...Darko Suvin How do dominant epistemological frames create political understanding and violence in the public sphere and through cultural texts? This article explores a theoretical answer to this question by identifying narrative categories, or frames, that create shared realities and collective...

...Anna Poletti This article considers zine making as a form of independent literary production that can offer new insights into the understanding of creativity in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. It situates zines as a form of literary writing, reading, and distribution that cannot...

... to materialize information, transforming it from something seemingly intangible into something tangible. Indeed, one of the main effects of documentation is information's materialization. This article contributes to new materialism by introducing a documentary approach to analyzing and understanding...

... like “society,” “history,” and “divinity.” Adorno and Aquinas are concerned with abstractions, with describing how categories like “sensation” or “beauty” function within historical or theological structures of understanding. Chaucer, conversely, is immersed in the particular; not only does he create...

...Kalliopi Nikolopoulou This essay is a critical analysis of Nietzsche's anti-Aristotelian reading of tragedy. My purpose is to show Aristotle's relevance for our age, which is strongly inflected by Nietzsche. I focus on the contemporary sidelining of catharsis in order to understand certain...

..., I suggest that we might in turn use another formalization, that of A. J. Greimas's semiotic rectangle, to understand a movement that occurs in Lacan's work from the three that dominated his earlier “structuralist” thinking—prominently on display in his early 1950s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter...

... currencies are continuously created as reinventions upon themselves and upon capitalist practice. The notion of failing forward is key to understanding the creative design of currency alternatives as carrying within itself not only hopes for the future but also the history of prior forms as well...

...Whitney Stark In this semimanifesto, I approach how understandings of quantum physics and cyborgian bodies can (or always already do) ally with feminist anti-oppression practices long in use. The idea of the body (whether biological, social, or of work) is not stagnant, and new materialist...

... to read literary works for their great moral wisdom, and they fault literary scholars for ignoring this appeal and for failing to understand basic economics. But as this survey of recent publications demonstrates, the conjunction of these critiques is odd: literary critics have been skeptical of claims...

... the category of reading to better understand the temporal, spatial, and sensory encounter between text and audience. © 2017 Virginia Tech 2017 affect theory aesthetics Eugenie Brinkema C. Namwali Serpell renée c. hoogland Works Cited Abel Marco . 2007 . Violent Affect . Lincoln...

... of the two films indicates that aӽliation across races must be based on a shared understanding of circumstances. White-savior motifs may assuage white audiences, but they deny agency to people of color. Copyright © 2018 Virginia Tech 2018 working class solidarity white savior Clint Eastwood...

... demonstrate a breadth and depth of thinking, experience, and understanding beyond modern commentators. Copyright © 2019 Virginia Tech 2019 animal welfare cruelty unnecessary suffering fashion humane methods unnatural conditions Works Cited Bradshaw John . 2017 . The Animals among...

... for understanding what it means “to common” within and against capitalism. Copyright © 2019 Virginia Tech 2019 the commons sovereignty revolution anticapitalist politics Works Cited Berlant Lauren . 2016 . “ The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times ”. Environment and Planning D...

... are inherently technological. It is not mere humans that have reached out and changed the climate but humans extended by planet-scale economies and industries. The computed climate models that show us the climate has changed are just another way we’ve come to rely on automated devices to understand what...

... on devastated land. This emphasis on individual recovery, in a city where large-scale urban infrastructures had failed, is key to understanding why the city has undergone only a slow and partial recuperation. The city was to be reconstructed both physically and ideologically as a city of individualization...

...Bashir Abu-Manneh This essay adapts Theodor Adorno's conception of modernism to Arab and Palestinian historical conditions and argues that it is crucial for understanding the emergence and contours of Palestinian modernism. Key features, such as the disintegration of the individual and history...

... landscape—from pastoral ideals to urban decay—demonstrates how Vietnamese Americans complicate conventional understandings of race, space, and citizenship in the Crescent City. © 2015 Virginia Tech 2015 Asian American diaspora ecology pastoral US South Works Cited Airriess...

.... Insisting on this etymological relation to prayer opens up the singular conditions of precarious existence, which include forms of petitioning, request, and rhetorics of belief. In this sense, the essay seeks to understand how the discourse of precarity exposes different ways of addressing forms...

... and transformational forms of discourse. Understanding literature as transformational requires us to consider, however, the fundamental question of whether “criticism” itself is even compatible with the kinds of surface, pious, generous, intensive, mutual reading imagined as alternatives. The essay explores several...