Volume 2, No. 2Volume 2, Issue 2

Todd Haynes’s 1995 film Safe depicts the demise of protagonist
Carol White as she suffers headaches, bloody noses, insomnia,
asthma, and seizures from environmental illness, which leads to
her social and marital demise and her taking refuge at Wrenwood,
a sanitarium retreat in the Albuquerque foothills. This article reads
Carol as a tragic archetype, and aligns the indices of COVID-19
pandemic life (face masks and social isolation for safety) with
Carol’s similar response to her illness. While the film has
previously been critiqued and interpreted from perspectives
including feminism, consumerism, environmentalism, suburbia,
race, heteronormativity, melodrama, plague, Whiteness, and AIDS
politics, this article performs a close reading based on Northrop
Frye’s archetypal definition of Aristotelian tragedy, and then
analyzes the differences in late-pandemic middle class American
perspectives from that of Carol White as she navigates her
situation. Late-pandemic middle class perspectives provide an
optimistic and alternate fate to the tragic pathos depicted in Carol’s
story.

Albania is a small country located in the Balkan peninsula on the
Adriatic coast. Its complicated political history and a cultural
identity that straddles European and Asian makes the nation an
interesting subject for analysis based on national identity
structures. Additionally, the nation has a rich oral tradition and
often claims to have been the birthplace of Homeric poetry.
Literature from this nation, however, is neither widely read nor
available. The only Albanian literary export of note is Ismail
Kadare who was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International
Prize for his entire body of work and his efforts to bring Albanian
culture to the global masses. Kadare’s writing style involves
creating alternate historical timelines, extensive usage of allegory
and, most significantly for this collection, the usage, re-usage and,
sometimes, reconstruction of Balkan myths.
This essay will analyse how Kadare uses myths in order to make
sense of the national condition of Albania from the beginning of
World War II until the early 2000s when Albania began its process
of recuperating from the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. Indeed, this is
not Kadare’s only motivation for writing. He also intends to
develop a new Albanian identity that is separate from its Ottoman
history. Albania was an Ottoman colony for over four centuries
and was subsequently occupied and influenced – culturally and
economically – by new geopolitical powers in Eastern Europe
such as Yugoslavia and Soviet Russia. In his novels, Kadare recontextualises myths to allegorically critique these foreign powers
as well as native politicians. In doing so, he attempts to show the
purity and nobility of authentic Albanian culture despite its
inherent atavism.

My Hero Academia and One-Punch Man are popular manga
series that have amassed a global fanbase. This paper, uses a poststructuralist reading to draw parallels between Albert Camus’
The Myth of Sisyphus and Japanese superhero manga, examining
how these works deal with the existential question about the
meaning of life. It observes that the superhero myth functions
with the help of several signs that construct a superhero’s
identity and that these identity markers define their take on the
existential problem. Furthermore, the paperexamines the role
played by the crowd—the in-text audience of the myth—in the
process of mythologization, where they serve as a medium
between the superheroes and the actual reader.

The superhero is a much-maligned figure in contemporary culture.
In what follows, I draw upon Plato’s idea of the auxiliary class and
Joseph Campbell’s monomyth to read the superhero as a modern
version of the auxiliary class. Focusing on the superhero archetype
that is found in the MCU or Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, I
argue that the superhero-auxiliary is underpinned by an ethos that
privileges values like public service, teamwork, social cohesion,
and self-sacrifice. The significance of this reading lies in showing
how the MCU re-mythologizes Plato’s auxiliary class for
contemporary culture. As a corollary to that, I hope that the
reading will ameliorate some of the negative reception that has
plagued the superhero archetype in literary and media discourses.

Ghosts is one of Henrik Ibsen’s best-known dramas. The reason
can also be found in the central theme of the play that caused a
scandal to its appearance: the luetic disease transmitted from father
to son. Ibsen does not explicitly declare the pathological
component but that critics have identified as hereditary
neurosyphilis. Some critics such as Derek R. Davis in the Sixties
and Russel E. Brown in the Nineties, proposed a pathology other
than the luetic one. Starting from the symptoms described by
Ibsen, they proposed that Osvald was suffering from
schizophrenia.
It is difficult to expect a literary character to behave exactly like a
person. It often represents for the author a symbol or an idea to be
developed. Therefore, it is not possible to subject a fictitious
character to a psycho-pathological analysis as if he were a real
person. However, it is possible to use him as a model and offer a
different interpretation of the literary work in which he moves.
That being said, the purpose of this work is to provide further
support to the schizophrenic theory of Osvald’s illness proposed
by Davis and Brown, using Jung’s archetypal theory. A
psychological interpretation can be provided here of what happens
on stage to the characters in Ghosts and highlight the
psychological symbol of the emerging Self.

In this paper, we have strived to decode the sense of place in Mary
Oliver’s select works through the optics of primitive mythology.
Primitive mythology unveils the primordial human culture and
human relationship with the non-human world. It silently
advocates posthumanism, immersive installation, intercorporeality,
and resists the dyadic approaches of human culture as well as the
model of two worlds – the human and the non-human. In the
context of Oliver, we find that she has given primitive myths an
apt place in her poetry and non-fictional works and has talked of
how these myths connect human culture to that of nature by
striking out ego-centric attitudes of Renaissance Humanism. The
poet has rejected such beliefs that promulgate the schools of
anthropocentrism, ego-centrism, pseudo-spiritualism/centralism
and the notion of Self/Other binary. She has rather favored the
concepts of posthumanism and eco-centrism, which deny any
privileges given to human beings. We have used the mythological
concepts of Joseph Campbell, Steven B. Harris and David
Leeming in this paper.

The performative value of standup comedy is in its inclusion of the audience in
the communicative moment; the audience member, at-home and live, exists as a
witness to the presentation of the comedian in the involuntary response of
laughter, an active and realized part of the comedic event. While there has been a
burgeoning amount of scholarly work surrounding the cultural significance of
standup comics and the literary implications of their work, there has been very
little scholarship assessing the work of comedian Bill Hicks, and none regarding
the final special filmed before his death, Revelations. In a world where a standup
comic has become the most popular interviewer of all time, and seven of the
most downloaded twenty-five podcasts in America are hosted by current or
former standup comedians, the link between the actual comedic event and the
larger scope of the comic’s influence is clear. Although scholars have correctly
identified standup comedy as a new literary and rhetorical form directing
consumers toward cultural and social change, and heterodoxic formulations of
thought, I will argue that this framework is incomplete. In order to wholistically
understand the influence of standup comedy on American culture, one must
correctly identify the religious nature of the comedian’s work and selfpresentation, specifically through the Judeo-Christian concepts of “messiah” and
“prophet.” Such a framework provides a language for the ritualistic response
within the prophetic moment, as well as the dual nature or reverence and
revulsion that consumers have for comedians. These concepts are archetypes,
and provide new language for interpreting both the work of Bill Hicks and the
standup comic in general. The comic claims to bear witness to the truth, and the
member of the audience participates in the prophetic moment by bearing witness
to the comedian, acting with him in ritualized movement. I will present a case
study and close reading of Bill Hicks’ televised special Revelations, evaluating
his comedy as a fulfillment of the prophetic archetype. When the standup comic
is understood prophetically, and the material understood through the lens of the
prophetic message, the consumer and the scholar are able to grasp the
foundations of the larger movement centered around the cultural figure of the
standup comic beyond the performative work; the larger movements amount to a
form of religious devotion, and the comic’s social commentary ceases to be
performative, but transformative. The devotion of acolytes to the extraperformative catalogue of comics like Dave Chapelle, Joe Rogan, and Hannah Gadsby form a larger cultural moment, for which Bill Hicks presented himself as
a forerunner and prototype.

Ahalya, the first book of the Sati-series by Koral Dasgupta, claims
to be a re-telling of the well-known mythological account of a
hapless woman and her plight under the brunt of a patriarchal
social order. Instead of reiterating the familiar tale of Ahalya’s
seduction and her consequent cursed fate, the writer chooses to
focus on the standpoint of the woman who relates the story of her
own journey towards self-discovery. Elements of memory, history,
myth and bildungsroman intersect to create an intricately detailed
narrative that ruptures the demureness and over-emphasis on
docile chastity associated with the traditional image of the Hindu
woman. In her attempt to prioritize the voice of the woman,
Dasgupta almost re-interprets the popular notions of virginity and
virtue accorded to the five women or panchkanyas of Hindu
mythology‒Ahalya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara and Mandodari. It is
believed that Ahalya, the most beautiful creation of Brahma, was
punished for no fault of her own, with no scope given to her to
assert any degree of agency.