Building on eighteenth-century philosophical traditions, Victorian aesthetics were often posed as an antidote to the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution and the political and economic demands of the marketplace, and in most cultures undergoing modernization the Beautiful has often functioned in opposition to the forces of power and…[Read more]

Will students raised on social media still read English literature?
• What is the role of English/American literature in the PRC, India,
Australasia, the USA?
• What is the role of English language in relation to other global
and local languages?
• What is the role of decolonising efforts?
• How do our respective state apparatuses affect…[Read more]

This article argues that there exists a problematic nexus between the industrial livestock industry, US food system policies, and American propagandist literature. The essay’s specific aim is to transform carnivorous appetites by subverting the integrity of America’s national gastronomic emblem – the hamburger. The article examines how hambu…[Read more]

A STEAM-informed humanities’ essay describing the theoretical concept of “ecophobia”-a notion put forward in Simon Estok’s theoretical text The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge 2018) that describes the systemic human fear of nature.

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways
in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence
ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also
reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article
traces the…[Read more]

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways
in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence
ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also
reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article
traces the…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature? I claim that conceptually linking the Constitutional protections enabled by the American civil rights movement to an emerging civil rights of nature would enable the rapid transition away from ecophobic attitudes toward…[Read more]

Makes use of the opportunity of the release of “Oppenheimer” to explore how Gene Wolfe uses his texts as factories into which guilt is inserted, but emerge ameliorated. Narrative serving the primary purpose of restructuring subconscious memory.

“People acquire phobias,” evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson observed, to “abrupt and intractable aversions, to the objects and circumstances that threaten humanity in natural environments” (The Diversity of Life 351). This often overlooked observation, conceptualized by an evolu­tionary biologist whose canon launched the Western corpus of…[Read more]

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the developme…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

The prominent Russian writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was known mainly for his work on the Soviet prison camps. In many of his fictional and non-fiction works, however, Solzhenitsyn dealt with the subject of Germany. This article analyses Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of Germany in the works August 1914, The Gulag A…[Read more]

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I’m sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the “uncanny body politic,” the uncanny valley, “dystopian poetics,” what it means…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

In “I, Stereotype,” Seo-Young Chu applies Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley not to robots but to a different species of humanoid artifact: stereotypes of the “yellow peril.” Through analyses of stories by Sax Rohmer, World War Two propaganda, and films from the Bond franchise, Chu investigates ways in which the logic of the uncanny valley has…[Read more]