Hakyoung Ahn, Sogang University
Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2024)

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the complexities and fallacies of individual sexual resistance and empowerment in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007) through an analysis of the sexual scenes between protagonist Yeong-hye and her artist brother-in-law in the second section. While the first and final sections have received more critical attention for depicting Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism as a radical form of political activism, the sexual dynamics in the second part have been comparatively under-analyzed. Unlike Yeong-hye’s other encounters with sexually gendered violence, the agency she exerts and the sense of liberation she experiences in the second part allow for a reading of the scene as empowering. However, this essay argues that the dynamics of individualized sexual empowerment portrayed in these scenes align with the structural gendered violence that pervades the rest of the book. It examines the novel’s blurring of boundaries between the artistic expression of the erotic and a male-controlled discourse of the erotic within the context of world literature, exploring the question of sexual autonomy through a global and transnational framework.

Margarita Marinova, Christopher Newport University
Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2024)

ABSTRACT: Seen by many as the Ur-story of travel and return to the home in western literature, the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus has inspired hundreds of retellings in different genres and languages across the globe, but they all encode the traveler as a male adventurer who crosses boundaries and penetrates spaces. In contrast, my essay takes a close look at a female literary re-accentuation of the original myth by the 2018 Nobel Prize winner, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, in order to investigate the significant disparities between male and female adventure stories, and explore how female re-conceptualizations of the Odyssey unsettle the traditional symbolic order through writing that is both pluralistic, multi-voiced, and universal, all-inclusive.  Ultimately, I argue that Tokarczuk’s creative refashioning of one of the foundational myths of western civilization in her novel Flights, constitutes a fresh feminist critique of modern subjectivity, and a bold proclamation of the need to embrace a new type of a model traveler: the “feminist nomad,” who is much better suited to the “becoming-world” of twenty-first century cosmopolitanism.

Anissa Wardi and Katherine Wardi-Zonna, Chatham University & Pennsylvania Western University
Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2024)

ABSTRACT: This paper considers Phyllis Alesia Perry’s use of art therapy as a modality of healing in Stigmata, a novel that examines intergenerational trauma resulting from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The protagonist, Lizzie, is not merely beset with visions of her foremothers’ pain but shares consciousness with her grandmother and great-great-grandmother. As a result of episodes in which Lizzie experiences the trauma of her ancestors’ lives, she is tormented, both in body and spirit. Her brutalized body bears witness to the wounds of history that have yet to be healed. This essay examines the neurobiology of trauma and the therapeutic value of expressive arts. Seminal psychotherapeutic theorists have long highlighted the importance of artistic endeavors in therapeutic treatment. In Perry’s novel, conventional psychiatric interventions have  limited benefits; it is Lizzie’s engagement in textile art that begins her journey to healing. Through quilting, Lizzie represents a maternal history and transmogrifies pain into art, trauma into narrative.

Shilpi Saxena, Punjab State Aeronautical Engineering College
Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2024)

ABSTRACT: “What is the emotional cost (affect) of being embedded within the spectrum of non-recognition and illegibility?” asks the protagonist of Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985). The essay revisits the notion of affect to theorize the embodied dispositions—the emotional or bodily responses to the processes of racialization and negation of Black people within the diasporic context. Drawing on the notion of affect as a useful paradigm for registering distinctive forms of embodiment or the somatic, the present study examines the affective dispositions of living in the constellation of anti-Black and anti-immigrant discourses. In particular, it surveys the recent upsurge of affect theory in literature, while examining Riley’s debut novel The Unbelonging through the lens of affect. The article sheds light on two aspects: first, the significance of affect and emotions in literature and second, how Black bodies are affected by this affect in ways that might not be captured fully in language. A renewed focus on emotions, sentiments, and affect facilitates a more nuanced analysis of The Unbelonging, and helps to assess and account for a range of affective experiences of individuals or communities, naturalized as inferior or subhuman.

Carrie Timlin, The University of the Witwatersrand
Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2024)

ABSTRACT: With rare exceptions, studies on author and activist Ethel Mannin have focused on her political non-fiction despite a broad consensus that many of her novels and short stories were vehicles for Socialist ideology. Her novelette Love’s Winnowing is a seminal example of how Socialist authors, and Mannin in particular, subverted the romance to political ends. Blurring the line between cultural commentary and popular fiction, Mannin’s nuanced integration of the experiences of working-class women in the story provides a window into the lives and concerns of its target audience, the connection between literature and its socio-political context, and the dialectic between aesthetics and class politics in interwar Britain. If Mannin’s fiction is detached from her politics, scholarship on it will remain incomplete. The same can be said for work that focuses on her politics, neglecting her fiction. Drawing on the popularity of the romance and the political affordances of a genre that occupied a controversial place in working-class communities, Mannin spoke to an intimately gendered politics located firmly within working-class women’s experience, not by overtly stating her aims, but by inviting a group of socially situated readers to draw on their familiarity with cultural codes to interpret her narrative creatively.