Abstract Narrative fiction that combines mathematical or scientific discourses with a pronounced interest in the topic of reasoning, particularly the mercurial effects of abstraction, unfolds an especially multi-faceted engagement with hegemonic cultures of knowledge. The contrastive analysis of two contemporary works of American fiction illustrates the role that the affordances of aesthetic form thereby play: Ted Chiang’s “Division by Zero”, a short story concerned with mathematical and empathic cultures of knowledge, and Richard Powers’s maximalist novel The Overstory, a climate change novel that challenges plant disparity awareness in Western culture. Powers’s novel can be seen as a critical response to the anthropocentric cultures of knowledge encapsulated in Chiang’s short story.

Abstract Hawthorne’s often-neglected tale, “The Seven Vagabonds” (1833), portrays one of the most significant instances of a vagabond’s way of life eventually materialized in literary pursuit. This paper examines the short story in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘carnival’, explicating how each vagabond arriving at the wagon offers some tantalizing glimpses of what a Bakhtinian carnival looks like. These carnivalesque features include the immediate familiarity between the characters, the suspension of moral and social rules, embodiment, and unfinalizabilty. Acting as the prelude to Stamford, the vagabonds’ merry gathering is ultimately canceled out. It is finally argued that the failure of the vagabonds’ utopia marks the narrator’s momentum of transformation, leading him to internalize the carnival spirit of vagabonds within his own imaginative mind and to change the role of carnival from an actual event to a literary pursuit, embodied in the creative and subjective art of storytelling. This transformation of carnivalization tallies well with Hawthorne’s modified political vision of utopianism in the aftermath of the Brook Farm experiment and Bakhtin’s configuration of carnival after its decline as a public event in the Renaissance.

Abstract This essay discusses how and to what effect Weird and New Weird fiction use description in unique and genre-defining ways. Using H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and China Miéville’s The City & The City as examples, it shows how the Weird relegates a comparatively large part of the text to description and attempts to elicit dread as an aesthetic effect. The essay argues that the Weird breaks with the traditional use of description by employing formally realist tendencies which it defies functionally, and by combining over-description with the failure to describe, whereas the New Weird is more concise in its use of description, ties it more closely to the narrative, and is less reliant on descriptive failures. Both the Weird and the New Weird demand more active reader participation in their creation of aesthetic illusion, which they encourage through the frames they create around their descriptions, thus preparing readers for the potential of aesthetic distance in the reception process and diminishing its effect. The analysis emphasizes the potential of description to be more than a subordinate to the narrative mode and to be a central component in the formation of a text’s implied worldview.

Abstract The article revises the well-established reading of the Canadian author and artist Seth’s first graphic novel It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (1993–1996) as autofiction, employing a more recent theorization on autofiction and the autofictional (that is, autofictional pact and strategies of counterfactuality). Seth consciously constructs his narrative identity, exploiting generic conventions and respective social expectations, which arise at the turn of the twenty-first century in light of the rising popularity of confessional writing in American alternative comics. Within the scope of this article, I touch upon the pragmatic of authorial self-articulation, that is, manipulation of architextual relations by means of his pseudonym, professional label, and genre elements, as well as the functional analysis of the binary system of characters. The study suggests the importance of differentiating between the fictional and referential in autofiction in order to preserve the autofictional equilibrium of establishment and subversion of authenticity.

Abstract In most of her writings, Sarah Hall uses the pastoral mode, tapping its complexity in order not only to revisit and subvert its conventions but also to represent and question the interactions between the human and the non-human. The pastoral is thus used as an aesthetic and ethical medium through which the crises of the Anthropocene are made visible. I argue that Sarah Hall’s Haweswater and The Wolf Border, drawing on the origins of pastoral, showcase an alternative pastoral trajectory that allows her to represent the challenges of the current environmental crisis. Through a thematic and formal study of Hall’s novels in the light of new materialist theories, I intend to show that the reinvention of the pastoral mode is a way for Hall to shed light on the realistic content of the pastoral that tends to go unnoticed: the actual working and living conditions of land workers, the political orientations behind rewilding programs, the representation of the environment and the ontological hierarchy that enables human subjects to reify nature and its non-human inhabitants. This alternative pastoral trajectory allows literature to investigate, question and reflect on the current environmental crisis and on our position as human beings embedded in a natural environment.

Abstract Cultural and religious representations may seem different from one culture to another. Yet the concept of the ‘Force’ that George Lucas developed in the Star Wars saga (1977–2019) has been compared to the Judeo-Christian and East Asian religions and traditions, and even to the Greco-Roman philosophical concept of ‘pneuma’. In turn, the Igbo of Nigeria believe in the existence of ‘Chi’, an enigmatic concept that has given rise to various interpretations. This article conducts a comparative analysis of the concept of ‘Force’ in Lucas’ Star Wars saga and the Igbo ‘Chi’ in Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta’s novel Kehinde (1994). It focuses on the principle of duality these works establish between the natural and supernatural worlds and its relevance for the twin characters in the narratives. The connections between the ‘Force’ and the twins Luke and Leia and between ‘Chi’ and Kehinde and her dead twin sister Taiwo evoke the epic structure of a hero that must, in Joseph Campbell’s terms, “slay [the] dragon” (Campbell and Moyers 1988/1991: 182). The article examines the relevance of religion and myths in these twentieth-century narratives that readdress the development of the heroes’ identity and their struggle to offer audiences role models to confront modern social and political questions.

Abstract This article focuses on the retrospective narrative in the Iranian American novelist Dina Nayeri’sRefuge(2017). We argue that the novel’s interpretations of acts of remembering, which presuppose confession and re-evaluation, define the ways of constructing the refugee identity of the main character, Niloo. Within the discourse of retrospection, the self appears in the mode of reflection over past events, and thanks to temporal distance, the self can verbalize changes in perception of the past self. Thus, retrospection becomes a psychological and narrative endeavor during which identity is created through the experience of re-evaluation. The interaction between then and now as well as their final convergence in the end of the novel result in the continuity of experience and coherence of identity. Niloo’s ontology of becoming is possible through the re-living of the past, its interpretation, and its integration into the present. In other words, the possibility of reflection over experience is the very condition for her becoming. The main character concentrates on her meetings with her father in different cities (Oklahoma City, London, Madrid, and Istanbul) and her re-evaluation of her emotional experience during those meetings. These moments of re-evaluation explicate the dynamics of her identity construction, which shifts from a rejection of her past to an embrace of it.

Abstract Historically, both the male and the medical gaze have sexualized and pathologized the female anatomy. Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body simultaneously perpetuates and problematizes the alliance between patriarchy and science that objectifies and disempowers women and their own stories. Her novel’s genderless narrator first eroticizes her/his beloved Louise and later abandons her because she suffers with leukemia, leaving her in the hands of her husband-doctor, a man whom she no longer loves or trusts. Under the umbrella of medical humanities, this essay explores how Winterson’s narrator dehumanizes and silences Louise by becoming the anatomist of her cancer to possess her entirely from afar and to mourn the loss of access to her sexual body; vicariously experiencing leukemia through storytelling, and thus depriving Louise of her right to make choices in her life, the comforting presence of the person she loves by her side, and the therapy of narrating her own account about terminal illness on the look of death.