Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Discipline
Institution
Keyword
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type
File Type

Articles 50701 - 50730 of 819612

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Island And Mobility In The Face Of Climate Change: Robert Smithson's Floating Island, Jaeeun Lee Dec 2024

Island And Mobility In The Face Of Climate Change: Robert Smithson's Floating Island, Jaeeun Lee

Kritika Kultura

This essay aims to examine the entropic landscape in motion that appears in Floating Island by Robert Smithson, a distinguished earth artist active in the 1970s. Floating Island was a temporary artificial mobile island made with earth, rocks, native trees, and shrubs, towed by a tugboat around Manhattan Island. Smithson attempted to combine his artistic imagination with the theory of science, particularly entropy, a pivotal concept in the second law of thermodynamics while also developing an original idea of his own, namely “dialectics of entropic change” that combined entropy with dialectic. He believed that the dialectic could go beyond entropy …

Go to article

The Multispecies Soundscape In Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, Qianqian Chen, Joan Qionglin Tan Dec 2024

The Multispecies Soundscape In Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, Qianqian Chen, Joan Qionglin Tan

Kritika Kultura

Red Sorghum, the masterpiece of Mo Yan, the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, is an exemplar of the Chinese root-seeking literature in the 1980s. Comparing the red sorghum field to an auditory field accommodating diversified species, the article unveils that its multispecies soundscape is characterized by its animated liveliness, tumultuous polyphony, and acoustic harmony between sound and silence. By delving into the historical and cultural context of the novel, as well as Mo’s personal background, this paper concludes that the clamorous multispecies soundscape in the red sorghum field can be attributed to Chinese ancient ecological philosophy, Gaomi …

Go to article

"Effable Nature In Unheard Stories": Tishani Doshi's Poetics Of Discovery, Juan Ignacio Oliva Dec 2024

"Effable Nature In Unheard Stories": Tishani Doshi's Poetics Of Discovery, Juan Ignacio Oliva

Kritika Kultura

This article aims to study the multiple nature metaphors used in Tishani Doshi’s poetry to convey messages of understanding and epiphany. Born in 1975 in Madras (now Chennai), Doshi is an Indian author and academic who has gained indisputable reputation as a novelist and poet, with other cultural and artistic interests like dancing and writing journal articles. She is especially devoted to narrating the urges of contemporary human existence, and to defending class, gender, and racial rights violated by capitalist patriarchal anthropocentrism, all while embracing the aesthetic beauty of artistic creation as a weapon to change the world. Therefore, in …

Go to article

Ronnie Govender And Asian Belonging Within South Africa, Maurice O'Connor Dec 2024

Ronnie Govender And Asian Belonging Within South Africa, Maurice O'Connor

Kritika Kultura

This paper explores the Asian presence in South Africa through the work of Ronnie Govender. One of its concerns is how fictional worlds based on real-life experiences become a means to counter the discourses of apartheid that insisted upon the incommensurability of cultural difference as regards Asian and African communities. In this light, the paper references how a white hegemony sets about compromising an already fragile co-existence that existed between the Black, Coloured, and Asian communities and considers the body of Govender’s work as a repository which aids future generations to connect with the traumatic nature of apartheid so as …

Go to article

Kaleidoscopic Visions Of South Africa: A Study Of State And Station In Imraan Coovadia's Tales Of The Metric System, J. Coplen Rose Dec 2024

Kaleidoscopic Visions Of South Africa: A Study Of State And Station In Imraan Coovadia's Tales Of The Metric System, J. Coplen Rose

Kritika Kultura

This paper discusses the structure of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System: A Novel. Drawing inspiration from Karina Szczurek’s review of Coovadia’s book, the article explores the kaleidoscopic view of the South African state that emerges across the storylines in the novel. Critically, this paper connects Szczurek’s terminology to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. The multiple perspectives that intersect over the course of Coovadia’s text foreground the polyvalent bonds connecting characters across space and time. These links form a web between characters which closely resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the rhizome in A Thousand …

Go to article

Indian Ocean Nomadic Diasporas: Destabilizing Master Narratives Of Belonging In M. G. Vassanji's Short Fiction, Dolors Ortega Dec 2024

Indian Ocean Nomadic Diasporas: Destabilizing Master Narratives Of Belonging In M. G. Vassanji's Short Fiction, Dolors Ortega

Kritika Kultura

M. G. Vassanji’s evocative short fiction delves into the complex and intertwined tapestry of cultures that Indian Ocean communities represent. His characters lead border and nomadic lives and they occupy in-transit subject positions. Signs of constant navigation between different cultural contexts abound in stories about diasporic subjects who try to negotiate the in-between worlds they inhabit by crossing identity thresholds, such as the ones built around the secular- religious, Western-Eastern, and present-past divide. This article explores the potential that the Indian Ocean experience offers and seeks to unravel the extent to which Indian Ocean migration can effect transformation within more …

Go to article

Memory, Haunting, And Duality: Malaysian Amnesia Within The Uncanny Home In Chuah Guat Eng's Days Of Change, Hannah M. Y. Ho Dec 2024

Memory, Haunting, And Duality: Malaysian Amnesia Within The Uncanny Home In Chuah Guat Eng's Days Of Change, Hannah M. Y. Ho

Kritika Kultura

This article analyzes Chuah Guat Eng’s Days of Change as a postcolonial Gothic fiction by discussing instances of haunting and repressed memory in the novel. It examines memory loss in the family and the nation, triggered by traumatic events and leading to haunting and the haunted. Using the concept of the uncanny, this study explores the postcolonial fears and disruptions that, paradoxically, open up creative thinking for revisionist history. It contends that Chuah Guat Eng’s novel offers a critique of postcolonial othering while also insisting on acts of remembering to mitigate amnesia. The paper evaluates desires for a reconciled home …

Go to article

Islands In The Stream: A Spatial Perspective On Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Reverse Flow, Faruk Faruk Dec 2024

Islands In The Stream: A Spatial Perspective On Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Reverse Flow, Faruk Faruk

Kritika Kultura

This study examines the role of Indonesian literary works with regard to the imagination as well as constructions of islands and seas, and in relation to the changing perception and attitudes of the Indonesian government respecting these twinned terms. The aforementioned is strikingly obvious in the case of the 2019 Natuna incident in which the Indonesian government verged on jurisdictional conflict with China over its Exclusive Economic Zone off Natuna island. The literary work chosen for discussion is Arus Balik [Reverse Flow] by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I examine this novel's imagination and construction of islands and seas with reference to …

Go to article

The Turn To The Archipelagic-Oceanic In Recent Critical Island Studies In Southeast Asia, Oscar V. Campomanes Dec 2024

The Turn To The Archipelagic-Oceanic In Recent Critical Island Studies In Southeast Asia, Oscar V. Campomanes

Kritika Kultura

This introductory essay briefly maps Critical Island Studies as it is so dubbed in Southeast (nesology/nissology, elsewhere) to be able to mark how the six contributions to this Forum Kritika reflect some of the most characteristic aspects and the latest conceptual turns of critical writing and scholarship in the field. A turn to the archipelagic-oceanic as the object of theorizing and critical study is observed to be the recent trend, itself reflected in the various essays here, with their choices of topics and texts in Indonesian, Taiwanese, Korean, and Filipino conjunctures and contexts.

Go to article

Masculinities In Literary Works On Indonesia's Post-Conflict Ambon Island, Wening Udasmoro, Arifah Rahmawati Dec 2024

Masculinities In Literary Works On Indonesia's Post-Conflict Ambon Island, Wening Udasmoro, Arifah Rahmawati

Kritika Kultura

Various studies have examined masculinities within a sociological context, emphasizing linkage to violence, power, and militarization. In this sense, researchers have frequently positioned masculinities as the reproductions of male dominance and their perpetuations of conflicts and violence. No study has examined the roles that masculinities and their embedded values have played in building and maintaining peace. This article seeks to fill in the gap by examining how young people on Ambon Island helped create peace by expressing their fluid masculinities through literary works. This article focuses on poems by two Ambonese men—one a prominent peacebuilder and another a former combatant …

Go to article

A Forum On Genders And Sexualities In Asian Cinema, Joel David Dec 2024

A Forum On Genders And Sexualities In Asian Cinema, Joel David

Kritika Kultura

Although neither the first nor the last instance in attempting to provide a snapshot of current concerns in the issue of genders and sexualities in Asian film, there will always be a need to determine the status of female, queer, and non-binary subjects in the region. In a medium as universally “readable” (though not always as readily accessible) as film, the project acquires extra significance during a period when film practice and scholarship are becoming more feasible for a greater number of individuals.

Go to article

Bodies, Landscapes, And The Air That We Breathe, Caroline Frizell Dec 2024

Bodies, Landscapes, And The Air That We Breathe, Caroline Frizell

Kritika Kultura

This article maps out material-discursive entanglements of bodies and landscapes, speaking from bodies-in-movement as ecokinetic poetic phenomena. The first-hand experience of waiting on the end of a phone line for information on disability support becomes a springboard to unpack the term material-discursive, locating it in posthuman thinking, with a focus on the way normative discourses become inscribed at an embodied level. When COVID-19 arrived, or perhaps erupted from within, bodies turned into sites of suspicion and precarity, mirroring the oppressive clout of normative discourses, that move invisibly and insidiously, creating and being created by relations of power. Hands, face, and …

Go to article

Weights And Pressures: Precarity And Democracy's Legislative Subjects, Victor Merriman, Sarah Black-Frizell Dec 2024

Weights And Pressures: Precarity And Democracy's Legislative Subjects, Victor Merriman, Sarah Black-Frizell

Kritika Kultura

This short essay introduces the Our Dance Democracy (ODD) project (2018–present) and the contributions to this Forum Kritika, “Dancing Democracy in a Fractured World.” The latter includes articles, provocations, and creative responses in visual and poetic forms. Dance is an art form positioned between artists and audiences, on one hand, and institutional structures— including funding regimes and performance venues—on the other. As state and civil society infrastructure experiences pressure arising from neoliberal political economy and the exacerbating effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, dance-makers experience increasingly burdensome conditions as artists, citizens, and human beings. Choreography itself emerges as a zone …

Go to article

Exploring Environmental Issues In Children's Literature: An Ecocritical Study Of Zhang Wei's Works, Yi Yang Dec 2024

Exploring Environmental Issues In Children's Literature: An Ecocritical Study Of Zhang Wei's Works, Yi Yang

Kritika Kultura

Zhang Wei is one of the most influential authors in contemporary Chinese literature. His earlier works were written for adults, but he has recently contributed to children’s literature as well. While each of his children’s books has its own original storylines, they share a strong interest in environmental issues and contain some obvious themes of ecological consciousness. Peninsular Ha Li Ha Qi, which was influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, is a kind of pastoral literature. Looking for the Fish King, on the other hand, deals with “toxic discourse,” informing children about the life-destroying evils of modern industrial technology. Last …

Go to article

The Ecological Terrain Of Class War In The Cadre Poetry Of Mayamor / Maya Daniel / Roger Felix Salditos, Jose Monfred C. Sy Dec 2024

The Ecological Terrain Of Class War In The Cadre Poetry Of Mayamor / Maya Daniel / Roger Felix Salditos, Jose Monfred C. Sy

Kritika Kultura

In his cultural criticism, Edel Garcellano protests that literature is a politically partisan act in a “terrain of class war.” Cadre writings from “liberated” or “red” zones, Garcellano writes, demonstrate a clear partisanship with the peasants, workers, and other participants of the liberation struggle waged by the National Democratic movement in the Philippines. His commentary on the ideologization of writers invites us to investigate works produced in the context of the protracted people’s war to better understand the so-called “liberated consciousness” of cadre writers. Mobilizing Garcellano’s interpretive model of partisan symmetry between author and text, this paper critiques poems written …

Go to article

Reclaiming The Indigenous Body: Discourse, Social Media, And The Aesthetic Of Igorot Activism, Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias Dec 2024

Reclaiming The Indigenous Body: Discourse, Social Media, And The Aesthetic Of Igorot Activism, Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias

Kritika Kultura

This essay analyzes online activist media addressing the red-tagging and trumped-up criminal charges against members of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance in the wake of the Anti-Terror Law in 2020. Engaging with critical scholarship on the archiving, colonial discourse, and representation of the Igorot body, I argue that these online activist media published on the organization’s official Facebook account deploy strategic essentialism by subverting the colonially othered and criminalized marker of the savage-terrorist. The Igorot body is rendered as a quasi-heroic figure of the Igorot warrior who invokes and appropriates traditional bodily customs on warfare and gender relations to embody a …

Go to article

How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao Dec 2024

How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao

Kritika Kultura

Animal fable, a genre that anthropomorphizes animals to convey moral lessons, demonstrates the possibility that animals can be tools to teach us to be ethical human beings. In this article1 I adopt ethical literary criticism, especially its conception of human-animal relations and the term brain text to investigate the role and place of animal fable in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi to explore how the post-Darwinian animal might be exploited by fabulists to tackle human reality. In the novel, brain texts of Pi as the storyteller reveal his intention to use stories as ethical interpretations of his experience which …

Go to article

The Invention Of The Brain: Artificial Intelligence And Libidinal Symptomatology, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee Dec 2024

The Invention Of The Brain: Artificial Intelligence And Libidinal Symptomatology, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Kritika Kultura

In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consciousness. For this purpose, I examine Angelo Mosso’s ergograph and its influence on modern psychology. The fundamental problem of his experiment lies in that nobody knows how he measured the blood flow in the brain. Mosso’s method to investigate the brain was unknown, but his description of the neural mechanism spread widely. However, Mosso’s basic assumption has not fundamentally changed, even in today’s neuroscientific context. The technological evolution offers more detailed images of the brain, but it does not necessarily allow us to …

Go to article

Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian Dec 2024

Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian

Kritika Kultura

By adopting Nie Zhenzhao’s conception of brain text, this paper explicates the generation of traumatic postmemories as represented in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a third-generation descendant of Holocaust witnesses. The authors argue that the traumatic effects of great catastrophic events, such as the Holocaust during the Second World War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, can be transformed into brain texts of horror and trauma of the survivors, which, with time passing by, become the traumatic postmemories of the survivors’ descendants who have not experienced these events. As far as this novel is concerned, …

Go to article

Ethical Literary Criticism And Ariel Sotelo Tabag's Panangsapul Iti Puraw A Kabalio, Mark Louie Tabunan Dec 2024

Ethical Literary Criticism And Ariel Sotelo Tabag's Panangsapul Iti Puraw A Kabalio, Mark Louie Tabunan

Kritika Kultura

Nie Zhenzhao’s ethical literary criticism provides a new take on ethics in literature, emphasizing the historicity of ethics and providing a new toolkit in understanding ethical dilemmas in literary texts. This article deploys ethical literary criticism in reading Panangsapul iti Puraw a Kabalio [Search for the White Horse], a marvelous realist novel by award-winning Ilokano writer Ariel Sotelo Tabag. Focusing on the ethical knots encountered by the four characters of the Tabaco clan, it examines the ethical choices they made against the backdrop of the ethical environments of the Second World War and the Martial Law period. Examining the life …

Go to article

Brain Text Conversion And Cross-Cultural Integration: The Theatrical Adaptation And Performance Of Shakespeare's Comedies In China, Hui Su Dec 2024

Brain Text Conversion And Cross-Cultural Integration: The Theatrical Adaptation And Performance Of Shakespeare's Comedies In China, Hui Su

Kritika Kultura

By taking the concept of brain text, this paper1 attempts to illustrate that Falling Man by Don DeLillo is an exemplar of how brain text(s) can be processed into literary text(s). Firstly, this paper extends Nie’s concept to include four types of brain texts, namely, those pertaining to characters, readers, society, and writers, then probes into DeLillo’s trauma writing by showing how DeLillo (re)represents different characters’ brain texts in the novel. The silence and loud voice of Drew’s photo “The Falling Man” function to simulate and build up readers’ brain text, and DeLillo’s criticism of “us-them” ideology as society’s brain …

Go to article

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Teenager: Ethical Literary Criticism And David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Jiayi Chen Dec 2024

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Teenager: Ethical Literary Criticism And David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Jiayi Chen

Kritika Kultura

Inspired by ethical literary criticism, this article1 attempts to bring to critical attention the ethical dimensions of Mitchell’s war writing in Black Swan Green. By analyzing the way in which Jason’s brain text in relation to war formulates and develops, this article tries to throw light on Mitchell’s strategy of approaching and reconsidering the causes and consequences of war from the perspective of a teenager. It is argued that Mitchell has exploited diverse expressive resources—the art of the fragmentary, for example—to break new ground for rethinking the wars that fade into history. Instead of portraying violent scenes where bloody battles …

Go to article

Circling The End Of The Line In Monsoon: Glints Of Significance Across Vimala Devi's Short Story Cycle, Paul Melo E Castro Dec 2024

Circling The End Of The Line In Monsoon: Glints Of Significance Across Vimala Devi's Short Story Cycle, Paul Melo E Castro

Kritika Kultura

This article analyzes Vimala Devi’s Monsooni (the 2019 English translation of her Monção, originally published in Portuguese in 1963, with a second augmented edition in 2003) as a short story cycle, a genre that differs as much from the traditional novel as from non-integrated collections of short narratives in its “tension between variety and unity, separateness and interconnectedness, fragmentation and continuity, openness and closure” (Lundén 12). It is this generic affiliation, the author argues, that makes possible Devi’s particular portrait of late-colonial Goa. Drawing on various theorizations of the short story cycle genre, the article scrutinizes the interconnections and breaks …

Go to article

Humanizing Corporeal Spectacle: Humor And Resistance In Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Simon C. Estok Dec 2024

Humanizing Corporeal Spectacle: Humor And Resistance In Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Simon C. Estok

Kritika Kultura

This article examines Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the comments it makes about the long- term corporeal effects of environmental catastrophes. Sinha’s choice of a first person narrative strategy strongly sharpens the visceral impact of the story. The narrator is a lovably unlovable misfit who has been deformed and crippled by an industrial disaster that claimed thousands of lives. While the effects of the disaster play out through the body of the narrator himself (he calls himself “Animal” because he is so deformed), they are more than merely bodily effects: they are psychological, social, economic, developmental, sexual, and so on. …

Go to article

The Nomad Of The Naked Body: The Trans-Corporeal Ecopoetics Of Sunwoo Kim, Won-Chung Kim Dec 2024

The Nomad Of The Naked Body: The Trans-Corporeal Ecopoetics Of Sunwoo Kim, Won-Chung Kim

Kritika Kultura

The material turn in the environmental humanities drastically changes our perception of who we are and challenges our attitude toward nature. In this article, the author argues that there is a critical connection between the works of Sunwoo Kim, one of the most prominent ecofeminist poets of Korea, and the trans-corporeal poetics of new materialist feminism. By resuscitating “dead” nature and recognizing the agency of things in the world, Sunwoo Kim deconstructs humanity’s prestigious position of all-powerful subjects and repositions them as equal actors with other nonhuman beings. Trans-corporeal poetics allows her to combine the two most conspicuous trends of …

Go to article

Bodies And Body Politics Of China's Northeastern Rust Belt, Yina Cao, Xudong Guo Dec 2024

Bodies And Body Politics Of China's Northeastern Rust Belt, Yina Cao, Xudong Guo

Kritika Kultura

The old industrial zone in northeastern China—China’s rust belt region—is a fertile site to explore the body’s political significance in China’s industrial rises and falls. In recent years, writers in the rust belt region have been increasingly concerned about the social impact of the region’s economic decline, with Zhang Meng’s film The Piano in a Factory (2010) and Shuang Xuetao’s novella Moses on the Plain (2016) being the most representative. Taking these two ar- tistic works as examples, this article discusses the implications of “organ” metaphors describ- ing the “rust belt.” This article uses the perspective of body politics and …

Go to article

Toxic Environments In The Handmaid's Tale, Its Sequels, And Other Feminist Dystopias, Péter Hajdu Dec 2024

Toxic Environments In The Handmaid's Tale, Its Sequels, And Other Feminist Dystopias, Péter Hajdu

Kritika Kultura

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was much more concerned with sexist oppression than environmental issues. The late 2010s experienced a boom in feminist dystopian novels, including a sequel by Atwood herself, and the television series adaptation of the novel is also part of this trend. This development evolves in a much more environmentally conscious context, which necessarily influences the interpretation both of the 1985 novel and the sequels. This article offers readings of recent feminist dystopias from the viewpoint of current environmental crises, especially the pollution crisis and climate change. The basic problem the religious fundamentalist regime of …

Go to article

Reading Corporeality In The Climate Change Era: A Comparative Study Of Seamus Heaney's And Hua Hai's Ecological Poetry, Chao Xie Dec 2024

Reading Corporeality In The Climate Change Era: A Comparative Study Of Seamus Heaney's And Hua Hai's Ecological Poetry, Chao Xie

Kritika Kultura

Few critics have paid serious attention to the corporeality depicted in the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s climate change poetry, despite the fact that the body has become an increasingly crucial topic in the climate change era. In a situation similar to Heaney’s, the Chinese ecopoet Hua Hai has stressed the mutual transformations between different forms of bodies in his works, but there have been few studies on Hua’s ideas of the body. These ideas are closely related to Confucianism and Daoism in particular. This article, referencing corporeal theories in the West and the East, is a comparative reading of Heaney’s …

Go to article

Corporeality, Genetic Technology, And Climate Change In The Year Of The Flood, Young-Hyun Lee Dec 2024

Corporeality, Genetic Technology, And Climate Change In The Year Of The Flood, Young-Hyun Lee

Kritika Kultura

In her novel The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood vividly illustrates the unmistakable impact of climate change on people’s lives these days. Genetic manipulation has become one of the technologies that people have grown dependent on to solve environmental problems in this age of climate change, where severe droughts, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and the like are being reported more frequently than ever. But genetic engineering has profound consequences for human corporealities, as both COVID-19 and The Year of the Flood show. In the novel, Atwood presents a world where humanity finds it hardly possible to survive without …

Go to article

Brain Text, Brain-To-Text, And The Mind Style Of Literature, Songlin Wang Dec 2024

Brain Text, Brain-To-Text, And The Mind Style Of Literature, Songlin Wang

Kritika Kultura

Zhenzhao Nie’s ethical literary criticism, specifically his theory of brain text and ethical selection, envisions an innovative and energetic understanding of the psychological and ethical processing of literature in the brain. This is evidenced by a survey of the ontological controversy between dualism and monism and a review of contemporary research in neuroscience, together with an investigation of the concept of brain text. Based on a comparative study of the neurolinguistic and neuroethical approaches and Nie’s theory of brain text, the paper endorses Nie in his proposal of the brain text as the source of literature and his advocating of …

Go to article

First Prev Next Last