Academic Section (Vol. 4, No. 1)

Abstract
With the second Trump administration’s return to a space-oriented frontier rhetoric, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and its themes surrounding extraterrestrial expansionism appear to retain their cultural relevance. Although the film has previously been the subject of scholarly analysis, it has not yet been discussed from the generic perspective of the American pastoral. Drawing on theorists such as Leo Marx, Edward Said, and Viktor Shklovsky, this article recontextualizes Nolan’s film as an extension of the American pastoral and argues that it employs an exoplanetary pastoralism. The article examines elements in the film that constitute American pastoralism and its exoplanetary variant, among them its use of machines, an all-American male protagonist, sublime imagery and religious allegories. The conclusion of this paper finds that the exoplanetary extension of the pastoral genre works to culturally reintroduce, reinforce, and naturalize the United States as an expansionary project.

Keywords
Film Studies – Speculative Fiction – Frontier Narrative – Pastoralism

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Abstract
2025 marks not only eighty years since the Second World War, but it also marks the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which led to Japan’s capitulation and thus the final end of the war, ultimately underlining the immense power of this kind of weapon. Even though those were (thankfully) the only two times atomic weapons were used to attack another nation, current international conflicts render their presence as relevant as ever. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood did not hesitate to address this current discourse in a biopic about Robert J. Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer (2023), is then mainly about the life of Oppenheimer and his scientific success, while also addressing his subsequent trauma. With the gradual disappearance of witnesses to the events portrayed by the movie, Oppenheimer takes on the important role of educating viewers about the history it represents, while additionally keeping the memory of said past alive. Accordingly, this article draws upon memory studies to examine the possible impact of Oppenheimer on viewers’ stance on atomic weapons. Altogether, then, I argue that the movie contains an ambivalent message about atomic bombs, which both honors and condemns the invention of it, focusing especially on the danger and risks of such weapons in order to warn present generations about them.

Keywords
Film Studies – Cultural Memory – Biopic – Anti-War

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Abstract
This article explores the interconnectedness between narrative style and affective reader engagement. Taking Helen Oyeyemi’s Black British short story “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” (2016) as a case study, I argue that empathy is constructed in contemporary British short stories through mediating an internal perspective at the level of narrative situation, in order to target a white, middle-class, female British readership. In doing so, the present study contends that the empathic formal features in Oyeyemi’s short story are not coincidental but depict an aesthetic pattern of the contemporary British short story. Following Suzanne Keen’s apt assertion that “generic and formal choices made by authors in crafting fictional worlds play a role in inviting […] readers’ empathic responses” (“A Theory” 215), this study traces the strategic employment of first-person narrative to foster perspective-taking. In combining methodologies of stylistics with postcolonial material critique, I propose linguistic evidence for literary techniques which make contemporary British short stories empathy-inviting narratives in a neoliberal capitalist literary market. Ultimately, this article invites scholars in empathy studies across disciplines to consider the entanglement between textual features and market-oriented authorial invitations to readers’ empathetic engagement with narrative short fiction.

Keywords
Narrative Empathy – Black British Short Story – First-Person Narrative – Middlebrow Culture – Stylistics

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Abstract
This paper investigates the haunting presences throughout Somali-British poet Warsan Shire’s poetry collection Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head. I argue that this sense of haunting, along with Shire’s reiterative returns to the body as/and the house, is a manifestation of (after-) effects of (neo-)colonialism and racism on Black bodies and Black women in particular. As Mark Fisher contends, haunting can be the expression of the “temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience” (42). The term haunting, in Fisher’s understanding, is in part derived from Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, which Fisher and others use to describe the imperfect recovery of a memory (45), which I suggest is what Shire attempts through her poetry. In connecting Shire’s works to Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “Glossary of Haunting,” one may be able to unearth the (non-) structural pain barely buried beneath.

Keywords
Film Trailer – Seriality Studies – Serial Narrative – Serialization – Storytelling

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Abstract
In the 1920s, a specter was haunting the United States, threatening to destroy the nation, the nuclear family, and the minds of children. Christian fundamentalists believed that they had found it lurking behind one name: ‘evolution.’ During the decade, laws that prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution were considered across the United States. In 1925, the American Civil Liberties Union tested one of them, the Tennessean Butler Act, in the Scopes Trial. There, the defense found itself confronted with a vague law, and an equally vague notion of ‘evolution.’ This article historicizes Judith Butler’s concept of a psychosocial phantasm, and argues that as such, ‘evolution’ had a function similar to the one that ‘gender’ has in contemporary anti-genderist discourses. These phantasms function to protect ideologies that are already under attack, and have been employed to unite various right-wing movements. This article investigates the rhetorical strategies and narratives which emptied the word ‘evolution’ of fixed meaning and layered it with various associations in order to collect and mobilize myriad anxieties. Through selected close-readings of T. T. Martin’s Hell and the High Schools (1923), E. P. Blair’s “Battle Hymn of Tennessee” (1925), and the transcription of the Scopes Trial, this article traces the construction and circulation of the phantasm ‘evolution’ and deduces how ‘gender’ might be disarmed in the contemporary legal battle against book bans in the United States.

Keywords
Book Bans – Censorship – Critical Race Theory – Anti-gender Movement – Anti-evolutionism

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