and agency, highlighting the complexities and implications of human-AI relationships in the postmodern era. This research contributes to our understanding of the complex relationships between human identity, artificial intelligence, and postmodernism, offering insights into the possibilities and challenges of human-AI interactions in contemporary society.

It is urgent to reflect on identity and how personal characteristics can engender it. The dichotomy that emerges when it comes to the identity between men and women reveals a segregation in which positive value is attributed to one and negative value to the other, placing the gender binary in our society as a unique condition. To this end, the guiding thread of this article will seek to understand the relations of identity in postmodernity and the relations that gender has in the poststructuralist movement, in a qualitative methodological proposal that encompasses basic texts on gender and identity in which the authors make considerations. From the conception of identities, we see that differentiating individuals is a process imbricated with meanings that reinforces the historical and geographical characteristics to which the subjects are subjected, which presents constant modifications, which gives rise to new identities. With regard to gender, the search for it to become an analytical category crosses the struggle of minorities affected by inequalities in power relations and the resignification of the term so that it does not only differentiate male from female, opening space for new conceptions and categories. The current social construction, therefore, demands that the meanings loaded with absolute truths be remodeled, counterposing modern thought and resignifying identities and gender, to deconstruct the ambiguities and generalizations rooted in each one of us.

It is urgent to reflect on identity and how it can be engendered by personal characteristics. The dichotomy that emerges when it comes to the identity between men and women reveals a segregation in which positive value is attributed to one and negative value to the other, placing the gender binary in our society as a unique condition. To this end, the guiding thread of this article will seek to understand the relations of identity in postmodernity and the relations that gender has in the post-structuralist movement, in a qualitative methodological proposal that encompasses basic texts on gender and identity in which the authors, in a surgent way, weave considerations. From the conception of identities, we see that differentiating individuals is a process imbricated with meanings that reinforces the historical and geographical characteristics to which the subjects are subjected, which presents constant modifications, which gives rise to new identities. With regard to gender, the search for it to become an analytical category crosses the struggle of minorities affected by inequalities in power relations and the resignification of the term so that it does not only differentiate male from female, opening space for new conceptions and categories. The current social construction, therefore, demands that the meanings loaded with absolute truths be remodeled, counterposing modern thought and resignifying identities and gender, to deconstruct the ambiguities and generalizations rooted in each one of us.

This article examines Gillian Wearing’s Family Album photographic series (2003 – 2006), relating her self-portraits to the postmodern identity theories of Fredric Jameson (1984) and Kenneth Gergen (1991) for the 1st time, as well as linking them to Hans Belting’s interpretation of the symbolism of the mask (2013). In the photographs, Wearing assumes the features of her family members through hyper-realistic masks and wigs, recreating and “wearing” the faces from the family albums. Through this process, the artist temporarily assumes the identity of another person while creating a new subject that combines and adds further characteristics to the personalities from which it is composed. The photographs from the series are compared with other works by the artist, particularly her self-portraits painted during the 2020 lockdown and those created in 2023, in which she portrays herself without a mask, marking a significant shift in her artistic practice.

This textual analysis of Nicola Yoon’s novel, The Sun Is Also a Star theorises the contentious issue of the transcultural identity of teenage immigrants in the postmodern psychosocial context. The study contributes to the heated discussion on identity formation in biracial and diasporic young adult literature by using Erikson’s concepts of psychosocial relativity, identity formation and identity crisis, and Jean Baudrillard’s concepts on postmodern identity. This article contends that in an effort to maintain one ethnic identity by erasing her previous Jamaican identity in Trump’s era in the United States, the protagonist Natasha experiences anti-Black racism, discrimination, and biracial identity formation. Conversely, another character in the novel, Daniel relishes dynamic identities to fit in the USA. However, his biracial identity results in an identity crisis. Thus, Yoon’s novel validates a postmodern condition, where teenagers’ multiple identities are regulated on the basis of ethnicity and their struggle for independent identities remains futile. Hence, the study shows that the USAdoes not allow biracial people to experience or adapt to Americanness easily. Keywords: adolescence; cultural identity; identity crisis; psychosocialrelativity; postmodernism

The article is an attempt to combine film and theological thoughts in relation to the film Wszystkie nasze strachy, in which the protagonist is modeled on the contemporary Polish visual artist Daniel Rycharski. His declarations, experience, and attitude confirm the validity of using the tropes related to the elements of the concept of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity for analyzing the film. The concept provides arguments that expand the possibility to consider the film and the protagonist’s creation in the perspective of the postmodern identity discourse with the contents that correspond with the phenomena and processes inscribed in the postsecular tendencies. The interpretations presented in the article take into account the context of non-heteronormativity and the manifestations of homophobia in a small rural community presented in the story, and also focus on the category of relationality, contemplativeness, identification, and movement, as well as the antinomy of religion and faith and Christocentrism.

This paper shows that postmodern identity is closely related to the image of cyborg in science fiction. Analyzing the environment and characters in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, written by Philip K.Dick, offers a deep understanding of characteristics of postmodern identity, which is unstable, fragmented and changeable. The bleak urban landscape where only few people live presents a post war and high tech world that shares features of postmodernism. Besides, the character John Isidore, who is a special, and many escaped androids are all considered as others that should be excluded from the normal society. Hence the dilemma of postmodern identity can be uncovered. To be specific, the android character Rachael Rosen illustrates the fragmentation and reconstruction of postmodern female identity because she is a humanoid robot designed as a woman. Also the combination between a cyborg and a woman gives an insight into the similarities between its identity and her identity. Based on the cyborg theory by Donna Haraway, the criticism by Anne Balsamo in Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism and the postmodern identity theory by Elena Abrudan, the extent to which Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? explored the identity can be disclosed.

Humanity gradually shifted away from religion and the sacred in the modern age, but in the postmodern age, people have discovered that science and reason alone cannot satisfy them. As a result, people returned in various ways to mythology, religion, and the mystical. Cinema, one of the most popular arts of the visual age, could not possibly ignore this move. Religious themes and elements are prevalent in films. Humanity has lost confidence in metanarratives thanks to postmodernism, and is shown to be on a different quest for meaning, particularly in science fiction and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic films. In many films, this quest evolves into a quest for the transcendent. People contemplate the beginning and the end; they speculate about their origins and their future directions. Postmodern viewers are drawn to the holy, mystical, mythological, and transcendental quests offered in movie theaters. As a result, the film business, which is capitalist in nature, uses this tactic to produce stories that are transcendental, sacred, mythological, mystical, magical, supernatural, and, generally speaking, religious. This essay explores the attempt of postmodern man to use cinema to re-enchant the demystified universe. The postmodern man is tired of extreme rationalism and is on a philosophical quest. The study analyzes five science fiction movies, which are also referred to as apocalyptic movies. These are Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), Prometheus (2012), War of the Worlds (2005), and I Am Legend (2007). The article argues that in these movies, post-modern man’s quest for meaning is addressed with some sort of transcendence, his modern identity is developed into a postmodern one, or a postmodern identity is brought forth, and his worries about the end are mostly appeased with a postmodern uncertainty.

This study brings into comparative perspective the major takes on the question of identity in the Arab world. It suggests that whilst in Western societies the discussion around identity has centered on questions of racism and the status of minority groups, usually in societies with solid nation -states and democratic traditions, the most influential scholarly contributions in the Arab world have centered on identity with regard to the question of political instability and the nation -state as a vulnerable entity and an unfulfilled project. Apart from a few marginal critical voices that endorse ethnic identity and differentiation, described here as essentialist and in many ways emulative of postmodern identity politics, major scholars view the tendency to reify, endorse, valorize, and politicize ethnic and cultural identity as an obstacle in the process of building genuine nation -states and perpetuate the Arab condition of social traditionalism and historical backwardness. This study ultimately suggests that any attempt to theorize and conceptualize identity should take into account the historical peculiarities of the context in question. More specifically, emphasizing an essentialist view of identity in the Arab world perniciously complicates existing issues of political rule and only deepens the impasse of an unfulfilled Arab nationstate. This study ultimately attempts to add up to a nascent body of literature that seeks to highlight the dangers of essentialism and the pernicious effects of category thinking, namely in historically backward contexts where the luxury of playing the identity card or identity politics cannot be afforded.

This article tries to investigate the connection space and time as they pertain to the fictitious world of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007). The book shows significant concerns regarding the existence of Israel as well as the concept of a Jewish state. By analysing the function of eruvim in the construction and contestation of Jewish identity in Chabon's postmodern detective novel from 2007, this study argues that Chabon creates a universe in which geographical place complicates rather than simplifies Jewish identity in diaspora and postmodernity. This study accomplishes its goal by analysing the function of eruvim in analysing Chabon's postmodern detective novel from 2007. So, the Jewish Alaska that exists in Chabon's imagination has a significant link to the contentious assertions that he has made regarding the contemporary geographical state of Israel.

Women’s history was established in Japan with the politically motivated search for matriarchal structures in ancient society by feminist Takamure Itsue in the 1930s and led to a gendered reading of history in the 1980s and 1990s, when historians such as Wakita Haruko explored the pre-modern organisation of the household. In the past two decades, the field has been expanded considerably, not least by Sabine Frühstück herself. As the cover suggests—a picture of actor Nakamura Shidō, who has an androgynous appearance due to his painted brows and lose silk haori, as well as the skin-to-skin embrace of his newborn baby—Frühstück’s most recent book is an invitation to consider the order of sex, gender and sexuality, as well as the occasions that challenged that order in modern Japan. By drawing on methods from history and anthropology and making visible unequal relationships determined by ideals of the nuclear family and heterosexuality, Frühstück adheres to two main demands of gender studies: interdisciplinarity and the deconstruction of types of domination. She distinguishes between three levels of analysis: individuals to be brought out of historical anonymity, as first called for by women’s history; institutional mechanisms shaped by state regulations and societal expectations; and overarching developments, including imperialism, war, the US occupation, economic boom and post-modern identity crisis.

This paper highlights the issue of consumerism in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), as well as its representation and its effects on the construction of postmodern identity. It also reveals how consumers resort to spatialized time as a way to overcome the fear of death. Since consumerism goes along with mass media, this paper discusses simulation and hyper-reality in relation to consumerism and the spatialized social time. In addition to this, it pays attention to simultaneity as another aspect of spatialized time. In incorporating the figure of Hitler in the narrative, DeLillo juxtaposes the past with the present and thus creates a spatialization of time. The figure of Hitler represents another aspect of consumerism. The protagonist of this novel, Jack Gladney, tends to consume Hitler’s image in order to acquire power as will be analyzed in the coming pages. Keywords: Spatialized Social Time, White Noise, Don Delillo, Consumerism, Present Moment.

Discourse about abortion within the Catholic community - not to mention the broader world - is broken. There are a number of reasons for this but one is surely the way that ideological forces have captured the minds of intellectuals. In his 1951 classic, The Captive Mind, the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz examined the phenomenon of Polish artists surrendering their creativity to the demands of Stalinist socialist realism. The book has endured because Milosz’s powerful insights transcended his own time. Indeed, those insights can be drawn on as cautionary notes and wise suggestions for how to approach discourse on abortion at Catholic universities in our own day. This essay identifies the ideological pitfalls of the present: Catholic absolutism, postmodern identity cancel culture, Trumpian lies, and more. The essay also draws on Milosz to suggest that the following could aid Catholic universities as they ponder how to talk about contemporary Catholic challenges around law and abortion. Universities should beware of the distorting effects of their affluence; reject the notion of one Catholic legal solution to abortion; and turn to the artists and poets.

The Rise of Subaltern from Fiction to Film: Postmodern Identity and Self in the White Tiger

The 21st century and internet technology has brought about many changes that includes exposure to new cultures. This creates opportunities for new identities to develop. In this study, the researcher examines identity integration through discussions on engagement in a globalized interest in connection with postmodernism. Twelve college students who were interested in a culture not connected to their own ethnic background were interviewed. The majority of the participants were interested in Japanese anime and Korean pop music while not being ethnically Japanese or Korean. Using Erikson’s theorizing of three levels of identity and Hidi and Renninger’s four phases of interest development, the researcher discusses the integration of participants’ interest into their ego identity, personal identity, and social identity as well as the utilization of the internet for interest development. The researcher ends with suggestions for future identity research that includes considerations around how identity integration might be considered (i.e., identity synthesis) and further investigations around internet content.