Humanities

15 pages, 253 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Zoocritical Reading of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799)

by Neil Cliff

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020022 - 29 Jan 2025

Thinking about how animals are categorised in Mungo Park’s journey into the interior of Africa provides a deeper understanding of their significance in the early exploration experiences of Africa by Europeans during this era. As it stands, there certainly exists a small but [...] Read more.

Thinking about how animals are categorised in Mungo Park’s journey into the interior of Africa provides a deeper understanding of their significance in the early exploration experiences of Africa by Europeans during this era. As it stands, there certainly exists a small but growing body of animal criticism in literary studies, and what can be suitably described as the animal turn is certainly gaining momentum more broadly within twenty-first century literary criticism and debate. However, there has been scant scholarly research on this theme of animals within eighteenth-century travelling practices. In recent times, the scholarship on Park’s journey has been highly particular; new understandings of Park’s trip are still being reached. Considering such specificity, an examination of Park’s narration of nonhuman animals during his trip will not only provide original insight into this aspect of his African experience but also interpret the ways that his narrative differentiates and categorises the various animal experiences he had whilst in Africa. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)

9 pages, 328 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Translating Franz Kafka’s “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People” as a Metaphor for A.I

by Dylan James Peterson

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020021 - 29 Jan 2025

Abstract

Differing English translations of Franz Kafka’s “Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People” have inspired diverse critical readings of the story. As a post-liminal text, a translation retrospectively highlights the ambiguity of the original’s rhetorical meaning. Read as a metaphor for artificial intelligence [...] Read more.

Differing English translations of Franz Kafka’s “Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People” have inspired diverse critical readings of the story. As a post-liminal text, a translation retrospectively highlights the ambiguity of the original’s rhetorical meaning. Read as a metaphor for artificial intelligence (A.I.), “Josefine” reflects an uncanny sort of regenerated reality as a conflicted narrator ponders the meaning of Josefine’s song following her disappearance. Likewise, the form produced by A.I. programs like ChatGPT following an initial human input is typically that of a narrative, albeit one devoid of creativity, replaced instead with algorithmic determinism. Philosophical questions about the discursive potential of technology such as generative A.I. pose challenges to the definitional assumptions about the form narrative takes in rhetorical situations, wherein the audience/reader is left with a message untethered from its prompter/writer. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Franz Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)

17 pages, 292 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Echoes of Albany: The Transatlantic Reflections of Anne Grant in Memoirs of an American Lady

by Rob Sutton

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020020 - 29 Jan 2025

Abstract

This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [^1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse focussed primarily upon the Scottish Highlands. Yet, the majority of [...] Read more.

This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [^1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse focussed primarily upon the Scottish Highlands. Yet, the majority of Grant’s childhood was spent in Albany, New York. After she had established herself as a writer and published various texts dealing with her more recent experience in the Scottish Highlands, in 1808, Grant published Memoirs of an American Lady, a semi-biographical account of her childhood spent in the multicultural contact zone of a British military outpost. There are two key issues that this essay explores. First, I discuss the process of memory. Unlike intentional travelogues of the time, Grant’s text was not compiled with the aid of a diary or ledger. Grant’s entire account comprises memories of events that occurred over forty years in the past. Part of this essay then discusses the potential fallibilities of the fragility of human memory upon the traveller. While it may be anticipated that this first issue is detrimental to the account of the traveller, the second key issue that I explore is arguably advantageous to Grant’s account. The extent to which Grant, throughout her life, immersed herself within various marginalised communities undoubtedly allows for the production of a more nuanced and balanced account of external cultures than was the custom at the time. What complicates this account is the mixing of memory and cultural immersion. In her writing around the Scottish Highlands, Grant frequently relies upon her experience of certain cultures as a child to explain and convey her understanding of the different marginalised communities she encounters as an adult. Integral to this essay is the fact that this mixing of memory and cultural exposure also occurs the opposite way around. In the Memoirs, the writer’s recollections of the Mohawk or the Kanien'kehà:ka people and colonial Dutch communities as a child seem to be coloured and subjected by her more recent experience of the Highland people. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)

15 pages, 1243 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Thinking Through the Tiger: Korean Cultural Identity, Space, and Time

by Eunkyung Yi

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020019 - 24 Jan 2025

Abstract

In the region of Northeast Asia, Korea has been identified as a nation that has a distinctive affinity for tigers. Koreans’ lives are deeply ingrained with emotions and thoughts related to tigers, even though they have completely disappeared from Korea due to historical [...] Read more.

In the region of Northeast Asia, Korea has been identified as a nation that has a distinctive affinity for tigers. Koreans’ lives are deeply ingrained with emotions and thoughts related to tigers, even though they have completely disappeared from Korea due to historical changes and urbanization. This study first connects the image of tigers in Korean creation myths and folk tales with cultural identity. The analysis uncovers that the satire and humor present in the literature and paintings depicting tigers were employed to surmount the realistic fears associated with these creatures. Subsequently, the study delves into historical perceptions and spatial concepts by examining folk tales and maps of the Korean Peninsula that are symbolized by tigers. During the Japanese colonial period, tigers were regarded as a symbol of Korean national consciousness, and since then, they have played a significant role in disseminating national spirit and identity discourse. Finally, the analysis of Korean proverbs related to tigers reveals the profound influence of these animals on the development of Korean concepts of seasons and time. This study thus demonstrates the significant role of tigers in shaping the cultural identity and conceptual framework of space and time in Korea. Full article

14 pages, 260 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Tales of Their Times

by Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 18; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010018 - 20 Jan 2025

Abstract

The aim of the article is to examine how the fairytales of storytellers from different times agree with the idea that their attitudes towards life appear in the fairytales that they tell and to consider whether they construct their fairytales so that they [...] Read more.

The aim of the article is to examine how the fairytales of storytellers from different times agree with the idea that their attitudes towards life appear in the fairytales that they tell and to consider whether they construct their fairytales so that they reflect the tensions and conflicts in their own times. This is achieved by looking into the tales of a woman storyteller in the nineteenth century when organized collecting began in Iceland, and three storytellers‘ repertoires from the twentieth century, when fairytales still belonged to the living oral tradition were tape-recorded. The survey is concluded by examining three recent plays involving fairytales which the author herself attended. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Depiction of Good and Evil in Fairytales)

13 pages, 251 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Wandering Jew as Monster: John Blackburn’s Devil Daddy

by Lisa Lampert-Weissig

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 17; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010017 - 17 Jan 2025

Abstract

Can we think of the legendary Wandering Jew as a monster? The figure does not easily fit the common definition of a monster and yet, the Wandering Jew is extraordinary. In the medieval and early modern sources of the legend, the Wandering Jew, [...] Read more.

Can we think of the legendary Wandering Jew as a monster? The figure does not easily fit the common definition of a monster and yet, the Wandering Jew is extraordinary. In the medieval and early modern sources of the legend, the Wandering Jew, who once sinned against Christ and is therefore doomed to be an immortal eyewitness to the Passion, serves as a model for the faithful. In his 1796 gothic novel, The Monk, Matthew Lewis creates a new strand of the Wandering Jew tradition, a gothic Wandering Jew, a being transformed from wonder to horror through association with centuries of antisemitic accusations against Jews as agents of conspiracy, ritual murder, nefarious magic, and disease. This essay argues that a variation on the representation of the gothic Wandering Jew, which began with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, further adapts the legend to make the Wanderer not a sign of redemption, but the monstrous cause of catastrophe not only for himself, but for those he encounters. This article, the first scholarly examination of John Blackburn’s 1972 Wandering Jew novel, Devil Daddy, situates it within the strand of the legend that represents the Wandering Jew as a monstrous source of destruction. Blackburn’s novel, written during a time of global concern over the development of biological weapons of mass destruction, portrays the Wandering Jew’s curse as a source of manmade global environmental catastrophe. In this way, the sin of the monstrous Wandering Jew becomes one not against Christ, but against humankind. Even as Devil Daddy explicitly references the horrors of the Holocaust, this representation of a monstrous Wandering Jew haunts the text, undermining its sympathetic representation of Jewish suffering. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Re-imagining Classical Monsters)

11 pages, 201 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Telephones, Narrative, Algorithms: Untimely Meditations on Kafka

by Ansgar K. Mohnkern

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010016 - 17 Jan 2025

Abstract

This essay traces Kafka’s writings as documents of a technological consciousness both a century ago and today. On the one hand, they are historical archives indexing the influence of modern technology in the lifeworld of the early 20th century. On the other hand, [...] Read more.

This essay traces Kafka’s writings as documents of a technological consciousness both a century ago and today. On the one hand, they are historical archives indexing the influence of modern technology in the lifeworld of the early 20th century. On the other hand, however, they also carry a historical index through which they become precise informants of our digital age. With a particular eye on Kafka’s parable “Before the Law”, this essay carves out elements of a narrative order which, as for surprising formal correspondences, can (and perhaps must) be called algorithmic. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Franz Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)

14 pages, 280 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Rethinking Gender and Epistemic Injustice: A Comparative Study of Male and Female Breast Cancer Memoirs

by Mahua Bhattacharyya and Ajit K Mishra

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010015 - 17 Jan 2025

Abstract

Breast cancer patients’ experiences of epistemic injustice in healthcare is a well-established fact. However, the significant role that gender plays in deciding the nature of epistemic injustice encountered by male and female breast cancer patients is still underexplored. Through a comparative analysis of [...] Read more.

Breast cancer patients’ experiences of epistemic injustice in healthcare is a well-established fact. However, the significant role that gender plays in deciding the nature of epistemic injustice encountered by male and female breast cancer patients is still underexplored. Through a comparative analysis of Alan F. Herbert’s The Pink Unicorns of Male Breast Cancer (2016) and Nina Riggs’ The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying (2017), we explore how male and female breast cancer patients distinctly experience vitiated testimonial dynamics and hermeneutical marginalisation. Breast cancer patients can negotiate credibility deficit, identity crisis, and existential crisis caused by epistemic injustice through narrating. Taking from Fricker’s epistemic injustice, later contextualised in formal healthcare by Kidd and Carel, this study considers both the male and the female points of view to identify subtle instances of injustice and ways to overcome it. This article also articulates the need to overcome the stigma of considering breast cancer ‘a woman’s disease’ so that male breast cancer patients’ testimonies are equally prioritised along with female breast cancer patients. This comparative study highlights the ignorance inside institutional healthcare by foregrounding insensitivity toward all breast cancer patients and especially a lack of awareness of male breast cancer. Therefore, reading and writing such memoirs might secure future epistemic justice to all breast cancer patients irrespective of their gender. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Medicine)

17 pages, 254 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Framing Deaths, Embracing Lives: Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series

by Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010014 - 16 Jan 2025

Abstract

Jack the Ripper fictions tend to be realist in mode, making frequent use of the Victorian press and archives to depict the 1888 murders. At the same time, they marginalise and exploit the victims, defining them as silent testimonies to the power of [...] Read more.

Jack the Ripper fictions tend to be realist in mode, making frequent use of the Victorian press and archives to depict the 1888 murders. At the same time, they marginalise and exploit the victims, defining them as silent testimonies to the power of the elusive perpetrator. In contrast, Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series (2011–2018), consisting of five novels devoted to one canonical victim each, shifts the focus and depicts their lives. This article outlines the way the fictionalisations of the five women’s lives bring to the fore five other ‘crimes’ or transgressions: addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, sex work, and homelessness, but also the way these texts replace what is sensational and formulaic in Ripperature with something more than mundane and gritty in the lived experience of everyday people, such as moments of personal joy or professional accomplishments. Drawing on Kate Mitchell’s approach to history, cultural memory, and neo-Victorian fiction, it argues that pre-dating the publication of The Five (2019), Clark managed to realistically re-present (make present) and represent (create a portrayal of) the late-Victorian crime of dismissing the women who were murdered. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Victorian Realism and Crime)

19 pages, 294 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Kafkaesque Algorithms: Kafka’s Writing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Jake Fraser

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 13; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010013 - 15 Jan 2025

Abstract

This article uses the surge of recent AI-generated simulations of Kafka’s writing as an opportunity to reflect upon both what AI can teach us about Kafka’s writing and what Kafka’s writing can teach us about the age of artificial intelligence. Under the heading [...] Read more.

This article uses the surge of recent AI-generated simulations of Kafka’s writing as an opportunity to reflect upon both what AI can teach us about Kafka’s writing and what Kafka’s writing can teach us about the age of artificial intelligence. Under the heading “Kafkaesque Algorithms”, this article explores three distinct but related questions that emerge at the intersection of stylistics, poetics, and media theory. First, do AI simulations of Kafka’s writing adequately capture Kafka’s style, and if not, why not? Second, is there perhaps something inherently algorithmic about Kafka’s poetics, in ways that might both tempt and resist simulation by AI? And third, is the notion of outsourcing low-level repetitive labor to machines—a common promotional strategy for contemporary AI writing aids—truly novel, or would it instead have already been familiar to Kafka himself? Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Franz Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)

18 pages, 252 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Certain Death: Mike Flanagan’s Gothic Antidote to Traumatic Memory and Other Enlightenment Hang-Overs in Doctor Sleep

by Erik Bond

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010012 - 15 Jan 2025

Abstract

This article uses the English Gothic’s eighteenth-century dismantling of male lineage and Enlightenment certainty in Horace Walpole’s The Castle Otranto as a lens for understanding the twenty-first-century commercial popularity of director Mike Flanagan’s Gothic films, particularly Doctor Sleep. Building on Stephen King’s [...] Read more.

This article uses the English Gothic’s eighteenth-century dismantling of male lineage and Enlightenment certainty in Horace Walpole’s The Castle Otranto as a lens for understanding the twenty-first-century commercial popularity of director Mike Flanagan’s Gothic films, particularly Doctor Sleep. Building on Stephen King’s 2013 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep establishes a new lineage of male writers who value how the Gothic traditions of irrational emotion and doubt can inspire new realms of knowledge to lessen psychological suffering caused by traumatic lineage. By “traumatic lineage” I mean the threat and violence some find necessary to maintain the patrilineal claim that it is “naturally” the only way to organize society. Like Walpole’s mythopoeic Gothic novel, Flanagan’s Gothic films demonstrate how patrilineal lineage damages other men, not just women; thus, Flanagan’s films offer psychological workbooks for practicing a type of reparative masculinity that involves exposure-exercises of cognitive behavior therapy (Doctor Sleep’s “boxing” intrusive, traumatic memories), male communities of care, and interdependent empathy. I support this argument by closely reading how Flanagan’s filmic tools of domestic metaphor, uncanny casting, and repurposed sets from Kubrick’s The Shining not only tell how to exorcise the inherited stills of the Overlook Hotel but also show viewers how to do so. We experience Dan Torrance’s reparative masculinity in real-time, communally sharing and recasting Dan’s horrific images of 40 years ago, but we now relate to them in psychologically helpful ways that enable community. In this way, I illustrate and encourage future study of how Gothic texts not only point to marginalized, repressed problems, but more importantly, how they help us relate differently to a traumatic past and innovate strategies for immediate relief from inherited suffering. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Legacy of Gothic Tradition in Horror Fiction)

25 pages, 377 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Rudolf Fuchs: An Underestimated Cultural Intermediary and Social Critic in Times of Conflict

by Konstantin Kountouroyanis

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 11; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010011 - 14 Jan 2025

Abstract

Rudolf Fuchs (1890–1942) was an influential figure in Prague’s early 20th-century literary scene as well as an intermediary between German and Czech literature at a time of intense social and political transformation. This study places Fuchs’ work within the broader context of his [...] Read more.

Rudolf Fuchs (1890–1942) was an influential figure in Prague’s early 20th-century literary scene as well as an intermediary between German and Czech literature at a time of intense social and political transformation. This study places Fuchs’ work within the broader context of his period, underscoring his significant, yet often overlooked, contributions to cultural mediation. The methods employed in this study include a detailed examination of Fuchs’ literary output and translations, alongside an analysis of his correspondence with contemporaries, to trace the evolution of his thinking from an initial alignment with Expressionism to a strong commitment to socialism. The results highlight Fuchs’ role in enhancing intercultural understanding, revealing how his translations and personal ideologies shaped the literary landscape of German–Czech relations. The study asserts the enduring relevance of Fuchs’ endeavors, particularly in the modern European sociopolitical climate. It also yields insights into the management of cultural diversity and ideological conflicts, as well as the upholding of social values amidst political volatility. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Prague German Circle(s): Stable Values in Turbulent Times?)

14 pages, 219 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Recreating Place: Charles Fothergill and the Limits of Travel Writing

by Pam Perkins

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 10; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010010 - 14 Jan 2025

Abstract

In 1806, Charles Fothergill, a young man with a strong interest in natural history, set out on a seven-month tour of Orkney and Shetland. His goal was to write a book about the islands that would emulate the work produced by the earlier [...] Read more.

In 1806, Charles Fothergill, a young man with a strong interest in natural history, set out on a seven-month tour of Orkney and Shetland. His goal was to write a book about the islands that would emulate the work produced by the earlier traveller Thomas Pennant on Wales and mainland Scotland. Despite his ambition, Fothergill never succeeded in completing his book. His surviving manuscripts, which range from a rough working journal covering one part of his journey to some comments on botany that seem ready to go to press, suggest some of the difficulties that he might have found both in constructing a coherent narrative of his travels and in recreating a version of Pennant’s antiquarian and scientific travels at a time when tastes in travel writing were shifting to focus more on the pleasures of landscape and aesthetics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)

24 pages, 368 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Beyond Anything Realism Can Represent? Monstrous Crime in Marx’s Victorian Novel

by Jayson Althofer

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010009 - 14 Jan 2025

Abstract

This article reads Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1, 1867) as the Bildungsroman of a congenital criminal: its eponymous character, Capital. Following Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Marx detects and dissects capitalism’s crimes. Capital has been called Marx’s [...] Read more.

This article reads Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1, 1867) as the Bildungsroman of a congenital criminal: its eponymous character, Capital. Following Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Marx detects and dissects capitalism’s crimes. Capital has been called Marx’s ‘Victorian novel’ and compared to English realism’s triple-deckers. Yet his indispensable informants include factory inspectors whose reports, according to Fredric Jameson, provide testimony beyond anything realism can represent. How, then, does Marx’s apparently realist aesthetic convey Capital’s criminal deeds and criminogenic drive? To address this matter, the article examines the Gothicism of Marx’s realism. It highlights his development of Engels’s Gothic realism, demonstrates how Capital begins in media res—its first sentence presenting an immense, monstrous collection of evidence of Capital’s cannibalism—and links this opening crime scene to Marx’s portrayal of the 1863 case of Mary Anne Walkley. Murdered in her workplace, Walkley inhabits an underworld overpopulated by fellow workers killed by wage-labour. The article argues that, because actuality under the rule of Capital is structurally and monstrously criminal, Marx’s Gothic constitutes a realistic medium to represent criminal monsters and structures. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Victorian Realism and Crime)

8 pages, 223 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Implementing Shoah-Themed Literature into Teaching with the Example of The Boy From Block 66: A WW2 Jewish Holocaust Survival True Story

by Milan Mašát

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010008 - 13 Jan 2025

Abstract

In this contribution, through literary content analysis, I examine the novel The Boy From Block 66: A WW2 Jewish Holocaust Survival True Story (2023). I am convinced that it should be included in literature classes dealing with modern historical issues, especially pertaining to [...] Read more.

In this contribution, through literary content analysis, I examine the novel The Boy From Block 66: A WW2 Jewish Holocaust Survival True Story (2023). I am convinced that it should be included in literature classes dealing with modern historical issues, especially pertaining to the Shoah. For two excerpts from this novel, I present several questions and tasks, the aim of which is to guide pupils to an adequate understanding of the events of the Shoah. I am convinced that this narrative is the one in which the events that relate to the Shoah are presented authentically and in an attractive way for young readers, and whose presentation leads to a certain de-abstracting of these ideas. Full article

12 pages, 245 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Pastoral Places and the City: Environmental Rhetoric in Plato’s Phaedrus

by Jack Love

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 7; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010007 - 10 Jan 2025

Abstract

Historically, the notion of nature or the place outside the city in Phaedrus has been read as a proto-pastoral dialogue. If we accept this reading of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus hierarchizes the landscape where the city is perceived as superior to the noncity. However, [...] Read more.

Historically, the notion of nature or the place outside the city in Phaedrus has been read as a proto-pastoral dialogue. If we accept this reading of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus hierarchizes the landscape where the city is perceived as superior to the noncity. However, I argue that Plato offers an alternative in Phaedrus that opposes the country–city hierarchized binary. Rather than seeing the natural world as a starting place for intellectual knowledge, Plato refuses the pastoral impulse that projects a construction of nature in Phaedrus. Instead, he values the noncity as any other place where individuals can come together in a dialectical fashion to ascertain truth. Indeed, Socrates’ orientation toward the setting in Phaedrus suggests that he is practicing a rhetoric of immersion in the ambient nonhuman place around him before attempting to project meaning onto it. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue World Mythology and Its Connection to Nature and/or Ecocriticism)

21 pages, 543 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Human, All Too Human: Do We Lose Free Spirit in the Digital Age?

by Aleksandra Sushchenko and Olena Yatsenko

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010006 - 9 Jan 2025

Abstract

This article engages in a philosophical dialogue with Nietzsche’s views on the discourse of power, examining the rising concerns surrounding the digitization and algorithmization of society in the context of advancements in robotics and AI. It highlights human agency through Nietzsche’s perspective on [...] Read more.

This article engages in a philosophical dialogue with Nietzsche’s views on the discourse of power, examining the rising concerns surrounding the digitization and algorithmization of society in the context of advancements in robotics and AI. It highlights human agency through Nietzsche’s perspective on creative culture as a space for individuals to actively engage in free thought and action, with responsibility as the key foundation of social resilience. By approaching metaphysical systems through the discourse of power, Nietzsche emphasizes that humanity can overcome system-driven delusions through reason, which he understands as the form of critical reflection existing solely in the domain of creative culture. We assert that Nietzsche’s arguments offer alternative perspectives on the ethics of technology, particularly through the dialectics of “weak and strong types of behavior”. It allows us to explore how resistance—existing in creative culture—can serve as a vital counterbalance to the mechanization of social life. Such dialectics provide a strong foundation for supporting algorithmic resistance by inspiring ethical frameworks rooted in individuality and emotional depth, challenging the homogenizing tendencies of digitization and algorithmization. It emphasizes the importance of subjective stories, emotions, and compassion, forming human-centered ethical principles that preserve the richness of individual experiences and protect against system-driven delusions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Philosophy and Classics in the Humanities)

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24 pages, 334 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Transcendence of the Human Far Beyond AI—Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and Schopenhauerian Eschatology

by Søren Robert Fauth

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 5; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010005 - 8 Jan 2025

Abstract

Humanity has always aspired beyond the human. The technological development in recent decades has been extraordinary, leading to new attempts to overcome the all-too-human condition. We dream of conquering death, upgrading our bodies into perfect performance machines and enhancing our intelligence through bio-nanotechnology. [...] Read more.

Humanity has always aspired beyond the human. The technological development in recent decades has been extraordinary, leading to new attempts to overcome the all-too-human condition. We dream of conquering death, upgrading our bodies into perfect performance machines and enhancing our intelligence through bio-nanotechnology. We are familiar with the side effects: alienation, stress, anxiety, depression. This article contends that Franz Kafka’s enigmatic oeuvre at its core harbors a yearning to transcend the human. Through a close reading of the narrative In the Penal Colony, it is demonstrated that this yearning is far more radical and uncompromising than the modern vision of extending and optimizing human life. Instead of the modern ego-concerned affirmation of life and the body that hides behind much of AI and modern technology, Kafka seeks a radical vision of total transformation and transcending the human into ‘nothingness’. The article shows that this transformation corresponds to core concepts in Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, primarily his doctrine of the denial of the will to live and asceticism. Instead of the species-narcissistic affirmation of life and the body that lurks behind much of AI and modern technology, Kafka strives for a definitive overcoming of the life we desire. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Franz Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)

19 pages, 1996 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Falling Back in Love with Trans-Inclusive Feminism: Canadian Creative Artists Re-Story Death and Choose Transformation

by Devon Harvey

Humanities 2025, 14(1), 4; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010004 - 8 Jan 2025

Abstract

Prevailing political and popular narratives often treat the issue of trans death as an inevitability and reduce complex stories of trans life to their endings. This paper investigates the transformative potential of creative forms of resistance—specifically a selection of Canadian poetry, personal essays, [...] Read more.

Prevailing political and popular narratives often treat the issue of trans death as an inevitability and reduce complex stories of trans life to their endings. This paper investigates the transformative potential of creative forms of resistance—specifically a selection of Canadian poetry, personal essays, and comics—and how their artistic affordances engage with transfeminism as an approach to narratives of trans existence. Rooted in Canadian author Kai Cheng Thom’s reckoning with the shortcomings of trans-exclusionary feminist thought, and informed by Chinua Achebe’s conceptualization of re-storying, this article explores how I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom, Death Threat by Canadian creatives Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee, and comics from Assigned Male by trans activist and Canadian comic artist Sophie Labelle re-story “necessary” trans death to orient queer death spaces around a trans-for-trans (t4t) praxis of narrativization. Addressing the (inter)disciplinary possibilities of trans-inclusive feminism and comics studies, this article celebrates how these texts disavow and re-story the “Good” Trans Character, who dies to satisfy transmisogynistic ideologies, and theorizes the T4t Dead Trans Character, who dies to reclaim instances of trans death and recodify trans personhood as a site of hope, agency, and self-determination. In their re-storying, these texts recognize the transformative potential of trans existence and echo Thom in their urging of trans-inclusive feminism to renounce narratives of disposability and invest in the dignity of all human life. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feminism and Comics Studies)

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