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• The Post-millennial British Novel

  Imola Nagy-Seres

  Views:

  92

  Book review:

  Bentley, Nick, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson, eds. The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. The Decades Series 4. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 297 pages. ISBN 9781441112156. Pbk. £85.

   

• Critical Wounds, Sutured

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  120

  Book review:

  Veprinska, Anna. Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 203 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-34319-4. Hb. €74.89.

• The Posthuman Vision of Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  Gilbert McInnis

  Views:

  799

  Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? explores the notions of the schizoid and the android as prototypes for the posthuman. Dick created androids to represent people physiologically and psychologically behaving in a non-human way, which is the same as Dick’s literal interpretation of a human without empathy—the schizoid. Hence, androids are metaphors for schizoid humans, or posthumans. Furthermore, there is a metaphysical worldview underlying Dick’s notion of empathy which differentiates the posthuman from the human, and this worldview conflicts with the materialistic worldview of the posthumans. Dick supports the metaphysical worldview over the materialistic ideology of the posthuman. The analysis draws primarily on Dick’s novel and three of his later essays to conclude that Dick wrote about the notions of the schizoid and android as prototypes for the posthuman long before anyone had an idea to embark on a full-length study of the posthuman, and Dick’s vision was an insightful warning about the coming implications of the schizoid posthuman for the twenty-first century. (GM)

• “He / looks into / his own eyes”: Thom Gunn’s Ekphrastic Poems

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  195

  Thom Gunn’s oeuvre spanned more than four decades, during which he kept writing ekphrastic poems. The way words and images relate to each other in them, however, changed gradually and considerably. While his early work is characterized by the dominance of the verbal over the visual, his later poems from the 1970s and 80s question the dominance of language and attribute destructive power to the image. Word and image become reconciled in Gunn’s last two collections from the 1990s and 2000s, respectively. The gradual change in Gunn’s ekphrastic work corresponds to the development of his identity as a gay man; this identity, full-blown at the end of his career, is reflected in his mature treatment of images. (IOH)

• “If the world is dystopic, why fear an apocalypse?”

  Zsófia Novák

  Views:

  184

  Book review:

  MacCormack, Patricia. The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 224 pages. ISBN 9781350081093. E-book. £15.83.

• Aging and Death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

  Réka M. Cristian

  Views:

  474

  With focus on the tropes of aging and death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox (1960) and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), the essay investigates the negotiation of the protagonists’ identity through specters of age and the means of encountering death, and it analyzes the representation of the dramas’ senior citizens with special regard to the ways in which these characters challenge mainstream cultural constructions of aging. On their deathbed, both Albee’s and Williams’s protagonists are reconnecting with their pasts in idiosyncratic ways: they build up a conscious “age autobiography” (Margaret Morgenroth Gulette) in an inventory of events and feelings assessing a complete(d) life and achieve an “agewise” (Gulette) identity that comes full circle in the very moment of grace. The characters who escort these two elderly women on their last journey reconceptualize the sense of intimacy between people. The dialogic potential of their empathy, care, and unconditional support during the end-game of the protagonists accommodates difference in various contexts by blurring the boundary between the old and the young as well as the one between men and women, because death has neither age nor gender. Thus, these intergenerational exchanges help elder characters’ agewise enterprises into the unknown gain a cathartic sense of freedom. (RMC)