This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[Read more]

This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bha…[Read more]

In this article we argue that the comics grid, the array of panels, can be understood as a specific technology of ‘revealing’ through ‘enframing’ and as such is the key element in comics technology. We propose Martin Heidegger’s conceptual framework (Gestell: literally, ‘the framework’), primarily discussed in his 1954 essay ‘The Question Concer…[Read more]

CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research

An overview of proposed categories for the growing graphic medicine genre of cancer comics (i.e. cancer narratives in comic book form) and an initial theory on the significant linkage between this illness and particular medium.

An overview of proposed categories for the growing graphic medicine genre of cancer comics (i.e. cancer narratives in comic book form) and an initial theory on the significant linkage between this illness and particular medium.

This article collides St. Apollonia’s medieval passion narratives – manuscript illustrations, church screens, and paintings by Francisco De Zurbarán and Carlo Dolci – with A.L. Kennedy’s contemporary short story “Story of My Life” to find out what happens when we move beyond the theoretical violence imposed by traditional approaches to gothic studies.

This essay calls for a reflection on the links between literature, activism, and social change in the Hispanic Caribbean, privileging certain interventions led by women, who have contributed to the defense of better living conditions and a more equitable social pact. Taking into account the diversity and mobility that characterizes the Caribbean…[Read more]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing a…[Read more]

This article details the contributions of blind readers to the development, design, and marketing of the optophone, a text-to-tone transcription machine introduced in the early twentieth century. We combine archival research with prototyping to investigate the dimensions involved in past coding and decoding practices. If archives provide…[Read more]

When presented with the term ‘inhuman’, I was drawn to consider how certain ways of being become associated with the inhuman, how this association is involved in the constitution of what is taken as properly human, and the deleterious effects for those who become associated with the inhuman. I’m going to address these topics in three stages. First…[Read more]

The term ‘musicalization’ comes from Werner Wolf’s study of intermediality between music and fiction, The Musicalization of Fiction (1999), which proposes the musicalized text as one that has an intentional and sustained connection to music and musical form that moves beyond the purely diegetic or incidental. In this article I draw on Wolf’…[Read more]