Words, images, and the body are memory media that are used in personal and cultural communication to construct our memory interactively. In literary works, these memory media carry historical and cultural memories and ethical connotations. William Gass’s Middle C and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson are both works presenting the idea of historical memory and cultural norms through words, images, and the body. By exploring three focal points, i.e., characters’ self-identities, traditional cultural memory, and the fusion of different cultures in these two literary works, this paper analyzes the characters’ ethical predicaments indicated by memory media and reveals the writers’ attitudes towards and memorization of historical events.

The present study explores Afro-Caribbean poet Grace Nichols’s “The Black Women Goes Shopping,” “Beauty,” “Looking at Miss World,” and “Invitation” from her poetry collection The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984) in relation to the concept of aphanisis. Based on a post-Lacanian analysis, the essay argues that against the dominant discourse of the civilizational ideal, Humanism, that silences black women by categorizing them as sexualized and racialized others, Nichols’s poetic personae rewrite themselves by evacuating the standardized negative implications associated with black women, confined to the lower leg of the binary trap in Western metaphysics. Rather than presenting themselves as marginalized figures spoken by myths and produced through abjection, these women resist their fading by the semantic overkill of the Other and shatter the self-pitying image assigned to them through their subversion of the Symbolic from within. Leaking out from the cracks of grand narratives, they reposition themselves outside the dialectics of recognition and voice themselves beyond the grasp of symbolic significations. By their transgressive repositioning, they open up a new space of signification and object to their fixation by the deadly gaze of the dominant discourse.

The late twentieth century ignited a global revolutionary impulse in the interface between literature and environment. Environmentalist ideologies became more manifest in the articulation and criticism of literary texts. Nigerian literature experienced and has continued to experience different shades of representation of the environment of which Tanure Ojaide’s narrative fiction is one of such representations. Although scholars have examined the representation of the environment in Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist (2006), they have often ignored the structural and persistent patterns of environmental pollution and how they relate to a class within an ethnic minority in the novel. This study examines the above relationship using environmental justice eco-critical approach, a strand of eco-criticism that establishes a connection between environmental issues and social justice, to disclose the social forces that are responsible for the heavy pollution in the work. These forces undergird the representations of and reflections on both the gaseous and the non-gaseous pollution/pollutants in the novel. It concludes that environmental privation is inextricably interwoven with social injustices, the biggest victims of which are the vulnerable and subservient class of a dispossessed minority ethnic group.

This paper, firstly scrutinizes the plant writings in Welty’s early works, A Worn Path and A Curtain of Green, looks into the agency of plants as well as the intra-actions of human and the nonhuman through the New Materialist approach, and then further investigates the aesthetic value of Welty’s writing and her environmental ethics. Welty, in A Worn Path, diminishes the distinctions between human and plants by emphasizing the agency of the latter, which is the manifestation of her de-anthropocentric view. Similar views are also found in A Curtain of Green. In addition, she presents how plants remain interactive with human beings affectively through their agency, thereby, as the depiction of the affective power of plants in healing the psychic trauma. Therefore, plant narratives, for one thing, add an ecological value to Welty’s “place” writing, for another, demonstrate the aesthetic significance of her environmental ethics.

The German writer Patrick Süskind symbolically projects the power of scents in his historical fantasy novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. The protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, has a supernatural ability to identify the odors of almost everything around him, yet he remains an undifferentiated self in psychiatric terms, seeking love, influence, and acceptance. Using Murray Bowen’s concept of self-differentiation, this article investigates the theme of marginalization in Süskind’s Perfume by examining emotional webs of interrelationships between Grenouille and those around him in different social, institutional, and cultural capacities. In his quest to have a unique personal scent, Grenouille becomes an obsessed murderer of twenty-five girls. However, he ends up tragically by being devoured with lust rather than love, ironically because of his special concocted perfume. Adopting a psychiatric approach, the article examines the functional level of Grenouille’s differentiation in three emotional systems and relationship processes: with Madame Gaillard, the tanner Grimal, and the perfumer Giuseppe Baldini. Grenouille, it is concluded, has a low level of self-differentiation, i.e. a weak range of self development. Accordingly, he is guided by his emotions in his contact with others and not autonomous in his thinking. His life goal is to be loved as an idol. However, his level of self-differentiation does not allow him to be an idol; instead, he remains in the margin, and his life remains ephemeral, as evanescent as “perfume.”

The article studies the concept of an artist-man as an artistic personality in the philosophical aesthetics introduced by Richard Wagner, based on the idea of the synthesis of the arts, and its transformation in the aesthetics of modernism. The purpose of the research is to analyze the concept of Wagner, provide rationalization for its connection with the Faustian theme and consider its interpretation in the novel Mephisto by Klaus Mann. So, the purpose stipulates the usage of methodological basis of the study including cultural and historical, historical and literary, comparative, philosophical and aesthetic research methods. The Wagnerian image of an artistic person and the idea of the synthesis of the arts gain momentum at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and get a second wind in the artistic legacy and theoretical works of the famous Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok, who developed the concept of Wagner. According to Wagner, the idea of the synthesis of the arts resulted in the idea of creating the image of a free person capable of comprehending, renewing and transforming the world, and thus revealed a connection with the Faustian theme, vital during this period. The essence of an artist-man, establish himself in his creativity, is considered in the article in terms of the development of the Dionysian principle as a primitive creative energy, aimed at creating and transforming the world and man with the help of art. Wagner’s concept is realized in an invertible way in the novel by Klaus Mann, where the image of an artist-man is identified with the image of Mephistopheles as the embodiment of a destructive principle. The article analyzes the degrading artistic principle on the basis of the image of protagonist. Mann’s interpretation of the Wagner concept and the Faustian theme enables to conclude that the modernist literature of the 1930s is accentuated by the idea of the degeneration of the artistic creative Faustian principle, its transformation into the demonic principle. So, the idea of transforming the world, implemented in the state reorganization headed by the totalitarian Nazi government, has got the features of the apocalypse.

Firoozeh Dumas, an Iranian immigrant living in America, narrates her life story and inspires readers to laugh even at the most tense moments. She wrote her memoir, Funny in Farsi, in English. The article examines her humor as grounded in three major theories and analyzes different forms of comedic expression in Funny in Farsi. The article also seeks to establish to what extent humor used in Funny in Farsi is gender, ethnic and culture dependent. Dumas’ humor, grounded in her unique social experience, develops positive social solidarity with other ethnic groups on the one hand and with her female readers on the other.

This study aims to examine the epistemology concept written in Serat Wedhatama. Serat Wedhatama is the masterpiece of King Mangkunegara IV (1811–1881). It teaches the principle of “Agama Ageming Aji,” meaning religion as the grip for the king, the concept of human beings, the purpose of life, relationship between people and with God, including the efforts to achieve the perfect life. It is known to be a handbook and guiding principle for Javanese people. The study on the epistemology of Serat Wedhatama done here intends to put the concept of knowledge as a core to understand ethical teachings as the central point of the manuscript. A comprehensive and holistic understanding is necessary to explain Wedhatama’s moral thought for not being partially disconnected from its epistemological basis. In addition, this study aims to explore the field of epistemology in the Eastern philosophy, especially Javanese philosophy. So far, Javanese philosophy is given less attention than it should be. The study is conducted by assessing Serat Wedhatama as a material object, and epistemology (philosophy of knowledge) is used as the perspective of the study.

This paper aims to articulate the historical background of the US missionary policy in the East and its outreach through literary and publicist texts. I argue that the theories and concepts motivating the Americans for the mission in the East in the XIX century were inspired by centennial attractiveness of the region to both Europeans and Americans. Additionally, in the US political and literary imagination, the eastern land was associated with the border of “the land of promise” “gifted” them by the Heavens. Linking the idea of the Old and New Canaan, the Americans determined the Middle East as a “new frontier” of their country. My basic claim is that the missionary, as a strategic tool of the ‘soft power’ managed the US colonial policy in the East and justified it with noble tales. What encouraged the pragmatic Americans to launch “soft power” technologies there? The reason lays not so deep: in a direct interrelation between the widening of New England missionary to the Middle East and the development of financial and exploration points there. In the paper, I propose the diversity of the American missionary narratives, most of which are intertwined into political texts. The travel diaries, essays, and particularly, the colonial-missionary novels have been structured around a plot describing the missionaries as courageous and legitimate defenders of the eastern lands and culture, and the aborigines, who were seeking their protection. This policy of the Americans have been pursued until present: without changing its essence, it has acquired new forms, and uses modern technologies to intervene in the politics of the eastern countries. In examining the roots of the US colonial policy, I explore the Joshua Strong’s concept of the Anglo-Saxons’ priority, Frederic Turner’s “Frontier thesis”, and other American myths and stereotypes.

Literature is composed of a group of Cinderella’s whose miseries are brought about by their violent and abusive fathers, and whose incompleteness is due to their mothers’ helplessness. Miseries come along one after another, but at the same time, plant seeds of love and hatred. Deficiency cries for remedies, and at the same time, brings forth talented youth. This paper aims to reveal the feature of incompleteness in French modern and contemporary literature by studying its awkwardness. Awkwardness would mean unnatural and uneasy in traditional culture, but it can also mean supernatural and super at ease in the context of drastic turns in the development of civilizations. French literature in the recent century is outstanding in terms of awkwardness. And this awkwardness not only acts as an antidote to repression, but also embodies the practice by men of letters. They write about absurdity and absurdly write, present helplessness and helplessly present, reveal all that is abominable and abominably reveal, and they rip up gentility and always rip up gentlemen-like. Not only does awkwardness embody incompleteness, but also feeds, repairs and develops incompleteness. To put this phenomenon briefly is that awkwardness lives by its awkwardness.

Intensified research into the natural world, the deterioration of which caused by humans we are experiencing particularly acutely nowadays, makes us redirect our attention towards our surroundings. Contemporary literary studies are likely, therefore, to benefit from such theories as Posthumanism, which, criticising anthropocentrism, posit a new perception of matter as inherently creative and endowed with subjectivity. The paper discusses selected tenets of posthumanism as a possible ideological backdrop to literary analysis. While not a homogeneous theory per se, posthumanism provides the field of literary criticism with particularly illuminating concepts. Its approach stresses the fact that a human being is an intersection point of material and non-material as well as human and non-human determinants. It also emphasizes relational and discursive nature of all existing entities whose meanings are formed in the ongoing processes of interactions (‘intraactions’) between them. Posthumanist analysis focuses on the sensual immediacy of material objects and on the kind of human–non-human closeness which rests upon material interconnectedness between the two participants of the relation. The posthumanist methodology appreciates the importance of the characters’ corporeality and focuses on the so far neglected or underappreciated elements of the diegetic world, namely the non-human subjects.