Search Results (68)

This article investigates the paradox of disappearance as both an aesthetic and a political phenomenon. Taking inspiration from Radiohead’s song “How to Disappear Completely,” it argues that aesthetic representations of disappearance never achieve total erasure; instead, they give rise to new forms of visibility. A true aesthetics of disappearance does not exist. Through case studies such as H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the article demonstrates that disappearance is always mediated: the invisible man becomes hyper-visible through his clothing, bandages, and mask, while the spectacle conceals marginalized lives only to expose them through mechanisms of institutional control (e.g., prisons, medical facilities, schools—as analyzed in Michel Foucault’s work). An investigation of the “novel of the institution” (Campe), especially as it appears in the works of Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, eventually explores the nexus between aesthetic representation and institutionalized forms of coerced visibility. Ultimately, the essay argues that disappearance, as an aesthetic and political event, destabilizes regimes of visibility—not by erasure alone, but by exposing the fragility of appearance itself. The tension between opacity and exposure suggests that resistance lies not in pure absence but in subverting the very mechanisms of representation. Full article

This article examines the intersecting forces of gender, class, and education in early twentieth-century Britain through a feminist reading of Pip Williams’ historical novel The Bookbinder of Jericho. Centering on the fictional character Peggy Jones—a working-class young woman employed in the Oxford University Press bindery—the study explores how women’s intellectual ambitions were constrained by economic hardship, institutional gatekeeping, and patriarchal social norms. By integrating close literary analysis with historical research on women bookbinders, educational reform, and the impact of World War I, the paper reveals how the novel functions as both a narrative of personal development and a broader critique of systemic exclusion. Drawing on the genre of the female Bildungsroman, the article argues that Peggy’s journey—from bindery worker to aspiring scholar—mirrors the real struggles of working-class women who sought education and recognition in a male-dominated society. It also highlights the significance of female solidarity, especially among those who served as volunteers, caregivers, and community organizers during wartime. Through the symbolic geography of Oxford and its working-class district of Jericho, the novel foregrounds the spatial and social divides that shaped women’s lives and labor. Ultimately, this study shows how The Bookbinder of Jericho offers not only a fictional portrait of one woman’s aspirations but also a feminist intervention that recovers and reinterprets the overlooked histories of British women workers. The novel becomes a literary space for reclaiming agency, articulating resistance, and criticizing the gendered boundaries of knowledge, work, and belonging. Full article

Are wartime dream diaries a testimony to violence and its impact on society and culture? Do dreams shape and respond to history and the collective remembrance of war? This article argues that wartime dream collections constitute a testimonial practice that brings visibility to experiences hidden from the public domain and missing from dominant discourses on war. Connecting post-2022 Ukrainian dream diaries and theoretical contributions to cultural dream analysis by Charlotte Beradt, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Wilfred Bion, I argue that recognizing dream sharing as witnessing raises ethical and political questions because it is not a constative speech act, but a form of thinking about and action on history. Within this ethical–political perspective, sharing dreams is never merely about relaying contents to the reader but a relational act of self-disclosure. I conclude that to read records of war dreams is inseparable from being called upon to receive and offer hospitality to a dream. Full article

The approach taken by Marvel and Hanna-Barbera to adapting Godzilla for a young American audience is a form of cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation involves removing the subject from its cultural context. In this case, Marvel and Hanna-Barbera removed the character from its origin, where it emerged as a consequence of the atomic bomb. Gojira is first a scourge of Japan and later its savior against invasion from cosmic forces and nefarious kaiju. Godzilla is changed into what is ultimately a sanitized version of imperial inventory. The properties of the 1970s Godzilla, however, were not wholly negative. Indeed, they laid the foundation for an American rediscovery of the original Gojira film and its sequels, which have since been released in their original versions. This article will examine how Marvel Comics and Hanna-Barbera cartoons culturally appropriated Godzilla for American children, but how this also led to an appreciation of the Japanese films. Full article

This essay explores the political dynamics of the Godzilla film franchise over the past 70 years, arguing that critical and scholarly characterizations commonly oversimplify the movies’ complicated messages, which reflect the complex, often contradictory responses of Japanese filmmakers and audiences to the experiences of war, the atomic bombings, defeat, occupation, lasting subordination to the United States, and a seemingly endless postwar period. The analysis focuses on Honda Ishirō’s Gojira (1954), in which pacifist sentiments are tempered by depictions of military weaponry and patriotic pride, and Yamazaki Takashi’s Godzilla Minus One (2023), where ahistorical narratives, misty-eyed nostalgia, and ultranationalist tropes co-exist with strong anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment themes. By contextualizing these two films within the contested history of early postwar Japan and the polarized politics of the early twenty-first century, this essay suggests that the Godzilla series has shown remarkable continuities over time and has captured the profound ambivalence with which the Japanese people have negotiated memory, nationalism, and the charged relationship between Japan and the United States since the end of World War II. Full article

With the growing popularity of Godzilla and kaijū media, scholarship on these topics is also increasing. While science themes (i.e., nuclearism, genetics, and environmentalism) are regular aspects of these publications, a research gap on the scientists themselves exists. Therefore, this article focuses on the five Serizawas (Daisuke, Eiji, Ishirō, Ren, and Shigeru) of Godzilla media (namely films, novelizations, and a webtoon) to examine their significance. Haynes’ six scientist stereotypes and Frayling’s considerations of how scientists are disconnected from laypeople provide frameworks for the analysis. Yet the complexities of the Serizawas ultimately suggest that interpreting them through a lens of sacrifice (of their families, loves, creations, and lives) provides a more solid thread by which to understand these men and their utilization of what can be deemed ‘Godzilla science’—a method to (re)assert the natural order of the world on (and in) which humans and kaijū must learn to live. Full article

Kaijū media frequently features dangerous scientific experiments as a central theme, invented by scientists who are falsely convinced that they both completely understand and control their advanced technology. In the past few decades, this has included the introduction of high-energy physics (HEP) experiments—especially mammoth particle accelerators—that, among other destructive results, allow for the entrance of equally large and dangerous creatures into our world from parallel dimensions. Public concerns voiced about the safety of the creation of two groundbreaking energy accelerators—the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe—in the early 21st century are tied to related science fiction media that capitalize on such fears (including Godzilla vs. Megaguirus [2000], Pacific Rim [2013], The Cloverfield Paradox [2018], The Kaiju Preservation Society [2022]). Particular attention is paid to the Netflix original series Stranger Things (2016–) as a detailed case study. This study concludes with an analysis of scientists’ attempts to embrace the popularity of Stranger Things in their communication with the general public, and suggests that ongoing issues with conspiracy theories have been fueled in part by such attempts, coupled with long-standing issues with the HEP community and their peculiar scientific naming conventions. Full article

This article contextualises the history of kaijū scholarship and looks particularly at the swell of publishing that has emerged in the last decade. It argues that the release of a series of new Godzilla films has led to a greater focus on the kaijū film, but that there is recurrence of critical themes that have persisted throughout scholarship on giant monster movies since the 1960s. This provides a literature review to understand how kaijū media has been critiqued, defined and challenged in response to the near three-quarter century history of kaijū cinema to consider if studies of the kaijū media provide the impetus to look at the kaijū as deserving of its own field of study. If zombie studies and vampire studies can occupy their own emerging fields of study, why not the kaijū? If the figure of the kaijū asks the biggest questions of our cultures, then do the giant monsters not deserve their own field? But, if this is an emerging field of study, the article poses, it needs to be more than kaijū film studies. Full article

Drawing on Susan Sontag’s understanding of the anxieties about contemporary existence lurking beneath the surface of science fiction films, this article argues that the focus on media monitoring, mapping and materializing the giant monster in the MonsterVerse functions as a negotiation of the limits of visibility of catastrophe. Hiding, waiting, lurking underneath the surface in the “Hollow Earth”, the giant monsters are—paradoxically—invisible and hypervisible, absent and present at the same time. Throughout and across the films and series in the narrative universe, media in the MonsterVerse are charged with “proving” the threat of the (in)visible, while at the same time challenging mediated registers of truth and trustability. Making the monster is simultaneously presented as the promise and problem of technological mediation. With the emphasis on flashbacks to different time periods—including the 1940s in Kong: Skull Island (2017), the 1950s in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023) and the 1990s in Godzilla (2014)—this not only appears to be about the mediatization of the monsters but rather their analogization. Captured in hand-drawn maps, grainy images and static sound recordings, proving the existence of the monstrous threat becomes a question of materiality as well. Full article

This essay proposes to read the classic cycle of Godzilla films (roughly, 1954–1995) using a posthuman perspective that makes its emphasis on animal, vegetal and mineral life. We will use posthuman and materialist philosophy to analyze hybrid monsters as part of new interdisciplinary studies about non-human agencies and their creepy potential. As such, we want to offer the first posthumanist readings of the Godzilla franchise, in time to celebrate its 70 years of existence and, in consequence, highlight how posthumanist the series has always been. Full article

In 1978, the American hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult released the song “Godzilla” as the first single from the fifth studio album Spectres. Despite not registering on popular charts, it would eventually evolve into an iconic song of its era. “Godzilla” continues to receive airplay on classic rock stations, and it remains a staple of the band’s touring performances. In 2019, a cover of the song, more than forty years after its release, made its film debut in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Though the song is primarily a tribute to the Japanese monster from which it gets its name, “Godzilla” also reflects the nuclear fear and paranoia of the 1970s Cold War era. “Godzilla’s” cultural impact, the song’s lyrics, the Cold War context in which it was written, and its connection to the kaiju films featuring the famous monster are examined. While this is the most popular and well-known song dedicated to Godzilla, it is not the only one. Other compositions have, but they have failed to achieve the iconic status that Blue Öyster Cult’s version has attained. This song has evolved into an unofficial anthem for the great monster. Full article

One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called ‘late stage’ capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seminal 1996 edited collection of the same name suggests, is that the construction of the monster in popular culture is fraught with the boundaries that constitute the society that has spawned them; the monstrous body “exists only to be read” (p. 4). Bringing together the theoretical insights of the Marxist theory of reification, critical animal studies, and monster theory, this article examines the ways in which cinematic depictions of gigantic monstrosity can inform our theorizing of multispecies relationships under capitalism. Specifically, I explore how the tensions between capital and human-animal relationships serve to construct and constitute the multiform monster, Jean Jacket, in Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope. Through an examination of the multispecies relationalities that the film portrays, I argue that the figure of Jean Jacket is a monstrous culmination of the reified and therefore, necessarily deferred nature of human-animal relationships under capital. However, Nope’s conclusion alerts us to the radical dereifying potential of multispecies bonds of care and embodied knowledge; systems of resistance that can be forged even within our current capitalist ruins. Full article

After a decade of dormancy following the release of Tōhō Studios’ Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), Godzilla and other kaijū burst back onto the scene with Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014). Several American sequels and a television series set in Legendary’s MonsterVerse quickly followed over the next ten years. Meanwhile, Japan’s Tōhō used their radioactive creation’s global success to reignite their own films with Shin Godzilla (2016), an animated trilogy, and Godzilla Minus One (2023). Short-format media like Chibi Godzilla and Godziban also circulated thanks to streaming services. Similarly, Godzilla’s longtime competitor Gamera also emerged from hibernation in an animated series produced by Kadokawa Corporation, Gamera Rebirth (2023). But how do these new installations relate to or depart from their predecessors’ predilection to address environmental concerns? This article continues the ecocritical analysis of kaijū eiga, expanding it to the 2010s and 2020s, as a coda to our duograph Japan’s Green Monsters (2018). This article picks up where we left off, examining the recent releases from an ecocritical standpoint. This analysis reveals that today’s films remain steeped in environmental commentary, but both fragmented and updated for the new concerns of the twenty-first century. Full article

During 2018, three academics employed what they referred to as “reflective ethnography” to examine the hypothesis that many disciplines (e.g., sociology, educational philosophy, and critical race theory) are motivated by extreme ideologies, as opposed to generating knowledge. The authors published, or had accepted, seven “hoax” articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals. When the story broke in the Wall Street Journal, the authors stated that the articles advocated a number of ludicrous, inhumane, and appalling ideas. For example, one argued that men should be trained like dogs with shock collars. Their acceptance for publication was therefore taken as evidence for the kind of ideas that many academic disciplines will advocate. In the present article, I will show that the central aspects of the hoax articles do not match with how they were later described by the hoax authors and many other commentators (e.g., journalists). Despite the vast amount of media coverage, this has (virtually) gone unnoticed. I will suggest that the widely accepted narrative of the so-called Grievance Studies affair is incorrect. Full article

The New American Poetry anthology delineated “schools” of North American poetry which have become seminal: The Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov), the New York School (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara), the San Francisco Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer), and the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure). The word seminal is used in a traditional way, from the root: “of seed or semen … full of possibilities”, but here also because the work is dominated by men and the omission of poets like Diane di Prima and Joanne Kyger seems especially egregious now. As compared to the whiteness of academic verse of the time, the New American Poetry was radical and more diverse, but could be seen as quite inadequate in those aspects from a contemporary perspective. Of course culture must always be judged in proper context, including its era and the anthology has had a powerful impact on the poetry of the continent from which it came. This paper posits that The New American Poetry, had it looked even slightly off the shore of North America, could have included the Neo-Barroco school of Latin American poetry. The affinities are almost endless and the limited scope of even the most radical poets of the post-war generation is exposed. Full article