http://hdl.handle.net/11320/19130 2026-06-01T16:26:12Z http://hdl.handle.net/11320/19137 Tytuł: Ethics of Empathy and Personal Shift in Lucy Caldwell’s These Days Autorzy: Tekin, Burcu Gülüm Abstrakt: The article discusses the ethics of empathy and personal transformation in Lucy Caldwell’s These Days (2022). In this award-winning historical prose, Caldwell creates an alternative literary space to commemorate the victims of the 1941 Belfast Blitz. I aim to discuss her ethical perspective, which manifests in two key dimensions in the novel: first, by fostering empathetic connections with readers, and second, by illustrating the empathic interactions and transformative journeys of the novel’s female characters. Furthermore, I draw on scholarly definitions of ethics and empathy to demonstrate how a strong emphasis on empathy characterizes Caldwell’s ethical perspective. As These Days stages a fictional revisit to the tragedy and its impact on Caldwell’s native city (Belfast), she vividly portrays human vulnerability and resilience through the female characters, who experience profound personal shifts through empathic encounters. This article demonstrates how These Days calls for human interdependence and, more crucially, considers the interconnectedness of all living beings as a profound source of solace in times of vulnerability and loss. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11320/19136 Tytuł: Victorian Echoes in Modern Erotica: The Sexual Politics of Nancy Audrey Spector’s Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray Autorzy: Poorghorban, Younes Abstrakt: Nancy Audrey Spector’s Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray (2012) reworks Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray by eliminating its original focus on homosexuality and aestheticism. Instead, the novel centralises the sexual exploitation of female characters, reflecting the tropes of erotic romance. Women in Spector’s narrative are depicted as passive objects or agents of male sexual desire, perpetuating the Victorian sexual ideology of the ‘angel in the house’ versus the ‘fallen woman’. The portrayal of Sybil Vane exemplifies this regressive stance, reducing her to a disposable figure of entertainment in stark contrast to Wilde’s morally consequential depiction. Rather than subverting Victorian gender politics or offering a meaningful reinterpretation of Wilde’s themes, Spector’s work reinforces patriarchal norms and punishes female sexual agency. Ultimately, the novel emerges as a derivative piece lacking substantive engagement with its literary inspirations. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11320/19135 Tytuł: From Collectivity to Embodiment: Political Engagement in Eileen Myles’s Selected Poetry Autorzy: Wajdziak, Julia Abstrakt: This paper examines how Eileen Myles’s poetry serves as a potent mode of political engagement. I analyze two poems, “An American Poem” (1991) and “I always put my pussy” (1993), to explore how poetry becomes a site of resistance. By placing these two poems in dialogue I demonstrate how Myles’s political poetry employs two key strategies: collectivity and embodiment. “An American Poem” subverts national narratives by reimagining Myles’s personal identity within the framework of American aristocracy. In contrast, “I always put my pussy” foregrounds desire as a radical political act, demonstrating how Myles uses embodiment to reimagine national belonging. The analysis of these poems is situated within Myles’s 1992 presidential campaign to illustrate how poetry becomes part of their broader political activism. Myles’s poetry operates as both a critique of hegemonic structures and a visionary act, showing the potential of poetic language to reimagine resistance. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11320/19134 Tytuł: “I Woke Up Already Hurting”: Postcolonial Affect in Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth Autorzy: Joseph, Gifty; Kennedy, John Joseph Abstrakt: Indigenous writing with postcolonial themes foregrounds the erasure and marginalization that result from colonialism. The genre-disrupting, coming-of-age novel Split Tooth (2018) by Inuit author Tanya Tagaq explores the personal and public life of a young Inuk woman from one of the Indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic region. Split Tooth focuses on themes like the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women, Inuit cultural settings, sexual assault, precarity, and violence. The novel meanders through emotions such as fear, shame, and grief, and can be analyzed through the theoretical framework of postcolonial affect. Postcolonial affect primarily examines the diverse emotional states of the colonized as indicators of the crisis that arises from colonization. The objective of the analysis is to highlight the delineation of affect in Split Tooth, as Tagaq blends the personal and the political in her narrative. Postcolonial affect is used for the theoretical examination of appropriation and violence that constitute the precarity of Inuit people, particularly women. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z