Free Flow: Comparison

While her reputation as an activist, journalist, and political commentator was established throughout her life, Dorothy Macardle’s literary work had fallen from wider public attention until the reissuing of The Uninvited and The Unforeseen as part of Tramp Press’s Recovered Voices series, as well as Earth-bound: And Other Supernatural Tales which was republished by Swan River Press. Rosamond Jacob’s extensive diaries have provided contextual information for multiple studies of the revolutionary period, and she is the subject of a biography by Leann Lane; her novels, however, remain out of print, despite having attracted some scholarly attention in recent years. In contrast to relatively substantial archival and journalistic material left by Jacob and Macardle, Margaret Barrington is a far more elusive figure. The story “Village Without Men” was included in Sinéad Gleeson’s anthology The Art of the Glimpse: in fact, the title of the anthology is taken from a review from William Trevor of Barrington’s work. Her writings, literary and journalistic, remain difficult but not impossible to locate, particularly since My Cousin Justin was reissued by Blackstaff Press. However, the longstanding challenge of accessing Irish women writers’ work evidently persists as an issue both of visibility and accessibility.

Adapted from: A. McDaniel “It Was a Smoke Dream”: Affective Aesthetics in Women’s Literature of the Irish Civil War, Published in Humanities 2022

Over the past few decades, fanfiction has become virtually synonymous with the digital and ephemeral. Nevertheless, fan studies has only recently begun to acknowledge contemporary fanfiction in physical print formats, quite apart from the traditional fanzines popular before the mainstreaming of the internet. This has most strikingly taken the form of fanbinding, a previously niche fannish practice that has recently been gaining ground. While fanbinding is a significant harbinger of what I would term the renaissance of print fanfiction, current research (while still in its nascent stages) tends to focus on the reader, in their role as fan binder and de facto publisher of fanfiction in book form. We have not yet seen research into fanfiction that is printed via print-on-demand (POD) technologies; moreover, there has not yet been any examination of the author as the (self-)publisher of their own fanfiction.

Adapted from: L. Price, Fanfiction, Self-Publishing, and the Materiality of the Book: A Fan Writer’s Autoethnography published in Humanities 2022

Whereas a utopia purports an ideal and perfect society, where the vast majority believe themselves to be happy and humanity appears to shine with its own light, the opposite takes places in dystopian societies. The latter condition, as often displayed in science-fiction literature and cinema, shows a dysfunctional and apocalyptic future with totalitarian societies in which alienated citizens live under the total control of a repressive power, without freedom of decision and without access to a culture that goes beyond the totalitarian principles defined by the regime. In the Cuban case, it is not necessary to resort to a distant future to represent a dystopian reality; an apocalypse on the island has already happened and continues to happen daily.

Adapted from: S. Juan-Navarro, From Utopia to Dystopia: The Demise of the Revolutionary Dream in Futuristic Cuban Cinema published in Humanities 2022

The affective dimension of cringe indicates that there is a point to this uncomfortable ambiguity and to the downbeat endings that are so common in cringe comedy. Because it often has as much in common with tragedy as it has with comedy, cringe can afford a distinct form of catharsis: “Vicariously experiencing the embarrassing moments of others, like watching Greek drama, incites and purges pity and fear from an audience. […] We laugh, we blush, we recognize [the] mortification–and then we move on”. Like tragedy, cringe comedies can “purge pity and fear from an audience”, shattering us in ways that allow us to better “navigate our way through the missteps of our sometimes awkward social lives”. In this context, I am intrigued by the autobiographical tales that many cringe comics have shared, both in their stand-up shows, as well as in interviews that serve as extensions of their trademark personas, and which testify to how comedy can serve as a form of activism.

Adapted from: W. Schwanebeck, Introduction to Painful Laughter: Media and Politics in the Age of Cringe published in Humanities 2021

Activism to protest the devastation of the ancient Hambach Forest blocking an expansion of the opencast lignite mining operation in Germany’s Rhineland in Fall 2018 provided enough spectacle for broad, even international, media coverage. While visual media can present shocking images and detailed data on Germany’s industrial lignite extraction and its disastrous impacts on local ecosystems and the humans whose hometowns, fields, and farms are obliterated, the narrative medium of literature can more fully represent the dire consequences of this violent practice, which devours not just subterranean and surface space but historically grown “places” and their temporalities—past, present, and future. Open-pit lignite excavation destroys it all: the sediment layers bearing testimony to the development of Earth history and of the human history preserved in archaeological artifacts underground; the naturalcultural landscape that has emerged from human settlements and agricultural practices that is typical for most of Central Europe; and the living environment and future of ecosystems, or what earth scientists call “the Critical Zone.” As a potentially new geological epoch following the Holocene, the Anthropocene was conceived by climate and earth scientists in the year 2000 as an epoch in which the impact of human activities has reached a scale that makes it a force affecting all of the Earth’s systems. While its exact starting date remains to be scientifically determined by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the concept of the Anthropocene, with its planetary spatial scale and attention to the “deep time” of Earth history, has also gained currency in the humanities and social sciences, which increasingly investigate the cultural, socioenvironmental, and political tensions between smaller-scale local or regional and large-scale global transformations caused by humans. Within the environmental humanities, literature in particular has the capacity to convey the complexities of issues, such as environmental injustice in order to create empathy for the living beings affected by these drastic changes, and to consider questions of agency and responsibility.

Adapted from: H. Braunbeck, The Past Erased, the Future Stolen: Lignite Extractivism as Germany’s Trope for the Anthropocene published in Humanities 2021