The essay points to an overlap between Metamorphosis and Kafka’s early unfinished story “Wedding Preparations in the Country”; it highlights the theme of the incomplete metamorphosis as underlying the protagonists’ predicament. The theme of the incomplete transformation is then traced in a number of Kafka’s short stories, revealing its importance in Kafka’s world-view.
This paper analyzes Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children within the framework of selected tenets of Karen Barad’s agential realism. With its focus on the inherent agency of matter and its uncanny creative power as well as intra-active entanglements among entities, Barad’s theory provides a context for a new reading of Rushdie’s magical realist novel. The project draws inspiration from quantum physics and points to the “spiritual” dimension of materiality while broadening the notion of agency to include all kinds of beings. Midnight’s Children exhibits a new materialist strand of the posthumanist perception of reality: the human body is depicted as embedded in intra-active connections with various kinds of entities, the human vs. animal opposition is questioned, and the non-human is appreciated. Most importantly, Rushdie accentuates the peculiar uncanny quality of matter. The paper argues that in Midnight’s Children human “magical” corporeality corresponds to the uncanny corporeality of the world.
October 2025: Malgorzata Kowalcze is an early-career researcher who holds a PhD in English literature and a Master’s degree in philosophy. Her principal research interests are in the fields of contemporary English literature, phenomenology, and posthumanism, with particular focus on New Materialisms. She is the author of William Golding's Images of Corporeality: Insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body (in Polish) as well as of a number of papers published in international journals. Her articles apply selected posthumanist theories and ecocriticism to the study of literature. She has guest-lectured about posthumanism in Spain, Italy, Romania, as well as Israel and Uzbekistan. In her current research project, she explores the connections between new materialism and the genre of magical realism. She is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies of the University of the National Education Commission, Krakow, Poland, where she teaches courses in the history of English literature and posthumanism.
Do the leaders of minority communities in divided cities influence group members’ expressed willingness to engage politically with rival groups? Studies typically link group members’ willingness to engage with rival groups to direct contact between individuals from opposing groups. However, such contact is problematic in divided cities, wherein opportunities to interact are scarce and frowned upon. Focusing on the contested urban space of Jerusalem, we find indications that the diverse nature of community leadership in East Jerusalem can influence Palestinian residents’ attitudes towards political engagement with Israeli authorities via municipal elections. The ‘middlemen’ role can explain community leaders’ influence in divided cities. They facilitate indirect contact between their constituents and the other group’s members or institutions. Our analysis employs original data from a public opinion survey conducted among Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem immediately prior to the Jerusalem 2018 municipal elections. It has ramifications regarding urban governance for other divided cities.
Minimal sufficiency readings of exclusive modifiers (Just the thought of food makes me hungry) have resisted a comprehensive semantic analysis that accurately predicts their distribution. In this paper we show that the distribution of minimal sufficiency readings is directly correlated with the interpretation of plural arguments and that the distributional facts reflect the connection between plural predication and scalarity: sufficiency readings are licensed precisely in contexts where ordering relations over alternatives are reversed. We develop a semantics for exclusives that is capable of generating either exclusive or sufficiency readings depending on the direction of scalarity.
This article demonstrates how Samuel Beckett’s Endgame fleshes out the implausible entailments of a world premised on the emotivist understanding of the self –– on a noncognitivist conception of metaethical anti-realism, which is precisely the moral theory of meaning that Alasdair MacIntyre sets out to dismantle in After Virtue. I delineate an analogy between MacIntyre’s critique of post-Enlightenment conceptions of obligation and Beckett’s staging of moral incoherence and interpersonal manipulation parodied throughout Endgame.
October 2025: Dr. Paul Andrew Woolridge is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Qatar University. He specializes in the history of literary criticism and theory, with a particular emphasis on modernist periodicals in Anglo-American letters. Dr. Woolridge has held appointments at Northeastern University, New York University Shanghai, and Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist (UIC). He has published in a number of academic journals, including The Cambridge Quarterly and Journal of the History of Ideas. His research areas include topics in cultural criticism, transatlantic modernism, and the relationship between literature and philosophy.
This essay analyzes Anthony Burgess’s “answer to Orwell” in his 1962 dystopia The Wanting Seed. It claims that the cyclical dynamic of liberal, oppressive, and conservative phases that critics have traditionally taken to be Burgess’s anti-Orwellian philosophy of history is balanced in the novel by an alternative picture of perpetual war, which may even be seen as the beginning of the Orwellian end of history. The text overlays these two interpretations, and it is not possible decisively to favor one over the other. The protagonist’s final existentialist insight is that we must “try to live” whatever world and history it is we live in.
October 2025: Jan-Boje Frauen is an associate professor at Zhejiang International Studies University (ZISU), Hangzhou, PR China. Jan’s academic background is in English, American and German Studies and philosophy (Göttingen University & University of California Santa Cruz). His Ph.D. is in International Relations and he has successfully completed a postdoc in science philosophy (Xiamen University). Jan’s interests span a wide array of fields in his academic publications, ranging from abstract philosophical considerations about the nature and future of subjectivity in the physical world to practical politics and recent history. However, 20th-century dystopian fiction and the work of Anthony Burgess have been with him ever since he wrote his M.A. thesis on Burgess many years ago. He has published numerous articles on Orwell’s 1984.
I study the history of early rabbinic higher education and culture of learning, as it reflected in their literature and in comparison to their contemporary non-Jewish environment. I am specifically interested in the "Orders of discourse" as they can be reconstructed through the analyzes the dialogues between masters and disciples.
